Praise Songs and Higher Times
I know that I said I would look at praise and worship songs as an English teacher, but I’m cheating and looking at praise and worship songs wearing a philosophical hat.
In a recent post, David Murrow explains “[w]hy men have stopped singing in church.” He says that there are some positives in the switch from hymnal to the projection of lyrics onto a screen in front of the sanctuary, but he concludes that “the negatives are huge.”
One of these negatives is that “[s]ongs get switched out so frequently that it’s impossible to learn them. People can’t sing songs they’ve never heard. And with no musical notes to follow, how is a person supposed to pick up the tune?”
[W]e went from 250 songs everyone knows to 250,000+ songs nobody knows (Murrow).
I experienced some frustration this past Easter for this very reason. The songs that were chosen for the Easter service were all appropriate thematically, but almost all were new to me. I’m pretty quick to catch onto songs, so it wasn’t really an issue of not being able to sing them. I am obviously not the same as the men who don’t sing in the Murrow post. But there was something else that I realized that we’ve lost since hymnals have become obsolete.
And it has to do with the way we view time.
In our culture, we understand time to be exclusively chronological. So much so that many who are reading this are saying, “Well, what the heck else would time be?” Chronological time, or “secular” time, is the idea that one thing happens after another. There is no meaning behind this ordering of events–it is ordinary time.
Higher time (kairos) is infused with meaning. It doesn’t replace ordinary time, but complements it.
Higher times “gather and re-order secular time” (Taylor 55). If you think of chronological time as a long rope, higher time takes that rope and ties it in a knot so places on the rope that are usually further apart, are now touching. These “kairotic knots” (54) meaningfully reorder time.
So, your birthday 2013 is closer in kairos time to your birthday in 2012, than it is to the other days that lie between them. This is because your birthdays all share the same meaning and the ordering of kairos time is one of meaning.
In the secular world, this is the only sort of time there is and I think we lose something if we view time as a mere sequence and neglect this other way of experiencing higher time.
What does this have to do with praise and worship songs? I think the songs we sing in church can go a long way in helping us to experience higher time.
Back when we sang from a hymnal, we’d sing the same songs every Easter In this way, the songs helped to connect all this Easter with every Easter I was alive for. But all these Easters were connected to every Easter all the way back to the first when Jesus asked Mary Magdalene, “Whom were you seeking?.”
The principle is the same with Christmas. We also sang the same songs at every funeral, and after the offerings were collected. The songs linked these events too each other in higher time.
The modern, secular view of reality is an impoverished view. This view of reality ought to be countered at every point if people are going to experience a life of fullness available in Christ. Certainly, the songs that we sing can help us to experience time as meaningful, but all aspects of communal worship can be looked at.
Perhaps a little more attention given to the traditional church calendar is worth a look.
Praise Songs: Metaphors that Work
Katheryn Scott’s “At the Foot of the Cross” contains these words:
Trade these ashes in for beauty
And wear forgiveness like a crown
Coming to kiss the feet of mercy
I lay every burden down
At the foot of the cross
I’ve sang this song quite a few times and the I have never sung it in the same way twice. That’s a good thing; we won’t always experience good poetry, good art of any kind, the same way. We will, however, experience bad poetry the same way every time. I’ve read Hamlet many times and it still surprises me. The same can be said for the songs of Josh Garrels and the book of Genesis. The best church songs will have the same quality. The presence and power of the figurative language contributes to the effectiveness of a song to bring some listeners into worship.
One of the first times I sang ”At the Foot of the Cross” I was caught by the idea of trading “ashes in for beauty.”
The next time I noticed that this phrase was preceded by the word “these.” This demonstrative pronoun puts the ashes I’m singing about right here–I walked into church covered in them. In Biblical language, to wear ashes, or “sackcloth and ashes,” is to demonstrate grief or repentance; importantly, it is an act of humility. This song, if sung honestly is a song of confession where the worshiper acknowledges his or her sin and the need for forgiveness.
By grace, these ashes are exchanged for beauty the song reminds us, for we are transformed to royalty as a crown is placed upon our heads. We aren’t just forgiven, but received as children of the King. This transformation occurs, not by our merit, but by the death of Jesus on the cross.
