The metaphor speaks for itself, really: zombies are taking over the world.
In Saturday’s Globe and Mail I read about university mathematicians in Ottawa who, in a paper entitled “When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak Of Zombie Infection”, deduce that the most effective means of combating an undead outbreak is an all-out aggressive attack on the legions of walking corpses.
Kind of a no-brainer, really (get it?). Globe Campus blogger Jennifer Gardy had the actual scoop on the story, pointing out that such tongue-in-cheek studies are a very effective way of getting students’ attentions.
Before that, I heard that Shawshank Redemption director Frank Darabont is set to adapt comic book Walking Dead for television, bringing zombies into a prison for guaranteed good times.
Guillermo Del Toro’s The Strain proved to be a fun summer read, marrying vampires with the plague-associations of zombies and tossing them together into a tight thriller.
Last October, Dead Set (on the British telly’s Channel 4) brought us five days of undead mayhem in the Big Brother house, scaring the crap out of us almost as much as it made us laugh.
Finally, Left 4 Dead secured Valve further success in the multiplayer gaming sphere, celebrating the joy of surviving the zombie apocalypse alongside three friends (which we’ll repeat in November’s Left 4 Dead 2).
So, why zombies, why now?
If there’s one thing that zombies are good for, it’s bringing people together. As everything from The Strain to Left 4 Dead stresses, the only real way to get through a disaster scenario is working together.
I won’t go as far as to compare the current recession to a zombie apocalypse, but … yeah, that’s what I’m going to do.
Watch, read or experience any decent zombie fiction and a tenacious trope is guaranteed to kick in at some point: deviate from the team and you die. Dead Set ends in everybody dying because the idiotic set of Big Brother castmates and creators can’t cooperate with one another. If you save your friend from the menace of a smoker in Left 4 Dead, that teammate’s death will surely seal your grim fate.
As our Canadian mathematicians point out, the best way to save our souls when faced with the undead is to work together to eradicate every last one of the motherfuckers, before the disease can spread any further.
To do a similiar job of beating the recession, a similiar spirit of cooperation is called for. The results won’t be nearly as speedy, of course – in fact, getting out of our economic rut may take longer than fighting off a horde of reincarnated post-mortals – but if we try to take the capitalist approach of “every man for himself”, we’ll fall back into the same cycle that got us here.
Perhaps the current flux of zombie fiction in the media is an collective creative effort of subliminal propaganda, instilling the essence of teamwork into the directionless masses? Perhaps that’s going a bit far.
Still, I like to think that pop culture media is a reflection of contemporary societal themes, rather than pure escapist babble. Thanks to the current economic climate, some people here in the west are truly struggling – just trying to survive and put food on their table (yes, so is Africa, but that’s old hat right?). If that isn’t as close to the apocalypse as we’re going to get, I don’t know what is.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to go dust off my sawn-off and crunch out my credit card bill.
