This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.
Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.
Volume Two, part two (the Undead Module) is out now (9/6/2024)! Go to my book’s 1-page promo to download the latest version of the PDF (which will contain additions/corrections the original blog posts will not have)!
Permissions: Any publicly available images are exhibited for purposes of education, transformation and critique, thus fall under Fair Use; private nude material and collabs with models are specifically shared with permission from the original model(s). For more details about artist permissions, refer to the book disclaimer (linked above).
Concerning Buggy Images: Sometimes the images on my site don’t always load and you get a little white-and-green placeholder symbol, instead. Sometimes I use a plugin for loading multiple images in one spot, called Envira Gallery, and not all of the images will load (resulting in blank white squares you can still right-click on). I‘ve optimized most of the images on my site, so I think it’s a server issue? Not sure. You should still be able to access the unloaded image by clicking on the placeholder/right-clicking on the white square (sometimes you have to delete the “?ssl=1” bit at the end of the url). Barring that, completed volumes will always contain all of the images, whose PDFs you can always download on my 1-page promo.
Bad Dreams, or Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse, part zero: “Fatal Homecomings”; or, Return of the Living Dead (and Vigilantism)
“Make haste! For it is before the walls of Minas Tirith that the doom of our time will be decided, and if the tide be not stemmed there, then it will flow over all the fair fields of Rohan, and even in this Hold among the hills there shall be no refuge” (source).
—Hirgon to Théoden, The Return of the King (1955)
(exhibit 34c1b: Death art and merch by René Mieville; bottom-middle: a photo of Death frontman and mastermind, Chuck Schuldiner, source; middle-upper-right: “The Death of Seneca” by Peter Paul Rubens. In metal, death is often a delight, something to “rock out” to.)
Picking up from where “The Undead: Zombies, Vampires and Ghosts (module opening) and Bad Dreams; or, Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse (chapter opening)” left off…
Part one of “Bad Dreams” will introduce the zombie relative to its infamous return, amounting to the apocalypse of police states, foreign atrocities and all of this coming home for good; i.e., Capitalist Realism being the result of pervasive social conditioning through canon, whereupon the elite use canonical sex, terror and force as a reliable grounding agent inside hauntological scenarios. These lobotomize workers during the Imperial Boomerang’s own return: the canonical zombie as a recycled nightmare, repeatedly preventing consumers from discussing the future save as past, “archaeological” depictions that are useful to the state as bad dreams; i.e., the home in decay as something to abject onto labor as composed of all the usual state victims its usual cops (and token agents) can police, thus rape and destroy when Imperialism comes home to empire: from people of color to GNC and Indigenous elements, to fears of those undead groups (the poor hungry masses) eating the white middle class out of revenge wherever they try to go. This return has a history unto itself, but also leading up to itself when the chickens come home to roost.
As such, part zero lays out some important concepts you’ll want to consider as the Imperial Boomerang’s assorted dead (cops and victims) prepare to return. To that, let’s spend a few pages going over some broad points, then outline vigilantism as a core component of the zombie apocalypse; i.e., as something to canonically attack and repel back into settler-colonial nadirs. Then, after all that, we’ll dive into zombies and their actual return in part one!
First, such scare tactics are the usual Capitalist-Realist kind, a kind of puzzle to solve through us-versus-them violence (military optimism); e.g., per the 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead, said dead (and their final revenge) will be waiting for our American friends, even on remote islands! The only thing to do is try to reconcile with said assimilation in reverse; i.e., “get down with the sickness” without being a fascist[1a], meaning going into a dark, rock ‘n roll body that upends the role of consumed/consumer insofar as power (and tissue) regularly flow.
And yet, when capital dies and the dwindling survivors outlast earlier peoples, they’re left inside an unenviable position: outnumbered by exposed, famished revenants. Eating each other in broad daylight, the return of the living dead offers up a black mirror showing America its true colors—as the cannibal all along (and not the underclass): “Here it comes, Mommy! Get ready to die!” (said song having the usual hang-ups regarding the monstrous-feminine; i.e., as something to seek revenge on, per Cartesian thought).
(source: Girl with the Dogs’ “OH LAWD SHE COMIN’,” 2023)
Except we’re hugging Medusa and letting go of our harmful colonizer mentalities that already have us eating the living dead; i.e., as made into meat that we eat, after which the state eats us (white America) as a) fattened up for it, and b) as something to realize as it’s happening: being eaten alive, including by our so-called heroes. In turn, the state turns in on itself as the elite (not goblins or other anti-Semitic labor trope; e.g., Troll 2, 1990) fly away in helicopters. They do so, then bomb the very cities they can no longer control. After that, they turn loose the usual, Crusader-style death squads (their dogs of war): attack of the killer (white) man babies LARPing as their favorite medieval regressions (e.g., Tolkien)! We must sicken ourselves (and others) to such liquidized regurgitation, including its half-real grounds for staging further colonization as time goes on. “Is that not why you are here? Are you not entertained?” Time for the harvest/expiation!
