I wrote this piece for an exhibition at The Doris McCarthy Gallery called, "You Cannot Kill What is Already Dead." It was published in this brochure.
George A.
Romero’s conception of the reanimated corpse with a ravenous hunger for human
flesh, first introduced in Night of the Living Dead in 1968, has become a zombie template in contemporary popular
culture. The voodoo undead or the diseased living have been called zombies, in modern
fictional narratives, but Romero’s creation, complete with the shuffling gait,
the ruined body, the blank expression and the pained moan has endured for
nearly half a century. Back in the late 60s the zombie was created as an
abnormal bodily spectacle and it is this spectacle you see (more often than
not) recurring today in the cinema, on the television and stumbling past you at
your local zombie walk.
The zombie is
abnormal, first because Romero’s zombie does not exist in the normal “real”
world and secondly because it is a figure that represents something that
transgresses the norm of being either living or dead by being undead (dead but
animated). The zombie is a liminal being, a creature that exists on the
boundary of life and death by never completely being either dead or alive.
Furthermore, the zombie is an abnormal spectacle because the normal body (considering
that the common usage of the word “normal” developed during the Industrial
Revolution) is often conceived as the human form that is productive, useful,
healthy and able in contemporary society. None of these adjectives can be
applied to the zombie.
The zombie,
then, symbolically represents our own fears of abnormality by existing as a
being that carries the signs of the less productive, useful, healthy and able
body all humans normally inherit, given a long enough life span. Therefore, the
abnormal spectacle of the undead zombie body (the gait, the moan and the ruin)
resonates with what is often conceived of as the so-called abnormal living
human body, which is also less productive, useful, healthy and able (that may
display a similar gait, moan and ruin). However, what makes Romero’s creation
so enduring is that the so-called bodily abnormalities that the zombie delivers,
the embodied signs typically associated with the approach of death or the
effects of damage on the living, are in fact normal, if normal is understood as
a usual or common biological or physical occurrence.
So, like the
zombie itself we are also liminal beings, halfway between our own animation and
extinction, not sick but not completely well, able in some regards and less
able in others. Our so-called abnormal bodies are our normal bodies. Therefore,
the bodily spectacle of the zombie does not represent bodily abnormalities but
instead bodily normalities that we often consider to be abnormal in our
contemporary culture. For as long as we consider the normal mortal body to be
abnormal because it will eventually become less productive, useful, healthy and
able than society requires, then George A Romero’s zombie will continue to live
(but also be dead) and the abnormal and normal will continue to haunt each
other, much like death haunts the living.
Christian Martius, October 2013.
