The Wisdom of Zombie Flicks
In a world obsessed with safety, wisdom waits where the wild things are.
Apologies, good people of The Cure, for the delayed publication here.
Your humble Curemeister was on a brief summer vacation and did, indeed, fail to deliver the usual human grown, 100% organic piece of written opinion to your inboxes.
Sincerest apologies.
Maybe that’s a light (and forgivable, right?) embodiment of the phrase beyond the pale—a term you clever folks probably already know means outside the realm of usual, acceptable norms.
But let’s unpack it a little further.
Basically, in the way back days of history, people lived in walled villages, right?
Back in the day, people lived in walled villages. Inside the walls were safety, community, civilization, and whatever small comforts could be found in the harshness of pre-modern life.
Those walls—palisades—were built from tall wooden stakes called pales (probably the origin of the word pole, now that we think about it).
Thus, “beyond the pale,” came to mean the area outside the community’s realm of safety.
AKA: where the wild things lived.
Which brings us around to the zombie flick of the summer, Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later, which begins in a town encircled by a (wooden, classic) zombie-proof palisade. The film’s probably not winning any Oscars, but it’s a pretty good and thought provoking rollercoaster all the same.
More relevantly, though, is the way that post-apocalyptic movies tend to distill the anxieties of the present into their imaginary future worlds.
Consider the recent Mad Max films, with their indictment of patriarchal structures and oil-dependency. Or Alfonso Cuaron’s underappreciated classic Children of Men, with its exploration of anti-immigrant sentiment and falling birthrates. There’s the post financial collapse scarcity of The Hunger Games. Even the kids animated film Wall-E is a lovably terrifying vision of a screen-cooked and sedentary human future.
Now, without giving too many concrete details away (pretty heavy spoilers are incoming though) what kinda happens in the world of 28 Years Later is: the villagers have to leave the comfort of their town to get wood and resources from the wider world.
Which is, of course, overrun with deadly zombies.
So, in the movie, one young village boy goes out on his first foraging/hunting trip outside of the town, accompanied by his dad. While out in the wilderness, the boy sees the smoke of a campfire. The dad explains an insane doctor is living out there beyond the pale and is a bad dude to be avoided.
The kid and the dad return to the village and in the celebratory afterparty, the boy sees his pop cheating on his mom…who is terminally ill in both mind and body.
In the heat of this betrayal, the boy leads his mom into the wilderness to try and get her treated by said unhinged doctor.
Of course, plenty of harrowing shit ensues. But the boy and his mom make it to the doctor, who is not the insane and wicked dude the dad (and larger palisade-enclosed community) made him out to be.
Sure, this Kurtz-esque doctor (brilliantly played by Ralph Fiennes, by the way, who is killing it these days) is a tad eccentric.
After all, he is constructing a giant tower of human skulls in the woods, which is not super normal. But it turns out that he’s making it as a memento mori and tribute to all the people who died in the zombie apocalypse…not the kind of sick cannibal shit everyone suspected of him.
We’ll skip the film’s narrative conclusion in a late-breaking attempt not to ruin the whole plot, but essentially, the doctor does in fact help (though in a rather tragic fashion), and the boy returns to the village equipped with a new perspective and a new confidence.
The kid comes of age by going beyond the pale.
So what, exactly, does this whole quasi-medieval-zombie-slay-fest have to do with 2025?
Well.
In our amateur take, 28 Years Later seems to reflect a specific-yet-nebulous vibe slash fear that we’ve all felt on the airwaves in the past decade.
As the world seems to be going to hell in a bucket at an ever faster pace, we tend to turn inward. To erect walls of safety around our communities and comforts, both literally and physically. To disconnect from those we deem beyond the pale, which ultimately causes us to regard those outside the comfortable bounds of our community as the other.
Thus, tragedy follows: we come to regard people and ideas, and things we don’t understand (or who make us feel uncomfortable or unsafe) as threats to handle rather than mysteries to engage with.
This cuts in all directions, by the way. It stretches from the obvious realm of politics down into things like rabidly protective fandoms and the (seemingly benign) messaging that we should only dig into things that exist in accordance with our values.
But.
Aren’t we really just cheating ourselves when we stay inside the palisades of our minds, of our communities, of our deeply held ideas about the world?
When we decide that there is nothing worth seeing out there but mindless zombies and dangerous ideas and chaos, aren’t we fundamentally denying ourselves the chance to transform and grow in unexpected ways, to come of age (no matter our age) as confident and capable agents of our respective life missions?
Doesn’t so much of life’s richness come from simply seeing what’s out there?
Our answer is: fuckin duh, of course it does. That’s why everyone loves to travel.
Yet we equally love our presets, our comfortable notions, our familiar zones of experience and mental spaces that provide a sense of order in an otherwise chaotic and scary world.
But to return to our communities with sharper wisdom and new learnings, to experience this precious life world and its riches of potential…we gotta explore beyond our palisades of certainty, whatever they may be. We’ve got to slip across the walls of normativity we erect around our minds (and trust the walls will still be standing upon our return) and journey into the places that aren’t so sure, that don’t feel so safe.
To really grow, we’ve got to go beyond the pale.
Catch you out there,
CONVICTS
Nice etymology lesson. I thought it was outside the bucket.