Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy

by Richard Greene; K. Silem Mohammad

  In Day of the Dead, Sarah, John, and McDermott escape from the army base and finally end up on a deserted beach. John is fishing, and this can be understood as a relaxing and enjoyable activity that provides food for the group at the same time. They have finally stopped struggling with their repressed instincts—in the form of the zombies—and have discovered a situation in which surviving is pleasurable in its own right. Zombies only exist under a repressive regime, so the absence of zombies in this scene equates to an absence of repression. This fledgling society on the beach can therefore be recognized as a portrait of a free civilization. In an entirely pleasurable social order Marcuse says that repressed sexuality transforms into Eros. This is played out on the beach as we see that the zombies’ engorged and selfish desire has been replaced by the living humans’ newly released erotic instinct to survive pleasurably as a group.

  Eros is symbolically released from the Undead body, and is reunited with the human individuals from whom it has been separated throughout the entire film. The jerky zombie shuffle is ironed out into the smooth-flowing and fully-functioning human bodies that are completely satisfied by their own playful survival on the beach. We have seen how Thanatos targets death as the only way of being rid of the pain and tension of a repressive existence. But the beach itself can now provide this release. Death and destruction are no longer needed to free the individual from his or her suffering, because in a non-repressive order he or she is already free. The gratified survivors have an intimate and pleasurable connection with their idyllic environment without having to return to the devouring womb.

  The previously subjugated and alienated instincts, as embodied by the Undead corpse, are now freely reunited with the three survivors. The return of the repressed transforms into the very fabric of the free order, so the zombies in this scene are effectively vaporized and re-constituted in an entirely new form. Eros and Thanatos are still visible, but they are no longer manifested as a sexually destructive and regressive desire; they exist instead, and are completely gratified, within the pleasurable relationships of a non-repressive civilization.

  The zombie yearns for freedom. It refuses repression and strives instead for an entirely liberated future. Yet this future is at the same time the zombie’s downfall. The Undead corpse might herald a new dawn, but it will never see the sunrise. The zombie, as the manifestation of a violent cry for instinctual emancipation, is eventually decommissioned by the very freedom it campaigns for so fiercely. Marcuse’s philosophical framework allows us to cast the zombie as a self-sacrificing martyr; its demise sparks a new beginning for civilization.

  Romero’s survivors pioneer a pleasurable reality in which their instincts are entirely gratified. For the moment at least, the survivors have found their instinctual paradise, but as Sarah looks out to sea, we can’t help noticing the clouds gathering on the horizon. At the end of the film Sarah has a nightmare. She cannot simply forget all the zombies that are still roaming around and feasting on dead flesh in the underground army base.

  Marcuse states that the memory of all those who suffered painful deaths in the past “darkens the prospect of a civilization without repression.”147 This is near the end of his book. It is decidedly downbeat, and seems almost to retract everything that he has argued before. The remaining zombies become this blemish that Marcuse speaks of—they are literally a walking reminder of all the people who died violently under the previous order. And so in Day of the Dead the legacy of a repressive civilization still remains. The zombies cannot be forgotten; they haunt the survivors as a memory of the old regime and threaten to return at any time.

  In subsequent writing, Marcuse states that his vision is unrealistic—that there will always be some form of repressive order dominating human life. If we now jump to Land of the Dead, any semblance of the harmonious civilization depicted on the beach has disappeared and been replaced instead by another repressive regime. The zombies are fenced out of the city, and so civilization is segregated from the instincts once again. As in the previous films, the zombies eventually bring about the demise of the controlling order. The skyscraper owned by the power-hungry business man Kaufman becomes the primary target for the advancing Undead corpses. Kaufman has illegally hoarded a massive wealth for himself and his cronies at the expense of the underprivileged majority living on the streets. He ignores the growing zombie threat and focuses instead on his own selfish plans. As we have already seen in Romero’s films, greedy and unlawful individuals open up a fatal gap in civilization’s defenses. This chink in the armor is soon exploited by the growing zombie army.

  At the end of Land of the Dead the human survivors are still fighting with their instincts even though Kaufman’s regime has been overthrown. Mulligan and his revolutionaries still wish to inhabit the walled city—the traditional seat of repression. Riley and his gang drive off to the north because they want to escape the city altogether. Even though they want to survive harmoniously, they are still inside “Dead Reckoning,” their zombie-killing armored vehicle. They continue to be alienated from the zombies outside, and therefore reject the possibility of a peaceful reconciliation with their own instinctual pleasure.

  Kaufman is only overthrown because the zombies themselves evolve and work out how to penetrate the city’s defenses. Throughout the film we see zombies being taunted, abused, and massacred, but this all changes when they rise up and march together on the city. The zombies display a newfound sense of cunning and ambition. They are communicating with each other and learning how to use tools. Social organization emerges within the zombie population; they are becoming civilized on their own terms.