Simply put, the zombie apocalypse is a nightmare scenario for the middle class experiencing what the lower classes/Global South experience on a daily basis; i.e., when the state of exception expands away from its normalized circle, security becomes a myth and a goal, there being no escape or anywhere to run from its hunter-like experts (e.g., Hans Landa sadistically torturing the incognito Shoshana with non-kosher dairy products in Inglorious Basterds, 2009): veiled hostility at the best of times, but with raw lethal force during the portentous homecoming as foretold and eagerly awaited by vengeful homeland defenders with neoliberal god complexes:
“Pure” escapism (the zombie shooter), then, is both a reflection of reality outside the immediate text and a call to violence against state targets by state executioners, mid-purge (“corruption,” in this case, being Red Scare inside the state of exception accelerating its own extermination rhetoric inside of itself—per the rise of vigilante, gang-like strongmen that defend capital by cannibalizing the state’s population from the outside-in; e.g., Homelander’s wonderfully on-point, Nazi-style Superman-in-decay (above) basically being a stand-in for Donald Trump wishing he were that fast and strong: “You aren’t celebrities; you will become wrathful gods. Show me a little wrath[1]!”). It is them we must indict while making our victimization at their hands (and our liberation from said hands) as plain as day: “Something wicked [and thicc] this way comes” (very much a pun for us and our Aegises’ cryptonymy[2] freaking Nazis out, smiting them as such—with peachy goodness humanizing the harvest per the dialect of the alien; i.e., as our wagon-like weapons reclaimed from our abusers)!
(artist: Muscle Mommy Cosplays)
As far as that goes, anyone who turns a blind eye is complicit, regardless of the medium or the content (from speedrunning to talking-heads-style news to film critics, etc); i.e., the bread-and-circus gimmick as something that turns the public sphere (and its half-real offshoots) into a gladiatorial arena, a wilderness to kill enemies of the state or cover up their dialogs with us-versus-them dreck; e.g., boxing matches documented by talking heads making hay while genocides nakedly occur. To that, people like True Gordie from The Pain Game are dead silent on these atrocities, keeping mum in favor of a return to greatness, of so-called kings-and-frauds-style pugilism; i.e., bashing the black man in boxing because he’s the one thing that men in prison-like conditions can never be: weak (“Deontay Wilder DESTROYED – Was The Fury Trilogy Overrated?” 2024). It’s merely praxial inertia, because Gordie only cares about his own rags-to-riches legacy and pandering to the masses; i.e., by generating controversy on part with the Blues and the Greens[3]. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be grifting for the Saudis in their colosseum, now would he?
No matter how childish and cartoonish, though, such violence is always acceptable if it maintains the status quo as a matter of take, take, take for those who already benefit from the system; i.e., to the detriment of others preyed upon by said system. Those who recognize this cannibalistic function and exploit it aren’t masterful as much as they are primed to abuse a system of thought (re: Man Box) that panders to their baser instincts as a matter of weird-nerd culture: push someone else’s head underwater not just to survive, but profit by being intolerant, xenophobic, and unaccepting of others who aren’t doing you any harm. It’s predatory in ways that make said victims hungry under reactive abuse (thus continuing the cycle of revenge from the police/vigilante side of things).
There’s a million ways to frame power in this respect. We won’t have time to stress this individually per case, so treat “middle class” as synonymous with “nuclear family” and “labor” as synonymous with anything functionally non-white per the settler-colonial model, but especially the monstrous-feminine/undead. As such, the settler-colonial nature of “home” under Pax Americana becomes a canceled future loaded within settler-colonial violence from the “past” coming back; i.e., the castle as a mortuary filled with the famous walking dead, a genocidal consequence digging itself up and looking to feed in reverse (feeding on the state having originally fed on them).
Said genocide occupies a kind of “vanishing point,” then, one myopically obscured by imaginary wreckage hidden beyond the zombie as the giver and receiver of state sex, terror and force. All exist in the same shared space and its yawning narrative of the crypt; re (from our Four Gs): “the closer one gets to the problem, the more the space itself abruptly announces a vanishing point, a procession of fragmented illusions tied to a transgenerational curse: ‘a place of concealment that stands on mere ashes of something not fully present.'” Few things are as censored/controlled as the human body (especially female bodies), which gives the owners of these bodies more power than they might otherwise be led to believe: cryptonymy showing and revealing in equal measure (“flashing” something we’ll examine more in Volume Three).
(artist: Crow)
As such, the future in this narrative of the crypt is always “undead,” stuck in a perpetual, frozen state of crisis, decay and us-versus-them, inside-outside, correct-incorrect, etc. The zombifying effect becomes a consequence of older traumas meant to pacify workers using displaced, half-veiled threats of sudden, impending destruction—usually in vague, violent, cataclysmic terms: the future is doomed, with Promethean “waves of terror” being taken to national, if not global, extremes; i.e., zombies are everywhere, thus unavoidable as a means of menticide. Canonical “archaeologies” not only welcome these rapid-onset dreams as calls to action; they fetishize the use of weaponized “toys” leveled against the usual recipients of state violence inside retro-future police states.
Apart from a general sickness, the undead are often defined by how they feed in relation to what they eat and where they come from. Vampires, for example, drink blood and invade or dominate a particular site from somewhere else—not just from beyond the grave, but another terrestrial location; e.g., Transylvania. Zombies, though, are not simply rotting corpses that eat brains; they embody the state of exception as a presence of “corruption,” whose liminal, transgenerational trauma is either given or received at home—e.g., the imposter Nazi zombie or fascist vigilante as givers thereof, and similar invader stereotypes who are made to feel like imposters that never really fit in because they start to internalize the state’s hatred of them during us-versus-them disputes (cops and victims).
To this, other fascist invaders can be the vampire (which we’ll examine in the next chapter, about undead feeding mechanisms) but also orcs and similar, green-skinned monsters with a vigilante flavor (such non-white colors code for generalized stigma, but also aggression). In short, they’re false revolutionaries taking class war to the streets in defense of the status quo and masculinity (thus Capitalism) as “in crisis”; i.e., justifying growing states of exception where these deputized, toxic-masculine killers operate: state zombies vs zombie workers as a matter of dogmatic possession. Whatever the likeness, this generally is a thoroughly abject enterprise; i.e., demons and the undead having far more in common than they do differences, insofar as the giving and receiving of state force is concerned!
