EDITORS DESK
It has taken Netflix’s latest K-drama sensation All of Us Are Dead a day since its release on Jan. 28 to make it to the number one spot of the world’s top 10 programs.
I would say it’s worth the 12 hours it takes to finish all 12 episodes of the first season. Full disclosure: I’m a zombie fan, but I’m no expert. I just can’t get enough of these reanimated corpses I must have seen it all, from George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead to Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead and Max Brooks’ World War Z. In the ‘70s, there was a Filipino film called Supergirl starring the forgotten Pinky Montilla and then superstar Walter Navarro as a dead man walking.
I’m not alone. More than a cult, these flesh-eating creatures, otherwise called the undead or the living dead, are a pop culture phenomenon. American author Zora Neale Hurston defined them in an interview with Paris Review in 1943 as “people who died and are then resurrected without their minds...and without their souls,” her definition based on “too many cases of proven zombies.” There have been credible reports published in reputable medical journals of people rising from the dead, as there are passages in the bible that might have provided the basis, such as in the book of Ezekiel, where Ezekiel, finding himself in a boneyard, observed the bones shaking to regenerate flesh and retake their human form, yet “there was no breath in them.” Zombies, no matter how defiant of natural laws, are so believable that even the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a zombie pandemic preparedness kit published in its public health blog, a tongue-in-cheek campaign that has many practical tips we can apply in the face of any disaster.
Whether or not it has any basis in fact, the lure of the zombie, which dates back centuries, as far back as the 17th century when West African slaves were brought to the sugar plantations of Haiti, is undeniable. No wonder what Netflix, through which All of Us Are Dead is currently spreading as fast and as far as the coronavirus around the world, chose a zombie film, Kingdom, for its first original Korean drama series in 2019.
When the going gets tough, go get yourself a zombie fix. Immersed in a world of the living dead, we feel more alive and whatever it is we confront in real life pales in comparison with the challenges of dodging a herd of ravenous mouths. In a way, zombies are a stress reliever, a brief escape from our mundane struggles.
Besides, do you know that a study has found that the human brain processes violence as it does rewards like sex or food? Zombies do satisfy that craving while keeping us from doing any harm in real life.
On a more positive note, there’s much to gain from the zombie apocalypse, such as moral altruisms. In this worst case scenario, we are compelled to imagine how far we are willing to go in order to survive. There are practical tips too on survival.
Personally, I like to think of zombies as a metaphor for human greed, our tendency to devour everything in our path because we can’t help wanting more, more, more, regardless of the consequences. Every zombie is a cautionary tale, a reminder that in the war of man against man, no one wins, everybody loses.
Human greed is the zombie that eats us up body and soul.
It’s the zombie that’s put our planet in peril, on which the trees, the animals, the clean air, the water, the food were once designed to be enough for us all are now reserved only for a few.
It’s the zombie that we are, no longer moved by death and destruction while, driven only by our insatiable appetites, we find ourselves mindlessly eating, consuming, ingurgitating everything until—as the zombie series of the day has so bluntly put it — All of Us Are Dead.
(AA Patawaran is the Lifestyle Editor of Manila Bulletin.)