By Neal Auch
We are living in the stupidest possible timeline. This statement has become something of an online mantra—a communal lament about the normalization of anti-intellectualism, racism, transphobia, sectarianism, shameless grifting, and gleeful cruelty. One would be hard-pressed to find any more compelling evidence for our timeline’s stupidity than this: many of the most serious threats we are currently facing were anticipated by the 2008 horror/comedy Zombie Strippers.
That film presents a dystopian vision of America’s future. A Republican president has seized control of the government, installed himself as dictator, and surrounded himself with incompetent loyalists. The administration’s policies are not discussed in detail, but the tidbits on offer are revealing. Public nudity has been banned, suggesting legal codification of conservative Christian values. At the same time, the US military has been stretched thin as a result of multiple colonialist ventures, including an active invasion of Canada. In order to deal with troop shortages, scientists have created a “chemo virus” which reanimates the dead, transforming human beings into unthinking monsters—weapons to be wielded against enemies of the state.
The bulk of Zombie Strippers’ narrative unfolds in an illegal strip club named “Rhino.” The club’s premier dancer acquires the “chemo virus” after being bitten by an infected soldier; surprisingly, her subsequent zombie transformation only improves her skills as a performer. As the story unfolds, more and more strippers willingly transform themselves into zombies, either to appease customers (who come to prefer undead dancers), or else because they find the prospect of zombification appealing in its own right.
The strippers’ transformation into zombies represents not only an embrace of the brutal military industrial complex which made it possible, but also a rejection of empathy and compassion. The zombie strippers describe their transformation as a return to a more primal state. Zombification, in the context of this film, is suggestive of an embrace of social Darwinism. One dancer reads Nietzsche in the dressing room, remarking that his philosophy “makes so much more sense now.” Another dancer laughs in the face of a declaration of love. “Love is dead,” she explains. The strippers’ embrace of zombie ideology is greeted with delight from the patriarchy (represented by the club’s exclusively male clientele) and also by capitalists (represented by Rhino’s owner, Ian Essko). In spite of its silly trappings and slapstick gags, Zombie Strippers is a deeply political film with a surprising amount to say about our contemporary political moment. At its core, this is a movie about the spread of fascism.
Following the introduction of the zombifying virus, the situation at the strip club rapidly descends into chaos. The dancers fight amongst themselves, desperate to usurp power from one other. They also begin eating their customers alive during private lap dances. Unable to control the dangerous movement he once profited from, the club’s capitalist owner soon also finds himself at risk. Zombie Strippers’ final act could easily be interpreted as a less-than-subtle commentary on the tendency for fascist movements to self-destruct, eventually consuming not only their perceived enemies, but also supporters, financiers, and true believers.
Some readers might scoff at the idea that Zombie Strippers conceals any metaphorical depth whatsoever. In fact, the film is a transparent reinterpretation of Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. That play is not only a masterpiece of absurdist theatre, it was also heavily inspired by the playwright’s first-hand experience of the rise of fascism in the lead-up to the Second World War.
Ionesco’s Rhinoceros takes place in a small French town where, on a day like any other, the residents are confronted with an unusual sight. A rhino is rampaging about in the town’s square. As the story unfolds, average citizens begin transforming into rhinos one after another. In the end, only the protagonist, Berenger, manages to cling to his humanity.
Like Zombie Strippers’ undead dancers, Ionesco’s rhinos are generally understood to represent fascists. The rhinos’ ideology is most clearly articulated by Berenger’s best friend, Jean, who admires their rejection of conventional morality and “primeval integrity.” Ionesco establishes a connection between the rhinos and racism/antisemitism early in the play. Well before his inevitable transformation, Jean loses his temper and lashes out at Berenger during an argument about the rhinos’ horns. “If anybody’s got two horns, it’s you! You Asiatic Mongol!” Berenger, for his part, rejects his friend’s hateful outburst. “I’ve got no horns. And I never will have,” he says. “I’m not Asiatic either. And, in any case, Asiatics are people the same as everyone else…”
In Rhinoceros, Ionesco proposes a disease model of fascism. Political slogans and hollow talking points spread through the townsfolk like a virus, corrupting characters one by one. The “disease” is even given a name: “rhinoceritis.” Interestingly, this viral theory of political propaganda places both Rhinoceros and Zombie Strippers in conversation with Albert Camus’ The Plague. That novel tells the story of an Algerian city which is afflicted by a mysterious pestilence. Although the novel works perfectly well on a literal level, it should almost certainly also be understood as an allegory for the destructive spread of fascism and, at the same time, for Camus’ own experiences during the German occupation of France. The connection between horror and language is also explored in one of Ionesco’s earlier plays, The Bald Soprano, and more recently in the 2008 zombie film Pontypool.
