bodies || 'body terror song' and zombies revisited
I'm so sorry that you have to have a body.
This is my body
Covered in skin
And not all of it
You can see
Kate Nash, ‘Mouthwash’
I don’t mind being eaten.
Ed, Shaun of the Dead
There’s a game I think I’ve invented, but has probably cropped up in a hundred different social contexts, and so probably has a hundred different authors1. My name for it, though, is ‘Give Me A Reason to Drink’. The rules are very simple: you go around a circle, and each persons says a negative thing that, one way or the other, is impacting them – anything from ‘being ghosted’ to ‘PMS’ to ‘the climate crisis’. The person expressing their personal woe takes a drink. If anyone else feels that that they beat a similar cross (“I too am upset at the result of the recent US election”), they take a swig too.
About a month ago, some colleagues and I were sat around a table, killing time before a karaoke session. Some people do not like to participate in karaoke while sober2 , so I proposed we play my game. One participant questioned the rules (“why can’t we say something nice to drink to”), but this attempt to challenge my authority was promptly squashed. A new rule was added: anyone who says tries to say something positive has to down their drink. I am, in my own way, a petty little tyrant.
We went around the table, sharing our little miseries. By the third round, I came out with:
Having to have a body.
Some of our party immediately understood what I meant, making little sounds of agreement and drinking deep from their cups. But one participant – I think the plucky upstart I mentioned before – was confused. Was I saying that I didn’t want a body?
And the answer is no, I’m not saying that. Not exactly. I do want a corporeal form. The alternative is not to exist at all (too terrifying a notion at this current juncture), or to be disembodied, a consciousness uploaded to the cloud like those women in that episode of Black Mirror (also terrifying, for reasons that deserve their own, separate, newsletter). I largely enjoy having a body. I am a happy participant in the physical plane, by and large.
But you can want something (like, say, gainful employment) and still appreciate its foibles (like, say, having to work when I want to be writing my newsletter which will, at some point, be about zombies).
Having a body means, of course, being subject to your body. Mind over matter only goes so far and eventually you have to respect your physical limits, whatever those may be for you. I’m lucky, really. My main complaint is bad eyesight. But even fortunate fools like me still have to cope with the humdrum pains of humanity – aching heads, nervous guts, a sleepiness that settles over you when you wish to be awake and young and alive. Others have to deal with much more difficult, chronic conditions. Recently a friend told me about how her immunosuppression meant that a common cold can lead to the contraction of “weird extra things” like “an infected tongue”, which are “just so unnecessary”. There are, of course, greater obstacles still than this mysteriously ailing tongue. We all know people with clear diagnoses of chronic conditions, and others who are desperate for a diagnosis for some profound but mysterious symptom or symptoms.
I am grateful, forever grateful, that my lousy corneas seems to be my greatest physical concern. But I do not take for granted that this will always be the case. I am in my 30s now. I am almost certainly past my physical peak3, biologically speaking. Maybe I feel this especially keenly as a woman who has been informed she has (like her fellows) a limited reproductive period, because in a way I feel like both society and I are counting my eggs, quite literally, before they’re hatched.
Even putting nebulous notions of fertility aside, I am aware that physically things can still fall apart. Things can always fall apart.
Outside the subject of functionality, there is the inescapable materiality of it all. Having a body means having to occupy physical space. This means we run the constant risk of being witnessed. For all our earnest desire to be seen and understood, we do not necessarily wish to be judged by a pair of cold and disinterested eyes. Earlier today, I was informed that a group of men on seemingly organised on Twitter to harass a woman who tweeted about passing her PhD viva. The comments were predictably vile, but one of the comments that struck me in particular was one that said she had “crow’s feet”. A comment levelled by one stranger against the other, almost like an accusation. Certainly as an act of denigration.
The person who did the tweet is not in any way a public figure. She’s just some person. She couldn’t have thought that publishing this Tweet would attract this much anger. Simply existing is enough to risk the outrage of others. Existing in a body leaves you open to scorn.
You, her, me. All of us. Strangers will have cast any number of aspersions on my body. As will have my colleagues, my friends, those who know me. I am being compared and contrasted to any number of people, because we are all comparing and contrasting, all the time. Even those of us who are enlightened and know that, of course, it’s what’s on the inside that counts.
Metaphorically speaking, that is. Because some people have very treacherous insides indeed.
Even if we could somehow divorce ourselves from concerns about our appearances, there is something about being observable that can feel utterly rotten when you are feeling vulnerable. I have cried on the Tube, and hoped that none of my fellow passengers would mention it. Which is a funny sentence to write down: I had to hope people wouldn’t display compassion to me. Because that would have been awkward.
The wish to be invisible is, of course, related to shame. The common adolescent desire for “the ground to swallow me whole” or to “just disappear” is telling here.
Maybe little children are less likely to have these concerns. There was a song we used to sing in primary school. I don’t know the title, but the lyrics went a little something like:
I’ve got a body
A very busy body
And I like to move around like this
Bless those teachers. They were trying to instil something positive into a bunch of impressionable children. But they were no match for 90s/00s society. Perhaps a part of me can still appreciate my very busy body, but oh, I don’t know if I can celebrate it with my whole heart.
