SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL STUDIES
Sustainable Brains: Deep Ecology and
Dawn of the Dead
Craig Finlay∗
Abstract:
This paper proposes a revaluation of the critical consensus that societal
fascination with zombies reflects collective concern regarding consumerism
and conformity. This revaluation supposes instead that zombies speak to deep-
seeded anxieties about our unsustainable consumption of the natural
environment. It is rooted in the philosophy of Deep Ecology formulated by
philosopher Arne Naess in 1973 and offers a novel, environmentally conscious
method of reading contemporary culture.
Keywords: zombies, anxiety, culture, society
There is a critical consensus that zombies, as depicted in cinema
since George A. Romero’s seminal Night of the Living Dead (1968) and
codified in his follow up Dawn of the Dead (1979) are a metaphor for
the rise of post-World War II consumer culture. Zombies in cinema are
read as embodying our own anxieties regarding rampant consumerism
and the rise of the monoculture. They present us with an uncomfortable
insight into how consumer culture has forced us to commodify our
identities through acquisition of material possessions. Stephen Harper
argues that audience foreknowledge of zombies as an analogue for
consumerism or conformism is in large part responsible for the success
of the genre, that “many ‘ordinary’ people actually sympathize with
anti-consumerist views and feel empowered, rather than patronized, by
their engagement with oppositional perspectives” (Harper, 2002: 2). We
take the connection for granted, the average moviegoer may enter the
theatre expecting to see in the visual image of a zombie horde a
metaphor for the homogenizing influence of mass culture. Philip Horne
writes that the image of “Dazed consumers, haunted by impossible
yearnings, shopping for shopping’s sake, freed from the casual chains of
necessity but feeling endlessly incomplete, hungry”, has almost become
a cliché (Horne, 2007: 98). I propose that the metaphor is not only a
cliché; it is also incomplete while the analogue between consumerism
and zombie-ism is readily apparent, the metaphor works at best
∗ M.A., Franklin D. Schurz Library, Indiana University South Bend, scfinlay@iusb.edu
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imperfectly. Incorporating ecocriticism, namely the philosophy of deep
ecology articulated by Arne Naess in the 1970s, results in a more-
complete understanding of the collective societal anxieties at work in the
success of zombie films. That is, zombies in cinema are not simply a
metaphor for rampant conspicuous consumption of jeans, televisions
and power tools but of what we popularly call “natural resources” – fish
stocks, fossil fuels and forests. Or, to use Deep Ecological terminology,
zombies are the very embodiment of our own anthropocentric attitude
toward the planet, which holds that we have a right destroy nature,
exterminate other species and subjugate entire ecosystems in the name
of supporting our own consumption habits and massive overpopulation.
The zombie-consumerism metaphor in Dawn of the Dead works
very well on the surface. A group of survivors of the zombie apocalypse
take refuge in, of all things, a shopping mall. They futilely try to resist
assimilation into the zombie horde while living out consumer fantasies
in the mall, taking what they please. The connection is summed up in a
scene in which Francine and Stephen are standing on the roof of the
shopping mall observing the horde of zombies mill about the parking
lot. Francine asks Stephen, “What are they doing? Why do they come
here?” to which Stephen famously responds, “Some kind of instinct.
Memory, of what they used to do. This was in important place in their
lives”. There is no small amount of irony at work here; while the mall
may be important enough for the dead to return post-resurrection, it is
far more important to the surviving humans who take refuge there. It is
also “a dangerous prize for the heroes; it is, as Robin Wood says,
‘associated with entrapment in consumer-consumer capitalism’” (Horne,
2007: 99). The survivors, having found an environment of plenty to wait
out the apocalypse, are also trapped there, unable to function
individually or as a group anywhere else. The mall comes to completely
fill the need that sociologist Jerry Jacobs later observed that it fills for
suburbia: “because of the expanding use of solitary escape mechanisms
[…] people are beginning to feel themselves increasingly isolated. To
counteract this isolation and boredom, more and more people are
seeking relief at the mall, relieve that the mall is unable in the final
analysis to provide” (Jacobs, 1984: 109). In Dawn of the Dead, the mall
is only a temporary refuge, however, and the zombies eventually get in.
