Warm Bodies

     Something that fascinated me about Warm Bodies is the relationship that the zombies had with the boneys. We see from the beginning that the boneys perform seemingly religious functions in a zombie society which, by our expectations of the zombie genre overall, should not exist. As well, these boneys also perform the function of bureaucracy, in that when quotes dip, as with the amount of child zombies, they appear with new ones. They perform marriages and assign children to parents as with R and his nameless wife, and also act as judge and executioner, as noted when R is confronted by them for keeping a living human. It seems then, that the boneys seem to act as a sort of government for the zombies - a thinking, conscious nucleus around which zombie hives form - implied also by the fact that boneys are rarely seen and instead, have all retreated to hives. They also perform as an almost Orwellian propaganda propagation system, through their continuous taking of pictures of conflict, in order to generate a sort of font of negative energy, which they present to other zombies to keep them mindless. The significance of these actions is that these boneys have become a representation of the inhumanity within a government system. These boneys are completely inhuman. While they have a humanoid form from their skeletal shape, they don't have the defining physical features of humans - such as the skin, faces, eyes, musculature, etc. They are all faceless, with none of the boneys possessing distinguishable features. As well, their functions are inhuman as well. They perform a marriage by linking two zombies and declaring them married. They then show up the next day and hand them children. There are no words, there are no gestures, there's no celebration of joy or anything. It becomes essentially a bare-bones mimicry of human actions. As well, when attacking R and Julie, R notes that the boneys aren't attacking them out of a sense of hatred or emotion, but are rather, attacking them out of a sense of pragmatism, that the couple is a danger to the boneys and their society, and they must be killed because of that. The boneys possess a sort of complete absence of emotion that highlights the differences between them and humanity, while maintaining a skeletal framework of human society. Thus, the boneys are an ugly mirror of humankind, propped up against the stadium city as a warning, and also a reflection, of what that society is like.