For example, Reagan from The Exorcist (1973) is seemingly possessed with the far-off spirit of colonized lands, which she vomits up on principle (dyspepsia, maybe); i.e., a bad girl needing to be exorcized of said evil as making her zombie-like, the bougie mother calling upon holy men to do the job in a suitably martyred, cop-like fashion. It’s obscurantism, crudely waving away postcolonial voices like one might a fart. Releasing such class-to-racial tensions canonically works with all the grace of ripping ass as one’s default response; i.e., minus the vague pretenses of irony that such bad-taste jokes foist onto the audience, the black penitent turned into the worst sort of spoof: colonial rehabilitation (with James Woods, below, being a thoroughly horrible person on and offscreen) by literally shitting out any spectres of Marx as stubbornly haunting us, waiting to return.
Except, it’s not just a feeling of undead invasion, but of one being followed, watched and occupied by the undead as something to abject however one wants (what Jordan Peele calls “the tethered”). In canonical media, such toilet-themed antics (so-called male humor) leaves the audience with a bad distraction—one made by the usual throwers of reactionary-to-moderate tantrums versus legitimate attempts to move past William Friedkin’s intensely problematic picture. That cannot happen unless the undead come out in ways that don’t constitute rejection. They’re people, not bodily waste!
(source film: Scary Movie 2, 2001)
More to the point, these ethnocentric attitudes are taught at the earliest age possible, and not just from a historical perspective; e.g., Jared Diamond’s 1997 Guns, Germs and Steel as something to critique from a historical perspective (Bad Empanada’s “Guns, Germs and Steel: A Historical Critique,” 2020) but also a Gothic one tied to similar reifications of what, by the late ’90s, was already a very dated concept: white supremacy as geographically essentialized (aka “moral geography” as something cryptofascists call Western Chauvinism, pro-European, and other dogwhistles we’ll unpack in Volume Three).
That’s where I come in. Whereas Capitalism pits workers against workers (thus fighting each other instead of the elite), Sex Positivity likes to challenge this bad education/parentage by focusing on positive justice through xenophilic struggle and tension—i.e., towards desirable goals by proletarian agents who have internalized human rights as something that all workers deserve. Zombies become something we’re presented as and which we internalize; so hugging this notion as something to come home to (and face state rejection by showing up where we’re not welcome) is something of a sticking point for the rest of the book series: vigilantism colonizing weird media.
While this inevitably means we won’t discuss fascist vigilantes[4] too much in this chapter (returning to them much more in Volume Three, when we discuss weird canonical nerds), I still wanted to outline several famous examples, here; i.e., of their gang-like gatekeeping as sold to kids. I want to so you’ll have an especially clear idea of what I’m talking about as we move forward into the bad dream of zombie survival stories: assimilation fantasies weaponizing the alien in defense of the status quo as nostalgic—of the white, cis-het American family’s childhood residence as something to stalk the streets avenging through standardized-to-tokenized class/race betrayals. Once fallen, the House of Usher must be avenged!
Of course, there’s two sides to every nostalgia—as dead dogma to wake up or keep asleep; it’s in the music of heavy metal as much as Walpole’s “ancient” castles, the ’80s a neoliberal hauntology that, even back then, wasn’t so magical; e.g., Sanctuary’s “Future Tense” (1990) reflecting on a black mirror about the false nature of what would enter a state of decay for disillusionment through neoliberal media:
What do you see on the news when you watch TV
War in the name of God, or a playground killing spree
Politicians promise you the world, and a preacher cries
All he ever wanted was your money, and a bitch on the side (source: Genius).
But, let’s look at some examples that are cheerier on the surface. Per our Aegis, let’s take an extended-exhibit look at something sold to kids that came from a violent past out of the same ’80s—the undying and kid-friendly “turtle power” of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (and similar media) through canonical weird-nerd culture; i.e., through a common outlet for said proponents: games[5]!
(exhibit 34c2: Artist, top-left: Reiq; top-middle: Persephone van der Waard; middle: source; bottom-mid-right and far-to-and-bottom-right: Ronin Dude. Videogames franchised during neoliberalism to glorify vigilantism in service to state survival; i.e., through fatal, Orientalist nostalgia aimed at kids. For example, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was originally an independent comic book series conceived in 1981 by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird and produced in 1984:
The Turtles’ beginnings were humble: they originated in a self-published black-and-white comic book that Eastman and Laird produced together in their homes. The initial print run of that first issue was only 3,275 copies, but word spread quickly and Kevin and Peter suddenly found themselves writing, drawing and self-publishing one of the most successful independent comic series of its day [source: The Mirage Group’s “Eastman and Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” 2021].
As the series’ popularity grew, their black-and-white, ultraviolent satire was toned-down and sold to children in televised color—i.e., a commodification of neoliberal, “Zombie Capitalism”/sentai xenophobia defending the streets of New York [and its white-owned properties] for the elite.
This is rooted in shameless Orientalism. Whereas the Foot clan effectively packages Asian populations and peoples of color into a single, generic other for the “good zombies” to brutalize, the same zombies’ rewards are the status quo as commodified through catchy slogans designed to acclimate the audience to a commercialized, Americanized world: “Pizza time!” [itself a Pax Americana product endorsed by Gorbachev’s bizarre, 1997 Pizza Hut commercial celebrating the Russian Federation’s troubled existence following neoliberal shock therapy and the illegal dissolution of the Soviet Union]. Any way you slice it, the pizza is product placement, including O’Neil as the redheaded damsel-in-a-banana-yellow jumpsuit, dutifully feeding our hungry lads boxed pepperoni and cheese.
