Killer Unicorns, Zombies, and the Apocalypse

Apocalyptic scenarios have been certainly been prevalent lately. Its hard to pick up a book, watch a movie, thumb through a graphic novel or play a video game without stumbling into some depiction of the End of everything on Earth. How strange it is that they we seem so intent on imagining our own demise.

This weekend I participated in the Annapolis Book Festival where I joined authors Diana Peterfreund and Larry Doyle in opining, only partially tongue in cheek, about zombies, mutants and even unicorns determined to destroy the known world. The kids in the audience took all of this quite seriously and asked really probing questions. They were wide eyed, like they thought an end, some kind of imminent end, was a done deal, something for which they ought to prepare. In fact, they asked their questions with the excited resignation particular to children and early adolescents; young enough to discern prevailing world views, and old enough to want to react and take action to what they were discerning.

“Couldn’t the zombies reproduce?” one asked.

“Do unicorns always want to kill you?” asked another.

“Can I get credit at school for reading this?” (This question was my favorite. It seemed both practical and simultaneously laudatory.)

As I flew back from Maryland, I thought about the popular and growing obsession with the End. This must be on my mind as well, I realized, noting that I just found myself watching the original Mad Max movies via Netflix streaming video. Weirdly, as a kind of penance I guess, I then went and watched the 1963 version of Lord of the Flies. The similarities to Mad Max’s challenges to the primal pecking order among the boys in Lord of the Flies were uncomfortably present. I even wrote a novel about a zombie apocalypse, in which I imagine 2/3 of humanity gone and the once mighty UN sitting proudly and secure on a tiny guarded island in the South Pacific. You know what? I think, sometimes, I’d like a bunker of my own.

So, what's going on?

Well, let’s first do a reality check. The seeming allure of "the End of Days" is all over popular fiction, but it might not be all that great. Consider those frightening moments when our fiction becomes reality. Any compunction we might indulge in wishing for the simplification that the End would afford quickly loses its fictional whimsy as we watch Japan, one of the most technologically advanced nations on Earth, struggle when the Earth itself literally begins to shake.

And yet, I will always remember the quiet, almost sheepish comment from a soft-spoken physician who was brave enough to offer his opinion on these matters last year at a national gathering of psychiatrists. This physician was part of the audience at an American Psychiatric Association meeting in which film director and producer George Romero and myself were discussing, among other things, the allure of apocalyptic scenarios in movies. This is of course something for which Mr. Romero is well known to have depicted with sardonic realism on the big screen.

The doc who voiced his views had stayed behind in New Orleans when Katrina took her toll. Almost sheepishly he raised his hand and admitted, as if in confession, that sitting there trapped on the porch of his house, the hurricane and later its aftermath raging, there was something simple and straightforward about the gun he kept at his side. The buck really did stop with him, and though he was terrified, he knew at least exactly where he stood. Anyone who feels this kind of thinking doesn't make sense needs to go back and watch Shane. When there's no one to tell you what's what, when the law is a three day ride from home, there is a freedom afforded by taking matters into your own hands. As one of my patients recently told me after watching I Am Legend:

"Dude - a zombie apocalypse would be so cool. No homework, no girls, no SAT's. Just make it through the night, man...make it through the night."

So, in our modern world (and here I am aware that I refer more to the so-called "developed" nations), a world where we are fed data that feels miles long but only millimeters thick, perhaps the allure of destruction is the simplicity that it procures. But, let's be careful what we wish for...I can't believe that the good doctor on his porch wanted to stay there for too much longer.