“The first rule of Zombieland: Cardio. When the zombie outbreak first hit, the first to go, for obvious reasons...were the fatties.”
You know you shouldn’t laugh. Maybe you don’t even want to laugh. But the laughter is not necessarily mean-spirited in the sense of being offensive to overweight people. Some of that laughter is stimulated by the fact that there in this, the first of what are many rules of living among zombies. (In the unlikely event that there is someone who does not get the allusion, this quote references the infamous rules of “fight club” in the movie Fight Club.) As the movie progresses, the rules pile up fast and furious, but this first rule is at least partially funny because it rings with realism. If the fundamental element of survival is based upon running for your life, then—as offensive at might be—it is a simple fact of life that those who run slowest will not run the farthest before things turn really, really bad.
“Oh, America. I wish I could tell you that this was still America, but I've come to realize that you can't have a country without people. And there are no people here. No, my friends. This is now the United States of Zombieland.”
And yet, the announcement about the first rule of zombieland is not the opening line of Zombieland. The viewer is thrown right into the plot with video of a munching zombie accompanied by the voiceover narration of Columbus. Time is not wasted on a slow steady buildup of backstory; the narrative begins at a 9 and dials it up to 10 almost immediately. This is America and it is in the grip of fear. The backstory is supplied: mad cow disease transforms into mad person disease and from there it is just a mere hiccup into mad zombies running around. Of course, the film was released long after the vampire which dominated the early part of 21st century horror films had been gobbled up by the zombie horde so backstory by this point in the cycle had really become almost entirely unnecessary. And yet, the film appeared before the genre had reached the point where it has become perfectly acceptable that there be no explanations at all for what brought on the zombie apocalypse.
“We had hope. We had each other. And without other people, well, you might as well be a zombie."
Zombie movies, it must be remembered, are rarely actually about the zombies. That the zombies act as a horde endows them with metaphorical significance related to society conditions. And, usually, the horde is engaged allegorically to comment upon the societal conditions of the survival of humanity. The film’s closing lines become the exclamation point punctuating the allegorical message here. Zombies who are actually zombies are really not different from humans who don’t engage. Call it zombification: the film’s message is that an apocalyptic attack of brain-eating or flesh-eating or whatever-eating monstrous creatures of the living dead does not really require the monsters. That message may not be particularly deep, but it became surprising prescient about a decade after the film’s release. The United States of Zombieland had come to exist without a single case of brain-eating resulting from the infection that had unleashed the divide which starkly separated the populace. Though, admittedly, there did seem to be some cases of brains having been eaten.