Just as videogames took root inside a neoliberal geopolitic, their “totally rad,” dated materialities and associate hauntologies have been repackaged time and time again; e.g., the skateboard [with Ronin dude shrewdly pandering[6] to his audience, below] a Bart-Simpson style form of rebellion recuperated to serve state aims; i.e., punks decay like all dissidents do when incentivized: to not give a fuck as privileged white bigots do [re: James Woods, Richard Dreyfuss, etc].
[artist: Ronin Dude]
Moreover, each reincarnation of the Turtles replicates the same coercive worldview for the children of tomorrow to embody again—e.g., Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem‘s 2023 apologia, “Society won’t accept us unless we become heroes.” This regurgitated propaganda is heteronormative, justifying apathy within the future as dead, but also myopically trapped inside Capitalism as something to defend, including its colonial binary as crumbling inside the ruins waiting to decay! It’s pacification in ways that attack the elite’s enemies in defense of a promise said elite will never deliver on!
[source: Brutal Ace’s “Chun Li Sparring Costume Remake Video 1,” 2024]
Over time and from moment to moment, the performances become frightened, desperately hyperbolic; i.e., with male heroes shown as hypermasculine and female “waifu” heroes often hyperfeminine, though Chun Li—Capcom’s resident “thigh queen”—is a femme cop with masc components: a centrist Amazonian compromise representing China during Capcom’s nation pastiche.
To that, nation pastiche is essentially bread and circus, including its anthemic, Olympian-grade music[7] and over-the-top announcers. All broadly normalize war and provide social elevation as a privatized process between competitors for various teams, including nations personified by superhero athletes [either in the flesh, or through avatars] and fans of those teams/athletes as predictably divided from childhood into adulthood; i.e., over who is the strongest, the babyface and heel for either as distracting from the class character behind the coercive war theatre [with competition being the most fun to watch—no one likes a rout, including Communists (e.g., Bay and I are currently watching EVO 2023 and enjoying MenaRD put up a good fight[8]; also the fact that he single-handled formed the Dominican Republic e-sports team, Mani-Pacquiao-style)—but, for the elite means that business and attendance are booming: “Killing is my business and business is good!”].
In short, it becomes an “us-versus-them” mentality to emulate, “taking to the streets” according to the usual trifectas and monopolies; i.e., inside a digital and/or physical colosseum of personified flags, anthems and drama, but also military paraphernalia and generalized product placement [e.g., slave food peddled during the cycle of war-as-theatre, below] illustrating the Military Industrial Complex and copaganda, mid-venue: a neoliberal centrism-as-gladiatorial working through a half-real videoludic on and offscreen. It forces players to turn into heroic/villainous monsters and fight for scraps; i.e., as NuckleDu puts it: “You gotta fight even though you’re scared!” [Capcom Fighter’s “Capcom Cup X – Top 16 to Grand Final,” 2024]. It becomes hyperreal, an illusory map of empire beyond which the real world is reduced to dust [and, you guessed, populated with zombies].
The process reduces people, but especially middle-class people, to paid shills, genuine victims, and unapologetic icons of war that serve profit by moving money through nature in corporatized and national forms; i.e., recruiting and accommodating the world’s strongest within a lucrative gladiatorial scheme that endorses material goods, mid-sponsorship; e.g., “brought you to by” Pagoda eggrolls, a pauper’s dish that becomes part of the same trademarked, gentrified signature in a larger body of kayfabe operations banking on war as a product; i.e., a heteronormative[9] spectacle to indulge in [and afterwards] about genocide inside the settler colony’s Imperial Core.
In turn, tournaments become neoliberal bread-and-circus [videogames] that hoard talent and pit it blindly against itself over and over. Simply put, it’s the promotion of war through corporate contracts working domestically on par with weapons manufacturers and military contractors on foreign soil; i.e., with trickle-down mentalities provided to middle-class consumers by being close to professional competitors as “royalty” [the petit bourgeois] and the gladiatorial teams of athletes being close to the power and wealth of corporations [“close” being the operative word, here; the money always flows up and pushes for more and more tournaments, thus more exploitation, hence more division between the elite and the working poor].
[artist: Dandonfuga]
Sex sells as a matter of “easy money” within exploitative practices like videogames being made “for [white] men” from childhood onwards. As spectators/artists, though, we can enjoy this content as a process and even subvert its Amazonian or Achilles-esque persona [exhibit 111b] as not belonging exclusively to fascist/centrist vigilantes punching the monstrous-feminine; i.e., as something weaponize against the proletariat, including colonial scapegoats like Laura Matsuda [left, but also 41e1]: through ludo-Gothic BDSM that overrides the status quo[10] in our hands. Simply put, there are no submissives in combat sports, resulting in two doms/tops wailing on each other in a very homosocial sense [e.g., Spartan homoeroticism] to try and make one party the unwilling sub/bottom; i.e., the sub in sports is always unwilling. The inherent theatre is inherently unfair and deceptive, but also heteronormative: gamers—usually boys—don’t cry except when they win and get the golden ticket [thus the girl, the house, the respect, the dream, etc].
[artist: Dandonfuga]
Also, in half-real meta narratives between games, players, and the world, the pursuit of profit combines conservative hauntologies with different contemporary franchises to revive in as closely as they can [e.g., Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise of the Dragons, 2023, ripping off Shedder’s Revenge from a year prior and Toxic Crusaders slated for 2024]: a neoliberal mimesis striving to milk the replicated material to death. This procedure becomes the thing to emulate, homogenizing all of the copies as lucrative “clones”; i.e., similar to Doom in the ’90s with FPS, or Mortal Kombat and its ’90s, “ninja kayfabe,” heavy-metal-meets-industrial music video/AMV approach to staged combat and Ed-Boon-style, color-coded “war Barbies” [e.g., Jade, above]. Even The Simpsons had their own beat-’em-up game, made by Konami who also did the TMNT arcade games and their Nintendo ports].
