Tag: Charles Taylor (Page 2 of 2)

Ahmadreza89 / Pixabay

The type of death one can expect from a zombie is nothing if not intimate.  They use no secondary object, like a knife or even a rock.  They use only their own teeth and hands.  Victims are frequently shown having their abdomens violated by a group of zombies who proceed to then put the vitals into their mouths.  Like I said—intimate.

In our culture we resist intimacy.  There was a time when servants would bathe and dress their betters, but nowadays we have a hard time carrying on a conversation with someone standing next to us at the urinal.

Charles Taylor observes that our culture is characterized by a “withdrawal from certain modes of intimacy, as well as taking a distance from certain bodily functions” (Taylor 137).  Taylor cites the work of Norbert Elias in his book, The Civilizing Process, where he describes a shift involving a “steady raising of the threshold of embarrassment, one might even say, disgust” (Taylor 138).  Where once people were advised not to blow one’s nose in the tablecloth, we now insist on leaving the table to perform the same act.

We are uncomfortable with intimate connections to others.  It is the convention that bodily functions are not even mentioned.  How much more offensive is the disembowelment and consumption of entrails witnessed regularly in a zombie film.

Clearly, this is a monstrous affront to our modern sensibilities.

Next zombie post: Zombies are Funny

Ahmadreza89 / Pixabay

The idea of the dead walking among the living has been around for a long time.  In Inferno, Dante meets Fra Albergio tells him of traitors like himself who are dead before their bodies die. Dante is horrified; he has seen one of these men the friar describes, one that “eats, and drinks, and sleeps, and puts on clothes” (33.141) but is, nevertheless, dead. In Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors walks Dr. Pinch, who is described as “a living dead man” (5.1.241).

Isn’t it strange that both Dante and Shakespeare conceived of the zombie, but it never caught on as a monster?

Zombies never caught on . . .until now

Zombies sure have caught on lately.  The zombie is one of the most popular monsters of the last century. Over four hundred zombie movies have been made and almost half of these since 2000 (see Wikipedia, “List of Zombie Films” and do the math)

So why the popularity of zombies now and not before?

The short answer is that monsters show up when our identity is under is threatened.  Not our individual identity, but our collective identity.  The form the monster takes has everything to do with what our collective identity is, and where it is vulnerable.  The popularity of the most recent addition to the monster pantheon, the zombie, suggests that it is representative of that which menaces our contemporary collective identity. Consequently, we can learn a lot about ourselves by paying some attention to our monster, the zombie.

George Romero’s in Night of the Living Dead (1968) presents us with the “modern” zombie. He changed earlier ideas of the undead and the transformation embodies exactly what scares the crap out of the modern identity.  What is this modern identity?

[click_to_tweet tweet=”The zombie is a horrifying reflection of the modern self in a world without transcendence—it is, therefore, a monster for our time. #Zombie #TheMeaningofZombies” quote=”The zombie is a horrifying reflection of the modern self in a world without transcendence—it is, therefore, a monster for our time.”]

The Modern Identity

This is a complex question, but at its most basic, the Modern identity is materialistic.

Our society made the turn toward materialism over a century ago.  Materialism in the philosophical sense is the idea reality is composed of matter.  Only matter.  Everything, including thought, feeling, mind, consciousness and will, can be explained in physical terms.

In other words, there is no spiritual reality, no transcendent — no God or gods, angels, demons; no objective Good, Truth, or Beauty, no universal meaning or human purpose.

This is what Friedrich Nietzsche had in mind when he voiced this idea through the madman in The Gay Science (1882) declaring the death of God. This idea didn’t immediately percolate down to the popular level of our culture.  It was beginning to be felt in the 1960s.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”The implications of materialism are one of the key features of the Dead in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. #Zombies #NightoftheLivingDead” quote=”The implications of materialism are one of the key features of the Dead in Romero’s Night of the Living Dead.”]

My thesis is that the zombie is a horrifying reflection of the modern self in a world without transcendence—it is, therefore, a monster for our time.

Next zombie post: Zombies (2): The Apocalypse