One of my old TAs from the University of California, Santa Cruz had this interesting thing to say about zombies:
When we’re as sick of zombies as they are of being alive, when the total overextension of the metaphor shades all things blankly and uniformly under the prospect of undeadness, a fantasy bright spark I’ve been having: how about a post-Reconstruction deep South story of metayers and croppers forced to work too close the recently buried, putting rentier capitalist-backed structural racism back where it belongs (that is to say, where it still remains insistently, against any illusions otherwise, in the house of the never dead and never gone), bringing zombies back to the fields, and above all, taking this as theme song and title? A screen play to be pitched, perhaps, if only the catcher wasn’t a Hollywood who won’t stop making Resident Evil films.
A curious idea indeed! If only the catcher wasn’t a Hollywood obsessed with repeating itself. If only.
