Zombies as a Sandbox-Transmedia and the Postmodern Turn

Our lovely hero Rick from The Walking Dead, attempting to reconcile the meaning of life.

Certainly trailing off of Dr. Jeff Mallinson's ideas and his influences, I would like to engage zombies briefly here. If you are looking for something to pass the time with, give his podcast a listen:

http://virtueinthewasteland.com/3/category/zombies/1.html

I am going to make the claim that zombies have beautifully reflected and responded to our mass subconscious' fear of modernity, science, and the death of culture itself. I would make the claim that the way in which zombies have been both collaboratively made into a subject of thought within a growing context and then that subject critiques its context (society-at-large) is arguably prophetic.

Zombies, as a creative creation, have now become a transmedia phenomenon stretching from graphic novels, novels, movies, video games, web comics, and more over the past 5 decades. I am especially inspired by Rachel Wagner's engagement with transmedia and religion and how those two intersect (212 in our reading of Godwired) regarding the conversation of zombies-in-media as a possible catharsis for affluent, modernistic cultures.

I would like to say that the subject of zombies has become a sandbox dialogue. Wagner discusses what it means to have religion as a transmedia subject with a sandbox view versus an answerbox view; the primary difference landing between the interactivity of the sandbox and the fixed narrative of the answerbox (220-235).

The zombie subject is a beautiful example of a sandbox dialogue because of how the theme and representation of zombies has changed over time due to different, growing sources, contexts, and medias. At first, key zombie movies focused on the events that took place in an imaginative setting where zombies have suddenly taken over. The earliest zombie movies simply look at the moment, the particular, the accident, of zombies and a specific story. Later films depict survival strategies, reclaiming human dignities, rebuilding human needs, and everything up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, ending with love. (Perhaps the zombie theme is still incomplete in its playing-out, since individual's expression/identity and aesthetics are yet to be meaningfully constructed in an adaptation yet to date.)

For an example piece of the story, look at Romero's Night of the Living Dead/Dawn of the Dead/Day of the Dead series. The focus and engagement with the theme of zombies in his films is highly religious, shocking, momentous, and represents an interesting piece of social commentary. There is a progression of hopefulness between the three movies. But after these movies comes more important themes than simply experiencing the apocalypse, surviving the apocalypse, and rebuilding from the apocalypse. The theme of zombies becomes a reflection of the postmodern turn and then the emergence from the ashes of postmodernity. One of the fascinating parts of the transmedia conversation behind zombies is that in playing with the possibility of society's fall to the undead hordes, it accomplishes an actual process of meaning-making for the real world. The complex narrative of the zombie apocalypse, as stitched together from many different pieces of media throughout the last 45 years, represents a very real progression into and reclaiming of meaning, hope, and love from the ashes of modernity's meaningless, contagious, and violent clutches.