And Say the Zombie Responded?
17
food. But it has no stomach. It can take no nourishment from what it ingests. It’s
working on instinct, a deep, dark, primordial instinct.” 13
To be sure, the notion of instinct plays a central role here.
Experimenting on a different patient, Dr. Logan cuts the zombie’s brain away,
layer by layer. Left with only the brain stem and the bits of tissue typically
associated with the reptilian brain, the zombie still moves and reaches out and
tries to eat. The implication is that the zombie has been turned into an animal—
something like a crocodile, in fact, that works on instinct to hunt fresh meat.
But why do zombies crave human flesh? In a seventh-season episode of
“The X-Files” written and directed by David Duchovny, Duchovny’s character,
Fox Mulder, argues that zombies have a hunger for human flesh because they
are acting out all of the desires that were impossible while they were alive.14 The
forbidden is fair game only after death, and so zombies enact the greatest of
taboos. The desire points at nothing greater than its own enactment.
It seems unquestionable that cannibalism is a marker for the complete
breakdown of society, but as always, the real question is how we define our
terms in order to live with ourselves. The Last Supper is not taken to be a
zombie banquet, and Christian transubstantiation is not taken to be an act of
cannibalism but rather an act of communion. Similarly, when a newborn baby
drinks his mother’s milk, literally eats a part of his mother’s body, this, too, is
not defined as cannibalism. And when humans who are not vegetarians eat pork
and beef and chicken and the like, they do not think of themselves as cannibals
because such creatures are not us: we are thought not to be animal.
To return to Dawn o f the Dead, as Dr. Rausch puts it:
Normally, the first question is, “Are these
cannibals?” No, they are not. Cannibalism in the
truest sense of the word implies an interspecies [sic]
activity. These creatures prey on humans. They do
not prey on each other, that’s the difference. They
attack and they feed only on warm flesh. . . These
creatures are nothing but pure, motorized instinct.15
One of the things to which this points is, of course, how we humans are
basically just sacks of meat. And it is interesting to note the extensive
implications of this sort of realization. In The Walking Dead television series,
for instance, the human survivors include a white, Southern, racist and an
African American man. When the two begin fighting, Deputy Grimes steps in
and announces: “Things are different now. There is no black or white. Only
white meat and dark meat. Us and them.”16 The assumption is that race goes
away after the zombies start chasing us. Race is seen as a quality of flesh that is
unimportant to anyone other than humans, and we are thus being chastised for
caring so much about something so invisible to other creatures. We humans are
caught up on race, that is, because we do not see the body for what it truly is: