Yet More from Dr. Schlozman and the ZRC Take on Apocalyptic Fiction
Honestly, this guy gets around. We’ve talked about him before here on the ZRC blog, here and here.
Recently he penned a short blog post that went up on Boston.com, about his theory as to the allure of ‘End of the World’ fiction.
It’s worth a read for a remarkably candid glimpse into what’s wrong with Anti-Zombie authors and, I suppose, many of their readers:
Apocalyptic scenarios have been certainly been prevalent lately. Its hard to pick up a book, watch a movie, thumb through a graphic novel or play a video game without stumbling into some depiction of the End of everything on Earth. How strange it is that they we seem so intent on imagining our own demise.
To paraphrase the old saw, ‘What do you mean ‘we’, Dr. Schlozman?’
I mean, I haven’t written any Anti-Zombie novels recently. I don’t know anyone who has. Our ZRC pal Michelle Hartz wrote an expose about unfair working conditions for the Differently Animated, but that’s hardly the same thing as what *you’re* doing, Doc.
Moving right along, Dr. Schlozman talks about a disturbing book discussion session where he and some other authors peddle fearful stereotypes to children, and then he gets to the meat of his piece:
I even wrote a novel about a zombie apocalypse, in which I imagine 2/3 of humanity gone and the once mighty UN sitting proudly and secure on a tiny guarded island in the South Pacific. You know what? I think, sometimes, I’d like a bunker of my own.
…
Well, let’s first do a reality check. The seeming allure of “the End of Days” is all over popular fiction, but it might not be all that great. Consider those frightening moments when our fiction becomes reality. Any compunction we might indulge in wishing for the simplification that the End would afford quickly loses its fictional whimsy as we watch Japan, one of the most technologically advanced nations on Earth, struggle when the Earth itself literally begins to shake.
And yet, I will always remember the quiet, almost sheepish comment from a soft-spoken physician who was brave enough to offer his opinion on these matters last year at a national gathering of psychiatrists.
…
The doc who voiced his views had stayed behind in New Orleans when Katrina took her toll. Almost sheepishly he raised his hand and admitted, as if in confession, that sitting there trapped on the porch of his house, the hurricane and later its aftermath raging, there was something simple and straightforward about the gun he kept at his side. The buck really did stop with him, and though he was terrified, he knew at least exactly where he stood. Anyone who feels this kind of thinking doesn’t make sense needs to go back and watch Shane. When there’s no one to tell you what’s what, when the law is a three day ride from home, there is a freedom afforded by taking matters into your own hands.
(I’ll only briefly mention the utter hilarity of the phrase ‘the once mighty UN’, which has likely never before been penned in earnest, and would have had all my Poli-Sci profs rolling in the aisles back at IU.)
He closes with a paragraph on, essentially, being careful what you wish for in this regard, but never, and this is odd for a psychiatry professor, addresses the fundamental, dare I say it, madness in adults actually entertaining such fantastic nonsense.
Still, I think he’s done us all a service by putting this out there in the open. End of the World fiction is, I agree, about wish-fulfillment. Put simply, it’s the childish, violent, selfish, narcissistic desire for simplicity and control, and the entertainment of that desire, that drives the genre. It’s not in the least bit laudable, and the fact that so many find it a comforting pastime, an outlet for their stress and anxiety, is profoundly disturbing on a societal level.
Yet here I have the benefit of having my eyes opened on precisely this topic by someone else, and I’d be remiss in not sharing that insight.
Specifically I’m talking about the John Varley short story, ‘The Manhattan Phone Book (Abridged)’, written at the tail end of the mass insanity we refer to as the Cold War, in response to that era’s particular flavor of End Times fiction, where the world is wiped almost clean by atomic warfare.
