THE APOCALYPSE IS COMING, AGAIN
One of the enduring strengths of the zombie genre – beyond the incarnation of death, the taboo of cannibalism and the horror of humans without souls – is the depiction of an apocalypse. Unlike the typical vampire or werewolf story, the menace of zombies lies not only in the peril and terror experienced by the individual characters, but further in the ultimate collapse of civilization and end of life as we know it. That dimension of societal cataclysm and even human extinction taps into a root fear that haunts our collective id.
I don’t recall a time when there has not been some imminent threat, in real life, presenting an immediate risk of global destruction. In grade school, in the waning years of the Cold War, we learned civil defense and survival skills for the nuclear winter. With a chill of doom, we’d hear about how many times over the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia could kill everyone on the planet, and it always seemed it would only take a trivial international incident to trigger a tragic escalation to mutually assured destruction.
As fear that humankind would end by nuclear war started to fade with glasnost and perestroika, the social consciousness was hit by a threat of disease and the prospect of apocalypse by epidemic. The chilling spread of AIDS served as a grim reminder that we remained susceptible to devastating pathogens, and could not count on medical science for timely salvation. The progression slowed outside high-risk populations, and was impeded by the transmission mechanism, but it wasn’t hard to imagine a more contagious strain, or a new virus, that would wipe out everyone.
The end of the dinosaurs used to be a subject of debate, and there was a sense of resolution when the scientific community coalesced around the asteroid explanation. But the idea that a rock the size of Maryland might fall out of the sky and crash into the earth with such devastating force that over two thirds of the species on the planet would become extinct was, at the same time, rather disturbing. The more we learn about the random clutter of space and the dynamics of solar flares and the like, the less secure we can feel that the end is not hurling our way at this moment through the blackness.
And now, of course, there’s a growing comprehension that we may ourselves have poisoned the atmosphere to a tipping point of apocalypse by climate change. Politicians who assert they are not scientists and refuse to hear the tolling bell of fate can offer little comfort in this, the latest portent of the end of times.
The coming end is nothing new. There are flood myths in many cultures. The Vikings had a vision of Ragnarok. For Christians, there’s the Book of Revelations, the Second Coming, the Rapture, the Final Judgment. There was a widespread belief that the year 1000 would bring the end of the world, which was a major selling point in the conversion of the pagan north to Christianity at that time. The Black Death struck like the terrible judgment of an angry deity.
Before Christmas was celebrated, the pagan holiday of Yule was observed in late December. Why then? Because that’s the first point when you can tell the days have stopped getting shorter and are starting to get longer. I suspect from very early on, people watched the gradual disappearance of sunlight with trepidation, imagining a continued progression to death in the cold darkness. Each year, the turn of the corner with lengthening days came as a tremendous relief, apocalypse averted one more time.
Some doomsday scenarios are more plausible than others. But maybe the bonds of social structure that bring order to our lives and the ecological balance on which our very existence depends are indeed so fragile and delicate that we survive on the precipice of a perpetual cliff. One thing is sure: the insecurity of losing it all is deeply entrenched and we can expect the fear that civilization will collapse and humanity will be extinguished will trouble future generations to come.
The delightful paradox of human psychology is that the horrific prospect of Armageddon is recognized as an obsession and exploited for its entertainment value. Consider the hysteria surrounding Y2K, where everyone was glued to the television on New Year’s Eve, eating metaphorical popcorn while waiting to see if computer glitches would crash power grids or cause missiles to launch themselves. Or 2012, which had the right panache for a Hollywood disaster movie. Sure, you could discount Nostrodamus or the Mayans as reliable guides for what to expect, but with two independent dubious sources agreeing on a particular year there remained a sliver of doubt that there just might be something to it.
Which brings us back to zombies, whose world-ending escapades are a source of delight for hordes of fans who know full well nothing like that is actually going to happen. Unless, of course, a zombie apocalypse might be a possibility.