The survivors brief respite is largely spent shopping, having been set
free in a mall with no security and no one watching the merchandise.
This temporary stasis, for Erin Moore, best sums up the “contradictions
implicit in the consumerism debate […] On one side of the glass, the
mall is a fortress of community, security, and plenitude. […] On the
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other side of the glass doors, however, the mall is a nightmare in which
the mystification of commodity fetishism and exploitation is revealed in
the grey, vacant gazes of the zombies” (Moore, 2006: 28).
John David Goss examines this mystification in “The Magic of the
Mall”, an examination of how the planned nature of shopping malls are
key to their meaning-making powers. Goss argues that “the built
environment is also, always […] connotative of meaning, consistent
with, but extending beyond its immediate function” and in that malls
“present an image of civic, liminal and transactional spaces, forms
consistent with, but not identical to, the function of selling
commodities” (Goss, 1993: 36). Horne agrees with the idea that there is
a deeper meaning for the shopper than material needs, and applies to
Dawn of the Dead the “emotional function of large-scale shopping for
the shopper” identified by anthropologists Mary Douglas and Baron
Isherwood (103). This view holds that shopping itself is as important as
the item consumed; that, it “is a component in a collaborative human
striving to construct meanings” (Horne, 2007: 104). Given the
pervasiveness of consumerism, then, Dawn of the Dead also presents us
with the destruction of meaning. For while the four survivors holed up
in the shopping mall have their choice of material goods, they cannot
pay for any of them, robbing them of the meaning-making ritual of
conspicuous consumption. Horne quotes actress Gaylen Ross, who
played Francine, in an interview about the film: “These things are only
symbols. A pound of coffee from a store is not just a pound of coffee; it
represents a way of being. In Dawn of the Dead, the symbols have lost
their meaning […] none of it is valuable anymore, because there’s no
longer a context for it” (107).
The ready consumerist parallels to the movie have made it, Harper
argues, ready fodder for “the host of unrepentantly Marxian critics
[who] have described the baleful impact of capitalist production on
those whom it exploits and the depoliticizing effects of commodity
fetishism on consumers” (Harper, 2002: 1). It may also be true, then,
that, having been so appropriate; there is little incentive to move forward
in this vein of inquiry. Jen Webb and Sam Byrnand examine how critics,
fans and filmmakers have solidified their own interpretations of
zombies, creating a number of tropes within the genre. These include
“novelists, movie-makers, cultural theorists, adolescents, philosophers
and the mass of fans, each of whom has a solid idea about what
constitutes a zombie, what constitutes a seminal zombie text, and why it
is worth researching zombies” (Webb; Byrnand, 2008: 83). Steve
Shaviro, in his essay “Capitalist Monsters”, takes the idea for granted
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that zombies are an analogue for capitalism, and his main task is to
figure out how to correctly apply Marx to contemporary cinematic
zombies. For Shaviro, while “traditional Marxist theory, of course,
focuses on vampires”, all “monsters are intrinsic to the ordinary,
everyday reality of capitalism itself” (281). The major task, then, is to
figure out exactly how Marx can best be applied to Dawn of the Dead.
Like Webb and Byrnand, Shaviro sees ready parallels between the
modus operandi of the vampire and that of the zombie: both are
“undead,” both consuming the living, and in both cases the consumed
become the monsters by which they were predated. The parallels are too
striking to pass up, then. Zombies are, for Shaviro the inheritors of the
class struggle embodiment in film and cinema.
