Farewell, Zombie Apocalypse?

It seems to me that in twenty-first century popular culture certain themes have been remarkable for their staying power. Novels featuring Dan Brownish religious-historical mysteries and the adventures of youths rebelling against the rulers of dystopian future societies, forensics-themed police procedurals in network prime time, Jason Bourne-ish spy thrillers and Bucket Brigade/Frat Pack comedies at the movies--these burned very brightly indeed for a time, and then flamed out, not leaving all that much of a legacy.

Others have proven much more enduring, some in just one medium (as with reality TV, regrettably), and others across the media spectrum--with, of the latter, the outstanding examples superheroes and zombies, the latter often bound up with a broader societal collapse scenario.

Recently I have found myself writing about that popularity--and particularly attentive to the way in which references to zombies have become standard in economic commentary, with leftist writers remarking a "zombie capitalism" or "zombie culture" in the neoliberal age, while Establishment analysts have increasingly come to use the term "zombie firm" (you can actually find the term used right here on the web site of the Federal Reserve itself!) in regard to businesses that, because they can much more easily do so in this age of ultra-loose monetary policy and ever-more hyperabundant credit (and the old adage that if you owe the bank a million dollars it's the bank's problem) have a Blanche Dubois-like dependence on the kindness of creditors.

Considering the events of the twenty-first century--and how science fiction has responded to them--I find myself thinking of a factor that would seem to merit attention, namely the way in which a "zombie apocalypse" so easily gave audiences a post-apocalyptic scenario without referencing the real-world problems threatening civilization. Rather than having to bring, for example, nuclear war (which never went away, though people seemed to forget about it until recently), or climate change, into the matter, they had this other basis for imagining a survivalist scenario in which they got to slaughter lots and lots and lots of dehumanized Others. Not everyone played things that way, of course. (The Night of the Living Dead films, at least, started off with a left-leaning politics, and I think one can say that of the Resident Evil movies, too. Certainly Max Brooks had something to say about the actual world in World War Z, while he opted not for a tale of survivalism but of "Greatest Generation"-type collective effort.) But it certainly seems to me that this was part of the appeal--a purer "post-apocalyptic porn" as Birdman famously put it, unmarred by any sort of social content, for which there seemed more room in an age in which so many brushed off big dangers like war and ecological crisis.

But that may not be so easy in the coming years. With, as Michael Mann observed, climate denial selling so much less well that the "anti-climate" crowd is changing tactics (emphasizing dealing with climate change as an individual issue rather than a systemic one, and indeed encouraging a defeatist attitude); while in the wake of the conflict in Eastern Europe even the stupidest observer of the international scene finds it much harder to pretend that the danger of nuclear war is not a serious threat to humanity; and also that COVID-19 thing that somehow just keeps going and going and going; I see no reason to expect us to become less cognizant of those things--let alone find good reason to be less concerned about them--but quite the contrary. And amid all that I suspect zombie apocalypses will lose some of their appeal to audiences.

By contrast superheroes will probably keep on selling tickets at the box office through it all . . . or if they don't, not on account of those same factors.