Similar to Street Fighter 2‘s 1991, post-Cold-War replication—of famous nationalized athletes[11] and pop culture heroes making money for the elite through sports-like avatars—it’s not so much a completely new thing in future schemes, but a revival of an old approach within a new era of ludic media raising the profitable dead-as-heroic: the streaming/cloud era of videogames being capitalized on by the Faustian sponsor from Wayne’s World proudly admitting he exploits kids for quarters[12] in the Arcade “Golden Age.” “He blows goats,” indeed:
Note how the sponsor’s “favorite game” is Desert Storm Commando Warrior, a diegetic allusion to a real-world conflict: “That would have to do with that ‘limited skirmish’ in the Middle East,” asks Wayne, per the studio-provided card prompts. Just as there was nothing limited about the “skirmish,” there was no limit to the degree to which neoliberals would try to profit off foreign conflicts; i.e., as something to manufacture but also sanitize/disguise through the proliferation of kid-friendly counterfeits that could charge the student money while indoctrinating them: to the business model the persona of war as sports-like.
To that, the deception of the term “sporting” under Capitalism is the lie that “fairness” has anything to do with it; the system is built for cheating by design, but cheating means different things for the elite versus regular players. We’ll explore this more when we examine Squid Game and Alice in Borderland [2019] deep in the Undead Module.
In the meantime, these little Quixotes [gamers] become not just action heroes, but last action heroes zealously defending the neoliberal dream of centrist action fantasies, Scarface-style, as the only legitimate course of action against oppression. Stars in “their own” movies, they’re not simply Captain America punching cartoon [nominal] Nazis and Marxist-Leninists during centrist kayfabe, which extends to debating real Nazis/cryptofascists vehemently condemning actual [non-nominal] socialists pushing towards Communism; they’re the defenders of the last bastions of “good” media, the American neoliberal dream of “doing one’s part” by making corporate vampires lots of money by turning a blind eye to real-world, systemic oppression in-text and out: leaning into stereotypes that solidify the divisions between the Global North and South, but also the embracing the fatal, self-destructive, white-Indian-style nostalgia that comes with it.
In short, whitey thinks he’s Cuban. Gamers in general might as well, playing whatever form of “oppression” lets them be the fascist, thus have a deputized form of vigilantism [something we’ll return to in Volume Three] that polices media, but also things connected to said media: a top dog that goes down in a blaze of glory. Sound familiar? It’s what weird canonical nerds want to be—a cartoon of a cartoon attached nonetheless to real-world atrocities and tokenization [with Pacino’s performance being a kind of vaudeville, the Italian-American playing a Cuban crime lord to capitalize of American Red Scare towards their Cold War enemy surviving after the end of history]: a zombie cokehead who thinks he’s bulletproof.
We’ve already talked about this repeatedly in the volume [re: “‘Death by Snu-Snu!’: From Herbos to Himbos, part 2“]; i.e., regarding “There can only be one!” Yet, the phrase literally becomes the pacified worker’s mindset within these bread-and-circus arenas, which I acknowledge in one future revival of the same basic scheme—Cobra Kai [2019]: “To this, less karate would be a good thing to aspire towards. Alas, the show makes its own argument through the crowd watching the carnage: They want to see their kids win, but there can only be one. That’s pretty fucked up, isn’t it?” [source: “Class Warfare – Classism, Fascism and Whitewashing in Cobra Kai, season 4,” 2022].
Whatever the form, future revivals tend to sanitize the history of this exploitation, focusing on the early neoliberal era of videogames as “better.” For example, though now discontinued, Neoliberal and Fascist Propaganda in Yesterday’s Heroes originally started off as a single, yet-unpublished blog post: “Policing Bodies: The ’80s Action Hero in Streets of Rage 4” [2021]:
Pro-policing is the worst consequence stemming from ’80s nostalgia, one whose propaganda manipulates the audience into adapting a cop’s mindset. There are two variants: militarized and domestic.
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- Militarized propaganda. The myth of invincibility is cultivated by the state operating as a foreign war machine through its population.
- Domestic (paramilitary) propaganda. The myth is cultivated through media sold to civilians who support domestic extensions of state control: the police.
A famous example of militarized propaganda is Nazi Germany. Through nonstop propaganda [World War Two’s “How Hitler Manipulated Germany into Committing Genocide – WW2 Special,” 2021], Hitler’s Germany promoted mythic, invincible strength as entitled. While the Soviet’s favored brute-force party control and active censorship, the Nazi state chose to manipulate the public through more lateral methods. Despite being tied to a cult of personality that hijacked a decentralized bureaucracy and encouraged competing bodies within, Hitler’s propaganda threw its “heroes,” the citizenry, at whatever enemy the state invented. This promise of power was effectively a con, one leadership eventually bought into. Hitler may have lied and cheated his way to power, but was nonetheless digging his own grave. Actual belief is beside the point when the mythology Hitler used led to his kingdom’s total destruction [The Armchair Historian, “Endsieg: Germany’s Final Plan to Win WW2 1943-45,” 2021].
Domestic propaganda is equally harmful, but less aggressive. In Propaganda, American writer Edward Bernays proposed that wealth and advertising allowed for the creation of “invisible people” that controlled the hearts and minds of the public—a monopoly of engineered consent that, in his mind, was vital to the survival of liberal democracy. Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent (1988) would outline these invisibles as the corporate groups that media groups are beholden to through advertisers. Such an invisible group is much like the one Carpenter commented in They Live, which came out the same year as Chomsky’s book [and which Zizek would comment on in A Pervert’s Guide to Ideology in 2012].
