Engl 1301 zombie ppt
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English1302ZombiePowerPointPresentation-1-1.pptx
English 1302 Zombie Presentation
An introduction to the topic in 4 parts
Part 1: The History of the Zombie
From ancient origins to modern contexts.
The zombie in ancient Mythology and religious practices
The idea of resurrection itself is a variation on the zombie theme, and can be found in many religious practices including Christianity, but dating as far back as ancient Egyptian mythology in the Book of the Dead, in which under some circumstances, mummies can return to life. Ancient Greek mythology also contains stories of the dead occasionally returning to life.
The image to the right depicts the Egyptian region of Duat, or the underworld.
The “Zonbi” in Hatian religious and cultural practice
The term “Zombie” comes from the Hatian, “Zonbi” and refers to a rare practice, in which a human would be poisoned and subsequently made into a kind of permanent servant to the poisoner. This was a very rare practice, in which individuals would be poisoned with a substance that lowered their heart rate so drastically as to be imperceptible, at which point they were declared dead. Then, they would be brought back from burial rites to be used as servants to the living. Because the poisoning was especially strong, it typically resulted in brain damage, yielding an acquiescent, “zonbi” servant. Here is an article in Harvard Magazine that documents one actual case of this practice occurring: https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2017/10/are-zombies-real
The Hatian Zonbi is likely a real phenomonen, but it is NOT a part of regular Voodoo or Voodou practice--the contemporary idea of Vodoo’s use of the zonbi is largely just a myth fueled by racism and misunderstanding. A few early 20th century American films dealt with this myth explicitly. For the most part, these films depicted Hatian people in racist, simplistic manners and did not do justice to the reality of Hatian religious life.
The image to the left is titled “zonbi” and is painted by Hatian artist Wilson Bigaud. You can see here that Bigaud has used images of rope to highlight the subservient role of the zombie in relation to the man in control of them. This man also carries a bottle, probably a representation of the poison thought to be used to turn humans into zonbies.
The Modern cinematic zombie
The zombie as most of us know it comes to us via George Romero’s 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead. This film never mentions “zombies” as such, using the term “Ghouls” instead, but it is the first, and by far the most influential modern depiction of what would come to be known as the zombie. There is little relationship between this zombie and the Hatian zonbi, but it is certainly possible that some connections can be made.
Romero wrote and directed this film specifically for a small film festival, and did not expect it to even attain national cinematic reach, much less critical acclaim.
The image to the right is an original promotional poster for the 1968 film.
Zombies in Contemporary Times
Contemporary zombies have evolved somewhat since Romero brought them into being. In many instances they’ve become scarier, running faster and dealing out more brutality. In still other instances, they may seem less threatening, and actually possess some of the basic human qualities that earlier zombies lacked, like the ability to speak, to reason and even to care for others. This evolution of the zombie suggests that it is here to stay. Romero’s zombies will always be at the center of our understanding of the modern zombie, but contemporary depictions of zombies show that we have adapted them to many different scenarios and situations—they are a durable feature of our modern world.
In some cases, zombies even have begun to regain their most fundamental human qualities, a sign of the evolution of the concept of the zombie. Such is the case with the zombie named “R” in the film Warm Bodies, depicted at left.
Part 2: So, what IS a zombie?
Delineating Some Basic Characteristics
Zombies are the dead, returned to life
Zombies are creatures that were dead, but have been returned to some sort of animated existence, though not exactly to life as the living experience it. They have been reanimated but remain in some significant sense also still dead. Thus, a fundamental feature of a zombie is its duality as both living and dead, and also kind of neither.
In the image from French series, “Returned” on the left, we can see that the return of a dead family member in the distance will soon present problems for the living family members. As neither living nor dead, but “in-between” zombies challenge how we view our relationship to life, from the most fundamental levels of families to the broader organization of society itself.
Zombies arrive en masse
The zombie is a figure that seldom appears alone. Unlike vampires, who typically do their work alone and savor their solitude, zombies tend to arrive in mobs or masses. Moreover, it’s their large numbers that usually makes them scary. While we might fear one solitary vampire, no one gets scare of a single zombie. Thus, many critics view zombies as a reflection of the evolving human discomfort with mass society. As society grows, zombies seem to be more and more the central monsters we use to represent our concerns.
To the right is a zombie horde, as depicted in the tv series, “The Walking Dead”.
Zombies get hungry
Zombies are walking dead and thus they don’t have all the same kinds of fully formed wishes and desires as human beings, but they do still desire. What they tend to desire most is to eat—usually human flesh! This persistence of desire, in a somewhat alienated form after death, is a sign that zombies still represent some aspects of humanity itself. Zombies are fundamentally different than we are, but they still possess echoes of what they were when they were alive. In this, they are still comparable in some ways to living, breathing humans. Part of what makes them so scary, no doubt, is that they aren’t that different from who we are.
