It's the End of the World : But What Are We Really Afraid Of? (9781783964758) by Roberts, Adam (reading in the dark .TXT) 📗

The Night Eats the World (La nuit a dévoré le monde, directed by Dominique Rocher, 2018) the main character wakes after a party to find himself utterly alone in the aftermath of a zombie bloodbath. Despite adapting to survive in this new world, his isolation slowly drives him to madness and hallucination.

Groups fare little better: while mourning the loss of humankind, they must also constantly watch helplessly as their own members succumb to the plague, slowly taken over by death. Maggie (directed by Henry Hobson, 2015) may not be Arnold Schwarzenegger’s best-known movie, but it is one of his more interesting. In the film, a zombie pandemic – called ‘necroambulism’, another attempt to steer clear of the zombie cliché while embracing its symbolic power – has collapsed society; Arnie’s young daughter Maggie is bitten on the arm and Arnie nurses her as she descends into the inevitable zombification. For a while, and despite manifest deterioration (at one point she is woken by maggots wriggling in the dead flesh of her bitten arm), she carries on more-or-less as normal; but there is no cure, and they both know that when Maggie finally ‘turns’ her father will have to accept her ‘death’ head on – he will have to kill her. There’s real poignancy in this exploration of grief and loss. It speaks to the experiences of so many who have watched their loved ones’ lives slowly claimed by unstoppable diseases.

In reminding us of our mortality, zombies also force us to confront our physicality. They record our disgust at our own bodies’ senescence and the inevitable decay of our flesh. We are deteriorating even as we speak, transforming our physical appearance long before death takes us. But they also record a more particular terror: that our bodies’ decay will continue beyond our deaths.

This is all connected with a unique aspect of our relationship with our own bodies. There are things that we are – brave, intelligent, curious, loving, lazy and so on – and then there are things that we have, like clothes and books. But the body exists in both these categories, for we both have and are our bodies. Our culture’s fascination with body horror is one of the ways in which we address the fundamental weirdness of this fault line between having and being. On the one hand our bodies are bestial, disease-prone, decaying flesh that we yearn to escape; on the other, a life lived in the mind would be a barren sort of existence – real life involves inhabiting the real world while being mindful of the sensual richness of embodied experience.*

And while we might primarily think of our minds as being ‘us’, for many of us our bodies are a fundamental part of that identity, and the idea of leaving it rotting in the ground is not a pleasant one. What happens to our bodies after death has occupied us for millennia. Many of our burial practices are to do with grieving; but they are also to do with concern for what happens to our physical bodies. The Egyptians, for example, believed the body would be important in the next life, hence the process of mummification. In modern times, there are still processes to preserve the body, while others would rather be cremated than leave their bodies to slowly fester. Zombies perfectly capture the horror we might feel at the prospect of this, as we are forced to confront, in fascinated revulsion, these decomposing corpses outside of the grave.

So horrified are we by the knowledge that our bodies are already on that steady decline to putrefaction that there are people who undertake onerous medical and surgical intervention, and spend prodigious sums, to stamp out the signs of ageing, to project an illusion that their flesh does not and will not decay. We all know how that goes: beyond a certain point, the hysterical denial of our intrinsic fate becomes even more alarming and bizarre than simple acceptance. There is no stopping the ravaging effects of time.

Worse still, perhaps our fascination with zombies comes not from our fear of death but our fear that we won’t die, that our beings will never escape our bodies and that after our deaths we will neither move on to some spiritual plane nor cease to be, but will carry on, our souls and bodies rotting together – a terrifying idea. This is perhaps connected to the different indignities we might suffer as we age. We might be fully in command of our faculties, but trapped in a body that is deteriorating before our very eyes. Or our bodies are fit and healthy but our minds are slowly being taken over by dementia. Witnessing the gradual but unstoppable slide into the mindlessness of the zombie state is an awful experience suffered in real life by a million carers around the world, as their elderly loved ones succumb to Alzheimer’s disease.

In both their mindless and their rotting state, zombies speak to all our fears of what old age holds in store. In the stories we tell, when forced to confront what is happening to the people around them as they turn into unrecognisable creatures, the characters often question whether there is anything left of the original person. In reality, when our minds and our bodies eventually betray us, will we lose what it is to be ourselves?

Zombies are scary not because they are dead and they want us to die too, but because they are trapped in a never-ending state of dying, and they want us to be trapped too, in our decaying and deracinated selves. We may think we want to avoid the inevitable ending, death, but we also yearn for the peace death represents – a natural death, after a natural life, is the last thing of which we should be afraid. It is the inescapable decline of everything in life – the gradual rotting of our bodies, our minds, our societies and even our humanity – that is truly