Thursday, May 10, 2012

Zombies: It's a Lifestyle Change, not a Diet

Stephen King argues in his non-fiction book Danse Macabre (http://www.amazon.com/Danse-Macabre-Stephen-King/dp/1439170983/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1336655091&sr=8-2) that the types of horror that we consume are influenced by the cultural fears and anxieties of the times we live in.  For example, movies like "Them!" from 1954, about giant ants, represents cultural fears over the realization of nuclear weaponry, after the horror of dropping the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  The great Universal horror films of the 1930's, which harken back to an almost pre-industrial 19th-century Europe, were a great distraction from the all-too-contemporary Great Depression and the frightening modernity of living in a post World War I world.  Are these European monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman) merely the front lines of the very modernist horror show of World War II to come, teasing out US audiences' anxieties about what was left unresolved after the devastation of WWI?  Gives a whole new spin on the next generation of these films, when Abbott and Costello hung out with the Wolfman, doesn't it?  Once WWII was over, and the United States begins its ascendancy to the top of the superpower heap, Boris Karloff and the rest have to jape with comedians, not menace poor damsels in distress, a sure sign that the world was safe for democracy and consumerism once again.

I've always been a fan of a good monster movie, and my allegiances have always been to the vampires.  They're the most human of monsters, if for no other reason than their close resemblance to non-monstrous humanity (although in recent decades the serial killer has usurped vampires in this category, adding a sort of 'banality of evil' ethos to the monster pantheon due to their obvious un-supernatural nature).  Their sensuality and allure have been well documented, and they have been able stand-ins for all sorts of cultural fears, many of those related to queerness (see, Carmilla, Anne Rice, "True Blood").  In fact, vampires themselves seem to embody the idea of 'queer time' or 'queer temporality' in provocative ways, since their ultimate allure is their immortality, and their shady existence (literally).  Who wouldn't want to have the power to mesmerize others, draw them into your control, and then decide if they live to serve you or not, all while living forever, and never aging?  It sounds like both the historical stereotypes of gays, and everything our contemporary time dreams about, and no wonder their popularity continues to live on in so many different forms, including Mormon vampires (the "Twilight" series).

Even though my fandom has always been for the vampires, there are aspects of Frankenstein's monster that appeal to me.  In keeping with my evocation of queer theory in the previous paragraph, the tomb as womb in the Frankenstein narrative is a queering of reproduction in very provocative ways.  As well, using a more traditional assimilationist approach, the primal need of the monster to be accepted as fully human, to be able to participate in perhaps the most fundamental of human rituals, the ritual of kinship formation and social networks via communication and connection, and to feel something akin to giving and getting love, speaks to any outsider bullied or stigmatized or shunned.  In other words, Frankenstein's monster sure could have used an "It Gets Better" video.  The werewolf doesn't much interest me, but I appreciate the dynamic it tries to play out, the culture/nature divide, although the lack of any real female werewolf leaves the base story of the werewolf much too patriarchal for my tastes.  The werewolf narrative often reads to me like a scary variation of Huck Finn or any John Wayne movie, those rugged individuals trying to escape the constrictions of 'polite society' (otherwise known as 'Girls Town') and heading out for the wilderness in order to enact 'real' masculinity free from criticism and restraint and girlie cooties.

I've spent some time on some other monster staples because, well, even though this blog post is about zombies, I don't much like zombies at all.  They bore me.  They have no personality, they have no humanity, they don't for a moment allow me a point of connection, and even worse, they don't much scare me.  However, I find their use in this contemporary moment as being a great source of amusement for so many to be telling.  I would argue that zombie narratives are so popular today because they represent the 'obesity epidemic.'  Many folks are familiar with the cultural analysis of perhaps the greatest zombie narrative in the US, "Night of the Living Dead," that it evokes the dread of what was happening in the 60's, the Vietnam War, Civil Rights struggles, the rebellion against the military industrial complex and the increasingly ineffectiveness of governments to serve their citizens.  Zombies, because they are such ciphers, seem to have gained traction in recent decades as being a 'go-to' monster for explicating societal dreads.

What could be more fearful than the 'obesity epidemic'?  Every day, in a million different ways, fat people are presented as the most dangerous thing to happen to our society since perhaps the Black Plague.  Soon the whole world will be fat, we'll all die impossibly young, with a plethora of crippling diseases, draining the coffers of nations via our health expenses and failing to reproduce, because everyone knows fat people are icky and shouldn't be touched, let alone screwed.  According to the now-disproved social-contagion theory, just being around us fattys will make you fat, and of course hauling our fat asses around in cars and airplanes is causing the destruction of the environment.   It is heady stuff, having the power to destroy the universe as we know it, and I for one won't take this responsibility lightly (rim shot).

