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.
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Bad Dreams, or Surviving the Zombie Apocalypse, part one: Police States, Foreign Atrocities and the Imperial Boomerang (Opening)
“I don’t want to wake up from a dream / That’s better than my life so I just stay asleep.”
—Jade Lyel, “13th Floor” (2023)
Picking up from where “‘Bad Dreams, part zero: Fatal Homecomings’; or, Return of the Living Dead (and Vigilantism)” left off…
If part zero equipped you with the idea of vigilantism/police violence as something to unleash unto the zombie coming home, part one shall now weigh the consequences and history of said return happening yet again—to meet the zombie as something to interrogate and hopefully humanize through rememory as a useful means of dreaming about unspeakable things. Pushed into the realm of dreams, they must be taken from said dreams and reassembled while awake; i.e., per Toni Morrison’s definition (from Beloved, 1989):
Rememory[1] as in recollecting and remembering as in reassembling the members of the body, the family, the population of the past. And it was the struggle, the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting, that became the device of the narrative (source).
Eventually the zombie must wake up and face its own decay as a class-conscious, intersectionally solidarized act (not just African Americans/pan-Africanism) extending to culture war and social-sexual expression per ludo Gothic BDSM on a global scale.
Thanks to capital, such apocalypse fantasies are pervasively common, and there’s no way to engage/play with and assemble them without some degree of trauma and confusion. Insofar as sex and force are powerful motivators, zombies are an element of social-sexual conditioning whose particularly imperiled headspace exists per settler colonialism as built to decay over time.
In short, there is always a return, the black side overtaking the white as a matter of planned collapse, which the elite will use to withdraw and plan their revenge through the middle class (the usual gatekeepers) raping the zombie on command; i.e., through police action as already synonymized with lethal force defending property using fear and dogma. This subchapter on the Imperial Boomerang will explore the challenging thereof, outlined in three further divisions (we gotta keep things bite-sized—to make sure your brains can absorb all this, but also so I can get through it):
- “part one: Survival (feat. Night of the Living Dead, Left 4 Dead, and The Last of Us—included in this post)”: Considers the dialectic of privilege waged against the alien dead when the chickens come home to roost. Defines the zombie, Imperial Boomerang and state of exception, then considers the ways in which zombies are policed through sex and force, mid-apocalypse; i.e., something abject to attack and divide, blowing apart/away with guns and otherwise dismembered as a form of pro-state discourse.
- “part two: Cryptomimesis (feat. The Last of Us, Scooby Doo, and more)“: Explores various stories that repeat on echo (through cryptomimesis) to normally divide workers too scared to face the consequence of state operations (zombies); i.e., how such things can be reclaimed from state monopolies, while nevertheless weighing on our minds (awake or not).
- “part three: Rememory (feat. Beloved, Frankenstein, and The Last of the Mohicans, and more)“: Examines the ways zombie apocalypse stories can be interrogated; i.e., as haunting our literal dreams, and where death/tokenization under capital can be reassembled and confronted after we wake up—as a polity/being to humanize and question per Toni Morrison’s process of rememory (through my personal experiences with the idea and writing this book).
Reclaiming the zombie’s agency through ludo-Gothic BDSM means coming to grips with the fact that it has been raped and made undead to begin with—not once, but over and over as the Imperial Boomerang sails home to exact a revenge argument (of Amazonomachia) on state workers: suffering to the conquered (a bourgeois strawman for genocidal victims, which the middle class attack at home per the process of abjection punching the ghost of the counterfeit). Per a humanized Medusa, though, Athena’s Aegis can reverse the flow of power (thus force regarding sex) in ways that don’t wait until then, and have more sex-positive, transformative results throughout:
(artist: Alexa)
As we shall see, this whole procedure is ontologically complicated, but especially the mirror-like zombie’s synonymizing with rape-as-undead—its compartment syndrome leaking unspeakable trauma above ground; i.e., feeling dead after sensing such decay in other people, other places, other times, as half-real, but also dream-like. Such remediation represents the far-off memory of genocide as both fleeting and falling apart, challenged by unspeakable trauma as something to face (along with its repressed abuse), then smash apart—per capital’s daily operations—to banish said memories to a state of stalled apocalypse: oblivion. Capitalists rely on such terror devices to instill reactive violence (survival mechanisms) as a matter of moving money through nature-as-monstrous-feminine; i.e., repeatedly selling these intimations of genocide back unto fresh generations sown with nostalgic memories of so-called better times and worse: “home” as haunted by sunshine and gloom (re: Walpole’s “gloomth”).
Because zombies in particular are perceived as both not alive and deserving of on-site capital punishment for returning to where they were never allowed, they cannot legally be murdered, raped, or otherwise abused. In the eyes of the state, they are merely “laid to rest,” but the process is always horrifyingly front-and-center during an apocalypse performed by the middle class having become the vigilante cop as part of the usual cloaked operations normally relegated to frontier atrocities (e.g., the Battle of Berlin): the zombie apocalypse becomes something to survive until order returns; i.e., after the vigilante middle class lynch the zombie-as-scapegoat, mid-witch-hunt.
In other words, the zombie’s entire existence is uncanny but also denied healthy love (symbolized commonly by the heart; e.g., the Tin Man, but also the literal beating thing pulled out of someone’s chest) by virtue of not being alive, thus lacking humanity and human rights in bad-dream scenarios. They aren’t simply food, but fodder looking for food only to be laid low by fascist vigilantism and reabsorbed into the state until it can regenerate itself and begin genocide anew, post doomsday. The elite require the middle class for such a project, de facto deputizing them to push the harvest far away until it eventually sails home yet again. Each time it does, it grows grim as it, per the liminal hauntology of war’s castles and undead feeders, brings trauma back to the homefront. Per Capitalist Realism, zombies are synonymous with the canonical apocalypse, then, as a xenophobic, psychosexual end of the world. Happening during eco-sociological state shifts, they can be applied to any genre: zombies Westerns, cyberpunks, ’80s-style beat-’em-ups, or “historical” dramas; zombies in outer space, Las Vegas, etc.
The history of this lies in the word apocalypse as currently synonymous with “zombie”; i.e., presently canonized as “an end of the world,” the word has different, more precise meanings that remain historically relevant to our discussions of subverting canonical disasters:
late 14c., “revelation, disclosure,” from Church Latin apocalypsis “revelation,” from Greek apokalyptein “uncover, disclose, reveal,” from apo “off, away from” (see apo-) + kalyptein “to cover, conceal” (from PIE root, kel-) “to cover, conceal, save.” The Christian end-of-the-world story is part of the revelation in John of Patmos’ book “Apokalypsis” (a title rendered into English as pocalipsis c. 1050, “Apocalypse” c. 1230, and “Revelation” by Wycliffe c. 1380). Its general sense in Middle English was “insight, vision; hallucination.” The general meaning “a cataclysmic event” is modern (not in OED 2nd ed., 1989); apocalypticism “belief in an imminent end of the present world” is from 1858 (source: Online Etymology Dictionary, 2023).
In Gothic terms, an apocalypse is a revelation about the present world as decaying behind a veneer of capitalistic normality—re: Baudrillard’s hyperreality except the trauma also extends to the population and ideology of a given setting and not just the buildings/cartography (which often have a dogmatic function to them). Nor are these places strictly depopulated; instead, they remain continuously occupied by individuals whose basic appearance doesn’t change, but rots under state sanctioned abuse: the brain rot of a fragile, fascist populace that grows increasingly frightened by everything in or out of sight, and which their home becomes one of our usual refrains to clear out; e.g., Tolkien’s treasure map or Cameron’s urbanized shooter during military urbanism.
However, because the source of this decay isn’t entirely local or foreign, its postcolonial, genderqueer subversion must happen by revisiting sites of trauma that are both deeply personal, while also being informed by larger geopolitical events, heroic personas and canonical “archaeologies” tied to the state as currently under attack from within (zombies tend to be a domestic menace with xenophobic qualities, marrying the fascist fear of the outsider and internal sabotage to a local population). It feels like a bad dream, but adumbrates settler-colonial horrors coming home to roost; i.e., a rememory assembled out of old dead parts—dead land, stolen generations, a diasporic and ouroborotic myopia.
Haunted by the dead of all places, our dreams visit us in ways we can reassemble per Morrison’s device to give the wretched fresh life. All constitute a transgenerational pedagogy of the oppressed having grown restless; i.e., the undead natives actively resisting capital/profit, thus police violence and the endless rape and war it entails.
Zombies denote the presence of settler colonialism bouncing around. To reiterate: First, we’ll look at the Imperial Boomerang’s history of traveling back and forth between colonized lands and localized, half-real examples; i.e., from Cambodia and Left 4 Dead (2008), The Last of Us (2023) as a matter of division. Second, we’ll consider other popular examples haunting our dreams as informed by half-real texts we can potentially put together as a means of uniting workers against the state. After that, we’ll briefly consider Morrison’s process of rememory per The Last of the Mohicans (1992); i.e., as an, at-times, seemingly involuntary reassembling of these bad dreams as dreamers do: in their beds at night.
Troubled by such complicated reflections, we’ll explore using them nonetheless to achieve intersectional solidarity with each other as normally divided under capital; i.e., despite past failures of the oppressed to unite on a wider level (we shall take this into the realms of toys and roleplay, in “Bad Dreams,” part two). We’ll only have time to scratch the surface, here, but I’ll do my best to suggest a holistic model; i.e., one you can express through any groups (and ideas) that you wish to connect yourselves to as a matter of struggle: part of the same intersectional undead mission moving inexorably towards a postcapitalist existence (or bust).
The Imperial Boomerang, part one: Survival (feat. Night of the Living Dead, Left 4 Dead, and The Last of Us)
Willow Creek was attacked repeatedly last night. Cruniac stationed archers on the perimeter of the town, and the bowmen were able to pick off the stumbling corpse-men as they approached. But there seemed to be no end to them. We have even seen Soulless and Ghols skulking about on the outskirts of town. All of us are beginning to worry, including Cruniac (source).
—The Narrator, “Down a Broken Path” from Myth II: Soulblighter (1998)
Capitalism is a hyperobject whose daily feeding is felt in the presence of undead trauma—the zombie apocalypse—as something to survive, which the elite manipulate through canon; i.e., as an argument for restoring the state, not dismantling it.
(artist, top-left: akiraeviI; top-right: Annabella Ivy; bottom-left: Zianab Jiwa; bottom-right: Winton Kidd)
Such things are legion, marched into the sea as a means of scapegoating an awareness towards Capitalism functioning through genocide as something to harvest, as usual, through nature-as-monstrous-feminine to some degree nude and vulnerable, but also tokenized and rebellious on the same undead surfaces (above); i.e., as something that rises from the night of the living dead to the dawn, the day and so on. Such things are rooted in rebellion and enslavement as equally die-hard, there being countless examples of the living dead returning for state forces (“survivors”) to do battle with; i.e., out of Hell, the underworld, the Valley of the Dry Bones, etc—what, in African studies, is a cycle commonly referred as the Kongo cosmogram, or the dead returning to life again and again:
(source, right: Dan Collen’s “Did the Trailer for Tucker Carlson’s Documentary Reference a Nazi Meme Co-opted From a Bigfoot Writer?” 2022)
Originally such myths were passed down orally after the Middle Passage as an attempt to hold onto one’s culture as a) being erased, but also b) giving voice to the profound and nigh-unspeakable levels of violence being exacted upon African Americans as chattel slaves.
All the same, such a model might seem strangely similar to the Hard Times square (or whatever it’s called) conceived by G. Michael Hopf: “Hard times create strong men, strong men create weak times, weak times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” Or as Bret Devereaux writes, “The quote, from a postapocalyptic novel by the author G. Michael Hopf, sums up a stunningly pervasive cyclical vision of history—one where Western strategists keep falling for myths of invincible barbarians” (source: “Hard Times Don’t Make Strong Soldiers,” 2020). In other words, it’s fascist propaganda through cultural appropriation that serves the useful myth of Gothic ancestry to invent a regenerating enemy the state can always use to call for violence against: the zombie.
For the sake of time and focus, we’ll stick to human-class zombies with meat on their bones; i.e., no kaiju or Biblical-style plagues, nor skeletons (sorry, Jörg Buttgereit[2]), just the fleshy dead appearing to fuck with the living and the living rising to the challenge.
