Transcript for Episode Two: Zombieland
[Music Intro]
[E Pellegrino]
Welcome to The Apocalypse Reviewed where we review stories about the end of the world as a way to talk about climate change and mental health. Today we’re reviewing the 2009 movie, Zombieland, and talking about the idea of ambiguous, ecological grief.
[Music fades out]
If you haven’t seen Zombieland, here’s a quick summary.
Zombieland takes place two months after a zombie apocalypse, where most humans have been infected and there are only a few left. The people who remain are doing what people do—trying to survive, trying to find the people that they love, and adapting to this new post-apocalyptic, post-zombie world. Well, I guess it’s not really post zombie. It’s post apocalyptic, all-zombie world.
The main character in this movie is Columbus, Ohio, who, like everyone else, defines himself by his destination rather than his birthname. He’s a geeky, college-aged guy, who is traveling from Texas to Ohio to see if his family is still alive. He views himself as a loner, with no close connections to anyone, including the family he’s traveling to see. Though, undercutting his character is this very clear desire to be part of a family—to have a sense of belonging with a group. So, when he runs into the first human he’s seen in months, a middle-aged man wearing a cowboy hat who calls himself Tallahassee, he jumps at the opportunity to befriend and travel with him.
They later run into two sisters, one twelve and the other around Columbus’s age. Their names are Little Rock and Witchita, respectively.
And the characters travel together for the rest of the movie.
And, while the characters frame their own personal journeys around getting to their name-sake destinations, the plot of the movie centers around a found-family, coming of age kind of narrative. Which means that the climax of the story is when the characters transform in some meaningful way, rather than accomplishing some specific task. In this case, the transformation happens when characters who have largely been looking out for themselves opt to look out for each other, and risk even their own lives to protect each other—to protect their group as a whole
For Columbus this meant letting go of the rules he’d made to keep himself safe so that he can rescue Little Rock and Witchita from an amusement ride gone… horrible?
[ E laughs at themself].
And the rest of the characters have sort of similar arcs.
But, there is a subplot in this movie, which revolves around Tallahassee. And specifically, it’s this quest that he’s made for himself to find and eat the last box of twinkies. And that’s what I really want to focus in on today.
Not just because it’s about twinkies, though that does make it kind of fun, but because it’s one of the most memorable parts of the movie. And I- I do want to reiterate that yes, I did say twinkies. Yes, they are the Hostess product. Yes, I have actually tried them, but I don’t really think that they’re that good, but I also don’t know anyone who thinks they’re that good. And, it is the only plotline that I remember from when I watched this movie for the first time 10 years ago. Which, if you’re curious, was at a high school sleepover. And I think it was the first R rated movie I had ever seen.
You could argue that people remember it, because the plot of the twinkie is physical, something external to balance out most the largely internal character development that happens throughout the movie. You could also argue that people remember it because it’s absurd. I mean, who looks for a twinkie during a zombie apocalypse?? Either way, this twinkie ends up being a pretty essential part of this movie, or at least a fairly essential part to the way we remember this movie— or maybe just how I remember this movie. And I think it offers an interesting take when it comes to a climate change narrative.
Zombieland is a post-apocalypse movie, which means that as a climate change reading, this story taps into the fear of what happens if we have fail to save our Earth, our landscapes, and our homes from climate change, and now we have to adjust to a new reality. These are stories about what’s been lost, what may be lost, and wondering how to deal with all of that. In essence, these post-apocalypse movies are about grief, and nothing demonstrates that better than Tallahassee and his search for a twinkie.
And I want to take a pause here. Much of what I’m going to talk about for the rest of this podcast is grief. Grief that is complicated. Grief where it’s hard to articulate what’s been lost. Grief that is intimate to a person, and is also anticipatory and a grief that is chronic and ongoing. It is not lost on me that I’m writing this in the middle of pandemic, where reports— keep going up, honestly. When I first wrote this script it was like 200,000, and now it’s over 260,00, and by the time that I edit it it’s probably going to be even higher.
So I know that so many people have died because of the coronavirus, and that so many of us are grieving in so many different ways. No one right now is untouched by grief.
We are grieving the deaths of our loved ones, the deaths in our community, as well as grieving the loss of normalcy, the sense of loss from not being able to see the people that we love in person, and the sense of worry and uncertainty about when we will be able to see them again.
The types of ecological grief that I’ll be talking about for the rest of the podcast are caused by different events. They’re caused ultimately by climate change. But the feelings are remarkably similar, and the people that they impact [the most] are remarkably similar.
