Zombie Babies!

Tonight in my "Notebooks" class we realized that Benjamin's project does actually ask us to think about the mall as having once been the possibility of a utopian project. Our first instinct is to laugh, but Benjamin would perhaps have us hold onto that laughter. In other words, Benjamin gives us a way of rethinking nature as well as conventional versions of "History" and of progress through his insistence that we rethink the idea of what constitutes an historical failure.

i immediately thought of two things. First, of an interview with Christopher Walken last summer in the New York Times Magazine in which he and the interviewer go see Dawn of the Dead and afterwards Walken says something like, "Not a zombie baby! That's too much." He's referring to a scene in which the surviving humans of a zombie invasion collect at the mall for safety, but one of the characters, a white woman pregnant with a black man's baby, gets bit by a zombie and consequently gives birth to a zombie baby.

i also thought of how many times my students have laughed at the "crazy hippies" in both films we've watched in class to give them some background for last week's reading of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: Berkeley in the 60's and Gimme Shelter. As the naked woman attempted to mount the stage during "Under My Thumb," one of my students leaned over with a gnarly grimace and asked, "Why doesn't someone arrest her?"

The failed interracial harmony at the department store room-to-go delivery mirrors the failed interracial harmony at Altamont. The sixties mantra of free love, symbolized by a black man in a green suit dancing with a blonde white girl in a crocheted dress who is stabbed by an "angel," is extinguished by potent government-issued LSD and security guards paid in beer. A millennial mall, invested in "harmless" circulation of convention, cannot bear the new.

But for Benjamin the question might now become, why couldn't hundreds of thousands of people come together to hear the Rolling Stones? What has become so vapid about contemporary malls, with their policed wares ranging from adolescent/thirty-something adult contemporary punk accessories to cell phones to engagement rings, that children, especially interracial newborns, are better off zombies?