Schrödinger’s Zombie & The Backstory of The Future

The zombie story is a casuistic narrative framework through which we run simulations of extreme situations in order to explore the possibilities of our own actions in scenarios we have yet to find ourselves in and either fear or, in some cases, secretly hope we will in the future. Relatedly, in the experiencing of this simulation — which I think of as a sort of vicarious projection of our fantasies of ourselves — we tend to use them as a way to bolster these personal fantasies regarding how skilled we are at self-preservation and/or success in general (we’d make better choices, we’d know not to trust someone, we’d be the ones to make it out alive, etc.). The shadow and the fear that always accompanies these simulations are more than just anxieties that we’d actually really suck at surviving in these situations, but the apprehension that we can barely feed and water ourselves without the vast productive and distributive networks of goods, services and infrastructure. And these actions that we imagine we would or wouldn’t be able to take are, crucially, both ethical and political. It is never a question of pure nihilistic or animalistic “survival.”

I used to think that the most interesting part of zombie stories was the mobility of the subject in our use of them as metaphors: are we the zombies or are we the survivors? While it feels obvious that the point is that we are always already ~potentially~ “both,” the implications of reading the story as an allegory from either the position of the zombie (‘consumer culture has really turned us into zombies, man’) or the survivor (‘what is ethically acceptable in a given material set of conditions?’) are very different. And I do think that the global coronavirus pandemic has definitely both changed the way we make and view these stories, but also the way we ‘read’ them, which is something I wrote about last December.

What I now think is interesting is the tropography of the zombie story, specifically the way in which it is actually a very limited, while at the same time extremely fertile, terrain.

What I mean to say is that

1. the basic premise of the narrative of every zombie story is overwhelmingly similar: stay alive, don’t turn into a zombie, survive, and that
2. the tropes — the recurring things that happen within the zombie story as a genre — are all either a pretty short list, or variations on a very, very short list.

In essence, the tropographical limit, or content question, boils down to: are they a) all going to die, or is b) one person going to live. More importantly, the formal question is how are they going to die? And the answer to — and our interest in — this question has as much to do with the creative ways we find to kill off characters, as it does with the ethical and strategic scenarios that form the context of their demise.

All this is to say that my partner and I ended up watching Zach Snyder’s Army of the Dead Friday night, and we really enjoyed it. Afterwards my partner, who is not as versed in zombie stories as I am, commented that there were tropes in there that she hadn’t really seen before. I was a little taken back because as tends to happen in certain generic fields, many tropes are explicit and explicitly set up to occur as both or either a “spin” on a classic, or simply an homage — the ~genre~ is in many ways and for many reasons blatantly recursive, or proudly ‘in-and-for-itself.’

The fascinating thing is that if you are not aware of the generic history of a trope, your ability to apprehend it as such — and therefore experience a whole section of the spectrum of its possible effects and affect on you — is precluded. This, of course, does not mean that the trope has no meaning or effect, and it also — crucially — doesn’t mean that you can’t, on some level (perhaps even without knowing it) apprehend both that the trope is self-referential OR approximate its *actual* meaning vis-a-vis that which it references.

I’m reminded here about the way my young children are able to levy a pretty sophisticated reading practice when faced with decoding a meme in which there are references with which they are not familiar: one is able to infer quite a bit from an assemblage of signifiers, especially if one is familiar with the tropography, which genre-enthusiasts, fandom… ites?, and meme connoisseurs all are whether they realize it or not. What my youngest, in particular, “gets” when she sees a meme that contains a reference she is not familiar with, is what it’s supposed to do. And that apprehension itself produces a strong effect, or affect: a similar kind of satisfaction as would occur if she were familiar with the reference. And I’d say perhaps that her satisfaction, the way she laughs at a meme, is even more robust in those instances where she doesn’t get a part of it, because she has performed a pretty sweet little hermeneutic methodology on the fly, and her ability to “interpret” that which she’s reading for enjoyment, provides a different sort of satisfaction that the sort of satisfaction provided had said meme referenced some fandom she knew a lot about. Not a better affect, but different, and perhaps more robust because of the formality of her critical reading.

Which is why my partner was right: there were some pretty sweet evolutions on a few tropes in Army of the Dead, one of which I want to consider here. I guess there is a bit of a spoiler alert: if you wanna avoid it, log off now (and thanks for reading this far!).

