This article from the Chicago Tribune calling this "The Year of the Zombie." I'm already a bit behind in my research and writing, and I'd better hurry up!
(Link to the 4 May 2009 article by staff reporter Christopher Borrelli)
(Link to the 4 May 2009 article by staff reporter Christopher Borrelli)
It's the Dawn of the Zombie Zeitgeist
People of Chicago, while you sleep, the Zombie Readiness Task Force worries, with admirably straight faces. In the event of an outbreak of the dead, should bodies of the deceased rise from their graves and stalk the streets of Chicago muttering for a bite of brain, the Zombie Readiness Task Force has a plan of action.
Its members have even written it down -- or rather, they have mostly written it down. The Zombie Readiness Task Force began at the University of Chicago as an act of speculative procrastination.
Junior Justin Hartmann and some friends, punchy after long hours of study at one of the most famously studious universities in the country, began to play a game of "What would you do if ... ?"
For instance, what would you do if the University of Chicago were besieged by zombies? As these things do in college, that late-night gab session last winter led to Hartmann and friends asking the university to recognize them as a student organization. Which led to a quick rejection. Which led to Hartmann and friends putting on ties and politely making their proposal before the sort of school officials who don't smile a lot.
This time, not only were they recognized, they also wrangled student-organization dollars out of the school -- $5,500 to be precise -- to bring author Max Brooks to campus, the guy behind "The Zombie Survival Guide" and "World War Z."
They grew to 25 members, and their timing was perfect.
This is the Year of the Zombie. (Feeling draggy? Just stumbling through the day, waiting to eat? Beset on all sides by moaning? You may be a zombie too. If so, cheer up, you ol' sack of flesh: Your time to shine has arrived.)
Forget the vampires of "Twilight" and their affectations. The A-list monster mascot of our miserable moment is a slouching corpse. Once you peek out at the zeitgeist from behind your fingers, you will see: Zombies are everywhere.
The next film from "Juno" scribe Diablo Cody is a bittersweet zombie tale called "Breathers: A Zombie's Lament." Which brings us to the burgeoning Z-lit genre: "Breathers" is an adaptation of a zombie novel by S.G. Browne, and hardly the only new zombie novel; Seth Grahame-Smith's literary mash-up, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies," debuted last month at No. 1 on Amazon's contemporary literature list. Then there are video games: The fifth "Resident Evil" has sold more than 1.5 million copies.
Theater? Michael Jackson's zombie classic "Thriller" is headed for Broadway. Social media? Facebook's "Real Friends Kill Friends Who Become Zombies" has more than 25,000 members. Fashion? New York magazine, in a nod to the bedraggled male models at the most recent Fashion Week, coined "Zombie chic."
Recession?
As banks have failed, there has been a cry from financial analysts to put down the "zombie banks," institutions that continue to operate despite a negative worth.
Public works?
On Interstate Highway 255 -- just east of St. Louis -- traffic signs were hacked last winter to read "Daily Lane Closures Due to Zombies." ( Texas and Indiana had similar incidents.)
Even paparazzi are not immune: Woody Harrelson recently claimed he struck a photographer in New York because he just finished the comedy "Zombieland" and mistook him for a zombie.
Chicago alone has seen, in the last year, a zombie bowling party, a zombie skating party and a zombie gathering at Millennium Park; last Saturday, you had your choice of attending a zombie prom or, in Andersonville, a zombie pub crawl -- basically, you march down Clark Street crying for brains, banging on bus windows. (More than 600 attended.) There's even a Web site for all your local zombie needs: chicagozombie.com.
The zombie has become so ubiquitous the Zombie Readiness Task Force was not even the only zombie-centric happening at the University of Chicago in recent months. A few weeks ago, U. of C. hosted its annual Model United Nations conference -- four days of what-if scenarios handled by representatives from schools such as Harvard, Yale and Stanford. One mock situation that required solving a zombie outbreak.
"It was controversial, sure," said junior Sam Fishman, an undersecretary general for the Model UN. "It's a serious conference. Some people got upset. But I thought it was fantastic."
Decaying, walleyed, bowlegged. At a glance, the zombie appears hard to love. He does not have the gravitas of a Mary Shelley for support; he does not own a tuxedo like Dracula. He is difficult to talk to. His strength is in numbers.
But if there's a reason the zombie of 2009 fits snugly into society: We know him; we are him.
"There's a sadness," said S.G. Browne. "They used to be us. But they're tragic and comical and they want to be friends, but we run. Vampires are Brad Pitts. Zombies are more like the Steve Buscemis. We can relate."
Indeed, at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Steven Schlozman, an assistant professor of psychiatry, uses zombies in class to explain neurology. Not just the zombie brain, but our response to crisis.
"What happens in zombie movies is important," he said, "because we shoot zombies in the head, then we start to enjoy it, then we feel sheepish. We can learn a lot from a scenario like that."
So, last fall he wrote a medical paper, in bloodless New England Journal of Medicine prose, "Ataxic Neurodegenerative Deficiency Syndrome: A Preliminary Pathophysiology and Proposed Global Remedies," about a case of Zombieism. He kept a straight face.
He mailed it to neurologists, to psychiatrists. But instead of disdainful reactions, "the phone calls of support have not stopped coming." Which is in keeping with the new Zombieism, a lightly zombified version of the recognizable world.
One of the most popular additions to the Marvel universe in recent years is "Marvel Zombies": Spider-Man and Co., but as flesh eaters. There's DisneyZombies.com, a fiction blog that -- well, you know.
And then there's "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" -- which Grahame-Smith said he wanted to hem close to the Jane Austen original, "to retain the idea of people not addressing what is before them, because they're too polite, even if it means not addressing zombies outside."
For instance, Chicago's WildClaw Theatre, which specializes in live horror plays, is currently producing "The Revenants" at the Angel Island Theater in Lakeview. It features two couples beset by zombies, and how the crisis tests their resolve.
"One of the strangest things I've noticed are the couples on their way out of the play," said WildClaw managing director Brain Amidei. "I've heard them whispering about the 'zombie conversation,' which is basically a twisted variation of the DNR conversation. Do Not Resuscitate. Except we have wives telling husbands: 'If I'm bitten by a zombie, shoot me in the head.' "
OK, so we have met the monster, and he is us. And we know where to look to find him: everywhere. But why now?
"Because with swine flu and everything else, it strikes a chord, it helps work out apocalyptic anxieties without getting too real," Brooks said.
In fact, "The Zombie Survival Guide" was born of pre-Y2K hysteria, he said, not unlike the zombies of George Romero's zombie classics, born of Vietnam and racial anxieties ("Night of the Living Dead") and zoned-out American consumerism ("Dawn of the Dead"). It may be a cringing irony that the current zombie craze coincides with a deadly outbreak of swine flu. But it goes beyond that, said Grahame-Smith.
"We live in a time when we think a lot about big faceless groups of people in the world who mean to do us harm and can't be talked to, and so it's not surprising we would take comfort in the zombie."
Indeed, Zombie Pub Crawl organizer Alaina Hoffman said she initially did it as a goof, as a fundraiser for her improv group. "But something happened when I showed up," she said.
"Everyone was gray and speaking in monosyllabic tones. There was no class, no race. You should have heard me the next day: 'We should all be zombies! This is what the world should be!' And I don't mean brain dead. ... We've been beaten up. I mean, it's so much easier to forgive a zombie. They're the best unifier we have."
cborrelli@tribune.com
No comments:
Post a Comment