It’s fitting, then, that Romero’s original screenplay for Dawn describes the mall’s “bright store fronts, with their displays of goods designed to attract shoppers to the sweet life the items pretend to represent.” Romero’s use of the term “sweet life” is revealing. In ancient Greek, the word “sweet” translates as hêdus, which also means “pleasant.” Hêdus is the word from which we get the English “hedonistic.” The sweet life that Romero thinks the mall advertises, we might guess, is a hedonistic life—a life of enjoyment like the one Aristotle talks about. But given what happens to his gang of four, Romero seems skeptical about the sweetness of this life. It wouldn’t seem to be so sweet after all.
In Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle examines the sweet life as a model for good living, or what he calls “happiness” (eudaimonia). When Aristotle talks about “happiness,” though, he doesn’t do so in a narrowly “psychological” way. He’s not using “happiness” the way I might if I were to say, “I was so happy when I found a limited first edition Japanese pressing of Goblin’s Dawn of the Dead soundtrack!” Our modern notion of happiness usually refers to a transitory elevated mood or feeling. Aristotle, by contrast, is speaking about something like the best possible life for human beings, the life in which human beings flourish most, the life in which they most fully shine forth as the kinds of beings they are.
To see what Aristotle’s driving at, consider plants and animals. While neither can be “happy” in any strict sense, they can still live better or worse as plants or animals. The best life for a spider plant will be the life in which it flourishes most as a spider plant, blossoming forth with sturdy green shoots and photosynthesizing without a hitch. The best life for a bulldog will be the one in which she flourishes most as a bulldog, with all the barking, tail wagging, slobbering, and eating that should entail. In turn, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics searches for the best mode of life for human beings. Aristotle wants to spell out the features of a life in which the highest capacities of human nature most fully come to light.
Although he ultimately rejects the life of enjoyment as a model of happiness, Aristotle tries to give it a fair hearing in Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Chapter 5. After all, he notes, this is the life in which most people—“and the most vulgar”—think that happiness consists. Even if he’s a bit snobbish here, Aristotle doesn’t think common opinion about the life of enjoyment is totally wrong or crazy. Surely, we’d all agree pleasure should have some place in happiness. No doubt we’re tempted by the lives of those who possess the material resources to enjoy whatever sensual indulgences they wish. If we’re honest with ourselves, part of us is probably tempted to say, “That’s the life!” Aristotle considers the life of Sardanapallus, a mythical Assyrian king who spent his palace days eating, drinking, and loving. In Dawn of the Dead, we might think of Roger, who finds the mall’s master keys and quips, “Keys to the kingdom.”
But can happiness really be reduced to a life of enjoyment through consumption? Like Romero, Aristotle thinks not. He dismisses the life spent in the pursuit of pleasure as “fit for cattle.” Aristotle’s not just being a prig here: he really means it. As he argues a few chapters later, such a sensation-focused life might actually do the trick for horses, oxen, and other animals, which lack capacities for reason and which flourish by living in accord with their sensitive capacities. But such a life cannot fit the bill for human beings, organisms best defined by their capacities for practical and theoretical reason.
To put the point another way, Aristotle thinks the life of enjoyment gets its priorities wrong. Neither the unlimited pursuit of stuff, nor its use in a life devoted to bodily enjoyment, grants sufficient weight to our key capacities. At best, a life of enjoyment treats these capacities as purely instrumental means for getting more stuff and more bodily pleasure. Like the flesh-eaters who always fall for Peter and Roger’s diversionary tactics—mindlessly following their tap-tap-tapping against store windows—those devoted to enjoyment through consumption ultimately get tugged around by whatever pleasures and wayward distractions come their way. So described, the life of enjoyment is not one somebody can truly lead. And since it leads to the atrophy of those capacities that most fully manifest our humanity, Aristotle believes that it can’t fully satisfy us. As the path to frustration taken by Dawn’s characters, it proves a kind of living death.