  At the end of the film, it is not the humans but the evolved zombies who seem to be drafting the plans for a non-repressive marriage between civilization and the instincts. As a manifestation of the dissenting return of the repressed, the zombies have broken through the barriers, cages and chains that used to keep them imprisoned. Motivated by the constant persecution of instinctual pleasure, they have finally overthrown the repressive regime. Now that they are free, the future is theirs to pioneer on their own terms. The zombie garage attendant, who kick-starts the Undead revolution and eventually kills Kaufman, turns away from Riley and leads his new breed of zombies off into the unknown. We cannot see where they are going among the tattered remains of the city, but Romero makes it clear that they are no longer closing in on the surviving humans with ravenous intent. Instead of pursuing their appetite for flesh, the zombies have turned their backs on humans and are stumbling towards their new collective existence together.

  The repressed Eros, previously manifested by the violent sexual bite, is liberated. Released from the clutches of repression, Eros expresses itself in the zombies’ newfound desire to survive, grow as a community, and organize a new harmonious way of existing. The evolved zombies now embody the transformation of repressed sexuality into Eros that is the hallmark of Marcuse’s non-repressive civilization. Thanatos—the urge to regress and be rid of all tension—is also liberated because the zombies are free to rot away pleasurably, untroubled by the constant burden of being alive. They reject the struggle with other humans in favor of creating their own community in which they can decay in peace. Both Eros and Thanatos are released. The zombies no longer embody repressed instinctual desire; they embody fully-gratified instinctual pleasure—the bedrock of a non-repressive civilization.

  We previously understood the zombie as a martyr whose eventual demise signifies the end of repression. The zombie is still a martyr because it can only serve the cause of freedom once it has given up its human life. But now it is the continued presence of the zombie, and not its absence, that hails the new order. So the martyr is no longer completely dead; the martyr is Undead.

  We can finally claim that the evolving zombies represent the beginnings of a pleasurable union between civilization and the instincts. So Romero is able to create the very system that Marcuse reluctantly deems impossible. Romero’s work is no more than a fantasy, of c
ourse; so too, it would seem, is the prospect of a free civilization. But let’s not end on a sour note. Imagine, for a moment, a possible scene from Romero’s next zombie film. Imagine leagues of living humans lining up in front of their Undead counterparts, happily sacrificing their flesh so that they might be liberated from repression and delivered into a realm of instinctual pleasure. The erotic and regressive bite would no longer be hostile; it would become a caring gesture that heralds a sensuous release from the tribulations of life. There would be a renegade band of humans who resist this journey to utopia and reserve their right to be unhappy and repressed instead. This would set up a fascinating philosophical question for Romero to explore: is it better to be Undead, happy, and free, or alive, miserable, and repressed? In this emerging new order, to give oneself to a zombie would be a radical act of self-initiation; it would be a rite of passage into the land of the dead—into a realm of pleasure and freedom.148

  17

  When They Aren’t Eating Us, They Bring Us Together: Zombies and the American Social Contract

  LEAH A. MURRAY

  George Romero’s series of zombie films, Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), Day of the Dead (1985), and Land of the Dead (2005), engages one of the fundamental questions of the last two centuries in American political philosophy: which is the superior position, individualism or communitarianism ?

  Individualism is the idea that the success of a society depends on self-reliance—individual hard work, ingenuity, and entrepreneurship. The individualist’s America is a place where individuals can reach their full potential unfettered by overreaching government or the constraints of traditional societal norms and hierarchies: in essence, a place where the individual shapes society, not vice versa. Individualists tend to reject communism, for example, because it limits individual freedom, especially by placing too much emphasis on the needs of other people.

  Communitarianism is the idea that societies prosper most and best when citizens co-operate. The Civil Rights Movement in America succeeded, on this account, because many citizens worked together to put the needs of the society above their own individual desires. Communitarians embrace neighborhood connectedness and group activities. They believe that a good society results from a sense of community and self-sacrifice, according to John F. Kennedy’s famous dictum: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

  Individualism and communitarianism represent two dominant American political tendencies that have been fundamentally at odds since the founding of the nation. Both these strains are found at the heart of the American social contract (more on this term in a little while). Indeed, much of American political philosophy is committed to the ideal of individualism and the notion that one person standing alone can fight the torrents. Our political, historical, and literary culture is littered with lone-actor hero-types who are represented as saving the day by behaving in a strictly American individualistic fashion. Some political philosophers, however, have argued that individualism is not necessarily the best thing for democracy, as it has increasingly led to detachment on the part of citizens from each other. The less people feel connected by their social contract, the more likely they are to allow their sovereignty to slip away. Should they be self-reliant and only look out for themselves? Or should they connect with others and develop an ideal of the common good?

  I argue that Romero’s Dead films evoke the problem of what should be at the heart of an American social contract, and that they implicitly advocate communitarianism over individualism.

