{"id":134,"date":"2010-07-24T11:45:02","date_gmt":"2010-07-24T16:45:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/people.williams.edu\/cthorne\/?p=134"},"modified":"2025-09-19T14:34:54","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T19:34:54","slug":"the-running-of-the-dead-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/articles\/the-running-of-the-dead-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"The Running of the Dead, Part 1"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Zombies<\/a><\/p>\n

\u2022360 Years Later<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first thing a person is going to need to know about Danny Boyle\u2019s 28 Days Later<\/em>, from 2002, is that it\u2019s one big trick. That\u2019s one good reason to like the movie, in fact\u2014that it is punking you. I don\u2019t think I can explain the movie\u2019s trick right away; we need to do the groundwork first, but it is the point to keep in mind: 28 Days Later <\/em>is a bit of the thimblerig. Don\u2019t let your eye off the ball.<\/p>\n

The second thing to know is that of all the zombie movies, 28 Days Later <\/em>is the one most steeped in political philosophy. One way to come at this is to call to mind something that George Bush said in 2006. A reporter at a White House press conference was second-guessing him on some issue\u2014it hardly matters what\u2014and Bush responded like this:<\/p>\n

I listen to all voices, but mine\u2019s the final decision. \u2026 I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation, but I\u2019m the decider, and I decide what\u2019s best.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A lot of people made fun of those sentences. I definitely <\/em>made fun of those sentences. The word \u201cdecider\u201d is maladapted, obviously, and it\u2019s the bit that most of us kept quoting, but the idea that Bush was hearing voices is also pretty funny. The thing is, though: \u201cI\u2019m the decider\u201d might sound inane, but it isn\u2019t just another Bush malaprop. \u201cI\u2019m the decider\u201d is not \u201cmisunderestimate\u201d or \u201cputting food on your family,\u201d because unlike these others it has a clear sense to it, one that we should <\/em>bother trying to understand. More: It turns out that this sentence, dopey as it is, has a long philosophical history behind it. I absolutely guarantee it: People with PhDs in political theory were whispering in Bush\u2019s ear. They fed him that line. \u201cThe human being and fish can coexist\u201d was his alone.<\/p>\n

My suggestion, then, is that if we understand the political philosophy behind that sentence, we will understand 28 Days Later<\/em>, too;\u00a0that what is at stake in this movie, as one of the important documents of the early transatlantic-Bush era, is what it means to have (or not to have) A DECIDER. And if we\u2019re going to understand that philosophy, we\u2019re going to need a refresher course on Thomas Hobbes, who is the single most important philosopher in the history of the political Right, or at least of one of its strands: not the free-market Right, and not the Christian Right, but the authoritarian Right, the party of SWAT-teams and strong leadership.<\/p>\n

The basic facts on Hobbes are that he was writing in the 1640s, 1650s, 1660s, and that he was a royalist: He thought that all societies needed strong central authorities and that no-one had the right to question the state, let alone oppose it. More properly: He thought that governments should establish the parameters of official belief and that anyone dissenting from the state religion or state science, even a kind of state metaphysics, should be silenced.<\/p>\n

In and of itself, this position didn\u2019t make Hobbes unusual, since there were lots of royalists in the seventeenth century. What made Hobbes unusual, rather, is how he got to his royalism, the arguments he used to defend kingship. Run-of-the-mill royalists generally argued that ordinary people should accept kingly rule because it was God\u2019s will: God likes kings; God is himself a kind of king; kings are therefore his representatives here on earth. Or they argued that kings were natural: that human groups always coalesce around strong men; that the first human groups were families, and then, when larger groups\u2014like clans or tribes\u2014began accreting, one figure began acting as father to them, and so on, until we reach the condition of modern states, where the king functions as father-to-the-nation.<\/p>\n

Now consider the opposite position: There were, in fact, people in the seventeenth century who didn\u2019t like kings; they took an axe to at least one of them. But even those people didn\u2019t have any democratic theory on tap to explain why kings were a bad idea. So the anti-royalists generally looked around history for counter-examples to monarchy, for examples, that is, of human groups that didn\u2019t form around strong men. And they found lots of examples: they found tribes, both in the Americas and in early European history; and they began lifting out of that history the times and places when ordinary people had assembled, deliberated, passed the conch. The anti-royalists granted that lots of tribes had had leaders, but thought they could show that these leaders had themselves been chosen, which meant that power had to be conferred on them by their followers, which meant that the followers were the original power-holders and so not finally or fully followers at all.<\/p>\n

