Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy

by Richard Greene; K. Silem Mohammad

  16

  The Undead Martyr: Sex, Death, and Revolution in George Romero’s Zombie Films

  SIMON CLARK

  A figure lies prone on an operating table, its bloodied rib cage exposed and empty. All of the vital organs have been surgically removed. But this body is not dead, not completely. It is struggling against the restraints that pin it down, straining to bite a doctor whose hand is just out of reach. “See, it wants me. It wants food, but it has no stomach—it can take no nourishment from what it ingests,” says the doctor, toying with the Undead corpse. “It’s working on instinct—a deep dark primordial instinct.” Suddenly the corpse breaks free. The Doctor grabs a surgical drill and bores a hole deep into its skull. Only now is it completely dead.

  In this scene from Day of the Dead George Romero unveils human instinct as the true star of his zombie films. Throughout Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), and Land of the Dead (2005), human instinct is the motor that drives the endless ranks of Undead corpses ever forward. From this we can straightforwardly deduce that Romero portrays pure and unrefined instinct as a dangerous force that is threatening to human life. But why should our most natural urges be seen as hostile, and why does Romero visualize them as stumbling Undead corpses with an insatiable appetite for human flesh?

  Repressive Civilization

  The Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) states that civilization, since its origins, has demanded the constant control and repression of the primary human instincts. Civilization’s main job, he says, is to overcome the inhospitable forces of nature. The necessities of human survival—food and shelter—are not in natural abundance, but they become easier to procure when people team up and work as a group. This is the beginning of civilization. Everyone develops a role, and as long as they stick to it they guarantee their own survival within the larger group. This contribution to the group’s cause is what we now call work. It is what we have to do, rather than what we want to do.

  Work basically means sacrifice, compromise, and a lot of unrewarding toil, but it is necessary (for the vast majority of us) to ensure our inclusion within the civilized order. But Freud says that the primary human instincts reject this order. They demand constant and unadulterated pleasure—they want to be freely and completely gratified at all times. Therefore civilization is unable to grant what the instincts crave, and the two forces fall into direct conflict with each other. Civilization attempts to control this conflict by offering its citizens attractive substitutes for pleasure such as wages, security, and leisure time. None of these compensations quench the instinctual thirst for absolute pleasure, yet the individual accepts them so that he or she can survive within the civilized group.

  But Freud goes on to state that deep down, the individual rages against the injustice of this deal. There is part of the individual’s mind that still longs for instinctual pleasure, even though it is banned. Freud says that this unlawful desire sometimes bubbles up within the social order and manifests itself as the dark and murky underbelly of civilization. Freud calls this lawless presence the “return of the repressed.”141 It is a blister on the social order—an unwanted by-product of authoritarian control. Civilization is therefore in a constant state of hostile negotiation, always trying to manage the chaos that it created by repressing the instincts in the first place.

  So the instincts are dangerous because they nurture an unlawful desire for pleasure that haunts the repressive order of civilization. Romero’s zombie, as an embodiment of these pleasure-seeking instincts, becomes nothing less than a visual metaphor for the return of the repressed. The conflict between humans and zombies in Romero’s films can now be understood as a dramatization of the struggle that exists between civilized individuals and their own repressed instincts. The basic instinctual urges are ripped out of the civilized population by repression, and are manifested in a separate body altogether—the Undead corpse. Freudian theory therefore invites us to conceive of the zombie as a drooling embodiment of an instinctual pleasure that refuses to give in to the repressive forces of civilization—that quite literally refuses to stay dead. A zombie can only be completely killed off when the part of its brain that generates instinctual impulses is destroyed. But throughout Romero’s films there are always more zombies, so repressive civilization never manages to totally subdue the instincts. Crucially, it is civilization’s repressive squeeze on the instincts that forces the zombies to come oozing out into the social order in the first place. So in Romero’s films the Undead corpse is the nemesis, but also the product, of a repressive civilization.

