Keep Your Apocalypse Away From Me

On the necessity of optimism and hope

Photo by Kind and Curious on Unsplash

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I realize I’m a confusing person. My politics can appear incoherent to many people and my tastes often baffle folks who know me.

I recently had a conversation with someone who couldn’t comprehend the fact that I don’t generally like to watch zombie movies. I, a horror fan who lives near Pittsburgh of all places (!) and I don’t enjoy zombie movies that much. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate them and have a basic knowledge of the genre and I think George Romero is an absolute genius (and universally beloved as a human being it seems).

And yet, I’m fairly chilly towards the subgenre.

Always Ask Why

I’ve tried to develop a habit in my life: always ask why. When I’m reading or watching something and come across a creative decision that puzzles me, I try not to immediately recoil into judgment. Instead, I try and ask “why is it this way rather than another?” It’s part of that whole spirit of Hospitality thing I get off on.

So why am I filled with ambivalence and even outright hesitation about zombie stories? Especially during a historical moment when seemingly everyone else LOVES them? The Last of Us is the most recent obsession that has enraptured the Vox and Daily Beast crowd, but The Walking Dead has been must watch TV for so many people for so many years as well. Clearly there is something in the ether or the zeitgeist that is drawing people to these kinds of stories. Why not me?

Religious Trauma? Sort Of, I Guess, Maybe

After some introspection, I think I’ve arrived at a reason that’s so compelling it feels mundane and obvious: I was raised in a quite fundamentalist evangelical tradition.

There are lots of people who have lots of bad feelings about having grown up in such a way. So many that entire discourse communities have sprung up around catchphrases like “religious trauma” and “exvangelical.” To be blunt, I think those terms are at times overused and have become too many people’s “entire personality,” but I’m not going to take that on here. The terms exist because the cultures of many of those religious groups were, in fact, very bad. Other people had much worse experiences than I did and I am not going to water down their struggles by claiming that I am living with religious trauma or that I suffered spiritual abuse or anything like that. The culture encouraged me to be afraid a lot, which took some getting over, but my experience doesn’t compare to that other people, who were legitimately traumatized.

Nonetheless, living in fear that the end of the world was around every corner does have a lingering effect on a boy.

And yes, the constant threat of Rapture and the Mark of the Beast and Antichrist put the end of the world in the very front of my mind for much of my life. When I think about attending church as a youngster, a series of images comes to mind, images that create a very real and dark world in my imagination:

It’s always night. I’m wide-eyed and pressed against my father in the pew. A middle-aged man is talking about current events and referring us to terrifying language about giant locusts and beheadings that are in Daniel and Revelation. These events are as real to the young me as anything else in my world because they are in the Bible, the divinely inspired word of God. The drive home is devastatingly quiet and my mind races. I imagine myself “left behind,” having missed the Rapture of the Church because I was, deep inside, a very sinful little boy. The parade of preachers I spent my life listening to made me sure of one thing: God’s patience had a limit, then all bets were off and he was looking for some serious divine justice to unleash on my little ass. And the nightly news was an ever-present reminder that the end, and my eternal annihilation was at hand.

Year after year I was promised this apocalypse and yet it never arrived. Eventually, with the help of my wife, several therapists, and a constant diet of horror films, I was able to overcome my fears enough to live a reasonably functional life in this world, such as it is.

I don’t think I need to connect too many dots for you. Growing up in that culture internalized in me a mindset that led to a depression and anxiety that often paralyzed me. When I wasn’t too afraid of engaging the world, I very often couldn’t see the point, since the future was to be canceled by the Second Coming anyway.

So yes, the zombie narrative has never been a favorite of mine. I realize that this is my loss; there are many great zombie films that have a lot of profound things to say about the world. But when I watch these films, I’m too reminded of the sadistic glee I saw in the fundamentalists who couldn’t wait for the world to end. Bring on the end was their obvious motto. Now I can only believe that deep down, they hated the world. They hated God’s creation and probably hated God. Their religion saw God as a catastrophic hammer to wield against their enemies. Somehow they missed the point that their enemies were who they should have been loving, not themselves.

The zombie narrative basks in the same kind of bleak revenge fantasy. And I simply get depressed thinking about the end of humanity. I am a humanist, after all.

The Fundamentalist Liberal Imagination

But here I want to step back and see the world as it actually is (as Matthew Arnold used to suggest we do).