We sang this song in church again a few weeks ago. I was caught by the line “Coming to kiss the feet of mercy.” In Luke 7:38, there was a woman who had “lived a sinful life”–Luke doesn’t say she was a prostitute, but this is certainly likely. When I sing this line, I am placed in the position of a prostitute. This is the point and the power of the line. I cannot judge others when I remember that my sin is no less than that of the woman in Luke. But my guilt as well as the woman’s is, nonetheless, erased by Jesus death on the cross. She wept and wet his feet with tears and wiped them with her hair. This is the response that this line can evoke in those who sing it–overwhelming gratitude.
This is only one verse: there are two more that are just as powerful.
Not all the songs that we sing in church use metaphors like this–nor need they. Metaphor and allusion are but two tools that the poet might use. And there are many tools. However, when figurative language is used in a song, it should work to achieve the purpose of the song–in this case, lead those who sing it into confession–an awareness of ones guilt and gratitude in complete forgiveness.
This is an example of how figurative language (and allusion) can work powerfully in a song.
But then there are those praise and worship songs where the figures of speech get in the way of, well, praise and worship.
Here are some of the metaphor issues that completely distract me from engaging with the song:
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one dimensional comparisons just lie there with no meaning to explore in the comparison
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cliché–these metaphors are so overused so as to become meaningless
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barrage–when figures are so numerous that there is no opportunity to receive them
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metaphor mosaic–when figures are so completely unrelated that I don’t know if we are talking about clothing, branches, wind, or wineskins
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And then there are the dreaded mixed metaphors
Previous Posts on this topic:
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An English Teacher Looks at Praise and Worship Songs
One of the things we do in church is sing. I love singing. When I was a kid I didn’t; I think I must have driven the Sunday school teachers crazy. I was one of a group of boys who delighted in changing the lyrics of the Sunday school songs and then giggled at our cleverness.
I am much older now, and most of the time, the songs are very effective in bringing me, sometimes incrementally, to a place of worship. This is, I believe, the purpose of singing in church. But some songs, at least for me, can work contrary to this purpose.
In these cases, I just can’t get past something in the song and I end up focusing on what I believe is bad writing and not on the intention of the song–be that praise, thanksgiving, confession, prayer, or whatever.
I struggle with whether this is my problem; perhaps I am too critical. I am critical of movies, songs on the radio, books and restaurants, so it’s difficult to turn it off on Sunday morning. But maybe I should try harder.
On the other hand, perhaps everyone would benefit from praise and worship songs that overly critical people like me could sing without distraction. Would it not be better if the songs we can in church were excellent in every way?
I understand that there is a lot of personal preference in the songs we like or don’t like. This can’t be avoided entirely, but I believe there are objective standards to which I am appealing. As a matter of fact, some of the songs that I think are excellent I don’t particularly like. I understand that all human art is likely pretty poor to its heavenly audience no matter how good it is, but I do believe that it is important that our offerings of praise be our best, nonetheless.
My first impulse was to level an indictment at specific examples of songs that I believe fail artistically (or theologically). But, this approach can be upsetting and the point of the critique is completely missed. John Stackhouse wrote a blog critiquing inferior worship music and many were unable to receive what he had to say.
I thought it would be better to praise aspects of some songs that are excellent. My hope is that present and future worship leaders and song writers would give a great deal of thought to the songs they sing and write so as to powerfully serve the connection between mere human beings and their creator.
Next Post: Good Metaphors, Bad Metaphors
Fatal Attraction to Freedom
I used to have sheep, about a dozen ewes and a big ram named Joe. This combination resulted in about twenty lambs in the spring. Once these little ones discovered the wonderful world beyond the teat, they became a huge problem.
The ewes and Joe would happily eat the grass in the center of the field, but the young ones would walk around the perimeter of the pasture always testing the fence.
In the Modern West, “Our vision of freedom is primarily socio-political, with the greatest threat to human flourishing being the other, whether the Nazi, the slave-owner, or the autocrat.” The ancient conception of freedom what much different. They had “what could be called a more religious or philosophical vision of liberty, the greatest threat to human flourishing is the lack of wisdom, phronesis, or virtue” (Hunger Games and Dystopia).
My experience with my sheep tells me that the ancients have the truer understanding of freedom.
If my young sheep could get out, they would. This was a problem; outside the fence was death.
Death came in two forms. The first was coyotes. I don’t suppose any further explanation is needed on this point, but let’s say there no sheep would survive the night.