  Freud says that repression is not only carried out and enforced by powerful institutions; it is something that individuals do to themselves as well, like an internalized self-censoring mechanism. This develops when the individual’s infantile fear of his or her father is converted into an adult sense of reverence towards authority in general. The father’s stern morality manifests itself inside the individual’s own mind, and this internalization of authority is the basis of the individual’s conscience. Freud calls this the “superego.”142

  In his first two zombie films Romero presents scenarios in which the individual’s superego—the sense of servitude to a higher authority—is overtaken by an aggressive and unlawful quest for power. In Night of the Living Dead, Mr. Cooper is the traditional patriarchal figure, but he is weak, selfish, and disrespected. He is constantly undermined by the other individuals who are struggling to survive the night on their own terms. This lack of a common authority leaves them vulnerable and accelerates the zombies’ advance.

  Ben, who survives until daybreak, is mistaken for a zombie by other humans. The sheriff’s men shoot him dead and then throw his body onto a pile of zombie corpses. This scene subtly suggests that Ben’s disrespectful and violent struggle with Mr. Cooper actually puts him in league with the zombies. Consequently he is shot by the repressive patriarchal regime and disposed of in the same way as the Undead corpses.143

  In Dawn of the Dead, those who normally serve the controlling order abandon their posts in an effort to ensure their own immediate survival: Stephen and Francine work for a television network, and Peter and Roger are both policemen. They all desert their civil duties and escape together as the zombie chaos swells out of control. This collapse of common authority creates a void in civilization’s defenses that sucks in the advancing hordes of zombies. In both films Romero presents a battlefield in which the struggling humans are effectively caught in a noman’s land between civilization and instincts. Those who reject the civilized hierarchy and plot a course towards their own immediate gratification are either consumed by the Undead or murdered by other more civilized humans. As the unlawful individuals attempt to reclaim their prohibited desire, the zombies, as an embodiment of this desire, close in on them. The only survivors are those who surrender their immediate pleasure and attempt to crawl back to civilization’s front line.

  In Dawn of the Dead the civilized economy is now redundant. Within the mall, Francine, Stephen, Peter, and Roger are able to take whatever they want for free. The mall has become a domain of lawless pleasure. The zombies in the mall may have been destroyed, but an Undead throng is steadily gathering outside. Once the gang of bikers violently force their way through the barricade, destructive incivility takes hold and the zombies return to wreak their bloody havoc. Stephen refuses to surrender the luxurious mall to the marauding bikers without a fight. Because he gives in to his selfish instinctual desire, he is savaged by the Undead hordes and becomes a particularly flamboyant zombie himself. Francine and Peter only survive because they leave the mall behind and fly off into an unknown, but more civilized, future.

  The presence of zombies becomes inversely proportional to civilization’s ability to enforce its repressive regime. The more we see humans violating civilized law, the more the zombies close in and destroy the social order. The number of zombies steadily increases throughout the four films, so Romero effec
tively portrays a dysfunctional society that is descending into unlawful chaos. It is unable to cope with the forces it has unleashed against itself. A reading of Freud allows us to state that the horror of Romero’s films is founded in this nightmarish vision of a civilization that is losing its repressive grip on instinctual pleasure.

  The Destructive Union of Eros and Thanatos

  But what is this instinctual pleasure that the zombies embody? What is pleasurable about being a moaning, mindless corpse? Freud claims that the human instincts are composed of two primary drives. He refers to them by the names of the Greek gods that personify them: Eros and Thanatos, the life and death instincts respectively. Freud says that every human pleasure, from passionate love to sadistic violence and greed, can be boiled down to one or both of these primary instinctual drives.

