In the past I already told you what I think of zombies and killing my mother, so you have a point to work from. (Grammarian police: I know that I should've said, "a point from which to work," but that sounds really prissy to me. From here on out just deal with it.)
Currently we have a new problem and that problem is that bookstores now carry huge sections on paranormal romance. Really? I'm truly glad that I no longer work at a bookstore. (Plus, do you know how much a box of books weighs? And do you know how many people don't know the alphabet in order? Some people will even put a book back on the shelf with the spine in. I really want to follow them home and see if their bookcases are filled with books with no titles showing. It must be impossible for them to ever find one after it goes on the shelf.)
What this means is that paranormal romance is becoming part of our collective mythology. Yesterday, after we had been studying Torah, my sister-in-law (who is here taking care of me) and I decided to figure it out. Vampires we kind of get. It's a person who is given to fulfilling his/her dark addictions. In the famous Twilight books we see people who struggle with this addiction on various levels. Some occasionally suck the blood of humans, some not so much. The evil ones just give into the addiction and hurt anyone unfortunate to be around them. Then there are the wolf guys, who don't want to be inhuman, but have to do it in order to protect their tribe. We see this all the time and all through history within the realm of wars and on down to the smaller order, street gangs. So the romance comes out in the form of a virtuous but delicious girl who falls in love with the goodness she sees within a monster. Or in her case, a couple of monsters. She ends up having a baby monster, becoming a monster herself and living happily ever after. At least presumably. Check back in a couple of hundred years.
Yesterday the Calendar section of the LA Times had a front page photo having to do with the new movie "Warm Bodies". It described the lead actor as playing a "slacker zombie". What other kinds of zombies are there? Type A zombies? If you eat the most brains are you overachieving? Can you get fat from eating brains?
Obviously there is a lot about zombies that I don't know. Well, I can tell you that I'm not a slacker muser, so I went out to do some research. I dragged my sister-in-law with me. We went to see "Warm Bodies" to see if we could understand the mythology being created.
I'm trying to establish the legend about myself that I can drash from any starting point, zombies included. What I learned from this particular movie is that zombies are scary because they don't have a collective memory. They don't know who they are or where they came from. The main character is called "R" because all he can remember from the past is that he thought his name started with the letter "r". Kabballistaclly we could have a hey day (hay day?) with this. We could run with it in the direction of Bina and letters and clues to remembering Torah and the universe and everything. But you guys aren't into that, so we'll go in a different direction.
It turns out the the main character is not a slacker. He's trying to remember. He collects things that are meaningful to him and creates a space where he can listen to his looted records and stare at the things he's collected. Mementos. (Another day I will try to remember to write about the kids' movie "The Guardians" and the connection to zombies but this post is getting far longer than my general audience's attention span.) He collects things that connect him to his past. Eventually he collects a pretty girl (instead of eating her brains) and she helps remind him of things through what we Jews would call arguing.
There are different kinds of arguing. When I was a kid many many adults would tell me to shut up and not argue. If you are respectful to each other, Jews have no problem arguing all day. It's fun. It means, "I don't understand because it seems to me ..." Now, if you tell a kid to just shut up and stop arguing, what you're really telling them is, "I don't care if you understand things. I just don't want to deal with you." Nice message. Children who are seen but not heard must have a very difficult time developing intellectually. But I digress (kind of).
When we are born we are the closest and the furthest that we will ever be to our own humanity. We understand everything and nothing. A zombie is someone who has become so focused on one thing (in this case it's eating your brains) that there's no room for anything else. (I'm not going into the whole brain dead thing here, because that's not a part of the mythology of the particular movie we watched.) There's no room left in this person for their humanity. People were created in the image of the Holy One. ALL of them. The smelly guy who asks you for some change has a spark of godliness in him. The kids rotting in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay have a spark. It is our communal job to remind them who they were... who we were collectively. When we lose our historical perspective, we focus more easily on eating people's brains. Ask people for clues. Everyone you meet has a clue that you need to become more whole. If you don't like who you are, look for the clues that will make you better.
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