Thanks to George Romero, every generation gets the zombie movie it deserves. 2005's Land Of The Dead, in which a city surrounded on 3 sides by water is made into humanity's last refuge against the walking dead, is at its core a comment on poverty and the culture of fear our own culture has become. The masses live in the rundown shambles of a broken urban landscape, pacified by liquor, loose women, and staged zombie fights. The rich live in a pristine skyscraper, high above the city, where they can go on about their lives as if nothing had happened. Thanks to the second law of thermodynamics, we are virtually guaranteed that the undead will infiltrate the skyscraper by the end of the film, proving once and for all that power and money can only protect you for so long against the unstoppable forces of nature.
Last year's Diary Of The Dead, like Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project, is told mainly from a first-person, you-are-there point of view. Diary follows a group of film students shooting a no-budget horror film when they first hear the news on the radio that the dead are coming back to life. The kids are mainly forgettable, their drama strictly boilerplate; for some reason they have their alcoholic faculty advisor along for the ride, a generically knowing and wizened middle-aged man who speaks not in dialogue, but in epigrams, like "Mornings and mirrors only serve to terrify old men." On first look, it seems as though Romero has done a poor job creating characters with whom the viewer can identify. It seems like a terrible movie because there's no one we can care about, but I think that in this new, 1st person, handheld genre, we don't need characters we can identify with because we are there. It is our experience of events that counts. The person behind the camera and his friends might as well be on the other side of the world for all we can help them. In this youspace/mytube culture, we are not only numb to staged violence thanks to years of horror movies and cop shows on tv, we have taken the extra step of actually seeing real people suffer and we come to feel that it's not so bad. More than once in Diary, we see a person walking around by themselves while the camera follows them. Of course, they get attacked, scream for help, flail around and so on, but the cameraman doesn't lift a finger to help. Documenting the experience, rather than survival or saving lives, has become the new imperative. Now, that means that everyone has a camera, everyone's a blogger, everyone takes time after work or between zombie attacks to upload the latest documentation onto the collective consciousness we call the internet. (I include myself in this. I own a videocamera, and this very document is my contribution to the collective consciouness, the hive mind, if you will.) 50 years ago you knew your schoolmates, family, the guy at the bakery, the town drunk. Now it's possible to interact with or just watch all sorts of people from all corners of the planet. Of course, it all gets blurred after a while, just becomes background noise. Go to youtube and look up anything, you'll get hundreds of videos which all start to blend together after a while, not because they're so much the same, but because they're all virtually anonymous.
This is Romero's point. (Thought I wasn't gonna get around to it, didn't you?) Our experience, because it's so well documented and readily available, turns us all into passive observers who are incapable of caring about the objects of our fixation. It turns us all into zombies, in a way, but instead of flesh, we have an insatiable appetite for more and more human experience. Like zombies, we don't really taste it or want it for any reason other than biological imperative, we just consume.
Diary Of The Dead is the 5th film in George Romero's zombie trilogy. I already told you about the 4th. If you haven't seen the first 3, don't miss out. They are gory fun, but they are also products of their times, and as such can tell us a lot about what America was like at the time. Just get off your ass and put them on your netflix queue, or stream them, or maybe even walk to your local video store, if it still exists, and ask the Human behind the counter for Night Of The Living Dead, Dawn Of The Dead, or Day Of The Dead. A quick programming note: Dawn and Day have each been remade in the last few years. I've seen the new Dawn, but not Day. The Dawn remake is not a bad film; anything with Marcellus Wallace and the chick from eXistenZ can't be all bad.
There's a lot of good zombie stuff out there, particularly Max Brooks' excellent books, "The Zombie Survival Guide" and "World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War." Other filmmakers have tackled the genre: Peter Jackson, that king of Nerds who was responsible for the recent Lord of the Rings trilogy, made one of the silliest and bloodiest zombie flicks ever, Dead Alive, which for reasons unknown is listed at IMDB as Braindead. Who can forget one of the most terrifying zombie flicks, and one of the few to feature zombies that run and jump instead of just doing the Undead Shuffle, 28 Days Later? Please do not confuse this film with the Sandra Bullock train wreck 28 Days. MAKE SURE YOU SAY "28 DAYS LATER" WHEN YOU ASK FOR THIS FILM. No one needs to see Sandra Bullock in anything.
