Written late last year, obvz. Insert fresh metaphors and horrors since to suit…
The COVID-19 global pandemic. Black Lives Matter protests. The 2020 US Election. Zombies? The march of the undead mightn't seem like the missing piece to the puzzle of just what the actual fuck has been going on this year, but shuffling through the events of 2020 in the sweet embrace of a rotting corpse makes more sense than going maskless at a MAGA rally. As this annus horribilis draws to close, is there a better way to look back at it than through a blood-splattered lens and grimly chuckle at it all?
“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen,” Vladimir Lenin once said. His words from around a century ago have taken on new life in the minds of many of late, given a fresh coat of meaning just as his slowly decomposing body gets touched up, and put out for display each morning in his Red Square tomb. As 2019 ended, it was as disturbingly clear to anyone paying attention to events in Wuhan, China as the 2016 election result was to anyone that had braved Adam Curtis's Hypernormalisation exactly what challenges lay ahead for humanity. That 2019 would be the last time anyone could pretend things were vaguely normal again. This was especially true for Australians squinting through the bushfire haze enveloping their cities, dreading the new threats they saw coming on the horizon.
As COVID-19 spread around the world, despite China's best efforts to contain it, the alert was sounding in unexpected places – former Trump adviser, Steve Bannon, for one, screaming like Paul Revere to anyone that would listen that 'a plague was coming'. Mixing in his warnings with the usual white nationalist rhetoric of 'the great replacement' – that zombie'esque horde of black and brown folks he and his fellows continue to insist are coming to, as South Park memetically put it, take er jawbs. A weird enough scenario to commence the year, a foreshadowing of what was to come. Despite COVID-19's origins, and genuine weirdness compared to other 'mere flus,' continuing to be as a wrapped in mystery as the origin of a zombie outbreak. Its touted source being either within the Wuhan wet market or from the adjacent bio-research lab; making as much sense as the animal rights activists freeing the research monkeys in the opening scene of 28 Days Later, and just as forgotten.
Cillian Murphy wandering the empty streets of London makes Danny Boyle's film at least that prophetic (and would've been much easier, and eerier, to film mid-London lockdown).
The only saving grace of COVID-19 is that it hasn't fully ravaged the world like plagues past. That the streets aren't lined with corpses, let alone rampaging reanimated ones. That unlike the rage viruses of many a fictional bio-zombie plague, the only people raging out in real life have been those infected with mind viruses; COVID-19 quickly became a vector for the spread of QAnon and Pandemic conspiracy theories from the US to Europe and Australasia. Protesters assembling in hundreds to thousands, certain that what they'd read in private Facebook groups were secret truths the lamestream media were too afraid to broadcast to the unwashed masses. Their bodies captive to simplistic, zero calorie narratives that it's all a globalist plot to have them vaccinated and microchipped. Their naked faces contorted, screaming about the evils of 5G and its effect on their precious bodily fluids. Demanding their God-given right to a haircut. That their rage has only helped spread the diseases of both the body and the mind says more about the living than the undead; and that has always been the point of zombie fiction. Of a world sedated, sleepwalking into oblivion.
A pandemic was something most governments had at least in theory prepared for, yet all it showed up was the emptiness of so much security theatre that had been put in place to ward off the twin threats of terrorists and asylum seekers and the priority given to the fictional lives of economies over the real needs of flesh'n'blood people.
There was nothing preventing a truly bad actor from flying around the world with vials of bio-engineered plague, in the manner of the 12 Monkeys film... so long as they were white. That seminal bio-plague drama skipped over a zombie-free apocalypse to depict an aftermath of permanent, underground lockdown – itself a very resonant cli-fi vision – that required the magic of time travel to undo it all, if only the right point in time to change things could be found. The 2020 Edition of the potential 'end of history' being ushered in through the chaos created by the ineffectual handling of COVID-19 was welcomed by the emergence of the Boogaloo Bois into mainstream culture, and widespread praise of the survivalist mentality; scholarly books on bunkers given primetime viewing to an audience of basement dwellers and precariat ride-share drivers by the so-called intellectual dark web. Could this be the moment when these heroic, well-armed libertarians would take centre stage in their ill-fitting, dadcore uniform of Hawaiian shirts and jeans, and remake the world in their image? And what would that even look like? For that answer, one need go no further than the pure libertarian survivalist porn that is The Walking Dead. Now in its tenth season, and very much in its homesteading at the end of the world / beginning of the next one phase. Practicing the tactics of the Roman Legion to defeat the hordes of zombies; zombies clearly acting as proxies for all the barbarians they fear are lurching across their borders to take over their world. An audience yearning for a world swept clean by any and every apocalyptic event, so long as it spares them.
That this stems from a fundamental misreading of Darwin's idea of 'the survival of the fittest' is nowhere to be found in The Walking Dead. Because that would require it to function as a critique, instead of an escapist fantasy perpetuating the myth of the well-prepared, rugged chosen ones. Just as American Exceptionalism is hard-coded into so much of their imperial propaganda.
But in the land of South Korea, a more correct reading of Darwin can be found, one where the rugged individualists of The Walking Dead would free to tread; 'least they end up ground under the wheels of a pair of kids not just surviving, but thriving in a city populated by zombified citizens. Train to Busan gives a South Korean salaryman a gore-splattered redemption arc, as its central protagonist learns to listen to the wisdom of his child – to not just help others to survive, instead of thinking of his needs first, but ultimately sacrifice himself in a showdown with his Jungian shadow, so that the next generation can survives. Its sequel, Peninsula, released during the pandemic, takes this a step further. Explicitly showing the fallacy of the rugged survivor, making the 'hard choices'. That the fittest are those who can best adapt to the new world, not get caught up in remaking it in their image. And as this year closes, there's no better mindset to enter the next one with than that.