By Thomas Fleming
PUBLISHED: 10:22 EST, 4 June 2012 | UPDATED: 10:22 EST, 4 June 2012
Rudy Eugene, 31, pictured in an old police mugshot, was shot dead by police in Miami after attacking a man and eating chunks of his face
In 'Eating People is Wrong,' Malcolm Bradbury's genial satire on 1950's leftism, it was still possible to take certain European prejudices for granted. Eating our fellows, as one non-European character in the novel learned, was wrong. Even today most of us probably regard it as not very nice. Nonetheless, the media in every form are ablaze with true stories of cannibalism.
A Haitian-American in Miami attacked a homeless man and ate three fourths of his face, a white mother in Texas drowned her baby and ate bits of it, and the son of a Kenyan college professor in Maryland killed and consumed parts of a 37-year-old Ghanaian boarding in his parents' house. In New Jersey, a man stabbed himself 50 times and pelted the police with some of his intestines. Most bizarre of all, perhaps, is the unconfirmed story of a Canadian homosexual porn actor on the lam for allegedly eating his Chinese boyfriend.
The internet - an electronic petri dish created to culture conspiracy theories - offers the usual zany ideas. It's all voodoo or environmental pollution, and we are on the verge of a zombie apocalypse. It is the tweet twittered round the world.
Amateur philosophers and pop culture critics are in a rush to ascend their cracker barrels and deliver their explanations for the hysteria. People are worried about the economy, see, and project their own fears onto the cannibals. Zombies, so they argue, are our worst nightmare because they have no redeeming virtues. Vampires are romantic - or have been made to seem so in cheap fiction - and even werewolves are tragic figures. But flesh-eating zombies? Why now?
Bogeymen and mythical demons are, as a sociologist would say, "socially constructed" by the stories we are told, the films we see, the religious traditions we accept. As we go mad, we are inclined to pattern our obsessions and delusions according to the myths that dominate our culture. A schizophrenic Christian or even cultural Christian has visions of Christ and the saints, while an ancient Greek in his dreams would receive admonitions from tall handsome people, whether gods or dead relatives.
If zombies and cannibals are coming out of the woodwork to stir our imaginations, it is partly the fault of a very sick popular culture that dotes on the perverse movies of George Romero, Anne Rice's novelistic gushings over vampires, and the teen-exploitation books, movies, and TV shows in which ghouls, werewolves, and vampires are basically not bad creatures who just need a little understanding. We are teaching ourselves not just to celebrate evil but to elevate it. Good people trying to muddle through in a difficult world are boring: Evil is way cool.
There are very few people, any more, who even know that the zombies of legend are not flesh-eating corpses but soulless voodoo slaves, exploited by their masters. For a real zombie movie, watch the Jacques Tourneur/Val Luten movie - beautifully filmed - I Walked With a Zombie. Then watch one of Romero's Night of the Living Dead cannibal-fests and you will begin to understand what has become of our poor world.
The appeal of the old pre-Romero zombie films, and of movies like Don Siegel's The Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Ionesco's play, the Rhinoceros or, even earlier, Karl Capek's R.U.R. and The War With the Newts was the fear of dehumanization. The forces of capitalism and Marxism, as well as mass media and commercialism, were turning out a breed of men and women who seemed less and less rational, less compassionate, less humane and, indeed, less human. People, in other words, like George Romero, Ann Rice, and their admirers.
We no longer fear dehumanization, because too many of us have already lost so much of our humanity. Rape, mutilation, cannibalism - it's all in a day's work for a TV scriptwriter. Someone with a DVD player and a Netflix account can feed his imagination all day long on comic book evil. It is our religion. The Greeks had Zeus and Apollo and Athena; we have Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Buffy and Spike, and the entire cast of Twillight.
Human societies have always had their share of misfits, creeps, and sociopaths, but they also had a moral, aesthetic, and spiritual framework in which to understand the outlaw Grendel or monsters living under volcanos. The great lyric poet Pindar contrasts the lawless rage of Mt. Aetna's Typhon with the serene and beautiful order imposed by the music of Apollo.
Today, such popular art as we have tends to side with Typhon, and there is hardly an undergraduate reader of Milton who does not think Satan is the hero. It is, of course, easy enough to turn off the TV set and throw away the pulp fiction celebrations of vampires and ghouls, but one still has to wonder what the neighbours are reading and watching.
The wildly popular Twilight films are full of romanticised evil-doers, notably vampires and werewolves
Unfortunately, anyone who takes up this theme will be put down as paranoiac or puritanical. Don Siegel is always described as a rabid McCarthyist, which he was not, and anyone who ventures to criticise vampirism will be dismissed as homophobic - "You see, it's an obvious metaphor."
Anyone halfway sane in the 21st century must feel like Dr. Miles Bennell (played by Kevin McCarthy character in Don Siegel's film). Before your very eyes, human beings are turning into pod people - soulless aliens without a trace of compassion.
"Look you fools, you're in danger! Can't you see? They're after you. They're after all of us! Our wives...our children...they're here already! You're next!"
Yes, it's over the top and not the ending Siegel wanted, but it's no less true. A stupefied fascination with monstruous evil is obviously contagious. A few cannibals or zombies, more or less, is nothing to worry about, it is worth thinking about a global population of deracinated consumers who tease their imaginations with real and fictional tales of such depravity.
As they used to say at the end of cheap horror movies, "They're coming to your town. Perhaps they are sitting next to you in the theater." If you are watching Zombie Apocalypse, they probably are - or, rather, they have to worry about sitting next to you.
Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2154452/As-popular-culture-overflows-vampires-zombies-forgetting-scared-evil.html#ixzz2cjCMAMq6
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