Two statistics:
Literary rate of the U.S. adult
population: 86%
Percentage of U.S. residents who’ve watched
zombie movies and TV shows: 95%
Even
though I’d stopped watching The Walking
Dead a while back, I did get hooked on zombie stories long ago. When video
machines came out in the ‘80s, I rented, and later bought, copies of the
original Night of the Living Dead and
Dawn of the Dead. In the first half
of the 2000s, I watched whatever came out – 28
Days Later, the Dawn of the Dead
remake, and Shaun of the Dead come to
mind.
Years
later, I bought and read the World War Z
novel and I couldn’t wait for the early days of The Walking Dead – before several of the cast members I liked were
killed off. Since those days, Fear the
Walking Dead has come out, World War
Z with Brad Pitt, Zombieland (which
I would highly recommend), the zombie-loves-human movie Warm Bodies, and the iZombie TV
series.
I’d say
we officially have a cultural phenomenon with zombies.
I’ve
spent a lot of time pondering what it means and asking others for their
opinion.
One quote
that I liked came from Robert Kirkman, an American comic book writer best known
for creating The Walking Dead. Kirkman
said The Walking Dead really is
“about us. It’s about how we respond to crisis.”
I saw an interview
years ago with George Romero, who made the 1968 film credited with starting all
of it, Night of Living Dead. Romero
said that he’d tried to make the black and white movie as realistic as
possible, like you were watching a documentary on something that really
happened; with local TV news coverage that appeared to be reporting something that
was taking place.
It made
me think of stories about Orson Welles and The Mercury Theater staging alien
ships landing in America during a 1938 radio broadcast. It was called “War of
the Worlds,” based on the H.G. Wells novel. People went nuts over it, thinking
it was for real.
Romero
said that Night of the Living Dead,
and later Dawn of the Dead, depicted
what Americans were going through viewing TV news with violent footage from the
war in Vietnam, riots and burnings in big cities, protests, the Pentagon Papers,
and Watergate. Paranoia was palpitating through the air.
We’ve had
a revival in zombie stories lately. I would say that Kirkman and Romero have
made a few good points.
Here’s my
take on what could be stirring up something close to paranoia, and how we’re
responding to crisis and stressful periods of change……
- · The Great Recession that started in 2008
- · Mobile devices becoming tethered to our wrists starting with the iPhone in 2007
- · Full-time jobs with benefit packages versus independent contractors
- · Transforming from print, cable TV, and a laptop – into Netflix, Snapchat, Pinterest, Twitter, Reddit, and a revival of Facebook. All of it on a smartphone, tablet, or flat screen wall mounts; and the occasional e-book on Kindle and Nook.
- · Owning a car versus sharing a car ride
- · Fear of infectious disease pandemics taking millions of lives, enough for people to wear surgical masks
- · Donald Trump running for, and getting elected, president. And for everyone else, Hillary Clinton running for, and nearly becoming, president.
Yes, you
can survive anything – even during a zombie attack.
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