We’ll look at many different examples, but stick to the 20th and 21st centuries (sorry, Matthew Lewis): Night of the Living Dead (1968), of course, but also Left 4 Dead and The Last of Us, followed by a variety of cryptomimetic offshoots in part two; i.e., per my expansion on Castricano, writing with the dead, or otherwise engaging with their many likenesses as echoes of trauma and its subsequent feeding.
I give each example for a different reason:
- Night of the Living Dead to outline the base concept of survival during us-versus-them tied to historical-material cycles of collapse; re: the Imperial Boomerang
- Left 4 Dead to stress the zombie’s psychosexuality
- Cambodia to give a real-world example intimated by such stories
- and The Last of Us (and similar undead revivals) to consider such necrotic assembly as mass produced through unironic cryptomimesis that we, as workers, desperately need to challenge; i.e., through ironic, sex-positive forms helping workers by facing and assembling our past abuse/failures, using them to dismantle capital.
Text or type, monsters concern poetic language as a preferential means of cutting through alienation using fetishized language for workers and nature.
To that, I never thought I’d go with zombies in a book about sex-positive expression written by someone who doesn’t exhibit sexualized abject gore (for an in-chapter explanation, see exhibit 34b). That being said, out of all the undead, I see now (with some surprise) that I’ve written about them more than any other monster type! Perhaps it’s not so odd, though; I wouldn’t fuck a rotten zombie, but a goth doll…? Mm, sure! Per Zombie Capitalism, zombies (sexy or not) collectively speak to the problems of the system and its built-in predation-through-us-versus-them-trauma better than any other (vampires, while gay as fuck, tend to be gentrified, witches and Medusa tokenized, and ghosts a bit vague and diaphanous)! It’s baked into them.
To summarize the larger problem these zombie examples will explore, capital—and by extension rape and war—are the result of monstrous experiments conducted first by Columbus (and later by others) in pursuit of profit. Indeed, profit is synonymous with both outcomes through capital, which leads to death and rape theatre as a cryptomimetic form of escapism, but also preparation for the return of Imperialism through the Imperial Boomerang (the back-and-forth travel of said device): to where it all began, the state; i.e., its birth and death as something to repeat with all its former victims hanging over it. Seeking some kind of equalizing through the state as normally unequal, such returns normally serve profit through the regulation of sex and force through attempted monopolies of terror, violence and morphological expression.
Of course, this is effectively what zombies are, but the state can’t monopolize them (or nature, below) through canon. Sex positivity under Gothic Communism involves reclaiming such things for worker aims, but first we must confront the Boomerang through the zombie; i.e., as blind, furious, and indiscriminately hungry per the giving and receiving of state force, which polices labor as sexualized and alien the way capital always does: through settler colonialism and slavery given a death warrant to further itself with until the end of things. This has a half-life; i.e., the more you put in, the stronger it gets, leading to growing denials and pretense: that you can kill it.
Sadly, that’s not how Medusa works, and by extension zombies; smaller units are part of a larger problem, a rot, and capital is to blame. To keep doing Capitalism, then, is to expand these monsters as a trauma response to the system working as intended, but eventually it will die by virtue of this. From the almighty Godzilla to the lowest shambling corpse, there is a price to pay for such exploitation. It is literally death, which can’t be destroyed, thus can’t be bargained with through state mechanisms (any of them) or counterfeits. Eventually the (zombie) chickens come home to roost (above), taking everything received into itself and blowing it all back into the giver’s soon-to-be-ruined face; i.e., as the Aegis does, or Godzilla’s atomic death ray. There’s no getting even or surviving it if all you put in is death because death cannot be killed; the only logical outcome is suicide, the Roman fool falling on his sword.
Like a cruel, seemingly unstoppable god, then, the state is effectively eating itself through a mirror argument that grows increasingly toxic over time; it must have these devices taken away before it’s too late. In short, we gotta put the pussy on the chainwax, camping the zombie before the state falls apart and total chaos ensues. We must transform it in ways that restore balance—not in the centrist sense of an oscillating pendulum of war and rape (which again, is the zombie), but that of post-scarcity as a harmonious existence with each other and nature as reunited with death: a new order of existence that lives with the trauma of the past as something to assemble, confront, befriend and understand into a better future.
So while, the undead predate capital, they and their apocalypses have evolved as a trauma mechanism under its regular abuses: the Imperial Boomerang as traveling back and forth like a giant sickle, its harvest grim wherever it goes. Where there’s zombies, there’s capital, which preys on zombies through us-versus-them to generate profit as something that goes back into the state.
Before we examine that process, let’s define zombies a little more clearly, as its evolution into its currently crystalized form (the apocalypse) is generally taken for granted. Then, we’ll expand on the Imperial Boomerang and what it is.
Zombies—while modular—share qualities with other undead and with demons and animals. In essence, they receive/give trauma and feed as a matter of forbidden knowledge/power exchange in relation to capital. Moreover, zombies generally arrive during an apocalypse, a return of the living dead that, while it reaches back into Pagan holidays like Samhain (aka Halloween) and other such notions of the afterlife, specifically concern a falling into the state of exception (re: a rescinding of rights during a time of state crisis, but especially decaying crisis); i.e., when the Imperial Boomerang sails home.
The zombie, with its green skin and rotting flesh, personifies all of these things as a cryptonym thereof, which repeats per cryptomimesis as a presence of state decay but also worker decay grappling with itself; i.e., as the state, like Omelas, feeds on said exception to try and regenerate its own territories and unequal positions at the cost of workers and nature. Exceptions, we’ll see, cannot be tolerated because they always divide us to defend profit through police violence, including token police violence during a fascist purge.
Simply put, a zombie is a giver/target of expanded state abuse, including vigilante forms, which all took time to evolve into themselves; i.e., Matthew Lewis and Mary Shelley wrote about zombies, but the discourse and state mechanisms of capital had yet to evolve and decay per stories like I am Legend and Night of the Living Dead. As it currently exists, a zombie is generally to some degree blind, angry and hungry as something to brand: as illegitimate criminal violence, though these qualities overlap and vary depending on the medium and genre; e.g., orcs in fantasy stories (especially videogames) functioning as outlaw zombies (the anti-Semitic trope of green skin [the color of stigma, which blackface extends pointedly to race] and eating flesh) despite technically not being undead; i.e., they—like people of color more broadly under Cartesian arguments and settler-colonial systems—historically fall unto the same state of exception by virtue of being non-white, thus are targeted for capital punishment as readily administered when the state decays: dead people walking. They’re more expendable than whitey is.
To see a zombie as it actually functions, then, is to see the state functioning as normal uncloaked; i.e., a rancid Aegis whose apocalypse denotes the paradox of a return without moving: an awareness that wakes up, “growing woke” regarding the function of the state as petty and cruel, but also divinely ordained to exploit others for profit in some shape or form (the function of capital is always secular insofar as profit is their god, a religion of money that is conspicuously fake; i.e., the Protestant work ethic).
Originally this exploitation would occur through conquest, in the medieval tradition of plundering gold, slaves and sex, extending to forms of enslavement that were more systemic (re: settler-colonialism and the generation of wealth through stolen labor and, in effect, generations). Over time, though, it would adopt ideologies ranging from Cartesian dualism to the Hammer of Witches: something to fetishize while alienating workers from—nature-as-monstrous-feminine, punching the ghost of the counterfeit while not-so-secretly lusting after it; i.e., like a bad dream; e.g., Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House” (1933) as something to revisit said xenophobia/abjection in comelier forms of anti-Semitism that are a) more open about said predation as a matter of service to the usual witch-hunter dumbasses, while simultaneously b) teasing them as a matter of conjuring up the slut in ways we can reclaim.
As this series has noted since “Into the Shadow Zone” (an essay from my PhD), this happens on the same kinds of trashy stages, through the same guilty pleasures/repressed sexual desires reversed on our attackers beholding us and panicking as a result: “Boobies, bush? Avaunt!”
(source film: Masters of Horror, episode 2: “Dreams in the Witch House,” 2005)
Cloak (or legs) open or shut, it’s standard-issue demon BDSM, cuties; we want to make it ludo-Gothic! I.e., it can be gentle (“Aw, do you have a ‘boner?'”) or strict (“Yes, motherfucker! Stare and tremble!”). What matters is that such duality (re)presents a unique and prolific opportunity to wake up in the kinds of shadowy places where bread-and-circus opiates normally call home. Few things open (or close) eyes like monster sex; i.e., being naughty in ways that camp canon and by extension capital, not quaint scapegoats (re: Lovecraft)! When camped, “rape and “death” are hot by virtue of calculated risk, thus mutual consent as something to illustrate, which—when interrogated further afterwards—gives us a chance to explore trauma in ways that open our eyes: to the zombie’s broader intersectional suffering!
To that, Medusa is someone to live with, whereupon you discover they fart, shit, pick their nose, get periods, have trauma tied to rape, to police violence through domestic abuse as always, to some degree, xenophobic; e.g., “My wife was a witch and I burned her!” or “My neighbor was a zombie and I shot him!” Such moral panics always lead to violence, as Richard Matteson and Matthew Lewis demonstrate, centuries apart; cryptomimesis is the echoing of that in ways we can liberate ourselves paradoxically with.
We’ve already gone over this playfulness extensively in the Poetry Module, so I won’t beat a dead horse, here (though doing so is fine when critiquing capital and genocide). Just, I wish to say that capital uses things until they are used up, then dies and resurrects through the general procedure as something to reveal and disguise itself as needed.
Such cryptonymy is dualistic, of course. Anyone who bothers to look backwards can see history as crowded with genocide, but also markers of “genocide” that serve as decoys and target dummies; i.e., per the sorts of complicit cryptonymies we must stage and camp while keeping tabs on our enemies playing with the same kinds of monster toys: in the usual doll houses as danger discos to meet revolutionary aids, mid-cryptonymy and mimesis. Normally paywalled, these 18-and-up tangents (and their PG, family-friendly segues; e.g., Tim Burton’s 1988 Beetlejuice, below) traipse through a very dark garden, a fallen paradise that is homely by virtue of its Satanic power challenging Cartesian thought (thus Capitalism) as a manner of “brothel espionage/rebellion,” of good play dressed up as “bad, very bad.”
Like Dante’s Inferno, people likewise go to them seeking power and sex, rapture and release for different reasons in settler-colonial territories (transformation, communication, violation, etc): America as a settler-colonial graveyard guarded by the monstrous-feminine as dualistic—the reaper-like whore as cop or revolutionary but looking basically the same. So long as these “visits with sin” routinely push people in a left-leaning direction, then it’s all good, man! Fuck her blue! As such, Capitalism must be escaped inside of itself, inside Medusa (so to speak); i.e., as something to transform through monsters and sex! Of course, there’s mixed signals among all the revolutionary-versus-cops chatter, but any good spy can tell the difference and works fast (why waste time?)!
Escaped or not, zombies (and by extension, things that are zombie-like) are slaves that denote genocide and slavery per Capitalism’s earliest iterations (from Columbus onwards) as going hand-in-hand toward Pax American as rotten-to-the-core; i.e., are angry about it as a transgenerational curse that haunts entire peoples per the mechanisms of capital both a) policing them as such, and b) turning their responses into a kind of comfort food for the middle class: a holiday (Halloween, of course, but also year-round treatments through walking synonyms; e.g., Jill Valentine).
“White people disease,” then, constitutes Man Box through weird-nerd culture as a developing kind of mirror/compartment syndrome—of freezing in front of the decaying double, the attacking of which releases various toxins. It’s a realization of one’s home (the state) as predatory and abjecting this onto the zombie as scapegoat, effectively blaming the victim while attacking them during the apocalypse as end-of-the-world reconciliation; i.e., per Capitalist Realism as a fascist enterprise punching Medusa. In turn, such persecution mania reliably and routinely decays into civil war as a feeling of self-cannibalization and training (through canon) towards such madness to defend the state with; i.e., “I’m eating myself, my home, my family and they, me! Such is life!”
When this occurs, it internalizes; the grim harvest becomes normalized in domestic territories, though it is often fetishized, dressed up to make it more palatable for the male/tokenized middle class. There’s a double standard, of course, white cis-het men being the universal benefactors (above) while token groups are expected to play their part in the same fascist appeasements; i.e., putting on the scary-to-slutty clothes and zombie makeup—with people of color becoming ghoulish fodder and those forced to identify as women becoming the undead, Sontag-grade Nazi whore (the colors of black and red denoting power and death, but also older ideologies attached to a shared collapse; e.g., Catholicism, Communism and, of course, fascism).
