I'm a Survivor?

On Zombies and Plane Crashes

Excellent question.

Hey, folks. It’s been a while, I know.

Winter is coming to an end, and I am slowly coming out of hibernation. I had not been planning on going into hibernation, mind you, but after finding myself shut up in a sort of interior cave during the dreary months of January and February, I decided to just let myself stay a while and rest in my melancholy.

I’m trying to get back to my “regularly scheduled programming” now, but am making no promises quite yet. It’s been a rough time clawing at the places where tiny strips of light seep in, and the job isn’t done. Until it is, I’ll do my best to push out some tiny folded-up notes, at least. Here’s the first one.

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There are two things I’ve watched on TV (well, Netflix and HBO-plus) lately that have been rolling around my head ever since.

The first was Sociedad de la Nieve (Society of the Snow) about the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes in 1972.

The other was The Last of Us, which takes place in modern times after a devastating worldwide zombie apocalypse in 2003. It’s set roughly twenty years later in a kind of parallel universe where danger and death still lurk in the shadows.

And then there are the zombies.

Needless to say, they’ve both got me thinking about survival and to what degree our will to live even in awful situations is innate.

But before talking about survival, a note on these two works: they are both masterpieces.

Like many others, I’d heard of the story behind Society of the Snow before, the takeaway that everyone remembers being, “They ate each other to survive.”

The story was apparently Americanized and told in the Hollywood-produced movie Alive, though I haven’t seen that version; it came out when I was a little too young to be exposed to that kind of bleakness. Judging from the trailer, it looks pretty similar.

I’d always been curious, though, so when I heard about Society of the Snow, I knew I had to see it. It was well-acted and visceral, with (I believe) Uruguayan actors who were partly chosen because of their physical similarities to the actual people. It was also in Spanish, which I appreciated more than the somewhat silly technique of having English speakers speak with the accents of whatever their native language is supposed to be.

I mean, really.

The Last of Us, for its part, is equally visceral and bleak, but with a decidedly less optimistic “transcendence of the human spirit” vibe. Its violence is shocking and 100% believable, the line between regular people and frightened animals blurring to a mere fuzzy, transparent dash.

Since I, like all of us, am a self-centered human who relates to stories by fantasizing about how I’d fare if I were a part of them, I wondered how I’d personally fare in each of those worlds that the creators so expertly built. These musings didn’t take long, and came back with a resounding answer:

I am 100% not built for survival.

Really, most of us aren’t. You only get to be exceptional in one or a few areas in life, and staying alive when all hell breaks loose isn’t in the cards for the majority.

Be it a plane crash in a frozen hellscape or a zombie apocalypse, I’d hope to be the first to die, preferably quickly.

But what do I know?

We can only really know ourselves in our present context. Drop us off somewhere else, and (I bet) all bets are off.

Because it’s always possible to surprise ourselves. Watching these stories it’s easy to think, “Oh, I would totally give up and die, and I’d do it on purpose.” But there are so many things we don’t and can’t know about ourselves, which is both eerie and fascinating.

Maybe we’d be desperate to live, at any cost.

So maybe I’d be eaten, or maybe I’d be working to convince everyone else to let me hack up the dead bodies for our survival, away from their lines of sight to protect their sensibilities lest they descend into madness. Maybe I’d be the first zombie, or maybe I’d kill zombie and opposing human equally mercilessly.

Hopefully these are things we won’t ever have to find out about ourselves.