The dead have always “left something behind” and the living have always been fed on their remains. To be human is to live in death: history, religion, politics, and even science can be seen as contending with the bodies of the dead. History is made of the deeds of the dead, the structures of the dead, and, most chillingly, dead ends. Religion buries the dead so they can live on while politics lives on in an undead procession. Rules and taboos may have originally come from how to deal with the dead and now they protect the living from the force of death and the dead from the forgetfulness of the living. Science determines the line between the living and the dead, it says what the living owe to dead matter and how dead matter can be manipulated by the living. These are each a realm of impersonal death, the death of others, the death of a collective/group, and the death that lies outside of life. Philosophy is the realm of personal death, contending with what to do in light of the fact of death. Learning to live in “anticipation” [vorlaufen] of death as Heidegger said and preparing for death as Socrates proclaimed. For Seneca the Younger death is not some distant possibility but already imminent in our lives already lived, “The major portion of death has already passed. Whatever years be behind us are in death’s hands.”. Many consider death to be a return, like Nabokov when he contemplates a picture where he didn’t yet exist or Plato considering metempsychosis (and these are just the thoughts of Westerners on the subject with a myriad of more or less well known insights on the subject coming from Eastern religion and reflection). Death is our silent obsession, it is endlessly mocked and portrayed just to be reduced or disregarded, but this never stops it from creeping back up in media and in minds under every disguise imaginable. The more it is talked about, i.e. symbolized, the more it tends to be mollified or even distorted as we lose the sense of gravity, or loss there of, that normally accompanies those piquant moments of encounter with this god, force, friend, foe, terror, comfort, ecstasy, anguish, inevitability, distant impossibility….every description succeeds at capturing a dimension of our grappling with death only by failing to finally subdue the beast/the beauty/the divinity/the abyss.
Given this dramatic exposition it is now time to discuss our latest portrayal of the deeds of Thanatos that has been thrust in front of western audiences. The movie 28 Years Later just came out as the third installment in a trilogy of zombie movies. Unlike most zombie movies this particular one portrays various responses to this form of apocalypse that are more or less interesting. There is nothing particularly revolutionary or groundbreaking here, but it is not a movie with nothing to say. This time around we get at least one character that recognizes the problem of the double that is presented by the phenomenon of zombie infection. The theme of the double seems to be a current obsession in cinema as we have almost countless examples of it flooding screens from The Substance to Mickey 17, even Joker: Folie á Deux can be read in this light, not as grappling with a physical double but the problem of the self as other is still present. Now with Sinners, something I am happy to call a masterpiece which makes it much harder to analyse fully, and 28 Years Later we have the undead double, the double as deathless self. This trope has been tackled by many writers already, memorably by Jacques Lacan himself in his analysis of the Amphitryon plays of Plautus and Moliere. Our current fixation on doubles may be related to any number of socio-cultural trends from the tension of our sense of control and loss thereof (we have both mastered the world and lost control of our mastery) or our position as pinned between the old worlds and the new as modernity is still left “incomplete” as Habermas suggested or perhaps it comes from the simple sense of uncanniness that people tend to have in balancing their identities between day-to-day physical space and the recent advent of cyberspace. The theme of the double is dense and ancient so a full analysis of it would take an entire book of its own.
While in most zombie movies we have the dead rising, in this universe the virus needs a living host to take hold, so we are dealing with a death that keeps on living (or life that keeps on dying). The traditional series of terms still applies, deathless, undead, or living-dead, because of the death of the subject and the insistence of the death drive (both of these themes are already analysed in depth by Slavoj Zizek in a number of articles and books). In this movie we see people that are thrust out of the human realm and into the various other planes of Samsara in common Buddhist conceptions. The fat “boars” that crawl in the dirt ceaselessly hunting for grubs are like the Preta with small mouths and endless stomachs, they are insatiable gluttons. All of the infected also fall into the traps of the animal and Naraka realms, slaves to passion, appetition and endlessly suffering. Perhaps we could even see the community off of the mainland and the gang introduced in the final scene as being a mixture of tendencies from the Asura and Devas, revering and reveling in conflict without actually facing their predicament or simply finding ways to seek contentment through indulgences. They cling to a life that doesn’t allow them to transcend their current travails. This sets up Ralph Fiennes’ character as being something of a Bodhisattva, there to ensure that the world remembers that there is some unity, nonsensical as it may be, in death. This is just a tangential fancy to follow in the course of this analysis. This movie portrays a local look at the theme of an apocalyptic catastrophe. An apocalypse is an uncovering, as the word’s Greek origin suggests (“apo” – “un” and “kaluptein” – “to cover”), so we can see what this portrayal of an apocalypse uncovers about human behavior or orientations. What I want to emphasize is that we are given three distinct relations/responses to this world and a character torn between them.
