To yield to the vampire is to lose one’s self-consciousness and self-preservation. One is reminded here of Heidegger’s description of how “they” tranquilize the invalid, making him think his death is always far away—too far to worry about. The sensual pleasure that the vampire promises is a prolonged time of drugged delay, of constant waiting, as if one were suspended forever in the moment between sleep and wakefulness. For both Stoker and Heidegger, this moment is dangerous because the self loses its focus and centrality. The vampire hunters strip away this veil of inauthenticity, exposing it to the harsh and sober sunlight, courageously plunging a stake of authenticity through the heart of the inauthentic vampire, asserting the sheer force of self against selflessness. Their selves are “fixed points” which sharpen readily into vampire-slaying stakes.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula was unique among vampire novels in its focus on the metaphysical condition of vampirism and its evocation of pity for the “true” human trapped in the false deathless state of the vampire. With a philosophical orientation towards death that would later be repeated in Heidegger’s Being and Time, Stoker insisted that only an authentic self, claiming death as its indisputable freedom, could have the strength and courage to destroy the false seduction of the selfless “they,” symbolized as a potential horde of vampires who all resembled each other while paradoxically resembling nothing.
Heil Heidegger? Dracula’s Willing Executioners
Is Heidegger’s philosophy a sound one? Are we willing to embrace his language of “authenticity”? To answer this question, I believe, is at the same time to decide whether we really like Stoker’s vampire hunters. Isn’t there something dogmatic, righteous and brutal about Van Helsing and crew? Are there dangerous implications in asserting that only a certain type of being is “true” or “authentic”?
As readers familiar with Heidegger will be aware, the philosopher’s career was marred by controversy over his membership in the Nazi Party. While many prominent German intellectuals fled the Nazi regime, Heidegger remained and enjoyed great prominence in the Third Reich. After the war, he was stripped of all his professional duties for his involvement in the Nazi Party. That Heidegger was technically a Nazi is indisputable. What remains a subject of controversy is whether his program of fundamental ontology can be divorced from his own involvement with fascism or whether it is inherently implicated. In other words, is there something about Being and Time that, even in the Weimar period before the Nazis took power, was pointing Heidegger towards fascism? I can only begin to approach this controversy here, but the reader is directed to a particularly useful collection entitled Martin Heidegger and the Holocaust which presents the views of both Heidegger’s supporters and detractors.
The most troubling aspect of Heidegger’s ontology for our purposes here is its sometimes Olympian dismissal of the everyday and the ordinary. The simple designation of “idle chatter” to signify everything from advertising slogans to the consolation one finds on a deathbed, seems frighteningly contemptuous. The move from contempt of the everyday to brutality towards those who “chatter” can hardly be far. Further Heidegger never attempts to describe the possibility for a social and communal relationship between individual authentic beings. So, if I tune out the chatter and confront my death, how do I go about forming an “authentic” community, for instance? Would privileged beings build a gated community? Wouldn’t it be something of a drag to have to live there? Though Heidegger makes clear that “authentic being” is not a biological designation, his failure to answer these objections allows a sizable gap in his philosophy for racial and cultural prejudice to creep in, even if it wasn’t already there in the first place. Heidegger’s later writings are chockfull of nationalistic paeans to the hale and hearty German peasantry, particularly from his own region, the Black Forest. In these later works, authentic being is used less as a metaphysical category and more as a marker for racial purity. Perhaps Heidegger took the ideas of Being and Time in the wrong direction, or perhaps Being and Time, with its language of “authentic” and “inauthentic” beings, was hopelessly open to racial and cultural prejudice from the start.
