The Six Million Dollar Question

It's very fashionable, yes, to faux-worry about the "coming zombie apocalypse." The put-on consternation has reached the kind of unimaginative cultural saturation level that induces in me the same kind of weary eye-roll I get off the neat-grungy hipster pose and its little dog too. If hipsters had a shred of internal logical consistency, the second they saw another hipster, they would have immediately set fire to the biodegradable wicker mesh bag they keep their entire jaunty chapeau collection in. And neither Brooklyn nor Portland nor Silver Lake would have been possible. Who loses there?

The zombie thing isn't as bad as the vampire thing we've had to endure over the past decade or so, but at least that's--a-ha--dying out finally. There's no latent powerhouse multi-platform-able marketing tool to latch on to our collective engorged jugulars like the vampires had with Twilight. But I think some of that was overblown, if you'll pardon the expression. Once the girl with physical mutism started sportfucking the real-live-boy director who wasn't her unwashed mass of a boyfriend, was it really about the vampires anymore?

They're trying to recreate the vampire formula by turning a zombie book into a major motion picture, but that's been such a colossal cluster of fucks that not even the sugar-coated box office poison of "starring Brad Pitt" can save it. Seriously, what was the last Brad Pitt movie that made any money at all? Ocean's 11? There were, like, 10 other dudes in that. And one of them was Elliot Fucking Gould, yo. Thelma and Louise maybe? All I remember of him in that was a hair dryer and some abs, which... OK, that was a pretty strong contribution. But even though he has made some interesting shit in between, there is no audience draw.

No, zombies are over. Plus, they're pretend. Well, mostly pretend. There was the one guy who was dead for an hour and came back but that was science, and probably not voodoo. Also it was Australia, so maybe that's just how it works down there. All backward and weird like the way your toilet water spins the wrong way.*

Like I said, pretend. Just like vampires. And who is paying attention to the real threat, the one that's happening right before our eyes, as documented by such journalistic enterprises as Access Hollywood and Us Weekly? Yep: cyborgs.

Not just cyborgs, but famous cyborgs. There's been a lot of talk about the bravery of Angelina Jolie in having a preventative, elective double-mastectomy to spare herself from getting breast cancer due to the presence of a genetic marker making it likely. And I agreed with the whole "bravery" angle... for  a while.

And then I heard that she was going to go in to have her ovaries removed, again, electively and pre-emptively versus cancer. Maybe the cancer thing is true... but what nobody seems to be asking is: if you're having something removed, what are you replacing it with?

This is someone with access to a great deal of resources, all kinds of leisure time and the type of tortured, escapist imaginative flights of fantasy one can only get from being trapped in a house--of any size--with a shit-ton of your own children. So I'll be the first one to posit the most obvious: she is, piece by piece, replacing herself with enhanced cybernetic implants.

To what end, you might ask. To which I would say immediately: what part of cyborg is hard to explain? Well, most of it because it's a totally made-up word, but am I the only one who saw The Terminator?

It's hard to be too scared because, cybernetic or not, she's a tiny woman, but then I think, am I the only one who saw Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines? And then I think: yeah, probably pretty close to it.

I'm not actually all that afraid of the Jolie-bot. Although she's clearly going to be programmed to kill, it's apparent that her enemy will be cancer. And, in keeping with the time-travel theme that walks hand-in-titanium-gripping-claw with cyborgs, she's fighting cancer in the future. Cancer she doesn't even have yet. Like the artificial intelligence playing tic-tac-toe a the end of WarGames, she is learning fast.

My main concern isn't her, it's the fact that she's a trendsetter. Remember when she went all baby-crazy and started snatching up kids from every corner of the unwashed world? Next thing you know Madonna was out there stealing babies from Malawi and making it seem greedy and harsh. And you know what the world doesn't need? Cyborg Madonna. Her enemy would not be cancer. The hanging question of what it would be is something I don't think any of us would want answered.


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*Up? I hope not up.