Firstly, we are shown this small village commune that manages to subsist through a separation from the world. The mainland has become some distant beyond to be variously marveled at and beaten back without any critical attempts to reclaim it or integrate it. There is good reason for this given the danger involved, but people rarely succeed in pointing out that the initial conditions in which our species evolved were at least just as dangerous if not more so. They have come to see “the infected” as a wholly alien other that must be put down. In this sense they are in agreement with the foreign powers that patrol the coast to keep the infection where it is. The movie is spliced with footage of archers in medieval style turrets defending a fortress against enemy invaders, this shows the islanders fantasy of viewing the infection as a war (with the inclusion of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “Boots” also alluding to this). This is how they suture over their symbolic frame. It is clear that they aren’t simply seeking mere life, if they were they could just become infected and live as animals, instead they are seeking a way to secure enjoyment. They do this through their fortifications and strict rules. In the beginning of the movie we see Spike trying to decide whether or not to take an action figure with him onto the mainland and he decides to leave it behind. This is likely meant to show his budding maturity as he leaves behind the relics of his childhood, but I would suggest an alternative reading where Spike recognizes that the island is a place of enjoyment and the mainland is meant to be beyond this. His expectation is that the mainland is a place devoid of enjoyment and fuelled by mere survival; instead, what he actually encounters is that his dad is having the time of his life slaughtering the infected. This could be part of what leads to his disillusionment with his father and his decision to leave. They never explain why they have an interest in going to the mainland. They don’t seem to have any scarcity that could be rectified by resources there and they only scavenge for interesting things leaving the wildlife untouched. This seems to suggest that it is an act of play, they go there to bend their own laws which are based around the safety of the community. We must imagine them having an unwritten, or perhaps even explicit though not stated in the movie, rule to avoid the infected at all costs yet they make a game out of hunting them. This highlights a kind of transgressive enjoyment, surplus-enjoyment or “plus-de-jouir”, that is built into the logic of the law itself. A subversive logic like this is pervasive in human activities, just as when friends are supposed to be nice to one another yet you only know two people are truly friends when they subtly or even aggressively jeer each other. In the U.S. military, for example, drinking alcohol is explicitly frowned upon and yet if you don’t at least have stories about copious consumption you’re not likely to be accepted amongst your peers. Combat is driven by a contradictory logic where you aim to preserve and defend the dignity of human life and snuff it out with the same gesture motivated by a fantasy of an us and them dichotomy. War has always been used to amplify a non-critical distance with the other to secure enjoyment.