How we interpret Heidegger will largely reflect how we interpret Bram Stoker, with his opposition of a “true” humanity against a “false” vampirism, or his embrace of a fierce self-possession that fuels what Van Helsing himself describes as “butcher work” in the novel’s most chilling description of vampire slaying. Read the following passage and imagine how it was possible for Nazi concentration camp doctors, guards and Hitler’s other “willing executioners” (to borrow a controversial phrase) to slaughter men, women, and children:Oh, my friend John, but it was butcher work; had I not been nerved by thoughts of other dead, and of the living over whom hung such a pall of fear, I could not have gone on. I tremble and tremble even yet, though till all was over, God be thanked, my nerve did stand. Had I not seen the repose in the first face, and the gladness that stole over it just ere the final dissolution came, as realization that the soul had been won, I could not have gone further with my butchery. I could not have endured the horrid screeching as the stake drove home; the plunging of writhing form, and lips of bloody foam. (Dracula, p. 320)
I am not the first to reflect on the troubling implications of the vampire slayer’s brutality. The vast majority of interpretations of Dracula over the last fifty years have focused on the vampire as a victim (sometimes guilty, sometimes innocent) of wildly disproportionate violence. He has been interpreted as a symbol of the Jew, the homosexual, the Oriental, the victim of patriarchy, the victim of imperialism—the list goes on and on. The clearest example in film of a revisionist interpretation of Dracula is John Badham’s 1979 version, with Frank Langella as an attractive and sympathetic Count, killed by Laurence Olivier’s bumbling and dogmatic Van Helsing.
While vampires can and do serve as markers for a universally applicable terror, as marketable in the early twenty-first century as in the late nineteenth, the novel which first made their terror evocative did so on the basis of a philosophy that many have found utterly tainted with the same stain that created the horrors of Auschwitz and Dachau. In adaptation after adaptation, we become Dracula’s willing executioners, ritualistically expelling the “inauthentic” beings from our zone of ontological purity. Can we justify our gleeful involvement in the ritual?
7
When There’s No More Room in Hell, the Dead Will Shop the Earth: Romero and Aristotle on Zombies, Happiness, and Consumption
MATTHEW WALKER
The flesh-eating zombies of George A. Romero’s Dead films turn stomachs—sometimes by twisting them right out of mangled bodies. Like vampires, they’re creatures of hunger, human beings who’ve returned from the dead to feed on the living. Yet unlike those Undead whose razor-sharp fangs complement their razor-sharp refinement, Romero’s zombies (un-)live not in some foggy Transylvania, but in an all-too-contemporary America. They have nasty table manners and are bad conversationalists. They are the mindless Undead, living corpses who’ll surround you en masse in search of a warm meal. And that hurts.
In his apocalyptic zombie masterpiece, Dawn of the Dead (1978), Romero hints that the Undead are around us, as close as the local shopping mall. Doubt it? Go and you’ll see them, shuffling down the aisles, staring vacantly into space, consuming without end. At Christmastime, you’ll find them pressed against store windows, hell-bent on hot bargains.
In depicting zombies as the ultimate consumers, Romero satirizes consumerism—the search for happiness through material acquisition. Although consumerism’s rise as an unofficial secular religion began after World War II and reached its apex in the “I shop, therefore I am” yuppie culture of the 1980s, human beings have long been acquisitive animals. Indeed, it’s striking that Romero’s sly criticisms of consumerism echo certain arguments offered nearly two thousand years ago by the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.E.).
At first blush, Aristotle might seem an odd guide to elucidate the character of
our contemporary zombification. After all, the philosopher whom Dante called “the master of those who know” lived and thought long before the advent of shopping malls, global market economies, and the sort of large-scale manufacturing that made mass consumption a viable possibility. And nowhere does Aristotle ever mention creatures like “zombies” or “the living dead.” While some spurious pseudo-Aristotelian works offer reports of iron-eating mice, you won’t find any commentary about flesh-eating corpses.
