The Walking Dead, Season 1 Episodes 1 and 2 (2010)

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Guiding questions: 1. What is a trauma zombie, and what is its relation to the

modern zombie? 2. Based on your reading of this article, what sort of

psychological impact do you think a zombie apocalypse might have on individuals? On humanity?

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Better off dead: the evolution of the zorµbie as post-human I edited by Deborah Christie and Sarah,Juliet Lauro.-1st ed.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-3446-2 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8232-3447-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8232-3448-6 (epub) r. Zombies. 2. Zombies in popular culture. 3. Zombies in literature. 4- Zombies in motion pictures. I. Christie,

Deborah. II. Lauro, Sarah Juliet. GR58r.B48 20II

398.21-dc22 20II007494

Printed in the United States of America 13 12 II 5 4 3 2 I

First edition and On the Beach

NICK MUNTEAN

CHAPTER 6

Nuclear Death and Radical Hope in Dawn

of the Dead and On the Beach

Nick Muntean

Many zombie narratives, given the nature of their subject matter, take

place within apocalyptic or postapocalyptic settings; as the li ving, sentient

humans that populated the globe die and become the undead, the societies

they once composed disappear, creating a world without formal govern

ments, religions, or cultures. The possibility of such a post-human epoch

on Earth looms large as one of the most salient threats in zombie narra

tives, along with a fear of being devoured (and that of devouring others)

and the terror of losing one's sense of identity while nevertheless remain

ing (somewhat) alive.

As one might expect, then, many of the zombie narrative's thematic

elements are not limited to this genre. One such example is Stanley Kram

er's 1959 film On the Beach (an adaptation of Nevil Shute's 1957 novel of

the same name), wherein a global nuclear war has killed most of the

world's inhabitants, sparing only the residents of Australia, who are now

made to face the grim fate of slowly waiting for their deaths to be delivered

by trade winds imbued with the bombs' radioactive fallout. The general

narrative conflict of this film-that of a small group of survivors set against

near-global forces of death-is strikingly similar to that of George Rome

ro's 1978 Dawn of the Dead,1 save for the crucial difference that the antago

nists in the latter film are allegorical, while those of the former are all too

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82 Nick Muntean

real. Rather, in On the Beach it is the plight of the protagonists themselves that is allegorical, as their lonely, doomed postapocalyptic existences offer no source of hope or meaning, such that the characters' psychic annihila tion precedes their physical destruction, and life itself becomes a state of

waking death. It is in this sense that we may call the characters in On the Beach "trauma

zombies," as their normal symbolic processes of meaning-making (that is to say, ideology) are so disrupted that they are unable to maintain a coher ent identity and thus enter a muted, dazed state of being not unlike that of the traditional zombie. The trauma zombie, as suggested by its appella tion, is born of a traumatic incident or injury-typically a confrontation with a massive rupture or collapse of their social order-and becomes, like the zombie itself, both victim and perpetuator of its affliction. Of course, catastrophic events do not equally affect all characters within a film; for instance, in Night of the Living Dead (1968), Barbara (Judith O'Dea) is deeply traumatized by her first altercation with the zombies, leading to an unsettling catatonia that unnerves many of the other characters, such that her eventual willing submission to the crowd of flesh-eating undead comes as little surprise, for she had essentially become a zombie some time

before. The similarities between the respective narrative functions of the zom

bie and the trauma zombie-as well as their homologous psychic states are expressive of the shared sociohistorical origins of these two figures, and indicative of two similar strategies for narrativizing certain facets of our social reality that elude easy articulation or ready categorization. Much as some of these collective anxieties expressed through the zombie center around the disturbing dialectical reality of modern social prog ress-that society's technological development is only attained by a con comitant increase in the potential for society's own self-destruction-so, too, is the zombie creature itself a liminal figure, simultaneously both life and death, and yet not really either, a monstrous "degree zero" of human ity that defies easy categorization or explanation (which is perhaps, partly, what makes it so terrifying).

Stories that focus on these transgressive cre.atures may also constitute liminal narrative spaces, vexing interstices of fantastical horror and realist social critique that test the bounds of our conceptions of what constitutes the human. The same can be said for the social function of the trauma zombie, and the consistency of its signification, though its specific narra tive function often varies among different texts. Regardless of the different processes through which the trauma zombie is engendered, or the various

Nuclear Death and Radical Hope

ends to which it is deployed, the nature of the trauma zombie itself is quite consistent: a state of being that is both that of undeath and unlife. As will be shown, the trauma zombie articulates a profound-and profoundly modern-shift from older cultural attitudes about death: the process of dying no longer means the conveyance of our eternally unchanging soul to another, more timeless realm; rather, death becomes a state that we inhabit within our own earthly vessels, something we become, rather than somewhere we go to. What makes these figures most terrifying is that, despite the extremely brutal, and uniquely modern, conditions that have produced them, we can nonetheless recognize something of ourselves in them. That is, what might be most horrifying about these creatures-both the modern zombie and the trauma zombie-is the unspoken realization that these are the contours of our contemporary cultural nightmares, the conceivable ends reached by our collective capacity for self-disgust.

