Explanation

Over the past weeks I’ve had to try and explain my thesis to numerous interrogators, and what I’ve found is that – against all expectations – each attempt is even more inarticulate than the last. It certainly seems as though my ideas should be concretizing around specific arguments, or at the very least that I should be evolving newer and more effective evasive strategies (e.g. Interrogator: ‘So what are you working on this year?’ Bennett: *Deploys payload of chaff*), but in fact all that happens is that I mumble less and less coherently on the subject of zombies. My hope – and I’m really holding out for this – is that these explanations will continue to degrade in coherence until, at the end of the semester, they transmit simply as undead moaning.

Of the Living Dead

I guess the most intelligible way of characterizing my project is to say that I’m going to be making claims about zombies, or the living dead. The two model claimants for my thesis are Roland Barthes, who probably doesn’t need an appositive, and Jalal Toufic, a Lebanese philosopher of film who does work on the undead, and here are the sorts of claims that these guys make: ‘As for foam, it is well known that it signifies luxury. To begin with, it appears to lack any usefulness; then, its abundant, easy, almost infinite proliferation allows one to suppose there is in the substance from which it issues a vigorous germ, a healthy and powerful essence, a great wealth of active elements in a small original volume…Foam can even be the sign of a certain spirituality, inasmuch as the spirit has the reputation of being able to make something out of nothing, a large surface of effect out of a small volume of causes’ (Barthes, Mythologies, p.37); and ‘…even death has suffering thresholds beyond which there occurs a reversal back into life; one reason for accepting the possibility of reincarnation (which in the schizophrenic’s case is undergone while s/he lives: <<I am Napoleon>>) would be that any organism has built-in mechanisms to arrest its operations once it cannot deal even inefficiently with its surroundings (it is itself one of its surroundings), whether through fainting, hibernation, catatonia, thanatosis, dissociation or even death: when the stimuli become radically unbearable for the undead, the only way out would be Life’ (Toufic, Vampires, p.148).

So part of the business of my thesis will be to make like claims about zombies—about their vision, their memory, their relation to space, their relation to proliferation, to infinity, the abundance of significations that crowds the act of biting, ditto the act of grabbing, the act of moaning—and these could be construed largely as poetic, probably I should say ‘hypothetical,’ claims. Ideally I would like all poetic/hypothetical claims to be subtended by critical ones, e.g. if I claim that zombies possess networked vision, and that what one sees all see, and if I proceed to follow this claim to Barthesian conclusions, then in a separate section (endnotes?) I would investigate Slither (2006), in which ‘zombies’ actually do possess networked vision, and, why not, Bergson, a French philosopher who makes claims about vision, image, points of view; or e.g. if I claim that all zombies are blind, and that what we talk about when we talk about zombies’ ’seeing’ must be construed across other sensory modalities, and if I proceed to follow this claim to Toufician conclusions, then in a separate section I would investigate ‘Tombs of the Blind Dead,’ in which the zombies actually are blind, and, why not, undead Daredevil’s role in Marvel Zombies. In this way a more or less rigorous, critical system of checks and balances (‘Do movies, anthropology, philosophy, comic books, etc. provide precedence for the claims that I’m making?’) will keep my claims legitimate, that is to say ‘based’ (and in a sense there’s no fun in making baseless claims anyway, since it’s the unspeakably wild claim about zombies—like, impossible-to-conceive, ‘two lines enclosing a space’-wild—that hasn’t already happened in ‘Thriller’).

That, anyway, is the plan. So that I can make both general and case-by-case, movie-by-movie claims about zombies, the thesis will probably divide naturally around two ‘claim spaces’ (In Memoriam Paul Saint-Amour, Requiascat In Pennsylvania), the one ‘hypothetical/poetic,’ the other ‘critical’ (and I’m not sure that there’s any real, or at any rate productive, distinction between the two). But since I haven’t technically started writing yet, all this is uncertain.

–Bennett