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48
However, besides the clear visual and aural markers that might serve to designate
other forms of the undead as more “aristocratic” than Romero-style zombies—pristine
features vs. decomposing ones; tailored dress vs. ripped clothing; ability to speak vs.
often, only the ability to moan—the differences between the classes of living dead might
also be attributed to three other features: first, much vampire lore links vampirism to
demonic possession, while zombiism, in its Romero-style incarnations, is an infectious
disease. Two, while vampires must suck the blood of others to live, this will not
necessarily kill their victims. Yet, in almost every Romero-style film, zombies will kill
their victims in an attack. Three, traditionally, vampires are thought of as solitary
creatures and even when they run in packs, they are still individuated. Romero-style
zombies are often conceived of as a mass, and as a creature of the mass, the zombie has
usually come to be thought of in terms of an exploited underclass.113
That the zombie would be taken up as a class symbol fits with the many economic
readings of the creature. In a July 2009 article on the popularity of zombies, Anne Bilson
noted that, “Nothing, it seems, can stop what Time magazine has called, ‘the official
monster of the recession’.”114 Indeed, it seems that zombies have often been regarded as
singularly economic creatures, and one of the most popular ways to read zombie films is
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
113 Interestingly enough, as I will argue throughout this project, while the conventional way to think about
Romero-style zombies is as part of a group, from almost the beginning, filmmakers have often worked to
individuate certain zombies—hence, the perception of zombies as group creatures often flies in the face of
how they are actually presented.
114 Bilson.
Object Description
| Title | And the dead shall walk the earth: Zombies and the politics of death |
| Author | Kee, Chera Dezarae |
| Author email | ckee@usc.edu; ckee211@gmail.com |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | Cinema-Television (Cinema Critical Studies) |
| School | School of Cinematic Arts |
| Date defended/completed | 2011-03-08 |
| Date submitted | 2011 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2011-05-04 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Marez, Curtis |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Kinder, Marsha Hoskins, Janet |
| Abstract | In October 2009, five pale, blood-stained teenagers sat on a curb in Newhall, California. They were not crime victims nor movie extras. Rather, these teens were “zombies,” waiting to participate in a Zombie Walk. These events, where groups of people dressed as zombies lumber through the streets, have been happening globally since 2001 and entice up to several thousand participants for each walk. Zombies are familiar characters in comic books, video games, television and film, but with thousands of people dressing as zombies and taking to the streets, it becomes clear that the kinds of work zombies do in U.S. culture provides insight into how we approach death, try to diffuse its potency, and use it to make political interventions into everyday life. Zombies are critical repositories of social fears and desires related to capitalist wage slavery, race, gender, and the political power of the masses, and as such, they demonstrate how representations and performances of death, in widely different forms, have served remarkably consistent functions in the United States throughout the past two centuries.; This project seeks to show that the zombie, as a creature of both/and—both slave and master, both living and dead, both black and white—is often positioned as that which invades the normative space of the living, a space that is generally conceived of in terms of whiteness, patriarchy, and heterosexuality. In forcing those who exist in this space to face a being who can encompasses both their ideals and that which their society rejects, the zombie can be used to try to support heteronormative ideals and the status quo while also undercutting those same ideals—often within the same text.; Chapter one provides a survey of zombie scholarship and describes the history of the figure in U.S. popular culture. Chapter two places zombies in their historical context, considering their ties to Vodou belief and U.S-Haitian relations. Examining travelogues, magazine articles, and official documents about Haiti circulating in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the zombie is identified as one in a long line of figures used in debates surrounding dependent territories, self-rule, and the limits of U.S. democracy. Early film zombies thus come to symbolize the paradoxes of capitalist democracy in the United States and as such, offer a potentially liberating imaginative escape from dominant systems. However, this idealistic feature of zombies is restricted by racism in early zombie films.; Chapter three considers how the zombie state in film is marked by race and gender, arguing that while the zombie can be terrifying, it also presents a fantasy of escape from white, heteronormative patriarchy. This fantasy state is often racialized, positioning blackness as more attractive than normative whiteness, and female characters frequently offer a point of identification with it. Many zombie films are therefore sites for staging conflicts over non-heteronormative desires, both promoting and punishing the transgressive and non-normative, often within the same text.; The fourth chapter considers the connection between the spectator’s relationship to images of death in 19th century presentations, like phantasmagoria shows and séances, to that same relationship in contemporary zombie video games. Arguing that certain visual technologies can encourage a sort of doubling of consciousness that empowers spectators/players, this chapter maintains that this empowerment, when placed in the context of representations of the dead-come-back-to life, allows spectators/players to enact desires that show death not as final, but as something that can be transcended, which ultimately robs the zombie of some of its inherent political potential.; The fifth chapter examines Zombie Walks. These events present a contemporary example of death being introduced into the world of the living to unsettle assumptions of how public space should be used. Public performances of zombiness disrupt the normative capitalist expectations of the spaces in which “zombies” walk while simultaneously allowing walkers to reject Western beauty ideals by dressing up as rotting, ugly corpses. In this way, zombie walkers offer an important example of the contemporary carnivalesque.; The final chapter of this project illustrates that while the zombie can stand as something that is both comforting and threatening, in either guise, it carries with it the potential of another way of imagining human society, and as such, it can represent the aspirations of any who feel that they are made over as slaves, cannibals, the infected, or the abject by their society’s standards. Thus, often, in the form of the zombie, death is not only made attractive in U.S. popular culture, it is made politically useful as well. |
| Keyword | zombies in film; zombie video games; Zombie Walks; voodoo in film; U.S./Haiti relations; race in film; gender in film; phantasmagoria; spiritualist phenomena; zombies and the carnivalesque |
| Geographic subject (country) | USA |
| Coverage date | 2001/2010 |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m3808 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Rights | Kee, Chera Dezarae |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Filename | etd-Kee-4414 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume51/etd-Kee-4414.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 59 |
| Contributing entity | University of Southern California |
| Repository email | cisadmin@lib.usc.edu |
| Full text | 48 However, besides the clear visual and aural markers that might serve to designate other forms of the undead as more “aristocratic” than Romero-style zombies—pristine features vs. decomposing ones; tailored dress vs. ripped clothing; ability to speak vs. often, only the ability to moan—the differences between the classes of living dead might also be attributed to three other features: first, much vampire lore links vampirism to demonic possession, while zombiism, in its Romero-style incarnations, is an infectious disease. Two, while vampires must suck the blood of others to live, this will not necessarily kill their victims. Yet, in almost every Romero-style film, zombies will kill their victims in an attack. Three, traditionally, vampires are thought of as solitary creatures and even when they run in packs, they are still individuated. Romero-style zombies are often conceived of as a mass, and as a creature of the mass, the zombie has usually come to be thought of in terms of an exploited underclass.113 That the zombie would be taken up as a class symbol fits with the many economic readings of the creature. In a July 2009 article on the popularity of zombies, Anne Bilson noted that, “Nothing, it seems, can stop what Time magazine has called, ‘the official monster of the recession’.”114 Indeed, it seems that zombies have often been regarded as singularly economic creatures, and one of the most popular ways to read zombie films is !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 113 Interestingly enough, as I will argue throughout this project, while the conventional way to think about Romero-style zombies is as part of a group, from almost the beginning, filmmakers have often worked to individuate certain zombies—hence, the perception of zombies as group creatures often flies in the face of how they are actually presented. 114 Bilson. |
