Surplus-life

[a more full explanation of the concept of surplus-life first raised in my original apocalyptic notes]


We shouldn't disavow the critique – of race, class, nation, gender, etc – embedded in much of the zombie genre, Romero first and foremost. Indeed, the vague, and often misleading, Leftism of its perspective constitutes the texture and tone perhaps as much as the relations between interior/exterior, fixity/flight, and care/brutality. And it remains, from its incipient moments on, capable of real moments of vitriol and shock: the sinking stomach feeling drops in freefall in the total horror of Ben’s death (when redneck zombie hunters "mistake" him for a zombie). But, as raised earlier, the on-the-surface social critique is the least interesting part of the films, particularly from a political perspective. If there is a sharper turn of critique and thought, one not caught in the abortive passage bound to the personal trauma, it can only lie in the zombies themselves, the real protagonists of the films.

Not since Eisenstein’s films have we witnessed such a startling construction of the mass subject: the slow pained birth of the new group from the wreckage of the everyday. Not class consciousness per se, but the wracking formation of something that, like all revolutionary movements, starts from the universal – not what is common across individuals but what is the universal principle under which those of a historical period exist – and lurches, however ineptly, toward its negation. Stumbling and swarming, single minded and mindless, they are the unhalting drive toward toward the destruction of the world that exists and all it stands for.

That said, they might be rather surprised to learn of this role of eschaton made flesh. In the Romero films, they are surprised to learn, period. And so before considering what it means for the “irrational” to develop a sense of what they have been doing all along and of the advanced tactics of how to do it better, we return to that dual core of what they do without “meaning to”: they consume, and they do not die.

What do they consume? Despite the endless LOL-zombie level jokes, it wasn’t always about “Brains…”. That particular iteration, with all its monotonous staying power, comes from Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead (1985), (which I'll write on shortly). No, for Romero and the meat glee of his SFX man Tom Savini, it is flesh, ripped from the bone, and it is entrails, the sickly wet thup of the unraveling guts.



But even aside from the fact that consumption does not answer hunger, the very eating and hunting practices were never about filling bellies, of persistently butchering the living to get every last bit of protein from them. Instead, they absent-mindedly snack and, more crucially, they are distracted by the fresher living, the not yet touched by zombies. Pragmatically, they should stick with the kill they’ve already made, not waste energy chasing new prey that will very likely turn out to kill the hunter. Of course, none of this matters or applies here, for there is that odd doubling: they don’t need to eat, yet it is just what they do. And not yet to turn the living to their side, not a quick bite to convert the uninitiated and add to the ranks. (It can’t be good for the effectiveness of your zombie horde to have a significant number of them missing large chunks of muscle and connective tissue.) They are consumers, pure and simple, the unaware manifestation of consumption compulsion hitting its joking stride in the mall wandering slack-jaws of Dawn of the Dead.

No moment so captures this bare anti-hunger and shameless consumption as that when, in Night of the Living Dead, the basement door opens to reveal “zombified” Karen – one of those holed up in the farmhouse - munching away on her father. The shot is remarkable, an entire case-study of familial tension and libidinal investment in a single moment: her mother opens the door, a crack of light reveals Karen, and she freezes, mouth full of Daddy. Not in knowing shame at the act, but with, at most, the minor embarassment and sudden stillness of one caught midnight snacking in the harsh glow of the open refrigerator. To hijack a Freudian moment, this is something approximate to, Mother, can’t you see I’m eating?

But the absence of her shame is compensated for by our revulsion, that knowing laughter and shudder. However, we should insist, our laughter/horror is not a response to the “body horror” (the tasteful black and white gore details are restrained, even for Romero), but at her fundamental misrecognition. This is not the misrecognition of eating your father by accident, not even of being unaware of how awkward a situation appears to one who stumbles into it. It is the fundamental misrecognition of zombies and of our attachment to them.

This is the misrecognition of one who has risen without reason, compelled to rise for no purpose beyond the mere repetition, consumption, and imitation of life. For the basic fact of the true zombie gesture, in its occluded form, is not the animation of the dead body but the over-animation of the living body.

To make this less cryptic, we might ask: how do the dead “rise”/“walk” in these films? And which dead?

As explained, these are not movies about transmission, at least in the explicit sense. You don’t become a zombie by coming into contact with one. Being bitten may hasten the process (an unbrushed, rank, rotten meat reeking mouth plus a jagged bite will likely lead to a nasty infection), but it isn’t the cause. The cause is an irrevocable change, something that, echoing Joyce, descends upon all the living and the dead.


