Non-places in post-apocalyptic cinema: zombie movies
Abstract
The “space” has always been a fundamental element in post-apocalyptic narratives. Among all the different kind of spaces, those considered “non-places”, defined by Augé, represent an important part in these narratives. Those are places with no identity, no defining features, denying any personality to the space, and which in these kind of narratives help to build the characters and the story in a context in which, after the destruction of the world as we know it, the spaces have lost their identity. This article tries to trace an outline of the use and function of the “non-places” in post-apocalyptic cinema, focusing in the sub-genre of zombie movies. In these situations the characters have lost everything, and they can’t feel themselves identified with any space. According to these, the non-places are usually used to represent this loss of identity and direction of the characters.
Keywords: non-places, cinema, zombies, space, post-apocalypse
Non-places in post-apocalyptic cinema: zombie movies
María Gil Poisa
Texas A&M University
Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Kansas anymore.
(The Wizard of Oz)
The reason why I want to apply the notion of non-place to post-apocalyptic cinema, specifically in zombie movies, is the importance of the element of the space on them. Both in the shape of traditional non-places and in places which have been devastated and stripped of their identity, and therefore transformed into non-places, the importance of this element is always present.
To begin, I want to specify what we mean with post-apocalyptic cinema. This genre encompasses all those movies which narrate the destruction of civilization and society, generally western societies, as we know them today. It usually happens abruptly and by causes that human beings cannot control: natural disasters such as volcanos or earthquakes, or invasions of an outside uncontrollable element like a virus or animals. In many of those narratives we follow the protagonists. Sometimes what the story tells is the outbreak, the “apocalypses”, but in some other cases what we witness is the consequences of the catastrophe and the way in which survivors need to keep on with their lives.
The second concept I would like to briefly present is Auge’s non-places. The French author conceives the non-places in opposition to “places”, defined as spaces with an identity, personal links and a history (or story). In that way, he understands the non-space as “a space which cannot be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity” (Augé 1995: 77). As in the concept of “place”, it is something that is not possible. There is not a “pure” non-place, the non-place is a complement of the place. They are those empty spaces, unnatural, which can’t be found; anonymous places which cancel the individuals, transforming them into a consumer of space. Ageographical spaces, they cannot be located due to their lack of identity; globalized spaces without identifying signs. Because they are not localized spaces we all can feel identification with them, but this kind of space will never be a personal and private space. We can identify the spaces, but we cannot feel identification; they are opposed to the wish of have their own, personal and individual space. We can be alone in those spaces, but they will not be intimate for us. They can work, in some way, as a means to escape from oneself and our usual environment, the separation between ourselves and the space around us as an escape way.
As the sociologist Manuel Delgado points out in his work El animal público (1999), in the non-place it is the traveller who creates the space by passing by, without connecting with anybody, unlinked and isolated, dehumanizing the space even more. These people will not try to reproduce a personal space in these places, but they will try to accept this lack of identity as something natural and belonging to its nature and condition. Non-places are totally integrated in modern society; they are recognizable, but we don’t stop to think about their origin or function. They are simply there, as spaces for transit.
The non-place, due to its own nature, fixes two qualities: the space (lacking identity and history, forgettable) and the relationship of the individual with it (no identification, no belonging). The human being builds its identity by comparing different features of him or herself with the world around, with infinite elements and concepts of which the space is only one of them. When we compare ourselves with the space in which we are, we are defining our own being, in some part, from this environment. When the individual is in a non-place, none contextual features can be found. These spaces can only work as a repression of the personal identity (lack of identification) and as a way to escape, the feeling of invulnerability. Places such as hospitals, airports, highways… places for transition and movement, unaffected by the crossing people, with no traces of the passing identities. Though these places have always existed, their proliferation and the conscience of themselves are a result of our time and two of its features: globalization and segregation.
Globalization is one of the reasons why non-places are identified as identityless spaces. The concept of space has changed with the new communications and transportation means; our planet is smaller now with the easiness of movement; right now, everything is close. With these new contacts, the construction of identities in a space level, context or origin is going to be modified, and the individual identities are overlapped with the collective ones. In a Western world, in which almost all of us can easily move around, this spaces stripped of their identities are more and more usual and quotidian. Communications and people movements provoke that these non-places are transformed in almost parodies of themselves, in an extreme example of lack of identity. A mall is not different from Madrid to Los Angeles; the airport is very similar in Buenos Aires and in Dublin.
The second feature is the obsession for security, reflected in a world of segregation and barriers. In a world marked by fear, the worry about security has been maximized, especially in transition places as the previously described, so barriers are extended, and individuals are segregated. At the same time we are bringing people closer one to the other, developing new identities and shrinking the world, we are stopping this process with the establishment of barriers. We join people through globalization and communications, but at the same time we are splitting this union through physical and institutional barriers, establishing these impersonal spaces as separations between identities in movements and development.
Both features, segregation and globalization, drive us to the concept of simulation: what we are seeing is not real, and we know it. We accept cities as simulation, TV-cities, spaces which produce a familiarity which distance us from reality: “There are not demonstrations in Disneyland” (Sorkin 1992: XV.) Baudrillard’s hyperrealistic Disneyland is a classic example of non-place; the theme park as a transition centre, a unique city made for the tourist: nobody stays over there, everybody is just passing. That is the city which imitates and contains many other cities, cities with no inhabitants. This is a city with restricted liberties, the one which will never be a democracy, the place which imitates everything but it’s nothing: they pretend to be real to get the identification of the audience in a fictional hegemony. They are “real” places which pretend to define the individual, but nobody can actually feel identified with them. It is the fiction space which makes us think about reality.