Central to Shaviro’s Marxist reading is the “tendential fall”, Marx’s
idea about the diminishing rate of return from a single investment. To
compensate, “a positive feedback loop is thus set into motion: the
accumulation of profit leads to the decline in the rate of profit, which, in
turn, spurs an even greater absolute accumulation […] ad infinitum”
(284). Shaviro sees a correlation in the zombie dynamic, where, “at the
tendential limit, nearly every last person in the world will become a
zombie”, save for uninfected elite. The rest, the zombie mass, presents
us with “the human face of capitalist monstrosity […] the dregs of
humanity … all that remains of human nature, or even simply of a
human scale, in the immense and unimaginably complex network
economy” (288). For Shaviro, zombies are both the “universal residue”
of a post-human world the shuffling mass of consumers, wandering the
planet with insatiable hunger. This line of reasoning, and the reaction to
it, have both become sufficiently standardized that Harper can undertake
a survey of both and examine how Dawn of the Dead has become a
battleground in that debate. While Harper believes that anti-consumerist
critics have been all-too-eager to dismiss “consumers as ‘cultural dupes’
[…] idiots who compliantly consume the images and products imposed
on them by the dominant ideology”, the popularity of zombie films
suggests a desire on the part of consumers for resistance to that very
imposition (2). He points out, however, that critics such as Terry
Eagleton, who write convincingly of the glamour and psychological
comfort of the commodity bears little resemblance to the realities of
everyday value shopping. He sides here with Meaghan Morris, for
whom “the radical critique of consumerism itself a Eurocentric luxury,
patronizingly aloof from the quotidian concerns of consumers, and
women shoppers in particular” (Harper, 2002: 10). Postmodern critics
such as Morris reject the image of consumers as a horde of thoughtless
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zombies, arguing instead that consumerism provides individuals with
“temporary empowerment” (Ibidem).
Harper himself, however, is unwilling to dismiss the consumerist
implications of the film, pointing out implications of the following
scene:
[…] having cleaned up the mall, the survivors stand staring down at
the zombies outside as they vainly claw at the glass doors. In this
brilliantly conceived scene, it is Peter who makes the chillingly
simple observation “they’re us”. Fran gives a slight shiver and pulls
up the collar of her expensive fur coat (an apparently unnecessary
garment under the air conditioned circumstances), indicating that
while guns constitute an effective defense against the enemy,
consumer goods provide the psychological protection against any
pricks of conscience. The scene dramatizes, perhaps better than any
other scene in contemporary cinema, the senses in which consumers
become guiltily aware not only of their own pleasures, but of the
social costs of consumerism (Harper, 2002: 8).
Finding issue with Marxist readings of post-Night of the Living
Dead zombies is not a counter to the zombie-consumerist analogue, but
perhaps a suggestion that the reading doesn’t function as perfectly as its
vampiric predecessor. The tendency to try to fit zombies into the same
sort of capitalist analogue as Dracula is due in part to the pre- Romero
depictions of zombies in cinema, most notably White Zombie (1932).
The story of a young woman placed under a spell by a voodoo priest, the
zombies of this film are “subservient, producer zombies” of the type
prevalent before Night of the Living Dead gave us the “evolved zombie
figure [which] appeared on the screen in response to the cultural
anxieties prevalent in a consumer society” (Moore, 2006: 21). Zombies
of this sort are a better analogue for the factory worker, performing an
unthinking, endless task at an assembly line. Another is very likely the
work of such critics as Franco Moretti, who made a convincing case that
vampirism serves as a perfect metaphor for the necessarily endless cycle
of capitalistic wealth accumulation outlined by Karl Marx in Das
Kapital. Marx himself made the connection between capital and
vampires, and numerous critics have applied that idea to vampires in
literature and film. Specifically, Moretti argues that the Count Dracula
of Bram Stoker’s novel embodies anxieties, unique to late Victorian
England, about its own system of capitalism. Moretti observes that
Dracula’s goal in his predation is “not to destroy the lives of others
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according to whim, to waste them, but to use them” (431). Like the
capitalist, he is driven by a need “inherent in his nature”; he drinks the
blood of his victims not out of enjoyment, but out of necessity because
without their lives he cannot continue his own. Dracula is, like capital,
“dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour,
and lives the more, the more it sucks” (Moretti, 1982: 432). Moretti
finds explicit confirmation of his analogy in the passage from Das
Kapital in which Marx writes, “the capitalist gets rich, not … in
proportion to his personal labour … but at the same rate has he squeezes
out labour power from others” (432). Both Dracula and the capitalist
have the same goal, according to Moretti: “continuous growth, an
unlimited expansion of … domain” (432).