For example, Lady Death is literally a comic book superhero, one meant to pointedly calm the nerves of the men involved (the traditional owners of property in America; re: comic books, but also the girls on the covers), playing out Irigaray’s notion of the sacrificial mother as already dead per the usual Gothic conventions, fetishes and clichés; i.e., made canonical per the usual flesh merchants trading prostitutes, except in corpse paint (again, an ancient tradition at least as old as Rome): an undead, mommy-dom sex doll with blind eyes, a Destroyer aesthetic and a sickle (the grim harvest, but also a horseshoe-theory treatment of the Communist sickle, mid-Red-Scare). It’s hauntological par excellence.
(artist: Ashlynne Dae)
Last but not least, there is generally a liminality of the corpse as not only murdered but raped, exposing its sexuality on the same traumatized body as—once exposed—a reliably abject proposition unto itself: the humiliation of corpses by defiling them. Such defilement is psychosexual, involving sex as well as literal dismemberment (use your imagination). All constitute the system (and those who uphold it) repressing elements of its own function; i.e., its daily operations that allow the universal benefactors (the middle class) to reap the fruits of slaughter just enough to have their basic needs met, before handing the lion’s share off to their masters, the elite. When the Boomerang sails home, the Imperial Core is threatened and the elite tap the middle class on the shoulder and say to them: “Time to pay up!” Most aren’t ready for that unless they view it as nostalgic and territorial—like a (video)game argument that cements them neoliberally as the monomythic hero rescuing the “Free World” from evil, from enslavement (re: personal responsibility rhetoric). Pot, meet kettle.
That should be enough about zombies to get you through the chapter! Again, for the sake of simplicity, we’ll stick to rotting corpses (or at least hungry green people slated for execution) and branch out, the deeper we go!
Before we hop into the texts themselves, though, I want to explain what the Imperial Boomerang is over the next four-or-so pages, including various factors that come into play under its return—bodies and trauma, but especially the manner in which the monstrous-feminine is sexualized per the Cartesian harvest of nature as alien and undead; i.e., the state vs Medusa during zombie apocalypses, insofar as nature is undead in two respects—both as the giver/receiver of trauma and something driven to feed as a traumatic survival response to profit. Said feeding subsequently operates through zombie canon being used to pacify forces that otherwise might rebel, mid-exploitation/shortage; i.e., when faced with the undead as a consequence of capital doing what capital does by design: manufacture, subterfuge and coercion (the zombie being a world-class guilt-trip the elite can use to scapegoat the middle class as fascist, not them: “Look at what you did!”).
To that, the bourgeoisie use canon—namely the sudden visitation of a vague, “impending” apocalypse—to threaten workers with capitalistic nightmares that cover up xenophilic potential and xenophobic abuses (the impostor, above) when the levee breaks; i.e., emotional manipulation, per the Superstructure, where they distract with false revelations conducted by the nation-state/corporations as inherently deceitful (which extends to its parallel spaces): meaningless money tied to monsters everywhere that destroy or steal personal property and capital, all while thrusting indiscriminate police violence onto regular middle-class people already terrified by moral panics as part of the process (which include gender trouble and minority activism as something to lament, fear and attack; re: DARVO).
This larger process is the Imperial Boomerang—re:
“The thesis that governments that develop repressive techniques to control colonial territories will eventually deploy those same techniques domestically against their own citizens” (source: Wikipedia). In Foucault’s own words during his lecture at “Il faut défendre la société” in 1975:
[W]hile colonization, with its techniques and its political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other continents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions, and techniques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself (source: Stephen Graham’s “Foucault’s Boomerang: the New Military Urbanism,” 2013).
Described by Graham as “military urbanism,” this phenomenon accounts for the legion of dead futures popularized in American canon and its expanded, retro-future states of exception—hauntological narratives that present the future as dead and Capitalism as retro-futuristically decayed; i.e., Zombie Capitalism and zombie police states.
Ultimately, the flight of the Boomerang becomes a matter of routine done to death. Yet still it goes, traveling back and forth.
As it does, what seems faraway one moment is—like Dracula’s castle (and its monsters)—suddenly upon viewers, whose vicarious means of “dog-eat-dog” survival are generally predicated on us-versus-them-style revenge and petty squabbles (e.g., TERFs policing sex and force). These, in turn, transpire inside impromptu, “flash-mob” police states during Capitalism’s decay period, canonized by popular stories that pacify workers through personal property meant to acclimate them to violence and enslavement with a deathly appearance as “likeness” (the simulacrum as doll-like, per cryptomimesis); i.e., towards an outwardly dehumanized way of thinking towards zombified givers and receivers of state torture: us-versus-them enacted by the middle class as class, race and culture traitors dueling amongst themselves (“kissing up”) while punching down necrophilically at the lower classes for being non-white, non-Christian and GNC, etc. “Satisfy my hunger!” they shout, aping their masters, but badly (through Nazi-Communist cartoons) while reaping Medusa’s fat zombie ass: “Om nom nom!”
(source)
Revelations are always, to some degree, obscene and horrifying: the realization that one is not only an unwilling-to-willing participant in genocide on either end, but a corpse, or that one is eating or fucking a corpse (e.g., sleep sex), friends with a corpse, etc, as something to oscillate regarding the perceived return of as fascist or victim (the in-group logic being that fascists are somehow “invincible”; they’re not). The dialectical-material reality of the nightmare is “archaeological”; i.e., as defined by Jameson, re: the dialectic of shelter whose elaborate strategy of misdirection evokes a neoconservative return to order with an undeniably historical past sold as “dead future” back to workers to pacify them with. These amount to palingenesis, or nation-birth mythology (which, as we shall see, are rooted in fascism as ultra-national in a team-based apocalypse: the Nazi zombie vs zombie labor within the Gothic chronotope’s castle-narrative). In this imaginary “past,” subservient worker emotions/actions are constantly reduced to a pacified animal’s inside the cage of the world itself, one that threatens classic state “efficiencies” every waking moment: the dreaded Holocaust, but also state-sanctioned suicides, nuclear strikes, cannibalism, and rape and murders in relation to a relaxed, but ultimately radicalized (fascist) bureaucracy.
The past becomes, to some degree, imaginary as informed by actual events, which repeat based on such conditioning as Pavlovian, menticidal: waves of terror and vigilantism seeking to end said waves during alarm fatigue draining the middle class of its empathy towards the wretched. While both become zombies for the state, the middle class hunts zombies down, witch-hunt-style, as a kind of recuperated release value; i.e., it’s a panic button, Capitalism-in-decay defending itself through medievalized poetics, mid-purge. Said button pushes whenever the bubble bursts, genocide and decay becoming frighteningly visible and persuasive towards said middle class gaslighting their victims; i.e., the former as gatekeepers being terminally afraid of an imaginary fate delivered by “terrorists.” It’s seen as “worse than death” and having some truth it, but in ways that lead them to play ball for the elite by raping the lower classes, races and cultures during stochastic terrorism challenging proletarian voices (and counterterror): “The rotten enemy is at the gates, now defend us or else they’ll eat and rape you!”
(source)
To that, the state’s brutal historical-materialism is like a gelatinous cube, a ravenous blob that knowingly eats everything around and inside itself. In turn, the bourgeoisie only stay in power by using an old aristocratic trick: carefully administer the right threats at the right pace and feel, the right perception; i.e., canonical media dressed up as fatal nostalgia during the dialectic of the alien, wherein the zombie-as-punching-bag makes for an effective state terror device: “They’re coming to get you, Barbara!” When threatened by the terrible kinds of violence associated with state collapse, middle-class workers will atomize and push the zombie away from themselves. As such, they desperately cling to the state should collapse even be mentioned, relinquishing their rights in the process. No argumentation is made for cooperation or communes. Instead, the scenario is always the same: the sudden threat of spontaneous gory violence—a fear of immediate, societal change that throws infantilized and persecuted people alike into a state of emergency and then hands one side a gun; i.e., lucid dreams of settler-colonial violence, mid-nightmare, making exceptions to who can live and die.
“Zombie” isn’t just the literal walking dead, then, but a liminal-monstrous existence whose buried past rises up and “walks” the earth; it “blips” into existence during Capitalism-in-crisis, conspicuously hungry for human biology (the colonized feeding on the colonizer as relatively alienated from said cannibalism).
Seemingly overnight, this actually happens more slowly as the Imperial Boomerang sails home; i.e., a return of the living dead through ambiguous invasions of the destroyed and the destroyer on the same deathly personas: “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth[3].” As the state becomes increasingly fascist, it gradually colonizes its own middle-class population, cannibalizing them through sanctioned violence inside a growing state of exception (a concept we’ll examine, here, but also in Volume Three, Chapter Two when we talk about proletarian praxis in conjunction with fascists). The home-as-settler-colonial becomes foreign, alien… hungry as a means of defending itself through self-cannibalism as fascist; i.e., Nazi zombies!
This cannibalism isn’t always figurative or grandly dramatic (e.g., The Hunger Games, 2008), and moreover, it has a built-in bias on all registers: dark (and queer) meat, first (female meat being somewhat protected by virtue of the state needing breeders—of owners and slaves alike—which they of course abject: “Mars needs cheerleaders”). Inside the growing state of exception, then, zombies “suddenly appear” through the manipulated demand of a great number of them: a black rapacious horde.
To this, the zombie becomes an elaborate distraction, occurring as a matter of experience through funerary markers that phenomenologically denote state abuse as doubled during the liminal hauntology of war and its grim harvest; i.e., through the zombie as a manufactured crisis parallel to the state working as it always does: as a cryptonym (symbol of hidden trauma) symptomatic of state abuse that exposes itself mid-conflict in a humanoid, Cartesian form. This isn’t always gore-inducing nausea, but eroticism pulling another classic trick out of the bag: graveyard sex.
(artist: Soy Neiva)
Under such market structures and motivations, the elite make death/genocide sexy and cool through fascist poster girls (conflating Communism through the same kayfabe theatre versus the American babyface). Medusa, then, becomes the usual peach to harvest when fattened up—a dark mommy to kill and tokenize, extending to her “brood” (the racist idea of non-white people as vermin coming from a single, Archaic-Mother source). Reclamation occurs through a seizing of the merchandise to say things about Medusa as dark, thicc, and delicious, but also human; e.g., the bi-racial PAWG as something to hug and fuck, but also appreciate as a thing unto itself: nudism dressed up in sexual, darkly charged outfits, a cultured aesthetic that glides between bodily and material elements adorning said body as castle-like, undead and black; i.e., as a matter of settler-colonial operations, mid liminal-expression: a look, a style, a mood conveyed by dummy thicc in-betweens, both white and black in appearance offering up size difference at a delicious glance (re: Lexi Love, Nya Blu, but also Soy Neiva, above).
Such zombies often lack an outwardly undead or black semblance (also above), but remain forbidden, potent, plucky and magnetic—able to speak to things that are paradoxically taboo and commonplace, stylized (those tats are killer, below). If the ghost of counterfeit can be interrogated and reassembled, mid-exchange, then flashing the goods as “goth” is perfectly fine! Medusa’s hefty cryptonymy (the stealth booty-as-cloaking-device that hides power in plain sight) needs to serve workers, not profit, but subsisting within capital is to be expected.
Furthermore, patterns repeat on bodies as doll-like, but also positioned like dolls that are both somewhat undead-looking and extremely fuckable in a paradoxically sex-positive sense. This is fine so long as you don’t tokenize (thus divide labor to serve the elite through fetishized, police-like distractions)! So pay attention and learn the trade; i.e., its hauntologized, cryptonymic symbols of “death” in quotes (e.g., tarot, ravens, skulls, etc)! Get it, girl (something to eat, something to fuck—same difference)!