This grief is disproportionately given to people of marginalized communities, in particular poor communities, Black and Indigenous communities, and other communities of color. And also that this grief is complicated and impacts all of us both on the personal level and in ways that are hard to articulate.
It’s hard to watch zombie movies now, because the pandemic model of zombie-spreading feels way too close to home.
[E laughs a little]
Maybe in the next decade we’ll see a shift in zombie movies, where they are written and read in the context of the pandemic moment that we are currently living through. Zombieland was released eleven years ago, long before covid-19 was a thought, so I feel comfortable reading this and other pre-2020 zombie movies as addressing the climate change anxieties that I mentioned earlier, but future zombie movies might not.
All that said, I felt like I couldn’t continue this topic without addressing the grief that is present in the room. And the current climate that we’re living through, and that zombie movies and ambiguous grief feel very different now than they did this time last year. And I hope that, as we talk about dealing with ambiguous grief in reference to the environment, that you’re able to take that information and apply it to this situation too.
That said, we were talking about a twinkie!
So we’re going to bring a little more lightness into here, alright?
So Tallahassee’s quest for a twinkie is introduced by Columbus’s narration and a Hostess truck stuck in a ditch on the side of the road. When the truck turns out to only have snowballs and no twinkies— and snowballs if you haven’t had them are this, um. Oh! They’re like this pastry, and I think they have, like, a coconut and vanilla filling and then the outside of it is coated in flaked coconut. And the outside is sometimes colored pink, but I don’t know if it’s always colored pink. –Tallahassee apparently really does not like coconut, so he gets upset when this trunk turns out to have no twinkies. Columbus is fine with it though.
But Tallahassee is not. And, actually, this desire to have a twinkie drives a lot of the story line. Like, the only reason that Tallahassee and Columbus meet Little Rock and Wichita is because they go into a grocery store looking for this box of hostess twinkies.
And we don’t actually get a ton of information from Tallahassee himself, about why he’s looking for a twinkie. But the movie is narrated by Columbus, and he does spend a lot of time thinking about it.
He sort of refers to it as something that is both absurd and rational. I think maybe Columbus sees the object of Tallahassee’s search, the actual twinkie itself, to be absurd, but that the search itself, and even having a search for something, makes sense.
Early on in the movie he says, “The only thing [Tallahassee] was more obsessed with than killing zombies was finding a twinkie. You see twinkies reminded him of a time not so long ago, when things were simpler… It’s like, if he got a taste of that comforting childhood treat, the world would become innocent again, and everything would be normal.”
And Tallahassee confirms this take almost immediately through his actions. As they head into the grocery store, where they would eventually meet Little Rock and Witchita, Tallahassee shares that his search for twinkies is “not [just for] any box of twinkies. [But for] the last box of twinkies anyone will enjoy in the entire universe.”
And it’s this idea “the last box of twinkies anyone will enjoy in the entire universe” that I find honestly heartbreaking, because, in essence, this search for a twinkie is how Tallahassee structuring his grief.
Grief over the loss of normalcy, over the loss of the world where he used to live in when there weren’t zombies and there were people who could produce twinkies, and also a more acute grief.
Tallahassee tells Columbus early on about losing his dog Buck, and that was his last tie to anything worldly. We learn later on that Buck was not actually his dog, but his kid. And the idea that he had lost his kid, I think was too hard for Tallahassee to ever really admit, so he never referred to Buck as his child.
As a viewer, though, we get a brief glimpse into his memory where he’s playing with his kid, who is only a few years old, and he- Tallahassee, he looks like a completely different person. He’s relaxed and laughing. He’s playing with his kid. He’s lifting him up. There’s a lot of joy there. He doesn’t look like someone who’s only looking out for himself, but someone who cares deeply about other people—about his family.
And all of this is in direct contrast to the zombie-killer extraordinaire, who likes cars and doesn’t want to learn anybody’s name. Part of his character arc is stripping away that outside mask to become, once again, someone who is caring and fatherly. And we actually see that a lot in his relationship to the other characters, but particularly to Little Rock, who is the youngest of the bunch. He very much takes on this fatherly role toward her, and that transition happens when he mentions this enormous grief that he’s been carrying.
