{"id":47680,"date":"2013-07-04T04:45:20","date_gmt":"2013-07-04T03:45:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/zombies-and-the-state\/47680\/"},"modified":"2013-07-04T04:45:20","modified_gmt":"2013-07-04T03:45:20","slug":"zombies-and-the-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/zombies-and-the-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Zombies and the State"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n


\n Horror Film as Neocon Fantasy<\/span><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n


\n by Ryan McMaken<\/a><\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

Recently
\n by Ryan McMaken: Pat
\n Buchanan on National Unity<\/a><\/i><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\n
\n \"\"<\/a>
\n <\/p>\n

World
\n War Z<\/a><\/i> (2013), Directed by Marc Forster<\/span><\/p>\n

In his book
\n on popular culture, The
\n End of Victory Culture<\/a><\/i>, Tom Englehardt identifies a narrative
\n employed in film he dubs the annihilation narrative. In films
\n where this narrative is employed, hordes of hostile savages lay
\n siege to a fortress inhabited by a virtuous population of defenders,
\n generally portrayed by white people. The set-up might also take
\n the form of a traveling band of innocents who are constantly in
\n danger of an ambush from hostile mobs of brown-skinned savages.
\n As Englehardt notes, this narrative of besieged freedom fighters
\n versus the dusky hordes has been<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\u2026[f]eatured
\n in thousands of movies, [and] its prototype was certainly the
\n band of Indians, whooping and circling the wagon train, but
\n “they” could be Arabs charging the North African fort
\n (Beau
\n Geste<\/a><\/i>), Chinese rushing the foreign legations (55
\n Days at Peking<\/i><\/a>), Mexicans rushing the Alamo (The
\n Alamo<\/a><\/i>), Japanese banzai-ing American foxholes (Bataan<\/a><\/i>),
\n or Chinese human-waving American lines (Retreat,
\n Hell!<\/a><\/i>).<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Obviously,
\n in 2013 it would be politically incorrect to portray white conquerors
\n mowing down non-whites (although that\u2019s still sometimes okay to
\n do with Muslims), so we turn to the undead as a stand-in for the
\n unwashed hordes who threatened us in the days of yore. <\/span><\/p>\n

Zombies are
\n convenient, of course, because they are not necessarily specific
\n to any particular race or culture, and modern viewing audiences
\n don\u2019t regard the human bodies being mowed down as truly human.
\n <\/span><\/p>\n

And yet extremely
\n similar political messages can be transmitted by employing a zombie
\n apocalypse plot as with an old fashioned tale of white victory
\n over savage natives. The heroes today, however, are no longer
\n necessarily white people, but are nevertheless agents of what
\n white people traditionally represented in 20th<\/sup> century
\n film, namely, order, civilization, safety, and enlightened rule;
\n and these things were in turn provided by the nation-state and
\n its army of military and scientific experts. <\/span><\/p>\n

World
\n War Z<\/i> excels in spades at employing these old models of the
\n annihilation genre, and its overall message can be summed up thusly:
\n we are threatened on all sized by hideous hordes of invaders,
\n and if it weren\u2019t for the government, we\u2019d all be dead. <\/span><\/p>\n

The movie
\n opens with a series of images of disasters, famines, mob violence,
\n disease epidemics and similar imagery. The overall effect of this
\n is to convince the viewer that things are spinning out of control,
\n and we are left wondering what can impose order. <\/span><\/p>\n

Shortly thereafter,
\n through the eyes of Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) we learn that Philadelphia
\n (where Lane and his family reside) is being overrun by apparently
\n zombified humans. <\/span><\/p>\n

With the
\n help of the U.S. Navy and Gerry\u2019s friends at the U.N., he is able
\n to escape to an American aircraft carrier where we learn that
\n Gerry is a former U.N. investigator and that he must now take
\n up his old responsibilities to learn the origins of the zombie
\n disease in hopes of stopping it. <\/span><\/p>\n