Unfortunately this group is perfectly comfortable with the proliferation of war. War is profitable. To cozen their way into the minds of the public, American corporations in the ’90s used neutral media like Streets of Rage to advertise pro-military and pro-state sentiments. Like Reagan before him, Bush Sr. targeted his population with family-friendly entertainment that repeatedly paralleled US policy as “good.” In turn, these franchises grew popular thanks to their magnetic, simple heroes (which, at the domestic level, represented police groups Keeping America Safe). These heroes became something not unlike Hitler’s propaganda, or the alt-right groups that emulated Hitler in the US: They offered what Healing from Hate (2019) refers to as “false power,” or the feeling of strength (timestamp: 24:30), to those who felt weak inside a broken home[13] [which in Gothic poetics is attributed to a perceived “other”—externally during Imperialism abroad and internally due a foreign agent when Imperialism comes home to empire]. Often, this weakness stems from the tremendous expectations society places on men through their heroic standards [Macabre Storytelling’s “Male Dating & Sex Struggles: A Problem In Plain Sight,” 2021]. People often play videogames to feel empowered; but videogames like Streets of Rage empower through propaganda disguised as neutral entertainment, specifically cathartic violence. The resulting worldviews (and the fandoms encouraging and protecting them) illustrate a territorial attitude to the whole affair.
Consequently, the fandom (and its masculinity) as “under attack” becomes a common feeling for nostalgic viewpoints that present the world in simple, violent terms: “Beat your problems up”; save the world, masculinity and Capitalism. When threatened, then, vigilantes will not sit idly by but instead defend themselves viciously as they’ve been taught. Streets of Rage teaches the application of force through the need to punish others a priori. On par with the Power Ranger’s “teenagers with attitude,” the youthful defenders are strong enough to fight, and taught into thinking they’re invincible—or at least impervious enough, through tacit support from the state; i.e., to embark on a desperate, foolhardy Children’s Crusade.
Unfortunately this soldier’s mentality overlooks the dialectical-material reality of the situation:
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- Those under attack by the hero have nothing.
- The relatively wealthy hero is made to think they are under attack by the criminals.
- The hero is doing the state’s bidding by sweeping the streets in coordination with the police.
Each mission is part of a violent, player-led campaign into impoverished levels like “Dilapidated Town.” There, the local population is entirely criminal (a fact illustrated by the hero beating everyone up). The player seems autonomous, literally holding a controller in their hands; the game still conditions them to “win” by beating up bad guys that just happen to be marginalized.
This is profoundly manipulative. Streets of Rage is not teenage rebellion against the state, but the state recruiting the middle class—specifically their angry youth—to police those most likely to rebel. This harsh treatment of the fictional poor mirrors bipartisan sentiments about the actual poor. Any anger or mistrust of the poor stems less from actual abuses committed against the player, and more from advertisements that manipulate player emotions.
Being slightly better off, the player is either keenly aware of actual socioeconomic problems (unemployment, economic instability and the shortage of material goods, etc) or told of them through videogames than present things in simple, black-and-white language. In either case, these overbearing issues are replaced by repeated promises: “Things could get worse.” By making this promise in-game, Streets of Rage primes its target audience to recognize and respect pugilistic displays of strength. Heroes are the only solution. Essentialized as the arbiters of Justice, their repeated shows of force replace more peaceful methods. Worse, fans recognize these violent displays in the police they see as “heroic” to a similar, cartoonish degree (and who generally frame themselves as heroic, too): teenage knights and Amazons [waifus, below] deputized by the local cops through gaming culture as an extension of its own neoliberal media.
[artist: Reluu]
Note: Eventually I plan to release the entire chapter online, but wanted to include a segment in Sex Positivity that feels relevant to our discussion about “undead” vigilantes and the “zombies” they attack—i.e., the crime these youngsters are so furious about as to be “tough on” in the first place. In doing so, the player is performing the will of the elite in a videogame format [the beat-’em-up] that has survived nostalgically into the present: a kind of “zombie vigilante” that operates beyond the law but also the videogame screen as informed by it [shoot, stab and punch the state’s enemies like the police do]. The fascist mentality of dehumanizing both vigilante and victim becomes a tradition to pass down to the next-in-line; i.e., a neoliberal rite of passage for the in-group to prove its mettle, time and time again against an imaginary foe. —Perse)
So ends the exhibit. Before we proceed out of part zero and into part one, please consider the essentialized, zombie-like function of such devices; i.e., regressing to a police-like childhood space in decay (as a Gothic castle would be) but having the means to police the so-called “corruption”: as something to banish in defense of the ’80s as an idea attached to its own canceled future. The corruption is part of the design, a kind of policeman’s janitorial high tied to monomythic junk food, schlock and deliciously trashy sex—in short, the usual white, male, middle-class (and token) concessions regressing to compromise the rights of others for the “privilege” of policing them; i.e., as a Man Box matter of assigning blame and punching down, thus settling the score through revenge against a hellish, undead/demonic[14] enemy (e.g., Contra [1987] and the white, CIA-style “rebel”) carried out by the usual benefactors of capital: white cis-het men preying on anything functionally black at home and abroad in a half-real, cop-like sense: defending property, not people, by doggedly pursuing the latter as criminal regarding the former as privatized.