Grief and mourning can be defined in a lot of different ways. But I like this definition by
researches Ashlee Cunsolo and Neville Ellis in their paper on ecological grief and climate change. They refer to grief and mourning as “the period of mental, emotional, and personal transition as people learn to live again in the context of loss.” For me, that’s looked like a period of storytelling. Where I tell myself the stories I need to hear to transition with my life.
For Tallahassee, the story he’s telling himself is about the last box of twinkies, where he will be the last person to enjoy that symbol of what life used to be. It’s a reminder both of his personal loss and the larger loss of the apocalypse. It’s grief structured around an outside goal. It’s something distracting and ultimately important to Tallahassee.
Ecological grief, defined by Cunsolo and Ellis is really similar. They say that it is the “feeling of loss due to the losses of valued species, ecosystems and landscapes.” For me, it’s the loss of fireflies in my backyard on summer nights, and the Christmases that are white less and less often. It’s the seasons feeling slightly delayed each year and seeing the sky go gray from the wildfires burning on the other side of the country. For other people, from other regions, the losses of landscapes and ecosystems are even more dramatic.
Cunsolo and Ellis subdivide ecological grief into three categories:
And I’ll be pretty much on and off quoting their article from here.
The first type is “grief [that’s] associated with physical ecological losses to the land, ecosystems, and species,” which is kind of like I just describe [with the fireflies].
The second type is “grief associated with disruptions to environmental knowledge and loss of identity.” Which, and now I’m sort of paraphrasing from their paper, particularly impacts people with close connections and relationships to the land. Their study talks in particular about how both Australian farmers in the drying, Australian Wheatbelt and Inuit from Nunatsivut in northern Canada (and I apologize if I pronounced that incorrectly) are both experiencing this kind of grief in all of these three ways, but this second way in particular, because their connections to the land are so strong that it creates this very cognizant, very real kind of grief.
And the third kind of grief that Consolo and Ellis talk about is “grief associated with anticipated future environmental losses.” And I think that this grief is the hardest one to recognize, and the authors say this is least studied out of the three types, but it’s probably the one that all of us are feeling right now. I know it’s the one that I see the most in people my age. I know it’s the one I see people talking about all the time on TikTok, even if they aren’t aware that they’re talking about it. It’s this dread about the future. I mean, not to reiterate it, but I know so many people around my age, I’m 24, and younger, who have this dread. And it’s really hard for those of us to process what’s going on, and what the future is going to look like, and it’s—it’s hard. And it’s also, like, really hard to experience all this and not recognize that it’s grief.
I remember this one time when I was at the checkout in Albertson’s, and the person who was checking me out— we had gotten on the topic of environmentalism, because I had brought my own grocery bags. And she just like, straight up said to me (a stranger) that she was probably never going to have kids. She wasn’t sure that the environment or the world would be good enough for them to live [in]. And she is not the only one I’ve heard say that.
The authors of this study warn that this 3td category of grief, this anticipatory grief, is a type of ambiguous loss, which can “lend to feelings of being frozen, halted, or stuck in the grief process.” And that it “may particularly impact children and youth who are growing up with “doom and gloom” narratives.”
So what do we do about it?
First, it’s important to acknowledge that we as individuals are a part of nature and have specific connections and relationships to the places that we love and the places that we live. There’s a common narrative in American culture that humanity is somehow separate from nature, and that’s just blatantly untrue. The health of our environment is tied to our health. Our lives are tied to the land we are on and the ecosystems we inhabit. To do this work, by which I mean environmental work but also the work of addressing and thinking about eco-anxiety and climate grief, we have to acknowledge— we have to recognize that we don’t only have a relationship to place, but that we have a relationship with place. Because without recognizing this relationship, it’s even harder to recognize grief that comes with losing a place, to address the grief, and to repair our relationships with our landscapes and ecosystems. So the first way to do that is to get outside?
[E laughs]
I know that’s kind of a trite environmental line. But the way that you get to know a place is by living it, by going outside and seeing how it looks and acts during different times of the year. And also to just listen to it.
