The Theory Schmucks

Boy, but do we love us some zombies. I’ve just finished reading World War Z by Max Brooks and am absolutely in awe of the novel’s poignancy. Reviews of the book will go on and on about all the reasons I loved it, so I’ll skip those and focus on this—Brooks’s novel is so compelling a read that I have to remind myself that I am not simply awaiting an outbreak. It’s not only unlikely, it’s just fiction. I’m clever, pretty well educated, and good looking reasonable. I shouldn’t have to keep telling myself zombies aren’t real. But I do—and I think it’s pretty obvious as to why.

Zombies let us humanize the idea of external threat. The argument gamers make is that zombies let us dehumanize, so we can make them an enemy and kill them without any moral ambiguity—they’re simply the bad guys. That premise is true, but founded on the wrong rationale. Look at the walking dead: they’re people only in shape. Intellectually and behaviorally, they’re animals or less. Unthinking, or driven by an instinctive desire for human flesh, zombies are all those shapes just outside the light of the campfire ring that made early humankind huddle closer together.

You don’t have to dehumanize zombies. At their core, they are embodied malevolence. By giving predators human form, we allow for a connection. Brooks’s novel is sprinkled with anecdotes about victims of the living dead screaming for their assailants to stop—the victims are trying to correlate the human form and unthinkable action. The end result is a seemingly human figure that is acting inhumanly. The method, however, is wrapping unconscious or barely conscious predation (depending on the zombie mythos) in a bipedal body.

This makes the walking dead an easy enemy. There’s no question that they should be done away with—they are, in every mythos, just foul creatures intending to destroy humans. I kind of glaze over ‘smart’ zombies in this article, since they present an entirely different kind of enemy, but even those zombies are always just out to feed and kill. I have never grown bored killing wave after wave of the undead in a video game, or watching it done in a movie. To quote Penny Arcade: if there’s one thing I hate, it’s those damn, dirty zombies.

[Godwin's Law Warning]

The process at work with zombies is the opposite of dehumanization. Dehumanization takes a nominally human character or type and strips down accountability and morality (and possibly intelligence). The best example of this can be found in video game Nazis. No game company has ever gotten in trouble for killing Nazis in fun and exciting ways. They’re the easiest bad guys in the world because it’s even kind of questionable to defend their nominal humanity. Nazi’s are the only non-zombie demographic I have never had a problem slaughtering waves of.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Of course, this makes Return To Castle Wolfenstein the greatest game ever conceived by man: you get to monkey-knife-fight with Nazi-zombies. Job done; every other video game can just go home.]

To return to the topic at hand: the terror of Nazi enemies is in how inhuman they can be. The terror of zombies is how human they seem. Dehumanization requires a bad guy—some human beings need to be implicated as the evil force to be dealt with. Zombies give us a human-enough form to fight without having to brand any group “the enemy.” And because the enemy is in a human body, our entire military industry is pretty well designed to deal with it.

Think about it this way:

A plague or ecological disaster means some scientist somewhere is racing against the clock to rush a cure (or whatever) to the people who need it. At the climax of the movie, the main characters get to smile and breathe a sigh of relief, saying “we made it.

Same scenario, only zombies:

A horde of undead are bearing down on an orphanage, the adults have locked the children behind as many heavy doors as they can and are valiantly holding off the zombie infestation using improvised weapons.

When help finally comes, do they say “whew, we made it?” No. What you get is:

Boom! Headshot!

Zombies are tangible enemies in a form we’re (for better or worse) used to killing. Sure, maybe you have to shoot them in the head to kill them. Maybe not. But the key is that you still kill them by shooting the crap out of them. No need for you eggheads here, just a steady hand and a 30.06 rifle. It can be terrifying, as Brooks so eloquently describes in World War Z, to realize that anyone that the enemy kills thins your ranks while swelling theirs.

What’s worse, though, is thinking about real disasters: what happens when survival isn’t ensured by our ability to kick more ass than the other guy? It’s much easier to be a hero when any individual can do their part to solve the problem. Harder is relying on someone, somewhere else to solve the problem for you while you wait.

Survivalists love looking at end of the world. Nuclear winter, global warming, water shortages, famine, etc. Some people make it their life’s mission to be ready for such events. For the average person, though, “zombie plans” offer the same reassurance that we can deal with unexpected danger without having to actually face the prospect of our own demise.

Instead of acknowledging that a service-based economy ill-prepares us for subsistence living (and accepting that fact), we construct hair-brained schemes to get us out of theoretical trouble—and feel oddly satisfied with the assurance that we could survive this fictional apocalypse. Here, let Red Vs. Blue make my point for me:

Zombies let us conquer without being imperialists. They let us face our own mortality without having to be powerless. The undead let us destroy a clear threat with overwhelming force, ingenuity, and willpower.

And they let M.C. Chris tear Kingdom Hearts 2 apart—that’s got to count for something.