‘Death or Rebirth’

Apocalyptic Borderscapes, Topographies of Exception, and Regulating Survival in Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead (2021)

Abstract

This contribution offers a critical analysis of Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead (2021) and its representation of apocalyptic borderscapes and topographies of exception. It examines how the film portrays the ethical dimensions of survival and death in the context of a zombie apocalypse, in which the border functions as a site of exclusion where subjects are not only excluded from a specific territory or the sphere of the law but also, more importantly, from the sphere of the living. The author analyzes the narrative, aesthetic, and cinematic strategies that Army of the Dead employs to shed light on this necropolitical dimension of the border and the ways in which this dimension is intertwined with the imaginary of survival in and of the apocalypse. In particular, the author argues that the plural and particular apocalypse(s) in the film not only expose patterns of seeming exceptionalism that mask the everydayness of biopolitical exclusion and the topographies of exception they produce but also make visible the territorial dimension of the border as a recurring instrument of bio- and necro-political control that regulates and structures survival.