Adventure #9 -- Sometimes I Worry About Zombies

Adventure - Heather

Description: To immerse ourselves in zombie culture, and then do interpretive art in response.


(Marty's Report):

So, I was tasked with the adventure for this week, but I'd had an adventurous week already. I called in sick Wednesday (more of a preemptive strike on some lurking bug than a response to an ongoing siege), which gave me almost four unscheduled days, an extreme rarity in my life.

I've been musing on creativity in life, not just making stuff, but on living life creatively at all levels of scale. So, with that in mind, I had an inspiration to make a short film for my Wilber class that I do twice a month over in Albany. Which I did, and was very satisfied with. It's really getting obvious that creativity and creative living are not optional activities, not little weekend excursions from the left brain to the right. But maybe my new focus got a bit tapped out by the 10 hours or so I spent on the film, so by Saturday morning, I was drawing a blank on ideas for a relationship adventure. My original thought was something like sunrise at the beach, which was nixed by the grey skies and drizzle.

But at the gym, Heather picked up a calendar of dance events; S.F. hosts a yearly week of dance, of all kinds and stripes. She found an hour of dancing to Egyptian pop music, which sounded like a ready-made adventure until she saw that they were doing belly dance. Both of us frowned and that was that.

However, Heather, with the fertile mind that she's got, thought that we should have a zombie fest. She's been reading "World War Z," and now, "The Zombie Survival Guide," (both by Max Brooks, and highly recommended by us both), and since zombies more than any other form of undead are her bugaboo, she thought this might be a good way of expunging their influence from her spongy mind. I added the "followed by interpretive art" part.

So before a shop at Rainbow (where she bought a remarkably good smoothie made with quinoa), we bought a zombie video game at Best Buy, and picked up the 2004 remake of George Romero's "Dawn of the Dead." With a quick lunch to fortify us for our fearsome foray, we loaded up "Left 4 Dead," and each of us taking the role of a foursome of survivors, commenced to play through some levels of this Xbox 360 game.

There is much to say about video games, that prevalent, important, and slummy part of modern culture. Also, a part of my life since I was a kid with my brother, saving up quarters to go to the video arcade in Birdcage Mall (that's the pre-yuppified Birdcage, mind you, when it was still a ring of semi-vibrant shops on the perimeter of the huge complex, and a rotting core of nick-nack shops on the interior, neglected because of the poor design of the place). Since then, video games have developed light years; Pac Man is now a super-retro experience and Pong is something of an atavistic freak. The distance between those groundbreaking games and something like "Bioshock" is difficult to calculate, both in terms of technical achievement and psychological sophistication.

"Left 4 Dead," however, is very high on the technical achievement, but falls about midlin' on the sophistication of mind dimension. Basically, you're tasked with surviving waves of zombie hordes, protecting your teammates, and getting from point a to point b. The pleasure of it is both the vicarious karma-free murder (is it murder if they're already dead, and digital to boot?) and the spookiness of the setup, where you're often in dim light situations with just a flashlight that suddenly illuminates the rotten face of an on-rushing zombie. And I mean "rushing," because of the various factors in the zombie equation, speed of movement is one, and L4D chooses the "human fast" option. Meaning the damn things are FAST! But you don't have to shoot them in the head--another factor in the zombie mythos--which makes the fifty or so creatures coming at you actually survivable.

So we played that for an hour or so, and then Heather had had enough. Also, we reached the hospital where we were to be extracted by a military helicopter. I wonder what happens next?

Then we made dinner, had a little spat about nothing, made up quickly (we are getting SO much better in keeping our punches above the belt, and then applying balms pretty soon thereafter), and ate dinner at the table together, which given our work schedules and eating patterns, is a pretty rare event. Dishes cleared, we steeled ourselves for the movie.

Now, I'd seen the original "Dawn of the Dead" way back when I was kid, I loved it partially because of the snarky social commentary. The setup is that for some reason (zombie lit seems to be leaning towards bio-explanations of zombiehood, though earlier versions stressed the religious or maybe-religious, or just who-the-fuck-knows reasons) the dead begin to rise as very flesh-hungry critters, and a band of survivors take refuge in a suburban shopping mall. They go through their travails and then a few of the survivors of the survivors fly away in a helicopter. One of my favorite bits of snark is when there is an image of a bunch of zombies scratching and moaning at the glass entrance doors to the mall, trying to get in, and the voice over from the survivors is, "But why do they come here?" "Well, they seem to come back to the place that was most important in their lives." To my bitchy adolescent self feeling cramped in the suburbs, that was manna.