Despite the historical distance that separates Romero from Aristotle, though, we can still imagine the two sharing a Cinnabon at the local food court. Like Romero, Aristotle isn’t above providing gross-out descriptions of cannibalistic mayhem. For instance, in the fifth chapter of Book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics—Aristotle’s major treatise on ethics—the philosopher serves up some memorably gag-inducing accounts of “bestial” vice so far beyond the pale that it seems simply to fall outside the boundaries of humanity. In these odd pages, Aristotle introduces us to feral women who devour unborn fetuses, Black Sea tribes who sacrifice babies and munch on raw human flesh, and mad slaves who feast on other people’s livers.
Okay, so maybe this bestiary would be more at home in the low-rent gore-shockers of some of Romero’s Italian imitators—think Lucio Fulci or Joe D’Amato—but the point remains: Aristotle finds a philosophical role for the disgusting if it can help clarify the nature of the human good. And even if the ancient agora is no match for the modern mall, reading Aristotle can help us understand the motivations and desires that Romero’s zombies share with today’s devotees of consumerism. It can also help us get clear about why a life organized around material acquisition might constitute the sort of “living death” that Romero suggests.
“Let’s Go Shopping First!”: We Are the Zombies
In Romero’s Dawn of the Dead—unlike Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake, which I won’t discuss—a zombie plague has been ravaging the world for years. With the ranks of the living dead steadily swelling, and with humanity’s petty squabbles only making things worse, society faces imminent meltdown and collapse. Fleeing Philadelphia, a quartet of survivors hole up in an abandoned but fully stocked shopping mall in suburban Pittsburgh. Although the foursome initially plan only a short stay, they end up remaining once they discover all the mall has to offer. The chirpy Muzak notwithstanding, everything they could ever want seems to be there for the taking—and all under one roof.
Seizing the mall for themselves, the survivors pick off the zombies who continue to stagger down its cold white corridors. Having sealed off the entrances, the quartet set out to shop till they drop. They try on clothes, watches, hats, rings, cosmetics, coats; they load up on candy, cheeses, salamis, coffees, spices. One of the survivors, Peter, says it all when he breaks out in a big grin and holds up a giant loaf of bread: “Mangia!”
Eat!
Consume.
But after their Hickory Farms and J.C. Penney orgy, the quartet grow finally and unshakably bored. The mall, despite its endless supply of material goods, ultimately fails to confer happiness. The survivors soon kill their time playing records on high-end stereo systems, getting sloshed on gin, skating aimlessly at the mall rink, gambling with worthless piles of cash lifted from the mall bank. Their life degenerates into glitzy despair, until they show all the vitality of the zombies in the outside parking lot. From behind her deluxe ’70s vintage fondue kit, Fran asks, “What have we done to ourselves?”
Romero is fairly explicit about the parallels between the living and the Undead. In one scene, the survivors—absurdly overdressed in fancy furs—survey their maximum-security consumer utopia. While the groaning hordes of zombies try to claw their way back into the mall, the survivors wonder what drives them.
PETER: They’re after the place. They don’t know why. They just remember. Remember that they want to be in here.
STEPHEN: What the hell are they? PETER: They’re us. That’s all.
As the hero and moral center of the film, Peter isn’t just speaking about himself and the other survivors in the mall. He’s speaking about us the viewers as well, consumers in our own right, viewers tempted by the fantasy of unlimited access to a mall full of stuff. And presumably, he’s speaking for Romero as well. Yet Peter’s words also have a sense of implied criticism. By equating “us” with the walking dead outside the mall, Peter hints that we the living might not be so much better off than the zombies.
“I Don’t Want to Be Walking Around Like That!”: Living versus Living Well
So what might we consumers have in common with the living dead? Why might we both have ceaseless desires to consume things?
In Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, Chapter 1, Aristotle calls the overreaching desire for the goods of fortune pleonexia. In ancient Greek, the word pleonexia literally means “the disposition to have more,” but carries the sense of “graspingness,” of “grabbing for extra when you have your share.” In Politics, Book I, Chapter 9, Aristotle tries to explain pleonexia by reference to people’s unlimited desire for sheer survival: “The cause of this disposition is being serious about living, but not living well. Now with their desire for living extending into infinity, so too they desire without limit the things productive of living.” In other words, pleonexia is motivated by an excessive desire to hold on to life. By taking more than their fill of the goods of fortune—which Aristotle identifies in Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, Chapter 2 as honor, wealth, security, and the like—those who “grasp” seek to keep at bay the inescapable bad fortune with which death confronts us. To this extent, the grasping differ from those whom Peter says “still believe there’s respect in dying.”44
In Dawn, graspingness is probably best personified by Stephen (a.k.a. “Flyboy”), the well-meaning, but tragically flawed, proto-yuppie who convinces his girlfriend Fran to take off with him in a stolen TV news chopper. When she expresses ethical reservations, he interrupts with an appeal to the ultimate, brute value of sheer self-preservation: “We’ve got to survive, Fran. Somebody’s got to survive.” Later on at the mall, Stephen rhapsodizes to Fran about his virgin “shopping trip” with Peter and Roger. “You should see all the great stuff we got, Frannie,” he says. “All kinds of stuff! This place is terrific. It really is. It’s perfect. All kinds of things. We’ve really got it made here.” Thus, when an outlaw biker gang invades the mall toward the end of the film—“We don’t like people who don’t share!” yells their leader—it’s Stephen who takes to his rifle and fires the first shots in a final battle to defend his spoils. “It’s ours,” he mutters. “We took it. It’s ours.”
One of the great mysteries of Romero’s zombie films is just why the dead return. In the first, Night of the Living Dead (1968), newscasters speculate that radiation from a returning Venus space probe is somehow involved. In Dawn, there’s some chat about a virus, and at one point, Peter proposes that hell is full, but no one really knows. No answer is ever settled upon.
Perhaps pleonexia plays a role. To desire living without limit is to desire immortality, or in ancient Greek, to be athanatos. But one might be a-thanatos—literally, without death, deathless—in at least two ways. On one hand, one could be immortal by living like the gods to whom Aristotle alludes in Nicomachean Ethics, Book X, Chapter 7, the divinities who spend eternity in the exalted contemplation of the cosmic order. On the other hand, one might be immortal simply by continuing to metabolize, simply by surviving, even if the resulting survival left much to be desired. To be without death in this sense might count simply as not being dead, or as being un-dead. So maybe one “explanation” for the dead’s return to life is that their graspingness in life—rooted in their unlimited desire for life—knows no bounds. From beyond the grave, they grasp for more living, even if such survival fails to count as living well. As Stephen speculates, the walking dead haunt the mall out of “a kind of instinct . . . memory . . . what they used to do.” As the Undead, the zombies continue to act on the desires that governed them during their lives. It’s not
surprising, then, that once the walking dead have turned him into dinner, it’s the now-lurching, Undead Stephen who leads the zombie army upstairs into the protagonists’ makeshift penthouse.
“Attention All Shoppers: If You Have a Sweet Tooth, We Have a Treat for You!”: The Limits of Hedonism
Even if both zombies and consumers are driven by graspingness, why join Romero in thinking that consumerism should turn us into zombies? Or, to put it another way, why should Dawn’s hard-shopping quartet zombify themselves through unlimited acquisition?
Once again, Aristotle offers a clue. Immediately following the Politics passage quoted earlier, he argues that the unlimited desire to consume for the sake of mere living typically assumes a certain picture of good living. In his trademark crabbed Greek, Aristotle writes, “And as much as they aim at living well, they seek after bodily enjoyments, so that since these also seem to find their source in acquisitions, all focus is on obtaining wealth.” In other words, those who grasp after material goodies are prone to identify the good life with a life of enjoyment, a life devoted to the kind of pleasure that we can procure through consumption. (In Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, Chapter 2, Aristotle calls such gratification “the pleasure from gain.”) In fact, so far as such a pleasure-focused life promises to be free of suffering, it might seem to offer the same insulation against fate that mere living does (see Smith, Revaluing Ethics, pp. 142-46).
Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy Page 10
