It has been observed, though I can’t remember where, that in times of great social upheaval and uncertainty, some mentally ill people actually seem to recover, even while people who are normally stolidly adjusted might be experiencing greater levels of anxiety and depression. This is the premise of Lars Von Trier’s film, Melancholia. In the first part of the film, Kristen Dunce’s character, Justine, suffers a paralyzing mental breakdown that leaves her unable to look after herself. Though she appears to have everything going for her: a handsome new husband, good job, affluent family; she simple drops out, unable to bear the suffocating dimensions of her allegedly ideal bourgeois life.
In the second half of the film, however, she makes a steady and surprising recovery, even though a large, newly discovered planet is poised to collide with the earth. By the end of the film, it is Justine’s normally rational, composed and competent sister, Claire, who is unable to function. Once her positivistic ideologies of science and progress are unable to shield her from the truth that the world is about to end, she breaks down. In the final scenes, it is Justine who, calm and composed, is able to confront the reality of the situation and provide comfort to those around her as the planet begins its collision.
A similar device informs the plot of George A. Romero’s classic zombie film, Night of the Living Dead. Here, the temporary suspension of the social order due to a zombie apocalypse allows a member of a suppressed minority, a black man in 1968 America, to enjoy a position of leadership normally structurally denied him. Trapped inside a farmhouse by the legions of undead, the protagonist Ben (Duane Jones) keeps a cool head and tries to help his fellows survive, while representatives of middle-class white society succumb to hysteria, panic and discord. In both cases, the overlooked, oppressed and excluded, what Jacques Ranciere calls “the part that has no part,” are revealed to be more sane and competent than the so-called mainstream, which is revealed for all its fractures, contradictions and weaknesses due to the extraordinary circumstances of the crisis.
Though our world is assuredly not ending, the COVID-19 virus has produced some comparable effects to those described above. The true heroes of the pandemic are those professions which, in the normal running of things, are low on social hierarchy: delivery people, fast-food service industry workers, truckers, grocery clerks, care providers, homeless shelters. Many people with allegedly “important” jobs, on the other hand, find themselves working remotely from home and spending their days monitoring streams of inane texts and emails, performing tasks that now seem oddly trivial. This re-contextualizing of the office casts all the small, disciplinary measures that ensure workers remain resignedly “in their place” in a new light. Protocols and activities that might have seemed normal just a week or two ago suddenly come across as a form of callous managerialism, both ridiculous and out of touch with the emotional demands and realities of a rapidly changing set of circumstances. With the sudden disruption of the everyday divisions of social space, one begins to realize just how much of one’s life is organized around working, with home life being merely that portion of time that allows us to recover our energies enough that employers might utilize them again tomorrow. Somehow many of us have ended up like Victorians, back before there were limits on the extent to which our time can be monopolized by work, with the difference that the Victorians still believed that things could be different, and fought for it.
Such a moment constitutes a crisis for those who benefit from the steady appropriation of our time and energy, as it gives people new norms and freedoms from which to compare the patterns of servitude and exploitation to which we have become habituated. Most frequently, these kinds of suspensions of the social order occur during times of war, where governments can mobilize the politics of fear focused on a common enemy. But, despite attempts to brand the coronavirus an “enemy of humanity” (please see my last post for more on this), the affective landscape of the current crisis is essentially different from wartime. What makes the current, humanitarian world crisis so concerning to those in power, is that it risks revealing the bankruptcy of a system where the imperatives of privatization and profit have hollowed out the common, shared resources and energies that allow us to survive on this planet. And, without fear of a spectacular terrorist or foreign enemy to cow people into submission, there will be no one left to blame but the establishment if things get much worse.
The seeming benevolence of banks and (some) governments in the midst of the crisis speaks to just how dangerous a time this is for an already strained and tottering social order. It also reveals the increased leverage that ordinary people suddenly have: to a certain, liberating extent, we can suddenly simply say “no” to the finely woven control structures that keep us accepting the increasing concessions and erosions of our shared world. Further, we are being forced, collectively, to do the things that we absolutely have to do if we want to stave off an actual apocalypse on the scale of Melancholia or Night of the Living Dead: stay home, drive less, consume less, cooperate with our neighbours, make peace with each other, be decent people again, give people and the earth time to recover. Not that we were necessarily bad people two weeks ago and have suddenly become saints. But very few us generally have the time to look after each other properly, let alone to look after ourselves. If this crisis goes on much longer, we might be poised to enjoy a renaissance of caring, compassionate, creative behaviours the likes of which have not been seen for several decades, if not longer.
The question is: how can we sustain this kind of momentum without the pressure and tragedies of the virus forcing banks, employers and governments to cut us a little more slack? Why shouldn’t we be able to live lives that are not a little more easy, a little more sane, a little less destructive, a little more sustainable? Why not try something that every study and test run has proven highly beneficial and successful, like guaranteed basic income? For a good long time, we have been like lobsters in a pot, the water growing increasingly warmer, but not fast enough that we might leap out and upturn the dinner. A sudden interruption of service has offered us a temporary reprieve from impending doom, but the reprieve has taken the strange and bitter form of impending doom.