This emphasis on the "modern"-specifically, post-World War II concerns embodied by the zombie and the trauma zombie requires some explanation, as the zombie has been a part of Haitian culture for centu ries, and has been a fixture of American culture since the early 1930s. Thus, in the interests of analytic clarity, it is necessary to introduce the periodizing concept of the ."modern zombie." This term, referring as it does to the flesh-eating, master-less zombie figure introduced most memorably by George Romero in Night of the Living Dead, is meant to distinguish the Romero zombie from the earlier, Vodou zombie, in which a single (usually white) sorcerer figure would extend his will through the mesmeric command of (usually black) laborers. In contrast, the modern zombie figure lacks any such centralized figure of agency and control, and it is considerably more gruesome in appearance and behavior than the earlier Vodou zombie. Whereas one of the principal terrors in the Vodou zombie narratives was the loss of self-control and self-identity through the imposition of the will of another individual, the modern zombie is terrifying precisely because no singular agent acts to possess the victim's mind. Rather, it is society itself-the very same cultural, ideological, and material institutions through which an individual realizes him- or herself as a subject-that is ultimately responsible for the zom bie's terrifying dehumanization.

It is my contention that the modern zombie arose after the allegorical powers of the earlier form were exhausted, and more specifically, that the cultural impact of the atrocities of World War II (i.e., the Nazi concentra tion camps and the aftermath of the atomic explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki) rendered the psychological threat of the Vodou zombie (that of

Nick Muntean

losing one's autonomy to another) obsolete, replaced instead by the far more disturbing possibility of an existential anxiety (that one could con tinue to live, but be nothing), which is also articulated by the trauma zom bie. 2 These events, and their repercussions in our society's collective memory, have, for the zombie genre, functioned much like a Freudian traumatic scene, arresting the normal flow of psychic energy (e.g., the common tropes and patterns of the "premodern" zombie films), such that the genre became fixated on re-creating and re-presenting this original transformative moment.

We will return to the zombie genre's traumatic wounds at the end of this essay, as only then will we have all the appropriate evidence and argu ments. At present, a brief summary of the two films will set the stage for a consideration of the ways in which they foreground the traumatizing col lapse of ideological systems as centrally catalyzing narrative events. The post-ideological anxieties expressed by these films will lead to an explora tion of the cultural antecedents of the modern zombie and the trauma zombie, and the allegorical value of such figures for our society.

In Dawn of the Dead, the isolated zombie outbreaks introduced in Night of the Living Dead (caused by radiation emitted from a returning space probe) have swelled to critical levels, rendering entire cities into little more than charnel houses of the undead. In a besieged news station in: Philadelphia, two television reporters, Stephen (David Emge) and Fran-! cine (Gaylen Ross), join with two SWAT unit members, Peter (Ken Foree)j and Roger (Scott H. Reiniger), and flee the city in the station's helicopter, ultimately landing on top of a shopping mall. After clearing out the zom bies roaming its stores, they turn the mall into their own fortified resi dence. A zombie bites Roger while he is securing one of the mall's entrances, and Peter is forced to shoot him before he transforms into a zombie. Over the passing months, broadcasts from the outside world grad ually cease, and the group settles into a comfortable, if bored, lifestyle. Their delicate homeostasis is violated when a group of motorcycle-riding looters break through the mall's fortifications, with the zombies soon fol lowing suit. Stephen attempts to fight off the bikers but is attacked by zombies, and, upon becoming a zombie himself, leads a cadre of his undead brethren to Francine and Peter's hiding spot. Peter kills Stephen, and Francine and Peter head to the helicopter on the mall's roof; while Francine prepares the helicopter for takeoff, Peter appears ready to com mit suicide-by-zombie, finally deciding at the last moment to join Fran cine in her flight to safety.

Nuclear Death and Radical Hope

Similarly, On the Beach features a small cadre of survivors set against an environment that has abruptly become sinister and strange. The year is 1964, and a global nuclear war has obliterated nearly all the world's popu lation. While Australia's geographic isolation and political neutrality saved it from direct destruction, deadly radioactive fallout has engulfed much of the Northern Hemisphere and is now slowly but inexorably advancing on the lives of the Australian survivors. An American submarine and its crew arrive in the port of Melbourne, whereupon the ship's captain, a recent widower, Cmdr. Dwight Lionel Towers (Gregory Peck), begins an osten sibly platonic affair with a local woman, Moira Davidson (Ava Gardner). Their relationship is interrupted, however, when the Australian Navy receives a radio signal emanating from somewhere around San Francisco. Hoping that the transmission might signal the continuing existence of life in the Northern Hemisphere, Towers quickly readies his crew and is accompanied by Lt. Cmdr. Peter Holmes (Anthony Perkins) of the Royal Australian Navy and the scientist Julian Osborne (Fred Astaire). After their long journey reveals that the signal was little more than a soda bottle knocking against a radio transceiver, the crew glumly returns to Australia to wait out their final days on Earth. Some, like Osborne, choose to spend their days living out the wild fantasies they would never have previously pursued (he competes in auto races), while others, such as Holmes, with his wife and young child, struggle to maintain familial cohesion and pur pose. Towers tries to come to terms with the knowledge that his family and everything he knew in the United States is now gone, and he vacillates between a desire to live out his final days in the company of Moira, and an austere sense of duty to honor the memory of his family. As the radioac tive gales move immanently near, the Australian government, in one of its final official acts, distributes suicide pills to those who would prefer not to suffer through the slow, anguishing death of radiation poisoning. Finally, the winds arrive and reduce everything, and everyone, to silence. In both of these (nearly) post-human environments, the characters are suddenly faced with a crisis of ideology. If we accept Louis Althusser's suggestion that ideology is "not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live,"3 then it is clear that both the zombies and the characters in the On the Beach are post-ideological in some sense. The zombies are beyond ideology due to certain neurochemical changes in their brains, and the characters in On the Beach can be considered post ideological insofar as there is no longer an extant system of larger "real relations" through which they can derive meaning. In both scenarios,

86 Nick Muntean

ideological subjects are forced by external conditions into mental states in which it becomes impossible to imagine oneself as a deliberative, con scious agent-the gap between one's interior mental state and the real relations of the world become an impassable chasm, such that ideological meaning-making ceases to function.

