(Andrew Calcutt is away in the sun this week - this is a guest post by Mark Beachill)
“Quick, on Radio 4. The news said there was a zombie apocalypse.”
My girlfriend has a fascination with all things zombie. Myself I'm
too squeamish to watch The Walking Dead with her. Had she misheard,
imagined?
A quick search on Google News led me to the story of a traffic
accident in the USA brought on when a parade(?) of people in zombie costumes
mobbed a car and the driver, panicked, knocked over a passer-by.
"No! It was in the UK and it said zombie apocalypse."
Back to Google News. It turned out the railway station announcer
in Brighton had bizarrely declared a zombie apocalypse over the tannoy. This
was his description of the torrential downpour after several months’ rain fell
in the space of an hour or so, flooding the station. Even more bizarrely BBC
Radio 4 picked it up for their hourly national news bulletin.
When we get freakish weather nowadays it is not usually zombies
that are invoked. More commonly the living are said to be out of control: reckless
consumption brings energy use that warms the globe and increases the likelihood of “extreme
weather events”.
The threat of ecological and meteorological catastrophe means consumption
must be reined in, goes the argument. In less secular times the Biblical flood
that put Noah on his ark – with God’s plan to cleanse past sins and start again
– might have been invoked. Today it is through is our sins against Gaia through
over-consumption that are said bring warning storms. So sure are the BBC, for example,
that they now limit air-time for any with an alternative view or even an alternative solution.
But, weirdly enough, perhaps the zombie metaphor is not all too
distant from the orthodox explanation. Contemporary zombies are a child of the
1970s, their endless hunger a metaphor for our endless consumption prompted by
critiques of mindless consumerism that first emerged in the seventies. It was
no coincidence that George Romero’s 1978 Dawn
of the Dead, the film that re-launched the zombie, had most of its action set
in a shopping mall.
The witty announcer reached for the wrong end of the world
scenario and so made us laugh resonating way beyond drenched travellers. And
perhaps humour is at least part of what we need to negotiate the many
millenarian settings that seem to crowd the imagination today and still carry
on – in our “mindless” pursuit of a better life.