Zombies invade the mainstream; please remain calm

Zombies are currently in the mainstream, now hitting the New York Times, after munching on Time.  The Times hits many of the same recent texts as Time did: Breathers: A Zombie's Lament, Zombieland, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.  Both newspapers express surprise at the zombie resurgence.  Both ultimately connect it to the economic crisis.

What does this mean, that the mainstream sources have now admitted the shambling dead?  It's tempting to see this as another milestone in the conquest of America by geek culture. 

It's also tempting to agree with both articles, that the economy has brought forth the walking dead.  There have been other recent examples of the zombie metaphor applied to the crisis, including "zombie banks" as described by the Wall Street Journal, another mainstream source.

But why does the rece/depression summon up zombies, rather than other monsters?  The Times at first thinks that vampires are inappropriate for a crisis, seeing them as "sleek demons for good times."  Yet the article immediately undoes itself, describing those sexy beasts as "suavely leach[ing] off society — like investment bankers who plunder outsize shares of deals for themselves or rapacious fund managers." 

Consider Lehman Brothers' Richard Fuld, for example, well-dressed designated villain:

Recall that Marx used this vampire metaphor:

Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the labourer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has purchased of him. (from Capital, I)

So did Voltaire, a century earlier, with a similar class angle:

We never heard a word of vampires in London, nor even at Paris. I confess that in both these cities there were stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business, who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight; but they were not dead, though corrupted. These true suckers lived not in cemeteries, but in very agreeable palaces. (Philosophical Dictionary; one translation here)

(Anne Rice also makes her vampires swanky, but in an admiring way.) For Marx, Voltaire, and others, the vampire metaphor means social parasitism.  For Marx this monster also functions in a van Helsing sort of scientific way, rendering the terror into something understandable, something which follows certain rules, with specific weaknesses, and therefore capable of being defeated.

Vampires should then do well in this year of predatory lender collapses, Made-off scams, and swelling unemployment.  Instead we apparently prefer zombies.  Do we set vampires aside as a gesture towards austerity, the nosferatu symbolizing excess in an era of involuntary simplicity?  If so, this also means setting aside the other form of vampire, the peasant. 

That's where the modern European vampire panic began, with Serb peasants, investigated for postmortem bloodsucking by Calmet and an imperial commission in the 1700s.  Some laters vampire stories pick up on this history, like the brilliant 1987 Near Dark, with its white trash vampires (best line: "How old am I?  Well, I fought for the South!  And we lost.")  Perhaps we'll see a return to these vampire tales - imagine Anne Rice's vampires, say, having to work for a living.

Other monster metaphors have been called to life by the economic crisis.  Frankenstein's monster, for instance, has also been in play (example).  That one offers all sorts of appeals, such as the parallels between a stumbling, massive creature and the stumbling, massive economy.  It offers the cruel satirical pleasure of imagining the economy's supposedly brilliant leaders as stammering idiots.  Alternatively, if one imagines the financial sector's directors as Frankenstein himself, those heroes-become-villains can be recast as the overreachers, doomed to receive terrible, satisfying comeuppance.  

And yet Frankenstein is perhaps a more... intelligible metaphor than the zombie.  If we see ourselves as the good Victor F., we take some ownership for the creation, feel better able to understand it, and perhaps some responsibility in taking care of the problem.  We set the thing in motion, after all (cue blaming the economy on bad consumer behavior).  If, on the other hand, we see ourselves as the movie Frankensteins' peasants with torches (for example) (and don't forget Obama's alleged line), our expectations for understanding the extreme complexity of the financial crisis are lowered... but our appetite for vengeance increased.  We know who's responsible, even if we don't know exactly what they were doing in that castle.

What do zombies offer, compared with these other monsters?  For one, they don't require our understanding.  We never really know why the dead return to life, since the explanation is occult.  Perhaps Hell is filled up, as the old poster had it.  Or maybe we never exactly learn - remember the sporadic tv news stories in Night of the Living Dead, which hint at a theory without developing it?  In Sean of the Dead, the thing just happens, or rather, the things just happen.  What a relief, removing this burden of having to learn so much, in the face of the sheer complexity offered by financial markets.

