Why zombies, why now? Mark Dery offers a typically fantastic take. Ultimately he sees the zombie hordes as an economic thing, an expression of Great Recession fears.
Now that the econopocalypse has thrown millions out of work, triggered an upspike in homelessness, and eaten the braaains of consumer confidence, the zombie has undergone a role-reversal, incarnating American fears that the republic is a shambling shadow of its former glory, Left 4 Dead by the near-meltdown of the financial system.
It's good to see Dery channeling themes we blogged last April and since: Marx's Gothic, White Zombie, unemployment, news media picking up Gothic language, etc.
Maybe we're seeing the emergence of a left Gothic take on politics and the economy in the post-Bush era. The HuffPo sometimes does this. Krugman's been singing the Gothic economic song for a while. And some real-life horrors certainly have a class rage flair.
And it's just always a pleasure to read more Dery when he opens the throttle wide:
Zombies are the resident evil of an economy whose moribund state confronts us everywhere we look in a landscape littered with dead malls, “ghost boxes” (dark, shuttered big-box outlets), and “zombie stores”—retailers forced by dismal sales to reduce their inventory to its bare bones, with the ironic consequence that their emaciated stock and empty floorspace scare customers away, accelerating the death spiral.
David Skal is well quoted in the piece, too:
Having cannibalized all their home equity, and foreclosed our future, zombies have become everyman avatars that have traded in the forward-looking, if audacious, message ‘I must eat you to live,’ settling for ‘I must eat you just to stay dead.’
What does the right-wing response to the left-wing Gothic look like in 2010? Maybe Anne Rice will take a shot.
The zombie drawing in your post reminds me of this artist's work: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bar-art/4456019315/
Posted by: Ryan | March 24, 2010 at 08:42