The similarities between zombies and vampires alluded to earlier
make a simple continuation of a Marxist reading seem like a natural fit,
as Jen Webb and Sam Byrnand point out in “The Zombie as Body and
as Trope”, an examination of various recurrent manifestations of
zombie-ism in cinema and literature. “Capitalism”, Webb and Byrnand
suggest, “works as an analogue of zombiedom because it too is
predicated on insatiable appetite, and the drive to consume” (89).
However, they point out that the metaphor does not work perfectly, due
to what is also a crucial difference between vampires and zombies:
“[capitalism] is not necessarily the mindless consumption of the zombie
[…] There is something unthinking, unthought about zombie
consumption; there is something organized, systematic, about capitalist
consumption” (89). The key difference here is one of sustainability;
while capitalism does demand never-ending consumption to continue, it
also must seek to sustain that consumption. Without consumption, the
endless cycle of money used to purchase commodities, sold for more
money, will shut down. As Marx himself points out, “the mass of living
labour applied continuously declines in relation to the mass of
objectified labour that it sets in motion” – capitalism must expand to
survive. Dracula, however, cannot allow too great an expansion of
vampires, lest the population reach a tipping point and outstrip the
available food supply. In this light, Moretti’s point that the inevitable
end of Dracula’s predation is a world of vampires doesn’t quite work.
It’s an observation better suited to Zombie films, as Horne points out:
“In Romero, on the other hand, the few surviving individuals are in
danger of going the same bad way as almost the whole of the rest of
society; it’s a world of zombies” (99). Dracula, a thinking being, must
operate so as perpetuate the cycle of victimization; zombies operate so
as to make the cycle irrelevant.
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Zombies have no interest in sustainability and as such cannot
function as a perfect stand-in for consumerism. Because consumerism is
ultimately subject to the needs of capitalism, it cannot be its downfall. It
is precisely the cessation of consumption, however, and of a plateau in
zombie creation, that inevitable in Dawn of the Dead. Indeed, in Day of
the Dead, this is exactly the case, as Dr. Logan explains that the
survivors are “outnumbered now, 400,000 to 1, by my estimation”. The
zombie population is now essentially stagnant; doomed to slowly rot and
“die” off while hunting for the few remaining humans. The analogue
here is clear; zombies do not function as a metaphor for simple
consumerism, itself merely a symptom of a larger illness. Zombies are
the embodiment of our destruction of the natural environment,
subjugated to support a massively bloated population. In Day of the
Dead, we see a biological population in an extreme state of what
William Catton, Jr. termed “overshoot” in his 1980 text of the same
name. In that book, Catton articulates the idea of „phantom carrying
capacity,” on which he argues humanity has grown dependent. The
phantom carrying capacity is a greatly inflated figure describing the
“maximum permanently supportable population” (34). Phantom
carrying capacity is inflated by the elimination of predators, the
destruction of forests to create crop land the depletion of fish stocks and
the use of fossil fuels. The result is overpopulation, which supports itself
by consuming at an unsustainable rate, and the consequences, he argues,
are inevitable. Catton writes that, “whatever the species, irruptions that
overshoot carrying capacity lead inexorably to die-offs” (213). The die-
off is inevitable; it is only a matter of time before the tricks used to
support phantom carrying capacity catch up to the species in question.
Tricks of science and subjugation of environment cannot delay die offs
permanently. In Day of the Dead, the zombie population, having
succeeded in subjugating all of humanity in service of its virus-like
spread, is now doomed to settle in for a long, slow, die-off.
