Interesting "Zombie" Story On CNN...

[Patrick]

Enjoy and discuss...

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/12/20/the-zombie-theology-behind-the-walking-dead/?hpt=C2

[Setherick]

Picking up on Patrick's command to discuss, I think this topic does need to be discussed. What is the ontological significance of people who actively identify themselves as zombies? Personally, I've found the zombie as cultural construct, not as voodoo machination, to be a floating signifier. In fact, I think this is why zombies are so popular because they can represent literally anything in terms of subjective experience. Thus a spammer computer network that hijacks multiple computer sys operations is a zombie network, just as "mindless" holiday shoppers are zombie consumers.

[Tadanori Oyama]

I hadn't ever considered the religious angle they pull here with "redemption", using the analog that in most cases zombies can't go back to being human, ergo they can not be redeemed. The idea has lent alot of weight to emotions in good zombie movies when one is forced to deal with loved ones who are or will become zombies.

[Patrick]

I think that zombies play second fiddle to the real horror of a zombie apocalypse. The real horror I speak of is a world without morality. Because zombies are mindless, they are more like forces of nature and just as there is no morality implicit in a hurricane or earthquake, there is no morality in the zombie's urge to destroy and consume.

The pathos in zombie films is generated by the moral struggle of the "living" characters (as opposed to the undead): how do you resolve killing creatures that were once your family, friends and neighbors?

I think Romero's films capture the horror, tension and dilemma of morality in a world where morality has, essentially, disappeared...

Zombie films also tend to be nilhistic, in that the survivors all know that eventually they will be killed or exiled by the millions and millions of undead.

Max Brooks' World War Z novel upended the bleak future that most zombie fiction paints by describing a world AFTER the zombie apocalypse. He also addressed the moral dilemma created in post zombie-apocalyptic world quite accurately.

In the end, I don't think zombies are quite as terrifying as the idea of what we would become in order to survive in a zombie infested world...

P.S. This Wikipedia article may be of some interest to zombie afficianados: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

[crash2455]

What I found most interesting about World War Z could be rewritten somewhat easily about any other global disaster.  The recurring theme in that book was that zombies weren't as much of a threat to humanity as humanity itself.  Our pride and our arrogance was our undoing:

-The battle at Yonkers could have been won if we used proper weapons and didn't spend time on tactics that don't apply to enemies who walk slowly and want to eat you.
-The Canadian story could have been resolved by people not going north, or at least having a fair amount of wilderness survival and rationing

There are other stories in there, but it's been a while since I've read it.

[Tadanori Oyama]

In the end, I don't think zombies are quite as terrifying as the idea of what we would become in order to survive in a zombie infested world...

I respectfully disagree. I find that ability to engage in a mortal quandry preferable to the inability to do so, i.e. death.

I propose that life is preferable to death and as such any state of living is, in fact, preferable to death. I farther propose that existance as a zombie does not constitute "life" and is therefore not preferable to death.

For me, the horror is always the threat of destruction of the mind, in whatever form it comes in. Death by human or zombie has the same result: a lose of thought and continued existance in my current state.

There are other stories in there, but it's been a while since I've read it.

How about the fucking Russians? That was some twisted shit. Resulted from zombies but humans formed the plan both times.

[Patrick]

Tad I think you're missing the metaphorical point that a director like George A. Romero illustrates so beautifully in his films..

In a world filled with the living dead, how "alive" can a person be? In that world does anything of your former life exist? Would you be able to form an unbroken mental continuum if every vestige of your "life" was killed and consumed by zombies? If you shot your mother because she was a zombie would you still be you and more importantly, how would that act change you? If your entire belief system was turned upside down and then destroyed, how much of "you" would remain?

While I think its easy to sit back and intellectualize, being there would present a very visceral challenge. Take, for example, the survivors of natural disasters, wars and plagues. How many of those people walk away from those experiences mentally intact.

I think World War Z echoes this theme beautifully. Every single person interviewed was changed in some fundamentally ironic way and most of them lost their families and their sense of who they were and what they were. In a sense they became the zombies...

[Wooberman]

*watches the debate, enraptured*

[Tadanori Oyama]

I don't claim peopel would come away unscarred by their experiences.

I only propose that they would come away.

The mere fact of survival indicates a victory. Death isn't a matter of degrees, a person is alive or they are not. The gray area is in the realms of the dying. The levels between life and the moment when death finally occurs may be infinitely wide, but dead is dead and there is no returning.

One can ask "How can you live with that trama?" only if the person is still alive. Most people don't ask "How could you die with all that trama"?

I can certainly see fearing what one becomes and the horror of experiences but only because I'm alive. Success leads to survival, fear, and torement while failure leads only to death. There are no options in death. None of me remains in death. As long as I'm alive, something remains, whatever my state.

[Patrick]

Yes, I agree with you 100% Tad, but the fact that zombies aka "the living dead" are walking around in the fictional world that we are talking about indicates a fundamental change in what a person might consider "living" or "dead".

Again, "living death" is an integral part of the ironic nature of "life" for a survivor in a zombie infested world...

Thank you for being respectful, I appreciate a good discussion... 

[Setherick]

The only twist I would add to what Patrick is saying is that if we're going to consider zombies as raising questions of our own mortality, we must read them in the context that most of the Western world is living under similar conditions that Nietzsche describes as the Last Man: "They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him; for one needs warmth. Turning ill and being distrustful, they consider sinful: they walk warily. He is a fool who still stumbles over stones or men! A little poison now and then: that makes for pleasant dreams. And much poison at the end for a pleasant death."

The zombie confronts people not only with death, but reminds them that they will die. It's not the tension that arises out of what it means to be alive, but rather the distinct possibility the individual will die and can die - brutally, violently, unintelligibly.   

[Seejo Crux]

I think a Freudian psychoanalyst would say that zombies represent Todestrieb - the Death Drive - in all of us. The drive is the source of violence, war, and our counter-intuitive desire to return to an inorganic state. The attempt of humanity to thrive in a zombie apocalypse can be seen as the eternal struggle between the Pleasure and Death drives in Man throughout his life.