ZOMBIES ARE US
THE
EXISTENTIAL OTHER
by STUART LENIG
Stuart
Lenig is Associate Professor of Speech and Drama at Columbia
State Community College.
---------------------------
As
a colleague of mine quipped,
"if you see one zombie movie this year. . . " Such
is the prophetic power of George A. Romero's affirming Land
of the Dead. That's right, I used the word, 'affirming,'
not words usually associated with the zombie genre, although
recent undead epics, 28 Days Later, Resident Evil,
and Shaun of the Dead, make one reconsider the latent
power of the zombie film to impart a variety of messages. Further,
America in 2005 with high and recalcitrant unemployment, (don't
be fooled by the 5% figure, full time work at Wal-Mart is hardly
full employment!) a poor balance of trade, and the fourth continuous
year of constant warfare doesn't exactly seem like a society
finding much affirmation. One would think that politics and
zombies would be strange bedfellows, but in fact they are quite
comfortable with each other, and have been since the genre was
conceived.
Val
Newton's I Walked with a Zombie (1943) provided the
first critical version of zombies as unregistered others, the
eyeless, soulless, unthinking stalking undead creatures that
did the bidding of masters, and were incarnated through weird
voodoo rituals. More often than not these beings were a reflection
of our own needs and cryptic Freudian desires rather than terrors
of the dark realm. Director Jacques Tourneur's Zombie
showed a marriage of the living dead when a governess must care
for a man's wife who has been zombiefied not only by voodoo
but through a loveless and sterile union. Vampires and mummies
are other refinements and permutations of the walking dead theme.
Zombies
have always held a special allure for those fears of a potentially
unpleasant afterlife experience filled with hellish torments
and obsessive compulsions. We are doomed to live out (or un-live)
our compulsions again and again in the next life. At the same
time, zombies have always seemed a freeing mechanism, a way
to talk about society in an unchecked and primitive state unrestrained
by civilization, sort of Survivor on steroids. Freud wrote in
Civilization and Its Discontents that "it was
discovered that a person becomes neurotic because he cannot
tolerate the amount of frustration which society imposes on
him in the service of its cultural ideals, and it was inferred
from this that the abolition or reduction of those demands would
result in a return to possibilities of happiness." Certainly
the dream images of mummies grabbing the girl, or vampires biting
victims on the neck or finally zombies consuming flesh and brains
is a form of wish fulfillment and empowerment. We want to possess
the other so we devour the brains of another, just as some native
tribes in pre-Columbian eras would practice cannibalism to invoke
the characteristics of their enemies. But zombie movies have
suffered from the notion of 'the gross out' rather than the
image of the socially critical, when the lens of zombies has
always been squarely on the living not the dead. But Land
of the Dead brings a level of refinement and sophistication
to the genre that could change all of that.
Romero's
output since 1968's groundbreaking Night of the Living Dead
has been consistently droll, mannered, and understated. Where
Spielberg, Scorsese, and Lucas have occasionally staged sensitive
dramas, they tend to lapse into gargantuan palettes where ideas
are swallowed in grandiose set pieces. Romero uses the lens
of zombiedom to depict our cultural malaise almost like a microscope.
In fact, one might argue that his films are more miniaturist
examinations of taboos, mores and rituals of a social society,
say more in the vein of Jane Austen than Dickens’ monolithic
explorations of groups: zombie films, at their essence, are
more about the mating and kinship of human animals than about
warfare. For Romero, the stakes are about reproductive rites
and not imperialistic warfare, and no where is that more apparent
than in the clever and introverted Land of the Dead.
In
Night of the Living Dead, Romero turned a lens on racism
and the growing schism between good democratic principles and
ideas laid upon racial and class guidelines. The triumph of
Night of the Living Dead was not its chilling undead,
but its chilling incivility between classes, colors and genders.
That Romero has consistently placed people of color (usually
unknowns) in central and pivotal positions has been not only
a tradition but a strength of the films and their message. Nearly
40 years after the first Romero zombie epic, audiences still
respond to these protagonists as marginalized citizens, which
speaks volumes about the social politics of American culture.
Sadly, not that much has changed. In Night of the Living
Dead, Duane Jones' resourceful Black protagonist proves
to be a willing and successful foil to Judith O'Dea's dazed
and overwhelmed white woman. The fact that a Black man had to
be the sole protector for a compromised white woman was all
but lost on the politics of the sixties, but has been recognized
regularly since. The act is repeated when Ken Foree appears
to be the only level headed soul in a rag tag team of survivors
living in a shopping mall in Romero's apocalyptic and invigorating
epic, Dawn of the Dead. Sarah Polley and Ving Rhames
seem similarly talented in Zack Taylor's lively but lesser remake
of Dawn of the Dead in 2004.
By
the time Lori Cardille inherited the mantle of mankind's conscience
in Romero's darkest film, Day of the Dead, the survivors
are militarized, living in underground bunkers and have forsaken
the earth to the overwhelming power of zombie hordes. The remaining
corrupted humans are militant, unreasonable, fascistic and in
most cases thoroughly despicable. The film's observant commentary
on the Thatcher/Reagan world was lost on audiences oblivious
to the West's war to maintain its colonial grasp on the globe.
The most humane character is Bub, a captured zombie the troops
are training to be more human, with the goal of turning the
beasties into an imperialistic military tool; not to truly understand
them or live with them. As the zombies successfully storm the
compound, the audience isn’t unhappy about the bloodshed
and carnage because humans have become less admirable than the
zombies.
Throughout,
Romero’s method has been to show humans as inferior to
zombies. It may be that the zombies munch on human brains, but
Romero teaches us never to turn our back on a fellow human --
that could really be fatal. In Land of the Dead, Romero
adds new wrinkles which are refreshing and exhilarating for
those of us who have followed his zombie epics for over thirty
years. First, there is a great human cast that provides more
texture, depth and variety to mankind than we have ever seen
in a Romero film. Simon Baker (of The Guardian) is
that rarest of all Romero characters, a genuine, compassionate
hero, a leader uncorrupted, caring, and even compassionate toward
zombies. Asia Argento, Italian horror master Dario Argento's
daughter, provides a very capable, vulnerable and intelligent
foil to Baker's human capabilities. In the aftermath of the
horrors of zombie invasions, or perhaps in response to the real
terrors of 9/11, Romero's characters face the terror not with
less caring and more selfishness, but with more kindness and
understanding.
Even
the ostensible villains, John Leguizamo's freebooting mercenary
and Dennis Hopper's sneaky capitalist-cum-power broker are amusing
rogues. They can't be trusted, but are consistently our dark
side: troubled, self-involved and obsessed with revenge and
possessions.
In
Land of the Dead, Robert Joy portrays a luckless, deformed,
sharp-shooting, slow-witted, but charming sidekick, Charlie.
Charlie licks his rifle before taking out humans or zombies
because as he tells it, "it picks up the light better."
As one might expect in a genre where subtlety is not a requirement
of its metaphors, the haves exist in futuristic tower residences
and shop leisurely in an opulent mall while the have-nots exist
in dark and dank street slums with death and destruction lurking
around every corner. The ironies for our capitalistic culture
in collapse are strong.
In
the hands of its best directors, the often unfairly denigrated
zombie genre reminds us that humanity's first challenge is to
remain human.