Thus, while critical and film theorists have been correct in
identifying a working analogue between Romero zombies and
consumerism, the connection has not been carried to its logical extreme,
one which maps the inevitable end of a worldwide zombification onto
real-life consumer culture: the effect of human destruction of the
environment. The philosophy of deep ecology, articulated by Norwegian
philosopher Arne Naess in 1973, provides the framework for just such a
mapping. Bill Devall and George Sessions included an interview with
Naess in their 1984 work, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered,
in which Naess tried to define the movement: “The essence of deep
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ecology is to ask deeper questions. The adjective ‘deep’ stresses that we
ask why and how, where others do not. For instance, ecology as a
science does not ask what kind of a society would be the best for
maintaining a particular ecosystem – that is considered a question for
value theory, for politics, for ethics” (Devall; Sessions, 1985: 74).
In the context of dominant ideology, deep ecology is rejection of
what Devall and Sessions call „the dominant world view”, which holds
that “people are fundamentally different from all other creatures on the
Earth, over which they have dominion” (43). Contemporary
environmentalism, which typically limits itself to opposing pollution
and advocating conservation, is considered “shallow ecology”. This
operates merely as a stopgap measure and sometimes in service of the
continued destruction of the environment that has come about due to the
dominant worldview. This because both environmentalist and
conservation movements take for granted humanity’s rightful
dominance over the planet. In the specialized language of contemporary
conservation, the Earth becomes, essentially, “a collection of natural
resources. Some of these resources are infinite; for those which are
limited; substitutes can be created by technological society. There is an
overriding faith that human civilization will survive” (Devall, Sessions,
1985: 42). Ecologist David Ehrenfeld breaks down the assumptions of
this technological worldview into five fallacies, which build upon the
preceding into a justification for subjugating the natural environment:
1. All problems are soluble.
2. All problems are soluble by people.
3. Many problems are soluble by technology.
4. Those problems that are not soluble by technology or by technology
alone have solutions in the social world.
5. When the chips are down, we will apply ourselves and work together
for a solution before it is too late (Ehrenfeld, 1981: 17).
Despite the near-universality of these assumptions, there is evidence
that they can or will alleviate the effects of environmental destruction.
This a point Devall and Sessions are adamant about, writing “The
technological worldview has as its ultimate vision the total conquest and
domination of Nature and spontaneous natural processes – a vision of a
‘totally artificial environment’ remodelled to human specification and
manage by humans for humans” (48). Frederic bender updates these
assumptions in The Culture of Extinction: Toward a Philosophy of Deep
Ecology, and identifies how to schools of thought generally thought to
be antagonistic, theistic and secular, operate more-or-less identically in
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regard to the environment. These he terms the “The Natural Need
Argument” and the “Human Superiority Argument”. The first holds that
since interspecies predation and competition is a fact of nature, all
species are morally justified in placing their own needs before those of
other species, and therefore we have are justified in exerting human
domination over nature and exterminating competitor species,
something no other life form on the planet attempts (70). The second
strongly rooted in Judeo-Christian theology, holds that, having been
created in God’s image, are the only “morally considerable beings” and
“nonhuman beings are mere means (resources) for human use” (70).
Therefore, we are again justified in exerting human domination over
nature. The secular and theistic arguments share a common goal; that of
justifying any exploitation and Bender argues that the end result is the
same. He also argues that adherents to either are likely to subscribe to a
third argument, that of the Sanctity of Capitalism, which holds that
“progress, i.e., ever-increasing material production and consumption,
increases human happiness without limit, progress is a direct effect of
capitalism”, and “unlimited economic growth requires unlimited
exploitation of nature” (88).
The aftermath of World War II, Catton writes, first saw the
articulation of this “belief that the limits to human activity had been or
would soon be removed inspired exuberant prediction. We came to
expect a flow of goods and machines and technical innovations that
would lift standards of living everywhere” (xi). This rosy, optimistic
faith in science and capitalism continues to be an important component
of our worldview, and one which, for Catton, can only end in societal
collapse as we continue the cycle of greater population growth
demanding greater environmental sublimation, all justified by the belief
that in the next generation fabulous new technologies will fix everything
before it`s too late. Catton argues that “the alternative to chaos is to
abandon the illusion that all things are possible. Mankind has learned to
manipulate many of nature’s forces, but neither as individuals nor as
organized societies can human beings attain outright omnipotence”(9).
