Welcome to Coronaland! Are humans becoming zombies?
By constantly tapping intothe public’s imagination, the zombie apocalypse theme has raised awareness. The relentless barrage of scenarios depicting outbreaks and images of the undead trigger fears that, more so than the coronavirus itself, are spreading like wildfire across the globe.
Abdel Aouacheria, University of Montpellier
Allociné
To ensure we don’t give in to the virus—including, and above all, in our own humanity—why not listen to what the zombies have to say about us?
Images from apocalyptic films
Far from the official rhetoric about the stages of the epidemic (1, 2, and soon 3), the anxiety is palpable, and tensions are flaring up here and there.
Special reports are airing one after another, and news channels are releasing real-time statistics (number of infections, deaths, and recoveries). Images ofdeserted airports and quarantined cities, with people buried alive, seem straight out of a movie, reminiscent of *World War Z* (Marc Forster), *Dawn of the Dead* (George Romero), and *28 Days Later* (Danny Boyle).
The fight against COVID-19 already has its martyr: Li Wenliang, a doctor who became a hero for being the first to warn of the virus’s dangers, before dying from it.
Surgical masks and hand sanitizer are flying off the shelves at pharmacies, while essential goods are disappearing from supermarkets. Everywhere, events are being canceled and schools are closing. Financial markets are plummeting.
With the outbreak of the coronavirus, the world seems to have turned into a life-size film set for a new zombie movie: Welcome to Coronaland (inspired by Ruben Fleischer’s *Zombieland* ).
The viral threat is breaking social bonds
With viral threats and zombies, both daily habits and living spaces are rooted in conflicting realities. While the coronavirus, like a horde of zombies, appears as a homogeneous threat, it always reveals heterogeneity and division among humans. This is because the virus, like the zombie, can infect anyone—loved ones, neighbors, colleagues—turning others into potential dangers.
Even Pope Francis has been asked to prove his credentials, as the Vatican has not been spared. The threat is no longer just the virus itself—which is invisible—but also the infected person, who is clearly visible and with whom coexistence becomes problematic.
Social bonds are unraveling in a centripetal movement radiating from the virus to the clan. The virus, a barbarian from the underworld —the realm of shadowy beings who do not fully or consistently meet the criteria of life—exacerbates paranoia and the rejection of outsiders. This has brought to mind recent incidents of anti-Chinese racism and even the assault on European tourists in Martinique. Panic also leads to the stigmatization of migrants.
New preventive guidelines have been put in place to govern social interaction, such as the prohibition of physical contact (“greet one another without shaking hands, avoid hugging,” as stated on the government’s website ), which effectively encourages people to keep their distance.
Just as in a zombie apocalypse, divisive dynamics begin to take precedence: the uninfected versus the infected, priority patients versus other patients, the settled versus migrants, those in power versus the powerless, medical professionals versus ordinary citizens…
The Rise of Biopolitics
As clearly illustrated by the film *Land of the Dead* (2005) and the television series *The Walking Dead*, a “zombified” landscape typically features overcrowded urban areas and confined spaces. We thus see the presence of bunker-like shelters, where a small group of uninfected humans has taken refuge, driven by a survivalist mindset.
Author Max Brooks has, in fact, compiled these locations and practices in a lighthearted way in his Zombie Survival Guide. This logic of confinement is not new: it echoes the political threats of the Cold War and the looming threat of the atomic bomb (one might recall George Pal’s *Time Machine* or Kurosawa’s *Live in Fear* ).
Next came the establishment of quarantine sites, which enabled the control of populations through medical and disciplinary measures: temperature checks and tracking of movements. Civil liberties could be suspended in the name of the state, which had become the guardian of public health.
This is the biopolitical era: what matters most is the establishment of a “double disciplinary logic,” to use Michel Foucault’s term—that is, to stop evil and improve the exercise of power. The requisitioning of mask supplies is a symbol of this.
Cellular processes and crisis management
These reactions fall somewhere between collectiveapoptosis —when a cell isolates itself and self-destructs in a controlled and methodical manner through a genetic program—and the cellular danger response.
The purpose of this process, introduced by the American pathologist Robert K. Naviaux, is to help the cell protect itself from stress or danger and to initiate the healing process. When this process becomes blocked, the cells behave as if the threat were still present, thereby preventing the healing cycle from being completed.