The second threat was grain. I had a lot of whole corn and high protein pellets on the farm to feed the 4,000 pigeons. There were also various grain-based feeds for the cows, sheep, pigs and horses. If these lambs got into any of this feed their behavior was predictable—they’d gobble up too much for their digestive systems to handle and they’d die. I’d find them with their legs sticking in the air.
Sheep eat grain with a kind of desperate ecstasy. I know this, because we fed it to them regularly. A few cups per day. If you ask a young sheep what he’d wish for if he could have anything, he’d ask for a pile of grain, and, the next time you saw him, he’d be on his back and his tongue would be blue.
When the Bible refers to people as sheep, don’t picture the white fluffy ones you see in all the Sunday school books. Picture one that spends all day striving for the glorious freedom beyond the fence.
Zombies Represent the Crisis of the Modern Idenity
The zombie functions as a monstrous other, transgressing boundaries and unsettling the modern identity, as monsters have always done. But, it goes beyond the scope of traditional monsters in that it also holds a mirror up to the secular self, and suggests, without the transcendent, we may nothing more than animated corpses, or worse. The zombie film further deprives us of the security of civilization, exposing human beings as Hobbesian brutes. The collective effect of these functions brings us to a crisis of identity and meaning.
In the pre-modern past, the self was a part of a cosmos seen as a “totality of existence because it [contained] the sense of ordered whole” (A Secular Age 60), and in this order held meaning for all things. In modern society, with the loss of the transcendent, any external referent by which we might understand the self has been removed and the modern self’s construction became an entirely interior process—reality is solely in the mind–“in the sense that things only have the meaning they do in that they awaken a certain response in us” (A Secular Age 31). To be a buffered subject, Taylor says, is to have “closed up the porous boundary between inside (thought) and outside (nature, the physical)” (A Secular Age 300). With this move from cosmic meaning to meaning residing only in the mind, the modern identity, then, can be understood largely by what it is not—by the things of which it has been emptied. It no longer has a place in a cosmic hierarchy of meaning, nor does it interact with spiritual forces or charged objects in an enchanted world.
The zombie, too, is defined by what is absent. Much has been lost in the anthropocentric turn away from the transcendent, and the zombie brings us face to face with who we are in the context of this loss. The zombie is the embodiment of this emptiness, for one of the key characteristics of the zombie is that it is “a body which has been hollowed out, emptied of selfhood” (Warner 357). It is essentially a “description of human existential diminishment” (367) that has been diminished one step further than has the ordinary resident of modernity. The zombie evokes despair and dread because it presents buffered selves with the potential of being absent from oneself. This is part of the horror of the zombie, especially in the early twentieth-century; it terrorizes the rationalist understanding of selfhood by exposing the fragility of subjectivity.
The zombie, too, is defined by what is absent.
The destruction of subjectivity is still a significant part of the horror of the zombie, but the events of the mid-twentieth century changed the conception of the self and therefore the monster that threatened it. After the horrors of the Holocaust and the use of the atomic bomb, faith in reason and the authority of science was abandoned, as had been faith in God in previous generations. This left humanity without any external authority. Sartre’s understanding of the self as existential agent is representative of the post WWII identity. Because “it is impossible for man to transcend human subjectivity,” the new authority was the self. He believed that unlike the objective world, the existence of the self precedes its essence; “subjectivity must be the starting point.” Thus, we are completely free to choose our own purpose, our own meaning. Additionally, ideals or beliefs are not reality; action is the only reality, for the only way to determine the value of ideals or beliefs is to perform and act which confirms or defines it” (“Existentialism is a Humanism”).
Putting these ideas together, we can claim that, in the post-nuclear world we understand the self as existential agent. Boon suggests that human action “in the absence of any external locus of truth—that is, in the absence of a reliable ‘other’ in whom/which faith can be placed—must face the threat of engulfment by the world.” For the existential agent, the greatest fear, then, is that “it will be absorbed by the other and thus be irretrievably lost” (Boon [in Better off Dead] 55-56). Taylor’s modern identity was buffered against anything transcendent, but now the self faces engulfment by the hostile immanent universe. Many of the deaths presented in zombie films are of a single screaming protagonist being pulled by countless cadaverous hands into the mass of the undead horde. This visually symbolizes the engulfment of the existential agent by the indifferent universe. Romero’s zombies are the embodiment of the challenge to the modern identity. When one becomes a zombie, one of many within the horde, the subjective self is annihilated and the existential agent is engulfed by a malicious world.