(artist: Raven Griim)
Ambiguity builds during an apocalypse; i.e., as something to survive while surrounded by monsters. Like all monsters, though, zombies are dualistic. They can be used either by pro-state or pro-worker agents; i.e., the zombie either being ex-to-generalized slave seeking liberation, or hauntologized cop punching the middle class clutching their pearls (there’s also overlap, with different forms of tokenization resulting as marginalized groups decaying into traitors, exhibit 34b). This hostile vagueness makes the zombie (white or non-white skin; male, female or intersex[4]) a personified cryptonym, one whose historical-material genesis per cryptomimesis yields fresh mutations that imply the state’s tried-and-true function: a corrupting force for the living to behold and puzzle over while fighting for their lives, but also a form of canonical gaslighting that sends the survivor(s) into a spiral of doubt when faced with the unavoidable sense of doom; i.e., repressed decay and lies emanating from the state during manufactured crisis. The two are obviously connected, but there’s no time to play detective, mid-apocalypse; the problem is too big and too sudden to make any sense of, the state simply prescribing violence as a means of escape when Medusa shows off that fat ass: blast the zombie apart instead of carefully using rememory as an effective, oft-involuntary means of putting the puzzle pieces back together.
A xenophilic clue can be gleaned through the disease vector itself. Although canonical zombies generally symbolize moral panic as tied to the underclass (often out-of-control sex and other state-regulated variables linked to worker bodies and labor), the exact reason for their sudden resurgence is never diegetically stated; it’s hushed up or abstracted (e.g., “The Colour out of Space,” 1927) to keep middle-class xenophobia rampant for fear of nuclear-familial collapse. Canonical zombies, then, merely represent the abject reciprocation of state violence, meted out using lethal force to control sex/fetishized labor between everyone inside the state’s boundaries. Then, it becomes counterfeit nostalgia and echoes in on itself through adaptations of adaptations; the entropy climbs, a kind of amplified senescence tied to the fatal family portrait as undead: from the original Lovecraft short story to The Darkest Dungeon‘s “The Color of Madness” (2018) to the 2019 adaptation by Richard Stanley (a good couple years for Cage, whose Mandy [2018] we will inspect later)! “The nuclear family was consumed by a far-off devourer!” In other words, it’s the usual abject muffling (re: cosmic nihilism viewing the colonial territories, outer space, as a hostile final frontier).
Even when canonical, though, survivor narratives are presented as suitably chaotic, insofar as danger is both hard to define and to pin down. According to the pathogen’s anisotropic (and highly figurative, volatile) nature, this xenophobic exchange is many things once. One, it works towards zombies as recipients of state violence; i.e., their appearance resembling the returning undead and their embodied trauma as something familiar to reject, thus aggregate a defense against by shooting at (suicide). Two, it can be from zombies as givers of state violence; i.e., whether directly or bounced back at them; e.g., the fascist “zombie” death knight operating inside hauntological death squads to resist the invasion of—with Cage’s American dad eventually destroying his own family (who admittedly are a bit worse for wear at that stage). Three, the middle class are generally caught, suitably enough, in the middle while the state cannibalizes itself through them (above).
Except this middle group generally targets everyone in their own attempts to make it through the nightmare: saving their own skins (and brains) from cannibalization. The inability to love or be loved dooms everything inside the state of exception but power will be there, killing labor first; i.e., the return of the black knight, the KKK, the Nazi, Cthulhu, as marching in the streets while white moderates (the middle class) pick and choose their targets: polite to your face as they promptly stab you in the back (re: Malcolm X).
Whatever text we look at, there is always some degree of chilly disposition, veiled hostility and cognitive dissonance/estrangement while fighting abjection (the feeding mechanism going haywire, supersizing slave foods [and the harvested dead associated with them] as the usual state mechanisms start to malfunction). But you have to start somewhere and be unafraid to critique older workers to learn from (and camp) them as needed.
This brings us to our first text to analyze, Night of the Living Dead (sorry, Matteson, but we’ve talked about your book a fair bit, already).
Clearly there is an inherently racialized (Cartesian) character to settler-colonial unrest in apocalyptic forms; i.e., slave rebellions framed as grotesquely undead to scare the middle class into punching down. This includes people of color as struggling to hold onto what little they have in American society as normally hostile to them, thus conducive to race (and by extension, class and culture) traitors. Incredibly iconoclastic, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, then, was a biting response to the antagonistic violence used against the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam’s Tet Offensive; i.e., as supported by protesters/college students at home who were consequently branded as “terrorists” and killed for it (e.g., the Kent State shootings, 1970). With Night, Romero was trying to capture and express these complicated uprisings—of worker outrage and police crackdowns—in his own work as a photographer world, albeit in Gothic language. It was a biting satire that Romero lost over time; i.e., as he slowly commercialized his own zombies, falling victim to the Hollywood-Communist paradox of raising too much money to critique capital later. But at the time, he was speaking to a common sentiment regarding American superiority in decline: the entire world as eating itself felt at home!
Yet, Night still contained the fascist torturers, moderate “survivors” and victimized tortured in its own tale of inclusive chaos: us-versus-them through a siege, Jim the black man’s house surrounded by the living dead of all sorts; i.e., as an alienated form of what The Birth of a Nation (1915) spectacularly and spuriously warned against, over fifty years previous—slave revolt (with Star Wars valorizing the same perspective from a white Indian narrative overwhelmed by superior imperial numbers).
This time, though, we’re shown a black man acting to some degree like a white Indian (the ostensible Vietnam vet, clutching his repeater and defending his home, only to be shot at the end of the film)—not a token plant, per se, but nevertheless operating usefully through the argument of survival that historically leads to tokenism: us-versus-them violence. In the end, Jim is killed by the cops—denying survival, thus potential assimilation, post-apocalypse. Simply put, he gets got.
To that, Romero’s story feels Afrocentric instead of Afronormative, insofar as “black” focuses on that particular minority group instead of others in America enduring similar plights together. Black culture in America, then, is routinely isolated, forced to face the bleak reality that it has become alienated from its own culture and history as forgotten, but returning fearsomely during times of crisis to face alone (a debatably tokenized, race-traitor gimmick, insofar as those offering aid within black culture, like the Nation of Islam, establish something of a monopoly on the subject while always waiting to act on larger systemic issues; e.g., Louis Farrakhan stonewalling and eventually having a hand in silencing Malcolm X[5]). It’s not a question of if, but when.
All the while, a pointed lack of solidarity is felt, feeling at times somewhat standoffish like Jim is (while this partially constitutes a flaw of Romero’s emphasis on a simple binary that reduces to white America and African America, such divisions extend to the latter group as focusing mostly on themselves as exclusively oppressed by the White Man; i.e., historically being divided from other marginalized groups as a matter of shattered revolutionary discourse). People can get touchy if you speak about their groups’ issues as part of a larger struggle (which these victims sometimes forget), which is why a pedagogy of the oppressed should respect what they say as historical. But granting them impunity from criticism by ignoring tokenism is sheer folly (more on this in part three of the subchapter when we look at Morrison and Howard Zinn).
In Romero’s case, Jim is still treated as human, though. In canonical apocalypse narratives, the zombie is not humanized at all—merely existing within a vague presence of “corruption” that must be rooted out while fertilizing worker mind with future abject dogmas; i.e., white-moderate apologetics for state abuse by recuperating Romero. By extension, the constant threat of state collapse mid-corruption is designed to weaken worker imaginations; it historically-materially doesn’t lead to Communism because imagination-deprived workers coerced by reactionaries will leap to fascism, which supports Capitalism in tokenized forms we’ve already discussed (re: the Black Nazi effect). But under it, even when there is no open sex, such monsters demonize sex as black per the settler-colonial binary whenever it becomes loosened from outright state control: the proverbial babe in the wilderness, forced to survive under decayed rudiments of settler-colonial territorialism and extermination rhetoric; i.e., raw butchery as a spectacle to voyeuristically behold under duress (a captive audience held at gunpoint, below): “‘Come and see,’ then obey me, child! Attack the zombie!”
The consequences of this child-soldier recruitment through Gothic media—its confusion of safety and harm, pleasure and harmful-to-non-harmful pain, etc—are frankly too broad to easily encompass, which the rest of the “Bad Dreams” chapter will holistically and patiently explore the effects of; i.e., across different genres, texts, groups of people, places, etc: from the zombie person as emblematic of genocide to the zombie house as the source for it, and so on. For now, though, we’re focusing predominantly on women, specifically white cis-het women to start with, and shall branch out from there!
To that, such damsels-in-distress (whatever the sex or gender) embody another aspect of Birth of a Nation carried into the present: the white woman (often a virgin) threatened with black (non-white) rape and other unspeakable, taboo things by the rebelling slave as always a being for which societal death is a paradoxical matter of existence; i.e., they are property first in the eyes of the state, their humanity something to debate through force: a problem to solve by asking questions with final solutions (re: the Jewish Question) that can be leveled at any victim of a settler-colonial project. This includes by proxy, as America (a settler colony) currently does with Israel and other such places fighting its wars for it: destabilize and feed within a territory emptied of order.
Granted, such dogma goes back to the Christian doctrine that moved Columbus (and others like him who came after his experiments) to butcher the Indigenous peoples of the Americas (and the Irish in Great Britain). But such ethnocentrism (and all the canonical essentialism that goes with it—biological, geographical or otherwise) crystalized through Birth of a Nation into later survival stories built on the same basic premise: us-versus-them against a non-white menace per the settler-colonial model, which can tokenize to punch down, Red-Scare-style, against zombie labor regardless of skin color (as Jim demonstrates).
In other words, any division serves profit, insofar as the undead are something to battle with and against for the state; i.e., big or small, one or many as part of the same umbrella force; e.g., the Night King’s hordes from Game of Thrones intimating Tolkien’s own problematic ideas of corruption as demanding a same-old return to tradition through fiery purification—a graveyard purge and a return to strength. It bears repeating that the idea suffuses gaming culture as mostly white/tokenized (Foreign Man in a Foreign Land’s “Racism in Gaming,” 2023). However, stories like Left 4 Dead weren’t shy about romanticizing that before such Internet forums came to be; i.e., turning the teenage white heroine, Zoey, into a de facto cop calling herself a survivor while stripping her down and handing her a gun: less an undercover cop and more an uncovered, underage one stuck in her underwear/birthday suit (re: “kissing up, punching down”).
(exhibit 34da: Top left, artist: unknown; top-right: “Zoey nude mod“; bottom-left: Cosplay Erotica. Zoey from Left 4 Dead. Keeping with the infantilized damsel-in-distress, she “is referred to as ‘teenangst’ in [the game’s] textures and ‘teengirl’ in [its] sound resources,” source: Fandom. While described by Andrea Wicklund as “an everyday young woman who everyone can relate to,” Zoey is conspicuously white, but also sexualized and infantilized, in-game and out; although she has no set age, the game’s paratextual materials describe her as a young college [middle-class] student forced to kill her own father after her mother bites him and tries to kill Zoey—i.e., the decay of the nuclear family structure and daddy issues [the Elektra complex, an inversion of Freud’s Oedipus complex[6]] rolled into one.)
This isn’t unique to Left 4 Dead. Valve’s insistence on centering heroism around white/tokenized characters goes back to 1997’s Half-life, with Gordon Freeman basically being the Nazi scientist stuck in a zombie-like hell of his own making (and bearing a curious likeness to Gabe Newell puffing himself up as the hero[7], mid-escapism). Even so, characters like Zoey—effectively naked even with their clothes technically on (re: Segewick’s imagery of the surface)—can still be reclaimed through iconoclastic media and sex-positive exhibitionism as addressing lived trauma; i.e., in ways that reverse abjection through forbidden sex as a matter of Gothic theatre per ludo-Gothic BDSM. Said BDSM offers playfully humanizing reflections on zombies and their associate trauma intimating in state workers’ personal lives, the latter being informed by the wider world and its propaganda around them threatening “rape” as something to put into kayfabe-style quotes (so-called “big dick energy” with a racialized flavor under Cartesian arguments: the BBC or the BBW as porn tropes bleeding into media at large). In short, there’s a genuine xenophilic element that feels “necrophilic” by virtue of hugging Medusa-as-undead during the dialectic of the alien: as one body or many (“riding the train,” as it were), with implied (or vivid, abject) gore sometimes part of the show. Consent is what matters, here!
