Writing Archive

Z3: DEAD BY XMAS

On this holly jolly eve, I'll be watching my favorite of the George Romero cycle, Dawn of the Dead, as I doze off to envisage shopping malls besieged the day after Christmas by bloodthirsty hordes of fetid, vicious ghouls. (Zombies, not shoppers.)

As night slips away into the lawn-display glory of Feliz Navidad, I think not about birth but living death, on an international scale. My Christmas tale: World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (NY: Crown Publishers, September 2006), by Max Brooks.

Of course, this all sounds less dramatic when I admit that the author is a former SNL writer and the son of comedian Mel Brooks. Surely, his 2003 how-to manual, The Zombie Survival Guide, is the stuff of mockumentary humor, like a FEMA plan for the unthinkable: here's how to fortify your house against, kill, and dispose of the living dead when they start coming back to feed on people.

The jacket of his latest book, World War Z, boasts that the Guide "formed the core of the world's civilian survival manuals during the Zombie War." Mimicking a work of nonfiction, WWZ takes the zombie apocalypse as a journalistic subject full of gravitas, with such acknowledgments as, "Some of the numerical and factual material contained in this edition was previously published under the auspices of the United Nations Postwar Commission."

This is where WWZ takes the zombie-mockumentary premise beyond a novelty gag, referencing also the pioneering "oral history" work of legendary Chicago journalist Studs Terkel. Like Terkel's interview portraiture of individual Americans in their own memorable, inflected voices, WWZ tries to capture the first-hand narratives of people from all over the planet who survived the near-extinction of humanity.

Their fragmentary recollections, sewn together with Brooks' questions, notes, and asides, create the meta-narrative of creeping death and a world torn to pieces.

Though Brooks doesn't populate his post-apocalypse with such distinct and distinguished voices as Terkel's, he nevertheless captures a sense of everyman shell-shock and triumph, as well as the social reflections and shirt-sleeve philosophizing of a Terkel text. (In the only non-ironic acknowledgment, Brooks says Terkel and Romero "made this book possible.")

Ranging the surviving peoples and places of Free Earth, WWZ pieces together the story of the Zombie War, starting with its origins as a viral outbreak in China and how world authorities ignored the crisis that eventually erupted into a Great Panic, on through to the turning of the tide. From official suppression and repression, to the final draconian solution that left masses to slaughter, Brooks' personal narratives chronicle how old conflicts faded, new fault lines formed, superpowers shifted, and population centers resurfaced after the massacre of nearly us all.

Seeming to freeze our current geopolitical moment, Brooks throws zombies into the mix to envision an alternate universe where elements of globalization set up the catastrophe and likewise make possible humanity's survival. It's a fairly obvious message that we can only survive by overcoming ignorance and division, our narrow-minded militarism and self-interest: "Who knows what we could have accomplished if we had only checked the politics and come together as human bloody beings" (WWZ).

Like an Atlantic Monthly "What If" foreign-policy scenario pitting the U.S. against North Korea or China, WWZ alludes to very real international contexts and currents that would form the backdrop to a global cataclysm. And the WWZ web site features a nifty atlas where you can hear the subjects of the oral history in audio clips, from their “interviews." The site captures not only those imagined voices but also the sense of scientific and technical verisimilitude of a Michael Crichton novel, or better yet, the pseudo-realistic narrative-framing of Daniel Defoe's savage survival classics, Robinson Crusoe (1719) and A Journal of the Plague Year (1722).

Overall, WWZ is a fun read that weaves the current shadows of international strife (epidemics, natural disasters, terrorism, warfare, eco-meltdown, nuclear proliferation) into a morality play of human will-to-live, much in the manner of grim novelist Cormac McCarthy's recent The Road. As an artifact of growing mainstream zombie culture, WWZ also pays off nicely with the shocking gore, destruction, and atrocity of a Romero movie, but writ large in globally conceived magnitude, envisioning entire megacities chewed to pieces in a helter skelter of viscera and hyper-violence.

I've written elsewhere about my zombie-obsession as childhood fascination with death, and then as the manifestation of childhood traumas, symbolized best by the vile movies I got to watch as a kid. Here, I'm reminded of George Romero's comment in an interview that his living-dead movies dramatize a new, revolutionary reality over-running a reactionary society, which is totally unprepared, outmoded, and doomed.

Every good zombie tale, thus, is not so much about an impossibly re-animated corpse coming to eat your brains, but about human savagery in the face of inevitable strife. As the creator of The Walking Dead comics puts it in Vol. 1 of that graphic epic, "Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in society... and our society's station in the world. They show us gore and violence and all that cool stuff too... but there's always an undercurrent of social commentary and thoughtfulness." (Find an online copy of WD Vol. 1 at the link above.)

WWZ feeds my enduring fascination with zombies — really, a creative obsession forged in childhood that in turn nourishes my imagination with primal, night-wailing imagery, to complement the hard features of reality with the idiosyncratic dressings of dreams.

And so, as I snooze to Dawn of the Dead's wailing ghouls wandering vacuous shopping-mall hell, the satire of brain-dead consumerism seems a fitting alternate-Christmas classic.
MERRY XMAS!

[...all zombie-art from The Walking Dead, an excellent comic-book series...]

POST SCRIPT
My sister says I'm "money"...
I couldn't claw out a zombie Xmas theme-song, so I just went with my current cerebral mood: self-indulgent, synthetic, noodlingly conceptual pulses of esoteric mind burps, thanks to MONEY MARK with "Maybe I'm Dead"...

Posted by Benjamin at December 24, 2006 09:23 PM