Zombies aren’t cool
When the first episode of iZombie opens Liv Moore is a perky, successful junior doctor planning her wedding. It only takes until the title sequence, though, and she’s single and spending all her time alone, doing nothing, except for when she’s at her dead-end job in the morgue. Liv Moore is a graduate without a future (she’s also been bitten by a zombie). This closed-down, anhedonic, listlessness seems like a characteristically millennial experience – as opposed to the stereotypical rebelliousness of baby bombers, or the ironic, detached disaffection of generation X (the enforced “flexibility” which comes from Liv taking on aspects of the personalities of the murder victims whose brains she eats is another dramatization of a quintessentially millennial experience). I like the show for its portrayal of this millennial position, and more for its sympathy to it, in particular its concern to defend millennial anhedonia against the passion of edgy, soi-dissant countercultural, “cool.”
I read this stupid blog post about how millennials are apparently “uncool,” and obviously it’s hella dumb, but it did make me think that if millennials are indeed rejecting the norm of “cool,” good for them. “Coolness” has long since become a means of normalisation, commodification, and oppression, and iZombie nicely illustrates that. Read more↴