That is all.
Last year's Diary Of The Dead, like Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project, is told mainly from a first-person, you-are-there point of view. Diary follows a group of film students shooting a no-budget horror film when they first hear the news on the radio that the dead are coming back to life. The kids are mainly forgettable, their drama strictly boilerplate; for some reason they have their alcoholic faculty advisor along for the ride, a generically knowing and wizened middle-aged man who speaks not in dialogue, but in epigrams, like "Mornings and mirrors only serve to terrify old men." On first look, it seems as though Romero has done a poor job creating characters with whom the viewer can identify. It seems like a terrible movie because there's no one we can care about, but I think that in this new, 1st person, handheld genre, we don't need characters we can identify with because we are there. It is our experience of events that counts. The person behind the camera and his friends might as well be on the other side of the world for all we can help them. In this youspace/mytube culture, we are not only numb to staged violence thanks to years of horror movies and cop shows on tv, we have taken the extra step of actually seeing real people suffer and we come to feel that it's not so bad. More than once in Diary, we see a person walking around by themselves while the camera follows them. Of course, they get attacked, scream for help, flail around and so on, but the cameraman doesn't lift a finger to help. Documenting the experience, rather than survival or saving lives, has become the new imperative. Now, that means that everyone has a camera, everyone's a blogger, everyone takes time after work or between zombie attacks to upload the latest documentation onto the collective consciousness we call the internet. (I include myself in this. I own a videocamera, and this very document is my contribution to the collective consciouness, the hive mind, if you will.) 50 years ago you knew your schoolmates, family, the guy at the bakery, the town drunk. Now it's possible to interact with or just watch all sorts of people from all corners of the planet. Of course, it all gets blurred after a while, just becomes background noise. Go to youtube and look up anything, you'll get hundreds of videos which all start to blend together after a while, not because they're so much the same, but because they're all virtually anonymous.
This is Romero's point. (Thought I wasn't gonna get around to it, didn't you?) Our experience, because it's so well documented and readily available, turns us all into passive observers who are incapable of caring about the objects of our fixation. It turns us all into zombies, in a way, but instead of flesh, we have an insatiable appetite for more and more human experience. Like zombies, we don't really taste it or want it for any reason other than biological imperative, we just consume.
Diary Of The Dead is the 5th film in George Romero's zombie trilogy. I already told you about the 4th. If you haven't seen the first 3, don't miss out. They are gory fun, but they are also products of their times, and as such can tell us a lot about what America was like at the time. Just get off your ass and put them on your netflix queue, or stream them, or maybe even walk to your local video store, if it still exists, and ask the Human behind the counter for Night Of The Living Dead, Dawn Of The Dead, or Day Of The Dead. A quick programming note: Dawn and Day have each been remade in the last few years. I've seen the new Dawn, but not Day. The Dawn remake is not a bad film; anything with Marcellus Wallace and the chick from eXistenZ can't be all bad.
There's a lot of good zombie stuff out there, particularly Max Brooks' excellent books, "The Zombie Survival Guide" and "World War Z: An Oral History Of The Zombie War." Other filmmakers have tackled the genre: Peter Jackson, that king of Nerds who was responsible for the recent Lord of the Rings trilogy, made one of the silliest and bloodiest zombie flicks ever, Dead Alive, which for reasons unknown is listed at IMDB as Braindead. Who can forget one of the most terrifying zombie flicks, and one of the few to feature zombies that run and jump instead of just doing the Undead Shuffle, 28 Days Later? Please do not confuse this film with the Sandra Bullock train wreck 28 Days. MAKE SURE YOU SAY "28 DAYS LATER" WHEN YOU ASK FOR THIS FILM. No one needs to see Sandra Bullock in anything.
That is all.
1 comment:
It turns us all into zombies, in a way, but instead of flesh, we have an insatiable appetite for more and more human experience. Like zombies, we don't really taste it or want it for any reason other than biological imperative, we just consume.
excellent point and interesting metaphor. hmm. i need time to consider my thoughts before saying more.
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