The cast and crew are slowly getting to know one another and what our lives are like outside of our involvement with The Dead Matter. CB Spencer does theatre work in Los Angeles and is a member of West Coast Ensemble. She has made appearances on “Ally McBeal” and “Passions”. Brian van Camp has been living in Michigan for the past year and a half working on a master’s degree in anthropology. Before that, he lived in Germany for five years and England for four years. He has acted in New World Disorder and Terror in the Mall. Tom Nagel and Sean Serino have both acted in horror/action movies before. Tom’s been in numerous films including The Butcher and The Beast of Bray Road, and Sean is featured in Robert Kurtzman’s own The Rage.
On my end, I’ve told folks that I’m finishing up my doctorate in philosophy at MIT. That’s led to some reasonable questions about what exactly it is that philosophers do. And I think any of my friends back in Boston would agree with me that that’s not the easiest question to answer. So I thought it’d be better to show folks what philosophers do—or at least some of what philosophers do—with a fun example. I owe it to discussions I’ve had with my friend Selim Berker, who is currently a member of the faculty of Harvard’s philosophy department.
Zombie movies of late have been pushing the envelope as far as what counts as a zombie, which raises the question: what are the necessary and sufficient conditions for zombiehood? Can a zombie move fast (Dawn of the Dead)? Can it have higher-order thoughts (Land of the Dead)? Can it be something that hasn’t first died and then come back to “life” (28 Days Later)? The only guide we seem to have in answering such questions is our intuitions. So here are my thoughts on the matter. Take one of the “ragers” from 28 Days Later. Now pretend that besides this rager being fast and not having died and then come back, it also has higher-order thoughts: a sense of self, the ability to plan, stuff like that. Is this suped-up rager a zombie? Seems to me that it isn’t. That’s a good start. But exactly why it isn’t a zombie is the more interesting question. On my end, I think there are several reasons. I’ll grant that zombies can move fast, but intuitively, a zombie has to have died and come back from the dead. They’re undead, and you can’t be undead if you’ve never been dead. More controversially, it seems a zombie can’t possess higher-order thoughts. Part of what makes zombies scary in a way that’s different from ghosts or vampires is their mindlessness: they can’t be reasoned with, for one thing. So this warms me up to claiming that being dead and then having come back from the dead, and lacking higher-order thoughts, are both necessary conditions on being a zombie. Being able only to move slowly, however, isn’t. What do you think?
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5 comments:
So then what philosphers do is talk about things? I don't understand the connextion. Maybe because I am not one though!
The connection is that Chris can "philosophize" the death out of any subject by asking question after question after question. And because he is brilliant, this does NOT make him a dick.
Actually, when I think about it, my 3-year-old is a philosopher because whenever I tell him anything, he always asks: "Why?" And when I give him an answer, his response is again, "Why?"
But oddly enough, whenever I say anything about Uncle Chris, his only response is: "The Darkness"
i was saying i didn't understand the movie & philosophy connextion - i understand what "philosophizing" is - my cat asks a lot of questions too
Hey, Chris. What a fun and interesting question! Do you think mummies are a kind of zombie? If so, then I think they are a counterexample to your analysis, because mummies seem to have beliefs about their past attitudes. Consider, for example, the villain in the 1999 movie 'The Mummy'. He was motivated by memories of the love he used to bear for 'Anck Su Namun', a woman in Pharaoh's court. Moreover, one of the characters in this film (namely, Beni) successfully bargains with the mummy to save his own life. If mummies are a kind of zombie on your view, then this suggests that one can reason with them. What say you to this? Do we have a counterexample on our hands? If you think not, I'd be curious to read about why mummies aren't genuine zombies.
Hey Mahrad! My gut reaction is that mummies aren't a counter-example. There's a tendency in the literature to distinguish mummies from zombies (and vampires and ghosts, for that matter) as a separate category of undead. So if there is such a thing as a 'common-sense' view of mummies, it's that they aren't a species of zombie.
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