Containment, Extermination, and Zombie Films
Zombie movies are a weird way to gain insights into questions about containment and geopolitics, but I think they have a lot to say.
On my other show, The Bang-Bang Podcast, we did an episode on the 28 Days Later trilogy: 28 Days Later (2002); 28 Weeks Later (2007) and 28 Years Later (2025). We covered them all in one sitting. If you haven’t seen them, two of the three are actual art; as high-brow as zombie films could possibly be.
To be honest, I’ve never been into the zombie genre. I saw 28 Days Later in the run-up to the Iraq War when I was just a young airman. The comedian Janeane Garafolo had praised it for perfectly depicting the “rage virus” that infected America after 9/11, and she was right. But I never stuck with The Walking Dead and wasn’t enticed by any of the other zombie properties that saturated media in the ‘00s.
I was turned off by zombies for the same reason that they were so prevalent during the War on Terror decades: They appealed to and validated the jingoistic imagination. Zombies allowed you to righteously other-ize what looked like people but were really gross, dangerous, and not-at-all-like-us ghouls—they weren’t even humans! They gave us license to indulge our fortress fantasies. We got to imagine ourselves securing us from them, and our means of doing so was by making mankind’s violent impulses into a virtue. Conjuring zombies as a problematique, even if only fictionally, gives some of us something like the “moral equivalent of war.”
I can’t claim to have had anything like a coherent politics when I watched 28 Days Later back in ‘03. Even so, I found the implicit barbarism contradiction—“we act as barbarians because they’re barbarians”—repulsive at a gut level. I felt much the same about the Iraq invasion and the War on Terror, even though I had no analytical critique to accompany that feeling.
In each of the 28 Days Later films, we see that zombies will kill you if you don’t kill them. People survive by viciously and reflexively murdering anyone who gets infected, as well as any zombie who comes near them. There Is No Alternative.
In that context, all three movies depict processes of physical containment and quarantine as the alternative to eradication. 28 Weeks Later, which came out during the peak of the War on Terror, lays this out as an explicit three-step process: “identify the virus; contain it; if containment fails, extermination.”
And yet, in all three movies, containment breaks down. The virus inevitably spreads. And in the moments of quiet bought through fencing, fortresses, and firepower, the moral equivalent of the virus infects humanity anyway. In the films, we end up sacrificing each other, we become savages in the process of keeping the savages at bay. The movies end up being a subversive indictment of geopolitics and US foreign policy. And I don’t even mean as metaphor; the movies show how nations move and make choices; geopolitics in action.
What’s stimulating about this is that geopolitics is a form of spatial reasoning, and I’ve argued for a while that spatial reasoning lends itself to reactionary politics. There are perhaps too many reasons for this, and I’m not the first to make the observation.
Using geography as the basis for action necessarily means justifying exclusion, division, or concentrations of harm. Othering is an essential part of spatial thinking. Settler colonies, military sieges, sacrifice zones, frontiers, sites of extraction, containment, encirclements, blockades—it all tries to realize something for us by creating states of exception in how we treat others who exist in a certain place.
I don’t want to seem too naive. Obviously if a zombie confronts you, it’s you or it. Resource extraction is necessary. There are situations where containment is too.1 And as a concept, sacrifice zones originated as a defensible ecological practice. With the exception of settler colonies, most spatial activities have their purposes.
The problem is really spatial solutionism.
As I mention in the episode, spatial fixes cannot be our horizon. Containment is not an end-state; it’s at best a way of buying time.
The success of containment ought to be measured according to how we use that time. If we use it to make ourselves into savages, or to turn a blind eye to the harm we allow others to suffer, then we failed. Containment has failed. But if we use containment just long enough to get us to a virus cure or come up with a strategy to save those trapped in an infected zone, then I would agree that “containment worked.”
My dissertation advisor and one of my mentors, Wallace Thies, posthumously wrote the book on containment. His argument is more simpatico with mine than it appears. While he argues that “containment works,” what he means is it works better than preventive war. He also rejects the binary of containment or war, explicitly recognizing that modern states have many tools at their disposal beyond simply war. Containment is one of the tools and its failure ought not mean war.
