Meta Zombies

[digitaldiscipline]

So...

Zombies can represent:
- powerlessness in the face of compulsion (self or that of other); a loss of will or self-control
- threat of powerlessness in general
- slaves to consumption
- soulless drones (self or other)
- consumerism / consumer culture
- threat of the / an apocalypse
- agents of infection / decay / death
- surrogate victims (guilt-free objects for us to harm)

I miss anything?

I think my inability to find zombies cool stems from my general indifference to or avoidance of splatterpunk; as Stephen King put it himself, "I recognize terror as the finest emotion and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find that I cannot terrify, I will try to horrify, and if I find that I cannot horrify, I'll go for the gross-out."

I don't respond to the gross-out with anything but avoidance (I'm not averse to dirt, I just prefer not to fuck around with squidgy shit. For a laugh, watch me try and handle raw chicken or raw tomatoes).

The gross-out is a staple of the zombie ouevre; I find it very easy to see, now that I've done some poking around this particular rhetorical and stylistic mulberry patch, why I gravitate(d) towards vampires when horror was what I read voraciously (they're at least getting laid-by-proxy while noshing on the flesh of the living, plus the prolonged life vs. rapid decay motif).

I'm already motivated questionably, shambling, ugly, and smell funny. I don't need any weird brain-cravings to add to that list.



"zombie thesis" turns up some interesting stuff, most (but not all) of it with tongue firmly in cheek:
- http://zombiealert.tripod.com/academy/id6.html
- http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/zombie.html

[inspired by some of the interesting responses posted here.]

Comments

zombies....

[maelstromsl.livejournal.com]

the only cool thing about zombies is blowing their heads off... I don't think zombies are cool, because I think of all the stupid normals and "suits" and church people as being zombies - so yeah, pretty much the antithesis of cool...

KA-BLAM!

Re: zombies....

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Maybe I should rephrase, the -concept- of zombies is cool to some people (however, that cool quotient eludes me); zombies seem to be pretty uniformly objects of scorn and disgust, or at best, pity.