This has a cross-media and transgenerational, curse-like effect. Set to catchy music, the health bars and HUDs return, as do the “rewards,” the Faustian (thus Promethean) Beowulf-grade “empowerment,” and the “rebel”/slumming aesthetic, but also the self-pitying cop who simultaneously lives for the thrill of combat—of feeling better than those he hunts and down kills—and completely hates himself for it (often in sequence over time; e.g., Mega Man vs Mega Man X). Puh-lease! It’s a LARPer’s con, my dudes, one targeting Don Quixote in spite of the ludo-narrative dissonance (e.g., real people don’t have health bars, but they’re also not zombies)! No matter how seductive the past may seem, then, Capitalism only uses it to conduct genocide by making the universal clientele their childish, lethal, somehow scared-of-everything and incredibly bigoted enforcers seeing themselves basically as ’80s cartoon heroes like the Turtles (a process aped by different token entities)! They think they’re Zorro, bravely serving the people; in truth, they’re cowards who act tough but concede to the elite—either white knights decaying into black, or just black deputized in search of one Crusade after another in worship of the police and the state (again, vis-à-vis Parenti: false rebels). Forever.
(artist: Blue the Bone)
Furthermore, whereas the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are a violent, sewer-dwelling gang of underaged crimefighters, the cross-generational vigilantes from Streets of Rage are ostensibly human recruits working in service of the elite. Yet neither is literally undead; they’re functionally undead, beating up the state’s enemies with nostalgic “special moves” (stab, punch, shoot) in order to regulate sex and force, thus receive scraps from their de facto employers (a fascist approach; i.e., kissing up and punching down): bribes toward a vague, assimilative promise of recognition, cheap commercial food and sex (above: April O’Neil’s news coverage, pizza and implied “party favors”—”‘Pizza’ time!” indeed).
The same goes for orcs (exhibit 37e), which exist inside a liminal state as demonized, violent scapegoats during displaced, centrist vaudeville (common hero fodder in Tolkien-ized, D&D-style videogames, for example). They aren’t rotten but still have green skin, a penchant for hiding in the dark and the anti-Semitic trope of eating human flesh (often of children) while nursing a perpetual animus with the “forces of good.” These and other fascist stereotypes caricaturize a dying (thus desperate) police state exacting a functionally white willpower onto a functionally black zombie hoard.
As we shall see, next, the state is always dying and hungry but tries its best to direct this hunger away from the middle class (the decay is part of the package). Sooner or later it cannot, the Imperial Boomerang sending the zombie knocking on their chamber door as a kind of undead alien returning[15] home to the haunted house as lent (a tired genre for a capitalism as a tired system); i.e., a fading memory redoubling in the face of state decay and cannibalism haunting the same lend-lease territories!
(source)
With all this being said, let’s dive into the zombie apocalypse as something to loudly exhibit the rotting elements inside; i.e., like a bad dream that has happened many times, and must invoke Toni Morison’s fragmented rememory to humanize itself as outwardly undead! Time to meet the zombie—not as a children’s cartoon or videogame hiding the rot, but in the blackened flesh as something to canonically debride!
Footnotes
[1] From The Boys‘ Season 4 Trailer 2 (2024).
[1a] So, unlike Disturbed singer, David Draiman (Bad Empanada Live’s “Singer of Disturbed Is Genocidal Zionist,” 2024), who wrote the original song “Down with the Sickness” (1999) that Zack Snyder (also a fascist) used in his Dawn of the Dead remake. Draiman is both Jewish and fervently pro-Zionist, making him a Jewish Nazi. As NMA writes,
David Draiman of Disturbed has posted pictures of himself signing a bomb during a visit with the IDF in Israel this past week. / Let’s let that sink in. If we’re feeling diplomatic, we can say that the metal and heavy music community is a diverse coalition of people representing a range of national identities, political affiliations, and influences, and as such there are a plethora of perspectives welcome within. Having said that, as Ozzy put it all the way back at the very birth of our genre, “Time will tell on their power minds/Making war just for fun/Treating people just like pawns in chess/Wait till their judgement day comes.” David Draiman is on the wrong side of metal.
While Draiman has been a long-standing Zionist and fervent supporter of the continued carpet-bombing Palestinians at an appalling rate over the past nine months, this revolting display exceeds his usual classy output by leaps and bounds. His performance here not only cheapens the realities of war, but represents the dehumanization of an entire population of people. It also stands in stark contrast to the many anti-war sentiments contained in his own lyrics across his career. Disturbed’s 2005 album Ten Thousand Fists critiques the US war machine and the subsequent destabilization of both American families and those abroad, yet Draiman seems to see zero contradiction between his own writing and the State of Israel’s military actions that he vehemently supports in 2024. Draiman has been vocally supportive of the IDF’s actions post-October 7th, making proud stances on social media with hashtags like #zionism, #fuckhamas, #neveragain,” etc, culminating in the viral post showing Draiman signing bombs intended to be dropped on the people of Gaza.
People in the music community have had an array of opinions and advocacy on the genocide in Gaza, with bands like Enter Shikari and Dying Wish successfully boycotting and ousting Barclays, an investment bank that supports Israeli weapons manufacturers, as a sponsor of the popular Download Festival, but few have had the degree of shamelessness to gleefully sign the very bombs being dropped on healthcare workers, civilians, UN representatives, and indeed, Israeli hostages. Facing backlash, Draiman has taken to both Instagram and Twitter with this to say in his defense:
“You think some clueless, willfully ignorant keyboard warriors will change [my stance]?” (source: “David Draiman Co-signs Murder of Innocents During Visit To Israel,” 2024).
In other words, he’s commodifying war by playing the false rebel (as metal—historically a stolen medium, taken from rock ‘n roll in 1950s America and spoken through the white British middle class a short period later [the late ’60s and ’70s]—is full of such examples): selling “rebellion” to white, middle-class America, while playing God, Omelas-style. He’s a cunt.
