Chewing It Over: Part 1

"(groan) We must be swift as a coursing river (groan) with all the strength of a great typhoon..."

During the Superbowl I watched the insanely chaotic preview for the upcoming Brad Pitt film, World War Z. It's the screen version of Max Brooks' novel, and I retched at the idea of yet another Hollywood adaptation that appears to grievously alter not only the events in the book, but the commentary and logic of it as well. So I decided that explaining my thoughts on the themes and ideas the book gets right would be a nice topic for my initial post – to be followed up with the worries I have about the Hollywood version, then perhaps later I'll fit in a review of the film upon its release.

Also, if you haven't already guessed, I'm kind of a zombie fan.

        
  Machiavellian Intelligence tells us to maximize success of ourselves in any social setting, achieving a higher level of "fitness" by utilizing the appropriate strategies as warranted by the present situation.  Following this, the protection of any success gained becomes the utmost priority.  A keen Machiavellian thinker might lie, coerce or kill their way to the social apex, all the while receiving overwhelming praise from - or instilling crippling fear in - those around them.  This ensures that no one, in any capacity, will threaten their position of dominance.  Theory of Mind describes how we think we interpret the thoughts of others, playing heavily into the two main strategies of Machiavellian Intelligence: deception and cooperation.  Additionally, Theory of Mind seeks to explain how we, as beings of consciousness and reason, often project such qualities upon objects, animals or entities that do not possess them.

             
When applying zombies to these ideas, it gives everything a refreshingly bizarre spin.  How do we humans, the most dominant species on Earth, deal with the presence of something that cannot be tricked, frightened or bargained with and whose sole purpose is to rip us apart?  And how do we project our qualities onto something that was us – that in many ways still is us – yet is definitively not us at all?

           
The novel version of World War Z explores these very questions from myriad perspectives.  It is a series of first-person accounts chronicling a decade-long struggle against the spread of an unidentified virus that, after killing its victims, reanimates them into roaming, flesh-eating monsters.  It realistically depicts the sociopolitical response that society would have to such a blatant violation of the natural world. There are elements of violence and horror, but this is primarily a book about human nature and social contract theory.

           
So, from this Machiavellian standpoint as far as zombies are concerned, the human race is pretty much fucked.  In the book, the complete collapse of civilization reduces the world's population to the vigilant and the dead, or dead-ish. These zombies do not have feelings.  They are not motivated by revenge; they are not motivated by anything.  They are, for all intents and purposes, a plague that causes a dilemma in Max Brooks' idea of Machiavellian strategy.  The walking dead being the outward threat that they are, it’s ironic that humans would turn inward and compete with one another not for increases in favor but for a better shot at survival.  

You remember what it was like, people just freaking out…boarding up their houses, stealing food, guns, shooting everything that moved.  They probably killed more people, the Rambos and the runaway fires, and the traffic accidents and just the…the whole shit storm that we now call ‘the Great Panic’; I think that killed more people than Zack [the zombies].

This, however, only solves the short-term goal of: “How do I survive on this day?” instead of the long-term goal of: “How do we as a species reclaim our dominance?”  The only way to achieve this is to use violence, but even here there are problems to overcome.  A human being can be dissuaded from maintaining conflict through several means: dissolution of morale, fear, and physical harm.  Aside from the destruction of the brain, zombies are immune to all of these.

Real fighting isn’t about killing or even hurting the other guy, it’s about scaring him enough to call it a day.  Break their spirit, that’s what every successful army goes for…But what if the enemy can’t be shocked and awed?  Not just won’t, but biologically can’t!

It is impossible to convince a zombie that you are not the one they want to eat, that it’s that guy over there who’s far tastier.  To this end, wiping out each and every one of them is the only way to improve social standing in a word dominated by the undead.

           
Now, getting rid of the living dead is hard enough, but learning how to cope with their very existence is another matter entirely.  After all, zombies were at one time human beings just like us, capable of thought and feeling.  What does it mean when we project ourselves onto our former selves, and can we go too far?  Are they still capable of forming thoughts like we can, even if they can’t act on them?  If they look like us, move like us but are not alive, do we treat them as objects or as creatures?

             
WWZ handles this subject in a few ways – some subtle, some not so subtle.  For instance, an earlier quote included the term “Zack”, which was used to describe the undead.  Giving the entity a name when science has none to offer is one way to control, or validate the existence of something that shouldn’t be.  The book describes another way that humans do this, though it’s a far more hellish method.

There’s a type of person who just can’t deal with a fight-or-die situation.  They’re always drawn to what they’re afraid of.  Instead of resisting it, they want to please it, join it, try to be like it…It put them right over the edge.  They started moving like zombies, sounding like them, even attacking and trying to eat other people.

It’s a futile attempt at cooperating with the dominant Other, while at the same time qualifying its place in a world that at one point rejected even the possibility of its existence.  Even so, we cannot predict that zombies will act in ways similar to ourselves just because they look like us; they are an entirely different organism – husks of what they used to be and nothing more. WWZ understands that popular concepts of human interaction and behavioral psychology are warped by this fact considering zombies are ostensibly human on the outside, and thus difficult to separate from. We feel as if we should know exactly what they’re thinking, what drives them, and what they require to survive.  How humans fit into the equation might not be immediately clear at the inception of an actual zombie plague. Ultimately, though, the extent to which a man needs to socially evaluate the zombie advancing toward him will be less than the extent to which he can swing a 9 iron at its skull. We'll see if the film finds any balance between the two.