Baden-Württemberg Seminar / GKAT Lecture The Government as the True Monster: The Collapse of Authority and Trust in Zombie Narratives

In recent years, the modern zombie narrative has become increasingly critical of governmental institutions, a criticism that has become all the more biting with recent failures on the part of civic leaders to keep the populace safe and to . . . lead. Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005), for example, depicts a New World Order based on corruption and selfish governance, one that emphasizes both economic disparity and anti-immigrant discrimination. In Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comic series (2003–19), the perceived democratic utopias of both the Alexandria Safe-Zone and, later, the Commonwealth, present elected leadership to be dangerously fallible, self-serving, and unreliable. Finally, the 2020 novel Survivor Song by Paul G. Tremblay is a semi-realistic zombie narrative evocative of both the COVID outbreak and general right-wing distrust of authority. The general distrust of the government repeatedly presented by a variety of zombie narratives increasingly mirrors the distrust and disillusionment experienced in the USA today, particularly in terms of ideological conflicts between the progressive masses and MAGA supporters and other right-wing “patriots.”