美国国家公共电台 NPR Why The Zombie Craze Still Has Our Undying Affection

 

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

OK. Serious question - now, why are we still so obsessed¹ with zombies?

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BAMM")

MILO MANHEIM: (Rapping) Welcome to Zombieland. It's a party. Go ahead. Everybody dance. Do the draggy leg...

SIMON: Zombies have been shambling along for at least a decade - books, movies, TV shows, including the biggest basic cable hit in history. "The Walking Dead's" midseason premiere comes up next weekend. NPR's Neda Ulaby tells us that zombies show every sign of continuing to eat and occupy our brains.

NEDA ULABY, BYLINE²: You know the zombie apocalypse has hit a new cultural benchmark when a teenage heartthrob zombie on the Disney Channel starts dating a perky cheerleader.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "ZOMBIES")

MEG DONNELLY: (As Addison) My parents have always taught me that zombies are disgusting, dead-eyed freaks, but you're not hideous³ at all.

ULABY: The Disney movie "Zombies" premiered last night. It's the second "Romeo and Juliet" zombie romance to come out in recent years. Bringing zombies into Disney, such a tightly controlled brand, was a challenge for Joseph Raso, one of the movie's co-writers.

JOSEPH RASO: The biggest thing we thought was going to be a problem is, like, brains - that zombies want to eat brains. And we were going to, like, put our flagpole on that. Like, zombies need to eat brains. That's just, like, part of the lore⁴. It's so important. And Disney was like, of course, they have to eat brains.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "ZOMBIES")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Son, try this - brains in a can.

ULABY: Disney wouldn't let its zombies really eat brains. The canned brains are vegan substitutes. Disney's a bit late to the zombie party. And around 10 more zombie films for grown-ups are supposed to come out this year, including next week's "The Cured" starring Ellen Page.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "THE CURED")

ELLEN PAGE: (As Abbie) There's so much chaos⁵ after the outbreak.

ULABY: Why won't the zombie trend just die? I asked pre-eminent zombie scholar Sarah Juliet Lauro. She published her first academic paper on zombies more than a decade ago.

SARAH JULIET LAURO: I never, never thought that 10 years later, the zombie would still be going so strong.

ULABY: Back in 2007, Lauro made sense of the zombie craze by thinking of it through the economic meltdown, how zombies reflected our insecurities, our helplessness, our fragile safety net. Then when President Obama got elected, she saw a kind of cultural backlash in the form of "The Walking Dead."

LAURO: Which has this sort of end-of-government fantasy where everybody's just on their own - and it really makes sense that you always had a gun in your basement because now you really need it. And you have redneck characters who are heroes.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE WALKING DEAD")

ANDREW LINCOLN: (As Rick Grimes) I'm keeping this group together - alive.

ULABY: The audience for "The Walking Dead" has fallen from its record-setting peak of a few years ago, but it still counts as a monster hit. Its spinoff "Fear Of The Walking Dead" starts its fourth season this spring. And "The Walking Dead" still resonates.

(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "THE WALKING DEAD")

LINCOLN: (As Rick Grimes) This isn't a democracy anymore.

ULABY: Nor is the world of publishing, feeling zombie fatigue⁶ with such high-profile bestsellers as "Pride And Prejudice And Zombies." Author Justina Ireland has her own historical zombie novel coming out in April and a theory about why they stay so popular.

JUSTINE IRELAND: Every day is a new and terrible terror, like, coming at you from the news. And it's just nonstop. I think people are feeling overwhelmed. And I think that's a great metaphor⁷ for a zombie invasion, right? Like, that is the iconic scene of a zombie - is the hoard⁸ coming to overwhelm a town or a mall or, like, the handful of survivors⁹.

ULABY: Ireland would like to see more stories about zombies rooted in their actual mythology¹⁰ in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Haitian tales of the undead working in the canefields are part of its history of oppression and revolution. Ireland's book is set during the U.S. Civil War. It's called "Dread¹¹ Nation."

IRELAND: The zombies really represent this idea of slavery and how we never really addressed it.

ULABY: Yet it keeps rising up at our American unconscious, much like zombies rising from the dead, Ireland says. As for zombies' usefulness as metaphors¹²...

IRELAND: Zombies are just really freaking cool. And so it's really easy to talk about very difficult subjects when you just have this really cool, neat thing as the apparatus¹³.

