I spent Thanksgiving week in the wilds of rural North
Carolina, so I wasn’t aware of the tumult that reigned on Black Friday until I
got back home and saw some of the astonishing clips online. The metaphor I once
used for these kinds of nationally incited mass-shopping binges was that of
lemmings, racing to collective suicide by drowning. But the level of violence
has escalated since the idyllic days of, say, 2004. Now, a different metaphor
comes to mind: the undead, brain-eating variety.
I think you can tell a lot about a culture by the genre
fiction it embraces. For a long while, vampires ruled; and not just vampires,
but hot vampires…vampires as dream
lovers. That made sense to me, in a society in which sex had been so completely
commodified that it had lost all its primal aura of mystery and menace. People
missed the element of risk that used to come with falling in love or lust;
they longed for the feeling of one kiss being worth torching the rest of their
lives to cinders. Vampire fiction (and movies, and TV shows) supplied that,
even as mainstream culture continued to streamline sexual behavior into a
series of Add to Cart products and hook-up apps.
The recent rise of zombie fiction to spectacular prominence
(starting a decade ago with 28 Days Later and culminating in The Walking
Dead and World War Z) seems to me to have a similar societal prompt, one
that becomes especially apparent around the holidays. Our culture has become
increasingly predicated on consumption—on reflexively grasping for the newest
and hippest and most tech-forward products dumped into the marketplace; and
since our major corporate players have turned planned obsolescence into a
science, they’ve pretty much guaranteed we keep buying the same things over and
over again. (“You need Beta tapes…no, VHS…no, DVDs…no, Blu-Rays…no, you need
digital downloads…no, you should be streaming.”) The result is a kind of
sustained hysteria. We never feel like we have enough, and we’re always being exhorted
to get more, more, more. And we respond with mindless, relentless obedience.
Enter the zombie apocalypse. This represents our current
worst cultural nightmare: the idea that even in death, we won’t be done
consuming. We’ll still have to get up and go stalking around in search of more.
And every brain we eat will just create another zombie who’s then our
competitor for the diminishing supplies that are left.
That’s why I think most zombie fiction out there
still hasn’t hit the right angle. It’s not the living survivors who should be
the focus: it’s the zombies themselves. We should be seeing things through their eyes, and face, with them, the
unimaginable horror awaiting them at the logical end of their rampage—the same
one facing every patriotic red-blooded shopper in America:
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