(artist: Super Phazed)
Sadly such things are a myth in Gothic canon, which retreats from the zombie as automatically and unironically rapacious (versus the white people “surviving” against them). Sold to workers in xenophobic zombie narratives that play out like bad dreams, the sanctioned, ritualized torture and killing of anyone inside the state of exception, mid-revelation, becomes not only endemic, but sacred to these bad dreams: “doing it raw” as something to confuse pleasure and pain as a psychosexual survival response; i.e., to close off with a Black Veil, Radcliffe-style, then tease “having sex” as unironically violent (re: demon lovers), the rape-in-question truthfully completed with bullets, knives and similar knife-dick implements against states targets. These dogmatic threat displays showcase extreme, abattoir-style gore and mutilation as a less-than-veiled argument of rape against state targets (e.g., gore wizard, Tom Savini, taking both barrels of a shotgun to the face in the 1980 version of Maniac, next page). Said targets classically don’t like that very much and respond in kind: tearing their attackers limb from limb using their bare hands (with guns historically being denied to rebelling slaves)!
Because zombie canon capitalizes on the subterfuge trifecta (displace, dissociate, disseminate), privileged witnesses will conflate state abuse with their own normalized realms of experience: videogames, TV shows and/or movies, etc, as a kind of abject, visual sewer to frame everything in notably disgusting terms. There’s clearly a proletarian power to this exposure, grossing the middle class out to paralyze them, thus keeping them at bay. For the elite and their proponents, though, zombies work in this manner to accomplish a perverse kind of strawman; i.e., they exist precisely because they threaten “vulnerable parties” (code for white people, but especially women), thus must be killed to tell the story and often as grossly as possible: torture porn. Such porn, under canon, evokes many of its racialized, psychosexual elements even when all the people onscreen are visibly white:
Note: Rape takes many forms besides sexual violence (though the Gothic is generally psychosexual, merging the two). Even so, I haven’t spent too much time talking about unironic rape and dismemberment in its most vividly naked forms. I’d like to address why below and still take the time to talk about some of the more delicate/touchy elements to such rape fantasies (and tokenism) as they present in Gothic fiction verging on zombie-esque extremes. —Perse
(exhibit 34b: I’m a proud gorehound, but as stated at the start of each book [“What I Won’t Exhibit”] generally I don’t like to combine sex and gore in my collage exhibits. It’s just… not my bag. That being said, I’d be remiss in ignoring the “almost holy” approach to creature features having a strong psychosexual flavor [especially zombies]. Stories like Alien project the zombie rape fantasy into “outer space,” using actual offal in veritable “gore wars” of one-upmanship to make their point. But just as often, movies like Maniac [a very trashy ’80s number, above] bring this crude class of abject puns squarely down to Earth. Even if the genitals are not openly involved during the rape, there’s a neoconservative element to it as a nonetheless worst-case scenario: the couple sitting in a parked car, violently accosted by a weirdo with a gun as covetous towards but also policing of their extramarital affairs! “Don’t do this or Zofloya will getcha!”
Such alienation and fetishization is already a regular consequence of capital, which the movie turns into a lethal form of roleplay. It celebrates the hyphenation of sex and violence, pinning such thrill kills on non-white, or at least functionally black, banditti-grade scapegoats when, point-in-fact, most murders and rapes are intraracial. Even so, cops still use this as an excuse to crackdown on non-white populations even more; i.e., to tighten the yoke of an increasingly militarized police force on all parties involved, claiming as they do to “protect” white women [and gentrified people of color] as a) having the money for their services, and b) adhering to the settler-colonial model as swayed most notably by monetary exchange.
By extension, such class, racial and cultural devices translate readily into Gothic fiction’s criminal hauntologies [a topic we’ll explore much more in Volume Three]: the serial killer as a kind of vampire, more often than not, but also a zombie lurking in dark spaces—all while threatening infantilized white women with rape as synonymous with sex and murder [conveniently ignoring the fact that most women are abused by their husbands, not random strangers during thrill kills and/or rapes]. In short, it constitutes a kind of “battered housewife syndrome,” relying on women who have been abused to view sex as unironically violent in ways they can revisit on a vague dark scapegoat—not their actual abusers, but generally a minority group to safely punch down against [often by proxy] for the systemic harm they normally experience on a day-to-day basis: “Any free woman in an unfree society will always be a monster.” Angela Carter basically nailed the TERF motto with that one, but it applies to any kind of female-wielded bigotry under the sun!
In other words, it’s incredibly common for middle-class women to prey on people with less privilege by leaning into harmful stereotypes under the same protection racket; i.e., from the POV of a cop’s wife as “queen bee” [earlier in this volume]:
good BDSM is often haunted by patriarchal state abuse (re: Man Box, which we’ll pointedly interrogate in Volume Three); e.g., the disordered thinking of narcissistic women abusing their own children and servants: trauma begets trauma. […] White women tokenize, too (albeit from a liminal staging point), praying on others through their ability to gatekeep fantasies of exploitation to suit themselves.
It’s a kind of “vindictive plantation fantasy” that sees post-Civil-War white women triangulating against their husband or father’s enemies, thereby doing a lot more to prey on those they still treat as servants [“the help”] or threats versus equals; i.e., the Gothic sort, meaning dated, ostensibly foreign [“dark”] and having sticky fingers/questionable virtues [re: Dacre’s Zofloya literally being a black servant standing in for the devil to tempt a white woman with poison]. It’s pimping the slave, endorsing a [again, pardon the expression] “jungle fever” for a white mistress getting her jollies [e.g., Mistress Epps from Twelve Years a Slave (2013), above].
Racism is centuries old, as are these kinds of intersecting class and racial tensions, but they haven’t gone anywhere; i.e., cemented within generational signifieds that pass varying degrees of racial bigotry down from feminism’s oldest forms to its increasingly decayed variants dressed up as liberation through rape—from radical authors like Mary Wollstonecraft [or her famous daughter] to a female regressive tendency to deny rebellion and push for a privileged few women to have the right to even create literature at all… provided they toe the line: from Neo-Gothic contemporaries like Ann Radcliffe, followed by the likes of Charlotte Brontë to Susan B. Anthony to J.K. Rowling, but also a centuries-spanning gradient of traitorous characters like Portia from The Merchant of Venice or Clarice Starling as lawyers or cops[8] [and too many subjugated Amazons to list]. It’s certainly true that some of these women are written by men, and I would argue those who sell out and police others in a half-real sense are following a very old patriarchal mindset we’d now call Man Box; e.g., Alien having a strong-if-abjected [onto the xenomorph, instead of Parker, the token black man] racist flavor built on Joseph Conrad’s spectres thereof, but Romero himself resorting to blackface to film his scenes of police brutality in Dawn of the Dead [more on that in a bit].
Inside the Shadow of Pygmalion, then, it’s precisely white women [and token examples] acting like men having formerly suffered at the hands of these men [with homophobia and corporal punishment being inherited by African Americans through gospel-class survival tactics]… only to ape their oppressor to “keep their spot” by making these kinds of Gothic arguments: women get raped by criminals, which really is just a more pedestrian label for “zombie” [with an apocalypse effectively being a crime wave committed by poor people, the gays, and racial minorities but especially black and brown people]. You don’t become a billionaire [male or female] without leaning into and effectively farming and peddling these stereotypes, in effect raping the zombie as code for a great many things; e.g., a monster from outer space, a devil worshipper and/or a gang member with a white bride and bastard baby that turns into a zombie [Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead being quite racist in that respect, below], etc.
“White girls, they’ll get you every time!” Jordan Peele’s black female detective jokes in Get Out [2017]. But there’s a sobering reality behind the gag:
“White liberal racism” has been accurately pinpointed as the movie’s symbolic Big Bad, the villain that, when left unchecked, will destroy us all. But another undeniable facet of that beast—in fact, perhaps, the most crucial part of it all—can be whittled down even further to, simply: white women (source: Aisha Harris’ “The Most Terrifying Villain in Get Out Is White Womanhood,” 2017).
And the reality of such a proposal is assimilation; i.e., the undeniable fact that battered housewives [and good little girls] who embed themselves in their abusive families generally take on qualities of the abuser [notable exception: Alice from The People Under the Stairs (1991), next page, but she was “adopted” into a false family]. But that’s still something future victims have to contend with! Otherwise, we’ve just ignoring what these people become: abusers. No one is immune to that, especially if they get you while you’re young! What’s more, abuse isn’t just cartoon Nazi evil; white moderates [and tokenism, it really must be said; re: Peele, sadly enough] have challenged civil rights and universal equality for as long as such battles have been fought [re: “Letter from Birmingham Jail“]—i.e., people scared of being racist precisely because they’re just as predatory as their openly bigoted cousins.
In such matters—and from people who are basically Hollywood royalty—the words “broken clock,” “perfidious,” “appeaser” and “hypocrite” might leap to mind. Except it doesn’t matter if Peele stands with Israel, making him functionally a Zionist [re: “Jordan Peele Faces Backlash“]; he’s still right about white moderacy sucking balls [though he neglects to mention his own functionally white moderacy as a tokenized black “progressive” ignominiously defending Israel and its settler colony project, in effect making him a black Nazi ipso facto]. Simply put, white women are some of the biggest, shameless gatekeepers of these stories and real life, capitalizing on the status quo to enrich themselves by keeping it the same [refer to Volume Zero if you want to see me take Radcliffe and true crime to task].
The same goes for any token cop/auteur. We have to challenge this framing of power [thus rape] in zombie stories, which generally all but guarantees a GNC component defending itself from TERFs, SWERFs, what-have-you [we’ll go over this much more in Volume Three] as racially inclusive from childhood: stopping racism [and other bigotries/normativities] by a) becoming genuine, good-faith friends with oppressed groups, and b) both listening to and holding them accountable; i.e., per a pedagogy of the oppressed where you find similarity amid difference, thus can heal from police violence by standing against it as a holistic matter of public discourse [e.g., John Singleton talking about “black skin, white masks” (token cops) in Boyz n the Hood (1991) by performing internalized bigotry during black-on-black police brutality onscreen].
In short, horror has room for such things and has had far earlier than Wes Craven [e.g., Charles Chesnutt’s The Morrow of Tradition [1901] but also arguably Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein [if read through a postcolonial lens] and certainly Théodore Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa” [released the same year as Shelley’s novel—1818].)
White and black are a function under settler-colonial models. In turn, canonical rituals that unironically defend the status quo through these models invariably celebrate power abuse (rape) against abject beings through police agents (and, by extension, detectives—more on them in the Demons Module); i.e., through extreme, weaponized force as righteous, but also fun, valid, and vital to a variety of traitors. It’s hard to survey everything because it all goes into the same dark crucible, but hopefully the above exhibit should touch on some of these interactions through Gothic poetics; i.e., their internalized bigotries, guilt trips, various syndromes, etc. We didn’t have time to explore Orientalism above, but for a neat example of an anti-war narrative about that, consider Godzilla Minus One (2023): a regenerating monstrous-feminine (a reckoning-style force of nature with zombie-like properties) as told from a kamikaze pilot’s demoralized, disillusioned perspective. It’s pretty good stuff!
The reality remains, though: the traitors-in-question concern functioning as white and manly within the settler-colonial, middle-class promise of elevation to even higher spheres; i.e., becoming capitalists[9] through billionaire Marxism as a classically white male grift (re: Newell, but also Bill Gates, James Cameron, and John Romero, etc, profiting off rape and war by playing both sides through computer media and parallel texts): guns, vehicles, bombs, and knives, etc, as sexualized through fetishized settler-colonial violence against zombies, or other monsters than serve a zombie-like umbrella role when Hell comes to Earth; e.g., the pixelated demon gore of Doom II: Hell on Earth threatening a demonic form of the zombie apocalypse: an invasion (which returns again and again in future forms of the franchise, below, hiding fascist rhetoric behind increasingly hyperbolic, blind-parody obscurantism/escapist “apolitical” dogwhistles: “It’s ‘can’t’ be fascist because it’s silly!”).
(artist: Robert Sammelin)
Egregore variation aside, it’s all one big geek show designed to gross you out in ways that don’t have Matthew Lewis’ irony (to be honest, Savini’s work is excellent, but his usage is hit-or-miss). Regardless of the storytelling format, these killing devices become fetishized, fascist implements of capital punishment as instrumental to the state’s preservation during a perceived “dying” period—one in which the colonial binary becomes radicalized. The whole ordeal is merely an invitation to suspend human rights during a power vacuum tied to Capitalism functioning as normal; the rot and its subsequent debridement is built into the system as something to inherit and carry forward by white/token survivors.
