In Defense of Zombie Movies

An Award-Winning Essay Inspired by G.K. Chesterton!

G.K. Chesterton as a zombie

[To provide a brief introduction, I have not won many awards for things I have written, but—to brag just a bit—the missive printed below did, in fact, come in first place at an annual G.K. Chesterton Rhetoric Competition held by the University of Notre Dame Graduate Student Union (this would have been about 15 years ago or so and I don’t have a clue if this is still a thing). The competition was judged both on the quality of the essay as well as its public oral declamation, so perhaps winning had as much to do with my public speaking acumen as my writing ability which. The prompt for the competition was “The Use and Abuse of Violence, or War: What is it NOT Good For?” - a Chestertonian topic if ever there was one! While thinking on what I wanted to write, I distinctly remember having a dream one night about zombies. I don’t recall what happened in the dream, nor do I recall it being particularly discomfiting, but I do remember upon waking, I knew that I had both a thematic hook as well as a title. For those of you less versed in Chesterton’s writings, the title is an (admittedly oblique) homage to Chesterton’s classic essay in defense of “low-brow” literature A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls. I don’t claim this essay is as good as his (I will actually grant that I find the closing paragraph somewhat cloying and pandering), but I like to think, in places, it rhymes with some things he might have written.]

I love zombie movies.  It’s not that I’m a big fan of the horror genre; I don’t delight in seeing buckets of fake blood, rotting carcasses, and gnawed upon limbs.  Zombie movies don’t have to be spectacle to be interesting; I find zombie movies interesting despite the spectacle.  No, I like zombie movies because, despite the current fad for “sparkling vampires”, zombies are the quintessential monsters of modernity.   Vampires, demons, and werewolves may be quite charismatic, calculating, and devious.   Zombies, on the other hand, are blank, characterless, and mindless.  It is hard to really call them evil despite the fact that they want to eat your brain.  This ambiguity of motive is precisely why they appeal to our ambiguous society.  Furthermore, because of their blankness, zombies are perfect pallets upon which the filmmaker may project society’s hopes and fears, and because they are monsters, this usually means that we project upon them our fears.  The zombie may reflect prejudice, consumerism, environmental catastrophe, or terrorism.  Their very blankness may also be seen to represent the undifferentiated mass of humanity going about its drone-like existence in our cities and streets.   

But there is at least one underlying quality that zombies in all their incarnations possess that belies their blankness; zombies are violent.  This is really the only positive quality we can attribute to them.  While their violence usually manifests itself in a hunger for human flesh they eat to no purpose because, well, they are already dead.  Now, everyone knows that the only thing that can stop a zombie is the destruction of its brain, usually best meted out by a pump action shotgun blast to the head.  For the purposes of our discussion, however, I’m going to follow the time-honored movie tradition of modifying the basic zombie to my own ends.  Imagine that, while undead, our zombies look no different than ordinary people.  Furthermore, they sound and speak as though they are normal people and appear to be able to make rational decisions; but make no mistake, they are in fact monsters intent on eating your brain.  Our zombies also show a limited sense of self-preservation; in addition to a blow to the head, our zombies can be stopped, at least temporarily, by the imminent threat of a blow to the head.  They still don’t mind getting other limbs blown or chopped off, but so long as the gun or machete is poised over their head, they have enough sense of self to ignore your brain so that they can keep their own.  Thus, the zombies can either be stopped by violence or the threat of violence.  One can almost imagine this mass of zombies as Hobbes’ vision of man in the state of nature; unrestrained animals bent upon the fulfillment of their desires—in this case human brains—and self-preservation.  I actually think Leviathan might translate well into a zombie movie; I’d call it “Nasty, Brutish, and Short”.   That would probably also be a good title for a biography of my screen writing career.

So why am I talking about zombies?  Well, the zombie here acts as a symbol of the capacity for violence in human beings.  Think of the zombie as the human person stripped of all other attributes except violence.  To quickly describe this link between zombies and humans, let me give you a brief account of some assumptions I am making about human nature.  First, I’m going to follow Aristotle’s lead and assert that man is a political animal; that is, there is some inherent desire and need for people to live together in communities.  Secondly, I’m going to take it as a given that we only create that which is a reflection of ourselves.  We create zombies and they resonate with us, because there is something within us that relates to them, that relates to their violence.  This is evidenced by the fact that in every era of history, despite our laws, despite our good intentions, despite our reason and rationality, we continue to fall into cycles of war and violence.  Now, just because there is a part of us that has the capacity for zombie violence, it doesn’t mean that all of us will give into it; in many the zombie might lie dormant and never awaken.  But you can be assured that there always will be some who give themselves over to their inner zombie.  The community cannot coexist comfortably with this violence; you cannot have a community made of zombies.  There is a tension within us between our desire for community and our capacity for violence.