"While both films depict the mental circumstances that engender these post-ideological subjects as occurring under (or causing) extreme disrup tions in the social order, the type of psychological state they invoke also occurs in the real world, and is typically diagnosed as schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is characterized by the subject's profound detachment from the larger world, from a sense of helplessness or lack of agency that becomes sublimated into the creation of a new internal reality over which the subject, as its maker, has complete control. According to the psychohis torian Robert Jay Lifton, "At the ultimate level, [the schizophrenic's] absence of connection beyond the self, the sense of being cut off from the chain of being, from larger human relationships, leaves him with the feel ing that life is counterfeit, and that biological death is uneventful, because psychic death is everywhere."4 Lifton's remarks were made regarding the common psychological reaction to the threat of global nuclear warfare, though others have argued that this schizophrenic state is not specific only to the threat of nuclear weapons, but is more subtly induced simply through the experience of being human in the twentieth century.

The Frankfurt School theorist and practicing psychotherapist Erich Fromm shared Lifton's concern about the psychological consequences of the threat of nuclear annihilation, as he believed that a future global ther monuclear war was "perhaps [the] most likely possibility."5 Yet even if a nuclear war did not occur, he was not particularly optimistic about the possibilities for humankind's future, as he believed that the next hundred years would simply be a continuation of the alienation and automatization that defined modern life in the early twentieth century: "In the nineteenth century the problem was that God is dead; in the twentieth century the problem is that man is dead. In the nineteenth century inhumanity meant cruelty; in the twentieth century it means schizoid self-alienation. The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men become robots. True enough, robots do not rebel. But given man's nature, robots cannot live and remain sane, they become 'Golems,' they will destroy their world and themselves .because they cannot stand any longer the boredom of a meaningless life."6 For Fromm, the central ization and automation of managerial societies limits opportunities for self-expression and autonomy, but it does not fundamentally alter human

Nuclear Death and Radical Hope

nature. In his view, there is a fundamental kernel of "the human" inside each person, which may be repressed or otherwise truncated but will nev ertheless persist, no matter how contorted it may become. It is on this belief that he makes his claim that "schizoid self-alienation"-humanity's fractured estrangement from its own "natural" beliefs and desires-has in the twentieth century supplanted cruelty as humankind's defining problem.

As detailed before, this psychological state is clearly evidenced by the characters in On the Beach, though it is conspicuously absent from the behavior and manifest emotions of the characters in Dawn of the Dead rather, it is manifested by the zombies. The near-overwhelming presence of the zombies has seemingly the opposite effect on Dawn's protagonists, as their predicament emboldens them toward action, making them crave more life, not less. Perhaps this disparity might be due to a different ground state for the films' respective characters: in On the Beach, the char acters were in love with life before the catastrophic events that led them to become half-dead, whereas in Dawn of the Dead the characters were merely sleepwalking through their existences before their social order was disrupted by the zombies.

What these arguments regarding the schizophrenic state of modern humans fail to account for is the fact that the characters in both films are experiencing cataclysmic reorderings of their material environments, and, consequently, their ideological systems. Schizoid self-alienation is the response to a general state of affairs in the world, which, in these two films, are hyper-attenuated and brought to the most extreme conclusions, such that the relationship between the experience of viewers and those of the characters is that of metaphor, not mimesis. Indeed, considering the radically destabilizing circumstances experienced by the characters in the films, their responses are better understood not as those of schizophrenics, but of traumatized individuals.

The cause of trauma, argues Cathy Caruth, is "a shock that appears to work very much like a bodily threat but is in fact a break in the mind's experience of time. "7 This notion of a rupture in temporal order is usually understood as occurring in a flash of fleeting subjective experience-the traumatic event itself-though with respect to Dawn of the Dead and On the Beach, we can conceive of this traumatic event as extending to cover all the characters' post-social lives. Indeed, this interpretation seems consis tent with Freud's views on trauma, as he held that the most salient element of the traumatic event was not that of temporality, but rather of the eco nomics of stimulus and release, as the traumatic experience is one that

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"within a short period of time presents the mind with an increase of stimu lus too powerful to be dealt with or worked off in the normal way, and this may result in permanent disturbances of the manner in which energy operates. "a While the source of this traumatically overwhelming stimulus varies it is often some form of confrontation with immediate physical

harm or violence; crucially, though, for Freud the traumatic incident is one in which the victim does not experience physical injury, as he believed that the source of traumatic obsessional neurosis is the near-experiencing of the event, and that actual injuries directed energy away from the devel opment of the traumatic neuroses. 9 The zombie's infectious bite, then, can be understood as both physically and psychologically implicating the vic tim into the traumatic event of the zombie outbreak.

For those not bitten, however, or those who have survived the instanta neous flash of global nuclear war only to then await their own belated annihilation, the "missing" of the event-both temporally and physi cally-is an insuperable rupture, such that they will never be able to "fully know" it.10 In response to this alienation, the traumatized individual begins to relive the event through such cathexes as trauma dreams and the compulsive repetition of certain acts, in an attempt to retroactively gain control of the traumatic stimulus, and thereby reassert a sense of control over the traumatic event. 11

There are strong parallels between the epistemological severance th�t occurs through the traumatic experience and the ideological vastation of the post-social environment, as well as that of schizoid self-alienation, �s in all three scenarios the individual finds him- or herself in a world where the larger social structures through which we maintain our identities on a daily basis are either absent, inaccessible, or malicious. Given such a state of affairs, it is not surprising that the characters in both films then resort to patterns of behavior that might be considered a sort of "obsessional neurosis."