Previous zombie posts:
- A New Kind of Monster
- A Brief History
- Ain’t Got No Soul
- Where do zombies come from?
- Crossing Boundaries
- Why Zombies are Disgusting
- Horror of the Body
- Zombies and Death
- Zombies and Intimacy
- Zombies Ha Ha
- The Horde
- Zombie Evil? Not so much.
- Loss of Fullness
- Consumption of Traditional Values
- New Monster, New Hero
- Zombies ‘R Us
- Zombies as Consumers (They’re us)
- The Human Monster
- Zombies and Hobbes
Absence of Authority: Zombies and Hobbes
Zombie films evoke the fear of how people would respond if there were no authorities to keep the baser appetites in check. I must admit, for me this is the source of zombie terror for me. Without the authority represented by government or any transcendent moral authority, human beings turn on each other. This fear of others—indeed, of one’s neighbours—is the basis of Hobbes’ analysis in Leviathan published in 1651.
For Hobbes, the natural state of man, which exists outside the context of society, is one of war. According to Hobbes, all men are essentially equal in their vulnerability and weakness. Our natural equality and our conflicting desires result in a state of constant war with our fellow man. He also argues that competition, diffidence and desire for glory are in our nature, as we seek gain, safety and reputation. We, therefore, live in constant fear because we realize that at any moment we can have everything taken from us, including our life. This is a reasonable fear, for Hobbes says that we have a natural right to everything, “even to one another’s body,” but to avoid the constant state of war that would ensue, we create contracts in which we mutually transfer these rights. To ensure that the contracts are performed, a society needs a sovereign who will compel adherence to the contracts through force or through institutional constraints. We willingly subject ourselves to this authority because it protects us from the state of constant war with others. The zombie invasion returns us to a state of “continual fear and danger of violent death, [in which] the life of man [is] solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
The zombies usher in a world where this third group invokes their natural right “even to one another’s body,” and they can do this because there is no longer a “sovereign” to enforce the contracts that Hobbes describes. The loss of authority is central to zombie narratives. Zombies are certainly horrifying in and of themselves, but, as Bishop points out, “such monsters would not pose much of a threat if actualized in the modern-day world; most probably police or military could quickly exterminate these aberrations” (22). But zombie narratives are almost always set during (or shortly after) the collapse of civilization, and whatever remains of the police or military, or any other governmental organization, is completely ineffectual and more often, nonexistent. Zombie movies, then, “offer a worst-case scenario of the collapse of all American social and governmental structures. Once people start to die at an uncontrollable rate, panic rages through all levels of the government and the military—a literal ‘dog eat dog’” world” (Bishop 23). At the end of Night of the Living Dead, the zombies have been contained and are in the process of being eliminated; by the end of Dawn of the Dead, they have apparently overrun everything. Government, military and all other forms of civil authority evaporate. According to Hobbes, the sovereign is supposed to establish “security and order, enforcing our agreements with others, resolving disputes, and imposing punishment. Hobbes’ sovereign also determines the ideology of the state (what is right and wrong, just and unjust). Under his authority, good and evil are absolute” (Fahy [The Philosophy of Terror] 65). In the absence of such authority, there is no absolute ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ Because culture has reverted to a raw state of nature, only desire and aversion exist. In the absence of “good” and “evil,” each individual determines his or her own morality. We desire what is good and have an aversion to what is bad. But individual desires and aversions are pursued at the expense of those of others. This is the role that the other, monstrous, humans play in zombie narratives. The biker gang in Dawn of the Dead invades the mall to pillage it, and they will kill anyone—living or undead–to have their way. Because the living and the undead are both driven by almost equally base desires to “consume” the other, the zombie holds up a mirror to man, revealing what he is in a world without authority. The line between monster and human is blurred.
Previous zombie posts:
- A New Kind of Monster
- A Brief History
- Ain’t Got No Soul
- Where do zombies come from?
- Crossing Boundaries
- Why Zombies are Disgusting
- Horror of the Body
- Zombies and Death
- Zombies and Intimacy
- Zombies Ha Ha
- The Horde
- Zombie Evil? Not so much.