“Hey, Let’s Get the Stuff We Need!”: Putting the Mall in Its Place
That’s not to say that Aristotle thinks material goods and sensual pleasure have no place in the best human life. As he argues in Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Chapter 8, we need material goods because they provide the equipment necessary for performing those noble and virtuous actions that best display our rational capacities at work. If we lack these goods, the happiness we obtain through our virtuous activity is apt to be stunted and deformed. Moreover, sensual pleasure can and should be enjoyed in a happy life—temperately, in a virtuous manner guided by practical wisdom. So even if he challenges the goodness of unbridled acquisitiveness, Aristotle defends some forms of consumption after all, provided that they stay within reasonable limits. In Politics Book I, Chapter 9, he insists that these limits are set by the good life itself. Acquisition that supports such a life is beneficial; acquisition that hinders it is bad.
Likewise, we go astray if we see Romero as a cranky scold in high Puritan mode, tsk-tsking us for being enticed by the day-dream of living in a shopping mall. Romero’s satire of consumerism, while sometimes savage, is never nihilistic, never merely cynical. More than anything, Romero’s treatment of this life is melancholic. Although the zombies horrify us, they are sad creatures, lost souls condemned to wander the mall in search of an elusive satisfaction.
While he’s clear that the mall encourages a false view of the good life to the extent that it encourages passive consumerism, Romero doesn’t necessarily reject the mall completely. Although the mall misleads us by identifying the good life with “gadgetoriented affluence” (as Romero’s script calls it), the mall at least offers temporary sanctuary for the film’s main heroes, Peter and Fran. For Romero, then, the mall is at least instrumentally valuable as a place where you can get useful goods—and surely, that value is nothing to scoff at. Ultimately, however, Peter and Fran have to leave the mall at Dawn’s conclusion if they’re going to preserve any of their humanity. As their helicopter ascends the shopping center teeming once more with zombies, Peter asks how much fuel is left. “Not much,” Fran says. The film ends on an ambiguous note: while the dawn sun brings with it the prospect of a happier day, even if Peter and Fran have to face it empty-handed, these last survivors ultimately have no place to go. To the extent that a life of unlimited means has blinded them to the ends that make a life worth living, it has left them without a clear destination.45
8
Zombies, Rest, and Motion: Spinoza and the Speed of Undeath
K. SILEM MOHAMMAD
Zombies are, one might say, the deadest of the Undead. In the classic Hollywood depiction, they are shambling, cadaverous beings whose creeping, halting motions are one of the most unsettling aspects of their appearance. Even in cases where a zombie is not technically dead, but hypnotized like Madge Bellamy in White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1932), or in a coma—arguably—like Christine Gordon in I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur, 1943), the eeriness of the cinematic spectacle consists in the separation of the person from her consciousness at the same time that she continues to walk and perform simple actions. A similar dread infuses the replacement of living persons by alien pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956) or by androids in The Stepford Wives (Bryan Forbes, 1975): the body looks the same, but the consciousness is gone or transformed into something inhuman.
We don’t want the dead to get up and walk, even—or especially—if we loved to see them moving in life. Nor do we want to see our loved ones acting slowed-down and emotionless as if they were “dead,” even in a figurative sense: it creeps us out. In the
absence of what we think of as the vitality of conscious existence, the ability to walk or clutch or even eat amounts to little more than the grisly reflexive spasms of rigor mortis. Either what ought to be vivacious and spirited has become still and lifeless, or what ought to be dead somehow, uncannily, is not. Either way, we react with horror.
But why exactly does slowness or stillness play so central a part in the horror we associate with zombies? Often invoked in this context is Sigmund Freud’s famous theory of the “uncanny” (unheimlich), derived from Friedrich Schelling’s idea that “everything is uncanny that ought to have remained hidden and secret, and yet comes to light.” Freud describes the uncanny as “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” Whatever we perceive as uncanny, he argues, is connected with memories that we have repressed since childhood and that are reawakened by unexplainable, disturbing recurrences. Things that we have shoved back into a dark corner of our awareness—even things that were initially familiar and comforting—undergo a disturbing transformation when they reemerge, especially if they reemerge by some means other than an exertion of our own will.