The most interesting aspect of Rhinoceros is not its Burroughs-adjacent understanding of language as a virus. Rather, much of Rhinoceros’ contemporary relevance comes from the rhetorical tactics its characters use to obfuscate and downplay the obvious threat posed by the rhinos. Ionesco establishes early on that these animals are dangerous—a rhino tramples one woman’s cat to death in the first act. However, instead of organizing themselves and taking concrete action, the witnesses to this act of violence waste their time on pedantry. A heated debate soon erupts about how many rhinos there were. Were there two different animals running in two different directions? Or just one animal which turned around? And how many horns did the rhino have? One or two? Was it an African rhino? Or was it an Asian species? No doubt, this sort of tedious hair-splitting will be familiar to anyone who watched in frustration as Twitter sycophants and mainstream media outlets leapt at the opportunity to describe Elon Musk’s recent Nazi salute as a “straight-armed gesture,” as if there were any ambiguity whatsoever regarding the meaning of that particular gesture.
While the townsfolk who bore first-hand witness to the rhinos’ violence waste their time on useless pedantry, those who did not sometimes outright deny that a threat exists at all. The character Botard, for example, initially suggests that any journalists reporting on rhino sightings are simply lying. When Berenger confirms that he witnessed the rhinos with his own eyes, Botard still denies reality, insisting that Berenger must be virtue signalling to impress his love interest. Even when, at last, the existence of rhinos becomes undeniable, Botard is still unwilling to admit his mistake. “I do not deny the rhinocerotic evidence. I never have,” he says, before immediately changing gears to advance some preposterous new conspiracy theory.
Even after the rhinos have begun to take over their town, many citizens continue to normalize and minimize the problem. “If you leave them alone, they just ignore you,” explains Dutard toward the end of the play. Later, he adds: “This is the situation and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
Moral relativism also plays an important role in how townsfolk justify their conversion into rhinos. The most explicitly fascist character, Jean, embodies this mindset. “Who knows what is evil and what is good?” he asks his friend Berenger. “It’s just a question of personal preferences.” The paradox of tolerance also comes up. “I’m not a victim of prejudice like you,” Jean says. The implication is that people like Berenger, who oppose violence and intolerance, are somehow being intolerant by virtue of criticizing the rhinos.
The rhino apologists’ use of rhetoric is often absurd and contradictory. The Logician, for example, speaks mostly in pure gibberish. At best, he is an idiot; at worst, he deliberately sows confusion in order to muddy the discourse. Dutard and Botard, on the other hand, were likely intended to satirize the left-wing French intellectuals of Ionesco’s time. Their rhetoric is sometimes superficially egalitarian. And yet neither man is any more inoculated against rhinoceritis than the nakedly hateful Jean. Far from weakening his critique of fascism, these ideological inconsistencies only reinforce Ionesco’s point. According to Umberto Eco, fascism is an ideology with “no quintessence.” In Ur-Fascism, he described it as “a fuzzy totalitarianism, a collage of different philosophical and political ideas, a beehive of contradictions.” What matters, ultimately, is not the rationalization Ionesco’s townsfolk offer for their transformation. All that matters is the emotional foundation of rhinoceritis: the beasts’ bottomless anger and gleeful embrace of a lifestyle marked by permanent warfare.
There is yet another facet of both Zombie Strippers and Rhinoceros which bears scrutiny. Both stories are profoundly silly. The silliness is intentional, of course; we are talking about comedies. But it’s worth taking a step back and reflecting on what these stories might be trying to tell us. Making the rhinos and zombies comical was a deliberate choice, after all. What metaphorical purpose might that choice serve?
On January 16, 2025, Rebecca Shaw published an opinion piece titled “I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down—I just didn’t expect them to be such losers.” The headline was met with delight and the piece went viral on social media. Shaw’s essay resonated because it articulates an emotion which many have experienced while consuming the news over the last few years. There is no shortage of far-right political actors who pose a grave threat not only to democracy, but also to the well-being of both marginalized people in particular and the human race at large. And most of these political actors are, for lack of a better word, extremely silly. When Elon Musk isn’t busy throwing up Nazi salutes, he spends his time posting cringe-worthy takes on Twitter (which he renamed “X” because X sounds cool, right?) and giggling like a pre-teen about how “69” is funny because that’s the sex number. Even the government agency Musk is using to dismantle America’s federal workforce is named after a tedious internet meme nobody has found funny for over a decade. History, if humanity survives long enough for history to exist, will almost certainly remember Donald Trump as the face of this era’s version of American fascism. But we should not forget just how peculiar-looking that face really is, from the preposterous combover to the poorly-applied makeup. Were he not so frightening, Trump would be objectively hilarious with his NFT scams and poetic description of the “old-fashioned” term “groceries” as a “bag with different things in it.” This disconcerting silliness applies not just to people, but also to entire organizations. The Boogaloo Boys are a far-right militia intent on inciting a second American civil war. They are also named after a stupid internet meme about the 1984 musical film Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo. The Proud Boys are a neo-fascist organization that promotes and engages in political violence. They also insist that their members respect a complex set of regulations regarding when it is acceptable to masturbate.
Whether intentional or not, all this silliness serves a very real and very sinister purpose. It is a distraction. It makes the hateful extremists seem less intimidating to outsiders and prospective new recruits. Fascist stupidity is a weapon. It is a shroud—a disguise which makes the rhinos and zombies seem less dangerous than they really are.
