Abstract
The zombie narrative could be regarded as a metaphor for reflecting on and externalising social anxieties in relation to the loss of individuality. Most zombie films tend to play with the anxieties of an imaginary male audience whose sense of sexual identity—understood as inherently heterosexual—seems to be in direct correlation to the male protagonist’s fate. The heterosexual identity seems to be at stake during the narrative and is somewhat jeopardised by the threat of the protagonist becoming a zombie at any given point. With such an emphasis on male relationships, it is possible to argue that the imminent possibility of the disappearance of humankind becomes the catalyst for the emergence of homosocial feelings among such men and, as a result, the emergence and development of bromance narratives. The zombie comedy, especially, appears to operate as the bromantic and homosocial narrative par excellence in which male characters can finally express their mutual ‘love’ in the disguise of brotherly banter, while using jokes as a shield to cover up what are perhaps their real feelings for one another.
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Notes
- 1.
Although, most recently, Jonathan Levine’s Warm Bodies (2013) breaks with this type of narrative by focusing on the relationship between a still-living teenage girl and an oddly introspective teenage zombie boy (who lives in a world mostly dominated by zombies) as they fall in love.
- 2.
It is only more recently that zombie movies such as 28 Days Later, Francis Lawrence’s I Am Legend (2007), Paul W. S. Anderson’s Resident Evil (2002) or the hit television series The Walking Dead (2010–present) have embraced female figures who play a more active role in helping rid the world of the zombie plague.
- 3.
This component of the narrative could also be regarded as a commentary on fandom and the homosocial aspects of bromance. The type of blind devotion that both the unknown owner of the room and Max show towards the wrestler demonstrates that the male-to-male dynamic operating within male-to-male fandom reconceptualises heterosexual masculinity through, as Garry Whannel points out, ‘a new repertoire of cultural practices which seek to demarcate, through space and ritual, a distinctive, defensive yet celebratory mode of being male’ (2008, 191).
- 4.
This crisis of masculinity is all the more evident in the third instalment of the saga (Plaga Zombie: Revolución Tóxica), in which a great part of the storyline centres on John losing quite a lot of bodyweight and, therefore, regarding himself as less of a man, while Max becomes a mother figure to one of the zombies. Interestingly, the director chooses two situations of conflict that are more commonplace in chick flicks or female dramas and that clearly feminise the male protagonists.
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Subero, G. (2016). Bromance, Homosociality and the Crisis of Masculinity in the Latin American Zombie Movie. In: Gender and Sexuality in Latin American Horror Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56495-5_5
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