Secondly, it’s also really important to understand that some of us are at higher risk of dealing ecological grief than other people. And I’m quoting from Consulo and Ellis’s paper here: [There are a lot of factors, but having a] “close living and working relationship to natural environments,” living through devasting climate hazards or very specific types of climate hazards, and seeing the effects that they have on your home landscape. They also include things like, you are at higher risk of dealing with ecological grief, if your culture place a high level of value on land and the environment. And additionally, different types of climate hazards will impact different kinds of people differently. And also understanding that [for] people whose cultures do place a high value on landscape and the environment, losing that could ultimately impact their cultures and their customs. And that has a lot of grief associated with it too. Additionally, different types of climate hazards will impact people differently, people who experience more gradual effects of climate change might also have a harder time recognizing the grief that they’re feeling. Where as someone who undergoes a really quick, fast disaster is more easily able to recognize that was a moment that caused a lot of grief. And that’s not to say that one type of grief is worse than another, just that they are different, and sometimes it’s harder than the other. And all to say, part of managing ecological grief, and thinking about our own ecological grief, is also recognizing the risk factors and situations that we are living through. That our cultures are living through and how they impacting us personally. So if you are thinking about climate grief for yourself, thinking about how these different factors can be helpful in understanding even what types of grief you might be thinking and how that will impact you.
The third idea that this paper mentions for dealing with climate/ ecological grief is to actually name the grief, because naming grief, and recognizing that we are grieving, helpse you cope with it. To use the Mr. Rogers quote, because I know everybody loves Mr. Rogers, “anything human is mentionable, and anything mentionable is manageable.” Naming the grief is you as a human, who is feeling human things, mentioning it, and then talking it with other people or writing about it can help you manage it— and to think through those feelings and manage them in ways that are healthy. [And] to tell yourself stories that are useful, so that you don’t get stuck feeling lost or haulted.
Fourth idea is to connect. To connect to people and community, and also connect to your places, if you haven’t already. Volunteering for restoration projects, like planting trees or cleaning up a river, can be a really good way of connecting to both people and place at the same time. But if you’re somebody who has social anxiety, even going out on a walking trail can be really helpful. Or! Going out on a walking trail with some gloves and a garbage bag to pick up litter. It begins to create this connection to place [for you], and connection and belonging are really, really important to building resilience. So that as things [climate change] progress, we have people we can rely on, and we know we won’t be alone.
And the last idea for managing ecological grief that I’ll mention is to develop a meaningful practice for grieving. I’ve mentioned in past episodes— or a single past episode— how writing this podcast is part of how I have chosen to cope with eco-anxiety and ecological grief, because talking it, and writing about it, and researching about it helps me what’s going on it. Similarly, after my cat passed away just a little over a month ago, um, which actually happened in the middle of writing this episode, I set up memorials for her. One in my writing space, where her cat bed is placed nearby with a stuffed, little, yellow, beanie baby cat in it, and also there’s another memorial on my virtual island in Animal Crossing. [Grief is] so non-physical, but it’s also such a strong emotion, that we can’t get out of our bodies. So having something like a journal or a physical memorial, where its a place where we can specifically think about and handle grief with, can be really helpful to us. And if you don’t like the idea of a journal or a memorial, maybe the idea of searching for the last box of twinkies during a zombie apocalypse is going to be the thing that helps.
For Tallahassee, I think that it is. He ultimately isn’t the one who finds the twinkie. He comes really close. He finds a box of twinkies that Columbus has shot while killing a zombie, but it’s Little Rock, the twelve year old girl, who finds a twinkie and hands it over for him to enjoy. There’s just one. It’s still wrapped in plastic. Tallahassee doesn’t share, but the people around him understand and give them the space that he needs, and he seems to really enjoy it when he does finally bite into the twinkie.
I give Zombieland four twinkies out of five.
[Outro Music Starts]
[Outro Music gets softer as E begins to do the outro]
This podcast was written and produced by me, E Pellegrino, and edited Rachel Britton and Amanda Saladino. The music is by the 126ers and JHS Records. If you’d like to support this podcast, become a patron at Patreon.com/theapocalypsereviewed. There’s lots of fun perks like livestreams, apocalyptic postcards from yours’ truly, and annotated transcripts with commentary about my writing process, the movie, and any tangents that come to my mind. Again that’s Patreon.com/theapocalypsereviewed, and for those who like to read along or who are hearing impaired, a script of each episode can be found at my website elizabethpellegrino.com.
And a quick disclaimer before I go. If you are considering watching this movie after listening to this podcast, please be aware that this movie is R rated and that there are some scenes of people dying. Additionally, there’s one scene that showcases the destruction of Indigenous crafts and artwork in storefront, and that scene also includes a white character who wears headdress. As always, I think that it’s important to be critical of the media we consume, and also I that there are things worth talking about from this movie. For other triggers, please search for “Zombieland” on Doesthedogdie.com
Thank you so much for listening. See you for the next apocalypse and, until then, take care.
[Music fades out]