Zombies are fat people, no question.  Like the stereotypical representations of fat people (and not, let me be clear for those of you who traffic in fat stereotypes, real fat people), zombies stumble and lumber around, unsteady on their feet and struggling with locomotion.  Like fat people, zombies have pasty, blotchy skin; the fat get this way from all that time indoors in their mother's basements gaming and consuming high fructose corn syrup.  Like fat people, zombies rarely get to dress in fashionable tailored clothing, or even care to invest in their personal appearance.  Like fat people, zombies have no interest in sex.  Like fat people, zombies are mindless and have no reason and won't deviate one bit from their hunger drive; fattys are so dumb you can't get them to see the error of their ways and start dropping the lbs.  Like fat people, all zombies care about is eating, and will do anything to eat.  Not only that, but their favorite thing to eat is brains, thereby symbolizing exactly what fat does to a human, it eats away their brain, their seat of consciousness and understanding of themselves as a human being.  Like fat people, zombies reproduce rapidly, and if we don't annihilate them, they'll be none of us (thin)humans left.  Therefore, no mercy or kindness can be shown to the zombie or the fat person, and they must be destroyed as soon as possible.

Thus, both zombies and fat people are completely dehumanized, and audiences can deploy their own well-stoked anger and fear of fat people vicariously through zombie narratives in TV, film, and games that requires exhilaration when zombies are killed, and the collective sigh of relief that the world has been made safe for the non-zombie/fat again.  Every day the collective drumbeat of 'obesity epidemic' rhetoric does nothing more than hasten the transformation of fat people into dehumanized, monstrous zombies who must be destroyed.  However, there is one key difference between representations of zombies and fat people, and I think it is frighteningly telling:

There are no images of headless zombies, but an industry of headless fatty images*+

*thanks to Charlotte Cooper for this wonderful phrase
+although I've been playing around with these ideas for a few years now, thanks to folks at the Popular Culture Association Conference for indulging my riffs on this topic

15 comments:

  1. This is interesting. I don't particularly like horror stuff to start, and I never waste an opportunity to call Stephen King undisciplined (I will never get back those weeks I spent reading the pornographically large edition of The Stand). Nevertheless, I love Zombieland. If you haven't seen it, you should watch it, if only because one of the Zombie hunters, Tallahassee, spends a good portion of the movie fiending for Twinkies.

    I wonder how this plot detail might complicate your analysis. What does it mean for the Zombies to consume Twinkies but to leave behind the equally unhealthy Snowball treats? Moreover, what does it mean for the fit, arguably (according to this post) fat-phobic Zombie hunter to want nothing else but to eat one of the most disgusting--but oh-so-sweet--treats ever invented?

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  2. My first thought about the Twinkie is the cultural trope about how Twinkies have a shelf life of 25 years or more, and thus perhaps the Twinkie is a stand-in for ideas about purity, naturalness, and the need for a 'cycle of life' that doesn't allow things to come back from the dead, and thus live forever. If the Twinkie 'never dies,' it represents the sort of world that could create the monster that is the zombie swarm.

    As for the reasons why the zombie hunter would jones for Twinkies, it would be to determine that, like cookie monster says, "[sweet snacks] are a sometimes food," and the zombie hunters' relish for Twinkies, alnogside his thinness, demonstrates a proper relation between humanity and indulgence. Like in "Frankenstein," it isn't such a bad thing that Victor Frankenstein is a scientist tampering with nature, it is that he deigns to take on a god-like role by creating new life. All in moderation, in other words.

    Thanks for making me think more about my hypothesis. Plus, I'd take a Snoball any time over a Twinkie, probably because the pink ones read as really queer to me.

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  3. Oh, wow. Beloved…you should win the internet for your awesome title alone. But then you wrote oh so much more awesomeness. And you wonder why I and the rest of your fandom are so fanatic! Speaking of which, I am very curious to hear more of their responses. And I love the Q&A above. Also, I continue to hope you will publish and otherwise share and use these posts elsewhere.

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    1. Thank you my dear Mycroft. I am always open to suggestions about sharing these posts, since you know my failure at mastering the internet. If you have any questions, let me know.

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  4. BRAIIIINZ! This is great. I think you can also add a disability analysis to your work on zombies, since many Disabled folks lurch, stagger, drool, have blotchy skin, don't have access to fashionable clothing, are culturally desexualized, and are thought to be best locked away from the sight of the general public (even though, hello, fatties, Disabled folks, and Disabled fatties are HOTTT). A lot of the fear of fatness is inextricably linked to the fear of disability and death, and cultural beauty norms and you-are-at-fault-for-your-non-normative-body scripts hurt Disabled folks and fat folks alike.

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    1. All excellent points, Sarah, and so right on (especially the HOTTT part). I wonder how frequently in Western history the fear of disability as a colonizing force of destruction has been as pervasive and controlling as the current 'obesity epidemic' panic today? I mentioned the Bulbonic Plague in my piece, so that is one instance. One might also suggest HIV/AIDS, but at least in a US context many folks have suggested vampires were the stand-in for fears of sexuality and contagion (Interview With a Vampire). Might also explain why vampires were so popular in 19th century Europe, with the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases in Victorian society. Thanks for your smart comments, Sarah.

