WHY ZOMBIE? PART THREE

Part Three: “So, Ayn Rand and George Romero walk into a cabin surrounded by ‘abject zombies’ and Ayn Rand says…”

The conventions of Night of the Living Dead are in essence Postmodern adaptations of the typical 1950s Western genre with the difference that they reverse the Marx/Stoker Judeo-Christian values and, instead, adopt the values of the social-Darwinists. Romero depicts the quintessential petit bourgeois nightmare of mindless masses – beasts and monsters – driven by insatiable appetites to consume the independent, rugged individuals trapped like pioneers by “savages” in their small homestead. The only real difference in how this convention is portrayed is a matter of form, not content. In the typical Western, the savages are from some amorphous Native tribe or perhaps an outlaw gang. In Night of the Living Dead whooping Indians and swaggering desperados are replaced by groaning monsters in the form of a priest and several working-class people still wearing their work uniforms. A critical difference between the zombie genre and the Western genre, however, is the way in which government – the culmination of human endeavor – is portrayed.

In the Western genre, classical liberal government is a civilizing force. In the zombie genre, the ‘savages’ are reinvented as a product of liberal government. In this way, the zombie genre echoes the Neoconservative criticism of Neoliberalism. Neoliberals believe that, through government intervention, the world’s savages can be tamed and integrated into the liberal world-system. Neoconservatives, however, disagree and believe that government is an enabler of savages which threaten their homesteads. (Ayn Rand expressed precisely this view, describing Native Americans and Arabs both as “savages” in a speech given in 1974 at West Point.) In the film Quarantine, the Neoconservative premise is taken even further by placing the zombies inside the homestead proper, while the government, instead of being a vague plot reference, is an active force keeping the ‘rugged individuals’ trapped inside to be devoured by the monsters.

While some liberals might laud Night of the Living Dead, Quarantine and other similar films for depicting minorities as strong, capable leaders when placed in harrowing situations as a triumph of progressive ethics in popular culture, when viewed through a Marxist lens, we see the veiled reactionary ideological message hidden within the fundamental philosophical thesis of Augustinized Western culture (including liberalism) itself: that is, while women and minorities may play important roles in the human experience, humanity is, nevertheless, doomed to suffer from its own ineptitude and corruption.

As indicated in the clichéd scenario typical to most zombie films, the gender and ethnically diverse cast finds themselves trapped in something of a libertarian survivalist fantasy, forced to use their wits and guns to drive away the parasitic masses. After all, the zombies themselves are portrayed as a vague gray mass, often times still wearing their name tags and work uniforms. This fact alone indicates that the zombies are largely viewed as libidinous monsters from the working-class and poor – some sort of horrific conglomeration of “welfare queens” – driven by pure Id to prey upon the more refined and evolved petit bourgeois individual who is not only beset by the monsters set loose by a liberal government, but also by the other living fools that he or she must suffer while trapped.

Certainly Gary L. Harmon is correct where he writes, “What people are willing to share and consume is a key to their views and values, and to their unconsciously held beliefs and tensions.” But, depending on which approach we take to analyzing popular culture, if we agree with Marx or conversely with Freud, we will arrive at radically different interpretations of what these views and values are, and how they come into being in the first place. If we accept Marx’s analysis, then we can see that fears of the zombie apocalypse belong to the elite and have simply become diffuse amongst the general population because the elite control popular culture. If we accept the Freudian analysis, the amorality of the zombie’s existence and “drives” are an ever-present force within every individual just waiting to rise to the surface when the Super Ego becomes too weak.

In an intriguing work published in 1957, journalist Vance Packard (perhaps incidentally) reinforces Marx’s analysis by emphasizing the incredibly subtle yet overwhelming power of the corporate media establishment which was then attempting to perfect its techniques for influencing the public. Packard describes the danger as it appeared to him over half a century ago, at a time when the media establishment was far less centralized:

[There are] large scale efforts being made, often with impressive success, to channel our  unthinking habits, our purchasing decisions, and our thought processes by the use of insights gleaned from psychiatry and the social sciences. Typically these efforts take place beneath our level of awareness; so that the appeals  which move us are often, in a sense, “hidden.” The result is that many of us are being influenced and manipulated, far more than we realize, in the patterns of our everyday lives.[1]

He goes on to note:

Somber examples of the new persuaders in action are appearing not only in merchandising but in politics and industrial relations…[T]here is the trade school in California that boasts to employers that it socially engineers its graduates so that they are, to use the phrase of an admiring trade journal, “custom-built men” guaranteed to have the right attitudes from the employer’s standpoint.

