Thread by @doctorow

Anthropology prof Clare Sammells (@csammells) teaches a class on the social subtext of zombie movies; in a beautifully wrought and extremely timely thread, she explains how zombie movies teach the wrong lessons for the pandemic crisis.

https://twitter.com/csammells/status/1250087269777707010

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It's not merely that zombie plagues would be very easy to contain: "you would immediately know who was infected. There would be no moral ambiguity about how to handle the situation...There is no asymptomatic incubation period."

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It's "the assumption that if institutions such as the police, prison system, federal government, and military fall away, that people would turn into the worst versions of themselves. E.g., the Walking Dead motto: 'Kill the Dead, Fear the Living.'"

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Anthropologically speaking, it's nonsense: "societies without centralized governments, etc (what in anthropology we call 'acephalous' societies) actually have less conflict than we do...there are mechanisms for how to resolve problems in ways that actively curtail violence."

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"What we are actually seeing in the COVID-19 pandemic is not a collapse of society, but its strengthening from the group up. People are creating neighborhood networks. They are reaching out to friends to offer help. They are showing care and concern for each other. "

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"That desire to reach out and help people during a crisis is often missing in zombie films, which tend to assume that we will all descend into Aggressively Individualistic Survival Mode unless forced to do otherwise. But that’s not really how people are, most of the time."

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It's a lesson borne out by history, as is so beautifully illustrated in Rebecca Solnit's "Paradise Built in Hell," and elaborated in her must-read commentary on the crossroads of our pandemic:

pluralistic.net/2020/04/08/non…

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It inspired my 2017 novel "Walkaway" and its theme of "covered dish people" - people who, during a crisis, visit their neighbors with a covered dish rather than a shotgun, thus increasing their neighbors' likelihood of doing the same.

pluralistic.net/2020/03/02/be-…

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