[2] Capitalism alienates us from each other as a matter of division for profit. So it’s very common to feel isolated and sex-deprived, as a result. The idea is to help each other out as a learning experience that aids Gothic-Communist development; i.e., “filling gaps,” as Rocky puts it. Per Tolstoy, “happy families are all like; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The name of the game is to figure out what each party needs and to go from there! You don’t have to cum to sex if you can’t/don’t want to, provided both parties are happy, and it’s not gold-digging (so-called “diamond dogs”) in this respect; survival becomes a means of finding love inside the market thereof (the Austen predicament), women/monstrous-feminine using what they’re forced to in order to survive, then thrive as a means of developing post-scarcity! Along the way, love and Communism (and all manner of sex, gender and labor through the linguo-material expression of these things) combine. In terms of individual cases, it’s exciting when it happens, precisely because capital discourages it. Good sex/company is hard to find as a historical-material effect; our synthesis through better daily habits and achievements go against said effect—with our potent, juicy Aegises (above)!
[3] Mike Dash writes in “Blue versus Green: Rocking the Byzantine Empire” (2012):
“Bread and circuses,” the poet Juvenal wrote scathingly. “That’s all the common people want.” Food and entertainment. Or to put it another way, basic sustenance and bloodshed, because the most popular entertainments offered by the circuses of Rome were the gladiators and chariot racing, the latter often as deadly as the former (source).
Such team-based sports mentalities continue to dominate Imperial-Core thinking under Pax Americana, generally with a monstrous flavor to achieve and uphold neoliberal centrism per all the usual refrains, monopolies, trifectas, and qualities of capital, etc: good monsters vs bad. In terms of chariot racing, though, such things hybridize in a cops-and-robbers shtick inside the American police state as a neoliberal phenomenon (Some More News’ “The Deadly, Avoidable Reality of High-Speed Police Chases,” 2024); i.e., fund the police, give them parallel copaganda shows that aggrandize them in a half-real sense, and profit off everything that ensues in a 24-hour news cycle.
[4] Their fragile defense is always of a state that is paradoxically perfect yet also forever in crisis.
[5] There’s two points I wish to make, here. One, for the sake of variety we’ll be returning to the history/analysis of gaming as a medium repeatedly in between chapters (and devoting larger potions of chapters to it, in Volume Threet). I’m a ludologist and like to include it, just so we’re not restricting ourselves to novels, cinema and television, etc. Nazis hide behind all media, so holistic (multimedia) analysis is the best way to expose them.
Two, we’re essentially talking about gamers, here; i.e., as predominantly white cis-het (ostensibly Christian) men of a middle-class origin. I hate the word “gamer” for various reasons, though (mainly because so-called “gamers” overuse it to the point of me wanting to stab myself in the ear to make it stop), thus haven’t used it much in the book so far. This will continue to be the case, with me preferring terms like “weird canonical nerd” or “white people disease,” etc. When bias prevails, just remember that they’re functionally synonyms!
[6] Everything in the photo screams white culture as something to protect from/during an apocalypse: a gentrified suburb where everything is tidy and clean, populated with white kids/teenagers playing pirate under an endless summer’s perfect blue skies. It’s pro-American propaganda hawking the now-dead American dream as a freak accident that, under American neoliberalism, will certainly never happen again. It becomes something for future generations to long for and adults to regress into as part of a midlife crisis. It’s shameless escapism profiting off a canceled future that, as is tradition, feels strangely dated: a return to greatness; i.e., when your neighbor/childhood friend just so happens to be the hot, tomboy girl-next-door as who likes all the nerdy shit you do, but also is straight from the comics you read and games that you play? Enjoy it, but critique it, nerds; a lack of critique, mid-consumption (George Romero’s zombie consumerism), is precisely what got us into this mess!
[7] E.g., the Street Fighter franchise; we’ll examine this more in “Bad Dreams,” part one.
[8] From Evo Events’ “Evo 2023: Street Fighter 6 Grand Finals | AngryBird vs MenaRD” (2023).
[9] The royal weight-class of a drug-fueled imaginary antiquity plaguing the sports world as—among other things—patriarchal, hence establishing men as superior to women “since forever.”
[10] Versus distracting from it through kayfabe rivalries and manufactured underdogs; e.g., even if Blanka wins as belonging to an underdog nation, there’s no material change in conditions for Brazil; or the characters being superficial, swapped out by players like alliances in cheap loyalties; or “cheap” characters representing oppressed nations played by “heel” players—Punk as a golden boy Urkel/”power player” who plays OP characters.
[11] With Zangief, Boxer, Sagat, Fei Long and Ryu and Ken all being based off Victor Zangiev, Mike Tyson, Sagat Petchyindee, Bruce Lee and Daniel LaRusso vs Johnny Lawrence from The Karate Kid (1984).
[12] Re (from Volume Two, part one): “Videogames have, since the 1980s, been a propaganda mill a scam tied to capital. Except, from the early 80s, you went from public entertainment devices that had a bunch of mostly young male clients cycling through them like a pimped out sex worker, to the place of business transitioning to larger amounts of money (from quarters to hundreds of dollars) per customer in each household (where there is more money to be had); i.e., a wife, purchased for paychecks, not pocket change, and ready to implement the business model into the first generation of what would become the New World Order under neoliberal Capitalism: a world enforced by neoliberal, monomythic copaganda’s us-versus-them simulations of Amazonomachia to maintain the status quo at a socio material level” (source).
[13] Which fascists recruit from, and neoliberals use during videogame canceled futures and infernal concentric patterns (among other media forms) to incite dogmatic, moral-panic violence against marginalized communities habitually preyed upon by state/Cartesian forces.
[14] Per the irrational, imaginary nature of the Gothic past, Hell is classically home to demons and the undead.
[15] Think Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” (1926), where the corpse does not know it is dead.