In the end, the nascent fascist movement depicted in Zombie Strippers creates nothing but death and destruction. Although much of the initial logic of zombification was economic, this pretence is quickly dropped as the undead dancers’ insatiable hunger for flesh drives them to consume more and more of their clientele. This, in turn, only creates more flesh-hungry zombies. Fittingly, the zombies seem to pose almost as much of an existential threat to one another as they do to humanity; much of the film’s finale is devoted to a battle for dominance between two dancers with a long-standing grudge.
Sadly, the zombie outbreak can only be contained through military violence. An elite team of marines (code-named the “Z” squad) destroy the zombies and rescue the handful of remaining human survivors. Interestingly, even this happy ending could be framed as a kind of petty in-fighting, since the zombies and marines both derive their power from the same brutal military industrial complex.
Zombie Strippers’ final plot twist is the reveal that the virus outbreak was intentional. “We like it when things go tragically wrong,” explains the scientist who orchestrated the disaster. (Not long after, he finds himself infected by the virus which he helped to create.) There is, of course, a depressing element of truth in the idea of unscrupulous elites profiteering from wars, pandemics, and natural disasters. But Zombie Strippers’ conclusion also seems to nod toward what the historian Timothy Snyder calls “sadopopulism.” This refers to a tyrannical style of governance which seeks to deliberately inflict pain on its own supporters under the logic that the resulting surplus of anger can then be redirected toward some convenient scapegoat. For many of us, the appeal of such policies might be difficult to understand. However, the logic of sadopopulism has a clear emotional resonance with the zombies’ ideology. According to their worldview, constant pain and struggle are an inevitable part of existence; the best one can hope for, then, is to delight in the promise that somebody else is suffering an even worse fate.
The final moments of Rhinoceros are as grim and chilling as any zombie film. Our protagonist, Berenger, is alone in his apartment. He is the last human left, surrounded by an army of bellowing rhinos. In a moment of weakness, Berenger laments his decision to remain human. He tries to will himself to transform but, for some reason, he cannot. In the end, our hero snaps out of it and regains his determination. “I’ll put up a fight against the lot of them, the whole lot of them!” he cries. “I’m the last man left, and I’m staying that way until the end. I’m not capitulating!”
It is worth pausing to ask what makes Berenger so different from his peers. Berenger is hardly an accomplished man, after all; he’s portrayed as a slovenly drunk. Nor is Berenger particularly smart. In fact, he sometimes finds himself bewildered by the rhino apologists’ clever use of rhetoric. So why is this man—and this man alone—somehow immune to rhinoceritis?
Berenger’s anti-rhino position is not based on wordplay or logic or slogans. Berenger opposes the rhinos on the grounds of basic human decency. “We have our own moral standards which I consider incompatible with the standards of these animals,” he explains. Berenger sees the rhinos for what they are: ugly, brutish, and destructive. Such beasts simply have no place in a civilized society. One does not seek to persuade a rampaging rhinoceros by sound logical argument, after all. As Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in a widely-quoted passage, fascists “delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.” Put differently: rampaging rhinos and flesh-eating zombies are not a philosophical conundrum which needs to be endlessly pondered and debated. Both represent a clear and present threat to the lives of innocent people. The only sane and ethical reaction to such a threat is to protect those who are at risk.
Rhinoceros is a cautionary tale. Given our contemporary political climate, it’s worth reflecting upon its characters’ mistakes. The most notable feature of the play is, of course, the fact that very little happens. At no point in the story does any member of the town’s dwindling human population actually do something to address the looming rhinocerotic threat. Instead, they spend their time talking. Reflecting upon one’s predicament is obviously useful, but a healthy public discourse would eventually lead to some form of concrete action. In Rhinoceros, conversation and reflection serve only to obfuscate the truth and excuse complacency. “Reflection is not the evil,” Kierkegaard wrote in The Present Age, “but a reflective condition and the deadlock which it involves, by transforming the capacity for action into a means of escape from action, is both corrupt and dangerous…”
Unlike the town’s besieged human population, the rhinos do take action. Indeed, the rhinos do nothing but action. They trample a cat, destroy a building, and constantly recruit new members. The rhinos move fast and break things. They believe in “action for action’s sake,” as Umberto Eco put it.
Berenger never succumbs to the rhinos’ propaganda. Even until the end, he is unwilling to capitulate. His conviction is certainly admirable, but his victory is at best a symbolic one. Surely, one drunkard doesn’t stand a chance against an army. Ionesco’s message here is not much different than Martin Niemöller’s famous poem, First They Came. By the time Berenger finds the conviction to put up a fight against the rhinos, it is probably already too late.
We are living in the stupidest possible timeline. We are surrounded on all sides by singing pachyderms and pole-dancing ghouls. This world is a farce—a tragic comedy. But the fact that the news is sometimes funny doesn’t make it any less horrifying. This is a story whose plot moves deathward. As Don DeLillo wrote in White Noise, that is the nature of plots. Given their druthers, the rhinos would gleefully trample us all to death. And zombies wearing pasties would descend from their stripper poles to feast on our pulverized flesh. But unlike Berenger, we humans need not stand alone. Not yet, at least. It remains to be seen if we can learn from the stories of the past before it is too late.