Today I wanted to instead call your attention to a very different body song: AJJ4’s ‘Body Terror Song’. It essentially summarises all the above into a neat, 17-line package with a catchy refrain:
I’m so sorry that you have to have a body
I’m so sorry that you have to have a body, oh yeah
I’m very sorry that you have to have a body
I cannot stop recommending this song to people. Its chorus comes to me, unbidden, all the time. The sentiment behind it is not complex, no, not at all, it is painfully simple. An expression of sympathy for all mankind, an acknowledgement of our terrible fragility, a fragility born from our body:
One that will hurt you, and by the subject of so much of your fear
It will betray you, be used against you, then it’ll fail on you my dear
I frequently misremember the name of this track, and call it the ‘Body Horror Song’. This might seem like just a simple mistake; while I know the argument that “there’s no such thing as true synonyms”5, “horror” and “terror” are at least both gesticulating towards a common sensation.
But I’m going to back myself and say actually it’s more profound than that and I am quite cleverly making a subconscious link between this song and the genre of horror. Horror, after all, frequently deals with blood and viscera, with the grotesque, with death and rot.
The genre is, appropriately, the natural home for zombies. Creatures who, as they carry on with their parody of life, are doomed to having bodies.
2024 saw the 20th anniversary of comedy horror Shaun of the Dead (2004). I celebrated by rewatching it and feeling anxious about the passage of time. “Simon Pegg looks so young,” I thought, and then realised two decades had passed for me as much as it had for him.
I’m so sorry that we have to have our bodies, Simon. I’m very sorry that we have to have our bodies.
Callous calendar concerns aside, the movie allowed me to revisit the idea of zombies, something I haven’t properly thought about in a little while. Despite being, perhaps, more committed to the comedy than the horror, Shaun’s zombies operate in a very similar way to George A Romero’s6. The movie’s title is, of course, a pun on Dawn of the Dead, and a loving homage.
We are encouraged to giggle at the zombies, but this laughter only underscores the dire nature of their predicament. These people have been reduced to gags – objects of slapstick – because they are now predominately body. They have lost much of their mind, and are now reduced to their corporeal form. Base, squalid, body. Driven by primal physical need. Lumbering about the streets of London, deprived of the dignity afforded human beings, stuck in the prison of their physical form (unless, of course, someone comes along to remove the head or destroy their brain). A constant source of embarrassment to their former selves.
Towards the end of a movie, a woman on the Trisha show explains that she still loves her husband, despite his transformation. Trisha replies, her face contorted in disgusts, “do you go to bed with it?” It, not him.
The universe of Shaun does not demand all zombies be destroyed. It finds a way to bring them into the fold of decent society – making them participants in a humiliating game show, or getting them to perform labour while heavily chained (there is no escape from capitalism, I suppose). Shaun, the hero of the movie, gets to continue living with his zombified mate Ed. He simply has Ed fettered in the garden shed, ready for him whenever he fancies playing a video game with his old pal. How sweet, he loves his friend! How terrifying to be his friend, double imprisoned, in a shed and in a zombie form.
Whether they are being shot at with a gun, or being incorporated into the “new normal”, Shaun’s zombies are a constantly the butt of the joke. We mock their physical form. But the awfulness of their physical form is, in a way, an end point to all our bodily fears. To quote AJJ once more:
I'm sorry that you have to have a body
Filled with infection
One hundred scabs singing in unison
Eyes and hands, sometimes bullets,
Uninvited, passing through us
Sometimes bullets.
Laugh at the zombies, go ahead, feel superior if you can. But remember they were once like us.
And, like them, we are not so immune to infection, or to the eyes that pass through us.
Treat your bodies well, if you can. Eat 30 types of plant and go for long walks and wear SPF every day and try to love your form as much as your can, because it is the one you are chained to. But extend grace to the poor teenagers fretting over their acne and their hair-where-there-was-no-hair-before.
And extend grace to yourselves, while you’re at it, and any of your nasty thoughts about your weight or your forehead or your nervous laugh or your sweaty palms and your awkward, too physical, presence.
I’m so sorry that you have to have a body.
Zombie songs
Wow, I can’t believe you’re still here. What a legend you are.
Assuming you must be interested in both (a) zombies and (b) songs, I’d like to take this opportunity to recommend two zombie songs to you. I’m not going to explain why I like them you just have to go along with it. I’ve written enough. Laura is tired.
‘Zombie Prom’ by the Kaiser Chiefs
‘Zombie’ by Jamie T
If you’ve got any other zombie song recommendations to share, please do in the comments before. Maybe we can get a playlist going.
Woo, still here? Gosh, thanks, pal. Hoping to get another one of these out before the end of December on a festive Inside Number Nine special. Until then – stay away from bitey men!
Like how different cultures can separately discover things like fried chicken.
Which is a sad indictment on our culture, for communal singing is one of life’s great joys.
Though if you wish to reassure me that I look great, I will certainly take it.
I believe it stands for ‘Andrew Jackson Jihad’, which is perhaps the most ‘punk’ band name since ‘The Dead Kennedys’.
Hello, Margot. Your sticky little fingers are all over this edition, aren't they?
Though I maintain my mother was dead right when she noticed how (intentionally) funny Dawn of the Dead was, and maybe we don’t give this movie enough credit for its dark sense of humour.