Indeed, we should stress the living aspect of this. In the graphic novel The Walking Dead, which gets to expand the moves, tropes, and themes of a Romero film into a long, unfolding narrative, the central character Rick realizes, upon discovering that the “roamers” include those who happened to die without being bitten, that if “they revived without a bite – that means we’re all infected. Or could be. That means we’re just waiting to die before we come back as one of those things.” Later in the series, as the death toll mounts and the survivors turn more and more ferociously against each other, he delivers the titular line, pointing out that “WE are the walking dead”: it isn’t us the living against the animated dead, but the remapping of the entire world into the fields and enclosures of the already dead, the apparently living just biding their time before becoming what cannot be avoided.

In other words, it is not dying that makes you a zombie. It is not-dying that does, already present in you as you fight off the hordes you will someday join. It is the fact that you don’t, can’t or won’t – in the varied inflections of will and non-agency of each option – stay down. All that is know, the one certainty after the tectonic shift that can’t be repaired, the “world revolution”, is that the dead will rise, because they never really die. Hence while the effects are personal (the pathos of the family consuming itself, the existential angst at the certainty of becoming a zombie), the cause is not.


Romero’s own comments about this, and the relation of his film to Matheson’s I Am Legend, are instructive:

"I thought I Am Legend was about revolution. I said if you’re going to do something about revolution, you should start at the beginning. I mean, Richard starts his book with one man left; everybody in the world has become a vampire. I said we got to start at the beginning and tweak it up a little bit. I couldn’t use vampires because he did, so I wanted something that would be an earth-shaking change. Something that was forever, something that was really at the heart of it. I said, so what if the dead stop staying dead? ... And the stories are about how people respond or fail to respond to this. That’s really all [the zombies] ever represented to me. In Richard’s book, in the original I Am Legend, that’s what I thought that book was about. There’s this global change and there’s one guy holding out saying, wait a minute, I’m still a human. He’s wrong. Go ahead. Join them. You’ll live forever! In a certain sense he’s wrong but on the other hand, you’ve got to respect him for taking that position."

One could say much about how Romero articulates the origins and trajectory of his project here, but for the moment, three comments. First, the sense that it was never really about the zombies: they are representations – more precisely, the external embodiment – of how people respond to a global shift. In a strange doubling back, they are nothing but the registration of the response to them, an echo chamber with a hollow void at its center (you are just our response to what you are). Second, the slippery question of at what point you are still human. The Matheson schematic of obstinance and refusal to adapt, for which we all do have some respect indeed, is perhaps less aon the level of his unwillingness to become something other and more the problem of one who doesn’t realize that he is already a consequence and product of that change.

Or, we should insist, at least the Romero reload of Matheson achieves this: if the zombies are a projection of how we respond to “earth-shaking change,” such a projection is needed because we lack the ability – or willingness – to read ourselves for the signs of such changes, to grasp what has befallen us all. Third, and most crucially, is just that sense of tectonic shift, of that “global change,” which provides the injunction to start from the beginning. However, to show the “beginning” of this revolution is not to locate a false origin or precise cause. The radiation loosed from the exploded probe may be “to blame,” but what is never explained, through any of the series, is how it is to blame. Like all evental shifts, there is a gathering storm of overdetermination, a blur of intersecting influences and pressures. All that we can witness is the emergent, the point of no return.


And indeed it is a point of no return. For what is the world condition that occurs? It is clearly not that all the dead who ever died rise. It is not even just those dead with enough connective tissue and meat on their bones to stand and shamble. It is those who died after the new set of rules came to be, after the radiation has spread, the evental shift that only becomes evident in its after-effects. In this way, zombie films are not about the living dead, at least not in any direct way. They are about the undying living. They are about surplus-life, the new logic of excessive existence: something has given us all too-much-life, an inability to properly die, a system that no longer knows how or when to quit.

If there is an infection or viral model here, it is of a systemic change that infects all, demands of you that you not die, just the continuation and modification of the human animal in its furious and unnatural perseverance. The instinct to survive turned against itself in parody, the conatus gone haywire. And more than that, the end of the sovereignty of not just the subject but the working body, now given a task that you can’t finish, a job from which you don’t get to punch out. In this way, both on the micro scale of the world of each body and mind compelled to stop minding and just keep going, and on the global scale, the zombie apocalypse is not the end of the world: it is the “end of the end”, the world never ending.

