MOTHER NATURE IS A SERIAL KILLER: World War Z and Population Reduction

by Christopher Barr

“I took the victims, over the trench I cut their throats and the dark blood flowed in, and up out of Erebus they came, brides and unwed youths and old men who had suffered much and girls with their tender hearts freshly scarred by sorrow and great armies of battle dead, stabbed by bronze spears, men of war still wrapped in bloody armor, thousands swarming around the trench from every side-unearthly cries, blanching terror gripped me!”   - Homer, The Odyssey

Zombies rise from the dead to chase down and eat the brains and flesh of the living.  Relentless in their unguided quest for flesh, like Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, there is no reasoning with this form of hunter.  It just keeps coming, in some cases, swarming packs in the thousands as depicted in the 2013, Brad Pitt movie, World War Z, based on the 2006 Max Brooks novel of the same name.  

SPOILER ALERT – INFECTED AREA

  

In World War Z, the world falls victim (or did we have it coming?) to an unknown virus that kills, then reanimates the millions of people unfortunately infected.  The remaining population run for the proverbial hills or the fortunate on aircraft carriers, in order to evade this unknown fast spreading virus of Zombie killers.  Brad Pitt’s character worked for the United Nations but is forced back out of retirement to save his family, and is tasked to solve this global pandemic and save humanity.  By the end of World War Z, despite the horror and massive loss of life, the environmental future of this planet scored a big win as well as the remaining survivors, just not in a way people would have hoped for.  Ironically, it took death to defeat death.  Mother Nature cleansing herself for renewal and self-preservation, because if we aren’t going to do it, maybe she will with hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis or in this fictional case, running, screaming reanimated corpses.

SPOILER ALERT – INOCULATED, VACCINE SUCCESSFUL, PLOT DETAIL FREE ZONE

This movie found a very interesting way to present its concern about over-population.  Its fictional narrative details a very serious, very real problem.  What are we going to do about the fast spreading population of people on this planet?  We have exceeded our carrying capacity as seen in our many environmental problems, rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, global warming and industrialized pollution along with the increasing demand for fresh water in the first world, the second world and most defiantly the third world.   The fight for food in many countries around the world is resulting in malnutrition and starvation.  Many of the World’s natural resources are being consumed faster than the rate of regeneration.  This may have more to do with wealthy nations squandering and wasting away a lot of the planets resources but over-population is never the less a very serious global problem. 

In Dante’s Inferno, Dante looked at the dead, on one of the levels of his journey with the poet Virgil, as the externalization of their inner lives.  People of his native Florence, in all their horrible self-imposed suffering, all their bottled up guilt and frustrations, these were the everyday people we see today on our streets only now with iPods, cell phones and apathy as their guardians, a place where our concerns for self-discovery, collective understanding and environmental issues are waylaid for our increasing obsession with self-gratification via consumer culture.  With our emphasis in modern society is placed heavily on maintaining our youth, there is little done to prepare us for aging and ultimately death.  

Philosopher Slavoj Žižek says it’s the ‘fundamental fantasy of mass culture, a fantasy of the return of the living dead’ because of some ‘unpaid symbolic debt’.  By avoiding the reality of death, one robs themselves the required time it takes to reflect upon it and move toward a form of understanding.  Self-discovery and self-awareness, as in the case of Dante, requires one to face reality in all its rawness in order for one to live a fulfilling life.  An internal quest not easily achieved but necessary to pursue.  The point I think Žižek is making, is the dead will leave us alone when we begin to adequately start paying attention to it. 

Zombie movies are likely more pervasive in our society because of our obsession with youth and our denial of death,  What’s interesting and telling about zombies is, when we are not running for our lives from them, they bring us together as people, people that want to live.  Albeit, very terrified people, but people who are forced to evaluate their existence and what it means to be alive, asking themselves the Albert Camus existential question, ‘Must life have meaning to be lived?’  Giving into it is certainly an option as well.  Why live with the struggle of constantly out running these things?  

Communitarianism in these movies are what works best, people working together to solve a problem.  We must ‘practice for death and dying’ says Plato, in order to live without the fear of death, understanding that ’it’ is coming one day but not today.  Sigmund Freud says, ”If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exceptions that everything living dies for internal reasons –becomes inorganic again- then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and,  looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones’.”

These movies, present themselves as horrifyingly grotesque but in some small way are teaching us, as a society, like during the Civil Rights movement, we must work with a common interest to survive, defend our right to live freely - as much as civilization can permit - and safety from all threats that oppose this desire for prosperity.  This is the goal in World War Z, just as it is in AMC’s TV show, The Walking Dead; survivors uniting and sorting out their differences for the greater good and the preservation of the species.