For me, one of the most interesting aspects of the Zombie is
the emotional pain it engenders in those it encounters. Two examples that stuck me were both from The
Walking Dead. These would be the wife and mother encountered in the first
episode, as well as the little girl met at the abandoned gas station. The special sort of fear that zombies instill
in the living is also interesting, as it differs in a fundamental way from the
emotions usually caused by other, more traditional monsters. Zombies are
different from vampires, another classic un-dead monster, in that they are
mindless whereas the vampire has full use of its mind. Part of what we fear so much about Zombies is
not so much the physical aspect so much as it is the mental death and loss of
agency.
On page 17 of the essay Your Zombie and You, the authors
have a quote that says “Monsters are unnatural relative to a cultures
conceptual scheme of nature”. In
American culture, death is often treated as a taboo subject. The vast majority of people feel that death
and the dead should be accorded a great amount of respect. Behaviors that violate this, such as
grave-digging and necrophilia instantly designate the perpetrator as a pariah. Zombies also violate the sanctity of
death. Whether is from disease and
infection or the supernatural, one of the most fundamental concepts of our
society as been drastically altered.
Death is no longer final, no longer inviolable.
The example of the wife serves to highlight many of the
issues that zombies bring to light. The
case of personal identity is given extreme importance. The husband of the Zombie knows that she
cannot communicate with him, that she would kill their son without a thought if
given the chance, and cannot be cured. And he cannot bring himself to put a
bullet through her skull. From his vantage point on the second floor of
the house, she poses no immediate physical threat. Rather, something about the
situation seems inherently wrong to him.
People just shouldn’t be up and walking around once they are dead. His inability to cope with this is implied to
lead to his, and therefore his son’s, demise.
The little girl serves to illustrate that this phenomenon
exists even without prior personal connection.
The look that crosses Rick’s face when the girl turns around and exposes
her necrotic flesh shows a different sort of disgust, almost anguish, than one
might expect. The white and pink clothes
of the girl, the long blonde hair, the teddy bear, these are all things that we
might associate with childhood innocence.
That even this is violated is a poignant statement about the totality of
the change that has taken place in Rick’s world.
There is, of course, the question of whether or not these
zombies remember in any meaningful way their former lives. If they do not, it is much easier emotionally
to kill them, as well as being less problematic in a moral sense. But if they,
as the two previously mentioned zombies do, exhibit behavior that hints that
they remember their past lives, it becomes much more complicated. And not only
for the fact that it is much harder to kill someone you love than it is to kill
a stranger. It gives added legitimacy to
the fear of becoming a zombie yourself.
If zombies are mindless shells, it lessens the pain of knowing that when
you die, you will do your best to kill everyone around you because you at least
won’t be aware of it. But if, for
example, you know you will be trapped inside, cognizant but unable to act on
the thoughts, it makes the thought of turning into a zombie that much worse.
All this is to say that people are uncomfortable with death.
Being in a leadership position within the community, understanding this is
vital. Knowing that a person’s fear of
zombies goes beyond the fear of bodily harm or infection is necessary for
effectively dealing with the zombie threat.
"Part of what we fear so much about Zombies is not so much the physical aspect so much as it is the mental death and loss of agency."
I find this part of your comment especially interesting in light of the "Corporate Zombies" essay we had to read in "Zombies Are Us," mostly with regards to elderly wards of the state feeling like they're turning into zombies: "I would prefer death to living as a guardianship zombie the rest of my life" (80, Zombies Are Us).
If you think about it, "mental death and loss of agency" describes what happens to us as we age. We may develop Alzheimer's, or be forced to live in a nursing home. We lose the ability to act on our own choices, or even the ability to make choices in the first place, as you become unable to take care of yourself. Being old in a zombie apocalypse is asking for trouble: you may slow the group down, you may take up more resources than can be afforded, and you may die at any time. You essentially turn into a liability.
Could you say that our fear of zombies is tied up with our fear of aging? Zombies have sagging and rotting flesh, the very picture of what happens to us after we've lived out our time and become dead and buried.
Building off of Jenny's point and the central argument of the original post, I believe there is a way in which we might situate part of the fear we encounter in the zombie figure within the broader context of cultural attitudes towards aging and mortality. As the initial post puts it:
"In American culture, death is often treated as a taboo subject. The vast majority of people feel that death and the dead should be accorded a great amount of respect."
On the most basic level, zombies are, quite literally, the living dead -- dead (or death) alive. The zombie is death personified, the traumatic return of the repressed real of bodily decomposition, rot, and decay that so many of our cultural rites and rituals surrounding death work to conceal or cover over. In the zombie, we are presented with a figure, a corpse, that will not stay buried, that resists such symbolic integration and continues to haunt our symbolic reality. The zombie is, in this sense, a figure of excess, embodying a perverse contradiction that cannot be accounted for within our symbolic register. As Peter rightly points out, "death" in a post-zombie world "is no longer final, no longer inviolable." Zombies not only violate the sanctity of death, but they exceed the bounds of our very conception(s) of death, of what it means to die, by virtue of the fact that they, despite all appearances, they are not (entirely) dead. At least, not in the sense that we would think of when we think of something as 'dead.' It is here that I believe we may identify one of the most fundamentally terrifying aspects of the zombie figure. That being the paradoxical position they occupy as simultaneously embodying that which we fear (death, decay) and at the same time that which we desire; namely, the ability to extend life beyond death. To this extent, the zombie is not merely a perversion of death, but a perverse embodiment of our desire as a culture to conquer death through science and medicine. We might, then, begin to identify a cyclical pattern being rehearsed in the modern zombie narrative: through medical and scientific innovation, we might extend life beyond death. The catch? It is precisely the living (in the form of flesh and brains) that sustain the 'life' of these new UNdead.
In response to Jennie's post, I would definitely agree that our fear of zombies plays off of our fear of aging. Since aging is something that, assuming we live long enough, happens to us all, it is a fairly common fear. This ties in the "it could happen to anyone" aspect of the zombie apocalypse scenario. Just as no one is immune from aging, no one is ever truly safe once zombies appear.
When someone becomes a zombie, he or she looses the greater part of their identity. While they may remain physically recognizable as consisting of the same physical components, their mental identity is, at best, almost entirely eradicated. The same obliteration of identity can certainly be attributed to ordinary, non-zombie death, as well as diseases such as Alzheimer's, but can it also be associated with ordinary aging aspects of aging, such as decreased physical ability. I guess the question that this raises for me is what attributes and qualities are central and essential to a person's identity, and which can be be done with out or altered or lost?