That's what is so horrifying. Not the possibility of it ending this way, in plague and rot and terror, but in the drawn out sigh of the thought, my god, what if it never ends... And worse, the possibility that this may be so central to the dominant logic of our age that it no longer is capable of horrifying, the soft whimper of protest drowned out in the roar of the self-same.

Nothing personal

[Thoughts on the zombie apocalypse template kicked off by Night of the Living Dead, the construction of the tropes and clichés that show us what it looks like for the world to end at the hands and mouths of the stumbling dead.]

The orgy and the ecstasy

First and foremost is a spatial opposition that visually orients the zombie genre as a whole, between the domestic interior – or interiors that become sites of cobbled together domestic living – and the wilds of the outside, always trying to burst through the doors and windows. This produces, almost inevitably, the great money shot of the zombie film: the horror and ecstasy of one of the survivors getting dragged across the divide, screaming as he or she is welcomed into the arms and mouths of the waiting horde. Hence we get one of our era’s greatest fantasmatic images, of just giving up on the entire domestic sphere of responsibility and family values, just getting pulled “against my will” into the orgy of irrationality and swarm collectivity.

But no, in these films, a man’s house – or any house secure enough to hole up in – is indeed a castle, and a castle exists for protection and siege, for shoring up the splintered remains of a distinction between private spaces and public spaces, between zones for family bickering and zones for all-out war.

Unfortunately, things aren’t much safer inside. The consistent lesson across Romero’s films seems to be: what divides us from the them, the rational humans trying to survive from the zombie hordes? At least zombies won’t stab you in the back or constantly pull guns on you during an argument. Toward the later films, Land of the Dead in particular, they will learn how to pull guns, but there it is in the service of a developing solidarity the petty and hysterical living can only envy. (Not to mention the amazing moment when Bub, the semi-domesticated zombie of Day of the Dead, learns to wield a gun and looks like nothing so much as John Wayne, in the halting bowlegged shuffle gait: the zombie as honorable stoic old West hero, the undead last bastion of noble American masculinity.)

The humans, though, prove to be your real enemies, unpredictable, stressed, and cowardly, who, again and again, get everyone killed in trying to save their own skin. Romero’s films, like those of fellow social critic horror director John Carpenter, have been from the start about the clusterfuck that is group dynamics and a deep, lingering awareness of the damage we remain uniquely capable of inflicting on one another. It may be the zombies who we are supposed to shoot in the head, but that won’t be nearly so satisfying as blowing away the jerks who have been making the apocalypse so unpleasant and dangerous.

Family drama

Therein lies the darkest, and simultaneously most joyous, heart of the zombie film: the consummate bad faith of the savagery you’ve been wanting to inflict all along. It is bad faith because it veils the basic desire under the sign of necessity: I had to kill her, she was going to “turn”. It is the flowering misanthropy of everyday life, the common desire to just stop talking things through, to stop biting your tongue, to unload on your friends, neighbors, siblings, and parents. And even more, on the stranger, on the human body we don’t know.

This is analogous to the response to Columbine and other “random” public massacres: so much of the horror and shock was due to the eruption in “real life” of what was supposed to remain a secret communal fantasy of nastiness toward our fellow human. The point here is not that there are certain pathological populations who are the bearers of this wrong urge. The pathology is structural, shared by all social beings, or by all those who have successfully become good citizens and people, all who have learned that conflict and urges are mediated by and disseminated throughout all language and discourse, that massive horizontal net of rules and conventions. In this way, the zombie film lets us bares our open secret and celebrate in it, watch an endless sequence of strangers shot in the head, the audience cheering at particularly “good” kills.

However, it keeps this bloodlust on a tight leash, via that blind of necessity, and thereby replicating all the more the structures of what is and is not allowed. In a line repeated across the genre with minor variation, “that was before… nothing is the same anymore.” This is marshaled most often before or after killing a comrade/mother/friend who has been bit and may “turn.” The question it raises, obliquely, is how long you’ve been waiting to do this, before the zombie apocalypse gave you an excuse.

And apocalypse should be stressed here in its proper sense, as the revelation of the hidden. Namely, what is apocalyptic about the walking dead is what they reveals about the conditions of the living, the deep, rutted grooves of antagonism and violence, the seething undercurrents of anger and repression. The open secrets of an economic totality, at once the violence of abstraction (the brutal consequences of shifting patterns of valuation) and the abstraction of violence (this is just business, folks, nothing personal).

