Post-Modernism/Post-Structuralism and Community

“IT CAN’T BE THE END OF DAYS… IT’S NOT 2012”

Warm Bodies, Zombieland, The Walking Dead, World War Z, Night of the Living Dead, Dead Snow, and Fido. This vast obsession with the living dead has triggered a movement towards an eventual world’s end and apocalypse. Strangely, our fears are only triggered by the extreme constructions of such a time. In a Halloween episode of Community, there is a comic interaction with such a construction of reality that the hyperreal and simulacrum take over. This Zombie mania “prepares us to meet the power of imagination”, and yet the “absence of this reality is reality.” We have not yet been overpowered by Zombies, but our creations have altered and constructed a newfound reality.

            The hyperreal is a world that is remade in the image of our desires. With the countless threats of our world coming to an end, we can only imagine how this might happen. Now we are encouraged (not only by the church) to prepare to defend and protect ourselves from the “end of days.” “The hyperreal overwhelms the reality of the people we actually live among through a parade of images that project a life that consumers are encouraged to try to live.” As a holiday that surrounds satanic traditions, Community uses this opportunity to represent and project images in our reality. The episode then transfigures a new reality that are images and projections of the Zombie apocalypse. This leads us to simulation.

            Where there is simulation, there are four phases of an image that Community and the roaring Zombie apocalypse theories emphasize. Simulation is a complete reproduction (not a representation of imitation). This allows a new real to replace the original. So as actors play characters, they then dress up for Halloween to only become Zombies. The first phase, the image is reflection of a basic reality. Community follows a study group in a community college which reflects common middle-class lifestyles and situations that follow that reality. The second phase, the image masks and perverts a basic reality. This is done when the characters have dressed up, created, and acted like other reflections in reality. Halloween acts as a mask to disrupt and displace our conceptions of a basic reality. The actors attempt to create complete lifelike reproductions. For one day, there is a new real that replaces the original. The third phase, the image masks the absence of a reality.  Through this phase, we are the most lost in a reality that we cannot recognize as a reality. Once the rabies related pathogen converts the people into Zombies, reality changes and proves that it isn’t static. The loss of reality control distorts our conceptions of a basic reality. In one 30-minutes episode, the audience is asked to look in from the outside (through our own reality) of a reality that exists for only 30 minutes. This repetition of signifiers are everywhere, so this representation of an imaginary Zombie-like reality wants to makes us separate what is real from what is not, but the “real is no longer real.” This murders the real in our normal lives as we try to imitate the real. However, the imitation is two steps removed from any reality. The fourth phase, is that the image bears no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own simulacrum. As the Zombies take over in Community, it bears no connection to any reality we understand. It now is its own reproduction to replace our original understanding of reality. This leads us to believe that the realities we have conceived of as true or false is now the new real. Once the outbreak has come to an end, the memories of the Zombies are canceled at an attempt to replace reality. Amidst the confusion, one voicemail from one character to another outlines the indisputable un-relatable resemblance to any reality. It is its own simulacrum; “the simulacrum is true.” The simulacrum is “a counterfeit, sham, fake, or pretend representation that marks the absence, not the existence, of the objects they claim to represent.”  

“Congrats! You did what Zombies do!” The persona of a Zombie-like reality is composed, constructed, and altered into its own simulacrum. The more we see it, the more it convinces us that not only isn’t it absent from our reality, but it has consumed our reality. “There was something in the air tonight” says Community character during this Zombie outbreak. What will it be like when the world ends? Everything that we have decided would happen in our relationship to each phase of the images of the Zombie apocalypse. What do Zombies do? Only what we have decided they do. Not only are these phases relevant to the media, but it has contributed to a hyperreality of the Zombie simulacrum.