The character:	Bub
The actor:	Sherman Howard
The movie:	Day of the Dead (1985)

Organic posthumanism, a future in which humans will recede and some different product of the planet will fill our void, is much to be wished for. Better yet, it ought to be planned for. Nothing could vouchsafe the preciousness of human life like realizing that the life of other species ought to be placed on a level like our own. In saving others we will save ourselves. In reaching out to others, we reach out to ourselves.

In other words: the zombie is our brother, and Bub, shepherded into a future of postzombieism by a visionary, is the next inheritor of the earth.

With apologies to Ben of Night of the Living Dead, Bub is surely the greatest character created by George Romero. In 1968, Romero fairly rewrote the zombie, emigrating the zombie from the Caribbean and from whatever goofball Hollywood voodoo tradition screenwriters could dress their Black extras in. In Night of the Living Dead, the zombies are created by signals from space, and there is a science, rather than magic, which creates them. Ben is a figure straight from the nightly news, especially in the final reel of the film. Bub requires a new way of considering not just the zombie movie, but the zombie himself. There is no civil rights movement precedent for the zombie, not unless you count whatever veganism was showing itself in the post-hippie era. Romero took the mind out of the zombie, and then, like the mad(?) scientist who returned his sentience, placed it back in.

This is more than a Frankenstein/Frankenstein’s monster situation, a corollary that Romero is happy for us to attach ourselves to and even more happy to subvert. Frankenstein, whoever he is, does some cutting and pasting to make his new man, and the monster is glued together in some way. There is no gluing for Bub; that fella just is the way he is. Frankenstein, with the hubris of Oedipus or Creon, believes that he can circumvent death itself. But Dr. Logan (Richard Liberty) is working with the living dead. He does not have to recreate life so much as refocus it. He does not pretend to build the whole canal; he merely opens and closes a sluice gate. The other humans look at the Florida Frankenstein not with wonder but with derision. Who can blame them? Dr. Frankenstein did not create his undead son in order to destroy the race that birthed him. Dr. Logan is doing something much braver than Dr. Frankenstein ever conceived of. If he can remake Bub, then he widens an already broad lane to human extinction. If Bub can recover the faculties which he appears to have had as a living man while maintaining the missionary capacity of his viral teeth, then there is very little hope for these remaining people indeed.

Dr. Logan, like Dr. Frankenstein, is not the hero. Bub is the true hero of Day of the Dead, because against all odds, he learns to love. Whatever good work Dr. Logan did to find the old synapses in Bub’s brain, it was up to Bub to look at the dead man and see not carrion but a friend he will never get to interact with again. If we ever watched a movie and rooted for a vigilante to get revenge on the one who wronged him, then we must feel much the same way about Bub. He takes the weapon of the enemy, uses it against the enemy, and becomes the Adam of a befouled Eden.