BackThe love of the living dead
The popularity of zombie films indicates that urban Indians are getting infected by the same socio-political conflicts as their Western counterparts
Premium(A still from the movie ‘Go Goa Gone’. )
Like consumerism and the free market, zombies and vampires have been around for quite a while. But it was only in the 1990s that India began to embrace the market and the joys of unbridled consumption. It took about two decades for the effects to sink in, but now, India is finally mature enough for foreign direct investment (FDI) in undead people.
In Krishna D.K. and Raj Nidimoru’s Go Goa Gone, which released in theatres last week, the panicking characters wonder how a Western affliction such as the zombie could be found in India. Then one of them answers, “globalization". To my mind that was the funniest moment in the entire film. If you asked Freud, he would tell you that the line was funny because it was too close to reality.
The origins of the zombie myth in colonialism and slavery are well documented in academia as well as outside. Also widely acknowledged is the fact that the horror genre, if not the entire realm of pop culture fantasy, reflect a society’s major cultural anxieties.
The films of George Romero, the man who practically invented the zombie horror genre in cinema, were all highly political. The haunting scenes of zombies wandering endlessly around a suburban shopping mall trying out branded clothes and accessories in Dawn of the Dead (1978) were as much a critique of consumer capitalism as his exclusive focus on the competitive (as opposed to the co-operative) aspect of human nature in Night of the Living Dead (1968), a comment on the viciously competitive culture fostered by the ideology of the market where the winners make a killing while the losers are dead meat.
It is true that the recent spate of homegrown zombie films—besides Go Goa Gone, the other flicks being talked about include Rock the Shaadi, No Exit and Rise of the Zombie—are a form of cultural import seeking to tap a ready market of adequately Westernized urban audiences familiar with the zombie and vampire genre from exposure to Hollywood horror.
But they are more than that: their growing popularity indicates that urban Indians are getting infected by the same set of collective neuroses and socio-political conflicts as their Western counterparts. Notwithstanding basic cultural differences—for instance, we mostly cremate the dead as opposed to burying them, making it that much more difficult for rotting flesh to make a comeback—the same factors that powered the genre in the West are now finally present in enough magnitude to power it in India.
This comes through clearly if you take a holistic view of the undead market, accounting for both vampires and zombies. It is not an accident that both varieties of dead people are increasingly popular in India. Walk into a Crossword or Landmark in any of the metros and you’re bound to find DVD sets of True Blood, the Blade and Underworld series, and the Vampire Diaries alongside stacks of Sookie Stackhouse mysteries, not to mention the book and Blu-ray versions of the Twilight saga.
Our fascination for the biologically dead but otherwise animated humans seems to be growing in direct proportion to the progressive take-over of human civilization by the biologically animated but otherwise dead humans. A lot of writers, from modernists like T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett to post-modernists like David Foster Wallace have written powerfully about the deadening or zombifying effect of consumerist society.
But the deadening happens in different ways depending on where you figure in the social hierarchy, and the zombie and the vampire are nothing but two variants of the same phenomenon that embody different socio-cultural realities.
Free market capitalism, as also what is known as late capitalism, with its progressive evisceration of the middle classes, tends to polarize society into two extremes: a small but wealthy elite that runs the show and lives it up, and the vast hordes of automated, brain-dead zombies whose primary function is to consume, and act as programmed.
Broadly speaking, the zombies are the masses and the vampires are the classes, though you do see the occasional zombie crossing over class categories. But the zombie, as indicated by its origins in slave lore, is essentially working class. Marx might say that the zombie represents dead labour, and he would be right in more ways than one. The vampires are invariably rich and powerful. The very first vampires in literature were feudal landlords, Counts and squires. Marx might say that the vampire represents dead capital, which needs living human tissue to multiply, and he would be right in more ways than one.
Vampires are individualists who like to work alone, or pass instructions to a small and trusted coterie. They have big egos and are power hungry. They will do anything to retain their empires of domination. Zombies, on the other hand, like to hang out in big groups, especially at malls. They are powerful only when they amass in vast herds. They are not interested in power, and less interested in bossing over you than in uniting their flesh to yours by eating you.
Not surprisingly, zombies are dumb. Vampires are hyper-smart. Zombies are plodders. Vampires move like lightning. Zombies are ugly, have bad hair, bad skin, smell horrible and disgustingly unclean. Vampires are beautiful, with glossy hair, glowing skin, either nice-smelling or odourless, and very hygienic.
Zombies live on the streets, get around by foot, and are always available when you want to meet them. Vampires reside in magnificent mansions, drive a BMW or Merc, and you can’t meet them unless they want to meet you. If a vampire bites you, you either turn into a zombie with an expiry date or become a glamorous immortal like them—but they have to like you for you to become immortal like them and not immortal like a zombie.
Every time a writer tries to break the clear class distinction built into the vampire-zombie mythology, he ends up either zombifying the vampire or vampirizing the zombie. There have been instances in popular fiction where vampires break the mould, as in Guillermo del Toro’s The Strain trilogy, or in Justin Cronin’s The Passage and The Twelve—and in both the cases they turn into zombies.
When Cronin’s proletarian vampires, or virals, as they are called, amass in herds, they lose all individuality, and begin to act like zombies. But the powerful monsters who control the viral hordes—such as the Master in del Toro’s The Strain, or The Passage’s Babcock, are more rounded personalities, and clearly distinguished as the super-vampires who control the working class zombified vampires.
Indeed, one major factor behind the enormous success of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series was her playing up every social stereotype (if one can use that word here) associated with the vampire, especially their lives of glamour, luxury and immortality. While vampires connect with our aspirational selves, zombies log into our fears of losing our identity and being consumed by the herd.
But both vampires and zombies, the undead as a species, as Mathias Clasen suggests in his essay, The Anatomy of a Zombie, confirm “the moral suspicion that most monsters are, or were, human". The zombie in particular, he argues, “panders to a more disturbing, base tendency to think in terms of us versus them, and it must be terminated with extreme prejudice".
In the real world, who is our most popular monster today? The terrorist, of course. And the terrorist, as the Delhi Police and the public address system of the Delhi Metro constantly remind us, could be anyone anywhere—even your best friend. In any zombie narrative, it is de rigueur for a loved one to turn into a zombie. And they must be terminated with extreme prejudice, as any terrorist should be.
Simple question: If your mother is declared a zombie or terrorist, will you shoot her? In Go Goa Gone, Kunal Khemu is nearly disowned by his friends on a similar suspicion, while Boris (played by Saif Ali Khan) shoots his best friend when he turns into a zombie. Exactly as sections of our law enforcement machinery arrest, torture or shoot individuals from certain communities simply because they are suspected terrorists aka them, the nameless but dangerous other embodied in the zombie or vampire.
Indeed, no zombie apocalypse or vampire-pandemic narrative is complete without a sequence where a bunch of humans launch into an orgy of killing, shooting indiscriminately, and with voluptuous freedom, picking off heads at will, and trampling on corpses on their way to a better world. The resonance with the so-called war on terror, the dozens of civil wars raging in Africa and the Middle East, not to mention the kill or be killed ethos in India’s own so-called red corridors is not coincidental.
As Clasen puts it, “The current viability of the zombie is an outgrowth of a tension between increased moral complexity in the post-modern world on the one and on the other a dark primeval urge to destroy the Other."
The zombies and vampires are here to stay. The big question is the same one posed, and answered (with way too much optimism, in my opinion) in every zombie and vampire narrative: How long will humanity survive in their midst?
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