Next we can look at the last response we are given to this world in the final scene of the movie, that of the ecstatic Jimmy and gang in colourful track suits. Not a lot can be said about them because of their brief presence in this film but we can venture for some assessments. They also fight to secure enjoyment in a world deprived of “creature comforts”, but they seem to do so in a “lawless” style. We actually see several allusions to Jimmy’s crew around the mainland in the movie, though none of them are directly mentioned. His name is spray painted across at least one building and the infected man they find hanging upside down has “JIMMY” carved across his spine. How all of this is tied together in the franchise we will have to wait and see, but for now we have what appears to be a roving band of subversive and irreverent revelers explicitly rejoicing in their torture and slaughter. At first sight this may seem to be the same as the enjoyment procured by the islanders in killing their enemies, but this activity actually seems closer to the death drive-esque repetitions of the infected. They cruelly and animalistically celebrate the act of killing itself, even drawing it out to show that it is done for its own sake. The bow hunting of the islanders is quick and impersonal allowing them to maintain their sacred distance, but the track suit clad warriors “get their hands dirty” and take a more intimate relation to their deeds. Their colourful suits and acrobatics are likely cosmetic allusions to power rangers drawing on Spike’s earlier indecisiveness with his action figure. This may mean that they represent a more childish approach to the apocalypse. These figures can be seen as engaging in a perverse mode of enjoyment, as evidenced by Jimmy’s upside down cross showing the inversion of a fetish derived from the Other. They are putting on a show, i.e. being an instrument for the desire or enjoyment of the Other which is a formula for identifying perversion. In contrast to this the islanders are likely neurotics clinging to rules and rituals that they can enjoy engaging with. They engage in the obsessional activity of accumulating trinkets and repress the difference between themselves and the infected. Perhaps the return of the repressed here is their sublimation of hunting the undead mainlanders and wearing masks to mock them. The track suit gents, on the other hand, disavow the difference between them and the diseased. They get along by saying “yeah we may not be any better than they are with our grotesque displays of violence, but we are going to get off on it nonetheless”. When we see more of them we will be able to say more about their particular approach in contrast to the islanders and the most interesting one yet to be discussed, that of Ralph Fiennes’ character.
Lastly, we get to look at the most unique approach in a zombie apocalypse movie I have yet to see, that of Dr. Kelson. He expressed his position more clearly than the others with the commonly tattooed meme phrase “memento mori”, Latin roughly translating to “remember death”. As a Lacanian sycophant this phrase always reminds me of the Freudian dream in which a father “forgets” or doesn’t know that he is dead. This dream can be interpreted in a simplified form as expressing that in order to remain in the dimension of the Law one has to repress or be in ignorance of the fact that the name-of-the-father, i.e. the symbolic father, the guarantor or even god, is absent/dead. Hence Dr. Kelson’s insistence and obsession with this phrase is then seen as an expression of his understanding that there is no salvation, there is no solution. Of course this could be contrasted with a reading where death itself comes to represent the transcendental law, death is the symbolic father or the law governing the world. This is something of a double void, however, as death is always absent or somewhere else, particularly in its personal dimension, and yet pervasive or even omnipresent. Lacan’s most unique “invention” for grappling with this kind of thing is the notion of the “non-all” which expresses something that is always present but never wholly there. This is incredibly complicated and often obscure, but we can simply think about how any predicate that is given to a totality of things becomes meaningless, e.g. if everything is red then nothing is distinctly red and red cannot be understood because of a lack of contrast, or a less simplified example is being itself, since everything has being, everything exists, nothing can fully show what being is (if you enjoy pantheistic approaches then you can easily understand that if God is immanent in everything then nothing is fully God though each thing may not simply be a part of God either… like I said it is complicated and I’m not sure there can be a clear explanation for concepts like these). Having death presented as non-all for Dr. Kelson points towards an understanding of his mode of enjoyment being Lacan’s infamously obscure “Other Jouissance” which is contrasted with “Phallic Jouissance” which can be seen in the other two approaches. This is becoming excessively abstract and technical in accordance with all of my worst and strongest habits as a writer, but this point is still too interesting for me to cut it out. For an effective analysis we can simply say that phallic jouissance always focuses on an object, not necessarily some particular or neatly packed physical thing but any thing that we can relate to as an object. In opposition to this, Other jouissance subsists beyond this dimension. So we can think of how pleasure always supervenes on some object that is typically fulfilling a need, desire or demand, Other jouissance is that ineffable enjoyment that escapes that circuit of fulfillment. Since that is more or less sorted, let’s return to the movie.
