"Still Cool as a Zombie": Community, the Zombie Aesthetic, and the Politics of Belonging

被引:0
|
作者
Cox, Colin A. [1 ]
机构
[1] Northeast State Community Coll, Humanities Dept, Blountville, TN 37617 USA
来源
HUMANITIES-BASEL | 2024年 / 13卷 / 05期
关键词
zombie; <italic>Community</italic>; Dan Harmon; film; television; psychoanalysis; affect theory;
D O I
10.3390/h13050117
中图分类号
C [社会科学总论];
学科分类号
03 ; 0303 ;
摘要
From Night of the Living Dead (1968) to The Walking Dead (2010-2022), zombie media offers a consistent refrain, namely to avoid becoming a zombie. This refrain makes intuitive sense. Why would anyone welcome becoming a member of a roaming, mindless, and often violent undead horde symbolizing humanity's destruction? However, zombification has affirmative, emancipatory possibilities. In "Epidemiology," from Season 2 of the NBC sitcom Community (2009-2015), we see the zombie's affirmative and emancipatory potential. In this essay, I argue zombification enlivens Community by provoking the show to rethink its relationship to its nominal protagonist, Jeff Winger, and to itself as a piece of avant-garde comedy television produced during the "Golden Age of Television," what media scholars also call, "Peak" or "Prestige TV." In this episode, Community evolves its understanding of its central protagonist by shifting, in some respects, from a conventional and historically predictable character to a character far less conventional.
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