As the bio on his official site and this Wikipedia article evidence, award-winning columnist Douglas Rushkoff is a talented and respected writer. As this article in Discover, titled “What You Can Learn from Zombie Movies: With lessons on science, consumerism, and the soul, a truly educational genre” evidences, even the smartest writers can come off like total jackasses when they don’t know much about their subject. Rushkoff posits, with more than a hint of disdain for his subject, the following about zombie movies: “Deep down, these schlocky horror flicks are asking some of the most profound questions: What is life? Why does it depend on killing and consuming other life? Does this cruel reality of survival have any intrinsic meaning?”
Ugh…
You gotta love how he writes off the entire subgenre as “schlocky,” despite Night of the Living Dead often appearing on top horror films lists and Romero’s entire Dead series being a popular subject in academia – nothing like placing yourself far above your subject so no one will think you’d actually partake in such vulgar media. Worse, he writes this piece like he’s the first guy to come up with these notions that zombie films are asking some of “the most profound questions” about life and death. Even passive partakers in the subgenre know that profound questions are pretty much on the surface. Christ, look no further than Bub in Day of the Dead for an excellent example of how these films – on the friggin’ surface – are asking these types of questions. It’s Dr. Logan in that film that has the line “They are us.”
Before this, Rushkoff states, “No other horror creatures invite quite the same breadth of paranoid speculation as zombies, perhaps because they embody such a pure, reflective sense of terror: animated corpses dependent on living flesh for survival. No wolf mythology, no castles, no capes, no fangs; just dead people eating flesh. In short, except for the ‘being dead’ part, they’re just like us. I’d venture this accounts for their popularity over decades of cinema, as well as their more recent migration to other popular media.”
Here he’s making the point that zombies are a departure from Gothic horror. Shortly after this he goes on to describe White Zombie as the first zombie movie, despite the fact that zombies wouldn’t actually eat flesh for several decades.
“In short, except for the ‘being dead’ part, they’re just like us,” he notes. Just as important, when it comes to the popularity of zombie movies, however, are elements of revulsion which are so important to horror at a base level (zombies are monsters: disgusting, gory, rotting, maggot infested), they are monstrous in the way that they lose essential traits of humanity (they are driven by animal instincts to feed, they generally can’t be reasoned with) and become dangerous, zombie apocalypses, like any apocalypse narrative, is full of drama, tension and thrills, and zombie movies are often special effects extravaganzas (offering all kinds of innovative ways to depict the destruction of the body). So, no, them simply being undead cannibals in and of itself does not account for their popularity; the very obvious and much discussed idea that zombies are a mirror of humanity is only part of the equation here.
When he does get around to Night of the Living Dead, he says, “Now it was up to the film’s human protagonists to distinguish themselves from the marauding bands of flesh eaters—and to keep from being eaten.” C’mon, man! Even a tiny bit of research will tell you that NotLD kicked off the now-standard zombies-as undead-cannibals premise. In other words, there were no marauding bands of flesh eaters before this.
Rushkoff then notes, “The film’s sequels had survivors holing up in places like shopping malls.” Well, actually, one sequel had them holing up in exactly a shopping mall, while the other had them holing up in a bunker, or a place that’s nothing at all like a shopping mall. If you’re gonna be down on the subgenre, at least watch a bit of it.
Really, though, I don’t mind the incorrect sweeping generalizations (“Zombies have been a staple of American filmmaking since the indie flick White Zombie”) as much as I dislike the lame attempts to be deep. He busts out the following: “The victim becomes a walking corpse, a human without a soul,” adding. “In this sense, all movies are zombie movies. Lifeless frames of celluloid passed in front of a bright bulb 24 times a second yield moving images convincing enough to make us believe there are living people up there on a screen, moving about with purpose. If the craft is done right, we care about those phantoms as much as we do for real people—alas, sometimes more than those we see suffering on the evening news.”
Right… so zombies, like movies, give us a false representation of life, so therefore all movies are zombies movies. Or ghost movies. Or Frankenstein films. Or possession flicks. Or Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Etc.
Here, let me blow your mind: all movies are art galleries because they present a collection of two-dimensional images arranged in a certain way.
Rushkoff bookends the piece by talking about Babylon Fields, a show that was picked up by ABC, which tells of a world where the dead have come back to life and attempt to simply pick up where they left off. He mocks it as the perfect show for “the truly soulless medium of television” although, considering Michael Cuesta – who helmed several episodes of both Six Feet Under and Dexter – is listed as director, it has a lot of promise as superior and thought-provoking television that asks questions about death, actually.
The show (which you can see some pics of here) has a premise swiped from the creepy 2004 French film Les Revenants, but it probably won’t be played nearly as dark. At the very least it should be better researched and make more sense than Douglas Rushkoff’s Discovery article on zombies.