My husband and I both have a penchant for horror movies, especially those featuring zombies and post-apocalyptic situations. He likes the creepy blood-and-gore imagery, and I like the freaky stories. It's something we share.
One of the things I always liked to think about when we watched these movies together was how great he'd be in a post-apocalyptic zombie war. Put us together on the set of 28 Days Later, for instance, and I'd be glad to have hitched my cart to him. Yes, he can be a huge pain in the ass in the regular world, but I enjoy thinking of how his various skills would come in handy when we're facing an army of rage-virus plagued zombie creatures of the End Times.
For instance, he's great at stealing, and he can be quite resourceful. He'd maraud the other apocalypse survivors to make sure that we'd have plenty to eat and clothes to wear and shelter. His tactics at manipulation would come in handy as well, as he'd convince me that the human parts or deer brains that we were eating were actually soy based. I'm not good at eating people or other animals.
It seemed good, and fair. I'd have paid my dues in the pre-apocalyptic days with all my jobs and being the responsible one; he'd protect me post-apocalypse, fighting off animals and zombie armies and making sure we had food. It would be a situation where he would be strong and brave and helpful, and I could stand by and scream and be useless and silly.
Last night, though, we watched a really bad post-apocalyptic zombie army movie called Tooth and Nail, and I realized something awful. In the movie, the survivors were living in a hospital. They had medical supplies and food, which was a pretty good set up until the cannibal army came to ravage them. One of the survivors got bashed in the leg in a cannibal army rampage, and another had to treat him with syringes full of morphine.
Ahh! There's the rub!
In the post-apocalyptic world, there would be syringes full of morphine! There would be abandoned pharmacies full of oxycontin! There would be no reason to live! It would be a junky-fun-free-for-all!
If we were in the hospital with other survivors, he'd bash himself over the head to have a reason to get all the morphine for himself. He'd suffer from too much pain to be able to fight the zombies, and he'd need me to fight them for him. He'd need me to hunt and gather food, too, and he wouldn't like the food I found. When it was time to run and hide, I'd have to haul him around in a wheelchair with a morphine drip IV and fight the zombies by myself...but he'd have a lot of opinions about how my zombie-fighting tactics weren't good enough. He'd waste our precious bullets by shooting himself in the foot once his head-bashing healed, guaranteeing a continued supply of morphine. Once he'd robbed every abandoned pharmacy and looted every empty hospital in our area, he'd be useless from detoxing for weeks, and very sorry, and very angry, and make lots of promises in between yelling at me for doing everything wrong.
We'd bring ourselves with us, right into the Apocalypse, and continue acting out our psychodrama in the midst of the end of the world. I'm so disheartened.
