"How Do You Not Understand a Word?": Language as Contagion and Cure in Pontypool

Zombie stories typically hinge on some post-apocalyptic conceit and challenge readers and viewers by holding up an analytical, at times satirical, lens on the ruins of the world we know—or think we know—to reveal some damning pathology in this transformation. Depending on the tale, zombies, embattled survivors of the zombie plague, or some combination of the two, reveal social ills and cultural anxieties through the savagery of their actions: the rampant consumerist society in Dawn of the Dead, the Cold War isolationism and racism in Night of the Living Dead, the unchecked militarism in 28 Days Later, or the global pandemic in World War Z, to name a few. Typical of the genre in film and fiction, what we will refer to as post-Romero political satire, is this return to everyday spaces, with their quotidian geographies that, when populated by mindless, savage, remorseless, and tormented beings, might strike us as unnervingly reminiscent of our own reality. The 1968 release of George A. Romero's Night of the Living Dead introduced the iconic modern zombie: a slow-moving, flesh-eating reanimated undead creature that can only die if its brain is destroyed. Romero's films are credited with invigorating the genre as a vehicle for social commentary, and he is widely recognized as "a radical critic of contemporary American culture [who] gleefully uncovers the hidden structures of our society in the course of charting the progress of its disintegration" (Shaviro 82).² This essay maps one trajectory of the post-Romero genre within the zombie narrative tradition at a time when the ubiquitous presence of culturally conservative, hero-driven zombie stories has left its mark on nearly every aspect of popular culture. Some examples include the Brad Pitt-vehicle film adaptation World War Z, the Train to Busan, which features a workaholic fund manager/father-cum-martyr hero, and the Shaun of the Dead with its anti-hero Shaun.³ What is potentially radical about the zombie narrative is at risk of being lost in the glut of superhero, action adventure blockbuster culture.

Bruce McDonald and Tony Burgess's genre-bending zombie film Pontypool (2008) challenges its audience to rethink the everyday along post-Romero sociopolitical lines but does so by setting the "outbreak narrative" in the less commonly explored discursive and affective realm of language (Wald 3).⁴ Crystalizing a central narrative thread of Tony Burgess's novel Pontypool Changes Everything (1998), from which Pontypool is adapted, the film further dramatizes the linguistic transmission of meaning and feeling, specifically implicating the romantic and familial linguistic intimacy of our everyday spoken language. Setting the outbreak of the zombie plague on Valentine's Day, Pontypool's narrative suggests that terms of endearment, those meanings that come to us most readily and predictably, those we embody and transmit materially, hold the greatest potential for violent contagion, even if or precisely because they also bring us our sense of place and connection in the world. Pontypool dramatizes the power and potential danger of simple, resonant, and satisfying sender-receiver loops of communication.

Pontypool takes a conventional trope of post-Romero zombie satire and brings it home linguistically, expanding that satirical critique to focus on the state or the citizen survivor and include all forms of intimate knowledge. The convention of the communicative lifeline (or what we will call the 'comm-tech' trope), at the center of so many works in the genre, positions characters in a post-apocalyptic world who, in their desperate struggle to survive, hope to be rescued by the state, often by attempting to navigate broken lines of communication. Survivors often search for or are faced with the challenge of interpreting the validity of government communications and military communiqués. Through the narrative structuring of this comm-tech convention, deeply held belief in the stability and benevolence of the state and its ability to protect the people is often challenged. In these moments, post-apocalyptic zombie narratives hold up a satirical mirror to the state. Again and again zombies come to...