“Not long after, this pronouncement came to pass. Nebuchadnezzar was chased from the company of humanity to eat grass like cattle and be soaked by the morning dew. His hair grew out, covering him like an eagle’s feathers, and his hands transformed into talons” (Daniel 4.30).
Zombies, as a genre of books and film, are metaphors much like any horror character. Vampires play on our fears and anxieties about desire and intimacy, the temptation to involve ourselves with another. Frankenstein’s monster embodies not merely a fear of science but of when the process of exploration and innovation is detached from morality. Zombies are a way to explore our nightmares about what happens when the normal world collapses, plunging us into disaster.
But what if you’re already in a place that’s strange, alien? That’s what, for me, The Last Days on Mars, a 2013 film starring Liev Schreiber and Elias Koteas, touches upon.
In prior summers, I’ve talked about movies that did poorly and/or faced bad reviews at the time but have come to be recognized as classics—think The Thing or Blade Runner. This is not one of those films, least not at this time. Having grossed just one-hundred eighty-seven thousand dollars and received vicious reviews, The Last Days on Mars is, arguably, a bad movie. I’m not going to defend it as some overlooked gem, something that deserves to be re-assessed. I do think the critiques of it are severe. It’s, I think, a fun little movie that doesn’t waste time and, as a thriller, does what it sets out to do.
Our crew, in the story, nearing the end of their six months of living and working on Mars has had no success finding any evidence that there ever was some sort of simple life on the Red Planet. That is, until one of the crew finds something unexpected under the microscope’s lens and makes and unscheduled trip to take another sample.
Turns out, beneath the surface, there is a bacteria living on Mars. And, it finds the human body to be a good host. Moving quickly, the bacteria overtakes the person it’s infected, killing and transforming them into something that has the form of a human, but is a dangerous, violent creature.
How it transforms a person is left unexplained, which serves the story well as it keeps the narrative moving and not bogging it down in exposition. Though, when one of the crew is infected, we get a sense of what might happen inside someone. Lying on the table and, apparently, dying, the commander of the mission laments that he can no longer remember the faces of his children or his wife. Something similar happens to another member, hinting that whatever the process this infection takes, it changes a person in mind as well as body, causing them to forget who they are.
The story of Nebuchadnezzar’s descent into madness is not one of the better known ones from scripture or even from the Book of Daniel. Resulting, apparently, from a moment of great pride in the empire over which he rules, the King is struck by an ailment that sends him running into the wild, de-evolving into an animal covered in hair and eating the grass of the field.
There is neither enough information in scripture nor the historical record to understand what overtook Nebuchadnezzar. Perhaps it was an acute and prolonged episode of mental illness brought on by injury. Possibly events or heredity caused a mental break. Or maybe it was an infection that, untreated, wreaked havoc with his mind.
Whatever the cause, he forgot who he was, forgot his humanity and began to act without reason. I imagine, like the infected commander and crew on Mars, he no more remembered his wives or children than he remembered his station, nor his name.
That is the horror inherent in both stories: forgetting. But this isn’t the kind of forgetting dementia can bring, though that is horrifying enough. No, this is different. Something from outside of us penetrates us, changes us, overtakes our bodies and our waking thoughts.
For our Martian crew this thing was bacteria, and for Nebuchadnezzar it was, we’re told, divine punishment. But neither of these is necessary to spark such changes in a person. In fact, we see it happen around us every day in this world. All of us are susceptible to the fear that moves without form amongst us. The fear that comes from uncertainty. An uncertainty that longs for an explanation. That will make do with a scapegoat.
We’ve seen this in the U.S. over our history, haven’t we? Reconstruction following the Civil War brought about change, which beget fear. That fear transformed white men, particularly, to act against change in ways many of them knew was against their better nature: beating and killing those of color.
It has happened in the world over and over to the Jewish people who have been seen (often because of those in power) as the cause of a particular society problems, be that Fifteenth Century Spain or Germany in the early twentieth century.
Too easily any of us, no matter our background, nor upbringing, nor our nationality can be overtaken by fear and begin to act in ways that are not us. Like the characters in The Last Days on Mars we forget our families and ourselves and act out in violence. Or like Nebuchadnezzar we lose all control and become isolated from those around us.
It can be tempting to dismiss these stories as nothing more than spooky campfire tales, but both carry for us a warning that has been relevant since this world began and will be even into the far reaches of the solar system. It’s a warning to not let our fears of change crowd out what it is to be human.
Lest we forget who we are.
Jesus it is tempting to look for a cause or an object of blame when we grow fearful of the changes in the world around us. Guard us from the fear that changes our perception of others. Keep foremost in our minds that they and we are beloved children of the Divine.