Armed with the tools needed to kill the state’s enemies, the survivors of a canonical zombie apocalypse are doing what Robert Neville from I Am Legend did (minus that story’s ironic twist) back in 1954: waging war against a “new” form of life he fears, but also cuts up, studies and catalogues. Echoing Frankenstein, such automated Cartesian violence against the abject counterfeit becomes a knee-jerk defense of the state as dying for the umpteenth time—consolidating strength brought upon by regular political/economic instability (an intrinsic function of Capitalism). Equally common is the worshipping of weaponized violence through the manufacture trifecta (scarcity, conflict, consent). Material conditions plummet, as a result; life grows cheap and pacified middle-class workers—having “consented” to Capitalism as the end all, be all by accident of birth—become embroiled in a circuitous ploy: punch Medusa/the ghost of the counterfeit back to Hell.
(artist: KisX3D)
Carried out by those who kill, “survivors” like Zoey (not just the girl, herself, but Jill Valentine [next page] and others[10] outside of overtly marketed zombie stories) become the real unironic monsters; i.e., extending their pre-war privilege and positions into the apocalypse. In turn, these pacified workers invoke the cult of machismo as a terrible call to arms; i.e., the right to use their guns, knives and bombs on other humans, all in the name of regulating sex and force to defend white from black in service to profit (e.g., rape/captive fantasies): defend yourself, vigilante-style, as threatened by the non-white dead with legitimate grievances (what MLK and company called “the race[11] problem”).
Per stolen generations and lost land, such dead are routinely portrayed as “vengeful” (with rape epidemic screeds being an old conservative tactic [re: the Wilmington Massacre of 1898] whose tokenism specifically targets white women, triangulating them in actively violent, TERF-like ways; i.e., built on Ann Radcliffe’s earlier, passive-aggressive fearmongering against other minorities while preying on them in complicit cryptonymies’ restless barriers, blindfolds, castles, etc): in the wasteland as Gothic (e.g., Furiosa’s racoon-style eyeliner). Rape is power abuse; to critique said abuse as farmed under capital, you must go where power-as-performance is, and face its undead exploitation in ways you can inject irony (and other things) into: by being naughty as a sex-positive way of showing you know what you’re doing to avoid unironic zombie-esque violence during calculated risk as something to bastardize and make less rapey (the rape fantasies of the Neo-Gothic period reflecting on the Dark Ages as something to rescue from itself in pseudo-historical stories).
(artist: Devilhs)
Such knowledge checks include subverting “zombies” as psychosexual symbols of reactive cannibalism; i.e., a given instance partly intimating a settler-colonial past and its atrocities returning to an origin of trauma (e.g., the lack of food in Cambodia leading to cannibalism and mass murder, which we’ll explore in a moment), but also the mechanized “mouth” of the state cannibalizing itself through the proxy of zombie war fueled by American industries: as geared towards owner/worker division, efficient profit and infinite growth per military expansionism (often expressed in dry, neutral-sounding language; e.g., “liquidated,” “aggressive litigation,” “made redundant,” “extreme prejudice,” etc).
Here, the state is undead and hungry for workers who also become undead within the state of exception, which must then be enforced through legitimate state violence dehumanizing some aspect of the harvest—with white women “humanized” to such a degree as to compel them to fight back against the usual dehumanized groups; e.g., African Americans a) turned into desperate, starving poachers of their own redlined, transplanted “homelands” (on American soil, that is), and b) having legitimate grievances against some white women as complicit in said redlining scheme/xenophobic rape fictions profiting off so-called (again, excuse the expression) “jungle fever.” All of this can be interrogated as a matter of ludo-Gothic BDSM provided we actually listen to our playmates (whoever they are) as a matter of social-sexual discourse, but also “reading the room”; i.e., as a mixture of tableau and code: putting “rape” in quotes, whatever form the export takes!
To that, guns are another Americanized export playing into the larger zombie dialog as globalized. As such, gun violence—while famously emanating from America and its police-state violence—has a nationalized flavor according to where the guns come from: the AK from Russia, the M16 from North America, the Steyr AUG from Austria, etc (which extends from the “guild function” of medieval, privatized warfare translated to NATO and current-day conglomerates). While these weapons can be adopted and customized for use elsewhere, guns are toys with a specific national function for non-rebellious (white/tokenized middle-class) users: as advertisements for their country of origin, but also its defense when “threatened.” Each has its own history—of being used in particular wars against particular “undead” peoples by the state, the former eventually returning from the grave when Imperialism comes home to empire; i.e., to violently wrestle sexual control (and other forms of labor and materials/Gothic poetics) away from the elite.
In the dreamlike unfolding of zombie narratives, then, the genocided dead return from the earth; in turn, our aforementioned guns emerge like fabled Excalibur to slay the “kingdom’s” enemies, which is precisely what the state wants people to think: “Zombies are abject. Do not humanize them, but see us as your salvation. Now pick up a gun and pop some heads!”
Sex-positive or not, decapitation is literally part of the zombie apocalypse dialog at this point; i.e., you can’t really say much about such things without making a point of it, but—just as often—must play with such memento mori yourselves as a potential means of camp: cops and victims, cowboys and Indians, Montagues and Capulets, the Jets and the Sharks, etc, as something to recognize in popular media without repeating its curse-like, both-houses violence in real life; e.g., the “looter shooter” model of Fallout and similar postapocalypse style exercises (which crank the survival up after the initial collapse—more on that when we examine The Last of Us, next page). For the target audience, decapitation is classically a reward, the “money shot” in such stories; per Sarkeesian, enjoy the fantasy but do not endorse its reifying against any victim of the state (though if you punch a Nazi, I won’t stop you).
(source: Mantas’ “I Just Made the Best Stealth Game in Fallout 4,” 2022)
Under neoliberal Capitalism, then, fascism is just another toy to throw on the pile—the medievalized, overtly genocidal exploitation of workers along sexually dimorphic, xenophobic lines (Cartesian thought per setter-colonialism) that already exist everywhere in heteronormative media. Even if sex isn’t actively discussed in zombie invasion scenarios, it is presented in ways that glorify violence through traditional gender roles that point to America’s settler-colonial past: a “Go West!” imperative to young men, but also their pioneer wives and Winchester rifles (crack-shots in their own right, who kill Native Americans while invading their land to make homes for white farmers and their children[12]).
During a prophesized return to this federalist framework, those having fallen under the state of exception in earlier times suddenly become targets of state violence again; i.e., a “new” underclass of workers carrying all the usual suspects under Capitalism, whether in open decay or not (the state is always in decay but the crisis will present as more or less so depending on the circumstances): Native Americans, white allies and the poor, as well as peoples of color, ethnic minorities and queer persons—in short, those highlighted by Howard Zinn as having been exploited by America’s ruling elite all along. As we’ll explore in part two of this subchapter (after we’ve covered some more examples of so-called “bad dreams”), such diversity-amid-intersectional-solidarity isn’t the end-goal but a point of praxis from now until the end of time. Diversity is strength; divided, we (workers and nature) become conquered, yet again, as monstrous-feminine.
(artist: Kent Monkman)
While hardly new, the persistence of the canonical zombie narrative endures alongside the structure that habitually enforces it. For example, I recently watched the first episode of The Last of Us (2023), whose postapocalyptic zombie story defaults to preapocalyptic violence, but also codifies it in retro-future language. It treats Communism less as an impossibility and more as a trend of nonexistence through an audience that defaults to pro-capitalist, eco-fascist fantasies in the face of societal unrest; re: Capitalist Realism in action.
The “free” market, then, responds to what sells according to those who own it, the latter manufacturing supply and demand by catering to a wider demographic of conservative viewers who regularly pay out according to how they feel about Capitalism a priori. Not only is this an appeal to the majority for profit; the feelings of the majority extend to “Communists” as things to zombify by the elite into vaguely fearsome, moving targets. For many Americans, Communists are like zombies, their ideas informed by real-world examples funneled through a particular lens: rioting is bad and rioters must be shot, including their leaders (called “bosses” in videogames). Otherwise, foreign genocides like Vietnam or Cambodia could happen again, except this time the war will be lost at home! It’s Red Scare.
American canon is patently designed to “zombify” consumers, making people forget that rioting is a pro-labor tactic (re: what Martin Luther King called, “the language of the unheard“). It does this using fear and dogma, presenting rioters as undead terrorists shambling out of the nightmare past (re: Joseph Crawford’s argument of “terrorism” being a carry-over from the French Revolution, used to discourage worker rebellions in favor of continued nation-state hegemony). Applied over time, canon infects pro-labor sentiments with bourgeois misinformation infused with real-world geopolitics, allowing local police states to thrive in the hauntological shadow of displaced (neo)colonial atrocities; e.g., Cambodia. Not only do these linger in displaced markers long after the initial xenophobic violence has ceased; their inception is complicated mid-genesis by obscurantism, the fog of war and political sectarianism to prevent xenophilia from taking root.
For example, the now-famous killing fields of Cambodia were implemented in multiple stages by multiple players. While the sole arbiter might seem to be Pol Pot—a petit-bourgeois con man bastardizing Marx’ ideas to wrestle power from the American-backed regime in Cambodia during the Cambodian Civil War (The People Profiles, 2022)—dictators are either installed or tolerated by global superpowers whose “tunneling effect” leaves many average citizens completely unaware of the situation (say nothing of neoliberal “fogs of war” that deny dissident journalists access to allied war zones).
Indeed, just as top party officials in Nazi Germany were privy to the Holocaust in ways the average citizen, soldier, scientist or middle-management personnel were not, many American politicians during the mid-1970s took sides over Cambodia by virtue of which nations were aligned with whom (the Vietnamese being seen as “more dangerous” [to American foreign interests] than the Khmer Rouge, by virtue of the Vietcong’s alliance with the Soviets during and after the Vietnam War); American intellectuals, meanwhile, questioned that a genocide in Cambodia was even taking place, subsisting on scraps of information that resisted quantification and assembly at every turn (as necrometrics tend to do). This resistance continues even when access to the “undead” portraits of the victims are gained, but also numerous shrines filled with their forgotten skulls[13] and bones as something to return to: what actual victims of genocide survived (not white middle-class people playing the white Indian).
(exhibit 35a: Top: photos of Khmer prison camp victims, source; bottom: “Meo Soknen, 13, stands inside a small shrine full of human bones and skulls, all victims of the Khmer Rouge. The small shrine, located 27 kilometers south of Phnom Penh, is one of many out-of-the-way-and-forgotten monuments to the ‘Killing Fields,'” source. The price of xenophobia is a refusal to love the “zombie,” the state fulfilling the prophecy of apocalypse within killing fields by littering them with the bones of the uncountable state’s victims: dirt farming for skeletons.)
Regarding Cambodia and its own abused population, it should come as no surprise that the United States had already killed hundreds of thousands of Cambodians in the early 1970s (as many as 800,000, according to Nick Gier). Cartesian violence isn’t just bombs; it’s the gatekeeper’s rationalizing of violence from seemingly “reasonable” sources during ironic state apologetics.
For example, Noam Chomsky—an outspoken critic of misinformation and the United States—remained incredibly skeptical of reports about the Cambodian genocide emerging in the mid ’70s, questioning the new regime’s early death numbers far more than the underreported figures that came after the initial killings, David Bleacher writes in, “How the West Missed the Horrors of Cambodia” (2017):
Writing about the events in Cambodia in the latter half of the ’70s with co-author Edward Herman, Chomsky accused the American media and scholars who reported on the killings committed by the Khmer Rouge of producing atrocity propaganda. The authors claimed that the mainstream were all too eager to accept, without adequate evidence, claims about horrible deeds that were attributed to the Khmer Rouge. [In doing so, both men] made the indisputable claim that conservatives would use reports about abuses occurring in Cambodia to claim that they had been right all along about the Vietnam War. To this day, Chomsky claims he was simply assessing the evidence available at the time. [… He] and Herman were far less critical of accounts of post-1975 Cambodia that described an enlightened and humane polity. They praised George Hildebrand and Gareth Porter’s now discredited book, discussed below, as a carefully researched work that [spuriously] demonstrated the successes of the new regime in overcoming the devastating results American military action had on Cambodia as it became a sideshow in the Vietnam War (source).
Defending the Khmer Rouge wound up being a giant mistake, one Chomsky has refused to apologize for decades after the fact (for a more thorough detailing of Chomsky’s overall approach, consider Bruce Sharp’s lengthy writeup on The Mekong Network, 2023). I don’t condone Bleacher’s veneration of George Orwell “getting it right,” but I also doubt it would have killed Chomsky to admit that he had been wrong.