What are we to deduce from these combined passages? First, according to Packard, industrialists have deliberately sought to “zombify” working-class people to make them more malleable with psychology (al la Freud via Adler). Second, the efforts to zombify the working-class have not completely eradicated all democratic sentiment from the minds of the populace; therefore, we are seeing the corporate establishment’s own fears popularized due to the corporate dominance of culture, as Marx emphasizes.

By viewing the zombie craze through this lens, Lauro and Embry’s contribution to the subject takes on a different and, in my opinion, more accurate meaning:

One psychoanalytic interpretation [of why some fear the zombie] purports that we are most acutely aware of ourselves as subjects when we feel afraid—specifically, when we feel threatened by a force external to our bodies. Quite simply, fear heightens our awareness of ourselves as individuals because our individuality is endangered in life-threatening situations. Nowhere is this drama more acutely embodied than in the model of the zombie attack: for the zombie is an antisubject, and the zombie horde is a swarm where no trace of the individual remains. Therefore, unlike the vampire, the zombie poses a twofold terror: There is the primary fear of being devoured by a zombie, a threat posed mainly to the physical body, and the secondary fear that one will, in losing one’s consciousness, become a part of the monstrous horde.[2]

Here, the authors provide clues to understanding the deeper significance of the zombie in popular culture and why those from the “ruling class” making production decisions in the boardrooms of multimedia corporations would find zombies to be the perfect expression of their fears.[3]

Long before George Romero introduced movie-goers to the zombie horde, Ayn Rand, the godmother of Post-modern individualism, articulated the fears of the world’s elites as they watched the last ruling monarchs of European feudalism dragged from their thrones and, in the case of the Russian Revolution, literally killed by proletarian hordes. In her famous 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, Rand writes:

The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man’s power to conceive – a definition that invalidates man’s consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. Man’s mind, say the mystics of spirit, must be subordinated to the will of God. Man’s standard of value, say the mystics of spirit, is the pleasure of God, whose standards are beyond man’s power of comprehension and must be accepted on faith. The purpose of man’s life is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.

Here, Rand’s reference to the “abject zombie” is directed at both religious communities as well as the many hundreds of billions of people who had adopted Marxist-Leninist socialism as their creed during the 1940 and 1950s. In this sense, Romero’s zombie should be interpreted as unconsciously articulating (through movies) what Rand was consciously articulating with her fiction writing – all the way down to Romero’s portrayal of the zombie priest in Night of the Living Dead.

The fears articulated by Rand, however, first became prevalent amongst the upper-classes before the Cold War. Her famous work, Anthem, was a sensation as early as 1937 – not long after the Nazis took power in Germany to stem the growing influence of Marxism in the German parliament. During the 1930s, many of Rand’s fans and the followers of Nazism were the same people and shared a common fear: they were terrified that organized workers would forcibly “collectivize” their society and cause the individual Nietzschean Übermensch, whether they were the figurative “barons” of industry or literal barons of the German aristocracy, to submit to proletarian democracy. Later, as evidence of this ideological symbiosis, we see the popularity of Rand’s fiction and Romero’s zombie films rise amongst different demographics simultaneously along the same timeline both during the Cold War and after.

[1] Vance Packard, The Hidden Persuaders (iG Publishing: New York, 2007 [1957], p. 31.

[2] Lauro and Embry, “The Zombie Manifesto”, pp. 88-9.

[3] A closer look at the complex corporate history of AMC, which has been key to keeping the zombie alive through The Walking Dead television series reveals a veritable Who’s Who of media moguls and “One-percenters” leading all the way to John C. Malone, Chairman of Liberty Global, dubbed “Darth Vader” by Al Gore for his business practices. In 2003, Britain’s The Guardian details Malone’s influence stating: “Malone ruthlessly used his company’s paper to take major stakes in some of the world’s biggest media firms, including AOL Time Warner, USA Interactive, the Discovery Channel, Motorola and News Corp, as well as cable systems in Asia, Europe and Latin America. In the UK, Liberty holds a sizable stake in Telewest – putting Malone in pole position when the firm merges with NTL in the not-too-distant future.” See http://www.theguardian.com/business/2003/jul/06/theobserver.observerbusiness7. Retrieved February 3, 2015.