The Po Show

It's the End of the World As We Know It
(And I'm Back, Baby!)

Well, that was quite the hiatus. And what topic brings me back to posting? Not the kids (who are doing well, thanks), or my health issues (which are much better, after a bout of badness that was truly not fun), or even the weather (which seems to be finally acting like fall, rather than yoyo-ing up and down insanely).

No, I'm here to talk about the end of the world. Or at least the end of our world, the one filled with electricity and intercontinental air travel and Facebook. I'm trying to figure out what my obsession with apocalypse is all about, because obsession is really not too strong a word.

I'm obviously not alone in thinking about this topic, because there are tons of book and movies and TV shows dealing with various forms of apocalypse or post-apocalypse. Is it an outlet for the fear that seems to be permeating modern life, fraught with climate change and oil spills and devastating natural disasters? Yet depiction of the end of the world is hardly new. There have been countless periods in history in which people have talked about the coming of the end times, with a real sense that it was right around the corner.

What I think is different is that during those periods, it seems that people expected God to lay down the apocalypse, in a spectacular Revelations kind of way. Today the stories all center around man-made destruction: wars or pollution or viruses mutated from experiments conducted in laboratories. In some of the stories, you don't even know what happened, what went down to cause world-wide devastation. Everything goes to hell, but there are survivors, who have to try and keep surviving.

That's the part that fascinates me (to an absolutely unhealthy degree). I'm drawn to questions of what happens to people when suddenly everything they know falls apart, when everyone they know could potentially become a threat. What happens to society? What happens to communities? What happens to individual families?

The stories that draw me in the most are those of pandemic, because I find that the most terrifying scenario of all. The randomness of who will fall ill and who will be spared is haunting. And the worst scenario of all is the (admittedly, highly unrealistic) pandemic in which people don't just die, but turn into something non-human. What greater uncertainty and terror could there be than when the people you love the most could suddenly turn into monsters who want to destroy you?

So here's where it gets dopey. Long before I developed this obsession with apocalypse, I had a phobia. Of zombies. Since I was a teenager, I've been absolutely fucking terrified of zombies. I used to have nightmares about being chased by zombies. I'd have nightmares about people I knew suddenly turning into zombies and trying to catch me. I've never seen Night of the Living Dead or any other zombie movie, because just looking at still photos is too much for me. Watching a whole movie would probably kill me. I did see I Am Legend, but only by watching it on cable and fast forwarding over the parts with the infected (and they aren't really zombies anyway, since they are not undead).

I've thought a lot about why zombies are such a popular, enduring theme (and they're more popular than ever now, and have really gone mainstream). Why are they (and vampires) so compelling? I think it's the whole undead thing, the idea that they're really hard to kill, since they're already dead, so that is a very scary plot point. And the whole relentless, unstoppable horde image is very frightening, as is the idea of becoming a zombie by being bitten by one. Plus, zombies EAT PEOPLE, so you get the huge gore factor that is necessary to that subgenre of horror movies, that I simply can't bear.

My recent problem has stemmed from a collision of my obsession and phobia. In other words: zombie apocalypse. It's been done in traditional horror films (which focus on the gore and terror, without the sociological issues) and in semi-comedic ways like Zombieland, but now there's a new series on AMC based on the comic book series The Walking Dead. This isn't a mindless gore fest, but a serious, thoughtful look at how human beings devolve under the pressures of survival under terrifying conditions. I've spent the last couple of weeks reading about the comic book series (lots of synopses, as I can't look too much at the actual comics, which are pretty horrifying). I tried my best to read about the TV series without actually having to look at depictions of the zombies themselves, but that ended up being impossible. I actually managed to read the articles that were prefaced with some zombies photos, so perhaps I've extinguished the phobia a bit. I even watched some interviews with the creators of the show that were interspersed with brief scenes from the show that featured zombies. The show looks brilliant, true character studies of people who find themselves transformed by the tragedies that have befallen their world.

But I can't watch it. It's just too much for me. So I keep thinking about it, about the story lines I read, about the images I saw. About the end of the world, only it doesn't really end.