Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism, and: Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (review)

The second-season premiere of AMC’s The Walking Dead (2010–) slaughtered previous ratings records for basic cable in the USA, drawing 7.3 million viewers for the first airing, 11 million total viewers for the night including replays and 4.8 million adults in the so-called ‘demo’, the Adults 18–49 demographic most coveted by advertisers. The show’s 3.8 rating (measuring what per cent of all the nation’s televisions were showing the programme) marks the series as not only more popular than other, more critically acclaimed AMC series like Mad Men (US 2007–) and Breaking Bad (US 2008–) but more popular than many broadcast network series as well – unprecedented, even staggering numbers for basic cable programming. Something unusual is happening here, beyond the mere novelty of zombie survival horror on television (The Walking Dead is the first such series in US television history to make it to air). The struggle of former police officer Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), his wife Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies), his son Carl (Chandler Riggs) and their unlikely group of fellow travellers to survive in the face of a once-impossible nightmare of chaos and deprivation has struck some chord in a national psyche traumatised by a decade of war, corruption, disasters both natural and manmade, and ongoing economic collapse; the precariousness, casual violence and basic ugliness of the fantastic zombie world seems for the show’s viewers to be in some important way isomorphic with our own.

For Henry A. Giroux in his Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism narratives like The Walking Dead map onto a form of capitalism that has itself become completely monstrous:

A casino capitalist zombie politics views competition as a form of social combat, celebrates war as an extension of politics, and legitimates a ruthless Social Darwinism in which particular individuals and groups are considered simply redundant, disposal – nothing more than human waste left to stew in their own misfortune – easy prey for the zombies who have a ravenous appetite for chaos and revel in apocalyptic visions filled with destruction, decay, abandoned houses, burned-out cars, gutted landscapes, and trashed gas stations.

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Giroux traces this vision of zombie politics from Wall Street, where zombies ‘roam the halls . . . of Goldman Sachs’ (2) to Washington, DC, where they gut the social safety net and launch missile strikes on civilians on the other side of the world at the push of a button. The figure of the zombie – which for Giroux becomes not undead but hyper-dead through its rejection of ‘any institution, set of values, and social relations that embrace the common good or exhibit compassion for the suffering of others’ (32) – stands here not only for neoconservatism and the Tea Party Movement (which come in for particularly harsh denunciation) but for the ideology of neoliberalism more generally, whose free-market corporatist hegemony has in the twentieth-first century become indistinguishable from authoritarianism. (Obama, of course, is largely indistinguishable from Bush in this calculus, and indeed is all the worse to the extent that he seems, to most political observers on the liberal left, to be better.)

From this recasting of American elites’ monstrosity flows the rest of Zombie Politics and Culture’s critique, ranging the general coarsening of political discourse and the explosion of eliminationist rhetoric, to new embrace of anti-intellectualism and denial, to the abandonment of the welfare state by both parties, to bipartisan acceptance of assassination, pre-emptive war and torture in the name of ‘homeland security’. The final third of the book hinges in particular on the increasingly precarious position of America’s youth under these new conditions, essentially arguing that Zombie America has decided, in the end, to eat its children. The decline of the welfare state...