Varley took issue with the entire genre of ‘after-the-bomb’ stories as being self-delusion wrapped up with self-importance, and the conclusion of the phone book story has always resonated with me. Whenever I see yet another Zombie Apocalypse tale where the author’s particular flavor of Noble Survivor, usually resembling the author in several important demographic respects, has to forge a new existence amongst the ‘Living Dead’, I think of Varley’s eloquent put-down of an earlier formulation of the same self-indulgent claptrap.
I’ll take the chance to excerpt my favorite part here, even though it’s a bit longer chunk than I would normally use:
We all love after-the-bomb stories. If we didn’t, why would there be so many of them? There’s something attractive about all those people being gone, about wandering in a depopulated world, scrounging cans of Campbell’s pork and beans, defending one’s family from marauders. Sure, it’s horrible, sure we weep for all those dead people. But some secret part of us thinks it would be good to survive, to start all over.
Secretly, we know we’ll survive. All those other folks will die. That’s what after-the-bomb stories are all about.
All those after-the-bomb stories were lies. Lies, lies, lies.
This is the only true after-the-bomb story you will ever read.
Everybody dies. Your father and mother are decapitated and crushed by a falling building. Rats eat their severed heads. Your husband is disemboweled. Your wife is blinded, flasburned, and crawls along a street of cinders until fear-crazed dogs eat her alive. Your brother and sister are incinerated in their homes, their bodies turned into fine powdery ash by firestorms. Your children… ah, I’m sorry, I hate to tell you this, but your children live a long time. Three eternal days. They spend those days puking their guts out, watching the flesh fall from their bodies, smelling the gangrene in their lacerated feet, and asking you why it happened. But you aren’t there to tell them.
In other words, and I’ll be far less eloquent here than Mr. Varley: grow up, Living Supremacists. All of you out there, writing and reading and shooting and filming and salivating over the simple prospect of taking control, of making the buck stop with you in some Zombie Apocalypse scenario where finally the world makes sense because you get to be in charge? Grow up. It isn’t a game, it isn’t funny, and quite frankly, it’s pathetic.
There is some awareness of this juvenile problem in Anti-Zombie fiction. Romero’s misanthropy prevents him from offering an easy out for his characters, and hence, audience, most of the time. Max Brooks appreciates the scale of the suffering in his virtual world, even if it’s from a videogame-like remove and with a certain amount of emotional detachment. Still, on the whole, it’s the bomb story all over again for Zombie Apocalypse fiction, only this time it isn’t even a distant nation or an atomic firestorm we’re told to fantasize about battling and cleaning up after, it’s our friends and neighbors, who we’ve supposedly been given permission to shoot in the head by.. the universe? God? Science? Medicine? Take your pick, depending on the source material.
The ‘Zombie Apocalypse’ thus takes after-the-bomb fiction one better, and removes the power of passing judgment on your fellow citizens from a planner in the Kremlin or the vagaries of blast damage, and places it in your hands. Holding, as Schlozman describes, a loaded gun.
Aimed, as often as not, at someone solely because they no longer have a pulse.
The Zombie Rights Campaign asks that all of us put aside these childish fantasies, as well as the hatred of Zombies spread by an Anti-Zombie media, and remember what Varley said: Everybody dies.
But sometimes, at least for Zombies, they come back. The ZRC is here to say that that’s no reason to hold it against the Differently Animated.
Update: Added some links and corrected a typo.
Update the longer: I thought this over a bit more while falling asleep, and I wanted to clarify; not ALL post-apocalyptic fiction suffers from the problem Varley outlines. You can be aware of the escapist trap and avoid it, and since humanity has in fact survived several historical events that could be accurately categorized as apocalyptic (the Black Death being an easy example, the Fall of Rome for the Romans, etc), it’s not like it’s a completely unrealistic scenario.
But the impulse that Dr. Schlozman describes, and half-heartedly waves away in his piece isn’t just some slightly-less-than-desirable frame of mind. It’s extremely unhealthy anti-social behavior. People like the patient he mentions who speak lovingly of how great it’d be to have an enormous disaster get rid of their worries about daily life are idiots or maniacs, not just misguided.
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