ULABY: So it may be quite a while longer, Ireland says, until zombies as pop culture phenomena¹⁴ have been done to death.

IRELAND: Or undeath (laughter).

ULABY: Neda Ulaby, NPR News.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "RE: YOUR BRAINS")

JONATHAN COULTON, BYLINE: (Singing) All we want to do is eat your brains. We're not unreasonable¹⁵. I mean, no one's going to eat your eyes.

1 obsessed   

adj.心神不宁的,鬼迷心窍的,沉迷的

参考例句：

• He's obsessed by computers. 他迷上了电脑。
• The fear of death obsessed him throughout his old life. 他晚年一直受着死亡恐惧的困扰。

2 byline   

n.署名；v.署名

参考例句：

• His byline was absent as well.他的署名也不见了。
• We wish to thank the author of this article which carries no byline.我们要感谢这篇文章的那位没有署名的作者。

3 hideous   

adj.丑陋的，可憎的，可怕的，恐怖的

参考例句：

• The whole experience had been like some hideous nightmare.整个经历就像一场可怕的噩梦。
• They're not like dogs,they're hideous brutes.它们不像狗，是丑陋的畜牲。

4 lore   

n.传说；学问，经验，知识

参考例句：

• I will seek and question him of his lore.我倒要找上他，向他讨教他的渊博的学问。
• Early peoples passed on plant and animal lore through legend.早期人类通过传说传递有关植物和动物的知识。

5 chaos   

n.混乱，无秩序

参考例句：

• After the failure of electricity supply the city was in chaos.停电后，城市一片混乱。
• The typhoon left chaos behind it.台风后一片混乱。

6 fatigue   

n.疲劳，劳累

参考例句：

• The old lady can't bear the fatigue of a long journey.这位老妇人不能忍受长途旅行的疲劳。
• I have got over my weakness and fatigue.我已从虚弱和疲劳中恢复过来了。

7 metaphor   

n.隐喻，暗喻

参考例句：

• Using metaphor,we say that computers have senses and a memory.打个比方，我们可以说计算机有感觉和记忆力。
• In poetry the rose is often a metaphor for love.玫瑰在诗中通常作为爱的象征。

8 hoard   

n./v.窖藏，贮存，囤积

参考例句：

• They have a hoard of food in the basement.地下室里有他们贮藏的食物。
• How many curios do you hoard in your study?你在你书房里聚藏了多少古玩？

9 survivors   

幸存者，残存者，生还者( survivor的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• The survivors were adrift in a lifeboat for six days. 幸存者在救生艇上漂流了六天。
• survivors clinging to a raft 紧紧抓住救生筏的幸存者

10 mythology   

n.神话，神话学，神话集

参考例句：

• In Greek mythology,Zeus was the ruler of Gods and men.在希腊神话中，宙斯是众神和人类的统治者。
• He is the hero of Greek mythology.他是希腊民间传说中的英雄。

11 dread   

vt.担忧，忧虑；惧怕，不敢；n.担忧，畏惧

参考例句：

• We all dread to think what will happen if the company closes.我们都不敢去想一旦公司关门我们该怎么办。
• Her heart was relieved of its blankest dread.她极度恐惧的心理消除了。

12 metaphors   

隐喻( metaphor的名词复数 )

参考例句：

• I can only represent it to you by metaphors. 我只能用隐喻来向你描述它。
• Thus, She's an angel and He's a lion in battle are metaphors. 因此她是天使，他是雄狮都是比喻说法。

13 apparatus   

n.装置，器械；器具，设备

参考例句：

• The school's audio apparatus includes films and records.学校的视听设备包括放映机和录音机。
• They had a very refined apparatus.他们有一套非常精良的设备。

14 phenomena   

n.现象

参考例句：

• Ade couldn't relate the phenomena with any theory he knew.艾德无法用他所知道的任何理论来解释这种现象。
• The object of these experiments was to find the connection,if any,between the two phenomena.这些实验的目的就是探索这两种现象之间的联系，如果存在着任何联系的话。

15 unreasonable   

adj.不讲道理的，不合情理的，过度的

参考例句：

• I know that they made the most unreasonable demands on you.我知道他们对你提出了最不合理的要求。
• They spend an unreasonable amount of money on clothes.他们花在衣服上的钱太多了。