And Say the Zombie Responded?
25
*Dawn o f the Dead (George A. Romero, dir., 1978).
9The point is made in a much more subtle and successful way by The Walking Dead. In
the second episode o f the television series, “Guts,” Glen and Rick decide to attempt to
walk to freedom through the zombie hoard by becoming one o f them. To accomplish this,
they systematically take apart a zombie they have killed and begin using its body. They
smear the entrails on their own clothes. They chop pieces o f the zombie’s flesh and attach
those pieces to their own bodies. Covered in the smell o f rotting zombie bodies, they thus
hope to pass as zombies (a plan that works well until it begins to rain and the blood and
gore are washed away). Before they chop up the zombie, they hesitate, unsure as to
whether or not it is ethical. Rick takes out the zombie’s wallet to announce the name o f
the man he used to be and pay him respect. Glen, looking at the wallet, announces: “He
was an organ donor.” {The Walking Dead , Ep. 2 “Guts,” written by Frank Darabon;
directed by M ichelle MacLaren; Original Airdate: 7 November 2010).
10“They are us. They are the extension o f us. They are the same animal, simply
functioning less perfectly.” Day o f the Dead (George A. Romero, dir., 1985).
11Resident Evil: Afterlife (Paul W. S. Anderson, dir., 2010).
n The Horde (Yannick Dahan and Benjamin Rocher, dir., 2010).
13Dr. Logan, Day o f the Dead (George A. Romero, dir., 1985).
14“Hollywood A.D.,” The X-Files, Original Airdate: 4-30-2000, Written and Directed by
David Duchovny.
15Dr. Millard Rausch, Dawn o f the Dead (George A. Romero, dir., 1978).
16Rick Grimes, in regards to the racial strife between Dixon and T-Dog; “Guts,” The
Walking Dead (Michelle MacLaren, dir., 7 November 2010).
17Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method, tran. John Veitch (NY: Cosimo Classics,
2008/1637): 117.
18Cf. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology o f Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (New
York: Humanities Press, 1962).
19Cf., e.g., my “Ichabodies, or The Tail o f the Headless Clones,” Conscious Choice (v.
13, n. 10) October 2000: 32.
20This is a point to which science is slowly drawing us as well. As Dick Teresi reports in
“The Evolution o f Death,” (Salon.com, March 18, 2012): Candace Pert, the discoverer o f
the opiate receptor in the brain, says that there has been a new paradigm in neuroscience
since about 1995. More than three hundred common molecules, chemicals, are found in
the brain, the immune system, and bone marrow. In other words, brain chemicals partly
responsible for consciousness are being found all over the body. When Pert says, “The
body-mind is one,” she’s speaking not as a Buddhist but as a biochemist, though
Buddhism, she says, may have anticipated this discovery. “Consciousness,” she adds, “is
a property o f the entire body.”
2lThis is something that Pinocchio (Norman Ferguson et al. dir., 1940) and the mummy
films starring Brendan Frasier {The Mummy [Stephen Sommers, dir., 1999], The Mummy
Returns [Stephen Sommers, dir. 2001], The Mummy: Tomb o f the Dragon Emperor [Rob
Cohen, dir., 2008]) do not understand. The protagonists seek flesh, they desire the body,
but they are already conscious. There is a Cartesian dualism at work that simply is
untenable.
NOTE: I am grateful to Felicia Campbell who invited me to give this paper in a slightly
different version as the keynote speech at the 23rd annual meeting o f the Far West
Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association in March 2011. To Felicia,