Plop Culture: the Zombie Apocalypse

[athelind]

I may have finally figured out why the current pop culture fascination with zombies does nothing but irritate me.

Ever have to hook a line to a three-month-old sea lion carcass to pull it off the breakwall where it shuffled off its mortal coil?

We had to do that several times a year during my billet at Coast Guard Group Monterey.

Dead, bloated, rotting things trailing gobbets of putrid flesh?

They don't faze me. They don't horrify me.

They annoy me. They represent an unpleasant-but-necessary task, and nothing more.

At the same time, I have a much clearer, more visceral understanding of what such a situation would be like. On an olfactory level, among others.

So, no, thank you, I won't participate in your Zombie Walk, and I don't wanna go see Zombieland.

---

Comments

[tombfyre.livejournal.com]

Out of the various flavors of pop-culture monsters, I've never been crazy over Zombies either. They're kind of boring. And yes, having to haul dead rotting sea things off break walls and whatnot would get annoying rather quickly.

Come to think of it, I can't see the attraction to Vampires either. Especially the sparkly ones of sudden modern fame. Besides, everyone knows that Werewolves are the best of the three. :3 And Dragons are top dog, so to speak. We need more Dragon games/Movies/Merch. To hell with this zombie and sparkly vampire thing.

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

Yes. Yes yes yes and yes. Zombies do nothing but stagger around muttering "braaains". As comedy figures, they are a one-joke concept.

People seem to love vampires for being sexy, which makes me wonder, are all these people that heavily into biting and bloodplay? I think I read somewhere that the Twilight vampires don't drink people's blood anyway. That and the thing about sparkling in sunlight instead of dying makes me wonder, why call them vampires at all? Why not elves or something?

And zombies? Reanimated rotting corpses? Can't be made sexy at all. Just disgusting.

And I want more dragon stuff too!

[tombfyre.livejournal.com]

Its settled then! MOAR dragons for us all. :D

[reveille-d.livejournal.com]

But the dead sea lions didn't comically try to assault you and eat your face, did they? No, I didn't think so, Mr. Obligatory Contrarian! :D

[araquan.livejournal.com]

This.

[foofers.livejournal.com]

Zombies make me go "meh." And this whole current zombie craze thing seems to be some kind of byproduct of the pirate craze dying out after the last of the Disney trilogy, like everyone just needed a new bandwagon to jump on.

Fools. It should be dragons.

[araquan.livejournal.com]

I don't know, if we ended up with the dragon equivalent of Twilight or something... Meh. c.c

[leonard-arlotte.livejournal.com]

Already past. It was called Eragon.

[araquan.livejournal.com]

No, that at least cribbed enough from Star Wars to remain somewhat above Twilight's level.

[leonard-arlotte.livejournal.com]

heh, I won't get into the argument about Eragon and Star Wars. I ranted enough about that back when it was current.

[astor-apatosaur.livejournal.com]

Whenever they do dragons, though, they always do it dumb. Wasn't Dragonheart the only time they picked a dragon to be more than "the bad guy at the end", and even then, the movie was meh.

Zombie dragon pirates will be the next thing. It'll be a Michael Bay movie too. :P

[terminotaur.livejournal.com]

Then that would be EXPLODING (yes, it has to be all caps because its Bay) zombie dragon pirates. :)

[kinkyturtle.livejournal.com]

I want Pixar to do a dragon movie. I bet they could make it interesting.

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

I daresay you're looking at the least interesting parts about zombies. What fascinates me about zombies is that, y'know, all of this zombie stuff is and always has been about us, about how we're the zombies, that we live in this witless culture that steals our lives and turns us into mindless gluttons consuming everything in our path to make up for the hollowness of our existence.

What further amuses me, intensely, is how almost no one acknowledges that. ;)

[circuit-four.livejournal.com]

Actually, you beat me to it. :) Yeah, if you look at most of the classic zombie flicks, it's the humans who are generally the biggest threats to the protagonists, and that's anything but accidental. If you're focusing on the literal putrefaction -- or expecting some big scare factor out of shambling mounds -- you're kinda missing the point, I fear. :/

[athelind.livejournal.com]

cpxbrex: ...we live in this witless culture that steals our lives and turns us into mindless gluttons consuming everything in our path to make up for the hollowness of our existence.

circuit_four: ...it's the humans who are generally the biggest threats to the protagonists...

You know, I could get the same effect by turning on Fox News.

I'm not blind to the metaphor. I appreciate classics like Night of the Living Dead and the shopping mall setting of Dawn.

With some labored effort, I could even extend the metaphor to, say, Marvel Zombies, where the fantasy of the superhuman blah blah blah.

It's the zombie bandwagon that's passed me by. Sure, the best of this stuff is a barbed commentary on modern consumer culture and man's inhumanity to man. Even the worst of it plays into that unintentionally. But Sturgeon's Observation still holds, and Marvel Zombies is still just a lame play on words pushed way too far.

I don't have an aversion to zombie movies. I'm indifferent to them, and I'm immune to the current memetic strain that asserts that the mere presence of shambling corpses (or variations thereof) can make a crappy movie watchable.

I mean, it's not like they're dragons (clutches his DVD of D-Wars protectively).