- Loss of Fullness
- Consumption of Traditional Values
- New Monster, New Hero
- Zombies ‘R Us
- Zombies as Consumers (They’re us)
- The Human Monster
The Human Monster
In Dawn of the Dead, the zombies are caricatures of the living in their spiritlessness, but in almost every zombie narrative, another boundary between the human and the monster is blurred—the living are frequently shown to be more monstrous than the walking dead.
The zombies certainly represent a serious external menace, but they cease to be much of a danger once the living humans have taken up a defensive position and fortified it. The real threat comes from the other human survivors on the inside of the barricades—“those who still think, plot, and act” (Bishop 39). As Dillard points out, “The living people are dangerous to each other . . . because they are human with all of the ordinary human failings.” Because “emotions such as fear, anger, hatred, and jealousy . . . are expressed only by the living,” these things come to seem “quintessentially human” ([American Horror] 22).
In his films, Romero clearly asserts that “the living have a certain propensity for murderous violence, territorialism, and irrationality—qualities that immediately surface during a crisis” (Waller 281). The zombies do not exhibit these negative human characteristics, but they always rise to the surface within the survival group. While the zombies attempt to consume the living, the flaws within human nature threaten to do the same from within the barricades.
The threat of the living is not only from within the survivor group, but outside it as well. Besides the zombie and the “hero”—the monster and the human, Romero’s movies include a third group in his films—the monstrous human. In these characters we see the worst and most inhuman behavior—again showing that the living are not that much different from the undead.
In Night of the Living Dead, this group is McClelland and his posse. Although engaged in a grizzly task, they do so with a heartless carelessness that ends in the unintentional murder of Ben. In Dawn of the Dead, the survival group is beset by lawless renegades on motorcycles, for whom “the only real sport left is slavery, torture, rape, and murder, the enactment of base appetites.” The zombies are shown to be less of a threat since they “don’t think or plan or scheme, they are mere animals to be avoided; other survivors, however, are more calculating and dangerous” (Bishop 24). Romero is showing us that “the true monster threatening civilization [is] humanity itself” (95).
Previous zombie posts:
- A New Kind of Monster
- A Brief History
- Ain’t Got No Soul
- Where do zombies come from?
- Crossing Boundaries
- Why Zombies are Disgusting
- Horror of the Body
- Zombies and Death
- Zombies and Intimacy
- Zombies Ha Ha
- The Horde
- Zombie Evil? Not so much.
- Loss of Fullness
- Consumption of Traditional Values
- New Monster, New Hero
- Zombies ‘R Us
- Zombies as Consumers (They’re us)
Zombies and Consumer culture
That the zombie is a reflections of modern man is apparent in Romero’s second installment of his zombie narratives, Dawn of the Dead (1978), where he “offers us a glimpse of a universe in which all spiritual values have been replaced by our awareness of the material realities of the corporeal and consumerism” (Russel 94-95).
In the beginning of Dawn of the Dead, heavily armed police are unable to evacuate residents and remove zombies from an apartment complex. It is clear that government authority is breaking down along with all other social institutions. In the face of complete social breakdown, the would-be-survivors seek solace in the modern spiritual temple—the shopping mall.
They find the mall occupied by animated corpses, the ultimate consumers, wandering aimlessly from shop to shop, apparently as unaware of each other as the crowds of shoppers on a normal day. One puzzled survivor asks, “What are they doing? Where are they going?” These questions underscore the otherness of the zombies, but the reply from another survivor shatters the barrier between the self and the other: “They’re us” (Dawn). The undead are just doing what they used to do in an important place in their lives, directed by the residues of memory and instinct.” Romero is explicit; consumer culture is a culture of zombies. Botting points out that the zombie/consumer “identification is reinforced by shots of survivors exchanging looks with zombies through shop windows, one group the mirror of another (Botting [in Gothic Science Fiction 1980 -
2010] 48).
So strong is the consumer impulse in the protagonists that, after clearing the mall of the undead, the survivors attempt to recreate and inhabit a pre-zombie world of consumerism. They take advantage of all the material pleasures that the shopping mall offers. Gradually, the ideal suburban home that they have created—including a TV that stays on, although it broadcasts only static—becomes not just a “safe haven,” but a “gilded cage” (Murphy 88); the material boon “is underwritten by emptiness as they lapse into frustration, bickering, anxiety and dissatisfaction” (Botting 49). After deconstructing all sources of fullness in Night of the Living Dead, in Dawn of the Dead, Romero turns his critical lens on the consumerism on which society relies to cope with the lack of meaning in modern society. The line between zombie and human is blurred as the undead are shown to be caricatures of the living.
