Real Zombies (They're Amongst Us!)

When I sat down to watch "In Line," the new episode of Workaholics, I still had no idea what I was going to write my blog post about. Little did I know, zombies would show up just a few minutes into the episode (I mean, show up on TV, not in my living room). In the episode Blake, one of the main characters, sends his best friend Adam to save him a place in line for the midnight release of a zombie video game on his behalf. Adam isn't familiar with the game and doesn't know where the store is, so Blake tells him to just look for the people waiting in line dressed up like zombies; Adam runs off down the street looking for the game store with the long line. Because he's running late and in a rush, he's not paying very close attention: he sees a long line of zombies (tattered clothes, scabs and other injuries all over their faces and bodies, complete lack of affect), joins them, and starts making conversation. But then the camera pans out, and we see that Adam is not in line at the video game store with the pretend zombies, but instead is waiting in line at the free needle exchange with the real zombies.

                   One of the last shots of the episode; drug addict "zombies" chasing Adam

The whole situation leads to hilarity (with some mugging and accidental PCP usage thrown in), because it's taking place on a Comedy Central TV show, but it really made me think about the zombies of addiction, the zombies who walk amongst us every day. We touched upon this issue when we discussed "Corporate Zombies and Zombie Litigation," which includes a section entitled "To Be a Confirmed Drug Addict Is to Be One of the Walking Dead." This section includes an except for a 1962 court case in which the judge is drawing a gory parallel between a zombie and a drug addict:

"The teeth have rotted out; the appetite is lost and the stomach and intestines don't function properly. The gall bladder becomes inflamed; eyes and skin turn a bilious yellow. In some cases  membranes of the nose turn a flaming red; the partition separating the nostrils is eaten away--breathing is difficult...Good traits of character disappear and bad ones merge. Sex organs become affected. Veins collapse and livid purplish scars remain. Boils and abscesses plague the skin; gnawing pain racks the body. Nerves snap; vicious twitching develops. Imaginary and fantastic fears blight the mind and sometimes complete insanity results...Such is the torment of being a drug addict; such is the plague of being one of the walking dead" (ZAU 78-79).

But hard drug addiction doesn't just zombie-fy the body, but also the mind: addicts lose their capacity for higher thought, lose their capacity to judge consequences of their actions, lose volition. They lose their affect and their agency and become controlled by their "zombie master," their drug. They are zombies in the realest sense; they are zombies in every sense, except that they're not actually reanimated corpses, but we're talking reality here.

I think that this phenomenon goes beyond hard core drug addicts to addicts of any kind, including alcoholics. I was talking recently to one of my friends whose older brother has struggled a lot with depression and alcoholism, as has she. He had been getting better for a while, and so he moved out west to start a new life for himself. He had been doing well and living there for a while, so she had been thinking of moving out to join him when she got a call. All within a few days he had gotten a DUI, broken his hand badly and needed surgery, and he was going to need to take at least a month off of work to recover. He wanted her to move out there and take care of him. Although she had been excited at the prospect of moving out to be with him, and she wanted to help him, she realized that, given the circumstances, it was impossible. He was sliding back into zombieism, he was losing control, he was giving in to his zombie masters. She wanted to help him, wanted to pull over and pick up backpack guy, take pity on the hitchhiker, but she knew that if she went out there to try to help him, she would get bitten too. His addiction and his depression would grab hold of her and infect her and then there would be no one to care for either of them.

I think part of the reason we love talking about zombies is that we can speculate about them all day, and then go back home and sleep soundly at night, knowing that they aren't real; they're scary, but they're safe. Except that they're not, and  the real zombies among us are the one we should be concerned about: the ones with hearts and souls, the ones that maybe can be cured.