  Eros is the urge to create and reproduce—to unite, nurture, and protect all human life. It embodies the basic principle of survival and growth. Eros is the instinct that brought humans together and created civilization in the first place. But as Freud establishes, civilization represses the raw human instincts, so Eros is in fact betrayed by its own creation. This is because Eros not only creates all the emotional and psychological bonds that pull groups of people together, it fuels a more extreme desire for immediate sexual gratification as well. Within this sexual dimension of Eros, reproduction and the continuation of the species are only incidental by-products of the overwhelming urge to obtain total physical bodily pleasure from other humans.

  This is where Eros starts to come into friction with civilization. The repressive order decrees that the body must be primarily engaged as a tool of labor, and this immediately alienates the individual from his or her erotic pleasure. Civilization would soon grind to a halt if everyone constantly pursued their own physical gratification, so any manifestation of erotic desire that is not an act of civilized reproduction is heavily repressed by the social order. This allows us to recognize the zombies’ thirst for pleasure as a specifically sexual urge.

  In Romero’s films the repressed Eros returns to haunt civilization in the form of the zombies’ rampant desire for flesh. The Undead refuse any sort of curfew on their erotic pleasure; they want it bad, and they want it all the time. They will bite any flesh they can sink their teeth into. This reactivates the entire body as an erogenous zone and takes the focus away from civilized genital contact. This desire to bite and consume human flesh is an act of reproduction that causes the Undead population to grow at a terrific speed. But as Freud establishes, this reproduction and self-perpetuation—the hallmark of Eros—is merely a by-product of the immediate urge for total sexual gratification.

  Thanatos, on the other hand, expresses the instinct to regress—to return to the inertia of inorganic matter. It is the urge to reduce life to something base, crude, and simple, and so becomes associated with destruction and violence. Thanatos yearns to reverse the turbulent process of growth, and summons the universal inertia of death to stifle the friction of organic existence. Civilization represses this destructive instinct by channeling its energy into socially useful aggression and competition. Some examples of this are aggressive contact sports, hostile economic rivalry, and the entertainment industry’s commercialization of violence and gore.

  In Romero’s films the repressed Thanatos returns in the form of the zombies’ violent bite that transforms civilized humans into rotting corpses. Everyone who is bitten will sooner or later turn into a zombie. So the Undead bite is not only erotic; it aggressively reduces individual identity to a crude and base level as well. Living people, as the working parts of the civilized infrastructure, are dismantled. The zombies stumble around, wearing the uniforms that used to define their roles within civilization when they were still alive. These uniforms speak of a civil function that is rendered obsolete under the reign of the destructive instinct. The individual regresses to dead matter—becomes no more than walking decay—and is therefore released from the tension of civilized human life.

  The repressed instinctual pleasures of Eros and Thanatos are therefore both manifested in the zombie’s erotic and destructive behavior. This sheds more light on the main characteristics of the Undead corpse. The zombie walks in a very striking way. The zombie shuffle, as I shall call it, is stiff and awkward, motored by a single and overwhelming urge to consume flesh. If this urge is specifically erotic as we have discussed, then the zombie’s body is effectively engorged with desire—bloated by its own sexual appetite. The awkward, stumbling zombie can therefore be compared to a swollen erection, stiffly swaying this way and that in its quest for pleasure. It is an unruly swelling of desire within the civilized order—an erotic presence within the very institution that tries to stifle, like a tight pair of pants, all manifestations of sexual arousal. Civilization demands that the body be soft and malleable, but the sexually primed and defiantly stiff zombie refuses to be molded into a pliable and subservient human tool.

  The Undead corpse’s sexual desire is realized when it bites into human flesh. But as we have discussed, this bite is more than just erotic; it also satisfies the instinctual urge to regress—to turn life into base and inert matter. Freud says that the regressive desire of Thanatos can be compared to that of a consuming and all-encompassing womb that wishes to draw life back into itself. In response, Barbara Creed suggests that this idea of a devouring femininity conjures up the notorious and mythological image of the vagina dentata—the toothed vagina—that literally consumes life and returns it to the womb from whence it came.144 We have seen that the zombie is a manifestation of the urge to reduce and destroy life. If this instinct to regress plays out the desire of the devouring womb, then the zombie’s mouth—the very thing that consumes living flesh and turns it into decaying mater—becomes nothing less than a manifestation of the vagina dentata. The bloodied mouth of the Undead corpse can be interpreted as a horrific depiction of the consuming female genitals, whose deadly bite removes the individual from the tensions and frustrations of civilized life.

