Zombie as missed connection (mourning dew)

Black Friday as the denial of death

I.

The first Zombie movie was in 1968. And no, they were not called zombies in that movie either. Fun fact: Romero’s Night of the Living Dead considered them ghouls. It was the viewing public/media that began to call them zombies. The idea was something reanimated dead people. A small reference in the movie to a reason for the dead reanimating is a radio broadcast of a satellite reentering the atmosphere and exploding. Radiation was the fear then. You know, Godzilla and all. 

Our fears have evolved. Load up on your anti-bacterial soap kids, an I am legend plague is coming. No actually the fear is growing up but that doesn’t stimulate your narcissistic tastes so I’m taking the long route.

Prior to that a zombie was from Haiti (think Serpent and the Rainbow). A part of the witchdoctor-slavery system. A precursor to modern capitalism really but that post will have to wait. Vampires could also make zombie-like ghouls. Vampires are clearly the upper class collecting capital (blood) from the lower class. The undead were a byproduct of that hidden massacre. Van Helsing and his updated version Blade are marxist revolutionaries.

 In Zombieland, when a dead human scurries down the street towards you, they say a zombie is coming because in the movie itself there is an awareness, a history implied, that the characters know what a fucking zombie is. The Walking dead is not an alternate universe. Everything about it screams 2010 US of A. So what do you call it when no one in it mentions something that everyone should be aware of? Repression.

“Walkers, biters, lamebrains, the dead” are all names that the characters try to apply to what they should obviously be calling zombies. They don’t because this show isn’t about zombies. 

II.

So enlighten us genius...What’s The Walking Dead really about?

Easy there governor I’m getting there. Every season so far we are presented with people who cannot move on from a loved one dying/turning. They died and part of them moved on. But another part of them remains, comes after us- albeit slowly. 

In episode one Morgan who cannot shoot his turned wife. Shane, haunted by the family he must let go of though he thought he had earned. The sister who must watch her sister turn. A brother who must move on with a group that effectively killed his brother. A christian man who must face the world is not sick but dead. That his wife and children cannot be healed. A lost daughter who must be put down. A valued member who must be put out of his misery. A son who must kill (again) his mother so she doesn’t turn. Turns out everyone is infected. However you die, turn you will. 

Now we have the governor whose little girl is kept in a state of undead waiting, one presumes like Hershel’s barn was. Waiting for the big other to come and fix it but now mourning that alas, he isn’t coming.  Unlike Hershel though, the governor is taking matters into his own hands. By sheer will he will fix things and return them to normal. Like the quaint town he has fortified.

III.

But why repress the name zombie? Because when you fail to mourn the death of a loved one you get anxiety. Anxiety leads to projection. And projecting all my terror into an external enemy is what a zombie is. They are the hate, confusion, rage and death that I feel. And I can dispense with that by putting a bullet thru their brain.

But that’s not mourning. And so when I turn around there are 6 more. 12 more. A world full of things that are coming after me. Rick’s rage in the prison is an apt description as any. He will kill until he tires of doing so. There will never be a shortage of zombies.

Until I run the ritual right, I can’t mourn properly and I can’t move on. The (preposterous) phone call to Rick is an attempt to run the ritual right. To do what is right and grieve. To experience the loss in all its terror and own it. Sometimes this must be done regularly, hence the name ritual. A Father would then be there for his grieving son. Lead him thru the ritual of mourning the death of his mother (or whoever). That is the right thing to do.

Does anyone still remember what is the right thing to do? Of course not thats why we have zombies.

IV.

Incomplete mourning has left us trapped in our own heads, and so day in and day out we try to (not) shoot our loved ones who are (not) completely dead, repeating it over and over, working through it until we master the material.  

We can spend the rest of our life in repetition compulsion if we want, but time marches forward and like everything else in life it comes down to a binary choice: we'll either get over them or become them.  It is inevitable.

That's why there's no sense in putting it off, and you certainly can't avoid it-- it follows you around. There are never enough bullets or arrows. No hideout that can withstand the slow methodical onslaught.

V.

The unspoken part of mourning is that sometimes we wished that the dead person was, well, dead. Children under 10 think the world is magical and if you hate someone then you can an affect their demise. The guilt of secretly at times wishing your parents, your boss, your spouse even your kids dead is repressed. Like a child we fear we somehow caused this. Made it happen by our ghoulish daydreams of a life without them in it. Ah the freedom. The things we would do with that other life instead of the one I'm living now. And then when they die, we know we thought those thoughts. We killed them.

Sure we didn’t kill them but the unconscious doesn’t seem to know that does it?

 It lingers. Rises up and begins to slowly stalk us. It is the zombie we want to put down for good but can’t. If we could just tell our loved one, explain it. Have one more shot to make it right, that I didn’t really want you dead. I was just being selfish and moody. I really need you and still do.

Thankfully, generations much wiser than our own figured out that these rituals help us do just that. God can and does forgive us. And you learn by doing. But we value beliefs more than actions so we create ever more elaborate beliefs and mock the old ways all the while doing nothing. 

In that sense The Walking Dead is THE american show of our day. It is unable to name itself because we walk around endlessly avoiding the dead. The walking dead. Or - What do you get when you get so good at denial, that you extend it to the inevitable?  You get American zombies. Denial of death. And what better way to deny death than shop. That is, to consume endlessly. 

N.