The 1978 film is a classic, low-budget if not low-rent, but cut through with both a love for the genre and a fairly modernist eye towards overt social commentary and allegory. The 2004 remake that we watched was a competent display of the genre conventions, but skimped on the commentary. It went more for the splatter effects then for the spookiness, and its psychology was pretty thin, though the characters were engaging enough, especially the entertaining prick Steve. Still, the casting, which I imagine was more a product of a B-movie budget, was of mostly unknowns, which gave the film a retro feel. Overall, an entertaining exercise. The ending, where they escape Milwaukee and head out on a boat to an island which--whodathunkit?--is infested with zombies who eat our heroes as a video camera watches. I thought that was a bit gratuitously downbeat, though as Heather reminds me, that's pretty in keeping with the genre. Still, we were glad to see in the extras, that there was a "post" to the catastrophe, in the form of survivors finding the video diary of the gun store owner who was across the street from the mall. I guess in the end, we'll mourn individual deaths, but really don't want the big curtain to fall across the whole species.

So, saturated with zombie lore and the neurological stimulation of two zombie experiences--movie and game--we set to art. I brought in a plastic drop cloth to Heather's room, as if I were planning a surgery, and set about my paper mache project. For some reason, in the last week I've been wanting to do this goopy hands-on art, and this was my chance. I felt like I was drawing on genetic memory, going back to art projects with my father when I was a young kid. I remember in particular making a paper mache pig out of a balloon, and it being painted a bright primary green with bits of felt on it.

This came out a bit differently, as you can see above (mostly, it was hard to get the contrast right for this image). It's actually a rather eerie thing, apparently a head and skinless spine strapped town to a table, rather reminiscent of a 1980's heavy metal album cover. I hadn't planned it, and actually thought I was going to do some upright shambling mass. But this popped out, and I was delighted not so much by the product as by the fluidity of the process and by my not second guessing myself very much in letting my right brain have a say.

I think I'm getting that, in the act of creativity, you are trying to manipulate or seduce your audience into a reaction towards the art and towards you; you're trying to serve some larger or deeper impulse or need, that impulse to grow and expand which is in the field that holds both you and your audience; and you have little control over what response you will receive, and tend to fail in as much as you overemphasize securing a particular response. It seems that the success of an artist, and act of art, has a lot to do with knowing your audience without pandering, and accepting the inevitable failures without flinch or gaminess, either in terms of your desire to be loved and powerful, or in your hurt in not getting that response. Just staying put with these realities, and the contradictions implicit in the act of creating, seem to be essential in actually maintaining an artistic. creative life. As with so much of life, it seems to come round, again and again, to surrender without going to sleep.

Now, Heather's post-zombie production she can describe and maybe post the drawing, but what I noticed was how disturbed she was afterward. I called her out to the back porch, as the rain had stopped but the air was still thick and humid. We talked about fears, and I realized that movies don't really scare me, and I wasn't scared by this zombie excursion because, I think, the internal hooks aren't really there. I see them as a pretty limited archetype, expressing a basic fear of us humans, but not very profound in light of the spiritual depths that we can experience and that's expressed by our saints. But, what does disturb me in art is expressions of real living humans who are expressing what Arendt called "the banality of evil." World War 2 movies sometimes do this to me, the more they stress the verisimilitude of the situation (a recent example being "Defiance"). It's humans who are acting with the emotional range of zombies, and wrecking damage all around them, that's what disturbs me. Partially there's the personal fear of these people and what happens if they get control, partially the fear of that tendency in myself, and partially a deep disappointment in the waste of potential that such human corruption or diminishment expresses. That's much more unnerving than zombies, for me.


(Heather's Report):

So I've been on this Zombie/Apocalypse kick lately. It may have started with Marty's positive lauding of Max Brooks' "World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War" and him being so impressed with it (which is a hard thing to do media-wise, to impress Marty), that I picked it up after he finished reading it.

I've never read or even heard of Studs Terkel's work or really experienced an "oral history" in literature but I was completely charmed by this book, and also very impressed with how well done it was. At points, I had to remind myself this was indeed fiction and not some ancient history that we now have rebuilt ourselves from far in the future from that point. Then it was off to the "Zombie Survival Guide" also by Brooks (his first book) and then "Earth Abides" (plague kills off most of mankind and then was sort of a thought experiment about what would happen to "civilization" and the earth after humans).

