Friday17 Aug 12:19 PM
Yoga Zombies! We Are Them. They Are Us.
Douglas Rushkoff recently posted an excellent little introduction to the zombie film genre which explores a few ways that the zombie genre reflects and comments upon the fears and insanity of our culture. But I think you can go further and get more personal with zombies and their ilk. For me, our perception of culture is a mirror of the self. We are them. They are us. And as we turn that mirror inward, the genre has real spiritual resonance.
Zombies are ravenous, craving, desiring-machines. Lost. Searching. Hungry. Pathetic...Hungry ghosts (Wikipedia), in the Buddhist and Hindu parlance. They are our wisdom teachers, showing us our frightening, hilarious, creepy grasping and cravings.
These soul-less, pestilent bodies, walking that ill-crazy, one-track strut, just b-lining it towards those deeply ingrained impulses and desires, like "Braaaainnssss." Consuming. Devouring. Feeding. (Yet never being satiated.) I love these guys. In a nutshell, or in this mortal, fleshy shell, I'm not really so different. And that's what's really frightening. And funny.
Their flesh is so un-real and gross, yet somehow they are still alive. Seeking....Just. Like. Us. Our bodies are slowly falling apart, crumbling. We practice this absurd form of aerobic meditation, popularly called yoga, wherein we work to stave off and postpone the inevitable decay of the body. We identify with our body: "I am that!" (as we point to our reflections) or "I can do this or that pose!" Yeah, right. Eventually all this will pass. And who are we then?
“Zombies tap into our primal fear of being consumed and force us to come up with something—anything—to distinguish ourselves from the ever-hungry, animated corpses traipsing about the countryside and eating flesh. Deep down, these schlocky horror flicks are asking some of the most profound questions: What is life? Why does it depend on killing and consuming other life? Does this cruel reality of survival have any intrinsic meaning?”
Douglas Rushkoff, Discover Magazine (Aug 07)
Link.
Video source: The American Nightmare.
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Sun 19 Aug 2007 at 08:50PM
Jesse
Sweet post!
Hey your viddies are looking awesome these days -- what encoding/compression are you using? Did you rip this from the DVD? What state was it in before you converted to Flash? Please share if you can!
Thanks!!
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