Perhaps one of the most chilling and memorable moments (not to mention downright awesome) in George Romero's original Night of the Living Dead (1968) is the point at which Helen (wife to Harry and mother to Karen), having just narrowly escaped being pulled through a farmhouse window and eaten by zombies, stumbles down into the cellar to find the reanimated corpse of her recently-deceased daughter feasting upon her father, Harry (who -- let's face it -- we have all been wishing a gruesome death upon since his first five minutes in the film). Karen, who arrived at the farmhouse alongside her parents, the Coopers, with a previously sustained zombie bite, has spent almost the entirety of the movie down in the cellar in a more or less comatose state. While Helen and Harry were fairly adamant early on about having at least one of them by her side throughout the night, things upstairs get a little...well, hectic. Attentions and energies were needed elsewhere. The need for information eventually draws them both upstairs. And while Judy (another farmhouse refugee) kindly offers to stand guard for a time so that the Mr. and Mrs. Cooper can see what's happening on the radio and television, sooner or later little Karen is left all alone in the cellar. It is at this point that Karen, the incarnation of that sacred figure of the Child, dies. Following the altercation between Harry and Ben after the plan to fuel the truck goes up in flames (literally), Harry, having just sustained a gunshot wound from Ben, stumbles down the cellar stairs and collapses next to his daughter Karen's corpse, she finally having died from what we presume to be some kind of infection. The camera then cuts to the mayhem upstairs, where zombies have begun to break through the boards on the windows and doors. Barely evading becoming food for the legion of living dead whose arms we see protruding through the gaps in the houses fortifications, Helen makes a break for the cellar only to be confronted with the deliciously eerie and abject sight of her daughter mauling Harry's corpse. In a move rather out of the ordinary for a zombie, young Karen wastes no time in making short work of her mother with a gardening spade.
Zombified Karen Cooper Hungry freaks, Daddy
I believe it is significant that it is the close-up image of Karen's face as she lurches towards her mother with the spade that has served as the signifying image of the film, having effectively functioned as the icon of the original Night since its release in October of 1968. For what I see in this iconic image of the undead child is not so much a demand as an accusation--less the typical "braaaaaaiinnns" than "how could you have forgotten (to look out for) me" (so now I'm going to eat your brains). In his book, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman introduces the notion of the (capital C) Child as a way of thinking about contemporary politics and ideology and their recapitulation of heteronormativity. For Edelman, the vast majority of our social configurations, political strategies, and ideologies can be aligned with what he identifies as "reproductive futurism." At its core, the idea of reproductive futurism turns around the basic idea that, without reproduction, there is no future. Within this framework, the capital C Child figures centrally insofar as it serves as the imaginary figure around which the entire constellation of reproductive futurism is structured and in whose name countless subjects can be mobilized. For of course, when we say that "there is no future without reproduction," what we are really saying is that, without reproduction, there is no future for humanity. The future, the logic goes, must be protected for the Child; we must do all we can to protect the Child, to ensure that the Child, as subject of the future, can thrive. Within the logic of reproductive futurism, the Child, Edelman writes, "remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention" (3) insofar as it is the Child who is the subject of that future which we cannot bear to imagine never coming to fruition. It is the Child, we imagine, who will at long last -- in a properly Lacanian fashion -- be able to enjoy. The fantasmatic figure of the Child enables us to imagine a world in which things really will be better tomorrow, where the meaning -- my meaning, my society's meaning, my life's meaning --always deferred in the present, might actually be realized.
Leaving the queer politics elaborated in Edelman's polemic text aside, I believe this idea of the Child as subject of the future is a compelling one, particularly when put to use in thinking about zombie narratives. While earlier texts like White Zombie (1932), largely considered to be the first feature-length zombie film, and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) both implicitly pit the zombie threat as a threat to reproductive family futurity -- insofar as the zombies in either film (and their masters) stand in the way of the happy heterosexual marriage and the child whom we may safely assume, given the time period, would (or at least "ought to") come out of it -- beginning with Romero's Night of the Living Dead, the idea of the future begins to emerge as an increasingly more pressing concern in the zombie infested universe. While in Night the concern seems to be for a more immediate future -- whether or not they will indeed survive the night -- films like Romero's follow up feature, Dawn of the Dead (1978), along with 1985's Day of the Dead, Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002), 28 Weeks Later (2007), and AMC's Walking Dead series all delve more and more into the question of a long-term future. What will happen to humanity, they ask, in lieu of the zombie apocalypse?
