Zombies, Mad Max, and Freedom: Our Obsession with Apocalyptic Media and Our Aversion to Real-Life Collapse

Art by Grandfailure

Zombies. Just take a look at cinema—not just American, but Asian, European, what have you—and you can see our strange fascination with the undead. The Walking Dead, Z Nation, any movie ending with “the Dead” (i.e., Dawn of the Dead”), Resident Evil, Train to Busan—the list goes on and on. There is a list of Zombie flicks on IMDB that lists over 400 zombie shows and movies, and there are probably more. Bumper stickers that say “Zombie Attack Vehicle” abound, and there are forums and blogs and online communities devoted to talk of zombie apocalypse. Not to mention zombie video games, apps, and more.  All this aside, I am a huge horror fan and I have enjoyed many a zombie flick, so hold your horses before you get all up-in-arms about how I’m anti-zombie.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this kind of widespread cultural obsession with mass destruction. Think of the atom bomb in the 50’s. Think of Y2K (which I never really understood anyway, because computers are about 200 times closer to taking over the world now than they were in 1999). Humans are junkies for our own destruction—but not really ours, personally. See, we assume we’ll survive—us and our closest friends and family, we will have the best bunker and a repertoire of survival skills learned from survival shows and blogs that will guarantee a win(which is wishful thinking). No, it isn’t our destruction that we salivate so savagely over, it’s the inevitable crumbling of society. All the rules, credit scores, social conventions and expectations turned to radioactive dust with the unlucky ones. What humans really want in this compulsively-overproductive, speed-of-light 9 to 5 existence is some fucking room to breathe. So we hope—no, we fucking pray—for it to all come tumbling down like the fall of Rome. Take your Netflix, take your social niceties and selfies, crappy service jobs and office politics, mortgages and payday loans, and let it all burn. Zombies themselves are just a Hollywood facade; it’s the idea of stripping our needs down to only one—survival. The truth is, we all foolishly think we would win the Darwinian Lottery, and so we wait—for the proverbial Atom Bomb, the onslaught of fire or undead or biblical storms to wash away all our debt and responsibilities and leave us standing, our true humanity shining in its purest form. 

"The rich and powerful are doing all they can to make the most money possible off of us so they can further fortify their new Zealand bunkers, and we just keep buying, and consuming, and working to pay off things we never should have wasted money on in the first place."

So we gobble up shows like The Walking Dead and dream about a world so different from the one we currently live in. A world without capitalism and online popularity contests. A quieter world, where cash is just kindling for the campfire. The problem is, those shows, movies, and video games are created by people who want to sell. They want to sell you a future-fantasy where most people are hot and have six packs, where people get to live out their video-game fantasies of strutting around in a band of sexy, dirty warriors shooting all of the undead uglies.

In these fantasy worlds, everyone has great hair (even though they throw some dirt in it for effect), the women never seem to have periods, facial hair is meticulously kept up (solar-powered clippers, maybe?), and there is always, always the sense of freedom, badassery and community, even when the characters are running from Z’s. Stores are ransacked for supplies (free shopping!), no one has a job, and no one is expected to be polite. Also, no one shits.

Now, let’s return to the real reality, the current  one, in which a large percentage of those of us in affluent countries like the US have chosen to deny the current situation to such an extreme that we’ve convinced ourselves that every time we get sick it is “just a cold” and don’t test for COVID; that our sudden mounting health issues over the past few years are “because we’re getting older”, that the weather is fine and the excessive natural disasters and forest fires are business as usual; that the rising cost of living and consumer products isn’t widening the wealth gap, fast.

Why the denial? Because zombie pandemics happen overnight, not as a drawn-out process where our quality of life lessens regularly, so they are easier to accept. In the movies, we go from our regular lives to being badass Mad Maxers overnight. Collapse in real life, however, doesn’t usually work like that. This generation of humans’ great grandparents worked and fought so that we would have better lives, and (depending on the demographic), they were often rewarded for their hard work. A gold watch at retirement. Social security. Hard-won rights. And we really want to believe that things are only getting better—because we have been conditioned by society and our family systems that progress and reward are inevitable. We want to hold on to that hope, and that’s understandable. It has been there all of our lives, and more than a hope, it was an expectation.

So now we’re getting desperate for normalcy. Anything but the “new normal”. To cope, we’re spending more time on our phones, streaming endless TV, getting lost in video games and VR worlds, swipe-right sex, addiction, anger, and violence. Anything to disengage from reality. What that’s doing is creating an even bigger disconnect between us and others, even our friends and family. We have started relating to machines better than we do to real live people. The rich and powerful are doing all they can to make the most money possible off of us so they can further fortify their new Zealand bunkers, and we just keep buying, and consuming, and working to pay off things we never should have wasted money on in the first place.

So yes, Ia lot of us would take a zombie apocalypse over the current situation. Unfortunately, an overnight apocalypse leaving several of us to band together as smoking hot apoco-warriors playing real-life Resident Evil in a tricked out Hummer is so far from realistic, it’s not even funny.

“I’ve begun to look at the world through apocalypse eyes. Our society, which seems so sturdily build out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of.”

—Neill Strauss