Zombie Meme Is Well Established

¶ … zombie meme is well established in American popular culture and in movies in particular. For more than 40 years American filmmakers have made movies in which zombies terrorize different societies -- there is some evidence that indicates that the trend to create these movies has increased in the 21st century (Bishop 12). Due to this degree of popularity, it is fairly accurate to state that the zombie meme is one of "high survival" based on three factors, its "longevity, fecundity, and copying-fidelity" (Dawkins 2), and that it will more than likely persist into the near future. When attempting to analyze the reason why this particular meme has continued throughout Hollywood and still excites movie goers, it becomes necessary to analyze the particular use of this meme as a social construction. An examination of current literature on the subject reveals that the zombie meme is highly effective for explaining aspects of contemporary American life, which is why filmmakers continue to use it and add to its popularity.

The zombie meme has a degree of penetrance and stability in American culture due to its usefulness for filmmakers in helping to contextualize certain social concerns that are existent today, and that were existent in the past when previous films were made. The history of these movies in the modern era began in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead, which ultimately functioned as an elaborate comparison with and protest against the violence and gore that consumed the country's thoughts during the Vietnam War (Bishop 12). Although this sort of longevity is a marker of the prevalence of the enduring nature of a meme, it is not the cause of it, especially when one considers one particular "copy" of a meme, such as the aforementioned film, when contrasted with the duration of the genre as a whole. Instead, "fecundity is much more important than longevity of particular copies" (Dawkins 2), which helps to explain the widespread notion of zombie memes in popular culture. This meme was able to expand beyond Night of the Living Dead into a host of horror movies that featured zombies, which attests to the fecundity of the zombie meme. However, what is equally important to the embedding of the zombie meme in American culture as its fecundity is its copy-fidelity. Dawkins explains that due to a low fidelity of the nature of memes, "…memes are being passed on & #8230;in altered form" (p. 2). This low-fidelity aspect of memes allows for them to mutate and address social concerns other than those pertaining to the Vietnam War, such as apocalyptic notions and those relating to the change in perception of American life after the September 11, 2011 terrorist attacks.

It is specifically due to the low-fidelity aspect of the zombie meme that it has continued to have social relevance, and is therefore used within major motion pictures as an important cultural concept. Part of the reason why this meme has continued within the medium of film is due to the relationship between movies and cultural concerns in America. Bishop explains that historically, film depicts the social needs of pressing issues of the day, which is why after 9/11 "American popular culture has been colored by the fear of possible terrorist attacks and the grim realization that people are not as safe and secure as they might have once thought. This shift in cultural consciousness can be most readily seen in & #8230;zombie cinema" (p. 11-12). Without the ability to mutate, which is attributed to the low-fidelity aspect of the replication of memes in general and to the zombie meme in particular, this type of movie would not have the social relevance and popularity that it still has today.

The zombie meme continues to play a significant part in American popular culture because it is useful as a means of portraying the fears that are present in this country after 9/11. The fear that America is actually vulnerable -- from a terrorist attack -- is a concept that has been revisited in zombie films, literature, and video games, time and time again. The zombies represent the downfall of conventional American society (which the country temporarily experienced during the World Trade Center assault) and the notion that standard rules of government, law enforcement, and the judicial system can suddenly no longer apply. As a result, the meme of zombies within films has resurged since 9/11, with empirical data proving this point (Bishop 12). The reason for the continuing popularity of zombie movies after 9/11 is that they both portray and help alleviate some of the social concerns that are relevant to the threat of terrorist attacks. On one level, people can relate to films in which there are no laws and there are savage attackers who will stop at nothing to kill them -- unless the surviving humans kill those attackers first. This recurring theme within zombie movies "certainly affects an audience's reception of those films" due to post-9/11 fears. On another level, the constant portrayal of these doomsday scenarios that are found within zombie movies is somewhat of a reassurance, and a way to cope with tragedy when it does happen, a perspective offered by a college student who was a zombie movie fan and who lived through 9/11.

The specific part of zombie movies that helps Americans deal with conceptions of disaster is the fact that virtually all of them take place in apocalyptic, or post-apocalyptic, settings. Regardless of what city, town, or even country that zombie movies take place in, there is always a situation in which that region is overrun by zombies. Despite the fact that different films offer a variety of explanations for such scenarios, involving nuclear weapons, viruses and more, the audience realizes that the destruction of the current world order is at hand, and is able to relate to such a situation which could actually happen. In this respect, these movies "point back to the viewers' future, as it were, a future of violent and chaotic degradation" (McAlister 8). Such a future is made increasingly more real with every society altering event of national magnitude in America. Although 9/11 was one such event, there have been others. The devastation wreaked by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 certainly produced the type of national catastrophe that is commonly depicted in zombie movies. Bishop's article contains several examples of people who described that wreckage as nothing less than the type of unreal scenes they were accustomed to seeing in movies (p. 14). The fact that people see traces of the zombie meme, or more specifically, traces of the zombie movie meme, in real life is a testament to its widespread fecundity, and alludes to how deeply embedded this meme is within American culture.

There are other aspects of the zombie meme that also make it appealing to American society, in ways that are substantially less depressing than the devastation of natural disasters. The loss of all rules, governments, and authority figures which is frequently depicted in zombie cinema does not always have to be a negative thing -- especially in zombie movies. With that loss of centralized authority, there is also a loss of the restraints of capitalism. As such, movie goers are able to indulge in some positive fantasy aspects o zombie movies, such as the fact that, "the end of the world means the end of capitalism, and everything becomes free for the taking. As a matter of survival, looting becomes basically legal -- or at the very least, there is no law enforcement present to prevent wanton theft" (Bishop 14). There have been several zombie movies that depict this most celebrated of American cultural values -- the attainment of free stuff -- which always goes over well with audiences. Zombie cinema allows people to indulge in fantasies, both positive and negative, and is about the assertion of free will in the best and worst of circumstances.