Previous zombie posts:
- A New Kind of Monster
- A Brief History
- Ain’t Got No Soul
- Where do zombies come from?
- Crossing Boundaries
- Why Zombies are Disgusting
- Horror of the Body
- Zombies and Death
- Zombies and Intimacy
- Zombies Ha Ha
- The Horde
- Zombie Evil? Not so much.
- Loss of Fullness
- Consumption of Traditional Values
- New Monster, New Hero
- Zombies ‘R Us
Zombies ‘R Us
Hopefully, I have made the case that the modern zombie is a monster for our time. Like all monsters, they challenge cultural identity, but these are our monsters—our identity.
They are completely immanent; they possess no transcendent ability or power; they transgress immanent categories including between the self and the abject. They rip our bodies apart, reminding us of our own immanence, and they kill us, which in the modern understanding of death is annihilation.
They have no cause that gives them meaning; in fact, they pretty much chew up all traditional values. They don’t really represent evil any more than the heroes of Romero’s zombie narratives represent good. Further, they terrorize our individuality by annihilating it through absorption into the horde.
Zombies are unique in the monster pantheon. They not only represent the monstrous other. They also represent the monstrous self; they are a reflection of us—modern selves.
Previous zombie posts:
- A New Kind of Monster
- A Brief History
- Ain’t Got No Soul
- Where do zombies come from?
- Crossing Boundaries
- Why Zombies are Disgusting
- Horror of the Body
- Zombies and Death
- Zombies and Intimacy
- Zombies Ha Ha
- The Horde
- Zombie Evil? Not so much.
- Loss of Fullness
- Consumption of Traditional Values
- New Monster, New Hero
Heroism ain’t what it used to be
Beowulf and Achilles, now those were heroes. Even more recent literature has guys like Van Helsing and Aragorn. In his treatment of the hero, Alsford says that a hero is “fundamentally oriented towards the other”; the hero “gives him or herself to the world” (29). Zombie movies don’t have heroes like that. Our heroes have changed, because we have.
Wherever we find monsters, there, too, we also find heroes (Asma 23).
We hate monsters because they embody otherness–what we are not. Literary heroes represent ideals and ideas that are valued by a society. Like monsters, heroes change to reflect their contemporary cultural context.
Like all heroes, the heroes in zombie films “face crisis situations in which they must assume extraordinary personal responsibility and make exceedingly difficult choices” (Robinson [Fear] 23). The modern hero has to make these choices in a modern world and that means there is no transcendent ideal to guide these decisions. Their choices are often between some moral principle and their survival. The focus in these moments of crisis is on the agony of the choice, rather than on the sacrificial nature of the hero. And despite the agony, the choice is almost always in favor of survival. Thus, in zombie narratives, it is not really appropriate to call the protagonists heroes. For with the emphasis on survival, and without transcendent ideals, it is more accurate to call them “would-be survivors.” Simon Pegg points out that “the protagonists of zombie invasion movies are not superheroes or professional monster slayers like Van Helsing – they are common, average folk forced to ‘step up’ and defend themselves” (Bishop 117). So, just as the zombie is an immanent monster, the hero in the zombie narrative is an immanent hero.
Like monsters, heroes change to reflect their contemporary cultural context.
In Night of the Living Dead, the fate of the character Ben reveals the demise of the traditional hero. Despite his failings, Ben is “the closest any of the human beings in Night of the Living Dead come [sic] . . . to being the sort of hero that is found in previous monster narratives” (Waller 295-96). For lack of any better place to put it, the audience puts their faith in Ben. This faith is regularly challenged, however. Ben is protective of Barbara, but only somewhat so. When Barbara first enters the farmhouse, she discovers a partially consumed corpse and flees. Ben, having just arrived in a pickup truck, intercepts Barbara, and with a tire iron gallantly dispatches several lurching men, who are becoming numerous, and finally leads the hysterical Barbara back into the house. Ben is a hero defined, not by knowledge or depth of belief, but by his actions (Waller 284). As soon as he arrives at the farmhouse and discovers Barbara, he gets to work barricading the doors and windows. His heroism is rooted in a material and practical—the immanent domain.
