After our viewing of Shaun of the Dead, I realized that a look at the zombie genre and its connection to Marxism may be the closest chance I get to having an excuse to put the above picture up on my blog. Oh, and also this awesome scene with an eyeball and a piece of wood....
(from Zombi)
The term Zombie has been around in western culture since the 1929 publication of Willie Seabrook's novel The Magic Island, which described the Haitian voodoo phenomenon now attributed to zombies (see The Serpent and the Rainbow). This was followed by a series of stories by H.P. Lovecraft that contained similar themes. The first zombie motion picture is considered to be White Zombie, a take on the Seabrook story by director Victor Halperin. Many point to the film adaptation of H.G. Well's Things to Come as the first modern zombie tale, in that it features a "sickness" that affects the population instead of a ritualistic, voodoo zombie.
Zombies stayed around as part of the sci-fi/horror/b-movie landscape for the next several decades, popping up in films like Plan 9 From Outer Space and other cheese classics as well as EC comics Tales From the Crypt and the I Am Legend/The Last Man on Earth combo in the 1950s.
Then, along came George Romero, and with him the use of the zombie as political metaphor. Romero's seminal horror film from 1964, Night of the Living Dead.
Romero's reinvention of zombies is notable in terms of its thematics; he used zombies not just for their own sake, but as a vehicle "to criticize real-world social ills—such as government ineptitude, bioengineering, slavery, greed and exploitation—while indulging our post-apocalyptic fantasies"-
http://www.greencine.com/static/primers/zombies1.jsp
Romero's Marxist parallel comes closest to full-blown realization with his 2005 film Land of the Dead. Coming right at the heels of Bush Jr.'s "political mandate" of 2004, Land imagines a not-too-distant future where zombies run amok and the elite are housed in a giant high-rise/mall, safely out of the zombie's reach. Soon, though, a more highly evolved zombie begins teaching the other zombies how to use tools and they storm the gates of the rich in a feeding frenzy.
How's that for an "Eat the Rich" manifesto?! I remember seeing the film in theaters in 2005 and thinking how explicit the metaphor was (much the same way people criticize Machete today...read this fucking crazy blog post: http://minx.cc/?post=305379). However, I think that's the point. Dawn of the Dead, hailed as Romero's masterpiece, uses the setting of a shopping mall as an overt political metaphor. Each Romero film builds on the times surrounding it. Time and distance will one day make people look at Land of the Dead as a snapshot of life in the second half of the Bush years, with Katrina and Iraq and all the madness buffered by extreme wealth and extravagant living.
Which brings me back around to Shaun of the Dead. I adore this movie. It's nasty, charming, and also deeply political in its own way. Edgar Wright takes Romero's metaphor of zombies as workers in a capitalist society and inverts it, making the surviving humans the workers and mining this for comedic value. The underlying message seems to be that only friendship and human relationships (Shaun and his buddy, his girlfriend, even his stepdad) can lift us out of the horrors of banality that accompany life in modern society. The most brilliant aspect of Shaun is how long it takes the lead character to notice the zombie outbreak has occurred. Wright seems to show the western worker drone as being more brain-dead and "asleep" then the zombies themselves. Or rather, there is not much difference between them.
The zombie, a uniquely 20th century monster, paved the way for movie monsters to be political. The wave of vampires, werewolves, and other baddies with underlying political metaphors and chips on their shoulders owe a lot to their Zombie Comrades.
No comments:
Post a Comment