“Many people,” Freud observes, “experience the feeling in the highest degree in relation to death and dead bodies, to the return of the dead, and to spirits and ghosts.” Vampires, zombies, and other Undead beings, accordingly, are often represented as (un)living embodiments of the return of the repressed. Their sluggishness replicates the motionlessness of death, but at the same time enacts a suppressed wish: that the dead might return to us, move among us again as they did in life. In its new, uncanny manifestation, however, this once-familiar motion terrifies us rather than giving us comfort or joy.
This dynamic of the uncanny is not limited to human bodies, or even to animate beings. Terms like “zombie” have enjoyed increasing currency in both theoretical and popular discourse as ways of referring to any attenuated modes of existence in which an original presence is supplanted by a phantasmic placeholder, as when Bulent Diken writes that the World Trade Center survives after its destruction as a “spirit, zombie, or fetish” in media consciousness.46 In this image, perhaps, we see the ultimate emblem of Undeath: an edifice endowed with consciousness by public sentiment only after its destruction, at which time it becomes a kind of inanimate zombie. Or it has in a sense been animated, but only as a set of phantom tombstones for itself. A stillness that in “life” was in no way remarkable (all skyscrapers are still) becomes uncannily inextricable in “death” from our association of it with a haunting and haunted absence.
Recently, however, popular-culture developments have thrown a spin on this traditional equation of zombies with creeping slowness and stillness. A new zombie walks—or rather runs—among us. Zombies (some of them, at least) are now scary in a speedier way.
Slow Zombies
Zombies of the original Caribbean variety, as depicted in films like White Zombie and I Walked with a Zombie, only move when bidden, or when set by some external cause into automatic motion. It may never occur to them, accordingly, to cease from such motion until they are commanded otherwise or stopped by some accidental force. They are, that is, only contingently animate. It is significant that these voodoo-charmed slaves first struck the popular imagination of western capitalist society at the dawn of industrial automatization: they are the perfect metaphor for an utterly alienated modern workforce.
In the intervening years of the twentieth century, however, a host of social and technological innovations conspire to create the conditions for a new evolutionary phase in the un-life of this figure, chief among which are the pervasive specter of nuclear annihilation and the increasing spasms of unrest among various underclasses. By the 1960s, a different kind of zombie rears its rotting head: one that does not merely shamble obediently, but pursues its own gruesome agenda.
The archetypal incarnation of the radicalized postmodern zombie emerges in George Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. Like its predecessors, this zombie is dull, slow-moving, and low on affect. Unlike them, it acts on its own initiative, a seemingly inexhaustible compulsion to devour the flesh of living humans. Perhaps more accurately, whereas the voodoo zombies are under the control of human masters who manipulate them in order to achieve their own ends, these ghouls are under the control of an impersonal force that nevertheless manifests itself in the zombies’ uniform compliance. That force is radiation, supposedly released by a satellite that has crashed to earth.
Romero’s radioactive Undead are aggressive, relentless, and highly efficient. By the end of Night, the living characters have all either been overpowered by them or killed trying to escape them. This is due in part, to be sure, to the protagonists’ isolation: recurring emergency broadcasts indicate that although the zombie menace is widespread, law enforcement and military authorities have been able to contain the outbreak in populated areas to some degree. Homegrown armies equipped with rifles, gasoline, and metal hooks manage to surround and demobilize great numbers of the walking dead with minimal difficulty, owing chiefly to one liability on the Undead’s part: like the voodoo zombies of the past, they are slow. As a rural sheriff proclaims during a televised news report, “They’re dead, they’re all messed up.”