After the others are discovered in the cellar, he seems to expect they “will prove to be as competent as he has proven and that help will come to those who help themselves” (Waller 285). He does not see himself as one who supersedes the others in ability. Whatever capacity he has, he expects it to be present in everyone else as well. The radio reports widespread attacks by people seemingly in a trance; later there are reports of widespread mass murders and cannibalism. The situation is stressful, and Ben does not always deal with it very well. He obviously lacks leadership skill, for example when he engages in bickering with Harry, or when he overreacts in anger on several occasions, the last of which results in his shooting of Harry with the rifle.
It is further obvious that he is not a traditional hero when he fails to save Barbara or any of the other temporary residents of the besieged farmhouse. He merely survives the night. In the morning, a posse, which has been killing the remaining zombies, approaches the house. Hearing them, Ben cautiously goes up the cellar stairs into the living room, and is mistakenly shot dead by a posse member who takes him for a zombie. His body is carried from the house and burned with the zombie corpses. Rather than standing next to the vanquished foe, or at least honoured by the survivors for his sacrificial victory, the hero instead lies, undistinguished, on a pile of dead monsters.
In Night of the Living Dead, the action is bookended between two scenes that “intimate that the zombie-human distinction is not that easily made” (Cooke 167). In the first sequence, a zombie is mistaken for a man, and, at the end, a man is mistaken for a zombie, and shot and burned as one. Thus, the movie gives its viewers a picture of a flattened world, for in the death of each character, we see the death of every previously-held source of fullness or meaning. In Ben’s death, we see the utter meaninglessness of everything in a world without the transcendent.
The immanent “hero” of this film burns like the great hero Beowulf, but this is no funeral pyre, but a garbage fire. There is little difference between hero and monster, given that Ben is laid upon a bonfire to be burned. Waller’s explanation of the action around the final bonfire reinforces the absence of any meaning that we can take from the film. The men in the posse have no idea they have misinterpreted the situation in shooting Ben; the movie audience alone is privy to this information. McClelland orders a deputy to burn the grisly heaps of the formerly undead. Because McClelland is the final human being we see in the film, Waller calls him the survivor. As such, we can look to him, and his fire, for those things that endure. He is “unemotional and almost cynically mater-of-fact. He is concerned not with explanations, but only with getting his job done. The work he is engaged in is just work and not a mission, much less a holy crusade” (Waller 297). Ben suffers exactly the same fate as the monsters, and the tragedy the night before is nothing more than a day’s work for McClelland and his men. McClelland’s attitude is what is required of secular man in the flattened world. The death of the thoroughly immanent hero symbolizes this symptom of the modern identity “whose very invulnerability opens it to the danger that not just evil spirits, cosmic forces or gods won’t ‘get to’ it, but that nothing significant will stand out for it” (A Secular Age 303). In Night of the Living Dead, “every convention of heroism is overturned by Romero’s script” (Russell 68).
In its treatment of the hero, Romero’s Night of the Living Dead reflects what Charles Taylor called the modern malaise. One of the effects of modernity is a malaise in which we get the sense that our lives “have been flattened or narrowed” (Malaise 4). The movie clearly illustrates the loss of the “heroic dimension of life,” at least of a sense of what we might call a higher purpose, “of something worth dying for” (Malaise 4). Taylor says that this sense of loss is inevitable given the “eclipse of the transcendent” (307). He distinguishes three forms that “the malaise of immanence may take.” First, is a “sense of the ‘fragility of meaning,’” the search for an over-arching significance; second, is the felt flatness of special moments in life; and lastly, is “the utter flatness, emptiness of the ordinary” (309). He suggests that this everyday lack can be the most painful and seems most significant for “people of some leisure and culture.” This malaise is, then, particularly acute for those who live in a consumer culture, who “feel [the] emptiness of the repeated, accelerating cycle of desire and fulfillment in consumer culture; the cardboard quality of bright supermarkets, or neat row housing in a clean suburb; the ugliness of slag heaps, or an aging industrial townscape” (309). The malaise of immanence that is felt so deeply in consumer culture is exploited in Romero’s second movie about the undead.
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