‘A Cure For Dead’ Pushes the Prejudice that Zombies are Inherently Bad and Need to be ‘Cured’
Posted By John Sears on March 15, 2011
Bear with me a bit as I actually employ my degree in Criminal Justice/Political Science a bit, folks:
Frequently in Anti-Zombie fiction, we are presented with a certain narrative, that of the Reluctant Protagonist Who Must Combat the Zombie Hordes. In this storyline, the protagonist, despite acting like a sociopathic madman or madwoman, looting, pillaging, and laying waste to the countryside, is in fact ‘justified’ by the savage turn of events the world has taken. His victims, err, ‘enemies’, are Zombies, or the particular misunderstanding thereof employed by the creative personality behind the Anti-Zombie movie/book/game.
The Reluctant Protagonist does not want to do these terrible things to Zombies, you understand. He/she simply must, because they are inherently subhuman creatures and would do awful things if left to their own devices. Pity the Zombie, these films say, but double-tap them just the same.
This repulsive line of thought has historical parallels, in case anyone is wondering. In the 19th century, Criminal Justice went through a revolution under what is called the ‘Positivist’ School. Simply put, Positivists searched for an objective basis to measure crime and determine what a crime was, rather than crime being defined simply as something that breaks the law. Positivists had some good ideas, but unfortunately, many of them attempted to combine late 19th century understandings of Biology to crime, and the result was what is now called the ‘Italian School’.
Have you seen the episode of The Simpsons, by chance, where Mr. Burns reveals he is a fan of phrenology, the measuring of skulls to determine mental traits? He famously dismissed Mr. Smither’s criticism of phrenology as quackery by stating:
“Of course you’d say that…you have the brainpan of a stagecoach tilter!”
That, in a nutshell, is the Italian School. Criminality, or other undesirable behaviors, is the result of the criminal being an evolutionary throwback, a lesser breed of humanity. (Or, sometimes, the result of brain damage.) In any case, the criminal population was to be managed clinically, generally locked up as long as possible, because crime was biology, and as such neither deterrence nor rehabilitation were possible. It was a short step from the Italian School to the adoption of Eugenics policies designed to ‘fix’ the problem of a criminal population once and for all by removing it from existence, one way or another.
I bring this up to point out how, despite this school of thought being thrown out ages ago with regard to the Living, it still predominates the average person’s understanding of Zombies today. Zombies are inherently criminals, or so the average American believes; they cannot help feasting upon the flesh of the living, particularly their delicious brains. It’s not their ‘fault’ per se, and they are often depicted as objects of pity (witness Bub the Zombie in ‘Day of the Dead’) by even the most hardcore Anti-Zombie directors and authors.
This has the benefit of allowing the directors and writers of these media projects to reconcile the obviously improper behavior on display by the lead characters with pre-existing notions of decency and proper behavior. Via Italian School-style assumptions about the Differently Animated population, we can handwave away the aggression and psychosis of the main characters of an average Anti-Zombie; it’s not their fault either, you see. Biology demands headshots.
Riiight.
Into this sorry tradition of moral rationalization comes ‘A Cure For Dead’, a new Anti-Zombie web series whose trailer I have posted below. Essentially we are presented with a standard Zombie Apocalypse scenario, but the twist is, some boffins have discovered a ‘cure’ for Zombiism. Now the one surviving member of this scientific team needs to journey through hostile territory (aka the Zombie Community) and he recruits a team of experienced Survivors/spree killers to help him do just that:
We are presented here with a sort of idealized fantasy of Italian School positivism. If the Zombie Apocalypse was written by Cesare Lombroso, it might look exactly like this. Only, you know, in Italian, I suppose. Here we have a population who are doomed to crime via biology, especially the crime of devouring our plucky protagonists (which has to rate as a misdemeanor at most, considering how annoying Survivors usually are).
Doomed, unless the noble academic can implement a plan to cure them of their inherent inferiority through applied biological science. Eugenics in a glowing green syringe.
Needless to say, The Zombie Rights Campaign takes a very, very dim view of this premise. Historically, such views have only led to tragedy and violence, and that is precisely what we see, even in this short trailer, from ‘A Cure For Dead’.
Zombies are people too, and may indeed have a fundamentally different biology from the Living, but that does not alter in any way their underlying sameness when it comes to our shared humanity. ‘Curing’ a Zombie is an assault on individual identity and a declaration of war against an already oppressed and marginalized population that only wants to live side by side with the Living. That’s terrible, and it’s what the ZRC is here to combat.
Thus, based on the available materials, the ZRC can tentatively brand ‘A Cure For Dead’ with our lowest mark, that of Living Supremacist. Stay tuned for further evaluation as episodes become available.