Those were the ideas that counted as radical in the seventeenth century. Hobbes\u2019s feat, in this light\u2014and if you pause here, you might see how nifty this is\u2014was that he worked out a way of starting with Position #2 and getting back to Position #1. He thought, in other words, that he could grant the radicals their main point and still make you see that monarchy was the only one way to go. Yes, all power was originally with the people, but even if you are convinced of that idea, you should still sign on to something rather like dictatorship<\/em>.<\/p>\n

If you want to see how he pulls this off, there are two specific argumentative sequences you\u2019ll need to understand. The first goes back to two simple observations.<\/p>\n

\u20221A. Everything wants to live<\/em>. Or, if you put in this in terms of political theory, every person has a right to defend him- or herself against attack. One of the few observations we can make about the world that seems all-but universally true\u2014true everywhere at every time\u2014is that people (and animals and even plants) will do what they need to do to stay alive.<\/p>\n

\u20221B. Being an early human must have sucked. <\/em>This is actually the heart of Hobbes’s argument: If you reflect on the earliest stages of human history, you’ll see that it must have been hard to stay alive. Anybody could have done to you anything they wanted. The only thing standing between you and every passing rapist was your own fist.<\/p>\n

But, Hobbes says, people aren\u2019t stupid, and they want to stay alive. So what must have happened is that they all got together and agreed, in a kind of contract, to appoint one person who would settle all disagreements and resolve all conflicts. That would be the king. And here\u2019s the sick genius of his argument: The contract is a one-time deal; it can never be renegotiated; because once you have agreed to give all power to the king, just to be sure that your next-door neighbor doesn\u2019t tear your throat out, you can\u2019t afford to disagree with the king any longer. In fact, it becomes nonsensical to talk about disagreeing with the king, because the king is the one who settles disagreements. It is part of the original contract that the king is always right.<\/p>\n

One other point to drive home: Hobbes was a kind of peacenik. We usually think of the peace movement as belonging on the Left, but Hobbes loved peace; peace was the whole idea; he was a right-wing pacifist, and in a sense, there have always been lots of these, though “pacifist” is not usually what we call them. We call them \u201claw-and-order types,\u201d and their politics goes back to the Hobbsean idea that nothing\u2014absolutely nothing\u2014is more important than suppressing the possibility that war might break out from within the tissue of society.<\/p>\n

So that brings us to Hobbes\u2019s second argumentative sequence, which was that\u2026<\/p>\n

2. War is always looming<\/em>, always threatening to break out from within the tissue of society. Primal conflict is always lurking in society\u2019s cracks. This isn\u2019t just paranoia on his part. Hobbes agrees with modern liberals on one easy point, which is that life is full of disagreements, and that these disagreements can\u2019t help but seep into our social and political institutions. Another way to put this would be to say that our institutions are shot through with gaps\u2014holes of uncertainty. All institutions involve ideas, propositions or arguments: \u201cPeople have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness\u201d or \u201cThere is no God but God.\u201d And these institutional ideas will always lead to an entire series of problems or puzzles, mostly because such propositions can never be self-interpreting, which means that any institution will tend to generate competing schools or factions or parties, as people inevitably and in good faith begin to disagree about what the body’s guiding propositions mean. Worse: Most institutions are involved to some degree in fact-gathering. Police departments, scientific agencies, central banks\u2014they all collect information about the world, and that information is also <\/em>going to need interpreting. None of it is going to have plain meanings. And here, too, there are inevitably going to be disagreements\u2014disagreements that on a philosophical level will be interminable. You cannot show beyond a shadow of a doubt that \u201call men are created equal\u201d or that “global warming is real.\u201d You just can\u2019t. Doubt is always possible<\/em>.<\/p>\n

So this is where the king comes in: The king is there to decide. This is one of the classic theories of the king (or the sovereign or the executive). And you have to keep in mind: This theory has absolutely nothing to say about what<\/em> the king should decide. It has absolutely no recommendations to make about which interpretation the king should choose. The whole point of theory, in fact, is that the decision is arbitrary. That has to be true by definition, if you think about it, since if it weren\u2019t arbitrary, it wouldn\u2019t be a decision. It would be a conclusion. There are all these void spaces in the political system where doubt and uncertainty fester; and a leader simply has to come in and plug that vacuum. The government, in other words, has to set the terms for religion\u2014or people are going to war over religion; it has to set the terms for law\u2014or people are going to war over law; it has to set the terms for science\u2014or people are going to war over science.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what Bush meant. Someone<\/em> has to decide, and the decision will always be arbitrary. “The decision,” it’s true, isn’t Hobbes’s word for this position. The cat who reformulated Hobbes’s argument around the concept of “the decision” was Carl Schmitt, who was the most important political theorist among the German fascists. “I’m the decider” is the best evidence we have that someone was really and truly — dead literally — feeding George Bush Nazi political thought. But let’s not get hung up on the Nazi business. The interesting philosophical point is that Bush wasn\u2019t claiming to be right. He was saying: I don\u2019t have<\/em> to be right. In fact, right-and-wrong is the wrong way to think about it. The king\u2019s decision\u2014or the president\u2019s decision\u2014can\u2019t be right or wrong, because no-one can tell for sure. Someone just has to decide, period. Political beings never choose between right and wrong. They choose between respecting the decision and \u2026 well, something else. Civil war. Chaos. Zombies.<\/p>\n

