So, oil’s still washing up on the gulf, the economy’s in the doldrums, the honey bees are dying and my favorite baseball team, the Colorado Rockies, have lost nine of their last 11 games.
Naturally, my thoughts turn to zombies.
I’m only half kidding. Zombies are big in the entertainment biz these days, which pretty much forces me to pay attention to them. We’ve seen zombie movies (Zombieland), zombie video games (Singularity) and I even recently read a bit of zombie literature (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies). Now I understand that Brad Pitt has just signed to be the lead character—living, I presume—for World War Z, a movie based on a novel written by today’s modern-day zombie expert, Max Brooks (author of The Zombie Survival Guide, which recently sold its 1 millionth copy).
In an interview with Time magazine, Brooks says that all of our minds tend to turn to zombies in times of trouble. “We’re living in times where there are really big problems,” Brooks says. “We’ve got terrorism, economic problems, unpopular wars, social meltdowns. The last time we dealt with this stuff was in the ’70s, and that was the last time zombies were really popular.” He adds:
I think now, people need a sort of safe vessel for the end of the world. You can read The Zombie Survival Guide or watch Dawn of the Dead and then go to bed saying, "Oh, it's just zombies."
Try doing that with The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Nuclear war can really happen. I think zombies are safe. Zombies are manageable. You can't shoot the Gulf oil spill in the head. I think some of these problems are too big and too tough to understand. What does the global financial meltdown of 2008 mean? I can't explain it, and I sure know you can't shoot it in the head.
Now, zombies are an inherently problematic genre of entertainment for the thinking Christian. Beyond the obvious grisly content concerns (rarely will Plugged In laud a movie in which the undead are gorily dispatched with shotgun blasts), zombies stir a host of theological issues, too. If there’s nothing beyond the realm of God’s saving grace, should we Christians try to evangelize the shambling masses? If we meet a zombie, should we try to invite it to church or small group?
But all that aside, it makes me wonder: Are our societal concerns sometimes imperfectly mirrored in our entertainment, however flawed that entertainment might be? I go back to the 1950s, in the dawning of the atomic age, when movie theaters were filled with B-movie blobs and aliens and giant crayfish. Or the 1930s, in the heart of the Great Depression, when Dracula and Frankenstein were brought to the silver screen. It seems that Brooks may have a point. But then when I think about World War II—perhaps the greatest crisis of the last century—most of our films during that period were … well, not very horrific. What gives?
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