However, the zombie apocalyptic fantasy is that of a world in which just such abstraction is destroyed, producing all the utopian possibilities and ideological pitfalls of a world beyond value. In a desperate echo of salvagepunk, the world of zombie hordes is a radical contraction of what is desirable to possess: if it can’t kill, heal, feed, help escape, burn, or barricade, then it only slows you down. Exchange-value rots even faster than the bodies, leaving behind objects in their naked utility and hardness.

Yet the vision of the zombie apocalypse is never a post-apocalyptic vision, not a single event and revelation out of which we regroup and attempt to rebuild. Rather, they are the mapping and figuring of apocalyptic duration, the crisis that will not quit and the ceaseless work of slaughter, partition, burying, and moving on. So too the content of the revelation, the hidden re-revealed again and again, from the deep inheritances of racial and class prejudice to lingering models of erotic possession and familial structure, from the deep and cathartic pleasures of corporal savagery to the sinking realization it was never the zombies who made this world unlivable. They just give the subjectless catastrophe of this century a necrotic, yearning form.

And on and on and on

In the fundamental non-progression of this apocalypse, stuck and skipping like a record, doomed – like the genre itself – to mutely repeat what we have known all along against our intended ignorance, the full recognition and mobilization of what has been revealed remains impossible. This is both on the level of the diagetic content of the films – what’s going on in their worlds – and the films themselves: in neither case can anyone get past the personal. The trauma is of the species itself, but the survivors – and the supposed critique internal to the films – cut themselves off at the knees by their resolute inability to think anything close to totality. To hearken back to the “missing question” of transmission, they lack the capacity – or, more frequently, refuse the consequences of such a thought – to fathom how the global transmits to the local.

As such, one faces two options. You can abandon whatever community to which you temporarily belong and get the hell out of town, preferably to the wilds of Canada (the deeply reactionary end of Land of the Dead) or a Carribean island (the oddly unconvincing end of Day of the Dead). Or you refuse to keep moving and establish your stronghold, whether mall, house, bunker, farm, prison, or factory. (A zombie apocalypse scenario set in a factory doesn’t exist, to my knowledge. But it really should: something like a Meyerhold gasworks drama meets The Grapes of Death.) Which essentially means, given the less than rosy view of what we do to each other, staying in one place long enough for the worst tendencies of the human animal, post-capitalism, to come out. Therein the deep social nihilism of the genre: stay with a group of other survivors, and soon you won’t be a survivor, falling victim to what inevitably happens when you’re trapped in one house with too many guns and an entire social order worth of antagonism.

Above all, the films institute a cycle of passages between these visions of fixity and flight. Their texture and tempo is precisely this gap: one gets to rest, but only uncertainly, with the awareness that the idyll is a calm before a storm that never stops. And just as these passages are stunted, thrown off course and kilter, rendered hectic and abortive, the passages of thought from base to superstructure are themselves messy and precise in their failure.

Recognition

It is because we don’t get a proper realism or cognitive mapping that zombie films better capture the logic of the times, that same almost-thought to be elevated over the closure of facile critique. The work of sharper critique and understanding, of making sense of what has been revealed and what is still hidden in plain sight, is forced into this position of the itinerant, the unwelcome guest forever pulling up stakes at gunpoint. The gun, here, is the inertia of the past, the savage insistence of the old roles and rules. That constant refusal to admit that things have changed, No, the government will come, there must be a rational explanation for this, we aren’t the kind of people who do this, coupled with the permanent flight, both in thought and action: we need to keep moving. All those forms of resistance that foreclose the possibility of real resistance, all the mental and social immobility that ends where it starts, back in the arms of the dead.

Gnawing at the air

It is now a commonplace for theorists and critics to elevate zombie films, along with their other gory brethen of splatter and dismemberment oriented film, for telling us something new about the "real." (Or, when those who read psychoanalysis get their/our hands on them, the "Real.") As in the following:

- The primal "real", some deep reptilian urges that get to return in all their anti-Rousseau fury, tearing away at living bodies like very ignoble savages.

- The thought of zombies as a kind of meta return of the repressed, the "Real" of contemporary life that cannot be included in the dominant symbolic order: a loopy perverted death drive whose cannibalism parodies the drives to excess consumption, thereby making the zombies mindless consumers or pitiless capitalists snatching up the weak, depending who you ask.

- What's "really" going on, the zombies as manifestations of racial, class, and gender conflict, as well as registering the anxieties and resistances to contemporary events.