Instead, Chomsky falls embarrassingly within George Orwell’s comments about nationalism, “[the nationalist] does not only not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity to not even hear about them.” While being a terrible person himself, Orwell had—like Freud or Nietzsche—arguably touched upon a larger truth when he wrote that statement. Nation-states need to be challenged in ways that allow for self-reflection, including transmuting the canonical zombie into iconoclastic forms that reflect on our collective past errors when assessing genocide. This includes Chomsky but also us.
While canonical media lacks comprehensive introspection and nuance by design, it is nonetheless rife with monstrous symbols and war-time scenarios associated with geopolitical events and their lasting cultural attitudes. Mention “zombies” to Americans, and older people will think of international incidents like Cambodia—specifically the American canonical framing whose subterfuge continues to disguise the dialectical-material realities that reliably lead to genocide: “No Capitalism or American-deployed bombs here, only killer farmer zombies (which neoliberal centrism dogwhistles towards with its own nation pastiche: the green-skinned “monster peasant” from Brazil, Blanka, literally wearing hillbilly overalls in SF6 [2023]—what Dutch from Predator would call “a half-assed mountain boy.” More on that in Volume Three, Chapter Five; exhibit 104c).”
In turn, everything else is swept aside by the monster—the escaped slave (note the shackles)—running towards you out of the white-owned jungle’s banana republic: the electric dead threatening ostensibly tax-paying survivors during a canonically black-and-white, us-versus-them argument; i.e., home as inside-outside, residents as correct-incorrect during what’s essentially a foreign plot. In zombie stories, it translates to racist, settler-colonial vaudeville theatrically punching down against the Modern Prometheus for seemingly “stealing” their lightning (their power, their Zeus-like “thunder”) from the elite and the middle-class. The person of color (especially the non-American person of color) becomes an extended being under imperial circumstances coming home. They’re treated as alien, but also anathema, reprobate, and doomed under police rule extending to the deputized middle class acting as survivors against rampaging beasts, orcs, monkeys green with envy and trauma, a panther threatening Jane with captivity and rape (who must be rescued by Tarzan, a white Indian). Even calling them “survivors” implies they must survive against people for whom Blanka (and similar characters) historically represent. It’s incredibly racist (and anyone who says otherwise is fascist, simple as that).
(source: Fandom)
Carceral hauntology participates in the transgenerational curse of zombie canon, clouding cultural hindsight by virtue of recursive nostalgia: the arrival of the zombie, thus cannibal Imperialism, as something to celebrate insofar as open violence is concerned. For example, breathe the word “zombie” to younger people already exposed to uncritical narratives from the genre and they’ll automatically think of the zombie as a moving target, not a victim: echoes of Cambodia, Vietnam and other American-sponsored disasters, but also proletarian movements resisting the state’s abuse committed at home; e.g., the Civil Rights Movement that Romero tried to humanize through a zombie narrative.
Such stories are made to lobotomize people at a young age (often through videogames, and before that movies, novels and religious documents); lobotomized children will hop to it as child soldiers usually do, indifferently accepting vigilante, fascist violence towards the “terrorist” zombie as not only vital, but fun (their erasure being a “blank slate” tactic common within ethnic cleansings and state crackdowns against labor). Anti-labor stems from canonical appropriation of the zombie symbol, but also older, fearful Americans decorating “their” homes with reactionary gargoyles like an imperiled fortress—their poetics limited to mere window-dressing but nevertheless incredibly visible (e.g., flags or mantlepiece guns). Over time, a settler-colonial mindset has set in: “This is our mall!” snarled for the state by Americanized kids killing kids (white-on-black, black-on-black, etc).
While this is generally a middle-class gimmick, it’s common to abject this recruitment onto far away victims of capital (which Africa very much is), but the reality is, it starts in America as having mastered what Columbus started. Columbus was a cunt, but so is America and all it stands for genocide because America is a settler colony that engenders such atrocities to defend itself while acting exceptionally good about it in the name of capital. Children absorb information, thus dogma, far faster than adults do—in short, being easier to train. Middle-class child soldiers, then, make for the easiest victims and abusers towards each other and especially less fortunate children elsewhere; i.e., in the Global South, who the North weaponize against and who, themselves, become weaponized in cruel capitalist schemes of territory and conquest completely outside their control (“like taking candy from a baby!”): the rise of endemic warlords simply another form of fascism that emerges abroad (and is used to justify future invasions into these lands again by American cops bringing law and order to neo-colonized lands depicted as black and savage).
(source)
As we shall keep exploring the deeper into the chapter we go (and hopefully subvert if we’re able), “home” is the casualty of such dogma, but also empathy and children in pursuit of a so-called “simpler time” (a nostalgic us-versus-them to defend from dissidents, heretics, zombies treated as “looking human,” blending in); i.e., empathy and defense of the home-in-decay (settler-colonial territories projected onto local residences) becoming a disastrous blame game punching the zombie to achieve profit as a crude but desired result. Over time, the casualty of victimized children extends into adulthood, the poor little fuckers growing up to become bullies of the worst sort: child killers, William-Golding-style. Per the Gothic’s process of abjection, this happens in cartographic replicas of the home, on a domestic level, but also abroad for much the same reasons: maps and enemies (obstacles)—their combined idea to keep power precisely where it is, pure and simple, by turning workers on themselves; i.e., the state of exception presented as home defense from evil, child-like and infantilized forces to “nip in the bud” (the foreign plot inside the home); e.g., Zionism (Bad Empanada Live’s “Israel Added to UN CHILD MURDER List, Alongside ISIS, Al Qaeda and Boko Haram,” 2024).
To be honest, there’s no way to really camp something like the Holocaust; i.e., when it’s shown “as is,” you can only show it as a historical event (or elude to such things in displaced forms; e.g., Star Wars’ “a long time ago and in a galaxy far, far away….”). If someone wants to camp their own abuse, that’s their prerogative, but that’s a testimony meant to achieve catharsis by speaking out; e.g., me camping my own rape and survival sex work (which we’ll get to) to find my path through life but also my voice. But this particular irony happens by voicing our oppression according to things we also cannot choose (for me, being trans), thus do whatever we can to change our environment as a matter of political action; i.e., from my PhD: “We camp things because we must!” But again, this is generally as an element of marginalized testimony towards things out of our control that actually affect us by virtue of the state isolating and attacking us as monstrous-feminine, alien.
By comparison, the so-called “apolitical” behaviors of reactionaries and moderates (usually white cis-het men) amount to Peter Pan syndrome trapping them in the past as a retro-future as dead, canceled—its fatal nostalgia a bizarrely tragic cloaking device they use to divide, then colonize Gothic media (e.g., Doom), Gamergate-style, and deprive it of openly political voices that speak to anything but their own sheltered lives. They act imperiled, but generally aren’t insofar as their abuse (which generally is far less systemic) is something they detach, bury and expect others to do the same (fascists recruit from broken homes; e.g., American History X [1998], above)! They refuse to associate with anything openly political. In turn, they pointedly foment cryptofascist conspiracies per false rebellion (re: Parenti) that swap the bourgeoisie for a cabal of imaginary “globalist” overlords making their favorite videogame heroine “less sexy”; i.e., “wokeness” and “cultural Marxism” being updated forms of the Jewish conspiracy in the modern day taken from the backstabbing Jew dogma of Nazi Germany’s own propaganda mills.
Proponents thereof blame activism (a dogwhistle for “the Left”) as “ruining movies, videogames,” etc, by “needlessly complicating” them vis-à-vis canon’s simpler time argument as “better” (re: the absence of tension, MLK’s “negative peace”); i.e., campily “making [these things] gay/political” as a matter of actively raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class-cultural consciousness, which weird canonical nerds not only aren’t used to, but trained to attack exactly as they do—underhandedly. In turn, they seek to curry favor from “the gods” as a diegetic offering/middle-class olive branch/Trojan Horse (a bourgeois sentiment echoed in neoliberal hauntologies reviving older videogames to stress their assimilative, monomythic aims: “Worship me! Claim my power[13a]!” It’s Faustian and Promethean, disguising fascist us-versus-them as sports-like “hype” that serves profit in all the usual ways: chaff as complicit cryptonymy that our own revolutionary forms must rise to challenge in the same spaces: life isn’t simple or fair and we must collectively fight for our right to exist through proletarian counterterror).
As such, these weird canonical nerds (and their tokenized elements) are not-so-subtly gaming the system in predatory, self-centered ways that defend capital in the process; e.g., Kyle Rittenhouse given carte blanche/protection by the cops the same way Edward Norton’s character is (above); i.e., they’re de facto cops doing the same job through vigilante violence: policing the functional undead as “not of the kingdom.” Taught to dehumanize the zombie, the children of these homeowners are instructed by their surroundings (daddy’s videogames) to see violent, brainless people to shoot as a wacky game. As such, they become violent and brainless themselves, xenophobic instead of xenophilic. For them, a world without Capitalism is an end of the world that calls for settler-colonial violence—imagination death insofar as they can’t imagination anything else; e.g., the Nothing from The Neverending Story (1984).
That shouldn’t be a shock; punitive violence and cataclysm are built into canon as “secularized,” religion repacked inside a culture built entirely around gun violence according to binary gender roles and neoliberal state worship. Dressed up as fun, but also nostalgic to a new generation of youngsters through the likes of Stranger Things (and the network’s calculated insertion of popular ’80s songs like “The Never-Ending Story” into their climactic scenes), this canonically reinvented worldview is literally all they know. Through the Capitalism-Realist myopia, it because far easier to imagine the end of the world as zombie, which they can reject and attack when the consequences of Imperialism actually begin to noticeably affect the Imperial Core; i.e., in a way they’ll either have to deny or face and accept their hand in. As such, it’s far more common for weird canonical nerds to punch down (or up) at scapegoats for these consequences than to admit responsibility as part of a broader systemic issue: one that requires intersectional solidarized political action with the oppressed—a pedagogy thereof—to dismantle.
In turn, capitalists financially incentivize zombie abjection (through sanctioned execution) as half-real—both between fiction and nonfiction—by sponsoring the zombie’s giving and receiving of figurative and literal lobotomies onscreen and off; i.e., as a byproduct of blind, uncritical, conservative consumption that endorses genocide as a structure with a particular kind of copaganda. Touched on by Romero’s 1978 follow-up to Night of the Living Dead and later by Day of the Dead, in 1985, the effects of canon on the human brain and its perception of the human zombie are tried-and-true. Under these effects, the braindead consumer dutifully imagines what already sells (not peace) through a lucrative zombie mode for the American middle class: what doesn’t challenge the current structure of war as a business—the mall, of course, but also the paramilitary scenes that commodify racial conflict under the mall narrative as something to riddle with bullets; e.g., Dawn of the Dead’s blackface scene.
Indeed, it’s the first thing we see before the police launch their attack: a white man playing a non-white man shooting a white man to kick the raid off. Romero, in effect, is using a classic police tactic/theatrical device—the false flag—to initiate, then make his broader argument; i.e., they drew first blood! Everything that follows, then, is basically revenge for the killing of the young (white, blonde) rookie (“They started it, we’ll finish it!”): a historical-material effect predicated on centuries of police abuse, from invasion, chattel slavery and redlining!
Furthermore, to call the scene problematic would be an understatement, as it crosses the line between entertainment and real-world atrocities in a way Romero has no real-world experience with, thus isn’t testifying to anything he’s survived. In short, “he saw it on the TV” (which he undoubtedly did, during the Vietnam war and its highly televised protests prior to any sort of neoliberal recuperation strategies being present; i.e., Gothic media; e.g., Aliens) and clumsily recreated what he saw as a perniciously dubious form of activism that feels, at best, insensitive and crass. It is memorable, but for the wrong reasons, and because of its rushed, heavy-handed and forced nature (the blackface paint also being used in Birth of a Nation during the attempted rape scene) verges on advertising the very vaudeville he’s supposedly against!
