And Say the Zombie Responded?
15
with them, and zombies kept in fighting arenas in order to have sporting
spectacles on which the humans can place bets.
Meanwhile, each time the humans go out to steal the resources of the
zombies, they always go at night so that they can shoot fireworks in the sky in
order to distract the zombies (who always look up in shock and awe) thus
making them easier to kill. All of this seems to be working well until one of the
zombies starts to become aware of what is going on. This is the African
American gas station attendant who is unnamed in the film but referred to as
“Big Daddy” in print because this is what the name-patch sewn on his uniform
says. He is defined, that is, by the job he had serving others. But still, the
revolution begins. And it begins with a visceral reaction to the violence that
always accompanies the human raids, especially as that violence leads to the
dismembering and beheading of zombies.
Big Daddy sees a fellow zombie lose a head, and, without eve n
understanding why, he starts to mourn. This is the beginning of the raising of his
consciousness. After he learns to mourn and see death for what it is, he starts
using tools, starts developing language, and starts organizing the other zombies
in something resembling an uprising as they march across the river bed and lay
siege to the walled-in city. It is as if what it means to possess logos is to have the
ability to mourn, and Big Daddy is on the way to a revolutionary logos. When
the zombies arrive, the viewer who has been paying attention is glad they are
there, rooting for them to take down their oppressors.
Here, the movie ends with a reference to how it began. Riley, one of the
humans who was a raider we met in the first scene but is now turned rebel,
speeds away from the city and stops to look at Big Daddy through his
binoculars. Their eyes meet once again across the distance. And this time, Riley
orders his second-in-command not to fire. “All they want is somewhere to go,”
he says. “Same as us.” It is a postcolonial zombie apocalypse that looks more
like a beginning than an end. It looks strangely like a chance for hope.
There remain two foundational questions we must consider in our
investigation of the nature of zombies, two philosophical questions of the
mouth: the question of cannibalism and the question of language. Why do the
zombies wish to eat humans, and why can they only moan and mutter as they
stumble along? These final inquiries are related, and they provide key pieces of
the puzzle if we are to understand fully what the zombie phenomenon is all
about.
Part of the horror of the zombie is that he or she might hunt and eat
you. And this is a true threat: to be consumed by our love of the Other. Within
the various fictional and artistic worlds inhabited by zombies, there is little
agreement as to why zombies crave human flesh. It is nearly part of the
definition of “zombie,” however, that they are constantly hungry and have a
craving for only one food-type.
In some sense, zombies are merely ravenous. The only real personality
trait all zombies have is that they are always hungry and always desiring human