I noticed that article and it struck me Klosterman came right up to the edge of something a lot more unsettling when he summed up the appeal as, "Zombies are just so easy to kill."
Had he taken it in the direction I expected, it would be that the zombie fantasy, as you hint, is involves being one the chosen/lucky "living" who are free to kill everyone else because they are stripped of their human status. Which, to me, seems to be the ugly side of American individualism - you and yours are special, most everyone else is merely ballast/backdrop/potential threat - as ever more accentuated by American capitalism which can treat large numbers of people as merely disposable numbers on a balance sheet. The fear of being a zombie is the fear of being disposable, being viewed as being an unproductive mass of bodily functions which can be killed because you're already worthless and just haven't stopped moving.
Klosterman doesn't do that, instead going for comforting tripe about emails. Which is why he's printed in the New York Times.
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Date: 2010-12-08 07:52 pm (UTC)Had he taken it in the direction I expected, it would be that the zombie fantasy, as you hint, is involves being one the chosen/lucky "living" who are free to kill everyone else because they are stripped of their human status. Which, to me, seems to be the ugly side of American individualism - you and yours are special, most everyone else is merely ballast/backdrop/potential threat - as ever more accentuated by American capitalism which can treat large numbers of people as merely disposable numbers on a balance sheet. The fear of being a zombie is the fear of being disposable, being viewed as being an unproductive mass of bodily functions which can be killed because you're already worthless and just haven't stopped moving.
Klosterman doesn't do that, instead going for comforting tripe about emails. Which is why he's printed in the New York Times.