- The forbidden, visceral, abject real of the body, the getting to see all the bloody bits brought to the surface, the abstract spirit of the mind rendered into just one more pile of succulent warm nutrition. Spirit is not a bone, it is the juicy bits encased within bone.

Fair enough. But our interest is in a different set of reals that map onto the particularity of what the figure of the zombie does and how it is positioned, uncertainly, in the mass culture of capitalism. Namely, it thinks how real abstractions work on real bodies, of the nastiest intersections of the law of value and the law of inevitable decay.*

And more specifically, it thinks this via two central concerns:

reanimation (transmission)

consumption (hunger)

In each pairing, the latter term is not the underlying cause, contrary to appearances. Romero-zombies are not reanimated because of infectious transmission of a "zombie disease" from the bite of a zombie, at least not until we get to the recent 28 Days Later model. They are reanimated because the world has changed in a way we can't determine. (How did the dead get the message to rise up? And why weren't we informed?) And they do not eat because of "hunger", in any physiological way: think here of the remarkable moment in Day of the Dead where Dr. Logan has removed all the vital organs of the vivisected zombie to watch it still strain to tear the flesh from his hands, its grashing teeth clamping down again and again on the air...

Rather, the latter term is the asubjective truth of the activity: it is the obscure center of a thought that exceeds what a zombie does or does not do, not verified by the reason why an individual subject, albeit necrotic and "without reason", acts a certain way. Hunger decoupled from the act of sating hunger, and transmission that we cannot trace. Each is the absent cause produced by the activity: precisely because it is not the reason for doing these things (the dead rising and the dead eating the living), it is raised in relief, the strange shadow undergirding and blackly illuminating the deeper workings of a totality. It is the point of the whole enterprise, from yawning graves to gnawing meat, precisely because it is missing from it. For what is hunger at its barest and most obscene if not a consumption that cannot end, for the very fact that it was never caused by hunger in the first place?



* I'm leaving out here a much longer, and rather theoretically dense, account of the relationship between cultural objects and real abstractions. It'll be in the much extended version of these thoughts in the book. If interested, search "real abstraction" on the blog to find my other discussions of it - there are far more than there need be.

Through the motions, wrongly

Unsettled beginnings

Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), the real launching point of zombies in mass culture, is one of those odd "foundational" films. It has its antecedents, to be sure, in three major strands. First, the voodoo inflected zombies of Victor Halperin's White Zombie (1932), Jacques Torneurs's I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and the shoddy knock-offs of both (i.e. the remarkable/awful Zombies on Broadway from 1945). Second, and more directly in terms of inspiring what Romero was "trying to do," Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend. (This would also include Ubaldo Ragona's 1964 film adaptation, The Last Man on Earth, in which we watch a survivor defend a house against hordes of the invading undead, perhaps the most common image across zombie movies.) Third, a tangled mess of aesthetic influences that give the film its distinct look: film noir lighting, Psycho-era Hitchcock camera angles, news reel footage, art-house discontinuous cutting and spatial disorientation, and the basic fact of doing the whole thing for very, very little money, and hence having the look at times dictated by what was available. All that said, Night of the Living Dead represents a shot in the dark: excepting the third strand of all the formal and aesthetic elements cobbled together, it is a notable, singular film, in just how far it goes in leaving behind those antecedents.

But like other horror films that seemingly start a trope (Nosferatu, Frankenstein, etc), they are already weirder and more sharply knowing about their absent source material than they "should" be: they seem to play with and off of an established template that cannot be found.* In other words, they are the films that themselves establish the rules of the game, from the "look" of the film, the kinds of stock characters and settings, broad tones and set moves, and the effect they are aim to have on the audience. Yet at the same time, they are already screwing around with those very rules: they define a genre by the way that they "misread" source material that wasn't there, at least not in any immediately accessible direct lineage way.

In other words, like other films that inaugurate endless series of imitators, spin-offs, reloads, mash-ups, and sequels, the "original" is original largely because it nails something about "what we've seen before" and know very well. What is new it articulates via the inherited tropes and moves of the old: the inherited language of film conventions eases us in and makes even that which we've never seen before seem familiar, well-worn, and expected. Conversely, what seems recognizable immediately, the "ah, yes, here we go again", is precisely the point of immediate departure into the uncertain, where it turns and goes the wrong way. Fittingly for the film that starts "the zombie film" per se, the uncanny and unsettling happens because something "goes through the motions" wrongly, just like the zombie's obscene parody of the movements and habits of everyday life. What the zombie film in particular offers, both in its content and in its relation to other films, is that the minor gap between the inertia of expected behavior or patterns and the yearning pull - affective, physiological, or historical - in another direction is that very gap, that crack in the totality of a system, through which the unwanted pour in.