In Dawn of the Dead, the human characters maintain an internal sense of distinction from the undead hordes surrounding them through an outward display of accumulated cultural goods; hi-fi stereos, elegantly appointed living quarters, and meticulously prepared meals all serve as means through which the characters attempt to cohere and inhabit the patterns of the society of which they were once a part. While they are seemingly composing these symbolic structures anew, they are doing so using pre viously existing components, and in accord with the conventions and ide ologies of the pre-catastrophic period. But they do so not out of a belief that they are really living the same lives they once led-for all this occurs

Nuclear Death and Radical Hope 89

in a small, windowless complex of storage rooms inside a shopping mall but as an attempt to stave off the otherwise crushing alterity of their new environment by constructing a microcosm of the ideologies of their old existence.

Unlike the world of Romero's film, the characters in On the Beach are, as they wait for the radioactive winds to slowly envelop them, already dead. Just as the living dead in Romero's film are drawn to the shopping mall by what Stephen (David Emge) calls "some kind of instinct ... mem ory, of what they used to do," the characters in On the Beach maintain nearly exactly the same lifestyles and routines as they did before the nuclear war, such as enrolling in secretarial school or purchasing gifts for �amily members they know to be dead .. While some characters in the film are able to find a certain freedom in their imminent fate-Osborne fulfills a lifelong dream by entering highly dangerous car races-most are unable to accept their new reality, so much so that Towers ultimately decides to leave Moira and travel back to the United States in the submarine with his crew, despite knowing that such a journey will only allow him to die in a nation that no longer exists.

In Dawn of the Dead, the survivors engage in the cultural patterns of pre-apocalyptic society as a means of generating their own positive iden tity, of distinguishing themselves from the culture-less undead that sur round them. In On the Beach, these cultural patterns are employed not as a mark of differentiation but of sentimental solidarity: their behaviors are one with those of the deceased. In light of this, it comes as no surprise that all the characters in Dawn of the Dead make personal decisions in favor of life extension; indeed, the film's climactic moment is realized when Peter decides against suicide and pulls the gun from his temple to fire the bullet into the brain of an oncoming zombie. In contrast, the characters in On the Beach choose to administer government-issued cyanide capsules in lieu of attempting to outlive the radioactive winds. Perhaps it is that these characters, already made half-dead through their atemporal delu sions, find themselves consigned to Antonin Artaud's articulation of sui cide: "lf l commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again .... By suicide I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will."12 For the charac ters in On the Beach, it is only through self-destruction, and the manner in which it is performed, that they can erase their traumatic wounds and be at one with the meaning they desire.

Yet given the difference in the nature of the antagonists in the two films, it is unclear how the characters in Dawn of the Dead might hope to

90 Nick Muntean

achieve a similar symbolic wholeness or unity. While trauma theory and ideology help to explicate the plight of the survivors in both films, it does little to advance our understanding of the zombies themselves, who, being beyond consciousness and ideology, are beyond such theories as well. Rather, the zombie exists as pure drive-though the zombies perform a gruesome caricature of our ideologies, they do not, and cannot, believe in them or realize themselves as subjects through them13-and are therefore resistant to psychological probing.

The real-world anxieties about death by radiation poisoning expressed in On the Beach were not the product of idle worry or the overly speculative minds of science fiction writers, as the horrible consequences-both phys ical and social-of extreme radiation exposure were demonstrated by the plight of the hibakusha in postwar Japan. The hibakusha-those affected by radiation generated from the atomic bombs dropped by U.S. forces on Hiroshima and Nagasaki-became a pariah class, unable to find employ ment or housing, with this discrimination often extended to their children as well. 14 As they wandered amid the ruined streets in the days following the bombings, survivors described themselves as being like "walking ghosts" and "not really alive." Dr. Michihiko Hachiya, a Hiroshima physi cian who survived the initial blast, described the residents' behavior as they moved through the burnt-out city:

Those who were able walked silently towards the suburbs in the distant hills, their spirits broken, their initiative gone. When asked whence they had come, they pointed to the city and said, "that way": and when asked where they were going, pointed away from the city and said, "this way." They were so broken and confused that they moved and behaved like automatons. Their reactions had astonished outsiders who reported with amazement the spectacle of long files of people holding stolidly to a narrow, rough path when close by was a smooth easy road going in the same direction. The outsiders could not grasp the fact that they were witnessing the exodus of a people who walked in the realm ofdreams. One thing was common to everyone I saw-complete silence .... Why was everyone so quiet? . . . It was as though I walked through a gloomy, silent motion picture.15

In the immediate aftermath of the explosions, witnesses described seeing the wounded "near-naked, bleeding, faces disfigured and bloated from burns, arms held awkwardly away from the body to prevent friction with other burned areas."16 Many of the most severely injured hibakusha soon died from their injuries. Philip Morrison, a Cornell physicist who

Nuclear Death and Radical Hope 91

had worked on the Manhattan Project and was one of the first American civilians to visit Hiroshima, described how, because of radiation, "the blood does not coagulate, but oozes in many spots through the unbroken skin and internally seeps into the cavities of the body."17 The similarities between this account and the spectacle of the gruesome modern zombie introduced by George Romero are quite apparent, though such images are conspicuously absent from the decidedly more mainstream On the Beach.

