The Year's Work at the Zombie Research Center by Edward P. Comentale & Aaron Jaffe

Author:Edward P. Comentale & Aaron Jaffe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2014-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Conclusion: The Promise of Infection

On Saturday, May 26, 2012, Ronald Poppo, a homeless man in Miami, was brutally attacked when thirty-one-year-old Rudy Eugene approached him under the MacArthur Causeway and started to eat his face. Describing the event to the police later, Poppo said, “He attacked me. He just ripped me to ribbons. He chewed up my face. He plucked out my eyes. Basically, that’s all there is to say about it” (qtd. in Robles). A few days later, on Wednesday, May 30, Alexander Kinyua, a twenty-one-year-old student at Baltimore’s Morgan State University, was arrested for murdering his roommate and eating his heart and brains. These instances of violent cannibalism were immediately portrayed in the media as “zombie attacks,” creating such a frenzy that, as the Huffington Post reports, “‘zombie apocalypse’ [was] Google’s third most popular search term by Friday morning” (A. Campbell). And on the very same day, Friday, June 1, David Daigle, agency spokesman for the CDC, sent an email to the Huffington Post denying the arrival of the zombie apocalypse, perhaps regretting the hype created over its own zombie-preparedness stunt. The email stated, “CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms)” (qtd. in Campbell). The all-consuming, infectious zombie could not, scientifically speaking, exist.

These so-called “zombie” incidents, and others that followed,6 nonetheless brought attention to the ammunitions manufacturing company Hornady, which had launched a line of certified zombie ammunition in October 2011. Hornady’s Zombie Max bullets, devised to “make dead permanent” (“Z-Max”), gained considerable demand in early June after the attacks and quickly became the company’s “most successful products” (Huber).7 Hornady spokesman Everett Deger explained the logic behind this product to WWJ News Radio in Detroit as follows: “We decided just to have some fun with a marketing plan that would allow us to create some ammunition designed for that . . . fictional world” (qtd. in Huber). Yet success in selling Z-Max ammunition was possible only when the zombie figure transcended the “fictional world” for which its bullets were designed, violating its assigned cultural narratives.

The gruesome events of summer 2012, while far from an actual zombie apocalypse, illustrate the easy slippage from the cultural imaginary of flesh-consuming zombies to very real incidents of cannibalism. The attackers that we, as a society, identified as zombies, were not wearing any costumes, did not have on elaborate makeup, nor were they responding or acting within the context of a larger collective affectivity. They were hardly performing a revolution. Still we saw them as zombies, even as they were stripped of their social symbolism and, in some cases, their clothing, left with nothing but their appetite for living flesh. Divested of all other signification, the zombie remains marked by its metabolic drive for consumption. At the same time, however, the absence of a rationalizing and revolutionary cultural narrative renders the newsworthy cannibal zombie endlessly terrifying. So horrifying, in fact, that even the CDC felt compelled, as the authoritative voice on infectious disease, to disavow all possibility of a zombie apocalypse.

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