[paka.livejournal.com]

Actually, this has surfaced recently in Too Much Coffee Man; a narrator type saying that zombies are basically our current fears that we're consuming everything in our path - and our horde keeps expanding. I think the dead part is a mixture of things; the existential thing that even though these guys are shuffling around, they're not really alive (as per Shaun of the Dead), but also this Halloweeny dead-stuff-looks-cool thing.

It also fits into the junk-culture-is-cool thing we have going on. So your "mere presence of shambling corpses (or variations thereof) can make a crappy movie watchable" comment - I think it's that the mere presence of shambling corpses reassures the viewer that this is not a great movie, that it's okay to like it despite it being total crap. With horror films becoming legitimized, there's this big push to have stuff which is really shocking and horrifying and yadda yadda, and zombies, you come in expecting it to be cheese as well as horror. A little like how people used to approach slasher films.

I think the bandwagon aspect is hilarious in its irony this way. What is pretty much a metaphor for American brainlessness and consumerism catches on; and because people think it's trendy, it starts becoming a bigger trend. This means people can really make book on brainlessness and consumerism because everybody likes zombie films, right? I'd say whoever came up with steampunk and zombies in the same setting would be making a ton of money, but then I look over at the Privateer Press guys and yeah.

And what really gets me is that zombies, in folklore? They're not rotting, they're just dead guys. They do work unstoppably in the hot sun for hours and they won't notice until you feed them salt. The Toutons Macoutes were believed to be zombies, because they were the unstoppable unthinking agents of the authorities. So in a way, the metaphor's gone right back to Afro-Carribean roots.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

The thing is, I can get most of that Hip Ironic Post-Modern Amusement just by seeing watching the ads.

And don't get me started about how the current crop of Romero-inspired Living Dead are completely divorced from the Afro-Caribbean culture that gave us the word "zombie". Voodoo zombies are a lot more interesting than the plague-virus shamblers.

[archteryx.livejournal.com]

What are voodoo zombies like? Not, for a change, snark, but actual curiosity.

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

Oh, totally, then. The bandwagon has passed me by, too. I am by nature repelled by hype, hehe. So, fair 'nuff by me. ;)

[athelind.livejournal.com]

And, hey, cheap shot at Fox news, so win-win all around!

[araquan.livejournal.com]

Indeed. I think the best (or at least, most overt...) example of this is probably the original Dawn of the Dead... I mean, just look where it takes place...

[kfops.livejournal.com]

Boy, did I ever ask the wrong guy about Pontypool, then!

I definitely don't go out of my way to see zombie movies (in fact, there're a few big, big "must sees" that I've missed, but that's a story for later), but I am rather a fan of "nothing is scarier than what I won't show you", which is where Pontypool seems to be pointing.

But then again, to each their own!

This post also gives me a chance to show-case my scary new user icon!

[zeeth_kyrah]

It.. looks like a pumpkin on a banana.

[kfops.livejournal.com]

Oh man, that's even better'n I thought!

I'll run with that!

Maybe colour would help...

[leonard-arlotte.livejournal.com]

I don't care for zombie stuff either, mainly because there's not much variety. I enjoyed 28 days later and Resident Evil, because they put a twist on it, but the horror genre in general has gotten kind of trite in the past couple decades.

[araquan.livejournal.com]

Did you ever end up seeing Shaun of the Dead?

[leonard-arlotte.livejournal.com]

Yes I did. It was ok... nothing I would have paid to see. (saw it at a party on DVD)

[cargoweasel.livejournal.com]

World War Z is my favorite of the current-gen zombie stories, and goes into that in some detail. Basically most zombie stories end when the army shows up - World War Z *starts* there.

[araquan.livejournal.com]

*nod* I liked the book, with some specific reservations. I'm looking forward to the movie. Which had better not suck. ^_^

[zeeth_kyrah]

That userpic looks rather like my own biohazard userpic, which I made from an image of biohazard wrapping paper some years ago...

[bfdragon.livejournal.com]

Why does enjoying the products of a meme have to be a bad thing? Shawn of the Dead and Zombieland were both funny, well made movies, the fact that it was was against a zombie backdrop is more coincidental. It's a setting, a tool in a storytelling palate like one might use fantastic or sci-fi. Neither movie was ABOUT zombies any more then LotR was about swords or Blade Runner was about robots. Sure, I'm not saying it's much use for a very serious setting, but it makes a good one for some kinds of stories.

I think people also forget that just because it's popular, or in style, that it doesn't have anything new to offer. Two of my favorite periods in architecture, Art Deco, in large part stemmed from a large Egyptian meme that came with the discovery of tomb of Tutankhamun.

Weather it's fine art or popular culture: There is nothing new. What matters is, what you bring to the table when an arrest has their hand at it.

I'm not trying to defend the zombie mame especially I frankly find most of the "X of the dead" and "28X latter" movies pretty boring, and maybe SotD and Zombieland aren't your particular brand of humor. I just think it's as shallow dismissing something for it's popularity as it is embracing it for it's fashionably.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

I thoroughly enjoyed Shaun of the Dead -- as I said elsewhere, I'm more indifferent to zombie elements in media than averse to them. I'll probably watch Zombieland on DVD or cable, a year from now. The premise just doesn't compel me enough to pay theater prices for it, and the general sense of humor doesn't strike me as my style, regardless of the presence or absence of shambling corpses -- so I'd rather have the option of just turning it off rather than walking out after going to the effort of a theater date.