Life and love in Zombieland

I can't help but archive this story: I am a Zombie in Love. I feel like the story is complex at many levels.

I see it implying the following: we are all zombies under capitalism.

The narrator's voice, deadpan, reminds me of the narrator (role played by Edward Norton) of David Fincher's The Fight Club (based on Chuck Palanhuik's novel of the same name): The man is an insomniac cog in the machinery of capitalism; he looks like he is sleep-walking through life, emasculated, not in control of what he is eating or accumulating. He was a zombie till the time, the arrival of his brute alter ego, Tyler Durden, makes him fall into "life". 

The zombie-narrator of I am is more living than the living of our times are. His observations are taut with irony, a sign that he isn't a stereotypical zombie. The story disabuses us of the immaculate misconceptions of the un-dead and the living that we have. 

Issac Marion, the writer, went on to expand the story into a novel. The film Warm Bodies is based on the novel.

Upon reading this story I have a provisional judgment: the real Zombieland isn't all that bad of a country to live in.

Halloween undone

I just came upon a refreshing refresher on the (historical) origins of the "Zombie."

In an antidote to the spectacularization of the Zombie by Hollywood, Amy Wilentz says that the Zombie was born in the midst of slavery, especially as a response to the excruciating cruelty inflicted by the French in the slave plantations of Haiti.

There is a compelling reason why American parents should prevent their kids from donning "fun" Zombie costumes:

There are many reasons the zombie, sprung from the colonial slave economy, is returning now to haunt us. Of course, the zombie is scary in a primordial way, but in a modern way, too. He’s the living dead, but he’s also the inanimate animated, the robot of industrial dystopias. He’s great for fascism: one recent zombie movie (and there have been many) was called “The Fourth Reich.” The zombie is devoid of consciousness and therefore unable to critique the system that has entrapped him. He’s labor without grievance. He works free and never goes on strike. You don’t have to feed him much. He’s a Foxconn worker in China; a maquiladora seamstress in Guatemala; a citizen of North Korea; he’s the man, surely in the throes of psychosis and under the thrall of extreme poverty, who, years ago, during an interview, told me he believed he had once been a zombie himself.