  And so the zombie’s bite, in Freudian terms, unites the sexual component of Eros with the violently regressive urges of Thanatos. This coalition nurtures a double-barreled instinctual pleasure that is in direct conflict with the civilized human body. Freud emphasizes the fact that repression squeezes Eros and Thanatos into a destructive union against civilization. The repressive order therefore triggers its own demise, and Romero’s zombie films take this proposition to its horrific conclusion. In Day of the Dead, Romero presents a scenario in which the traditional, hierarchical, and repressive model of civilization is outmoded. He shows a civilization at breaking point, in which the individuals in the army base no longer adhere to the repressive principles of the social authority. Disorder gains the upper hand, and the full force of the repressed Eros and Thanatos is eventually unleashed. The resulting wave of zombies swiftly consumes all that remains of the tattered civilization. There’s no going back for the survivors; their only option is to disregard the previous repressive system and move on in an effort to pioneer an alternative social order.

  The Possibility of a Non-Repressive Civilization

  The German philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) came up with a new relationship between civilization and the instincts that goes beyond Freud’s version.145 The mere existence of the return of the repressed testifies to civilization’s inability to harness the instincts effectively. Marcuse says that this point alone justifies the quest for a new and more successful model of civilization that can accommodate the instincts without repressing them. He highlights the fact that civilization is a product of the historical processes that have molded it through the centuries. If it has evolved to become what it is today, then it can evolve again to become something else. Marcuse focuses on the dissident content of the return of the repressed—on the fact that the instincts refuse to be culled, modified and channeled into something they are not. He says that the primary instincts hold onto the memory of a time when they were free—a time prior t
o their subjugation by civilization. It is this memory that makes Eros and Thanatos constantly challenge civilization’s repressive conquest, and keeps alive the prospect of a reality that is built entirely on pleasure. The Undead corpse, as an embodiment of the return of the repressed, is transformed by Marcuse into a tireless campaigner for non-repressive civilization. So beneath the rotting surface of Romero’s zombie we can now discover a revolutionary blueprint for freedom.

  Marcuse says that a non-repressive civilization would prevail once the curfew on instinctual pleasure is abolished. In a free society, the instincts would no longer be the enemy of the state. A liberated Eros and Thanatos—total and unrestrained instinctual pleasure—would be the currency that holds the new order together. Within this order, work would be transformed into a sense of play. Whereas work is the perpetual delay and repression of pleasure, play is gratifying in itself—it serves no purpose other than that of creating pleasure. This playful pleasure would form the basis of a non-repressive civilization.

  This initially seems to take us back to the beginning of Freud’s argument. He claims that civilization would soon crumble if total pleasure were suddenly unleashed. The social order would experience a fatal resurgence of destructive sexuality and violence. Marcuse crosses this impasse by stating that a vital transition must take place before a new non-repressive civilization can be realized. He argues that sexuality is only destructive because it is distorted by the regime of repression. If sexuality is freed from the clutches of repressive civilization, it manifests itself in an entirely different way. Liberated sexuality becomes re-united with the pure version of Eros—the instinct to “combine organic substances into ever larger unities.”146 The task of building and maintaining a free civilization now becomes erotic and therefore instinctually gratifying in its own right. This civilization would be an entirely pleasurable institution, free from all repressive frictions. Thanatos, as the urge to be relieved from suffering and tension, would now pull away from death and find total satisfaction in staying alive instead. Eros and Thanatos would write a new constitution—a mandate for freedom and pleasure.