To demonstrate this tension, let us assume a hypothetical.  Picture a man who is under attack by the modified zombie that we have constructed.  He tries to reason with his assailant, but this does him no good because our zombie can’t be reasoned with; he can talk to the zombie about love and peace and the futility of violence until he’s blue in the face; it’s not going to stop the zombie from eating his brain.  So, our man is faced with two rational responses; fight or flight.  Now for the individual human, unburdened by any responsibility, flight is probably the best option, especially since most zombies are pretty slow.  But let us assume that our man is not simply an individual, but a father protecting his family or a governor protecting his state.  A community of humans cannot run from the zombies and maintain its character as a community; it has to stand and face the zombies; it has to use violence.

Now violence is powerful; its ultimate expression involves not only depriving someone of their liberty but of their life.  Whatever else we may say about community, it appeals to the part of us that is not violent, thus when we are in community with one another, we are not zombies.  But whenever we employ violence, we tap into that part of ourselves that is a zombie.  Because it is impossible for zombies to live in community, the more like zombies we become the more our community mimics the rotting flesh of the traditional movie zombie and decays.  Our very justification for fighting is to defend the community; what use is it then if the act of defending the community is the very thing that causes the community to collapse? The real question is not whether the community should use violence to protect itself, it has no other choice, but how to contain violence within its proper scope. 

To answer this question, I’m going to turn to the unlikeliest of allies; Niccolo Machiavelli in his famous tract The Prince.  I am using Machiavelli as opposed to St. Thomas Aquinas or an advocate of just war theory for the same reason that our hypothetical zombie replaced human attackers; Machiavelli’s reduction of statecraft to the rules of power mimics our zombie’s reduction of humanity to its propensity for violence.   Think of this appeal to Machiavelli as a reductio proof in mathematics; since Machiavelli has gone further than any other political writer in advocating the state’s use of unrestricted violence, then any constraint upon violence within his system proves the inherent constraints upon violence necessary in even the most violent of communities.  Q.E.D.  Now, as anyone familiar with Machiavelli knows, he doesn’t shirk from instructing the prince to employ any violent means necessary to maintain control of the community.  In chapter 14 of The Prince, Machiavelli tells the reader “…a prince should have no other object…but that of war…”  He has reached the same conclusion that we have in our hypothetical; be prepared to be violent, because if you aren’t, somebody else will be.  Machiavelli is encouraging the prince to have the single mindedness of a zombie; to become a zombie. 

But this is not all Machiavelli has to say on the subject; we get a hint that he is not simply concerned with propping up amoral zombie tyrants in chapter 12.  Here Machiavelli tells us, “…there cannot be good laws where there are not good arms, and where there are good arms there must be good laws[emphasis added]”.  In Machiavelli’s estimation, the prince is under no obligation to uphold the values of community for the sake of his subjects; he rules only for the purpose of fulfilling his own desire for power.  But to ensure that he remains in power, the prince must have a good army, and to have a good army the prince must enact good laws.  Now, there are many and varied definitions of what exactly good laws entail, and we get no hint in The Prince as to what those laws might be; but I would hazard a guess that one of the most basic functions of law is to keep violence within its proper sphere, especially given this axiom’s connection to the necessary structure of the prince’s army.  Suffice it to say that law has some power to restrain violence and make a space in which the community can thrive while at the same time channeling humanity’s propensity to violence to the proper goal of the community’s protection.    

In summation, for people to exist in community requires the use of violence.  Its proper scope is to be restrained by good laws.  Now there is a basic dialectical tension here; it is the nature of powerful forces to reach beyond their proper bounds and law and violence will always fight for ascendency.  Perhaps this tension is why no human society has or will exist into perpetuity.  We need the community, but inherent in the community’s creation lies the seed of its own destruction.  Perhaps this is why the City of God is the only one that will last forever.  Christ came to fulfill the law, and it is the fulfillment of the law by grace as opposed to the law of power that holds sway in that City; and while that City is founded on violence, it is not founded on the violence of war, but on the violence of the willing sacrifice of Christ upon the cross.  The foundation of the City of God is in all ways opposite to the foundation of the city of man.  That’s ultimately why I like to watch zombie movies; they remind me that the city of man can never be the City of God.  And we can all be sure of one thing; in God’s City we will no longer need to watch zombie movies to be reminded of that fact.