Zombies, Resident Evil, and why low culture is my favorite culture

Yourself's post reminded me about a really bad paper I wrote last year about zombies' significance in American culture.  It was like, reallyyyyyy bad, but it certainly was a good excuse to watch a lot of crap-tastic movies and re-read some Walking Dead.  The only other redeeming quality to the ordeal was meeting with my very, very Italian professor whose accidentally-comical accent was simply a joy to listen to. 

It's a me, world-renowned cultural historian of 20th century film.

He sure did make a mistake in offering me an independent study, but golly did I take advantage of the situation.  Fast forward to the end of the semester and all I had was a half-researched pile of nonsense, though much can be said for my improved ability to shit out academic bullshit to fill a page.  Stunning examples include:

"Commenting on the assessment by past Harvard University president A. Lawrence Lowell, historian James Livingston argues that movements in academia away from a focus on the individual, such as the post-structuralist “death of the author,” and Martin Heidegger's “eclipse of the self,” and towards studying cultural pluralism and group identities are merely playing catch-up with the Lowell’s evaluation."

Heidegger was one smart nazi.

^This is some serious mastery of minimizing the meaning/wordcount ratio.  Yes, I am available for lessons.  In any case, the one interesting thing, not surprisingly related to video games, that came out of this 3-credit plunge into absolute fucktardation was about the Resident Evil series. 

Chris Redfield: making cigarettes cool and being significantly more of a badass than Leon Kennedy since '91

The general idea I had is that an infection narrative, similar to real-world disease outbreaks, replaced a bunch of other shit (nuclear contamination and the like) as the cause of action in the plot of zombie media...and as far as I can tell the original RE game is the first to employ this new zombification scenario.  Now, in my paper this was kind of a fuck-me moment because that game is fucking Japanese and furthermore was released before stuff like the huge anthrax scares and swine flu outbreaks occurred.   This is an issue when you're arguing a causal effect between the real-world events and the whole "zombie infection as disease rather than just hungry for brainssssssssss."  Luckily, this is a blog post not a 20 page faux-history, so I don't have to have a anything remotely resembling a thesis, and Yourself never has a fucking point so the hell if I'm going to. 

Man that is the best opening to a game, like, ever.  I'd play it if I wasn't finishing what Yourself would refer to as "Unchartable 3."  Fuck him this game is absurdly fun, and well worth the zero dollars I spent stealing it from my little brother.