On one level, Snyder (or somebody) tricked us, or at least the folks who watched the trailer. The trailer strongly suggests that the plot is as follows: mercenaries are hired to steal a bunch of money from a vault deep beneath Vegas, when they return to the surface there has been a zombie apocalypse, and they must now fight their way out. Pretty simple, right? I don’t need or want much more from a zombie film, because as such the revelation of its plot is not really a spoiler. But that’s not what happens!

Well it is what happens, just not in that order, kind of. What happens is that the backstory becomes part of the story in a way that makes you realize (like, really feel) the “backstory” is always part of the story, but that the way that it’s told is super important because the backstory itself is important in a way that the way much contemporary backstorying does not achieve.

What happens “in the backstory” is this: a zombie escapes from the military, goes to Vegas and infects everyone. The main guy and some other folks have an adventure there just prior to the military sealing the whole thing off, and barely make it out. (The primary story (see: the main plot of the movie) is that they have to go back in to get a bunch of money out of a vault.) But that’s about as much as I can say about the backstory because it was shown to us as a sort of musical montage that smashed the form of the music video together with the form of the cinematic trailer. We don’t go through x amount of the film suspecting there is a backstory and then hearing about it ‘second-hand,’ or getting some sort of reveal imbedded into the drama of the primary story: we’re shown it in a way that is akin to someone holding the prequel comic up and flipping through it at a medium pace — not at all unlike my middle child explaining the plot of a comic book to me over facetime. And it takes some time and space in the film: once it was done I literally asked, outloud, “how he was going to tell the story” if he told it all in this weird opening montage. That was obviously before I realized that I’d just watched the backstory, which the trailer had low-key tricked me into thinking was the actual story. But it isn’t simply the form of the movie’s backystorying, it’s an element in that backstory’s own tropography — a sort of nested trope — that made both me and my partner say “DAMMNN.”

As we’ve seen, the whole premise of the zombie story are the questions who is going to die and how. One of the classic tropes at the moment of the how is the teasing back-and-forth of “oh no they’re gonna die- nope their safe- of fuck no wait- whew I thought they were gonna die- OH FUCK THEY’RE DEAD.” As you can imagine the skill required by the genre to continue developing this trope becomes increasingly more difficult to pull off as our historical relationship with said trope deepens. The show proper has a couple of those, but the most brutal (not explicit), and (therefore?) heart wrenching is actually shown in the aforementioned backstory montage.

In it, one of the characters in the main guy’s original group, shown in snippets bashing around an increasingly chaotic Vegas, is a woman who we are shown being separated, then searching for her daughter. The woman is a badass. We watch the team get whittled down in impossible situations and she’s just like Sarah Connering all over the place and guess what? She miraculously, against all odds, finds her daughter! As the backstory montage draws to a close: our team is scrambling to escape Vegas as the last of a massive shipping container wall is constructed around it (don’t worry I’ll spare the details) and we are presented with a stomach churning back and forth while the mother and daughter attempt to — and ultimately fail — to make it out alive or together. And we are watching this, and watching our main guy watching this, in horror, along with us. We see, in a sense, what he has seen: someone not only not make it, but almost make it, and this after working so hard to make it. Putting it this way the whole thing is cruel: the analogy to the real — our supposedly less fantastical — world, is strong.

I don’t know if I need to remind you: this whole thing only takes a couple minutes, while a song plays and we cut back and forth between a number of fantastic and absurd scenes as Vegas succumbs to apocalyptic horror. And yet the affective impact was, and is, impressive and lasting. In the film, the story proper, the woman and her child are never discussed; never named, and her story, outside of the montage, is never mentioned again.

The way a backstory is told is as much (if not moreso) about how we tell stories as it is what we tell stories about, giving us an inkling as to how how we tell stories forms our ability to apprehend what stories we feel we need to tell. And really much of this boils down to how the stories — and how living in a world that bears an active relationship to the way those stories are told — makes us feel. Because after that — “after” the “backstory” — we have to act, which is why how we feel is not only ethical, but political.

Zombie Vegas is the domain of genre — both specifically the zombie one, but also genre as a system of making domains into which we group literary things — and at the center of it there is a zombie king who is evolving and trying to make new evolved zombie babies. He stands, now and then, menacingly before the ruined three dimensional simulacrum of actual American symbols, trapped by the means of distribution which have been used to imprison him. Outside of this there is only a desert. In the sky a nuclear warhead careens downward, ready to turn it all to glass. We know the mother and her child did not make it out, but the question remains: did anyone — or anything — else? If they did, where are they going? Have they been bitten?