The islanders are dependent upon their fantasy of being a last bastion against the decay of humanity and civilization. They defend their castle but in order to do so they promote and celebrate the same sort of barbaric behavior that they oppose. Rather than being caught purely in the logic of the death drive like the infected, they are in the realm of desire where they can justify their position through some kind of story and external authority. This makes them dependent upon a/the structure of signifiers to secure enjoyment, hence the father’s exuberant exaggerations when telling stories about his son’s exploits on the mainland. They require their stories and rituals to assure themselves that they are different from the infected. What the infected specifically lack is the ability to speak, to tell stories or to justify their actions, otherwise it would be blatant that they are simply people that are sick or merely malevolent. Instead the infected are completely other and not subject to the dimension of the signifier. They cannot be seen as suffering or enjoying in any way. They are even beneath the dignity of animals which can at least be marveled at. This is in direct contrast to Dr. Kelson’s position which he summarizes quite well by saying that he collects bones from “infected and not infected alike, because they are alike.”. A cursory glance may seem to yield the intuition that Dr. Kelson is just as dependent upon his bones and “memento mori” as the islanders are on their stories, but his attitude reveals no signs of fetishism for his project. He has a kind of indifference to any notion of completion or fulfillment. He even said that he never thought he would get the opportunity to be asked about it. His enjoyment is not derived from the project but results in it. We immediately see him as continuously smiling and friendly, a genuinely mirthful figure, with no need to attach his happiness to any particular activity or objects. Even when Spike knocks over his skulls, disrupting this seemingly sacrosanct structure, the doctor simply grins and tells him not to worry. In remaining detached from any kind of sentimental dependence upon his bone temple he again recalls the figure of a Bodhisattva who is sometimes described as being suspended between the worlds of samsara and nirvana. In Lacanian terms he has undergone subjective destitution and no longer binds himself to the symbolic codification of meaning which allows him to dwell with the Real of death. He doesn’t profess some deeper meaning behind things; he simply tarries alongside them as they stand and smiles. He is a Nietzschean child1 and artist with a ludic lightness about him, “‘Play,’ uselessness – as the ideal of him that is overflowing with power, as the ideal of the child” (The Will to Power sec. 797).
Only Dr. Kelson seems to be intimately aware of the dimension of the double presented by the infected. In most zombie movies we are given some scene in which a beloved character is transformed and so we must watch the rest of the cast grapple with eliminating them. This movie offers no such sentimental punch, and it seems to be more interesting for it. This facilitates the unempathetic approach of the other characters. Very early on Freud connected his notion of the uncanny [unheimlich] with the double as something that disturbs our sense of stability, familiarity, or being-at-homeness. This aspect is seen in the perspective of Spike who cannot quite grasp the attitude his father has towards the infected. Instead they appear to him as something almost human, almost familiar, but not quite. This further supports a reading of the islanders in general as obsessional neurotics as Lacan emphasizes in “Sosie” (Seminar II) that obsessionals always hang on to the other in desperation, through aggressive drives, and “When he expresses great indifference, that is when his interest is caught at its maximum.”. In contrast to this Dr. Kelson cannot help but feel some kinship with the infected and a compassion for him, in some sense they are “extimate” (portmanteau of external and intimate again from Lacan) for him. He cannot live amongst them and yet cannot abandon them so he resides at the periphery of their world and the islanders’ world. Interestingly the possibility of the mother having a brain tumor also suggests an extimate relation where her character is defined by something that is in her but is not her, an inimical excess. This gives her another unique familiarity with the notion of the double as she gets to experience herself directly as other. We cannot be ourselves, identify with our egos, without there being some radical other to oppose us, and this is often met with a violent reaction upon recognition.
Much like Dr. Kelson’s bone temple, this is a useless essay towards which I have very little attachment and yet I am nothing but pleased to have put it together. Movies, both good and bad, never fail to offer incredible opportunities for us to apply our concepts and cognitive tools. I am actually convinced that with most works of art, if they deserve this epithet, we can never exhaust our possibilities for speaking about them. We could even explore the possibility of representing the infected as another approach to coping with the apocalypse, but this would likely amount to little more than the same talk about the death drive that Zizek invokes when discussing the undead. Although I could construct this temple of phonemes indefinitely, I have had my fun and will cut it off here.
- In terms of the three metamorphoses of Nietzsche, this would likely position the islanders as lions closing themselves off and saying “no” to the world and Jimmy as a camel or ass indiscriminately saying “yee-ah” and drinking from every puddle ↩︎
Snake Swallower 
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