I believe there is still a little bit of grace in this strange calamity. For decades we have consoled ourselves with a popular culture that plays the nightmarish breakdown of the world as we know it, over and over again in myriad forms. Or are these really wish fulfillments disguised as nightmares? Perhaps we seek release from a system and culture which is supposed to cater to our every manufactured desire, but can’t ever really deliver the goods because it is actually designed for a different end altogether. What I call “the zombie imaginary” is really a coping strategy for a seemingly insolvable conundrum: we thirst for a better world, but we have been told it simply isn’t possible—this is as good as it gets! If that is the case, and yet I still must struggle so hard and feel so bad, there must be some reason, and some release. What zombie films and other catastrophe narratives offer is an indulgence of one of our most antisocial fantasies: the idea that life would be better if there were just less people around. This is the fantasy summoned—and then skillfully critiqued—by such canonical zombie films as Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, where the protagonists take refuge in a shopping mall. It is the fantasy behind the atrocious film version of World War Z, which tries to reassure us that the white nuclear family can survive any global pandemic just so long as we let enough of the "right" kind of Middle Eastern people perish. Shifting from movies to the political theatre, it is precisely this fantasy that politicians mobilize when they try to convince us that the barrier to our flourishing is some other group of people: foreigners, lazy “welfare bums,” immigrants, or “baby boomers,” to give just a few examples.
One of the most disturbing new mutations of the zombie imaginary is the meme of some cynical younger people calling the coronavirus the “boomer killer.” This is what austerity, when narrativized by the zombie imaginary, does to us: it divides society from within, along new and old fracture lines, encouraging us to dehumanize and fight with each other rather than to change a system that really only benefits a select minority.
Many of us have been exposed to these stories for so long that they have become second nature. While they offer temporary relief, they never actually address the true source of the problem, which lies in economic and political systems, and how these structures limit and condition our everyday lives. The best of these films do offer intelligent and biting critiques of social ills, but even these narratives are tinged with a cynical vision of human nature that conceals, usually unintentionally, an ideological overgeneralization. This is, to a large extent, a limit of the genre itself: intelligent apocalyptic films provide critiques of human behavior that is conditioned by particular historical, economic and political circumstances. But they often present these images of ourselves as if they were reflections of an immutable, inescapable human nature. This is part of the nihilistic thrill of pursuing these films: they appeal to our Hobbesian suspicions that humans are terrible, monstrous creatures who, without the counter-pressure of social violence and coercion, would simple resort to cannibalistic atrocities. Of course such a world deserves to end! It is a relief when the last victim has been devoured and the credits role.
But what these films actually describe are the affective realities, the dark, and nowadays not so well disguised undercurrents of an economic system based on the constant expansion and privatized appropriation of collectively produced wealth. They are the fantasies specific to late, world-devouring capitalism, and they are fantasies that will end when this same system ends, to be replaced with newly interesting forms of cultural production. This is not the place to go further down a Marxian rabbit hole, except to say that the other reason zombie films take the form they do is because the deeply antisocial, aggressively competitive and a-moral tendencies of capitalism are, in our time, enwrapped in what could be called a “biopolitical” imperative to at least pretend that the system is designed to care about the well being of the populations that serve it. This makes viruses form the penultimate boogeyman of the current system: it is the Achilles' heal, so to speak, that has the power to reveal the monster behind the curtain: of a system that only cares about people so far as they are able to produce value for a rich minority.
The film Melancholia is very smart about signposting the limits of the apocalyptic genre that it explores. You might remember the scenes were the two sisters go for a horse ride, but the horse stops short and refuses to cross a small bridge over a creek on the path that leads to the town. Throughout the film, in fact, the protagonists are never shown outside of the lavish estate; only the servants are able to pass through the seemingly magical and increasingly claustrophobic force field that encircles the family in their comfortable but ultimately barren lifestyles. This tells us, the viewers, that perhaps the world is not really ending; perhaps it is only the bourgeois world of the protagonists that the planet Melancholia is set to destroy. For all we know, the servants could be in the town, enjoying a pint at the local pub while the harrowing eschatology unfolds at the estate. Melancholia, in other words, is in the eye--or telescope--of the beholder.
Because they reflect our late capitalist predicament back to ourselves, zombie and apocalypse films have to end badly, devouring their own worlds and characters in one way or another. Our real, human societies do not have to share this fate, though the current global climate change crisis might indicate otherwise. But if these past few weeks have shown us anything, it is that people are still very capable of being kind and decent, on a large scale, and under difficult circumstances. If we were following the cynical, familiar scripts of popular culture, we should all be stockpiling ammunition, food, and toilet paper for the immanent war of all against all. But this isn’t the generalized case (except perhaps for the toilet paper part). Just as Greek tragedies were therapeutic rituals in which a society faced its deepest fears and anxieties, to prove that it is possible to travel, together, to the other side of calamity and survive, so too does the present crisis have the potential to demonstrate to ourselves that we are actually still capable of being kind, compassionate and generous.
We are surviving a zombie apocalypse! But what if, by the end of it, there weren’t any zombies to be found, not because they had all been incinerated by Brad Pitt and the World Health Organization, but because we decided, together, that nobody should have to be dehumanized and disposed of, cast beyond the pale and scapegoated, just to serve our own, unattainable and unsustainable fantasies of progress and prosperity? We actually deserve to be happy and healthy, and not worked into the ground, not cowed by debt, anxiety, guilt and depression. We deserve employment that feels good, and that makes us feel good, rather than feeling exploited, unimportant, overworked, secretly ashamed for our privilege yet unable to enjoy it. We deserve these things, and could have them--for real and for generations--if we decided, together, to live differently, under a different game than winner takes all. It would be better for all of us. We can do it!
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