So I suggested zombie movies after shooting down the belly dancing gig and looked online to see if there were zombie movie review sites. Which, of course, there are many. Although we found a lot unfinished or just lame. Maybe the reviewers got eaten. But in due course we decided on the newer version of "Dawn of the Dead" (which I had seen parts of, even the ending, but wasn't sure at the time of choosing). When going shopping at Rainbow, I also suggested getting a zombie game to play, to add to the immersive experience of Zombie... culture, as Marty put it. We bought "Left 4 Dead" and then went off to our expensive and healthy shopping at Rainbow Grocery, our local co-op. It was insanely busy since the previous day was International Workers' Day, a holiday I don't really know much about but I know Marty would.

"Left 4 Dead" was your usual shoot 'em up fare, which we played co-op, taking the roles of two of the four "survivors" presented in the beginning of the "story". There's a lot of confusion, especially on the split screen. And especially when you only have a flash light to give you a measly circle of tunnel vision or being vomited on by a "boomer" which makes you blind and attracts the swarming hordes of zombies to come eat you. Fortunately, you can kill these zombies by just shooting them, you don't particularly seem to need a headshot. Nor does being splattered while wounded infect you.

And I've certainly learned a lot about killing zombies and routes of infection from the Survival Guide. I was like, don't set them on fire, not good. Or, that particular weapon is better than that one. I'm all set if the world goes to hell in a Zombie Handbasket.

Then we watched the movie. I won't really get into the content of the movie, since really, a lot of zombie movies follow a similar pattern: widespread infection, widespread panic, zombies shambling (or running) in mass hordes after a few desperate survivors, and often ends.... poorly. While watching the movie, I was fine. Well, mostly fine. I think I may have already had some zombie freak-on during the game. And maybe as the movie continued I started fidgeting and getting more restless. But for the most part, sort of disconnected from the whole immersion into Zombie-World.

But afterward, I felt quite disturbed. The game didn't get me as much as the movie did although I think I dreamt of it later. Well, I know I dreamt of the movie later, or at least the gnashing of putrid teeth, snapping at me. I remember sitting around with some friends talking about Hell. Marty and I are not Christians nor even religious so we don't believe in Heaven or Hell as such. But we gamely discussed what our own personal hells might be. Mine has always been being chased by hordes of zombies who are trying to bite me. Not to eat me, but to turn me into one of them. Oh and with the sound of non-stop crying babies all around. *Shudder, horrors!!* I don't realy have "nightmares", or at least what other folks might call nightmares. I've had a lot of "horrible" dreams but usually, they aren't very scarey, to me anyway. But occasionally I have a dream that chills me upon waking or actually wakes me up in a cold sweat. And often zombies figure into these dreams.

Because of this strange zombie/post-apocalypse jag I've been on, I've been immersing myself in a lot of zombie and "after the world ends" type of stuff and subsequently have been discussing it in therapy. For me, zombies represent a deadened unconscious. Alive but unaware, stuck in a completely singular space. Maybe even with a tiny spark of awareness that one is in that space but can't do anything about it. Like being in a coma, completely paralyzed and can't do anything about it. Well, in this case, running around gnoshing on people but a tiny bit of oneself alive and aware in the back of the mind. Yuck. I have a terror of being that. So, zombies. Yeah, I don't like 'em.

However, the post-apocalyptic stuff is a different matter. I've always had a fascination since my younger years, probably pre-teen and on, with what I've termed (with different phrases) Disaster Psychology. What is the psychology of a global-wide disaster before, during and after? How do people deal with an impending disaster, how do they react as it is happening and what do they do afterwards? So I've always liked watching post-apocalyptic movies although I've always noticed that I feel they are lacking afterwards. Usually you just get the "this is what happened after the event" type stuff and not the lead up and the event itself. Or you get the lead up and the event without the afterwards. I want it all. And it's a rather hard psychology to study since we haven't really had a catastrophe that has led to some sort of post-apocalyptic state. But it always gets me thinking. What would happen? Movies, be it zombies or not, sort of poke around in thought experiments but I start asking questions. What would really happen?? Would we (humanity) fall apart and become bandits, would we rally in a progressive, communal way? Etc.

So I could ramble on about this for hours but I realize I'm getting away from our adventure.

This is my art I did, a simple picture, expressing what I was feeling in the moment, after playing the game and watching the movie.