Welcome to Coronaland! Towards the zombification of humans?

The theme of the zombie apocalypse has worked its way into theimagination of the masses. The incessant stimuli produced by contamination scenarios and images of the living dead trigger fears that, more than the coronavirus itself, spread like wildfire across the planet.

Abdel Aouacheria, University of Montpellier

To avoid giving in to the virus, including and especially in our own humanity, why not listen to what the zombies have to say about ourselves?

Images from apocalyptic films

Far from the official phraseology on the stages of the epidemic (1, 2 and soon 3), the anguish is palpable and tensions erupt here and there.

Special programs follow one another, news channels deliver their statistics in real time (number of infected, dead, cured). Images ofdeserted airports and quarantined cities, with their undead, seem to come straight out of the studios, reminiscent of World War Z (Marc Forster), The Army 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 dangers of the virus, before dying of it.

Surgical masks and disinfectant gels are being snapped up in pharmacies, while basic necessities are disappearing from supermarkets. Events are cancelled everywhere, and schools are closed. Financial markets plummet.

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 Welcome to Zombieland ).

The viral threat breaks social bonds

With viral threats and zombies, both habits and living spaces are anchored in conflicting realities. If the coronavirus, like the pack of zombies, presents itself as a homogeneous threat, the latter always reveals heterogeneity and division among humans. This is because the virus, like the zombie, can infect anyone - loved ones, neighbors, colleagues - making everyone a potential danger.

Even Pope Francis was summoned to show his credentials, and the Vatican was not spared. The threat is no longer just the virus itself, which is invisible, but also the patient, who is clearly visible and with whom any cohabitation becomes problematic.

Social bonds disintegrate in a centripetal movement from virus to clan. The virus, a barbarian from the infravii - the world of interlopers who do not fully or permanently meet the criteria of the living - exacerbates paranoia and rejection of foreigners. Recent examples include anti-Chinese racism and even the attack on European tourists in Martinique. Panic also leads to the stigmatization of migrants.

New prophylactic rules have been introduced to regulate living together, such as the prohibition of physical contact ("greeting without shaking hands, avoiding hugs", as the government website puts it), which in effect advocates living apart.

As in the case of Zombie Apocalypse, the dynamics of disjunction come to the fore: spared vs. contaminated, priority patients vs. other patients, sedentary vs. migrants, controllers vs. controlled, white coats vs. ordinary citizens...

The advent of biopolitics

As the film Land of the Dead (2005) and the TV series The Walking Dead clearly illustrate, zombified space implies overcrowded urban territories and places of confinement. These include bunkerized refuges, where a small group of healthy humans are entrenched in survivalist logics.

Writer Max Brooks has compiled these places and practices in a playful way in his Survival Guide to Zombie Territory. This logic of confinement is not new: it reiterates the political threats of the Cold War and the imminence of the bomb (remember George Pal's Time Machine or Kurosawa's Living in Fear ).

This is followed by the establishment of quarantine sites, where populations are controlled by means of medical-disciplinary devices, such as temperature measurement and movement analysis. Freedoms can be suspended in the name of the raison d'Etat, which has become the guarantor of public health.

This is the biopolitical era: what takes precedence is the implementation of a double disciplinary logic, in the words of Michel Foucault, i.e. stopping evil and improving the exercise of power. The requisitioning of mask stocks is a symbol of this.

Cellular processes and crisis management

These reactions are halfway between collectiveapoptosis - when the cell isolates itself and self-destructs in a controlled, methodical way via a genetic program - and the cellular response to danger.

The purpose of this latter process, introduced by American pathologist Robert K. Naviaux, is to help protect the cell from stress or danger and initiate the healing process. When this process is blocked, the cells behave as if the threat were still present, with the effect of preventing completion of the healing cycle.

And yet, responses to crises raise the question of how to return to normal, i.e. how to build resilience. Can our societies really heal from these situations, which are perceived as exceptional and transitory? It's worth noting that the neo-zombie (putrefied, cannibal, catatonic, etc.) was born and established in the post-9/11 era, from which we are still not out of the woods.

It is therefore to be feared that the current episode, following on from SARS and avian flu, will continue to lower the collective tolerance threshold for security and segregation.

The reflection of our anxieties

Zombies are a reflection of our anxieties about death, and a possible image of our own demise.

The coronavirus, like the zombie threat, fuels conspiracy theories and rumors, which theWorld Health Organization (WHO ) has decided to combat.

The former generally feature experiments gone wrong (as in the Resident Evil franchise) or serving hidden interests (up to and including the accusation that the 49-3 was forced through). Mystical explanations are put forward, with the infection likened to an expiatory punishment or "Gaia's reaction" to limit the mass of humans.

The latter produce miracle cures: chloroquine,children's urine, cocaine and garlic (already in vogue against vampires). The intoxicants also blame scapegoats such as the pangolin or the ever-present bat, which can be the object of reprisals.

Virality at the heart of Coronaland

Commercial offers from hospital merchants also spread at the speed of light, with the sale of masks in kit form. This virality is what Coronaland is all about. Anything and everything can spread quickly and unpredictably.

From the precautionary principle to intoxication, anything is possible to compensate for unbearable uncertainty. The quest for patient zero, described in the film Contagion (minus the zombies), is also part of this approach, to the point of worrying the Davos forum.

Although the authorities are redoubling their efforts in the hunt for the virus, the result can only be a mouse, especially as there are asymptomatic carriers of the coronavirus.

Moreover, what's the point of wanting to circumscribe the initial perimeter of contamination in an age of globalized ecosystems? We can read in this a desire for control in the face of a viral threat perceived as irrational, devoid of conscience, moving and mutating. In fact, this is what led the Pentagon to publish a scenario to be played out in the event of a zombie invasion ( CONPLAN 8888-11), a sort of hyperbole of the viral pandemic.

The zombie embodies change

If the infection was able to activate the zombie imagination so quickly, it's perhaps because zombies really do live in us today.

And what if, with the current crisis, the threat wasn't above all that of zombification, of the de-civilization of human beings? "The zombie embodies change", director George Romero told Positif magazine in 2008.

For the father of modern zombies, what's important is how people react to catastrophe, not the threat itself.

What the zombie metaphor has to say is that it's up to us to mitigate the yoke of our primitive fears, to place ourselves outside the dictates of survival instinct, primal fantasies and consumerism to which we fall prey (as much as viruses).

Finally, the "complex" objects that are zombies place in our hands the Gospel of perdition dear to Edgar Morin. Complex objects, because zombies are not only a social phenomenon (with the recent fashion for "zombie walks") and trans-media products (cinema, literature, comics, video games and music), but also in medicine, with pathologies whose symptoms evoke zombie putrefaction (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 mankind's lot, and will remain so for a long time to come. The living world also cultivates a blind indifference to the future of its components. If mankind were to disappear (or at least modify its behavior), the rest of the biosphere would probably be better off, as suggested by the spectacular drop in pollution levels in China.

In the face of infectious diseases that take us back to our animality, we need to respond not only with more hygiene measures and more research, but also with more humanity, i.e. fraternity, solidarity, creativity and collective intelligence.

This article was co-authored by Joachim Daniel Dupuis, Doctor of Philosophy, cinema teacher and author of the book "Romero et les zombies, autopsie d'un mort-vivant" (L'Harmattan, 2014).

Abdel Aouacheria, Biologist, CNRS research fellow, specialist in the life and death of cells.., University of Montpellier

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.