In no small part, this omission may be due to the tight controls exerted by the American military and government on information released to the American public regarding the long-term effects of the bombs (in fact, they went so far as to deny the possibility of radiation poisoning in the initial months following the bombings).18 When the government did release photos of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they were panoramic images of destruction; human victims were almost entirely absent. American public opinion surrounding the ethicality of using nuclear weapons was decisively in favor of the government's decision throughout much of the 1940s, in no small part thanks to the extensive censorship campaign aimed at "Japanese propaganda" concerning radioactive fallout and its attendant diseases. Despite this early censorship, Soviet atomic weapons testing soon led the American government to publicize the effects of radiation in great detail, such that the general public was well aware of the general effects of radia tion by the time On the Beach was released in 1959.19

At the end of World War II, however, the United States was far more aware of a similar degradation of the human condition occurring on the other side of the globe, where the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps produced the Muse/manner, those prisoners so devastated by the condi tions of their imprisonment that they were reduced to such a state of bare existence that, years later, many survivors remained uncertain as to whether one could properly refer to these individuals as being fully human. Indeed, Giorgio Agamben notes that the title of Primo Levi's con centration camp memoir, Se questo e un uomo, literally means "if this is a man" (this text was first published in English as Survival in Auschwitz), suggesting that "in Auschwitz ethics begins precisely at the point where the Muselmann, the 'complete witness,' makes it forever impossible to dis tinguish between man and non-man."20

While the Muselmanner (literally "Muslims")21 were a small subset of those imprisoned in the concentration camps, their extreme condition had a profound impact on prisoners and guards alike.Jean Amery, a concentra tion camp survivor, provides a brief description of these individuals: "The so-called [Muselmann], as the camp language termed the prisoner who

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was giving up and given up by his comrades, no longer had room in his consciousness for the contrasts good or bad, noble or base, intellectual or unintellectual. He was a staggering corpse, a bundle of physical functions in its last convulsions. As hard as it may be for us to do so, we must exclude him from our considerations. "22

The excluded position of having given up and been given on by com rades places the Muselmann in a liminal category-they constitute "the untestifiable, that to which no one has borne witness,"23 yet they are, as suggested before, the "complete witness" of the inhumanity that lurks in man. But even then, this meta-witnessing would be partial and incomplete, as it could tell only of the inhuman side of the Muselmann, while another, separate account would have to be made of the human elements. The Muselmann, like the zombie, is a line, heterogeneous and indivisible, more terrifying in its unassimilable liminality than the dark region it delineates: "I remember that while we were going down the stairs leading to the baths, they had us accompanied by a group of Muse/manner, as we later called them-mummy-men, the living dead. They made them go down the stairs with us only to show them to us, as if to say, 'you'll become like them.' "24 The Muselmanner resembled the living dead not only in the unsettling blankness of their psychological states, but also in their outward appearance. While the physical process of becoming a Muselmann began with generalized malnutrition and starvation, it was only in the second stage that the transformation, both mental and physical, truly began t6 take hold. 25 The physical similarities between the Muselmanner and th� modern zombie are uncanny-even the language employed by survivors to describe them ("living dead," "staggering corpse") immediately denotes zombies. Yet the metaphysical similarities between the Muselmann-the complete witness-and the zombie are somewhat less immediately appar ent. It is precisely because he is unable to tell of the nightmarish condi tions of the concentration camps that the Muselmann becomes the complete witness of those horrors, just as the sublation of ideology into instinct simultaneously renders the zombie as both completely blank and the totalizing instantiation of the ideologies of late capitalism. The experi ence of the camps have so completely overwhelmed and annihilated the Muselmann's capacity to make sense of them that this silence itself serves as a testament to the unspeakably appalling nature of the camps, the reduc tion of unique individuals into pure symbols. In this sense, then, the mod ern zombie's mute lack of consciousness performs a similar function for modern society writ large, embodying the terrifyingly rapacious yet auton omous mechanisms through which subjects' consumption is purposed as a

Nuclear Death and Radical Hope 93

(re)productive act, the end point of the ideological and material processes through which late capitalism predicates its growth and stability on autophagic strategies of debt and credit.

Taken more figuratively, this description would also seem quite apt for the characters in On the Beach, who, with each passing day, spend an increasing amount of time staring blankly at the landscape that will soon become toxic with radioactivity. Yet their experience is a sort of doubling of this notion of the "complete witness," for not only does their predica ment symbolically condense the logical outcome of the prevailing ideolo gies of their day, but it also places them in a scenario where even if they possessed the language to articulate their experience, they would be unable to make an act of witnessing, as there would be no one alive to hear their stories. In this way, On the Beach forces the audience to directly confront its characters with a mixture of dread and pity (and perhaps a dash of schadenfreude), offering no safe positions of secondary identification through which we might find momentary respite. Dawn of the Dead, on the other hand, displaces the terror of the post-ideological subject onto the zombies, thereby providing the audience with a somewhat safer zone of secondary identification in the film's principal human protagonists; we feel safe because, in witnessing their horror and anxiety, we know that we are not alone in our emotions, that these are shared, "natural" responses to such scenarios.

If we are to take but one lesson away from that of the Muselmanner and hibakusha, perhaps it should be the radical new conception of death that they suggest. For unlike the traditional mode of dying, in which the cessation of biological and psychic processes occurs roughly simultane ously, the Muselmanner and hibakusha embody a gruesome reimagining of the process, in which physical death, believed to be preordained and imminent, becomes a prolonged process, both producing and produced by the psychic death, which precedes the nearly invisible moment at which the body's life functions cease. In this formulation, the modern zombie functions as the obverse of the necro-psychic processes of the characters in On the Beach.

