On Desire, Instinct and Troublesome Intellect
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ShareDesire and instinct, which run full-bore and unchecked in the zombies, transgress the imposed boundaries and limits of human society. The grotesque, imbalanced, out-of-whack physicality of the zombies is a taboo itself. Their half-rotted carcasses are open to the world, like exposed wounds or syphilis sores; sometimes, they are fully turned inside out as their once hidden gelatinous entrails ooze and bubble. This is an inversion of the scientists in Day of the Dead, who don stained lab coats and attempt to understand, control, trick, and redirect the zombies.
The humans symbolize repressed body urges: their dirty lower bodily stratum are covered by army fatigues or science gear. They attempt to deny the grotesque that hides within them. In turn, the zombies are ravenous avatars awakened from the id of the ‘normal’ people, symbolically embodying the public’s latent dissatisfaction with their own dystopia. We give birth to monsters, on many different levels.
The zombies are like children catalyzed by “deep down primordial instinct,” blurts Dr. Logan in Day of the Dead. “This one, even without a stomach, wants me. Even when it receives no nourishment,” he ponders. The zombies are powerful, disturbing aberrations that barely resemble proper human condition, let alone etiquette. The doctor pinpoints the issue at stake: the undead are “working from that central bit of prehistoric jelly that we inherit from the reptiles.”
Their guts flop out, their contorted bodies walk despite rigor mortis, though they are often suspended in a motor coordination vortex, as well. Yet, as demonstrated by the unlikely zombie protagonist Bub, they retain small cognitive leftovers, tiny specks of former consciousness. Logan suggests they can be :domesticated and conditioned to behave”, if they undergo a regimen of forced re-education and inculcation. This is, ironically, exactly what Dr. Moreau insisted about the animals on his own island, his paradise lost littered with grotesque hybrids. This is exactly what some parents of punks believe, too.
Romero pursues a double line of reasoning. Both humans and zombies have been devoured by their brains. The zombies ask no questions, heed no caution, and lack empathy. They’ll gnaw on children and priests, no problem. People, though, are subsumed by an over-weaning sense of confidence, entitlement, aggression, and intellect—the engines of hubris. Neither humans or the undead are nourished by the heart. Dr. Logan figures that “the brain is the engine, the motor that drives them.” The brain is the central control panel, lacking pathos, in the zombies and most people.
Make no mistake, though. Bub, with his darkened, shriveled, deep-lined face, is sympathetic to a degree. His face appears akin to the creature in Edward Munch’s painting The Scream, the figures in Leon Golub’s Gigantomachy series from the 1960s and his Mercenaries paintings from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Like them, his body is dehumanized, reduced to a hideous, debased form—mere emotive flesh. Through such bodies, the apocalypse is readable and definable; the apocalypse is made flesh. It is not the hell of Dante, is the hell of bodies putrifying, and re-animated, at the local mall parking lot or Florida cavern.
Bub the Zombie, listening to The Ramones, “Pet Sematary”
Romero’s films picture what will happen, what will become of us when B-movie macabre becomes the reality, writ large. The invasion will not occur from a distant planet, it will come from our hands too easily drawn to bad decisions. Foreshadowed in the sinister technocrat languages and bureaucracies imagined in the likes of Orwell and Kafka, germinated from the human mind itself, the zombie contagion transforms, engulfs, and mutates us. The undead are rampant and ruinous while citizens, scientists, and soldiers are divided and specious. The undead’s herd-like reflexes often outmatch our perilous individualism and self-interest.
Romero’s idea that bodies are also war zones also invariably links to the American onslaught of militarism in the waning years of the Cold War, commingled with ramped-up omnivorous consumerism. This invokes the impending zombification of the nation under the lure of commodities. People’s bodies may become a hideous byproduct of global technical failure, but they are stoned on consumption, thus miss the warning. In Day of the Dead, when the zombies attack the military missile silo/underground bunker, it is as if they are instinctively confronting the last vestiges of American decadent bourgeois society – the same society that instigated and propelled their mutilated bodies to emerge like the dead children of Nagasaki.
The tightly controlled films of Romero’s trilogy, often replete with hokey flailing bodies and black comedy routines, identify the limits of authority in any given power structure. The zombie invasion acts as a leveling force that links consumers, sellers, workers, bosses, police, and army, mimicking the late stage of late-stage capitalism, with its dot.com and housing bubbles, bird flu and tornado terror, solar flares and nuclear meltdown, in which the tenuous systems that shape society are seemingly unstable as decomposing bodies.
The zombies, or our potential future selves, usually governed by rules and grids, discourse and logic, are reduced to survival by any means necessary. On a positive note, Romero suggests another option: resist the future, don’t give in to zombification, be media literate, give up the burdens of faulty science and the heartless military-industrial complex, deplore social prejudice and scapegoating, and find your conscience before it is devoured by unscrupulous, vain brain impulses – the darker, more terror-infused side of ourselves.
