nobody likes you when you're dead

[intertribal]

Chuck Klosterman has this interpretation for why we're living in a zombie moment (I remarked upon this a couple nights ago, when I noticed two different zombie video games being advertised on TV):

In other words, zombie killing is philosophically similar to reading and deleting 400 work e-mails on a Monday morning or filling out paperwork that only generates more paperwork, or following Twitter gossip out of obligation, or performing tedious tasks in which the only true risk is being consumed by the avalanche. The principal downside to any zombie attack is that the zombies will never stop coming; the principal downside to life is that you will be never be finished with whatever it is you do.

I'm pretty sure zombie fiction is popular because it's an adrenaline rush to live vicariously through people who are slamming axes through other people-not-people's heads.  That had to be part of what it was for me.

Five years after 28 Days Later blew my mind, I think I'm exhausted of the genre.  I just don't think much can be done with it, after all.

Comments

[fengi.livejournal.com]

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.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I had that moment too when I read that sentence. I was like "YES!" And then "Huh? Oh, it's about Twitter."

Your second paragraph is exactly what I feel about the current zombie craze (I first started thinking about this while watching Zombieland). I think it's gone into hyper mode since 28 Days Later, which was much less kill-all-zombies (more like kill-all-soldiers in that movie) and much less... hyper and happy about it.