The Philosophy of Zombie Strippers

Woefully unimportant things have a way of lodging in my brain, so I never forgot about the unexpected success of Zombie Strippers back in 2008. When I ran across the DVD recently, I picked it up out of curiosity and was pleased to find it references several major philosophers.

When a facility running tests on zombies shares a building with a strip club, the worst is bound to happen. A zombie escapes and bites a pole dancer and it’s all downhill from there. The strippers feed on their clientele, discolor, and fall apart, but they keep on gyrating and peeling off garments. Eventually, the guns come out and the gore ramps up even further.

 

Surprisingly, Zombie Strippers is a cut above your usual B-movie about zombies or strippers, so if any of the above sounds intriguing, knock yourself out and look for these nods to great thinkers.

 

 

SOCRATES (470/469-399 BC)

Early in the film, the strip club DJ introduces the next dancer to take the floor:

“Now Bobby Sox, is gonna tease you with her Socrates!”

You caught the pun, right? Socrates was the ancient Greek philosopher made to drink hemlock for corrupting the youth of Athens. It was his habit to hang out in the agora, the city’s public gathering space, to discuss the issues of the day: What is the perfect form of society? Is there an afterlife? What is the nature of language? Much of what we know about Socrates comes to us through the writings of other ancients, most notably the dialogues of Plato.

Plato’s dialogues showcase a form of discussion lacking in public discourse today. Typically, the interlocutors will venture their respective ideas of, say, justice, and then make rational objections to each other’s hypotheses. Often, when reason reveals a flaw in an argument, its purveyor will abandon or revise his position. The result is a conversation that makes progress, steadily drawing near a more perfect conception of the truth. When was the last time a talking head on television showed any capacity for backing down in the face of a superior argument?

 

RENÉ DESCARTES (1596-1650)

Proceeding forward along the history of philosophy, our next thinker appears as the club descends into mayhem. A stripper and her ditzy boyfriend confront a soldier hunting zombies. The soldier demands that they say something human to prove they aren't zombies, and the boyfriend does his best:

“Uh . . . shit! Could you give me something easier? Okay, okay! Um, I think therefore I am. I think? Actually, I have doubts about that one.”

“I think therefore I am” is the common English translation of French philosopher René Descartes’ Latin dictum Cogito ergo sum. Descartes wanted to set the sciences on a firm foundation but realized our senses often deceive us. In fact, it was possible to doubt just about everything. He even considered the possibility that the whole world was but a dream concocted by an evil daemon. So he looked around for one thing he couldn’t doubt, something solid to serve as a beginning point for constructing an entire system of knowledge, and--Voilà!--he realized that with all this doubting (thinking) going on, the existence of a doubter (the self) was certain.

 

 

Philosophers never let a good a proposition stand, so they have poked holes in this elegant maxim in the centuries since it appeared in Discourse on Method (1637). However, while it would be faint consolation to the philosophe, I still think we can say his first principle is pretty good.

 

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844-1900)

Earlier in the film, Kat (played by porn star Jenna Jameson) is in the dressing room reading The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche and even quotes it:

“That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, right?”

Okay, most of us know that one, but she can do even better:

“Yeah sure, but everything great must first wear a hideous and monstrous mask in order to inscribe themselves on the hearts of humanity.”

Friedrich Nietzsche is a philosopher dear to me, although it has been years since I read and reread most of his major works. The first quote is from Twilight of the Idols (1888). The second has proven harder to pinpoint, but it may be from Beyond Good and Evil (1886), so Kat appears to have made it to the later Nietzsche.

Nietzsche remains a scary philosopher in the public imagination because of his bombastic writing style, iconoclastic quotes like “God is dead” and concepts like the will to power. Unfortunately, his ideas were not fully understood or even widely available until long after they had been purveyed in a twisted form by his sister and some of the 19th-Century’s worst political actors. The Übermensh, for example, describes an individual who is superior through self-overcoming, with no need to seek validation through power over others (previous post). In fact--if I remember my Walter Kaufmann correctly--Nietzsche was considered by many of his contemporaries to be a soft-spoken and polite fellow.

 

JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (1905-1980)

The philosophical references in Zombie Strippers are too numerous and forced not to be an intentional motif. When aspiring stripper Jessy is walking home one night, she passes a large sign bearing the name of her fictional hometown: SARTRE, NEBRASKA.

Jean-Paul Sartre, while not generally considered the handsomest of philosophers, was nonetheless able to convince his romantic partner, early feminist thinker and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, that an open relationship would be a good idea so he could entertain a young Algerian mistress whom he later adopted as a daughter.

JP--as I assume his amants knew him--is known as one of the great existentialist philosophers. In a wonderful essay entitled “What Is Existentialism?” he explains that whereas for centuries we have been taught that our essence (our soul) exists first and then comes to inhabit the flesh in existence, it’s actually the other way around. We are born, and through the experience of living in existence, we determine our essence. The choices you make, with no confidant but your own conscience, determine who you are. This is Descartes in reverse: I am, therefore I think.

Conclusion

What does all of this philosophy have to do with the deeper content of Zombie Strippers? At first, I was tempted to say there is no deeper content to Zombie Strippers--after all, it has a bit about a zombie firing pool balls out of her vagina--but the film actually makes an effort to comment on the cheap thrills pervasive in America today, cheap thrills that the movie itself represents but also underscores through references to our rich heritage of philosophical thought.

I would say all the philosophy I’ve described above is Philosophy 101, but of the above thinkers, I only studied Socrates and Descartes as an undergrad. I had to study Nietzsche and Sartre on my own, so I guess that makes this a notch above Philosophy 101. But that doesn’t spare this from being one of the most pointless blog posts ever.