However, responses to crises raise the question of a return to normalcy—that is, of resilience. Can our societies truly recover from these situations, which are perceived as exceptional and temporary? It is worth noting that the neo-zombie (decaying, cannibalistic, catatonic, etc.) emerged and became prevalent in the post-9/11 era, from which we have still not emerged.
There is therefore reason to fear that the current crisis, following on the heels of SARS and avian flu, will continue to lower the public’s tolerance for security-driven and segregative measures.
A reflection of our anxieties
Zombies reflect our fears, particularly our fear of death, while also serving as a possible image of our own demise.
Like the zombie apocalypse, the coronavirus is fueling conspiracy theories and rumors, whichthe World Health Organization (WHO) has decided to combat.
The former typically depict experiments that have gone wrong (as in the Resident Evil franchise) or that serve hidden agendas (to the point of accusations that Article 49-3 was rammed through). Mystical explanations are put forward, with the infection being likened to a punitive punishment or a “Gaia response” intended to limit the human population.
In a matter of seconds, miracle cures are concocted: chloroquine,children’s urine, cocaine, and garlic (already popular as a remedy against vampires). Misinformation campaigns also target scapegoats like the pangolin or the ever-present bat, which may face retaliation.
Virality at the Heart of “Coronaland”
Commercial offers from hospital vendors are also spreading like wildfire, with the sale of DIY mask kits. This viral spread is what defines Coronaland. Anything and everything can spread there quickly and unpredictably.
From the precautionary principle to misinformation, anything goes when it comes to alleviating unbearable uncertainty. The search for patient zero, as depicted in the film *Contagion* (minus the zombies), is also part of this approach—to the point of causing concern at the Davos Forum.
Although the authorities are stepping up their efforts to track the virus, these efforts are likely to amount to very little, especially given that there are asymptomatic carriers of the coronavirus.
Moreover, what is the point of trying to contain the initial scope of the outbreak in an era of globalized ecosystems? This can be seen as an attempt to exert control over a viral threat perceived as irrational, mindless, ever-shifting, and mutating. This is, in fact, what led the Pentagon to publish a contingency plan for a zombie invasion ( CONPLAN 8888-11), a sort of hyperbole of the viral pandemic.
The zombie embodies change
Perhaps the reason the infection was able to spark the zombie imagination so quickly is that the zombie is, in a sense, already alive within us today.
What if, in the midst of the current crisis, the greatest threat were not so much one of “zombification” as one of the de-civilization of humanity? “The zombie embodies change,” director George Romero told *Positif* magazine in 2008.
For the father of modern zombies, what matters is how people react to the disaster, not the threat itself.
Olivier06400/Wikimedia, CC BY
What the zombie metaphor tells us is that it is up to us to ease the burden of our primal fears, to free ourselves from the dictates of the survival instinct, from primitive fantasies, and from the consumerism to which we are prey (just as much as we are to viruses).
Ultimately, zombies—as “complex” entities—place in our hands the “Gospel of Perdition” so dear to Edgar Morin. They are complex because zombies manifest themselves not only as a social phenomenon (notably in the recent trend of “zombie walks”), as transmedia products (film, literature, comics, video games, and music) but also in medicine, with pathologies whose symptoms evoke the putrefaction of zombies (such as Buruli ulcer), in the natural sciences (with the manipulation of their hosts by certain parasites), and in philosophy (with the concept of the philosophical zombie).
Sharing the Earth with an infinite number of microbes has always been humanity’s lot, and will remain so for a long time to come. Moreover, the living world displays a blind indifference to the fate of its components. If humanity were to disappear (or at least change its behavior), the rest of the biosphere would likely be all the better for it, as suggested by the dramatic drop in pollution levels in China.
In the face of infectious diseases that force us to confront our animal nature, we must respond not only with stricter hygiene measures and more research, but also with greater humanity—that is, with brotherhood, solidarity, creativity, and collective intelligence.
This article was co-authored by Joachim Daniel Dupuis, Ph.D., a film professor and author of the book *Romero and the Zombies: Autopsy of an Undead* (L’Harmattan, 2014).
Abdel Aouacheria, biologist, research fellow at the CNRS, specialist in cell life and death, University of Montpellier
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Readthe original article.