Outside, looking in

Think here of the beginning of Night of the Living Dead, where the first zombie we see - the first recognizable zombie of late capitalism - looks like nothing so much as a homeless drifter of sorts, a gaunt raggedy man. Tellingly, Barbara and Johnny, her soon-to-be-killed-and-zombified brother, hardly pay him a second glance: at worst, he'll ask them to spare some change. He is not marked as undead, at least not in the technical sense. Just as unwanted. Therein lies the explosion out of and against the accepted codes of who we recognize and who we don't: the zombie's furious attack, which here has nothing to do with trying to eat them, is the feral assertion of the right to be noticed. Even to the end of the encounter, we can practically read on Johnny's face the bourgeois frustration: funny, it's not usually this hard to kill the poor...



* This approach to genre-defining horror films is entirely indebted to Marsh Leicester, whose way of thinking about these odd lineages inflects my thinking throughout this project.

Grave lessons

May 68 poster

Where the Situationist International and zombies meet. Our trajectory through the buried politics of the undead might start here with the bloodied, one-eyed glare of the accusing, raised up to get beaten down again, the endless cycle of not being allowed to die and being blamed for that fact. Not the campy schlock of the mass moaning "brains..." but the quiet rage and planning of the group in formation. Bourgeois, you have understood nothing, and we have some things to teach you. The collective pedagogy of those beyond the pale.

The city of the dead in the city of quartz

It is time to move on toward zombies. The long trek through The Bed Sitting Room finished (and the salvagepunk chapter of which that reading is a part), the next uneven apocalypse in question is that incessant figure of recent years, the horde of the walking dead. The transition, as it were, from robbing history's graves to those who rob their own graves.

Perhaps appropriately, I'm quite sick of zombie culture in its total market saturation: as a particularly dominant form of the general obsession with all things undead, from the Twilight-and-Hot-Topic-ing of tweens to the phrase "zombie apocalypse" entering the broad conversational sphere, it stands as the supreme image of managed viral "underground" culture. The shambling crowd of unmentionables like so many tap-dancing LOL cats.

As such, and hopefully without the petty feeling of betrayal because "I was a fan from the beginning and now they've sold out," I'll try and draw out both the peculiar ideological formation underpinning this mass image, and the aspects of the zombie, as a recurrent image extending back toward the apex and subsequent collapse of Fordism, that resist this contemporary formation. Or, at the least, that remains capable of stripping the veil from the supreme nastiness, bad faith, and willful misconception of the world order on which undead-centered culture hinges without admitting it.

And, on a related note, I'll be heading down to LA to give a talk (and DJing a set of "related" post-apocalyptic music) on these very issues. Come join, or if you know anyone who lives in LA and would like to watch me try to explain the connections between the quivering wings of dead pinned butterflies and the fear of never being able to clock out from work, spread the word.

The dead rustle, the earth shudders (Apocalyptic notes, 2)

Even where reality finds entry into the narrative, precisely at those points at which reality threatens to suppress what the literary subject once performed, it is evident that there is something uncanny about this reality. Its disproportion to the powerless subject, which makes it incommensurable with experience, renders reality unreal with a vengeance. The surplus of reality amounts to its collapse; by striking the subject dead, reality itself becomes deathly[...]
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

If it wasn't already apparent, the media flurry around Seth Grahame-Smith's forthcoming Pride and Prejudice and Zombies makes it conclusive: the zombie - at least in its often enoyable yet impotent, kitschy, "survival guide", Zombie Strippers and Shaun of the Dead form - has become the nightmare-image of the day. If salvagepunk is the dream-image vision of rust and bolts restructuring of the built world, the lurch and rot of zombie hordes is its seeming negation. The obscene persistence of the human animal shows itself, not built or builder. Salvagepunk's homo faber meets its homo superstes, defined not by how it refashions the apocalyptic world it inherits but by the bare fact of its survival (of its own personal world-ending event, its death), a survival that nevertheless signals the end of the collective world as we know it.

In other words, in the zombie scenario, the problem is not the immensity of what is to be done by the too few survivors, of how to make a world so as to avoid its trendlines toward systemic failure while still salvaging and repurposing the ruined tools of the "before." The problem, faced with zombies, is that there are too many survivors.


