"Zombie Apocalypse"

I recently overheard a conversation regarding what would be the worst case scenario: that is, if the world was over-run by the zombies. The conversation was asking that the other person somehow imagine a situation where the mind is so stuck that it would be in a corner and have no place to go but face undead human beings who prey on the living. It is also a kind of fantasy of being over-run by inanimate beings that are ‘aware’ yet ‘have no awareness’. I have actually become quite used to the idea of worst case, impossible scenarios, similar to ‘what would you rather have..’, given the choice of two deeply painful experiences.

 One of the most interesting premises in the zombie film genre is that something without consciousness (such as a virus, or radiation) would animate a dead body and operate through that body. It is like having the best of both worlds, but without the mind. Many science fiction novels I read as a young adult seem to have employed this theme quite skillfully. In Robert Heinlein’s novel The Puppet Masters, alien worm-like creatures nestle in the backs of people’s heads and start to impersonate people’s behavior, gestures and language. Soon, they start to take over the American government, in a plot to dominate the world and its media. Even as a child, I was enthralled by the idea that these invertebrate creatures could somehow install themselves into perfectly functioning human minds and start to take over the function of mind, without actually being the mind itself. It seemed to be a very elegant way for humans to be used by non-humans, without the non-humans having to even evolve tools, arms or legs to do its own bidding.

 Does this remind me of anything? It reminds me of what I read just yesterday in the Surangama Sutra: “now your eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind are like conspirators who have introduced thieves into your house to plunder your valuables.” (p.175) Is it possible for that which has no awareness to invade that which is aware? In the case of what Buddha describes, it is not a zombie or alien invading the mind. Rather, it is the mind conspiring against itself to squander all the great things it has. But there is an uncanny similarity to what I read in science fiction. It is the notion of how humanity is fooled into accepting appearances as the true mind. Appearances, like the worms or viruses of science fiction novels, end up taking over the functioning of a perfectly good mind.  The difference is that in Buddhism, mind never ‘vacates’ its position or its essence. It only appears to do so.

What could things without awareness do without the mind? Science fiction seems to play with these ideas in different ways. In many zombie movies, it almost looks as though the barely animate virus wins out by taking over human consciousness. It plays into a fantasy that makes the scenario horrific, which is that humans are nothing more than bodies, waiting to be taken over by any number of natural elements. Science (and capitalism, for that matter) operates under similar ideas. According to these modern ways of thinking, we are really just bodies with specific natural functions, and we need to consume or be consumed in order to survive. It almost sounds like a classic behaviorist position to me. Zombie movies only point out the fragility of this position, by showing how easy it would be for human brains to fall prey to viruses, and thus to degenerate to the level of an almost non-sentient being. The zombie in these films typically operates on a sub-human, often sub-animal level, displaying no signs of vitality, no consciousness, no compassion, and no warmth. It is like being taken over by a filing cabinet or a sink. Even the most basic life forms would appear to have some vital striving that zombies seem to lack in these movies. Instead, the zombies move with a quiet desperation from one person to the next, ‘consuming’ the living so that their mere bodies could keep existing indefinitely.

I think one reason for the rising popularity of this genre is that it must play into human fears of what consumerist ideologies mean, or don’t mean, for most people. But in some sense, there is something crude about this movie, because it plays into facile notions of cultural universality. By positioning the entire world of humans as vulnerable to virus attack, we are lead to think that all humans are universally vulnerable and imprisoned to their biological legacy. There is no cultural intermediary of ingenuity, or collective wisdom, or cross-pollinating ideas, to mitigate this raw vulnerability to ‘biology’. In so doing, zombie movies reflect the common feeling of being over-run by corporate, ‘global’ world-views that have no concern for human cultures. These perspectives typically operate under a Darwinian notion of survival of the fittest, privileging the biological over the social. In the zombie world,  no collaboration or brainstorming (pardon the pun) can resolve the ever-present problem of physical, body survival.

While zombie movies are all in good fun (not to be taken too seriously) perhaps the idea behind them needs to be examined more closely. Do these movies satirize materialism and the obsession with bodies, or does it perhaps play into these obsessions and ‘feed’ our fears? I think that, like most B-movies, zombie movies contain a mixture of education and exploitation. On the one hand, they may educate audiences on the extremes of taking the brain to be in the body. On the other hand, they exploit our fears of losing our mind when we succumb to the diseases that plague all bodies. The antidote to this fear would be an insight that our minds are not in our bodies at all, and are thus not prisoners to the natural elements. But this perspective requires a complete turn away from the emphasis on body and material, non-aware environment as the driving forces of life and responses.

The Surangama Sutra: With Excerpts from the Commentary by the Venerable Master Hssuan Hua. A New Translation (2009) Buddhist Text Translation Society.