This generation’s guns-and-bunkers fantasy is objectively better than its predecessors.
It’s Halloween season as I write this, and that means non-stop zombie jokes and references. It means folks dragging out the same old fantasies about how they’d survive a zombie apocalypse, whether by building a safehouse, planning a defense, or just enjoying a few of the hundreds of video games that allow one to machine-gun the hell out of an unending army of the living dead. (I personally like Left 4 Dead 2, but everyone’s got their favorites.)
This fantasy, of being one of a few tough holdouts against a horde of enemies, of surviving the collapse of all the civilized structures designed to keep that scenario from happening, is kind of a guy thing. It’s especially strong in the teen years, when a testosterone-flooded system yearns for violent catharsis and adolescent rebellion has little use for civilized mores. Even after that age, though, the fantasy holds a certain appeal. It’s fun to imagine a scenario where you can stop worrying about taxes and traffic lights and rent checks, where all your problems are refreshingly immediate and most of them can be solved via shotgun. It’s legitimately entertaining to tell yourself how you’d come through an impossible armageddon alive and well, surviving in a harsh and unforgiving world.
On the other hand, it’s also pretty much pure unreconstructed machismo. As one internet commenter noted:
Zombie movies are going to be popular as long as dudes fantasize about being in a situation where the most valuable possible trait is the capacity for heteromasculine violence and sociopathy towards the diseased and weak.
The thing is, this naive critique of the zombie apocalypse fantasy actually underscores its strength. Because to criticize the zombie apocalypse as a macho survival fantasy is to ignore its existence in the context of other macho survival fantasies.
To criticize the zombie apocalypse as a macho survival fantasy is to ignore its existence in the context of other macho survival fantasies.
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As Western society has grown more civilized, stable, and prosperous, things have gotten safer. There’ve always been those who criticized this very concept, guys who felt that men were growing weak and soft because of their lives being insufficiently imperiled. My favorite is still the one who blamed the wussy modern men of the 1920s on, no kidding, safety razors. Most of us, though, just enjoy the occasional fantasy of how if that safety and civilization were taken away, we’d still be totally awesome. And those fantasies, too, are growing more civilized.
Back a generation or two, the apocalypse was scheduled to be nuclear. Fallout shelters sold like mad, each one stocked with canned food and plenty of ammo, because once they dropped the bomb, your less-paranoid neighbors would be trying to steal your canned food and you’d have to kill ’em. This fantasy developed further, into a whole post-nuclear genre of fiction, all positing a Mad Max future where heavily-armed dudes in badass leather outfits ruled the wastelands.
Then, too, there were the paramilitary fantasies, embodied in the right-wing cult favorite Red Dawn, where the only thing that can defeat the forces of international communism is a bunch of, yes, heavily-armed teenage boys having the best camping trip ever. These fantasies are still acted out by a diminishing number of kooks and paranoids, but they’ve lost a lot of steam as one apocalypse after another (nuclear war, Y2K, the Rapture, etc.) has been cancelled on them.
Today, people’s fantasies revolve around a safely imaginary apocalypse: zombies. Unlike nuclear war, the dead rising to feast on the living will not be less likely next year than it is this year. Its likelihood is… steady, let’s say. Other than that, it’s got all the hallmarks of a great apocalypse fantasy. It’s got bunkers, looting, mysterious lone wanderers, and best of all, the opportunity to shoot all the people you want, consequence-free.
Let’s just admit it: we’ve all wanted to shoot someone. We don’t actually do it because it’s wrong, and if we’re not at that level of moral development, we don’t do it because society has a lot of structures to disincentivize murder. But we indulge the fantasies nonetheless, because we’re human and there’s a part of us that’s always going to want to shoot our way out of trouble.
For the first time in history, we’ve stopped fantasizing about shooting people.
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And that’s where the zombie apocalypse differs. Because for the first time in history, we’ve stopped fantasizing about shooting people. The entire point of zombie hunting is that the people you’re shooting at are dead. They’re not people any more. There’s frequently a scene in zombie fiction where someone has to drive this point home: the zombies aren’t saveable, they aren’t going to get better, they’re upright corpses with teeth. (Can’t overemphasize the teeth.)
When you kill a pushy neighbor, a godless commie, or even Master Blaster, you’re extinguishing a human existence, a person with as much complexity and inner life as yourself. And that’s something we’ve grown increasingly less comfortable with. More and more, we’ve internalized the idea that killing people is actually wrong, not just sorta wrong. Our old fantasies of killing people with impunity feel more inappropriate every year. The Red Dawn remake flopped like a dying trout.
We still love the fantasy of violent self-reliance and freedom from society’s rules, we still get off on the notion that killing people without consequences would be cool as hell. But the form that fantasy takes shows that we’ve learned that killing human beings IS a consequence, that shooting people is intrinsically wrong, with or without societal rules against it.
Zombies, however, aren’t people any more, so we can blast the hell out of ’em with total moral impunity. And let’s face it: that’s awesome.
Photo—pasukaru76/Flickr
Back before internet gaming was common there was a “fake LAN” internet service with a slogan I love and still use today, “Kill Pixels not People.” It pretty much sums up a lot of our masculine power fantasies today. I get pissed off at someone at work? I’ll go shoot some dudes in Planetside 2. Kids driving me up the wall? Drop in a Mech and shoot some big stompy robots. Want to relax but still possibly blow stuff up? Launch some Kerbals into orbit. 🙂 Pixels allow for all sorts of ways of “living out” these power fantasies, I… Read more »
Zombie apocalypse scenarios aren’t new, they’re just in style now. There’s a reason government agencies have used the scenario for training purposes (although only recently acknowledged it publicly) and that’s because it’s the combination of every worst-case scenario. Nuclear war, while a big phobia of most for a long time, has evolved to be even worse due to technology shrinking the bombs and allowing them to now be held in a suitcase or smaller. Still infinitely more dangerous than zombies. Zombies are dumb and stupid. Look deeper and you’ll find that in every zombie apocalypse story, show or movie, the… Read more »
This reminds me of one of those old 1950’s-era Twilight Zone episodes (or maybe it was The Outer Limits?) where the family in the bomb shelter after the nuclear war has to decide whether to open the door to their neighbors or not. The neighbors knock less and less until eventually the knocking stops. We’ve been thinking about/fantasizing about these things for a very long time. I imagine towards the end of the Western Roman Empire the people in Rome told a lot of these stories imagining the barbarians sort of the way we imagine zombies. (The word apocalypse is… Read more »
You’ve touched on a great irony of all these shows and stories about fighting zombies. A lot of the anti-zombie tactics are actually pretty stupid. Gunslinging macho tactics are only slightly more sophisticated than the zombie brain itself. So, there’s one irony – mindlessly fighting mindless creatures. Taking on zombies head-on with firepower or muscle power as your central feature would be perhaps the stupidest way to fight them, only the best thing as a last resort. That would provide the least strategic or tactical advantage compared to the zombies’ own strengths and weaknesses. The best, most effective advantage over… Read more »
Another way to put it:
If you’re using melee weapons or even handguns against zombies, that’s because you’ve probably made several pretty stupid choices. Smarter choices would not let them get so close.
Exactly! Incendiaries, explosives, or a well positioned industrial chipper would be a lot better than small arms. Also, why do the protagonists always light out for the country? A high-rise suburban office building always seemed more defensible.
Based on the _Walking Dead_ series, one of the most useful things to have in a zombie apocalypse is an Anthropology degree. Not one of the cultural ones, but a social anthro degree. What survivors will have to do is make a transition from a large-scale industrial/agricultural society to smaller, scavenger/forager communities. You can’t keep applying the same social, political, and military rules to the new situation. You have to change the whole organization of society. Especially once the ammo and processed food runs out.
True survivalists should do a little field work in the Amazon or the Congo….
In reply to Douglas: Military tacticians, especially the ancient masters, would tell you that a fortress you can’t escape from is no fortress. A high-rise building would be impenetrable to an enemy that can’t climb ladders, but by the same token it would be a trap for the people who fortified it. (Unless you’re banking on helicopters coming to your rescue.) One advantage of taking to the country is maneuverability, which takes advantage of the superior speed of humans over zombies. Holing up in a building destroys one of your key advantages. A high-rise fortress is great if you want… Read more »
I’ve definitely noticed some thick gender stereotypes in the _Walking Dead_ series. (I’m still on season 2, though, so no one tell me any spoilers.) The two main cop characters are practically cartoon characters of macho cops. They swagger and posture so much they can’t even stand up straight. (Ironically like zombies, actually.) They can hardly walk straight because of the way they swing their arms and strut bowlegged like apes. They are incapable of having a conversation without their thumbs hanging in their gun belts. What I absolutely hate about the show is that so far the women survivors… Read more »
Come to think of it, the zombies themselves resemble the worst stereotypes that our society has about men. Maybe the zombie mania right now is actually a critique of traditional masculinity, except using the zombies as the symbols. Look at all the horrible things that misandric people associate with males today. Maybe the *zombies* are the male stereotypes, not the zombie fighters. For example, negatively stereotyped men and zombies are both: Filthy Stupid Clumsy Not really human or barely human Disgusting eaters Grunters and mumblers Have only one thing on their minds Obsessed with other people’s bodies Entirely self-centered Terrible… Read more »
Dead on. You can’t have a conversation with them, zombies Are terrible listeners!