For another, zombies let us visualize people gone bad.  They aren't corrupted morally, in Voltaire's sense of the powerful taking unfair advantage of the ruling system, but just somatically rotten.  Zombie hordes are not the elite, sneering at us for our incomprehension, but are instead the demotic hordes, a leveled mass of humanity gone horribly wrong.  This is a tremendously useful visual metaphor, since it can be applied to all sorts of groups.  Consumers led astray, devoured by credit-fueled shopping gone mad.  Retirees, lives undone by withered pensions.  Or the unemployed, whose numbers swell month by month.  This last one is especially pungent, since it summons up our pity and fear, especially with the terrible anxiety of being bitten and forced into that confused, hungry mass.

Third, and perhaps more important, is that zombie attacks don't drive proactive action.  Zombie victims are all about reacting to the sudden attack, dealing with the eruption of horror into everyday life.  How appropriate to those who see the financial crisis as a black swan.  How useful, too, politically; the zombie metaphor lets us hunker down, nail down the windows, and wait for help.  A zombie war doesn't require us to think as scientists, or vampire hunters, but as grunts.  And who are we fighting against, again?

There is an exception, the classic zombie movie which mainstream journalism doesn't bring up.  White Zombie (1932) features a vampire-like parasitical capitalist, played appropriately by Bela Lugosi.  He creates a zombified work force, growing it by various unsavory means.  His operation and his body are destroyed in something like a revolution.  This is, most likely, not what Time and the New York Times have in mind.

(thanks to Jason Mittell)

Comments

[Len]

I'm not ready to give up the vampire characterization yet. Each time the big financial houses come back to the U.S. government for additional bail-out/stimulus money, I am reminded of the victims of Dracula that are treated to multiple visits. Night after night, he returns to drink from them, while their defenders try to ward him off. With each successive attack, we wonder -- will the next draining be fatal? If not vampires, maybe we need another monster model that is some kind of parasite or symbiote....

[sara]

great post!

[Patrick Murray-John]

Maybe just an expansion / different twist on your second point--zombies are particularly interchangeable, both in appearance and personality. So as you say they work great for generalized masses. It also says, "Take your pick of causes--it's too hard to sort them out anyway." And that also reminds me of the mass of complex financial instruments that we're struggling to sort out. They're a big mass of interchangeable ('cuz no one really understands them), hard to hunt and kill, entities eating up the innards of the financial system.

[Jim Groom]

Bryan,

You have outdone yourself here, from Near Dark to White Zombie! You rule, I also love the marriage of vampire and zombies you come up with when ending with White Zombie, this is an important realization, and the way the Bela Lugosi's eyes are disembodied in White Zombie really suggests him as a sorcerer/vampire. Bravo!

And when you look at some clips from White Zombie here and here the question of the laboring zombies under the calculating capital vampires is right on. I think that is the metaphor Marx was looking for after framing capital as vampiric, labor as being zombified. Two species of the undead that are in many ways in struggle.

I was thinking about zombies as they related to slavery lately, and there is a good quote from Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys that focusing the identity of a zombie within the eyes:
'She have eyes like zombie and you have eyes like zombie too. Why you won't look at me.'

In fact, the Wide Sargasso Sea is an excellent reading of the implications of slavery, colonization, and post-colonial identities as in many ways zombified by structures of power and capital. Making the locus of the zombie very much within the very system, the outbreak being a larger sign some kind of dangerous self-awareness the zombies come to of their own enslavement. A moment of compassion and recognition that I have only seen in Romero's Dawn of the Dead when the Zombie in the baseball outfit and the women on the other side of the glass in a store seem to have a moment of wherein they realize they are of the same stuff.

I love the White Zombie offers a third way to look at all this, and the common idea of the eyes as telling and symbolic opens up some very interesting threads yet again as to how we are made to see and interpret this current phenomenon.

[Bryan Alexander]

Good point, @Len. If we see vampire stories return, I wonder if they'll be explicitly about financiers?

(bowing to nice Sara)

Great point about interchangeability, @Patrick. I like the way that applies to all ends of the class spectrum. Did you see the movie Fido?

[kevin m]

Very cool you tackled these ideas

The Zombie is a 'paradox summary' metaphor. The Vampire is not, he or she is an 'elite in hiding' metaphor, they are amazingly distinct. The Zombie is a summary of human lower functions, it's an accessible way of combining all of our basic bottom-feeding manners (things that seem more akin to insects and vultures) with the shape-form we label human. If you study early-human paleoscience, you'll dicover that before humans tackled hunting and gathering, we were scavengers for protein and depleted fruit-nut-tubers in our local areas without regard to the plants survival past current seasons. This made us constantly mobile and unable to create lasting communities: the zombie.