One of the most stimulating books I have read in a while is Max Brooks’s World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, which uses the plot Macguffin of a global zombie infestation to examine various facets of our world – including socio-political structures, shifting relationships between nations, cultural taboos and paranoia, and the shaping of human nature in the cyber-age. This is a book of vignettes, related in straight-faced documentary style; it takes the form of testimonies collected by a UN agent after the zombie war is over. Without attempting a comprehensive review, I’d like to mention two of my favourite sections, both of which reflect on how modern technology has facilitated self-projection, narcissism and alienation.
The first of these is in the voice of a young Japanese man named Kondo, one of many survivors of the zombie apocalypse that the book chronicles in elaborate, realist detail. Raised in an education system based on rote learning and fact retention, and shielded from the practical aspects of life, Kondo calls himself an otaku, which to him simply means an outsider – someone who felt so cut off from the real world that he chose to retreat into a "better" one, where he could be more in control.
He means the Internet, of course.
If George Romero’s second zombie film Dawn of the Dead – which drew a direct line between zombies and the burgeoning shopping-mall culture – had such immediacy in the late 1970s, imagine the possibilities that exist for zombiedom in today’s world. The witty subtext to Kondo’s story is that he was for much of his life an automaton himself. He spent nearly all his waking hours staring into the hypnotic depths of a computer screen, mechanically sharing and acquiring information, interacting with people whom he didn’t really know, occasionally getting up and lurching to his bedroom door to collect the breakfast or dinner tray his mother had left for him outside. (Does any of this sound familiar? Mull the question for a few seconds between checking your Facebook notifications.)
When the zombie skirmish begins, Kondo and his online acquaintances treat it as they would a video game, as something that is in no way connected with their real-world lives (to whatever extent they are aware of having a real-world existence). They collect and exchange details about the conflict, monitor its spread, congratulate each other on their hacking skills.
When Kondo finally does open his door and looks out, he sees one of the living dead crawling slowly on its belly toward him. “The left eye was locked on mine and its gurgling moan became a choked rasp.” We gather this is because the creature has spotted food – but perhaps it had simply recognized one of its own kind.
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The other section is narrated by a man who was in the service of a wealthy employer (“I’m not sure what he really did. Something in entertainment, or high finance”) at the time the outbreak began. This moneyed show-off, we are told, converted his huge mansion into a secured, well-stocked fortress that no zombie could possibly breach, and made it a refuge for all the celebrities he knew (along with their personal staff). Which in itself was a good idea – the only problem was that he couldn’t resist setting up a 24/7 webcast from each room in the house, so that everyone in the outside world could see what he had done and marvel at it. In his blissfully hubristic playing of this Bigg Boss-like game, it didn’t occur to him that his viewers would make a beeline for this sanctuary, and do a better job of breaking into it (being sentient humans with the ability to plan and strategise) than the zombies could. And once that happened, even the staff would turn their backs on their celebrity bosses. We’d been paid to protect rich people from zombies, not from other not-so-rich people who just wanted a safe place to hide.
The idea of “regular” people trying to take over a place that was once reserved for the privileged has special resonance in a world of innumerable reality shows, TV contests and the constant playing out of the “15 seconds of fame” theme. But of course, this subplot is also about the unthinking, uncontrollable exhibitionism of the rich and famous. As the narrator says:
The first of these is in the voice of a young Japanese man named Kondo, one of many survivors of the zombie apocalypse that the book chronicles in elaborate, realist detail. Raised in an education system based on rote learning and fact retention, and shielded from the practical aspects of life, Kondo calls himself an otaku, which to him simply means an outsider – someone who felt so cut off from the real world that he chose to retreat into a "better" one, where he could be more in control.He means the Internet, of course.
If George Romero’s second zombie film Dawn of the Dead – which drew a direct line between zombies and the burgeoning shopping-mall culture – had such immediacy in the late 1970s, imagine the possibilities that exist for zombiedom in today’s world. The witty subtext to Kondo’s story is that he was for much of his life an automaton himself. He spent nearly all his waking hours staring into the hypnotic depths of a computer screen, mechanically sharing and acquiring information, interacting with people whom he didn’t really know, occasionally getting up and lurching to his bedroom door to collect the breakfast or dinner tray his mother had left for him outside. (Does any of this sound familiar? Mull the question for a few seconds between checking your Facebook notifications.)
When the zombie skirmish begins, Kondo and his online acquaintances treat it as they would a video game, as something that is in no way connected with their real-world lives (to whatever extent they are aware of having a real-world existence). They collect and exchange details about the conflict, monitor its spread, congratulate each other on their hacking skills.
Japan was doomed, but I didn’t live in Japan. I lived in a world of free-floating information. The siafu, that’s what we were calling the infected now, weren’t something to be feared, they were something to be studied. You have no idea the kind of disconnect I was suffering […] Japan might be evacuated, Japan might be destroyed, and I would watch it all happen from the safety of my digital mountaintop.Of course, it doesn’t quite work out that way, and little wonder that when Kondo awakens to the most unthinkable crisis of his life – his computer is no longer working, the net is down – he goes nearly insane. Like the zombies, he needs something to feed on, and that something is the glow of the screen and the validation of others in the cyber-world. But all that is gone now, his parents – whose faces he barely remembers – seem to have disappeared too, he is agoraphobic about stepping out of his building, and so socially inept that knocking on a neighbour’s door, even in an emergency, is not an option. Besides, what are those shuffling noises coming from the hallway outside?
When Kondo finally does open his door and looks out, he sees one of the living dead crawling slowly on its belly toward him. “The left eye was locked on mine and its gurgling moan became a choked rasp.” We gather this is because the creature has spotted food – but perhaps it had simply recognized one of its own kind.
****
The other section is narrated by a man who was in the service of a wealthy employer (“I’m not sure what he really did. Something in entertainment, or high finance”) at the time the outbreak began. This moneyed show-off, we are told, converted his huge mansion into a secured, well-stocked fortress that no zombie could possibly breach, and made it a refuge for all the celebrities he knew (along with their personal staff). Which in itself was a good idea – the only problem was that he couldn’t resist setting up a 24/7 webcast from each room in the house, so that everyone in the outside world could see what he had done and marvel at it. In his blissfully hubristic playing of this Bigg Boss-like game, it didn’t occur to him that his viewers would make a beeline for this sanctuary, and do a better job of breaking into it (being sentient humans with the ability to plan and strategise) than the zombies could. And once that happened, even the staff would turn their backs on their celebrity bosses. We’d been paid to protect rich people from zombies, not from other not-so-rich people who just wanted a safe place to hide.
The idea of “regular” people trying to take over a place that was once reserved for the privileged has special resonance in a world of innumerable reality shows, TV contests and the constant playing out of the “15 seconds of fame” theme. But of course, this subplot is also about the unthinking, uncontrollable exhibitionism of the rich and famous. As the narrator says:
Sometimes I ask myself, why didn’t they all just shut the fuck up, you know? Not just my boss, but all of those pampered parasites. They had the means to stay way outta harm’s way, so why didn’t they use it? […] But then again, maybe they couldn’t, like a switch you just can’t turn off. Maybe it’s what made them who they were in the first place.[More on World War Z soon. And no, I haven’t yet seen the film, which I’m told doesn’t have much to do with the book]
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