What apocalypse movies can teach us about coping in the COVID-19 Era
What really separates humans from zombies?
You know, aside from the whole being dead thing, zombies are a lot like us people: pack animals with zero sense of personal space wandering around aimlessly looking for flesh and brains.
Never has there been a time in humanity’s existence where this has been more apparent than right now, amidst the promise of an impending apocalypse.
Covid-19 has taken the world as we know it and flipped it right on its decaying head, and while our insides spill out into the aisle beside the barren sanitizer shelves in the local supermarket, we’ve all been left wondering what the fuck to do with ourselves in order to remain alive and even more importantly, sane.
Luckily for us, popular media has been preparing us for this moment for the last half-century — or at least since apocalyptic films, TV shows, comic books, and assorted media have existed, beginning, arguably, with George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968.
Yes, we can learn a lot from zombie movies and TV shows in our current anxiety-ridden, lockdown-friendly, trigger-happy social climate. For example,
Avoid the mall, for fuck’s sake.
When is the last time something good happened inside a mall? You can’t remember, can you? That’s because literally nothing good ever happens in a mall. In zombie movies, this is doubly true.
Plenty of zombie films and shows follow their “survivors” into places like shopping malls (Dawn of the Dead, The Walking Dead, and Warm Bodies to name a handful), through which the mindless undead carelessly waltz all day and night as if retracing the steps of their former lives as mindless consumers — only this time they’re bent on a different kind of consumption. Less flashy. More fleshy.
Amidst the total chaos that is the Coronavirus Era™️, it goes without saying that one should absolutely and unequivocally avoid the fucking mall — any public place that lends itself to throngs of senseless humans is a no-go zone right now, and yet it doesn’t seem to have fully penetrated the immense skulls of a large portion of earth’s population. For example:
Just… stay home. This isn’t even news. Most countries have enforced total lockdown, remote working for unessential businesses, and the closure of all public spaces to flatten the curve and stop the spread of the virus.
If yours hasn’t, and you’re tempted to visit the mall or any other public space for whatever reason, just know that the rest of planet earth is collectively giving you the Fuck-You Face and I hope you get eaten by zombies.
“Stay inside at first; go out when you must, but stay away from the hospitals, police stations, and religious centers where people gather, because they’re concentrations of vectors for infection and violence.”
~ Max Brooks
The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From The Living Dead
Which brings me to the next lesson we can learn from apocalypse films:
The real enemy is Us.
It’s not the coronavirus we need to be on the lookout for; we can’t even see the boy. Besides, it has a 2-week incubation period so we’d only really know we have it long after the fact.
The real opposition in times like these is our fellow human, and not just because of their potential to spread the virus.
In The Walking Dead, the villain Negan manages to nurture some semblance of order amidst the chaos — mostly by putting into practice one simple philosophy: Give me your shit, or I’ll kill you.
Of course, society hasn’t yet crumbled to the level where we’re all scrambling for the crumbs… or has it? The current incarnation of Negan-esque mentality can be seen in supermarket aisles across the globe.
Negan — once a rugged and handsome and painfully likable psychopath portrayed by Jefferey Dean Morgan — has been watered down to your average panic-buying hypochondriac systematically depopulating grocery store shelves of Purell hand sanitizer, pasta, and toilet paper with a maniacal type of rabid glee.
Negan lives on, but he now wields but a specter of his barbed-wire baseball bat named Lucille, who finds her current incarnation in economic privilege, physical wellbeing, and societal standing. Ouch.
What films and shows about the end times teach us is that we as humans are not only afraid of gruesome death — be it by zombie or lethal virus or monster or even our fellow human — we’re innately terrified of a total societal breakdown and the nasty side of human nature that comes with it. If a pandemic can turn us all into potential carriers, the grotesque underbelly of a suffering humankind might rise to the surface.
For us, the most terrifying prospect is not the gradually decaying face of a flesh-eating zombie, it’s a perfectly able man pushing over an elderly woman to get to the last roll of non-essential toilet paper — an utterly terrifying supermarket tableau. So,
Protect your brains.
At the risk of sounding “on-the-nose”, protect your brains. Zombies love them. In this case, “zombies” meaning boredom, complacency, and all-out apathy.
We’re all locked down and cooped up in our homes either working remotely, looking after painfully bored children, or doing sweet fuck all. A strong routine will be your saving grace amidst the chaos. Why stockpile toilet paper when you can stockpile activities; some fun, some productive, some for your own wellbeing or personal growth — be it physical, mental, emotional or spiritual.
Acts of kindness will go a long way too, not just for you, but for those who might not be in as comfortable a situation as you are. The true heroes in apocalyptic movies don’t always wear capes or have superhuman abilities.
Contemporary bravery usually comes in the form of a kind gesture, like sharing essential supplies with those less fortunate, making donations — or other acts of self-sacrifice, like listening to 10-minute voice notes.
These instants of raw human empathy are already happening in the real world as reliably as they inevitably do in most apocalypse movies, and it shows that, as long as we retain basic kindness and empathy for our fellow human being, we can maintain our humanity — even in the grimmest of scenarios.
Because, when it comes down to it, even if self-interest, corruption, and total idiocy reign supreme, fundamental human kindness will always have a gap through which to glance.
That’s what separates us from the zombies.