This is exactly the argument Franco Moretti articulates about Dracula:
that the Count Dracula of Bram Stoker’s novel embodies anxieties,
unique to late Victorian England, about its own system of capitalism. It
is a system, Moretti writes, that is “ashamed of itself and which hides
factories and stations beneath cumbrous Gothic superstructures (434–
435). Dracula’s unquenchable thirst for human blood embodies the true
nature of capitalism, is “capital that is not ashamed of itself, true to its
own nature, an end in itself” and the Dracula’s presence in London
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exposes the “great ideological lie of Victorian capitalism”, that the
system may be used toward meritorious ends; that is, any end other than
the accumulation of more money (Moretti, 1982: 435).
If Moretti is correct, and the success of vampires in literature and
film has been in large part due to the fact that it exposed the true nature
of Victorian capitalism, then it might we not also argue that the success
of zombies in popular culture since 1968 is because they expose as a lie
another dearly-beloved economic lie? Shaviro makes this connection
when he observes that while “Dracula personified the classic regime of
industrial capitalism […] the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries is
rather characterized by a plague of zombies” (282). The key word is
here plague. In movement and mental ability the basic physical
attributes of the zombie, what Kyle Bishop, writing of pre-war zombie
films describes as “not monsters but rather hypnotized slaves”, changed
little (199). Both are slow, lumbering capable of only basic movement
or tasks. Romero’s innovation, however, was to have the zombies come
as a horde, an unstoppable wave. For Bishop, the most striking aspect of
zombies as a monster genre is also that which has led to the articulation
of the zombie-consumerist analogue: the loss of individuality. Bishop
writes that “it is the essentially human behaviour that explains the
success of such fiends in nineteenth-century literature […] Although
undead, Bram Stoker’s archetypal Count acts as though still alive, using
his immortality to pursue rather carnal desires” (200). Zombies become
lost in the crowd, however, subject to a larger homogenizing force.
Furthermore, what they do, they do unthinking, communally, and
without thought to consequences.
Recall that the extermination of humanity would have consequences
for the zombie population: while Romero zombies do not need to eat
people to “live”, said eaten people return from the dead to sustain the
population. Once every last person on earth is killed, the zombies begin
a slow countdown to extinction. The analogue between zombies and
Catton’s idea of carrying capacity is striking, but the reason why
audiences do not pick up on it is because of the internalized assumptions
which drive our slow, continual domination and destruction of the
environment. If we do not recognize the fallacies of the dominant
worldview, then we do not recognize exactly why the image of the
zombie horde, which reveals these fallacies, terrifies us so. It is not the
gory image of people torn asunder by undead cannibals; that is merely
the message which obscures the messenger. Bishop points out that
“zombies movies have no direct antecedent in the Written word because
of the zombies’ essentially visual nature; zombies don’t think or speak –
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they simply act” (196). The extreme visuality of zombies obscures the
larger and inevitable effect of the zombie dynamic. As Marshall
McLuhann writes in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,
because we tend to focus on content of a medium, not the “social
consequences... [that] ... result from the new scale that is introduced into
our affairs by each extension of ourselves” (McLuhan, 1994: 7). An
example he uses is that the content of a novel is print, and so we focus
on the plot, not the effect of the novel on society. McLuhan did not
believe that we extend ourselves randomly; it is when faced with the
“physical stress of super stimulation of various kinds [that] the central
nervous system acts to protect itself by a strategy of auto-amputation”,
or the creation of a new medium (McLuhan, 1994: 42). With this in
mind, we may understand that the origin of any “invention is the stress
of acceleration of pace and increase of load” (42). Any sustained
irritation, then, requires a new medium to alleviate it. This provides us
with a partial explanation for the evolution of zombies as a capitalist
monster.