\u2022Of Zombies Fast and Slow<\/strong><\/p>\n

A different movie now, and a confession: I\u2019ve never felt so puzzled by a movie as I was the first time I saw Zack Snyder\u2019s Dawn of the Dead <\/em>remake, from 2004. I walked away from that movie not understanding anything. It was my own personal Mulholland Drive<\/em>. I had liked it well enough, but just couldn\u2019t get it to add up. The problem was I went in cocky. I figured: This is, in its bones, a Romero movie\u2014Romero\u2019s Dawn<\/em>, the second of the Dead movies, came out in 1978\u2014and I know how such movies work; I\u2019m on my home turf. And then the confusion snuck up on me. I got all the way through that first screening convinced that the new Dawn<\/em> was staying, by remake standards, pretty faithful to the original. It had the mall; it had black actors in central roles; it had strife among the survivors. Three of the actors from the original showed up in cameos, and once I\u2019d spotted them<\/em>, I was pretty sure I was watching an homage. I was in the mood <\/em>to watch an homage.<\/p>\n

But then I walked away from the movie, trying to get it straight in my head, and I couldn\u2019t make it tally; I couldn\u2019t figure out what the movie was doing. I went in with expectations derived from, yes, a certain reverence for Romero, and by those standards everything seemed wrong\u2014or off\u2014and I couldn\u2019t figure out what had changed.<\/p>\n

Or rather one thing had changed: The zombies were fast. But then I knew this going into the theater, because the press had made a big deal about it. It was the Big Innovation. 28 Days Later <\/em>had introduced the novelty. The Dawn <\/em>remake made it seem like a trend: the living dead, lickety-split. Three quick thoughts about this:<\/p>\n

\u2022Fast zombies are not, in fact, an innovation; I mean, even in \u201902 or \u201804,\u00a0they weren\u2019t an innovation. The press was just wrong on that count. Breakneck zombies had been introduced years earlier, in Return of the Living Dead<\/em>, from 1985, which is also the movie that gave us the chiming, Karloffian B\u2019raaaaains<\/em>, spoken like breath across a beer bottle.<\/p>\n

\u2022 That said, the underlying convention had remained more or less intact. The late \u201880s and \u201890s were a fallow period for zombie movies, so the few fleet corpses of the Reagan era hadn\u2019t really led anywhere, and this allowed the press to feel, when 28 Days Later <\/em>was released, that its creatures were next-generation zombies. We remembered zombies as slow, and these weren\u2019t. But then does that change really make a difference? I mean in some sense, it\u2019s obviously an improvement<\/em>. Boyle and Snyder ditched that staggering, shambolic gait, which was always the easiest thing to parody about zombies. The new zombies were limber and belligerent, and to that extent just scarier. To get caught by a Romero-style zombie always required a signal lapse of attention. One could reasonably conclude, then, that fast zombies were an improvement in horror-movie technique<\/em>, a kind of engineering advance. But other than that, I mostly walked away from Dawn of the Dead <\/em>thinking that the change from slow to fast was neutral, that it didn\u2019t actually change any of the meanings that a zombie could carry. It\u2019s was like putting a new engine in a chassis you really like: Romero with more oomph, Romero all souped up. And the Dead shall book<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u2022I was completely wrong. It turns out that up-shifting the zombies from slow to fast changes everything<\/em>; it entirely re-frames the zombie movie as a genre. I find this utterly fascinating. It seems like a small change, little more than a tweak, like defragmenting your hard drive. And it leaves nothing untouched.<\/p>\n

PART TWO IS HERE.<\/a><\/p>\n

PART THREE IS HERE.<\/a><\/p>\n

PART FOUR IS HERE.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2022360 Years Later The first thing a person is going to need to know about Danny Boyle\u2019s 28 Days Later, from 2002, is that it\u2019s one big trick. That\u2019s one good reason to like the movie, in fact\u2014that it is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,73],"tags":[81,89,85,78,4024,84,79],"class_list":["post-134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-movies","tag-28-days-later","tag-danny-boyle","tag-dawn-of-the-dead","tag-hobbes","tag-horror","tag-zack-snyder","tag-zombies"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/115"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134"}],"version-history":[{"count":34,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1785,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134\/revisions\/1785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}