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    2. Sarah, your spot-on point about the fear of death reminds me of something I forgot to include in my piece, that fat people are seen as 'the living dead' because all fat people are assumed to be one deep fried oreo away from death. As you point out, fears not only of scarcity and the fat body, and consumption and the fat body, but fear of mortality and the fat body, are all reasons the proliferation of zombie narratives in our present time is an apt stand-in for the culture's wrestling with these anxieties. After all, isn't 'the moribidly obese' just another way of saying 'the living dead'?

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    3. Plus, wouldn't it be nice if I could spell 'morbidly' correctly in my post at 6:06 pm? If there are other mistakes, please forgive.

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  5. In regard to your last line about headless fatties and headless zombies, may I point out that the tried and true method for killing a zombie is to cut off its head? Which makes some sense to me. We dehumanize fat people by turning them into headless fatties, so obviously we would kill a zombie by cutting of its head.

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    1. Yes, excellent point, Carolmerel! Interesting that unlike, say a vampire who needs to be stabbed in the heart, the seat of life is in the brain in the zombie, even as they represent a mindless, irrational hunger that operates as if there is no brain, or seat of reason.

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  6. I'm sharing some fantastically smart words from my friend Lizzy, words that elevate this discourse in provocative and intelligent ways, so I hope you enjoy:


    "Nice! Deleuze and Guattari called zombies the only modern monsters and linked them to slavery and colonialism.

    I liked your method of mapping the zombie-as-fat-person to the vampire-as-contagion idea of earlier criticism on the subject of disease. Of course, the zombie is "contagious," too, but its essential lack of explainability or coherence as a subject (their mindlessness) does seem to mirror something of the way everyone's always struggling to understand "obesity" but always coming up short.

    In relationship to current pop ideologies of health, the zombie to me seems born out of the perfect wavering between the timeless zone where we live forever if we consume the right things in the right way at the right moment and the fear that what we "really" are is moving corpses. Is it not the real fear that disease is everywhere after us that drives us toward this obsession with having to be healthy? But on the other hand, how can we possibly know conclusively (in life or in death) that we *are* healthy, that the herbs, the Weight Watchers, the gym, the health literacy efforts are working? What if we can't know, precisely because we have already entered a kind of zombie space where we will consume any product or idea, so long as it feeds the drive to feel subjective control over health. What if we are already dead, but too mindless to know it?

    In fact, the product we consume when we go to Weight Watchers is our own subjective experience of wellbeing. There is something shaky about that ground, and out of that shaky ground, of course, emerges the zombie. There is both death and no-death in the timeless space of the zombie, resolution and ambiguity, the already-dead vs. the still- living, them vs. us. And, of course, extreme consumption to the point of self-cannibalization. Alternately, there is the timeless space of the perfection we project for ourselves if we only get it right: By informing myself about how to be healthy, I stave off death; by consuming this protein bar, I am doing my best to ensure I am around for my kids for a long time; by going to the gym 3x a week, I am building muscle and burning fat. Mesmerized by this wish-projection of ourselves as the picture of health, we close ourselves off in the airtight glass box of the fantasy of ever-regenerative health. Sealed outside, the zombies are spectacle, comical at times, too. Zombies are thus both our detritus, what's repulsive in us mindlessly trying to engulf us, and what we could never be.

    That seems to map onto your idea of fat person as zombie, though I'm afraid zombies have become very multidimensional, now almost synonymous with pop culture itself. In this, zombies may be transcending their mindlessness: If they were always signifiers for the utter failure of signifiers, zombies now seem to stand for something. What, I'm not sure.


    I suppose that when one is succumbing to illness and realizes it, the image of the zombie disappears, if we can become mindful of what's happening. Still, there's always denial."

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  7. Fascinating exploration of possible hidden meanings behind our monsters. I couldn't help thinking about the film Gods and Monsters about James Whale, director of Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, etc. The film explored his later life sorrow over ageing and identity as a gay man, but there was an interesting parallel drawn between his experience in the trenches of WWI, watching a man he was attracted to dying and then slowly rotting on the barbed wire of No Man's Land amid flashes of artillery fire that made it impossible to retrieve his body. The flashes and thunder of guns and the nearness of death and decomposition seem to have carried over into the atmosphere in the film Frankenstein.

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  8. This. Is. Freaking. Brilliant. I've been waiting for years to read your thoughts on this, and it's as challenging and fascinating as I suspected it would be. Oh, my friend, you inspire me to explore and write more about the historical and contemporary monstrousness of The Fatties.

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  9. Oh and btw, the responses by others are likewise fantastically thought-provoking. Thanks to everyone for chiming in!

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  10. Lynne and Lesleigh, please forgive my delay in replying. Thanks fro reminding us about the film Gods and Monsters, Lynne, and for another example of how these monsters do so much more than provide easy scares. Lesleigh, I look forward to hearing more of your work on monstrosity and fatness, and thank you both for your kind words.

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