Modern zombies have longed to eat human flesh since they first appeared in George Romero’s groundbreaking 1968 film, Night of the Living Dead, but they weren’t specifically associated with brains until 1985, with the parody zombie film, Return of the Living Dead. The poster for this film is shown on the left.
Zombies are usually nonverbal
While there are some exceptions, zombies are typically incapable of speech and are generally thought to lack access to the symbolic realm of language altogether. Via this inability to speak, they are nearly lost to the world of meaning and exchange. Because of this, they are usually beyond the social order—an external threat to how we live and function.
Part 3: Some critical Issues in Zombie Studies
Sigmund Freud and zombies
Probably the most influential theories to be applied to zombie narratives comes from the field of psychoanalysis, in Sigmund Freud’s notions of the uncanny and the return of the repressed. The theory of “the uncanny” holds that when we encounter an object that resembles something we know, but in a new or unique circumstance, we often find the experience terrifying. This unusual combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar, for Freud, produces fear in a way that neither the familiar nor the unknown is capable of on its own. The zombie, having once been human, is a little bit familiar to us, but now being dead, is also wholly unfamiliar. Thus, the zombie is a classic instance of the uncanny.
Another idea to emerge from Freud’s theories is the return of the repressed. According to this idea, when we deny or repress our desires they don’t simply go away; they may wait around for a while, but eventually they come back, in an altered, and often uglier form. This theory clearly dovetails with the theory of the uncanny, and together they comprise the basis of a whole lot of zombie analysis. The re-emergence of the dead back into life is a harbinger or warning of something that has gone awry in our social fabric—a sign that something in our society that we’d thought we’d done away with has returned, most unnaturally. Thus, Freud’s thinking also sets the stage for understanding zombies not only as external threats, but also as potent representations of the worst of ourselves. In the Freudian view, Zombies come from us.
Zombies and mass society
Mass society can be defined by populations that have grown exponentially, usually because of industrial or economic innovations. Because zombies tend to arrive in masses, critics are often concerned with the way these monsters might be related to our own understanding of life in mass society. The French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari wrote that, “The only modern myth is the myth of zombies.” They understood that as society grew and expanded, it needed the zombie as a monster to represent its fears of the dangers inherent in this growth and expansion.
The zombie narrative challenges us to imagine ourselves in as members of an overwhelming social order-- often it can be difficult to tell just where society ends and the zombie begins. Consider the images on the right. The upper image is of a real-life busy airport during the early days of the COVID pandemic, as people rushed to get home to their families. The lower image is of a cinematic zombie horde. You can see how they resemble each-other, raising questions about the relationship between the human and the monstrous, under the conditions of modern mass society.
The zombie as “Other”
As we’ve discussed in the previous slide, zombies usually arrive en masse but they are also by definition outside of society. They represent an unassimilable mass—a group at odds with the social order. For this reason, the figure of the zombie has often been associated with real life groups of socially marginalized individuals, and zombie films interpreted as models for how our society views and deals with its marginalized members.
Sometimes, zombies can be depicted in deeply conservative ways, emphasizing their otherness as a reason to attack and destroy them. In other depictions, it’s not that simple, and zombies can be represented in ways that reveal the need to change our social order, to attend to the plights of our own marginalized individuals.
Consider the images at the right. The first is a photograph taken of actual Palestinians, seeking to gain entry to a part of their world that Israel has denied them. The lower image is from the film World War Z, in a scene that also takes place in Israel. Here, it is the zombie hordes who are massing to overtake a security wall built by Israel. As scholars have noted, it is clear that the film is producing propaganda, using the zombies as stand-ins for Palestinians, an ethnic group that Israel has consistently demonized and marginalized. Here, we can clearly see how the zombie narrative overlaps with very serious questions about otherness and social marginality.
Zombies and consumerism
One of the key features of our contemporary society is consumerism. The products we consume have in many ways become almost as important to us as our humanity itself. Perhaps because the one desire that still belongs to the zombie is to eat, or to consume, Zombies are often associated with consumerism in modern society.
The image on this slide is an original work of art by Steve Cutts, entitled “Social Media Zombies.” In this image, Cutts is relying on the mindless zombie trope to depict the consumption of social media as a kind of all-consuming, and deadening, desire. Zombie narratives call into question that which we consider most “vital” to capitalist society—consumerism itself; rather than seeing consumerism as vital, zombie narratives see it as deadening.
