Thus far in class we have tried to discuss what it means to be a zombie. Do they have feelings? Do they have memories? How much of "alive them" is left in "walking dead them"? All of these questions also relate back to if zombies have affect or not. To have affect means you feel emotion, your actions are not solely based on survival but you have the ability to direct your actions toward an emotion. Over the past couple of weeks we have had many different representations of zombies. For instance, the opening scene of the Walking Dead when the zombie wife goes to the door and tries to open the doorknob. Clearly she has some sort of memory of being in the house. We also see this in the scene where Rick finds the little girl who picks up a stuffed animal. Unless for some reason that I am unaware zombies use stuffed animals to lure potential human meals, this leads me to conclude that the only reason the girl would pick up the stuffed animal is because she remembers it in some way. Whether is offered her some type of comfort or not, she remembered having a stuffed animal. We have also seen in the film Warm Bodies that some zombies have the ability to feel love. Most recently in the short story Delice by Holly Newstein we have the realization that a character figures out she is a "Zombi". The ability for a once alive person to realize that she is now in fact a Zombie is pretty new. This changed my whole perception of what exactly a Zombie could be. There could be in fact different types of zombies that could include:
1. Typical vision of a zombie having no affect
2. The ability to possess some memories
3. The ability to realize that one is a Zombie
This leads me to question whether our ideas of zombies has changed over time and what has caused that change?
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4. The ability to act upon that realization. If I realized I was a zombie, essentially unkillable so long as I avoid shots to the face, alive for as long as I cared to be...it makes me wonder: In a post-zombie-cataclysm world, where everyone and your neighbor is part of the zombie herd/horde, what is the new normal? To be a zombie of course. To be hunters, instead of hunted. To survive a zombie apocalypse, if a manifestation of this reality included being a sentient, rational, albeit deceased, person, whose only real need was to cannibalize the living...
Of course our idea of zombie has changed over time. A lot of modern zombie lore has its roots in Romero and his depictions of zombies. "Night of the Living Dead" brought about this modern depiction of zombies which then he took beyond that with "Dawn of The Dead," using zombies as a representation of political issues in society. Building upon that, we have had a resurgent of zombies since the turn of the century, which is concerned about how we can use the zombie character to speak about the inner workings of the human psyche. So, the zombie in itself is no longer about this creepy walking dead meant to scare you, but the zombie is now meant to show you humanity and help you understand what it is like to be human. It is also used to questions your actions an how you should react to certain situations in the real world, instead of a zombie world.