As a last feature, Augé points out that the non-places are invaded by text: the signs as instructions; we need them because they are no our natural spaces, we don’t belong to them, so they need to be decoded. Those texts are addressed to people as users, as part of a dehumanized mass, the individual itself is nullified. Non-places are not made for human individuals, but for dehumanization.
However, some authors understand the non-place as potential places; from them something can be built, there is a future. They see the city as a landscape which is continuously made and unmade, and in which places and non-places can be interchanged with the pass of the time. Cities are constantly built and rebuilt, a place which was already considered part of the collective identity and memory is destroyed and replaced by a new one, creating a non-place.
As a last note about the non-places, Mitchell’s vision of the city in his “urban requiem” says that non-cities kill traditional cities by delocalization, stripping them from their identity through the non-places, in a faster and faster changing process towards the lack of identification and collective identity. In her article “Paisajes urbanos y ‘no lugares’ en el thriller español contemporáneo: Fausto 5.0 y La caja 507”, Carmen Herrero says that “the user is forced to constantly show his or her identity, emphasizing the condition of anonymity, therefore reinforcing the condition of the modern humanity as lonely beings” [the translation is mine].
To end with this section, some examples of spaces which are part of our everyday, and are usually considered non-places: airports, malls, hospitals, highways, factories, amusement parks.
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Those are considered transition places, crossways that everyone can recognize. What I want to do next is to apply them to the subgenre of zombie movies, as a paradigm of post-apocalyptic cinema.
Non.places and non-cities in zombie movies
Before we start talking about the relationship between non-places and zombie movies we should delimit which kind of films we are referring to. Zombie cinema is a subgenre of horror pictures which could be classified into the catastrophes films and, in most cases, (post)apocalyptic cinema. We shouldn’t forget that in many movies which can be considered apocalyptic, we don’t see the real concluded destruction of civilization, but the first outbreak or attack which triggers the chaos and with it the action. On the other hand, in some other movies the situation is already totally out of control and society is devastated; those are the ones considered post-apocalyptic. The core of the genre is the use of the archetype of the zombie defined in the 60s by Romero, with a second stage with the peak in early 2000s, inheriting features from other previous subgenres such as the catastrophes, invasions, and even the traditional Haitian zombie. The genre, when talking about modern horror, is considered to have been started by George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead in 1968, and it is also the most paradigmatic example which meets all the conditions to talk about non-places in zombie movies from the early years. This film changed the archetype of the zombie, took features from previous science fiction cinema, and established the first canon of the genre.
In post-apocalyptic zombie cinema after the total destruction there are no places; their previous identity has been destroyed, as in many science fiction dystopias. Places as we used to know them don’t exist anymore; the context is changed and, therefore, characters and their actions are changed as well. Also, in the classic case of zombie genre, we have the invasive and attacking element, zombies themselves, who act as the chasing enemy of the characters. Because of them nobody can settle in a place for a long time, danger is constant and means are limited; survivors are transformed into nomads. This status of devastated and transition places strips them from their identities and long-term memory, leaving just short-term prints, memories of destruction.
In this way, many spaces that were considered places before are now non-places: the same houses are transition or isolation spots, since victims are chased by the enemy. Spaces have been dehumanized, and chaos and destruction have been expanded. After the outbreak, sacking and attacks, both by people and zombies, spaces which we used to recognize have been destroyed; they will never be the same. Dismantled streets, dumped cars and silent buildings full of conscienceless human shapes walking around are the setting for the genre. Society as we used to know it have disappeared, and our characters are now into a survival dystopia in which space has lost its identity; what before used to be safe and familiar places are perceived now as dangerous and unknown. Also, these spaces are not going to be reconstructed, because destruction is already assumed, though they can be recycled, transforming the reality that we are used to in something totally new. When before the multitude tended to gather in a centre, an urban heart, now they need to come back to the periphery to escape from themselves, or from corruption itself, which is one of the traditional interpretations for the archetype of the zombie. For example, in The Walking Dead comic book and TV show, the survivors try to create a community and own a new space in a prison, which is traditionally one of the paradigmatic non-spaces. Trying to inhabit it as a hopeful place, giving to it an identity and community feeling, from a non-place of isolation for members expelled of society, they try to create a place for living and share.
In addition, we can observe that in these narrations, though it is not exclusive to them, the literary/cinematographic space have been globalized: as audience, we are not really concerned with where the films are setting in, what is important is what is happening, so cities, the human space par excellence are now just generic spaces, with no beginning nor ending. The lack of shape and orientation of non-cities in this kind of cinema has a clear function: without established limits or directions, without any reference point, not only the characters are disoriented, the audience is as well. We, the audience, just like them, have lost not only our identity, our past and our future, but also our direction and hope. In this way the non-city creates an isolated and agoraphobic atmosphere which rises the tension and collaborates with the rhythm of the movie. We fell locked, with no escape and, at the same time, chased; if the city has no borders, no limits, it will have no end neither, no way out. This joins the features of the enemy: multiple and dehumanized, we don’t know the number so it could be infinite; it is everywhere surrounding us, and it will never get tired. We have an infinite and unstoppable persecutor, and a chased individual locked in an unlimited space. In this kind of cinema the city is dead; it has been killed by non-city, and it will not be back from dead as Romero’s zombies would do.