It just wouldn’t be a week monitoring the pop-culture/journalism feeds without another piece that combines ivory tower cloud-talking with dubious historical analysis to frame a piece expressing befuddlement with, and general distaste for, the presence and popularity of the Differently Animated in media:

What are we to make of AMC’s The Walking Dead? The question is perhaps overly vague, so I should clarify: if we proceed from the truism that filmic monsters express certain fears and anxieties in the cultural imaginary, what are the walking dead of The Walking Dead telling us?

The question proceeds in part from the unavoidable sense that we seem to be approaching zombie exhaustion—a critical mass of the living dead on film, television, prose fiction, and video games. If we start from 1932’s classic White Zombie (not the first zombie film ever made, but as good an arbitrary starting point as any), between 1932 and 2002, there were 224 films produced featuring zombies or the living dead—which gives an average of just over three zombie films per year during that period.1 Since 2002 however those numbers have snowballed. 2003 saw twenty-six zombie films; 2004 and 2005 thirty-eight and thirty-nine, respectively; and those numbers continued to rise, topping out in 2010 at sixty-nine films, for a total of 378 films over the past seven years—an average of fifty-four films per year. And that doesn’t include the predictable glut of prose fiction about the living dead or gimmicks like Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice with Zombies; nor does it include such video games as Left for Dead. At what point does this trend exhaust itself?

We’ve been over this turf before; indeed, this article relies heavily on the same tired ‘count the number of Zombie movies produced and listed in a year, ignore the number of films made in total or the relative percentage of films’ analysis that we previously discussed.

Honestly, if someone tries to compare the era when a handful of big Hollywood studios made everything that was called a ‘movie’ to the era when half the high school kids in America can shoot, edit and self-publish their own films in high-definition (using cameras that fit in their back pockets) as if they’re remotely equivalent, instead of completely different creative worlds?

Just walk away. It’s not a serious conversation. This is equivalent to looking at the market for leaded gasoline in the 1932 vs 2010, then concluding that nobody drove last year because nobody bought leaded gas.

*rolls eyes*

I would legitimately be interested in a serious and thoughtful analysis, comparing market share, percentage of published films, perhaps self-reported data on interests in various film genres (assuming it exists over that long of a period) and the like, to seriously and legitimately answer the question of how popular, in a historical context, Zombie movies really are.

I haven’t SEEN that analysis yet; instead we get stuff like this, or the io9 piece I dissected a few months back, which cram a bunch of lists from Wikipedia into a blender, ignore the ongoing transformative results of the technological singularity we all live inside, and pretend an apple isn’t just comparable to an orange, it IS an orange, just an oddly crunchy one.

Next up, we get a riff on how Zombie movies are becoming more and more respectable, at least in terms of mainstream taste, as they are accepted into the worlds of high brow television, major hollywood features, etc.

Not exactly a breathtakingly original line of thought, and it’s clearly patronizing to the independent film; in fact, the article entirely ignores the contemporaneous arthouse/indie horror film circuit and its contributions to the Zombie film genre. Nothing whatsoever is said about movies like Cabine of the Dead, George’s Intervention, Closure, Lonely, Slices of Life at all.

*shrug*

Finally we get to my personal favorite portion of these navel-gazing articles, the Grand Theory of Zombies and What They Mean:

That being said, perhaps the innocuous nature of the zombies in The Walking Dead is not merely a reflection of the genre’s new excess, but of excess more broadly: the embodiment of the nightmare of detritus, surplus, the indivisible remainder. Zombies are, after all, quite simply dead that won’t stay dead; and not only will they not stay dead, they want to turn you into one of them, and will keep coming, mindlessly, inexorably, until you destroy their brain. That, in a nutshell, is the Romero conception, and while it may suffer variations on that theme, it has become more or less the norm—which is to say, we don’t often see voodoo-raised zombies any more. Zombies and their rage-infected fellow travelers exert the fascination they do because they are the ultimate embodiment of what Julia Kristeva figures as “abjection”—the abject, she says, has the singular identity of “that of being opposed to I”; it is something inescapably Other, that which is excess to us. It is that which is “ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated.”

Actually a lot of what most people think is attributable to Romero isn’t his at all; many popular Zombie tropes come from Russo, O’Bannon, Fulci, Peter Jackson, Boyle, Snyder or others. On the surface Kirkman’s particular ‘Zombies’ are largely Romero-esque, but in some important ways they differ, particularly in the manner that Romero flirts with the idea that he hates humanity even more than Zombiekind, whereas Kirkman’s allegiance is pretty clearly with his (flawed, largely interchangeable) protagonists. Romero has in the past made Zombies into characters, if not very pleasant ones; for Kirkman and The Walking Dead that’s as absurd as worrying about the characterization of individual raindrops in a thunderstorm.

Moving beyond that, and simplifying the lit-crit language a bit, Zombies apparently represent The Other, which we can’t accept and integrate, nor can we completely ignore.

Yeah. That’s helpful and specific, and not at all completely based on the author’s personal feelings and prejudices about the Differently Animated. Really. Completely solid, objective reasoning.

Oh to have a desk to bang my head upon.

To recap Flowtv and Christopher Lockett:

1) There are more Zombie movies being made today (when everybody and their brother has a camera) than in the 30s
2) Mainstream media is paying more attention to Zombies, therefore they’re closer to real ‘art’
3) Zombies represent The Other

To quote the inestimable movie Airplane, “Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.”

Tags: Journamalism, Robert Kirkman, Romero, Television

This entry was posted by John Sears on Sunday, January 16th, 2011 at 12:19 am and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.