The cinematic tsunami of dehumanized humanity dissolves under mechanized slaughter: This very special effect recalls and re-configures historical experiences for which the term nightmare is quite inadequate. It operates as cathartic memory dump and also, or so may we reasonably conjecture, as preparatory exercise in desensitization, but Daniel Drezner, foreign policy analyst and zombie aficionado, is worried about the adaptation of World War Z for other reasons. His concern is that the film-makers may be injuring the precious work of literary art, especially by focusing on what appears to be a conventional hero, played by world-bettering superstar Brad Pitt, of a type absent from the original narrative. “The closest thing to a strategic savior in the book,” notes Drezner, “is a despised Afrikaaner who modif[ies] a decades-old plan to preserve the apartheid government.” Whatever the possible omission may say about the movie, the origin of the book’s final zombie solution supports a certain theory of the political unconscious of the genre. As we have discussed, the zombie “holocaust” re-animates revolution and revelation as insurrection of the resurrected and two-sided genocidal war for the fun of it. Equality becomes destruction itself, utopia becomes necropolis, in a shockingly familiar materialization of total negation (“consummate negativity“). In those images from WWZ, it is as though the stacks of corpses shown to the world in 1945 and ever after – human bodies “like cordwood,” in the famous phrase – have all at once swirled up to undying vengeance. On the level of political-military history, the accelerated human wave assault re-enacts and compresses the ultimate tactic and counter-tactic of class struggle. On the intimate level, within the triangle of audience member, character, and zombie, we simply seek ecstasy in escalating depravation. The female lead character dies by emergency amateur Caesarian section, with coup de grace administered by her twelve-year-old son, though true fans may hope-fear that similar deeds, in keeping with the apocalyptic aesthetic, will in future be brought spectacularly to view rather than left respectably buried offscreen. Either way, macro or micro, imaged or merely imagined, movie or book, recollection or forecast, it is the same worse-better sadomasochism; the invigoratingly deadening, actively suspended inter-annihilation of opposites; unboundedly self-canceling and self-extending deathbirth; end of the world without end; schizo-hallucinated mass martyrdom in the media Colosseum without walls or borders (“and no religion, too”). It must be serious business, this empty escapism.
Well, I’ve still never gotten into what really bothers me the most about THE WALKING DEAD and other mass kill scenarios: Why aren’t there more flies? There would be zillions of flies. It’s the zombie movie equivalent of noise in outer space.
Well that scene in New York. that figures prominently in the trailer, doesn’t come up until quite a ways into the story, the book opening up in China, and segueing to Israel, and parts west, and east