Albeit the wrong kind of survivor. In an echo of continued surging anxieties about overpopulation, the "planet of the slums", contaminated commodities from afar, and the ongoing degradation of the global south, the ongoing passion for all things zombie has the quality of a perverse, rather subversive joke. Rather than the production of corpses that results from capitalism's management (supported coups, ignored genocides, blocking of access to food and medication, destruction of ecosystems) of its unwanted poor, the production of corpses in the a zombie scenario becomes the production of more mouths to feed. World hunger at its most naked, the sick repetition of want let loose on a global scale.


Yet we need to think through the specificity of the recent period of zombie-fixated culture and its fixation with contagion. For in this wave, exemplified by Boyle's 28 Days Later films, the focus is less on the insatiable hunger of the zombie and more on the danger of the bite, of the transfer of the virus. To be sure, we might read in this continued fears about pandemics, AIDS, and other "literal" figures of contagion and transfer via the bodily act. But this would miss the crucial aspect at hand, namely, why the undead aren't even undead anymore.

The dominant logic of the zombie film from the 40's through the early 80's was two-fold: either the Haitian zombie who was not dead per se and actively controlled via voodoo...


or the shambling hordes, still bearing marks of their life before death, of Romero's trilogy (and others, such as Ragona's Last Man on Earth).


The latter won the day, as icon, as shot in the dark that founded a set of generic conventions, and as site of critique. Romero's own films tracked out their nascent logic, moving to the shuffling corpse mall shoppers in '78 to the factional military dwelling underground in '85. As a tradition, it found its extension into the aesthetic splatter and brutal decay of Fulci's films in Italy, ranging from the Satanic Surrealist genius of The Beyond to Zombie's island of fetid cadaverous cannibals. However, as a horror trope, the zombie film lost its mainstream cachet for a period, as the nameless, replaceable hordes were themselves replaced by the endless iterations of the big names (Freddy, Jason, Michael, Chuckie, etc) and the attempts to found series of continuing characters. More precisely, continuing locations of threat and menace in hard-to-kill, discernible individuals.

Such a tendency was equally hard to kill for the industry, as it continued (and continues) to churn out increasingly campy versions, with the kind of proto-mash-up format we can see in Freddy vs. Jason and Alien vs. Predator (those odd films that have distant ancestors in the sort of madcap goofiness that is Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein). In the two year span between '94 and '96, Wes Craven released Wes Craven's New Nightmare (which took the piss out of his own Freddy Kreuger series and, with a broad, post-modern gesture, took the legs out of 80's horror seriality) and Scream, which paved the way for imitators of its brand of knowing, black comedic, smug slasher moves and conventions.

This is all to say while the legacy of Romero's films never went fully away, the dominant logic in horror films became that of one-to-one violence: the antagonist kills one individual after another, not as a systemic event (suddenly all the dead rise) but a series of encounters (Jason kills another camper) that give the illusion of moral readability and localizable causality (revenge, individual pathology, the usual suspects).

Yet if we consider the preeminent expression of the contemporary zombie film, the Boyle films, as well as the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, with its significant difference from the original, we find a striking departure from the Romero gesture and its embedded politics.


Namely, in these films, the zombies are not the dead risen: they are simply the infected living. The Rage virus in the Boyle series, the rabies-like contagion in the Dawn of the Dead remake. The Wikipedia entry on the remake spells out the gap:

"In the original, as in Night of the Living Dead, all 'recently dead' are reanimated by an unidentified source. Zombie bites seem to somehow induce rapid death, and subsequent reanimation, even though death by any manner will result in reanimation of the dead as well. The cause is never fully elaborated upon, but news reports in the first film imply that the cause is radiation from a space probe to Venus that was destroyed and landed back on Earth. In the remake, it springs up worldwide overnight, and is definitely blood or saliva-borne, relying on zombie bites for transmission (like rabies). In the original, anyone who dies for any reason returns after several minutes (so long as their brain is intact). In the remake, only those infected return and after a period of less than a minute after death."

In short, the specificity of the zombie - as the global condition that repeats endlessly, the ceaseless getting back up of the corpses - is abandoned for a scenario that combines the one-to-one logic of the slasher, the subject-turning bite of the vampire/werewolf film, and the fear of the thoughtless, rabid masses (although who are less concerned with sating hunger than with biting, in a blind fury of species propagation).

What is consequently abandoned is what gave the nightmare vision of the zombie its stomach-turning potency: neither the unthinking rage not the poisonous bite of the contemporary non-undead, but the lumbering want of consumption (hunger beyond shame) and the inexplicability of rising up once more. We lost the critical vision of the conatus gone haywire.