Zombies and death
A significant and seemingly somewhat unique feature of American culture is its tendency to avoid confronting death. For some critics, zombies represent a cultural attempt to compensate for this oversight—an attempt to really reconcile ourselves with death. We’ve discussed Freud’s idea of “the return of the repressed.” Perhaps our fixation on zombies is itself a return of our own cultural tendency to repress death, itself.
The attempt to make sense of death goes back a long way in human culture. To the right is an image from a performance of Hamlet, one of William Shakespeare’s most famous plays. In this scene, Hamlet has found a skull on the ground and it prompts him to contemplate his own mortality in a meaningful and moving way. Interestingly, the skull depicted in this particular image is real. It belonged to a man who loved the play Hamlet, and whose dying wish was that his skull be used in a performance of the play. The actor, David Tennant, granted the man his wish but said it still freaked him out a little bit.
The zombie Apocalypse and the possibility of a new world
In zombie narratives, the presence of zombies often precipitates a larger social catastrophe. This catastrophe does not simply result from the existence of the zombies, but also from the breakdowns in an already-fragile human social order. In this way, zombie narratives often make it possible to explore concerns that society has about itself. For many critics, zombie narratives bear witness to how fragile and at times broken our social order really is. On one hand, this can be seen as dystopian—a word for an imagined world in which our social order has broken down completely. But it can also be seen as a kind of hopeful wish for the possibility of starting over. While a zombie apocalypse is extreme, it is one way to begin to rethink our society from the standpoint of a fresh start. While the setting of the zombie apocalypse is usually quite dystopian, it can also be the start of something better, and potentially more humane, than what we have now.
Part 4: Zombies in Contemporary Culture
Zombies and Role Playing
Zombie narrative are obviously very important to our society, but we also sometimes go beyond these narratives, to actively make zombies a part of our lives.
For at least a decade, locally and nationally organized “zombie walks” have provided performative opportunities for people interested in zombie culture (and in cosplay more generally) to dress up and act out their best zombie impressions. This can give people a feeling of liberation from routine life, as well.
Images to the right are from a 2014 zombie walk outside of Minute Maid Park in Houston. Here’s a link to the Chronical article in which they originally appeared.
Zombie target practice and zombie Hunting
While there is a mostly positive embrace of the zombie, as evident in zombie walks, there is also plenty of evidence of a darker and more violent attitude toward zombies in such organized fantasy group activities as zombie hunting and zombie target practice. Of course, these zombies aren’t real but the shooting is, and the urge to practice for a future of all-out violence and mayhem is in some ways indicative of an underlying cruelty and fear inherent in modern society. Zombies can bring out the best in us, but also the worst.
This image to the right is an actual image of a “Zombie Safari” offered several years ago outside Dallas.
Zombies and Science
While zombies are typically the province of philosophical and theoretical analysis, rather than of hard science, scientists have historically found the idea of the zombie fascinating. More and more, zombie films engage directly with the idea of medical contagion in a believable, and scientifically plausible way. At one point, the CDC actually put out an online link to prepare citizens for the possibility of a zombie apocalypse. The brochure was done for comedy and for promotion of more serious safety concerns, not to be taken seriously. But living through the COVID pandemic is teaching us all that there is a proximity between real-life disaster and zombie apocalypse. It has torn use apart as a country in many ways, and left some skeptical of even the most basic science, while others look to science for answers and solutions. At left is an actual image from the CDC’s tongue in cheek zombie preparedness campaign.
Scientists are interested in the zombie narrative as a template for how to handle pandemic-style disasters, but they are also interested in the idea of altered consciousness that zombie brains represent. In analytical philosophy and science, thinkers have frequently postulated the possibility of a “zombie” brain as a kind of thought experiment with relevant implications for scientific and medical thinking of real-world physical issues affecting the human body and mind.
Zombies in Literature, Part 1
Literary writers have often imagined what the world would be like from beyond the realm of the living. Many of Emily Dickinson’s poems, for instance, are voiced by individuals speaking from beyond the grave. Check out the poem to the right, “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” as an example of this voicing.
In this poem, Dickinson euphemistically characterizes death as a suitor and the speaker as the one who has been “courted” away from her life. This exploration shows the way that the human fascination with consciousness beyond death has existed for a long time.
Zombies in Literature, Part 2
Still other writers, like T.S. Eliot, have depicted living individuals as “dead” in form or function. This is different than Dickinson, writing poems that speak from beyond the dead. Instead, Eliot is considering life through the motif of death.
His poem, “The Waste Land” depicts busy, tired workers walking over the London Bridge at the end of the day, as “dead” in order to show how defeated they are, and how defeating the modern world is to their spirits. This kind of depiction anticipates the way that zombie films sometimes depict human society itself as “zombie-like” See the relevant lines from “The Waste Land” on the right.
“Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.”
