July 17, 2005
Zombie World
If the hysterical body is the star on reality programming, where the pretense of theatrical tradition is still cultivated in regular old-fashioned drama top billing these days goes, quite ironically, to the corpse. In crime scene dramas the decomposing dead body is the outright star. For the role of cadaver, the competition for young Hollywood actors is, at the risk of a bad pun, very stiff. What, if anything, is behind the rise of the human carcass in mass programming is not entirely clear. Is it a response to our Age of Perpetual War? Who knows? As a general rule death and its archetypes are of universal interest. All else failing, death is always a sure bet to captivate the public imagination. Where the significance of the corpse in cop dramas is somewhat enigmatic, the exact opposite is true for the meaning of the equally popular zombie. The zombie has rarely ever been more fashionable. In quick succession in the last few years there has been 28 Days Later and the Resident Evil franchise (smarter faster zombies), Shawn of the Dead (zombie comedy), the Dawn of the Dead remake, etc. In these movies, and in George Romero’s Land of the Dead just out, the living corps provides a clear metaphor for life in the world as we humans have made it for ourselves. Granted it is not always the same in each. In Romero’s landmark film on the subject, Night of the Living Dead (1968), the zombie was likened to the cold war “other”, the threat to our value system that was to test those assumptions and would ultimately expose them as shallow, bigoted and corrupt. Unlike filmmakers like the Italian Lucio Fulci, in which the zombie is usually very literally a voodoo fiend or an escapee from Hell, Romero’s living dead theme was always allegorical. Ten years after Night of the Living Dead, in his Dawn of the Dead, arguably the best zombie flick ever, the walking dead clearly represent our mindless consumer culture. In fact, with Romero, the theme has continued to evolve over time, and in a remarkably linear way at that. In the chaos and bedlam of the first film the zombie epidemic was just beginning. In the second movie the zombies are mindlessly going through the motions of life, in particular, flocking to the mall. With the 1985 Day of the Dead, granted not the greatest movie ever made, a zombified world is becoming normal. Zombies have become the fodder for sport and entertainment. The scientist is hard at work in his underground laboratory trying to socialize the undead, trying to teach them basic people skills, in order, one would suppose, to put them to work doing menial jobs for their living masters. In the ensuing twenty years, Romero’s zombie has begun to cope with life after death. The epidemic of the dead rising has long since past in Land of the Dead. By this time the undead are, quite frankly, tired of all the abuse. Not only do the living have to learn to deal with their miserable reality, but the zombies – Romero calls them “stenches” – are also evolving. The living dead must themselves finally learn how to live. To say of the movie that both living and dead are on equal footing is not entirely accurate. Romero reveals his sympathies. He has left more than enough room in this movie for the idea that the “stenches” might actually be more humane than the totally corrupt living. Oddly, in all these years, Romero is really only catching up to the premise of Donald Barthelme’s 1981 “The Zombies” (for the whole story click here). Barthelme, with his signature deadpan sense of humor, foresaw the banality of a world ruled by the living dead. In his story the male zombies regularly come to the town of the living in search of human brides. The tragicomedy that ensues could very well predict Romero’s next zombie movie.