Combined and Uneven Apocalypse: Luciferian Marxism by Williams Evan Calder

Author:Williams, Evan Calder [Williams, Evan Calder]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846944680
Publisher: NBN_Mobi_Kindle
Published: 2011-04-16T00:00:00+00:00

Out of this unyielding “pain,” one has two choices, at least according to the film: suicide or mass participation in knowledge-sharing. (The other non-choice that we see pursued, with no great success, is to skulk around a cellar, biting into the brains of idiot punks who have little knowledge to share, or to wait around until your “turn” to make a bad joke and go for your girlfriend’s head.) The first choice we witness in a moment that genuinely shares pain beyond the film, to all who watch it, as Frank, now “technically not alive,” prays briefly, removes his wedding ring, and pushes himself into the blazing fires of the crematorium. Yet even this attempt to cut himself out of the cycle, to refuse to participate in the zombie holocaust, cannot succeed. It may remove his ongoing personal pain, but as we witness earlier, it is the fact of burning and the transmission of the buried message in the smoke, out into the night air, that allows for the mass dissemination of knowledge. In opting out of the cursed game, Frank becomes a martyr for a cause he died to avoid supporting.

If Frank’s death is the awful pathos of a broken man caught in a cycle of the inevitable, the other alternative is the joyous center of the film, its recurring cheers from the audience, and the “utopian” kernel of it all. It is collectivity formed out of what could be a crushing awareness, knowing that you are not even special in the ontological pain you feel, that you are just one of a growing horde of those powerless to change it, to die properly, to quit the pain. Yet against either the dysphoric retreat or the escape into the fantasy of the irrational - “I will act as irrational, bloody shambling horde-like, as the system that made us” - that linger at the edges of this first knowledge emerges a new rationality.

This is a crucial point, for much of the ideology of the zombie situation hinges on the assumption of their irrationality. Sure, maybe they once knew what they were doing, and now remember a shard of it. Or maybe, in the later iterations of the Romero cycle, particularly Land of the Dead (2005), they can move toward an incipient group knowledge, rudimentary use of tools and implements, basic swarm strategies, and so on. Return shows something different altogether: what if what this thing we assumed from the start to be, at least initially, mindless in its anger, illogical in its hunger, what if it has been rational all along? What if it not only can hurt, but comprehends this hurt? And what if it realizes that this pain is not individual but collective? What if the ways in which it aims to destroy the system - the system that wants to destroy it - are rational?

Return approaches, in the midst of its gags and “punk” soundtrack, these very serious questions, although incompletely. The closest it gets is to

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