Yet in identifying the ways in which the modern zombie and the charac ters in On the Beach reveal the dormant potentiality of the hibakusha and Muselmanner lurking within each and every one of us, we are made to confront the question of whether this is a uniquely modern condition, or some more universal aspect of humankind. For if the madness that pro duced the horrors of World War II was an isolated aberration from the prevailing behavior of modern societies, a fugitive perversion of human

94 Nick Muntean

nature, then perhaps the zombie is little more than a token reminder of this lamentable moment. But if this madness was, in fact, an inevitable manifestation of the developmental path of industrialized societies, of the trajectory of human evolution, then the zombie becomes a quite different figure altogether.

That is, if this madness is inherent to the human condition-and the continuing existence of nuclear proliferation suggests that, at the very least, it is a condition inherent to our modern epoch-then the modern Romero zombie, both in appearance and in its psychosocial, meaning, presents a damning choice: either this potentiality is always already inher ent within our conception of "the human," or it is some type of supernu merary element that has somehow affixed itself to human nature, perhaps parasitically, as a bacterium might function, or insidiously, by altering the very fabric of our nature, as radiation alters that which it comes into con tact with. On the Beach presents a similarly ambiguous scenario: has it always been possible for this profound, collective loss of hope and sense of humanity to arise (as perhaps could be found in medieval plague narra tives), or is this new zero-level of humanity a uniquely modern development?

Slavoj Zizek's writings on the Muselmanner may help to answer this question, as he argues that these figures are

the "zero-level" of humanity in the precise sense of what Hegel called "the night of the world," the withdrawal from engaged immersion in one's envi- ronment, the pure self-relating negativity which, as it were, "wipes the slate" and thus opens up the space for specifically human engagement. To put it in yet another way: the Muslim is not simply outside language ... he is the absence of language as such, silence as a positive fact, as the rock of impossibility, the Void, the background for speech to emerge against. In this precise sense, one can say that in order to "become human," to bridge the gap between animal immersion in the environment to human activity, we all, at some point, have had to be Muslims, to pass through the zero-level designated by this term.26

If we understand this "Void" in the language of ideology, then the hiba kusha and Muselmanner function as the potentiality inherent in the pre and post-ideological human, the bare margin of difference between humans an� animals that allows the former to become symbol-using crea tures. For Zizek, the existence of the Muselmanner and hibakusha reveals the traumatic kernel of inhumanity in us all, one that is timelessly and essentially human. The feelings of terror called forth in the presence of the

Nuclear Death and Radical Hope 95

Muselmanner and hibakusha are those of atavistic revulsion, a reminder of the nonself from which consciousness blossoms, and subsequently denies. In confronting this repressed primordial form, schizoid self-alienation is called forth in the space created between nonself and self, between the truth of that which everyone carries somewhere inside of them, and the cultivated sense of identity that can only stably function through the denial of that truth's existence. Thus, while the Muselmanner and hibakusha function to actuate these universally human anxieties, the means through which they do so-by recasting death as a state of being, rather than as a realm to which we pass, and the instrumentalized pro.cesses through which this is achieved-mark these figures as quintessentially modern expres sions of this ancient anxiety. If we were to consider this in the terms of literary analysis, we might say that the anxiety is the story, while the Muselmanner and hibakusha are its modern emplotments.

On the Beach, then, presents a scenario in which the characters are made to inhabit circumstances strikingly similar to those of these World War II atrocities, especially those of the hibakusha-a double emplotment, of sorts, of this age-old anxiety. Given the profound traumatic injuries inflicted on the hibakusha, it is not surprising that the characters in On the Beach are similarly affected. Extending the application of trauma theory beyond the film to the United States' cultural self-identity, On the Beach can be understood to function as a sort of trauma dream, a subject that Caruth argues perplexed even Freud "because it cannot be understood in ter�s of any wish or unconscious meaning, but is, purely and inexplicably, the literal return of the event against the will of the one it inhabits."27 On the Beach's bleak conclusion is fitting, then, as it does nothing to ameliorate its aura of fatalism and refrains from offering its characters (and the audi ence) any ersatz sense of hope.

Yet because the trauma zombie is a less figurative category than the modern zombie, it consistently retains a critical potential that the real zombie may, at certain times, lack. Upon being traumatized, sundered from their ideological and semantic systems, the trauma zombie is reduced to bare drives, that "untamed root that exists prior to all cultural develop ment, "28 a state of death in life that is the perverse obverse of the modern zombie's life in death. And yet it seems as though precisely what is lost in the characters of On the Beach is the belief in that essential kernel of the human, perhaps because the very act of belief itself is a cognitive luxury available only to those who possess a sustaining ideological and psycholog ical schema through which they can imagine themselves as conscious, deliberative agents. Indeed, the characters in On the Beach act as though

96 Nick Muntean

(perhaps rightly so) their deaths will also be the destruction of all human kind, such that they retreat into the obsolete habits and ideologies that sustained them in their pre-apocalyptic lives. This suggests that, for these characters, what makes us human is not anything inherent to the individ ual human itself, but rather is only accrued in the nexus of social relations through which we maintain ourselves and our systems of production (both material and conceptual). The most despairing element of the trauma zombie, then, is its own inability to recognize itself as being human, a negative feedback loop of dehumanizing anguish and alienation.

Both films seek to grapple with the implications of World War II-the heralding of the atomic age and the horrors of the concentration camps though both their generic forms and their period of production pro foundly influence the ways in which these anxieties are articulated and narratively resolved. Given the temporal proximity to the events and the urgency with which they resonated at the time, in addition to its more realist style and the use of the trauma zombie, it is not surprising that On the Beach directly confronts these issues in its narrative diegesis. Given the interval between World War II and the mid-r97os, and the sequence of displacements that occur, it is not surprising-though by no means inevi table-that Dawn of the Dead sublimates these anxieties into the figure 0f the zombie. Beyond this initial displacement ( of atomic fears away from radiation or culpable humans per se to that of the fantastical zombie fig ure) is the question of what narrative possibilities are then circumscribed. or overdetermined as a result.

