Robinson Crusoe and Zombies

On the End of the World, the Zombie Apocalypse, and other comforting Bourgeois Fantasies

Say what you like about the zombie apocalypse but at least you don’t have to go to work in the morning.

Zombie movies are about how much fun the zombie apocalypse will be. Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland, Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, are all at least partly about this. In Dawn, the survivors who take over the shopping mall end up rather enjoying the purging process, and then set about raiding the shops, furnishing their new secure apartments on the top floor, etc. Shaun tries, with varying degrees of commitment, to treat Z-Day as an opportunity to stay in the pub. Similarly, the Simon Pegg character in World’s End (a quasi-zombie movie of the Stepford variety) ends up treating the post-apocalyptic world in the coda as an opportunity for endless fun and showing off. But I think it goes deeper than that.

There’s something about the end of the world. Ironically, a lot goes on there. And a lot of what goes on there seems quite free compared to how we live now. But the fantasy is a dead end (pardon me) because the freedom gained always has bourgeois horizons.

The sighted survivors in The Day of the Triffids find themselves dramatically and suddenly freed from social restrictions. Indeed, the story is actually about their constant struggle to maintain their new freedom from social restrictions in the face of various attempts by others to impose new structures of power. Yet their new freedom ultimately amounts to being independent, small-holding but relatively wealthy farmers. The final attempt to assimilate them back into a structure of power is framed as an attempt to impose a feudal system and integrate them into it, i.e. to revoke their status as bourgeois individualists.

In Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend, the only surviving human being constructs a totally isolated life, hiding from the rest of the population at night because they’ve all become vampires. Safely tucked away behind shutters, garlic, and sound-proofing, Robert Neville sits alone and studied biology while listening to classical music, and boozing. During the day, when the vampires are all asleep, he roams the world freely, totally unrestricted, ransacking shops and libraries, and killing his sleeping vampire neighbours. He doesn’t just get to opt out of wage labour, he has actually ascended to bourgeoisdom.

Matheson frames the story as one of corrosive loneliness, but it’s hard not to see the fantasy of absolute autonomy, freedom, self-reliance, and unfettered individualism lurking within. Neville is paranoid, suspicious and hostile when he eventually thinks he’s met a human woman, and is ultimately unhappy to find himself surrounded by rational vampires who are forging their own new society, complete with social rules – to which he is now as allergic as they are to garlic. Indeed, the finale of the story demonstrates that he has become a lone alien creature to the vampires. He alone stalks the part of the day into which they cannot venture, and kills them freely. He is to them what they once were to him. He has become the monster, the legend. And the crux is that he has felt entirely free to kill them, lawlessly, at whim. They will execute him for this, because his removal is to be the keystone to their new construction of a nascently-totalitarian system of social control. This is the negation of Neville’s society-of-one, which he built alone, rationally planning his own safety and liberty. The story is the fantasy of the self-reliant bourgeois, but recast as giving way to tragedy in world that - so Matheson apparently feared - was about to abolish him in favour of vampire socialism.

Marx’s reading of bourgeois economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo led him to christen then ‘Robinsonades’ after Robinson Crusoe. Robinson Crusoe is, of course, the man stranded on an island who survives alone – at least for a while – because he can rationally and determinedly work to create a world for himself. The starting point of Smith and Ricardo was an idea of society based on an idea of human nature which saw society as an aggregation of isolated, rational individuals. These individuals were the basis of the economy, with the entire structure reflecting the unitary, atomised nature of individuals, and their rational choices. The world was made up of lots of Robinson Crusoes. Relatedly, there is the fetish of individual genius, work, enterprise and initiative.

It’s a fantasy, but so is the story Robinson Crusoe. The pleasure of reading it lies in the relishing of the fantasy of self-reliance, which is a function of the narrative conceit of isolation. But the isolation is more than just a narrative conceit enabling a fantasy. The isolation is a fantasy itself. A very attractive one. Its basis is the fantasy of autonomy. Yet the autonomy being fantasised is usually contained or containable by some kind of petty-bourgeois role.

The detective is another example. The fundamental appeal of the detective story lies in a fantasy of autonomy. What does every detective story have in common? The hero or heroine who can move as freely as they choose from place to place, doing what they wish according to their own judgements as they make those judgements, managing their own time, roving from person to person conducting interviews, or from scene to scene gathering evidence or perceptions, entirely under their own steam… Whatever the fictional copper’s notional complaints about paper work, the body of the story will see him or her cruising from suspect to suspect in a car. The appeal is of not being tied in some way in which most of us are tied… Here’s the secret fantasy. It works in a way reminiscent of the American fantasy about solving guilt-problems held over from conquest which lies at the heart of the American ghost story. American ghost stories are all, fundamentally, about disputed real estate. British ghost stories are, of course, far more about the haunting of the modern by the feudal. Both are about capitalism vs some flavour of pre-capitalism. The detective story is about some fantasy of freedom from the capitalist organisation of time or, relatedly, from the schedules imposed by the bourgeois family. Yet this freedom can only ever be imagined as a partial achievement, a reward accompanying the semi-privileged status of a petty-bourgeois social position, be it that of cop or wealthy amateur or private investigator.

Even in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (almost the first work in the post-apocalyptic genre but for a little known French prose poem), there is a clear wish-fulfilment logic at work. Despite the horror of what happens to the human race in that book, and the overpowering feel of melancholy as Shelley weaves her metaphor about the failure of Romanticism and her loss of the companions of her youth, the isolation of the last survivors lends itself to pleasure. Toward the end there is a clear sense that the last few people alive on Earth are rather enjoying bodding around Europe all by themselves. The ultimate irony is that the tragedy of Romantic individualism and personal freedom is not generalised political freedom but rather tyranny followed by utter atomisation and loneliness. The last people are living the Romantic dream, which is only possible in good conscience if everyone else is already gone. This is precisely because that Romantic dream was always personified by the privileged. Percy Shelley was arguably the most radical of all the Romantics yet this was true of him, and his horizons were bounded by it.

It’s not difficult to see something similar in our present-day stories about the last few survivors of the apocalypse (zombie or otherwise). We’re living in the ruins of neoliberalism, but neoliberalism continues. Dead system walking… well, running actually. And still eating. Zombie neoliberalism, as many have observed. And these ruins of neoliberalism are also the ruins of liberalism, of social democracy. The fantasy of prosperity is still indulged. The aspiration to freedom is still indulged. It’s just that they’ve become inherently cheap fantasies, predicated upon the idea that everybody else has to be cleared out of the way, or made disposable.

The fantasy is fundamentally not just a fantasy of not having to work (self-employed, self-reliant, self-sufficient, independent wealth) but of work itself being abolished. So far, so utopian. But the bourgeois imagination can only imagine this utopia in a world in which there are no people, and nothing is produced. The zombie is thus the great mass of the proletariat, rendered the living dead by the capitalist system, then eliminated from the fantasy by the bourgeois imagination, yet still there, milling around with nothing to do.

And, annoyingly, still needing to eat.