Vampires, which functioned well as an analogue for capitalism for
decades, was no longer able to fulfil that function with the rise of
consumer culture and the wholesale ecocide we began to perpetrate after
World War II. Shaviro recognized this when he wrote, that “the
nineteenth century, with its classic regime of industrial capitalism, was
the age of the vampire, but the network society of the late twentieth and
twenty-first centuries is rather characterized by a plague of zombies”
(282). He was trying to apply it to the rigid Marxist framework,
however, and zombies do not really fit that. Marxism is as much a part
of the dominant worldview as is rampant capitalism, promoting an
anthropocentric approach to nature. Devall and Sessions quote
philosopher Pete Gunter rather acerbically condemning humanistic
philosophies as simply cloaking the dominant worldview in different
disguises: “Pragmatism, Marxism, scientific humanism, French
positivism, German mechanism, the whole swarm of smug anti-religious
dogmas […] really do not, as they claim, make man a part of nature. If
anything they make nature an extension of raw material for man” (54).
He raises a fair point; both capitalism and Marxism take for granted
humanity’s inherent supremacy. Marxist theory cannot fully account for
the phenomenon of zombie films because Marxist theory is ultimately in
service of the environmental destruction for which zombies are a
metaphor. That the destruction of the natural environment is steadily
increasing as ever more people compete for ever fewer resources
explains the shift from vampire to zombie. Vampires prey on
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individuals; they operate on a small scale, too small to embody the
societal anxieties engendered by the human-perpetuated extinction of
nearly 10,000 plant and animal species annually. Bender provides a
striking example of the increased pace of environmental destruction that
accompanied Catton’s post-war optimism: “before humans invented
agriculture, Earth was home to six billion hectares (14.8 million
hectares) of forest. Today only 4 billion hectares remain […] Half that
forest loss occurred between 1950 and 1990” (53).
Part of Moretti’s argument rests on the assumption that Dracula
embodied anxieties about capitalism specific to the late 19th century, and
it is to this that the novel partially owed its success. I argue that a similar
dynamic is at work regarding the genre of zombie films, that moviegoers
have looked into ravenous hunger of the zombie horde fighting to eat the
last few humans on earth and saw, in those pathetic and dumb faces, our
own future. The terror of zombies is the realization that the dominant
worldview is a lie, that technology cannot save us, that we will not pull
together and fix things before it’s too late. We do not look at zombies
and see how consumer culture has forced us to commodity our
identities, or how it compels us to buy more, more ever more in search
of material happiness. We see ourselves in the future, an ever growing
population propping itself up by subjugating more of the natural
environment. It is not the extinction of humans in zombie films that
terrifies; it is the extinction of the zombies. We know what must
inevitably happen to them after the last survivors holed up in shopping
malls and farmhouses are devoured and join the horde. Devall and
Sessions might say that zombie films prick our “deep ecological
consciousness”, an intuitive awareness of imbalance in the ecosphere.
They argue for a revaluation of the Western sense of self, “defined as an
isolated ego striving primarily for hedonistic gratification or for a
narrow sense of individual salvation in this life or the next” (67). They
argue that this social programming dislocates us from nature and each
other, “leaving us prey to whatever fad or fashion is prevalent in our
society or social reference group and […] are thus robbed of beginning
the search for our unique spiritual/biological personhood” (67). The
strange attraction to the zombie is not as simple as Bishops summation
that “the horror of the zombie movie comes from recognizing the human
in the monster” (204), but from a deep, intuitive awareness as the loss of
that spiritual/biological personhood. Anthropocentric societies consume
and destroy the natural environment at a rate which suggests either a
belief that supplies or inexhaustible or humanity will not ultimately
suffer because of it. While our population grows the natural
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environment shrinks, and like the zombie horde in Dawn of the Dead,
many mouths to feed, not enough food to feed them. Of course the end
result of both is inevitable and the same.
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