The Mythic Function of the Zombie Apocalypse: The Politics of Contagion

 

Our standard movie monsters deviate from their early folkloric roots in a number of major ways, but the most notable might be the general move from bewitchment to infection: where strigoi, revenants, zombi, and loup-garou are generally the result of targeted curses, post-Universal-era vampires, zombies, and werewolves are created by being bitten.

We might blame this on the general demystification of western culture, where belief in the ability to be cursed by a witch is rare — and where even self-described witches often consider curses prohibitively dangerous to the caster— or on contagion being a more visually interesting mechanism in film, (though I would argue against this, citing the use of curses in J-horror and post-Suspiria Giallo, not to mention high-budget fantasy like Harry Potter). Instead, contagion spread because in an age of mass-media propaganda and heterogeneous populations, it’s a more flexible metaphor for our political anxieties.

This innovation, the idea of monstrous contagion (which probably can be credited to Stoker), has its most interesting manifestation in the zombie apocalypse narrative.

Political ideas are, functionally, heuristics about how best to run the world. Such heuristics can be reasoned about, and we can talk about what kind of world benefits best from certain political positions. Scott Alexander suggests that the set of tendencies we associate with the far Right , (a heavy focus on physical defense and self-sufficiency, careful gate-keeping and control over population, and a distrust of social services), makes the most sense in a dangerous environment, while tendencies we associate with the far-Left, (a heavy focus on equality, including trying to ensure care for the sick and poor), spreads in an environment that’s safe and resource-rich.

In Alexander’s terms, Right-wing values are for surviving in an unsafe environment, (specifically, one with war, disease, and widespread trickery), while left-wing values are for thriving in a generally-safe world, (where things are generally trustworthy and the marginal cost of risky gambles is lower). This form of Apocalypse myth will appeal to people with Right-wing values: they present a rough world where only people with Right-wing values are able to survive. By suggesting that those conditions emerge in the very near future, such as in the first three Mad Max films, they justify a survivalist impulse.

Zombie apocalypse stories are a refinement of this genre, made to appeal to specific, timely ideas. I don’t think that this is necessarily the result of the filmmaker’s ideology; instead, shifts in the political climate have changed what kind of media resonate. Rather than embracing the same kind of 50s family-based patriarchy that you’d see in early nuclear apocalypse movies, (as parodied in Blast from the Past), the new cozy catastrophe features a band of free agents. Repopulating the world is explicitly made out to be a bad idea. We see some of the seeds of this kind of narrative in the more subversive takes on nuclear apocalypse stories that were showing up around the time Night of the Living Dead came out. A Boy and His Dog seems like a particularly good case.

Zombies themselves vary wildly. Sometimes they hunt by smell and other times they hunt by hearing or sight. They exist on a spectrum from totally mindless automatons to merely distracted animals. Sometimes they are dead and sometimes they are merely ill. Sometimes they move slowly and other times they move like lightning. The cross-genre commonalities specifically construct an environment that favors current Right-wing values:

1. By the time anybody notices, there are a lot of them. Any remaining humans are surrounded by enemies and are justified in hoarding weapons and building walls
2. Zombie-ism is infectious or effects all dead. Remaining humans are justified in being suspicious about other remaining humans, and justified in treating them as potential threats. Not only is living in large groups or caring for the sick a drain on scarce resources, but it also dramatically increases the likelihood of contagion within the human community from inside.
3. Only small pockets of humanity remain. There are no social structures still in place to provide resources or care for the ill, so people are justified in behaving ruthlessly.
4. The zombie infection creates clearly visible physical changes. Zombies cannot pass among humans unnoticed for long, and all zombies are threats, so treating people as threats based on appearance is not merely acceptable but actually necessary

There are also common story-lines that appear in zombie apocalypse media. For instance:

1. Story: A lover or family member of a survivor is infected, and the survivor keeps the infected family member around for longer than is safe out of an irrational attachment.
   Moral: Emotional connections are potentially dangerous; only ruthless and detached behavior is safe.
2. Story: Our small band of survivors finds a village that is doing well enough to start re-building parts of society, but that village is already harboring infected people or has unacceptable practices.
   Moral: Large groups harbor dangerous free-riders, and in a resource-poor environment social services can only be provided at an unacceptably high cost.

Why does it matter that a genre has such a clean mapping to an ideology? The stories we tell and consume have a feedback loop with our expectations. It’s not that we can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality, but instead that we will, when suspending disbelief, treat internal consistency as evidence of generalizability, even when the premise presents an extreme or pathological situation.

A pathological premise — one that, when looked at carefully, has unintuitive side effects — can be extremely useful for widening the imagination, so long as the pathological premises you consume are sufficiently varied; however, when a popular genre embeds a pathological premise into its definition, the side effects, (whose value lies in being hard to predict from experience with the real world and with other stories), become common sense. The zombie apocalypse genre embeds a pathological premise that is a superstimulus for Right-wing values: it presents a wholly unrealistic premise that, if taken seriously, justifies what half the population of the western world already believes.

It’s evident that many people, (including groups that should know better), have assimilated ideas from the zombie apocalypse narrative. This is particularly clear when looking at the kind of organizations that have used the structure of these stories, (rather than recurring images from them), to advertise themselves. The CDC released zombie preparedness information, as a ‘fun’ way of teaching people about CDC informational pamphlets for things that actually exist; of course, the biology of a zombie virus is improbable in ways that specifically prevent organizations like the CDC from being useful in those stories, (such as spreading too quickly and having too high of an infection rate). This CDC project was in collaboration with FEMA, who used it as an excuse to pass on general disaster preparedness information — but the zombie apocalypse story differs greatly from what happens in actual disasters by discouraging people from banding together. While the zombie apocalypse tie-in may have increased the audience for this information, the popularity of the zombie apocalypse narrative, (and before it, the nuclear holocaust narrative), seriously damages our intuition about what real disasters are like. It’s too easy, likewise, to generalize the lessons of a zombie apocalypse story to any kind of civilizational collapse — it’s too easy to take the lesson that the strange behaviors of zombie apocalypse survivors are part of ‘human nature’ rather than the result of very specific, nearly impossible pressures.

Fiction is a very powerful tool. By manipulating the expectations of its audience it changes their behaviors. So, we must be careful of the kinds of stories we tell. Luckily, even in the genre of zombie films, we have some mutations that break the set of assumptions discussed above.

Night of the Comet is a zombie film with some characters who turn slowly but without infection. Instead, all the zombies are created by a single event (dust from the tail of Halley’s Comet causing desiccation), and those characters who turn slowly had less exposure to the dust. In Night of the Comet, characters who are turning can be identified; the threat is quickly over, and banding together with other survivors is not only necessary but actually desirable — in a rare properly-happy ending in zombie apocalypse films, our protagonists begin to rebuild society by getting hitched and adopting foster children.

Dead Snow is a zombie film without zombies. Instead, it features traditional revenants — dead Nazis are given a magical pseudo-life, along with extreme strength, by the power of their greed. The revenant is an interesting candidate for the role of anti-zombie, because a revenant is necessarily rich (there’s an untapped mine of stories involving the Walt Disney Company as a revenant — Walt Disney’s corpse protecting his stash of IP, growing bigger and stronger over time). Dead Snow doesn’t do much ideologically with this premise, but again in the absence of infection, banding together is encouraged.

We don’t live in a world where the zombie apocalypse is possible or where its assumptions are valid. We live in a world where some people are trustworthy and others aren’t, and where working together is often but not always worth the risks. Ours is a messy universe and we deserve stories that prepare us for that complexity. Be careful of stories that tell you to discard your most important tools.