Night seems to offer little hope in the way of reproductive futurism: the haunting face of an undead Karen carrying with it all the force of a return of the repressed, the inevitable return of the traumatic Real let loose in her zombified gaze. All of the real and potential couples we are presented with in the film are killed or infected by its conclusion, enacting a total destruction of the family in the Coopers and the foreclosure of any possibility of future family formations in Ben and Barbara and Tom and Judy. (It is worth noting alongside these observations that while we are made aware of other survivors in the world within the film -- posses of men roaming the countryside, killing off the living dead -- it seems significant that there is no mention of any female survivors; they are conspicuously absent from the film following the deaths of Helen and Barbara). In Dawn, we learn that Francine, the sole female survivor in the film, is carrying a child. Yet in many ways the film seems similarly pessimistic about the future and the future that (presumably Roger) and Francine's child would inherit. The fact that an abortion is even suggested to her as a viable option -- one which she indeed appears to take into serious consideration -- seems telling. While no decisive answer is ever reached, it seems safe to assume that, despite her excessive smoking throughout the film, she is still with child as she and Peter fly away from the zombie-infested mall with little idea of where they are going or what the future has in store. In this regard, the film ends on a decidedly ambiguous note.
What is crucial for us to remember here is that this notion of reproductive futurity as invoked by Edelman as a political strategy; it is a way of organizing ourselves and our societies. Such a posture, he argues, uses the imagined figure of the Child as subject of the future in such a way that it effectively (re)structures the field of the political -- it renders any alternative to reproductive futurism unthinkable, misanthropic, anti-human. What I believe Edelman's critique of reproductive futurism is aiming at (or at least what I get out of it) is a critique of this mandate implicit in reproductive futurist politics, the imperative to carry on the human line and thereby sustain the fantasy of the Child as subject who is to realize our always-already deferred meaning. Is the ultimate good to simply continue "investing" in the future in the form of the Child (both real and imagined)? Or is there a more ethical attitude we might take towards reproduction? There is perhaps no better (and more disturbing) depiction of the obscene character of the mandates of reproductive futurity than in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, in which the ostensibly safe and protected space of the military compound is revealed in fact to be a horrific, nightmarish chauvinist space in which a kind of reproductive futuristic marshal law has been implemented with the coming of the Jim, Selena, and Hannah. In this perverse twist on the seemingly endless repetitions of reproductive futurism in film, rather than merely alluding to the promise of reproduction and the continuation of the family (and consequently humanity) vis-à-vis the union of the (fertile, heterosexual) couple, the bones of the matter here are laid bare: there is no happy embrace, no allusion, no ambiguity. Instead, what we are confronted with in the military compound in 28 Days Later is the obscene nature of the reproductive imperative, in which any kind of ethical concerns are subsumed to the mandates of reproduction. (The irony here, of course, being that by the film's conclusion we see precisely the kind of reproductive futuristic narrative tendencies from which it appeared we had escaped, symbolically solidified in the now-domesticated mother-father-daughter triad pictured in the final scene. Everything about it seeming to suggest that this is, indeed, the New Family.)
All of this is to bring up what I feel is a most compelling point raised in zombie fiction, one that frequently seems to be overlooked in discussions of the zombie. As a zombie (which indeed I am), I eat. All counter-arguments aside, this point seems to be something that everyone can agree upon. If food is not my only desire, it is at least my primary and most pressing need. Yet in eating, whether we can ascribe intentionality to it or not, I reproduce. At least, in a matter of speaking. Returning to the idea of zombies as signifying the horrors of a meaningless existence, we might note the way in which "breeding" or spreading the zombie population (even if it is unintentional) is inextricably bound up with the horrors of the ostensibly meaningless nature of the zombie's plight. While the zombie narrative frequently present us with a state of crisis in which the logic of reproductive futurism may indeed seem necessary, essential even, zombie scenarios also present us with an opportunity to rethink and reflect upon a politics centered around the unquestionable 'good' (or presumed eventual goodness) of the future and what it has in store. For as many zombie narratives have asked: who would want to inherit a world like this? Far from suggesting that all the survivors in these texts should simply give up, abandon hope in face of the pessimistic realization that, indeed, the future may not be better tomorrow, what I am suggesting is that the blind progenation of the zombie population in texts like Dawn of the Dead and 28 Days Later presents us with a space in which we might begin to question or confront the tremendous implications of trying to bring new (human) life into such a world.