The Breaking Time

Zombies, Mutants, Cyborgs and Aliens: Fight for the Future

Welcome back Damien Williams for a riveting rant on, well, the aforementioned bogeymen, and what kind of future our culture is choosing.

Please pick another apocalypse. Image by Quidditch.

I don't like zombies. I don't mean I'm afraid of them, or that they skeeve me out. I mean that I don't like the current use of them as trope, or a modern cultural cipher. I told you this the last time we spoke, and I told you that I'd tell you why.

You see, back in the day, when Romero was using zombies to talk about consumer culture and the death of individual preference in the face of mass markets, a zombie horde was a potent symbol. It was crushing, endless, homogenizing death. Why do you think Dawn of the Dead takes place in a mall? It was a terrifying indictment of what Romero believed was happening to our society.

Later, when the zombie symbol came to be applied out to Western society as a whole, and not just its consumerist leanings, the fast zombie became the stand-in for the hyper-connectivity and infectious nature of concept, idea, and emotion. Unthinking Rage just spreads and spreads.

That was all well and good. The problem is, zombies don't represent that anymore. Honestly, so far as I see it? Zombies don't represent anything anymore. The modern zombie is an empty symbol, representing only itself. The fight against zombies is now only the pure expression of futility, of never giving up in the face of odds which will defeat us. Zombies are just about Fear. They are collapse and terror and, yes, also the changes that survival of terror wreaks on people. But, in the final offing, I think that's boring.

I'm what some might call a pop culture junkie. I'm interested in all aspects of the popular media (even if, as I say, I don't exactly enjoy every single one of them), because I believe that our pop culture is reflexively connected to the wider culture. It tells us what we're thinking, it tells us how we're feeling, and in turn it influences those thoughts and emotions.

Pop culture amplifies and exaggerates our existing beliefs, distilling them down and reflecting them back to us in a glittering panoply of spectacle and story. What this means for you and me is that, as long as I'm here at The Breaking Time, I'll very often talk to you about the nature of our society — and our perception of its imminent and immanent collapse — through the lens of our pop culture and what it is doing for and to us. If the ascension of “Reality” television is Jean Baudrillard's nightmare scenario, then the rise of zombie apocalypse narrative is mine.

No They means no "sheeple"

A useful reminder

I'll make this quick, because a deluge of journalism work leaves me without the time to devote to a proper post. The above xkcd comic is one of the best takedowns of a big gripe of mine that comes up repeatedly: the dubbing of entire swaths of the human population "sheeple" or ignorant scum because they aren't going about their lives the same way you might be. This is often paired with the assertion that said stupidity has increased, and people are dumber than they use to be.

So you're smart. Great. Intelligence is a beautiful thing to have. But the world is full of remarkably bright people who make really dumb calls, and people of average intellect who've made brilliant ones. The world is also full of extremely intelligent people with elaborate justifications for very bad ideas. Reality is awakening to the fact that there are a thousand and one talents, each of which might be perfectly adapted to a situation where others are useless. 

There is vast and appalling ignorance in the world but, really, this isn't new and it's actually improved dramatically. If someone wants to argue that the current industrialized world, with widespread literacy and a far lower possibility of dying by violence, is less catastrophically dumb than a land where 99.9 percent of the population can't read and regularly indulge in nailing a cat to a tree and headbutting it to death, go for it.

Also, where the fuck do the elect get off assuming a magical invulnerability from ignorance? Newsflash: you've been appallingly ignorant at some point in your life. I sure as hell have, and no doubt still am on some fronts. The fact is, any self-proclaimed genius probably isn't half as smart as they think they are and the people they dismiss are probably fairly smart in areas they won't acknowledge.

I rant a lot here, but I believe any thinker has to keep in mind the old saw about Socrates' wisdom: everyone's ignorant, and he was wise because he knew his own ignorance.

I do know this, though: dismissive condescension is a monumentally stupid way to deal with the world.

Triumph of the book

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

-Carl Sagan

I'm an unrepentant book addict. I have more of the lovely things than places to put them, and I'm always finding and getting more. Being a book lover, however, I'm familiar with the widely held belief, held by both print enthusiasts and others, that my favorite method of transmitting knowledge is kind of a dying breed. I don't believe it personally*, but it's out there.

Recently, as a friend and I discussed the return of Futurama and various series each of us should check out ("You really need to see The Sopranos, a fascinating character study"), it occurred to me that not only are books not dying, their method has infected other media. Television, one of the primary media that was supposed to replace books as better suited to the needs of a smaller attention span starved public is now more like its old-fashioned rival than ever.

Television has increasingly embraced longer plotlines, deeper characterization, more literary themes and definite, planned endings than ever before. The best, most-talked-about shows (like The Wire) are compared to novels. Series are perceived as more permanent things, not to be forgotten about after they're cancelled, but worth watching and savoring (sometimes, as with Futurama and Family Guy, this even leads to an eventual resurrection). Meanwhile, the sitcom is being slowly garroted in the closet.

Hell, there's even a booming industry in going back and overhauling old school TV stalwarts (Battlestar Galactica, V) to make them more like literature and less like, well, old school television.

The changes haven't just affected the elements of television programming, but how it's received as well. It's less common to see people gather around for a particular episode, unless they're particularly avid or the episode a landmark of some sort. Instead people seek out series, either online or on DVD, and watch them, often several episodes at a pop. Like chapters of a damn book.

Nor is television alone, over the last decade and a half, comic books have scrambled, with varying degrees of success, to embrace literary methods. Writers have received increasing prominence while people read whole story arcs in a sitting more frequently than before and older work is sought in collected editions instead of individual issues. The very name of the medium's even considered slightly disreputable. No, no, these are now graphic novels (the term dates back to the '70s, but it's become much more common in recent years).

There's a lot of factors behind these changes, of course, but one reason for television and comics increasingly mirroring books in format and consumption is that literature is a really old medium, and so there's been far more time to find some common ways to hold people's interest, methods that continue to have staying power. As they come of age, television and comic producers seem to be learning that crafted surprises, interesting plots, realized characters and immersive worlds never go out of style as long as the human brain continues to function. Perhaps, even, audiences don't mind some bleakness and ambiguity. 

Something Sagan nailed about books is their endurance. Perhaps those dark, magical little lines will have the last laugh, after all.

* Exhibit A in reasons books ain't dead is the fact that one of the most massive media phenomenons in memory was the Harry Potter series, something that should dispel any notions that coming generations aren't willing to read long, complicated things on old-fashioned dead tree sheets, as long as they find them interesting.