In Romero’s later films, however, containment of the Undead has not been so successful. By Dawn of the Dead (1978), the first sequel, it is clear that the crisis is global, and that there is no clear solution in sight. In Day of the Dead (1985), the third film in the series, it appears that humanity has been driven almost entirely underground. Land of the Dead (2005), the most recent installment, hints that while civilization has regained some of its foothold, the threat of zombie rebellion indicates what may be a permanent state of crisis for two competing “class” structures: the privileged but besieged living and the disenfranchised but ever-more organized Undead.
The slowness of these zombies, then, does not necessarily result in failure. Like ants, they are relatively easy to kill, but as soon as you turn your back there are more of them. Romero’s message at the end of Land appears to be that the Undead, like Mother Theresa’s poor, are always with us. In fact, the Undead in this fourth film are in many ways indistinguishable from the living poor: they are hungry, unruly, and unattractive, and no one wants to become one of them. They are no longer really even truly scary, so much as a grim, intractable nuisance. From a certain perspective, Land is the most “optimistic” film in Romero’s tetralogy: despite all the horror and slaughter, there is still, it suggests, something like a choice to be made, and accordingly there is a potential solution. What this solution might be is unclear, but at least there is still some time to work towards it. This much at least the leaden pace of the zombie masses allows.
Before we move on to the sped-up zombies of more recent cultural productions, let’s take a brief look at Spinoza’s Ethics (1677), wherein he derives a theory of ethics from the natural physical relations of acting and being-acted-upon that obtain between bodies, and of the speeds at which those relations occur.
(De)composing Bodies
In order to apply Spinoza’s thought to the concept of Undeath, it may be helpful first to examine his account of the difference between life and death itself. He argues that death is by no means a cut-and-dried state, and that the body might in fact “die” though certain vital signs persist:I understand the Body to die when its parts are so disposed that they acquire a different proportion of motion and rest to one another. For I dare not deny that—even though the circulation of the blood is maintained, as well as the other signs on account of which the Body is thought to be alive—the human Body can nevertheless be changed into another nature entirely different from its own. For no reason compels me to maintain that the Body does not die unless it is changed into a corpse.47
To talk about life and death as points on a continuum in this way rather than as absolute states of existence, and to define life itself as a set of relations between moving parts rather than as a my
stical force that exists independently of the body, is to posit a radical definition of consciousness or soul.
In his earlier book, The Emendation of the Intellect (published posthumously with the Ethics in 1677), Spinoza describes the soul (or mind) as a “spiritual automaton” (II/18), a mechanism that is autonomous but subject to fixed laws of thought in the same way that material bodies are subject to physical laws. In the Ethics, Spinoza treated mind and body as two separate modes of the same essence, and was especially concerned to refute dualist theories that attempted to explain the motions of the body by positing the dominance of mind:And of course, no one has yet determined what the Body can do, i.e., experience has not yet taught anyone what the Body can do from the laws of nature alone, insofar as nature is only considered to be corporeal, and what the Body can do only if it is determined by the Mind. . . .
Again, no one knows how, or by what means, the Mind moves the Body, nor how many degrees of motion it can give the Body, nor with what speed it can move it. So it follows that when men say that this or that action of the Body arises from the Mind, which has dominion over the Body, they do not know what they are saying, and they do nothing but confess, in fine-sounding words, that they are ignorant of the true causes of that action, and that they do not wonder at it. (Ethics III, P2, Schol.)
From a Spinozist point of view, we might observe, there is no material difference between a zombie and, say, a ghost. Both are the mobile, uncanny residue of living subjects, toxic complexes of actions that continue past the point when they should be able, or when none desire them to. A Spinozist would then reject any idea that they are opposites, that one is “body” and the other “mind.” Such distinctions finally amount to little: both move, both touch, both bring death to life. What is a body, if not a presence that imposes itself on experience? What is a mind, if not the principle that translates the actions of such presences into intentions and desires?
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