  Civic-Mindedness versus Fear

  According to Thomas Hobbes’s theory of the social contract, as developed in his 1660 work The Leviathan, people are brought together because they are terrified. Hobbes famously claims that life for man in a “state of nature,” devoid of government and authority, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”; that is, individuals basically go around trying to kill each other, much like the zombies in Romero’s films. The characters inside the besieged farmhouse in Night of the Living Dead demonstrate how a community can be formed simply out of fear. Most of the characters have never met before the terrifying events of that evening bring them together. They quickly form a governing apparatus in which two male antagonists, one black (Ben) and one white (Mr. Cooper), vie for a position of power while a horde of zombies advances outside.

  Ben is the hero of the communitarian position, working from the very start to save as many people as possible. He tries to make the farmhouse as safe as possible for himself and the traumatized, useless Barbara, even when she does nothing to help him. He exemplifies the social contract by drawing all parts of his community into the protective equation. On the other hand, Cooper, who is soon found hiding in the basement with his wife, child, and two other persons, embodies the individualist position of “every man for himself.” He admits openly that even though he heard screaming upstairs, he refused to risk his own life by coming up to help. He also advocates not going to the central community location prescribed by emergency broadcasts, in favor of maintaining the relative safety of their basement fortress (Ben argues that if they must remain in the house, it is safer upstairs).

  The conflict in Night could be seen as representing the beginning of the end of individualism as an appropriate core for the social contract. It is interesting in this context, however, that by the end of Night even the predominantly communitarian Ben ends up shouting that upstairs, he is the boss, thus reverting to a more individualistic position. When Ben tries to get the gas required to escape from the farmhouse, Cooper locks the door in an attempt to keep him out, and Ben finally shoots him out of rage. Cooper, wounded, staggers back into the basement, where he is attacked by his own daughter, now a zombie. Eventually the zombies overcome all the characters except Ben, who makes it through the night by barricading himself in the basement (Cooper’s favored site, ironically), but is mistaken for a zombie and shot by the vigilante mob as he emerges in the morning (it is difficult not to infer that his being black has something to do with it as well).

  Alexis de Tocqueville argues in his 1835 treatise Democracy in America that democracy will only work in this nation if individuals are civically minded. Note that Tocqueville is attempting to explain how democracy can work to a Europe that has much stronger communal ties, a Europe whose people are connected to each other in a vast hierarchical fabric. For government to work without that vast tapestry, people need to be connected to each other in order to further the aims of a government based on the rule of everyone over everyone—in other words, a society with more Bens and fewer Mr. Coopers. The more Americans join various groups ranging from the political to the religious, Tocqueville says, the more they connect with each other, thus furthering both the ends and the means of democracy. The warning he issues concerning the larger democratic project is against individualism. His concern is not that people might want to be distinct individuals (in fact, Tocqueville champions the personal rights of people to make their own choices), but that they might care more about themselves than about the community as a whole.

  In Dawn of the Dead, these themes are played out even more elaborately. As the film begins, the zombie threat is in full force. Since the social contract has already broken down, panic has set in and we see Americans reverting to a Hobbesian state of nature. The usual organs of social control, government and the media, are on the brink of collapse. Near-panicked analysts on television attempt to tell people what to do to survive, but no one listens because all, including the “experts,” are gripped by total fear of a hideous death. This fear has led to what Leviathan envisions: the declaration of martial law in the city. Only by completely giving up our individual freedoms to an outside authority can we hope to survive.

  Whereas Night depicts the catastrophic failure of individualist isolation, Dawn demonstrates the next step in the social contract: coming out of the state of nature, driven by fear of death, to an untenable social living position. First,
poor people are mowed down by the military as fear and anarchy give people an excuse to kill whomever they want. Sadly, these are the same groups that society has taught them to fear the most: the blacks and Hispanics who live in the projects. We also see remnants of a more communitarian social contract when the priest tells Peter that he could not kill the zombies, and so has just forced them into the basement. This is the first time in the Romero films that any concern for what happens to the zombies is implied, and the first time we see an explicit non-individualistic tendency given words. The priest says:Many have died, last week, on these streets. In the basement of this building, you will find them. I have given them the last rites; now, you do what you will. You are stronger than us. . . . But soon, I think they be stronger than you. When the dead walk, señores, we must stop the killing . . . or lose the war.

  When the two military men, Peter and Roger, connect with two media people, Stephen and Fran, they eventually develop a little social contract in the abandoned shopping mall that they occupy together. Immediately they hook into the old institutions of the former world, which has taught them not to think of the zombies as human. The media reports that zombies should be destroyed: despite their human appearance, they should be considered mindless, soulless animals undeserving of respect—exactly the opposite advice of that given by the priest. The team at first takes the offical advice to heart, whole-heartedly taking pleasure in shooting the zombies inside the mall from moving vehicles with high-powered rifles, and using the ones milling outside for target practice from atop the safety of the roof. Eventually, however, the official advice is difficult for our little group to follow, when Roger is bitten and they have to face the fact that he must be destroyed. Once it happens to someone in their group, they cannot be so callous—the “humanity” of the zombie is more difficult to ignore. Whereas the group has taken the other zombies they have killed and put them in the freezer, they bury their friend Roger in a patch of interior landscaping.