Sure, I can see how The Walking Dead appealed to a particular kind of conservative American who saw the nation as going to liberal Hell. To that group there was an appeal in cutting the world down to the quick and letting the virtuous bootstrappers rebuild it like the virtuous, bootstrapping Founding Fathers.

But there is a dark appeal to the liberal in this kind of story as well. Since 2016, a justifiable anxiety about the direction of America has calcified into a blind acceptance that the end is nigh. Every news event is taken, without question, as the latest sign of a fascist apocalypse. The notion that the news media is a profit-driven enterprise that uses fear as a money engine is never allowed to temper these End Times fears. So there is some reason that The Last of Us has become The Walking Dead for liberals. The “believe me, it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better” crowd is inexorably drawn to these stories.

When I witness this liberal mindset about a future canceled by fascism, all I can see is a regurgitation of the fundamentalist paranoia of my youth. The italicized nightmare I presented above has its corollary for one who cares about liberal and progressive political causes. And this matters.

There was a lingering consequence of the bleak hopelessness and constant fixation on every possible fearsome outcome for every news event for my mental and emotional health back in my youth. One was a somewhat wasted youth. Debilitating anxiety can keep you from living a full, productive life that might be useful to other people.

The intense and unceasing vigilance of well-meaning liberals on the lookout for brain-devouring enemies around every corner most certainly has an impact on the well-being of its adherents today. My history with the fundamentalists taught me that a human psyche simply cannot maintain a certain level of vigilant intensity forever. Running an engine in the red will burn it out. The same goes for people. And right now is an undoubtedly worse time to be zealot. We are simply swimming in media that constantly shoves moral panics in our face. It’s impossible to know what to filter out and still be considered a caring, informed citizen in your social group.

Back then, in my life among the fundamentalists, there was of course intense social pressure to take zealotries of Chicken Little seriously. That same social pressure seems even more intense in apocalyptic liberals. “If you’re not freaking out or angry, you’re not paying attention etc…” But I want to argue here that this is simply not sustainable and it’s a bad tactic to employ for your given political ends.

The zombie story is one that, I suppose you might say, triggers me based on my religious history and current political commitments.

If I get any push back against the comparison I’m making here, I’m sure it will rest on some claim about the privilege I have in being able to protect myself from freaking out. And I honestly have no defense against that claim. It’s no doubt true and I have to own that and live with it. At some point, one must recognize one’s own lucky draw in life and do their best with it.

I will only say that, in this case, if I’m to be of any good whatsoever to literally anyone else, I have to look after my own mental health. I did not spend half a lifetime escaping the debilitating paranoia of one fundamentalist group to join the great cause of another, no matter how righteous it may be. Keep your apocalyptic fantasies away from me.

How To Tell a Good Zombie Story

All that said — and I fear I’ve alienated literally all my readers one way or another here — there is one zombie movie I actually like (and it’s a Romero!).

The author having an embarrassingly fun moment with actor Eugene Clark, Big Daddy from Land of the Dead.

Land of the Dead is normally dismissed by fans of the genre as a minor and disappointing work. It’s probably no surprise then that I actually like it. It has an extremely blunt political message about capitalism but that’s not really the appeal of it to me.

What it boils down to is that this film “re-humanizes” the zombie. Unlike the standard zombie film, the walkers are not simply a nightmarish remnant of what’s lost. While they are, of course, the reanimated dead bodies of a lost human society, they are also more than that. The movie’s plot depicts their organization into a new society, one with dignity and that deserves to exist in the ruined world.

A social media acquaintance, let’s just call him Burke, suggested to me that the zombie narrative could be seen embodying the fears of certain religious groups that the raised dead might include, as he puts it, “those people.” Land of the Dead definitely tackles this deconstruction of the genre by its re-humanization of the undead, to the horror and destruction of the wealthy elite who have re-constructed the landscape of Pittsburgh to keep the unwashed masses out of their post-apocalyptic Heaven.

My admiration for the movie rests on that simple fact. It’s an inverted zombie film, one that shows the final destruction of capitalism and the birth of a new civilization. In short, it’s not about the end; it’s about a beginning.

Call me a sucker, but I happen to like hope. I seek it in both my religious practice and in my politics.

On social media (and Substack Notes!!) I put out a call for things I should address in this piece. One helpful comment I got was to watch the Netflix series iZombie, which apparently revises the zombie in a similar way — a new kind of culture, striving to co-exist with old-fashioned, un-undead humans. I have not seen the show, but I like the concept.

I’d love to hear from people about this. Please never be afraid to let me know what you think. As always, I apologize in advance for all the wrong things I write.