Gerry is
\n flown to South Korea, a suspected place of origin of the disease,
\n where he is protected by Navy SEALS and where he learns from a
\n rogue CIA agent that he may learn more if he takes his search
\n to Israel, where the Israeli state is effectively fighting off
\n the zombie invasion thanks to its garrison state.<\/span><\/p>\n

Gerry also
\n learns that North Korea is perhaps the one society that has effectively
\n contained the zombie disease by knocking out the teeth of all
\n 23 million of its inhabitants in a matter of days. Apparently,
\n zombies that cannot bite you cannot infect you. <\/span><\/p>\n

Gerry travels
\n to Israel where he finds Jerusalem surviving the apocalypse thanks
\n to all the walls it has built to contain the Palestinians. The
\n images of safe and free non-zombies protected on all sides by
\n fortress-like walls from a crushing mob of savage zombies, reminds
\n the viewer that the garrison state has many advantages. Indeed,
\n the more segregated and controlled a society is, the better. <\/span><\/p>\n

However,
\n lacking the hard-core totalitarianism of the North Koreans, even
\n Israel eventually succumbs to the hordes, although not without
\n a valiant and courageous fight put up by the highly-competent
\n Israeli regime. <\/span><\/p>\n

With the
\n help of the U.N., the U.S., Navy, The W.H.O., and a tough-as-nails
\n female Israeli soldier, Gerry is eventually able to devise a solution
\n that will finally allow the survivors to fight the zombies on
\n relatively equal terms. <\/span><\/p>\n

In the final
\n scenes, thanks to government airlifts and interventions, ordinary
\n people are able to avail themselves of this government-provided
\n cure and perhaps overcome the invaders. <\/span><\/p>\n

It is somewhat
\n difficult to overstate how profoundly authoritarian and statist
\n is World War Z<\/i>, and the film employs many of the Cold War-era
\n narrative elements that instructed viewers to trust and rely on
\n government experts and military might while regarding the general
\n population as nothing but a faceless, helpless mob. <\/span><\/p>\n

Thus, we
\n see in World War Z<\/i> some similarities with 1950s UFO films
\n in which government scientists and military personnel are our
\n last great hope, all wound up together with war movies or the
\n same era portraying Japanese, communist, and Arab invaders crushing
\n in upon outposts of (usually American) civilization. <\/span><\/p>\n

At the same
\n time, the film, while employing zombies as a plot device, is essentially
\n a movie about a disease pandemic like Outbreak<\/a><\/i>
\n (1995) and The
\n Andromeda Strain<\/a><\/i> (1971) and as such, the heroes in World
\n War Z<\/i> are the official state forces who seek to contain the
\n disease in the face of a clueless or panicking populace. <\/span><\/p>\n

It should
\n be noted, by the way, that zombie films need not employ these
\n narratives. Numerous zombie films and television shows, such as
\n Night
\n of the Living Dead<\/a><\/i> (1968) and The Walking Dead<\/i>
\n (2010- ) imply instead that survival is assured by localized resistance
\n or small bands of survivors who rebuild society in the new world.
\n In such cases, the central government is often nothing more than
\n a far-off and irrelevant memory. <\/span><\/p>\n

In World
\n War Z<\/i>, however, the sheer aggression and numerical advantage
\n of the zombies makes it pretty clear that total destruction of
\n the human race will be at hand without the efforts of Gerry and
\n his friends in high places. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Copyright
\n \u00a9 2013 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or
\n in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.<\/span><\/p>\n

Republished with permission from: Lew Rockwell<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Horror Film as Neocon Fantasy by Ryan McMaken Recently by Ryan McMaken: Pat Buchanan on National Unity World War Z (2013), Directed by Marc Forster In his book on popular culture, The End of Victory Culture, Tom Englehardt identifies a narrative employed in film he dubs the annihilation narrative. In films where this narrative is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-47680","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47680"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47680\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}