Dispatches from the middle

Partly because it’s Halloween, and partly because I’ve enjoyed a great many horror and horror-ish movies over the last many months, I’ve been thinking about the zombie movie as a genre and, for lack of a better phrase, its “social purpose”. I’ve mentioned before that one of my favorite things about running very, very long distances is how it forces one to reconnect with instinct. Living our comfortable lives, in which we neither hunt nor escape, we have become largely detached from instinct, physicality, and visceral experience. We’re no longer aware of our surroundings in a tangible sense. And we crave this!

It is precisely these missing sensations that the zombie movie provides us. In a post-zombie-apocalypse world there is no more drudgery, there is no more weighing trivial choices, or agonizing over image and expectation. There is only survival. Banding together with other survivors (at least one of whom is generally smokin’ hot…) to brave the elements and fend off hordes of marauding undead invokes a sense of connection on many levels. Connection to your fellow survivors, to your surroundings, to your own body, your abilities, your resourcefulness. As much as the premise is hardly realistic (though any one of the manifold pandemic scenarios the genre represents is frighteningly plausible), it restores a very real sense of vitality, of being part of something crucial. For this same reason, war movies are so captivating. It’s not that most people would actually want to take part in a war – in fact, for most people, the suffering is inconceivable and anything gained from the experience would pale in comparison to the horror of it. It’s the perceived sense of significance that is so appealing, of casting off all of life’s excesses (the most cumbersome of which can be the future itself, something handily removed by war dramas and post-apocalyptic fantasies) and stripping existence down to the bare and vital necessities of the here and now.

We weigh ourselves down with trifles and needless concerns. On an instinctual level, we’re bored as hell and zombies provide us with a tailor-made solution. The question is – how to restore the missing connections and achieve a sense of significance without the help of our decaying catalysts?