Tuesday August 16, 2011

ANNALS OF THE CULTURE WAR. What are the conservative art critics up to? At First Things, here's Ethan Cordray on zombie movies:

But what if this fascination is about more than just gross-out gore and action thrills? What if it represents a subtle, subconscious understanding that something is wrong—spiritually wrong—with our culture.

Zombies represent the appetite divorced from everything else. They are incapable of judgment, self-awareness, or self-preservation... And they aren’t just hungry for anything—they specifically want to eat the living, and even more specifically the brain, seat of rationality and self control...

As we become more and more zombified, as our culture becomes ever more adept at amplifying our desires through advertising, pornography, and a media culture obsessed with gratifying every appetite, we can see the inevitable results of that process shambling along on their rotting legs...

I notice that kids these days are also going for vampire movies and TV shows. Vampires seem to be the opposite of zombies, at least behaviorally; they are very self-aware, and Lord knows they wish to preserve their eternal lives. And they're hungry for blood -- as Christians are for the blood of Christ! Doesn't this say something positive about our society?

I can play this game all day, but no rightwing think tank is paying me to play it.

UPDATE. All the comments have been lovely, but I liked Jay B imagining Cordray's interpretation of "squeeze my lemon till the juice runs down my leg": "What if this song isn't about citrus juice? What if it's about yearning and the consummation of the sexual act?" I would actually expect Cordray to find in it a condemnation of the sexual act, because that's what, as a good little theocon, he has been trained to find -- you know, the way Jonah Goldberg looks at the work of David Simon and finds it conservative because fart snort black people.

It's also fun when commenters pretend to play Cordray's game ("No, no, no. Zombies aren't collectivists. Zombies are the Galtian Superman. Consider: Each zombie works for itself, without concern for other zombies...").