In Night of the Living Dead, for instance, the confrontation between humanity and its abject double could be considered, at best, a stalemate, and at worst, humans ultimately destroy themselves in the process of attempting to destroy that which threatens them.29 In either event, the narrative possibility is provided for humans to triumph over the zombie threat through further violence-no deep soul-searching or self-criticism of the events that promulgated the zombie outbreak are required. Dawn takes this one step further by asserting that narrative resolution can be achieved without any final reckoning or culling, that the possibility of sur vival is reason enough to continue to hope. The full ideological and politi cal import of this maneuver is, of course, · open to debate, but it is important when discussing zombies to bear in mind that it is a trope that is both transgressive and self-limiting in equal measure.

Ultimately, the fact that Dawn of the Dead posits the possibility of social continuation is what sets it apart from On the Beach. That this optimism might only be possible through the use of the "fantasy bribe"30 of the

Nuclear Death and Radical Hope 97

zombie figure is perhaps secondary to its ultimate. optimism about the fate of the human race. Despite the chaos wrought by the excesses of consum erism and the military-industrial complex, Dawn suggests that humans do have the capability to adapt and change, that the zombie will not haunt humankind forever as its dark abject Other, but that, given the proper response, the undead will eventually be regarded as indicative of an extremely trying developmental period. That On the Beach expresses an opposing view on human nature is not a refutation of Dawn's position, but, rather, reveals that the question is ultimately not whether this zero level potentiality is inherent within us, but whether we believe that it is. For if we do, then this belief fully overdetermines our actions, rendering us without hope or the conviction that we can change our material exis tence, a state that renders us as little more than the walking dead.

The trauma zombie then functions as a conceptual twin of the modern zombie, complementing the critical (yet ultimately optimistic) function of the flesh-eating undead with a character that is less figurative yet more fatalistic. Bridging the gap between the allegorical horrors conceived by our collective imaginations and the actual horrors of the real world, the trauma zombie is a compelling character that serves to reveal more about the nature of zombies and the societies that deploy them as myths. What is most terrifying about these traumatized survivors, however, is not that they envy the dead, but rather that they are no longer even capable of envy, or any other human emotions. Instead, they inhabit a psychological realm of such unremitting barrenness that it is as though humankind never existed at all.

Notes to pages 77-90

40. Ibid. pg. 46. 41. Dillard. "Night of the Living Dead." pg. 23. 42. Zizek, Slavoj. "Welcome to the Desert of the Real!" The South Atlantic

Quarterly. Volume IOI, Number 2, Spring 2002, pg. 385-389. 43. Ibid. pg. 27. 44. Sutherland. "Rigor/Mortis." 72. 45. Lauro and Embry. "Zombie Manifesto." pg. IOI.

6. NUCLEAR DEATH AND RADICAL HOPE IN DAWN OF THE DEAD AND ON THE BEACH

Nick Muntean

1. The selection of Dawn of the Dead (1978) instead of Night of the Living Dead (1968) (which was made much closer to the time of On the Beach's production in 1959) is due to the fact that, compared with the isolated zombie outbreaks in Night of the Living Dead, in Dawn the zombie hordes have swelled to truly apocalyptic numbers, and therefore constitute an overwhelming global antagonism much closer in spirit to the radioactive winds of On the Beach.

2. One can continue this argument, as I have elsewhere, that the 9/u attacks engendered another epochal shift in the nature of the zombie form, as evidenced by the fast-moving, viral zombies of 28 Days Later (2002).

3. Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001. p. II 1.

4. Lifton, RobertJay. The Future of Immortality, and Other Essays for a Nuclear Age. New York: Basic Books, 1987. p. 154.

5. Fromm, Erich. The Sane Society. New York: Owl Books/Henry Holt, 1955. p. 359.

6. Ibid. pp. 359-60. 7. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History.

Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. p. 61. 8. Freud, Sigmund. Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (r9r5-r7).

London: Hogarth Press, 1959. p. 16. 9. Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. New York: Norton, 1961.

p. II. IO. Caruth. Unclaimed Experience. p. 62. I I. Freud. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. p. 36. I z. Artaud, Antonin. "On Suicide." Artaud Anthology. New York: City

Lights Books, 1965, p. 56. 1 3. In this way, it is almost as if the zombies are post-ideological socio

paths, as they bear an outward semblance of humanness but have no sense of morality, empathy, or any other definitively "human " qualities. Yet the soci opath, despite acting in accord only with the whims of his or her own id, can

Notes to pages 90-9 5

nonetheless feign an air of-oftentimes quite charismatic-humanity, some thing unavailable to the zombie (but perhaps available to the vampire).

14. Boyer, Paul S. By the Bomb's Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994. p. xx.

15. Hachiya quoted in Lifton. Future of Immortality. pp. 150-51. 16. Lifton. Future of Immortality. p. 151. 17. Morrison quoted in Boyer. By the Bomb's Early Light. p. 78. 18. Lifton. Future of Immortality. p. 51. 19. Boyer. By the Bomb's Early Light. p. 307. 20. Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive.

New York: Zone Books, 2002. p. 47. 2 I. As Agamben extensively details in his book, the precise origins of the

term are unknown, but he believes that the most likely explanation "can be found in the literal meaning of the Arabic word muslim: the one who submits unconditionally to the will of God," which, in the context of Auschwitz, becomes "a loss of all [personal] will and consciousness." Remnants of Auschwitz. p. 45.

