Analysis: Take my zombies, please!

[nebroadwe]

The artistic problem with zombies, en masse, is the same one that characterizes War of the Worlds-style alien invasions, or migrations of killer bees, or eruptions of long-dormant volcanoes: they're best suited to thematic conflicts on a grand scale -- the limitations of the human intellect when confronted with the complexities of nature, or the assault on individuality by mass society, or the inevitability of death. There's no negotiating with such forces; all that remains is how society reacts under the wheels of the juggernaut. But it's a bit hard to personalize the confrontation between civilization and chaos, whether that chaos is represented as mindless entropy or active malice. One usually ends up following the hero(es) or point-of-view character(s) through a picaresque or a series of vignettes elucidating various facets of the collapse; said characters emerge as types rather than rounded individuals. Those claustrophobic moments of self-defense in the basement or the tunnel or the cave are about as close as such stories get to the personal; it's notable that moments of real intimacy are generally represented as perilous (or fatal) because they distract the individual from the group purpose or the mass threat. Me, I'll take Frankenstein or The Invisible Man over The War of the Worlds or even Invasion of the Body-Snatchers because I prefer the character work required by conflicts between the worse and better angels of human nature and because I find the poetics of despair philosophically distasteful. Hope never fails, even though human endeavor frequently does.