Yesterday I finished reading Compendium 1 of Robert Kirkman's comic, The Walking Dead (issues #1-#48).
First off, I really enjoyed it! I have some minor resevervations that I'll explore in a later post. But, in general, if you haven't read the comic book and love the show (this was how I came to it), I highly recommend it to you. It's so interesting.
But, before I get into discussing specifically The Walking Dead (this will come in a later post), I want to explore some thoughts about the "zombie apocalypse" genre.
It was a strange realization, but when I started seriously considering "the zombie apocalypse" sub-genre, I realized I don't know how to describe it.
Is the "zombie apocalypse" a fantasy?
Well, the dead rising is a common theme in modern fantasy. The icon of the sword wielding hero fighting an animated human skeleton is a common trope in modern fantasy (sword and sorcery specifically). And yet, in many zombie apocalypse texts there is a tendency to attempt to describe the phenomenon of the dead rising in terms of scientific theory. E.g. it's a disease; it's a new micro-organism; it's the result of the earth passing through a comet, etc..
This seems to disqualify it as a fantasy for me, which seems to turn, specifically, on how fantastic phenomena are treated. In fantasy, the appeal is always to magic, the inexplicable. A key element of fantasy is, to my mind, the thesis that all is not explainable through recourse to the observable world.
And so, is the "zombie apocalypse" a science fiction?
Hmm. The appeal to science to explain the phenomenon of zombies seems to make it conform to the conventions of hard science fiction. It is a kind of "extrapolative" genre. It's kind of a thought experiment based upon the initiating question: "what if all the dead rose up?" And yet--it feels wrong to call the "zombie apocalypse" a science fiction as it doesn't manifest any of the familiar tropes of the genre.
The key source of drama in a zombie apocalypse is always the struggles of the survivors. The story seems to emerge from a conflict with Nature (i.e. "Nature" designated as a world filled with zombie). And so, the zombie apocalypse seems to have more in common with the naturalistic survival stories of, say, Jack London, than the speculative stories of H.G. Wells.
Is the "zombie apocalypse" a horror?
Hmm. This feels the most intuitively correct. I'm sure lots of folk would be happy just filing the sub-genre away after glimpsing the gore, the undead, etc.. I'm not willing to do that. There's something about the "zombie apocalypse" that disqualifies it as a horror to me. Before you call BS on me, let me try to make a case for it.
In a "pure" horror tale, the key aesthetic effect is the experience of horror. Thus, the monster (or the ghost, or the demon, or the alien) emerges as a kind of negativity, something that cannot be fully represented or described: you see a flash of a tail, a pair of eyes, some teeth, etc.. The "experience of horror," according to many theorists of the genre, is that moment when our language breaks down, when we can't describe what - that - thing - is. In the "zombie apocalypse," you always know precisely what the horror is: zombies. And in these zombie apocalypse tales, very often the characters become somewhat desensitized to the sight of zombies and move among them, somewhat un-fazed (although their guard is always up).
So, we're back to where we began: how do describe the "zombie apocalypse" genre. I have a working answer. I don't have time to write it up just now. Tomorrow I'll pick up where I left off.
Nice post! The "zombie apocalypse" is an interesting genre stew. I think examining the appeal of the ZA genre might be a good way to get at the issue. In my opinion, a zombie in a medieval forest is kinda boring, expected even. The ZA is tantalizing because the zombie is in your living room, bleeding on your mother's favorite throw pillows as it tries to bite your face. The fear/fascination comes from the incongruity. The threat of our world becoming fantasy/horror. The uncomfortable (disastrous) incorporation of non-fiction and fiction. That's why the ZA relies on science, not necromancers. We don't see news stories about necromancers on the morning news. We see plenty of stories about epidemics. The epidemic is just the (slightly ajar) door through which horror/fantasy creeps into face-biting range. And I think you nailed why ZA isn't horror -the knowability of the threat. I would also point out the scale of the threat. The ZA isn't a monster. It isn't Pumpkinhead. It's a fundamental change in "our" reality. It's a strain of birdflu that makes grandma eat the dog. I might argue that the ZA narrative derives its power from its tendency to avoid easy classification; it doesn't allow you to say, "yeah, well, that's just fantasy." (I'm starting to think of Orson Welles's radio broadcast of War of the Worlds.) The ZA wants plausibility (in the here and now)... with zombies. Anyway, nice post. Made me smile and type things at you.
ReplyDeleteThanks! The way you put things, that the "ZA" isn't a monster, it's a Pumpkinhead, makes a lot of sense for me. The effect of ZA narratives do seem to derive from vexing our clear cut distinctions between what is plausible and what is implausible: the line seperating the natural and the supernatural. It's like the ZA narrative spirals around a kind of reality principle but makes it strange. Hmm...
ReplyDeleteIt would be slightly dissatisfying if a necromancer showed up and declared a supernatural explanation for the Walking Dead. Part of the terror of the zombie in the ZA narrative is that there seems to be a scientific explanation for it, but no one can offer one. Danielewski's *House of Leaves* comes to mind, a weird novel that takes as a major the fundamental incapacity of perception and observation (i.e. science). The horror that the protagonist experiences is that he simply *cannot know* anything, measure anything, percieve anything.
The shambling corpse creates a similar effect: there just MUST be a scientific explanation for this epidemic; but there doesn't seem to be one.