22. Amery quoted in ibid. p. 41. 2 3. Agamben. Remnants of Auschwitz. p. 41 24. Aldo Carpi quoted in ibid. p. 41. 2 5. "It was possible to ascertain that the second phase began when the

starving individual lost a third of his normal weight. If he continued losing weight, his facial expression also changed. His gaze became cloudy and his face took on an indifferent, mechanical, sad expression. His eyes became covered by a kind of layer and seemed deeply set in his face. His skin took on a pale gray color, becoming thin and hard like paper. He became very sensitive to every kind of infection and contagion, especially scabies. His hair became bristly, opaque, and split easily. His head became longer, his cheekbones and eye sockets became more pronounced. He breathed slowly: he spoke softly and with great difficulty. Depending on how long he had been in this state of malnutrition, he suffered from small or large edemas .... They excluded themselves from all relations to their environment. If they could still move around, they did so in slow motion, without bending their knees. They shivered since their body temperature usually fell below 98.7 degrees." Zdzislaw Ryn and Stanislaw Klodzinski quoted in Agamben. Remnants of Auschwitz. pp. 42-43.

26. Zizek, Slavoj. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (M_is)use of a Notion. New York: Verso, 2001. p. 77.

2 7. This recurrence occurs because the mind has been unable to give meaning to the traumatic event-or, as Caruth describes it, "the outside has

254 Notes to pages 95-IOI

gone inside without any mediation." Unclaimed Experience. p. 59. If we under stand those mediating agencies as that of consciousness and ideology, then the parallels between our groups are brought into even sharper relief, as the trau matizing objects are literally the specter of trauma itself.

28. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, 1970. p. 351.

29. The uncertainty here is indicative of the ambiguity of the ending, in which it appears as though the zombie threat is being brought under control by government authorities-which would count as humans "winning," in a way-but is achieved through the destruction of non-zombies such as Ben (Duane Jones), such that the very cycles of self-destructiveness that brought civilization to that crisis point are simply re-perpetuated.

30. Fredric Jameson describes the fantasy bribe as proof of a Utopian element in all mass culture texts: "The works of mass culture cannot be ideo logical without at one and the same time being implicitly or explicitly Utopian as well: they cannot manipulate unless they offer some genuine shred of content as a fantasy bribe to the public about to be so manipulated." "Reifi cation and Utopia in Mass Culture." Social Text. Winter 1979. p. 144.

7. LUCIO FULCI AND THE DECAYING DEFINITION OF ZOMBIE NARRATIVES Steven Zani and Kevin Meaux

r. Examples include race anxiety as the "meaning" of White Zombie, or Night of the Living Dead understood as a reaction to American fears about the spread of Communism.

2. The text is eerily prescient of future zombie film rhetoric. Tablet VI of Gilgamesh contains a threat from the goddess Ishtar that she will "break in the doors of hell and smash the bolts; there will be confusion of people, those above with those of the lower depths. I shall bring up the dead to eat food like the living, and the hosts of the dead will outnumber the living. Let the dead go up to eat the living! And the dead will outnumber the living!" Gilgamesh. Trans. John Gardner and John Maier (New York: Random House, 1985).

3. Further development of the plague/zombie theme that extends beyond the scope of this chapter can be found in Jennifer Cooke's Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory, and Film (New York: Macmillan, 2009), which treats the issue at length.

4. For thinking about zombies as a limit space for the very idea of human identity, see Nick Muntean's preceding essay in this book. While the account we are about to give here of plague narratives in literature is more attuned to questions of social dissolution on multiple levels, he addresses the same issues, and many more, on a more existential or individual register in zombie narratives.

Notes to pages IOI-I6 255

5. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron. Trans. Mark Musa and Peter Bondanella. (New York: Penguin, 2002), 9.

6. Ibid., r r. 7. Ibid., IO. 8. John Kelly, The Great Mortality. (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 85. 9. T homas Dekker, The Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker. Ed. F. P.

Wilson. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 26. IO. For a more in-depth exploration of how cannibalism is both literally

and metaphorically used in literature, see The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology andAnthropophagy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), which has become famous, if controversial, in cannibalism scholarship. For the brief original account of cannibalism by the androphagi, see Herodotus, The History of Herodotus. Trans. George Rawlinson. (New York: Tudor, 1956), 236.

rr. Dekker, Plague Pamphlets, 28. 12. Ibid., 30-31. r 3. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year. (New York: Norton,

r992), 41. 14. T hough obvious exceptions and parodic counter-texts exist, such as

Max Brooks's The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection from the Living Dead (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003), which argues precisely for employing such techniques.

r 5. Louis Landa, "Religion, Science, and Medicine in A Journal of the Plague Year." In Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, 2 76.

16. Paula Backscheider, "Preface." In Defoe,AJournal of the Plague Year, x. 17. Rebecca Totaro, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English

Literature from More to Milton. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005), 12-13.

18. Johannes Nohl, The Black Death: A Chronicle of the Plague. (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 54-

19. Sterno is a brand name that has become the generic term for jellied cooking fuel. Mixed with other liquids, it can be strained to remove its poisonous methanol content and consumed as an alcoholic beverage.

20. Steven Kellman, The Plague: Fiction and Resistance. (New York: Twayne, 1993), 3·

8. IMITATIONS OF LIFE: ZOMBIES AND THE SUBURBAN GOTHIC

Bernice Murphy

r. Douglas Sirk's best-known films include Magnificent Obsession (1953), All That Heaven Allows (1959), Written on the Wind (1956), and Imitation of Life (1958). T hey are notable for their sentimental, soap-opera content, mannered acting style, painstakingly composed color schemes, emotive scoring, and