As Ross Lockhart writes in “Attack of the Bourgeois Braineaters” (2004):
Dawn of the Dead is more than just a zombies-at-the-shopping-mall critique of consumer culture, as elements of racism and class war are also included within its framework. In one of its opening scenes, “a SWAT team clears out a tenement building in Pittsburgh. The residents are primarily Puerto Rican and Latino, kept captive by the undead both within and without the building” (Rider 7). Despite the abject poverty of these residents, one of the police officers makes a statement reflecting what Stephen Harper calls “the film’s theme of material insecurity and envy” (5). “Shit man, this is better than I got.” Harper further observes that the tenement sequence “invites the audience to consider zombiedom as a condition associated with both racial oppression and social abjection and, therefore, sanctions socio-political interpretations of the film as a whole” (6). The tenement sequence also introduces the audience to two members of the film’s core quartet of protagonists, Ken Foree‘s Peter and Scott Reiniger‘s Roger, a pair of SWAT officers, one black, one white, who manage to remain civilized as their fellow officers “end up indiscriminately murdering residents and zombies, uttering racial epithets and generally being hysterical” (Rider 7).
Described by Roger as “going apeshit,” there’s a process of abjection to what seems like an off-hand statement: the vigilante cop he’s critiquing as “acting like an animal” using the police raid (already a colonial tool) to escalate violence as a matter of extermination rhetoric. Said rhetoric is conspicuously guided by class-traitor (cop) resentment towards the government-housed poor as being non-white on its face; i.e., as a naked excuse to kill as many “zombies” as he can “while the getting’s good.” To that, there’s no distinction between the living and the unliving but also the undead; to him, they’re all roaches to squash, and he pushes door after door open, treating the layout (and its occupants) like a shooting gallery. The Imperial Boomerang has well-and truly-come home.
To this, Peter and Roger’s subsequent conversation about dignity in death hangs over the fascist, trigger-happy mania of their fellow officers, who they abandon to hold onto their humanity after seeing the people they were “supposed” to protect (a police state lie: when push comes to shove, cops are trained to automatically kill workers as “enemy”—to cull the herd of black sheep, as it were) being dehumanized so thoroughly yet holding onto their dignity as much as they could: even when faced with end times and police brutality, these people are still more human than the cops are. “Who’s the savage? Modern man!”
Such praxial inertia can be noted outside the film as felt across its franchise commenting on the same struggles to feed the profit movie (re: the Star Wars problem). Things stay the same because canonical artists have no financial incentive to change according to those in power. It’s a bourgeois illusion, one people are born into (and can only escape through “radical,” drug-like ways, which we’ll explore deeper in the primer).
The fact remains, if we want to change, the undead must be considered beyond a singular monolithic target during monomythic violence. Clearly racial animus is baked into the settler-colonial model, one that divides different state targets under profit to claim the mantle of victimhood as a tokenized position that decays into raw betrayals and defeat. The ghosts of the Civil Rights Movement and exclusions of older radically conservative feminisms occupy a territory likewise shared with the victims of American foreign policy coming back around. All must be included and holistically combined in the shared chorus of the damned; i.e., per our multiracial, GNC, all-inclusive hauntologies, chronotopes, cryptonymy and cryptomimesis reversing abjection.
Doing so happens by imitating retro-future, universally liberating regenerations (re: Matteson’s apocalypse where the zombies win) having formed out of old decaying oppressions (and their tokenized polities’ harmful representations of oppressed groups policing themselves): our Song of Infinity outshining the seminal catastrophe of state shift during the liminal hauntology of war! This reversal of abjection is not painless (far from it), but it can help us heal from unironic rape; i.e., as a state weapon of terror meant to pacify us into tokenization and division, and which we learn to fight back against and express our dehumanization during rape play as ironic based on blindly campy (and pornographic) forms that we can introduce irony towards: “necrophilia” as walking a very odd tightrope.
Graveyard sex, while not always on display as such, is what a zombie apocalypse effectively boils down to (even when overt sex isn’t shown); i.e., canonically pimping walking corpses by slapping “of the dead” on it and going from there; e.g., Highschool of the Dead, but also simply Rape of the Dead putting an eco-fascist chokehold on such matters:
(source, top: Rape Zombie: Lust of the Dead, 2012)
Such partially imaginary things can be camped, but all occupy the same Gothic stage. It can be more fantastical or less, depending on the degree of the apocalypse; e.g., Dominic Mitchell’s In the Flesh (2013) treating the tightrope as a matter of politics and location that comments on Britain in decay versus a more outlandish and Americanized, gun-heavy approach to such things:
What makes In the Flesh somewhat different is how it shifts some of the human struggle onto the undead without sacrificing what’s at stake: survival. Granted, it feels inevitably more pedestrian when displayed in an immediate, everyday setting. These are not fantastical wastelands; neither civilization nor its inhabitants are presented as some kind of abject, faraway husk. Instead, they mirror or parallel our lives, as they exist, in the present. / I enjoyed this comparison in that it seemed less remote than the typical, post-apocalyptic fare. Not that there’s anything wrong with the Mad Max (1979) or Star Wars (1977) approach. In fact, I actually prefer delving into those worlds—to glean the hidden, allegorical message contained therein. At the same time, those worlds can take on a life of their own, to the extent that the message sometimes gets lost—carried away by the imaginary setting and its fantastical inhabitants. If one wants to avoid that, it requires a different approach (source: Persephone van der Waard’s “In the Flesh (2013): Season 1 Review, part 3,” 2018).
As such, we must set our sights on displaced forms of genocide beyond the suffering of a single alienated people (or their psychosexual, undead exploitation) cannibalizing themselves for the elite; i.e., recuperation; e.g., of feminism, Afrocentrism, queer culture, the British labour party post-Thatcherism, etc. For all of them, the us-versus-them dynamic of the decaying Americanized home/society affects all peoples, places and things, but classically incentivizes white/token America (and neighboring entities) to abject labor for the elite. So close to the problem and yet so far from its solution, they radicalize from childhood onwards to deputize and attack the zombie; i.e., anyone who isn’t human can have anything done to them (murder or rape) without fear of repercussions: with their parents (actual or de facto) ostensibly caring for them but in fact dehumanizing them in a never-ending war reinforced by centuries of dogma.
Such normalization through undead vaudeville doesn’t recruit the zombie as automatically friendly to the state (akin to a good Godzilla or terminator), but does demand sacrificial revivals per horror media as holy in the eyes of Americanized families when assisting profit in this respect (a kind of “mark of Cain,” slave brand or tramp stamp that, regardless of the colonized group, marks them for settler-colonial abuse).
To that, I want to consider The Last of Us as revived in 2023 (and older stories accomplishing the same idea, before and after Romero’s corpus) in ways that I, educated as I am, previously responded to in a sex-positive revelation: waking up in the middle of the night to reassemble them through rememory as putting Morrison’s device to good use; i.e., using it to challenge profit, thus genocide through the zombie as something to reunite with and make whole again as a matter of stolen childhood. There’s a lot to cover (so many toys with play with, so many likenesses to interview). Even so, I’ll try to focus on zombies as we progress, piece by piece, from indoctrination to subversion through the apocalypse; i.e., as a matter of residence and resident made zombie-like since before we were born until after we are dead.
We’ll get to Morrison and rememory during part three of this subchapter (and consider childhood regressions and restoration with ludo-Gothic BDSM, in the subchapter after that). For part two of “The Imperial Boomerang,” we’ll look at The Last of Us more and go over various ideas in relation to it and similar stories (and toys, characters, etc); i.e., cryptomimesis per a factory of toy-like simulacra whose proliferation resurrects abject violence within capital as friendly (conducive) to its daily operations. No doubt, a holistic understanding thereof shall prove handy when the time comes: defense of home as under attack by functionally white zombies of a police agency that stems from horror media as something to reclaim for all oppressed groups (not just African Americans, though it behooves us to examine and critique their history of doing so, below. Beware anyone allergic to valid criticism).
(source: Tai Gooden’s “The Black Guy Dies First Will Put a Critical Eye to Black Horror History,” 2022)
Never forget, this is our mall! Our toys, our voices, our Aegis! But we must acclimate ourselves towards them by taking them back while they are sold to us; i.e., as children receiving settler-colonial propaganda as something to camp (which takes time, care and effort).
Onto “Bad Dreams, part two: Cryptomimesis (feat. The Last of Us, Scooby Doo, and more)“!
Footnotes
[1] To my knowledge, Morrison’s usage of the word “rememory” is primarily a noun. When using it in verb form, I will adjust it to “reremember.”
[2] The director of Nekromantik (1988), a movie about a guy who has sex with threesome with his wife and a corpse, which leads him to get cuckolded by the corpse (rip). Awkward!
[3] Peter, from George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978).
[4] E.g., the xenomorph. More on him, later.
[5] From F.D. Signifier’s “The REAL Faces of Black Conservatism” (2023).
[6] Freud is a quack, but the idea actually comes from Carl Jung (also a quack):
According to Freud, during female psychosexual development, a young girl is initially attached to her mother. When she discovers that she does not have a penis, she becomes attached to her father and begins to resent her mother, who she blames for her “castration.” As a result, Freud believed that the girl then begins to identify with and emulate her mother out of fear of losing her love. Resolving the Electra complex ultimately leads to identification with the same-sex parent. While the term “Electra complex” is frequently associated with Sigmund Freud, it was actually Carl Jung who coined the term in 1913 (source: Kendra Cherry’s “Overview of the Electra Complex in Psychology,” 2023).
However, just because the ideas are technically stupid (above) doesn’t mean they aren’t codified into society and its linguo-material devices; i.e., in ways we can reclaim (re: Creed’s monstrous-feminine)! I generally hate “pure” psychology but still have to critique it in Gothic theory all the time (again, Creed, Freud and so many others), and clearly I love the word “psychosexual”!
[7] I.e., a heliocentric approach to men as godly and savior-esque but imperiled per the middle class as tentative and fragile under Capitalism. Similar to Tool’s Maynard James Keenan pushing for reactionary violence in his music (re: “Ænema“), such then-current regressions like Newell’s go back to Heinlein’s Competent Man as revived by James Cameron in his media (followed by Nintendo and id Studios’ Metroid and Doom), but also further back still with Lovecraft’s astronoetics; i.e., per At the Mountains of Madness mythologizing its author’s racism tracking with even older bigoted men like Edgar Allan Poe and Joseph Conrad, and women like Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Dacre or Charlotte Brontë, etc. Whatever direction time flows, all run along the same track as a spatial sensation—capital (commonly called “civilization”) as black-and-white, us-versus-them survival; i.e., tied to the West/Cartesian dualism as “superior” but always under attack: the Gothic chronotope.
[8] Cops are class traitors, recruiting from workers to police workers.
[9] Black Capitalism is a thing and it sucks; e.g., Lil Bill’s “How Black Elites LIE to Us” (2023); i.e., race (and culture) traitors betray to class elevate, regardless of the parties involved. This includes black male comedians like Peele picking and choosing who they attack and defend; re: white women and Israel. My dude, you can’t just have your one big hurrah and then poison the well once you “make it”! You have to consistently attack profit (and its bigotries) or you’re just propping up Omelas!
[10] E.g., Tomb Raider‘s own babe-in-the-wilderness scenario pitting posh Lara Croft (above) against nature as foreign, alien, and undead, but also dangerously tomb-like; i.e., our resident raider sporting fascist elements (the death’s-head skull-and-wings) that advertise her regressive mercenary nature entering those aforementioned “tombs” (cities, colonies, and other such territories both foreign and domestic): a British Amazon to pacify Britain’s fascist presence with, but also export to fascist dens elsewhere. It’s the usual fascist lie: “This is what you’ll get when the time comes!” (with fascism being unable to allow such leeway insofar as its competing logics—infiltrate and subjugate—will quickly bridal such women when formal power is acquired by party leaders).
[11] As usual, I would argue they weren’t radical or solidarized enough, needing to connect race to matters of culture and class in ways that Marx failed to entirely do, over a century prior (re: anti-Semitism and homophobia). Developing Gothic Communism is a holistic endeavor that solves intersecting problems of race, class and culture; i.e., by accounting for axes of oppression making people turn against one another in order to survive, mid-apocalypse. This requires camping the ghosts of people like MLK and Marx, but also the zombies of people like them in broader poetic discourse.
[12] Zionism being an emulation of American genocide just as the Nazis were; i.e., Zionists are Jewish Nazis (or non-Jewish people speaking for Jewish people as such).
[13] The beheading of the zombie extending to a beheading of Indigenous groups as a form of identity death and shaming by colonial forces.
[13a] From IGN’s “Age of Mythology: Retold – Release Date Trailer | Xbox Showcase 2024.”