In a strange twist, when the contemporary zombie film approaches something like the massification of the vampire, it is a contemporary vampire film proper that comes closer to the blow to thought of the Romero gesture. Let the Right One In, the superb 2008 Swedish film, gives us a bleak sight of hunger-beyond-reason and homo superstes, although with a vital distinction: Eli, the permanent pre-pubescent vampire of the film, is constituted around her fundamental fact: the ontological trauma that comes from being fully aware of one's hunger, of reason apprehending the non-reason of drive. A symptom already traversed still yearns. As such, it is the proper dialectical twist of the relation to want and thought in the Romero world.

The Cotard's delusion (that turns out to be no delusion at all, unlike the sublime indeterminacy of Martin) of Eli finds its negation in the bare hunger of Night of the Living Dead's Karen, seen here eating her father. The shot is remarkable: the door opens, a crack of light reveals her, not in shame at the act but with the sudden stillness of one caught eating at the open refrigerator in the night. The absence of the shame is filled by our revulsion, perhaps not at the tasteful black and white gore of the moment but of her misrecognition.

This is the misrecognition of one who has risen without reason, not compelled to rise for a purpose beyond the mere repetition and imitation of life. For the basic fact of the true zombie gesture, in its occluded form, is not the animation of the dead body but the over-animation of the living body. What is the world condition that occurs? It is clearly not that all the dead who ever died rise. It is not even those dead with enough connective tissue and meat on their bones to stand and shamble. It is those who died after the new set of rules came to be, the evental shift that only becomes evident in its after-effects. In this way, the Romero films are not about the dying world. They are about surplus-life, the new logic of excessive existence: something has given all too-much-life, an inability to properly die, a system that no longer knows how or when to quit. The non-undead of the contemporary zombie reveals, in odd relief, that the classical undead are themselves just a continuation and modification of the human animal in its perseverance.

But the shuffle of the risen dead speaks radically, of those not even rudely awakened, but rudely going-on, the obscenity of that which can rot but which never goes away properly. A world of refuse, of unnecessary surplus-life that's forgotten how to speak.


Why, in the contemporary climate, of the consecutive fever-pitch and clusterfuck of the neo-liberal order, has the zombie at once become our definitive nightmare-form and betrayed its particularity? What undergirds this new vision of the undead who were never dead? And what will the next vision be, after the death throes of the infected? These are questions to be borne out further in thought and far further in the geopolitical and cultural consequences to come in the next few years. Yet the lines from Adorno with which we began give a crack through which to think.

The surplus of reality amounts to its collapse; by striking the subject dead, reality itself becomes deathly.


The point here, both frightening and expansive, bleak and bright, is to take fully onto ourselves this endgame of the "surplus of reality," of the symbolic, political, and economic overdetermination of all the things of the world under capitalism. Out of this surplus, this overwhelming of the subject capable of speaking and intervening in the world that was, the dead things and soon-to-be-dead bodies of the world, now the basic truth of the system, find tongues. As in the infinite corpse-strewn wasteland that concludes Fulci's The Beyond (one of the few films with the courage to stick to its properly apocalyptic guns) and as in Debord's proposition that reality explodes in the heart of the world made unreal, the task might be, at least figuratively, to stop searching for the nostalgic beating heart that brings radical thought to a standstill, in its frozen image, and to start from the fundamental deadness of that world. This is neither conciliation nor reconciliation. It is an exposure of the already-was and no-longer.

For what if we bring the plague, not just of surplus-life bound to spin its decaying wheels in the corner, but to the deeper dead? A structural condition - and what is this if not a better way to speak through the dead and to make history say what it should - that goes back further, against the grain. The long dead rising, rustling in their coffins, awake and restless and buried too deep, but thinking again. Scattered bones in killing fields sweating and shuffling. The whole earth shudders.

Here lies protectionism, here rises our mordant want

This was the cover image of The Economist last week (with the caption: "The return of economic nationalism"). Given my deep love for all things undead, it warms this necro heart to see free-market champions turn to the only adequate iconography for this period, of the Frankensteinian attempt to shock the assemblage-corpse of deregulated capital into lurching, unholy life with massive bailouts.

(Of course, the subtitle of The Economist story: "A spectre is rising. To bury it, Barack Obama needs to take the lead." Such a modern-day Van Helsing will also need to try to pry anti-economic anti-nationalism from our cold, hungry living dead hands.)