And Say the Zombie Responded?
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presence of our lost loved ones, the present absence of the Other, is real.
Zombies are a way of working this out in popular culture. And if we try to love
that Other in the mode of presently-absent, we risk loving an image rather than a
person. We risk horror. Similarly, for Christians there is a real presence of the
divine—an actual presence that must be taken seriously. But if we worship the
resurrected flesh and the sketchy metaphysics that supports it, we commit
idolatry. Jesus warns us against this, but many Christians fail to listen. In zombie
terms, if we take the zombie to be our loved-one, we are soon going to face
horror and die ourselves. That zombie that is walking around is not what our
loved one was really fully about. And in Christian terms, if we take the
resurrected Jesus to be Christ, if we think that this is what Christianity is fully all
about, we miss the point, we wallow in the depths of the sacrilegious, and we
will face horror and die ourselves.
Of course, there are zombie moments in culture that are somewhere
between Jeffrey Dahmer and Jesus Christ. If the threat of the zombie is the
threat of idolatry and narcissism, then we must always be worried about how we
treat our dead. Vladimir Lenin demanded that his body be destroyed after his
death precisely so that it could never be kept as an idol, as a false object of love,
thus replacing the living revolution that demanded the Russian people’s full
libidinal attention. But we are a species of zombie-lovers, never wanting to take
the harder path. Consequently, early in the 1920s influential members of the
Russian Cosmism movement argued the need to have cryogenic equipment on
hand at all times in case of Lenin’s death. Their plan was to preserve the leader
and his brain for a full-body resurrection at some unknown future date. Though
Lenin gave clear orders that nothing of the sort was to be done—because to have
the body still there after death would truly jeopardize the Soviet state—doctors
were secretly told instead to prepare to mummify Lenin’s body should the leader
pass. And it was thus that in January 1924, just three days after his death (the
same amount of time it took Jesus), Lenin returned to greet the people of
Moscow in his vacuum-sealed glass crypt.
The “real” zombie is thus related to the cult of personality. The real
zombie is there to stand in for those we have lost, beckoning us to commit those
sins of ego, those sins of idolatry, that doom us. No wonder most zombies in the
movies move so slowly. They don’t need to chase us down. We are drawn to
them. And worse yet, we know that each of us will someday become one of
them. Whether we are bitten and infected now or simply die from natural causes
later, if the dead walk the Earth, this is our shared fate. Every single person will
someday become a zombie—each of us haunting the world with the echo of our
selfhood, driving those who loved us and whom we have left behind to the
horror of that very same realization.
Over the last ten years, “zombie walks” have been growing in
popularity. In large cities, college towns, and all over really, people dress up as
zombies, meet at a mall or on some street, and then proceed to walk, stalk, and
moan their way around. They wear the clothes of everyday people—the sorts of