Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Peanuts 1960's Collection

There is exactly one place in the state of New Jersey that I love, and believe it or not it's to be found in miserable stinking Trenton. Wayfarers Erasmus and I struck dumbly upon this refuge while haphazardly in search of sustenance for body and soul, as is our idiom.

It was a winter to depress all winters. No frosty clarity or bearlike scoops of snow to twinkle the eye. Only the sucking winter murk of the Delaware river valley, laid down thin like the trail of a poisoned slug. (You know the painting of Washington crossing the Delaware, with the crystalline floes of ice and heavenly shafts of light? Artistic license.) Where the trail crooks the scum is deposited, a natural debris catch upriver from nobler Philly. South Trenton between 206 and the crook forever sours under the bitter benediction of the Lower Free Bridge: TRENTON MAKES — THE WORLD TAKES. How to feel about a city whose most prominent public fixture just makes you sick to your stomach? We ventured into those neighborhoods blighted and forgotten, once factory housing, now not even worth turning into a ghetto. We were only a little hopeful, and only because Erasmus had spent less time there than I.

Hungarians and Germans had settled there once but were mostly gone. As a granitic record of their presence they left behind a runestone in the form of a restaurant called the Blue Danube. Coming in from the wet I could feel myself swell with warm oven air. We were cozied in by heavily stained woodwork, made back when trees were bigger. On the walls hung tin artifacts and oil paintings made back when the world was dimly lit and modest in color. The whole place strung up in multicolored little fuse capsule lights — the best kind. The magnificent bar like a snub-nosed tank, long enough for six stools maybe. A peaceful handful of regulars making the music of a few people quietly and comfortably gathered. The small TV set up in the corner was tuned into a network broadcast of It's a Wonderful Life. People were watching. Two squat matrons, probably sisters, served us on china with good thick forearms and the kind of stern cordiality that is so much more nourishing than false cheer. No kidding, they were watching It's a Wonderful Life.

The approaching season bares the truth of the world, the goodness and the sadness. We bundle up because our emotional armor falls away with the leaves. It snuck up on me a few days ago when I saw that the Peanuts television specials from the 60s have just been rereleased, with all due attention to quality. I thought about the scene where Royal takes Margot out for ice cream, to make amends, and the tender theme carol from A Charlie Brown Christmas plays. The Peanuts gang is there in Wes Anderson's gang, especially in the underdog sympathies, Chuck and Linus's oft-mocked sincerity, and the Lucy-ish notion of who gets to boss who around.

The dearest symbol of the season, for me, is Charlie Brown's scraggly little Christmas tree (Tannenbaum, in Deutsch) found amid gaudy aluminum commercialism. You may not remember just how often Charlie Brown laments that everyone has "gone commercial" — almost as often as he correctly identifies himself as "depressed" or the other kids cruelly call him "stupid". People suffer a similar amnesia with It's a Wonderful Life, forgetting how brutal it really is. (Capra and Stewart had just returned from the war.)

When I keep an apartment I like to get a little Charlie Brown tree for the holiday, for cheer. It must be got by trudging to the far corner of a tree farm with a bow saw.

If Peanuts contains another symbol as powerful (and even more universal) it is the unseen Little Red-Haired Girl, object of Charlie Brown's unrequited love. Inspired by Charles M. Schulz's own lost love, of course — the one who got away. From Schulz's biography, "I can think of no more emotionally damaging loss than to be turned down by someone whom you love very much. A person who not only turns you down, but almost immediately will marry the victor. What a bitter blow that is."

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

The Girlfriend Experience + The Informant!

Soderbergh is synonymous with shenanigans. That's the key to understanding his famously bimodal career. Half of Soderbergh's films, the ones he's most widely known for — Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, the Oceanses, The Good German, The Informant! — are marquee pictures about capital capers; the wily little guy vs the slippery establishment in a lively game of shakedown, fraud and con.

The other half, the indie and art house pics that cost less than Danny Ocean's third-best suit — Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Schizopolis, Full Frontal, Eros, Bubble, The Girlfriend Experience — are actually cut from the same cloth. (As are those few mid-range art house pics, like Solaris and Che.) Collectively these lower-profile numbers represent Soderbergh's own personal shenanigans, each a prank of sorts on the audience or, better yet, the industry.

I can't help but feel like Steven really put one over when Sex, Lies, and Videotape won the Palme d'Or in 1989. After all, that's the movie that invented the James Spader Experience, which is a bit like getting slapped with a dick.

Since then Soderbergh has sub-specialized in unconventional and unmarketable formats (like the miniseries and short film collections) and used his A-list leverage to actively subvert industry standards for how films are produced and released. Bubble was shot like a film school weekend assignment and released simultaneously in theaters, on DVD and via HD cable broadcast. Studio exec: He can't do that! Can he do that? Next the guy saunters off to Spain and Mexico for three months with Benicio del Toro and sixty million dollars and comes back with a four-hour biopic of Che Guevara. Studio exec: What the fuck am I supposed to do with this? Steven shrugs. (A limited art house release garnered back half the budget.)

Possibly Soderbergh's most audacious con was getting Schizopolis accepted into the Criterion Collection. Make no mistake: If you watch that movie, the joke is on you.

The Girlfriend Experience is a classic bait and switch. Come see dynamite porn star Sasha Grey in her first dramatic role — as an ultra-chic Manhattan call girl! Wowie wow. You horndogs won't be disappointed, as long as you get your rocks off watching a hooker's toadlike Wall Street clients blubber and moan into her tits over the housing market collapse.

Kudos, you bastard.

Monday, October 26, 2009

Tulpan

It is impossible to resist the opportunity to use the word yurt in a sentence. Even if the movie had stunk I'd still be excited to say something like, Never have I seen so much dung heaped about a yurt!

The Kazakh steppe looks to me rather like the Oklahoma panhandle, only more so. Flattened by the immensely azure sky is a spread of chalky canvas on which to sketch an existence. Asa, a would-be shepherd just back from the Russian navy, does exactly that: sketch on the pale side of his neckerchief a camel and a modest home and some guiding stars. His own dustblown paradise. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good yurt must be in want of a wife. Except Asa hasn't yet got a yurt, which makes two problems.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Dziga Vertov II. Man with a Movie Camera

FOR VIEWERS' ATTENTION:

THIS FILM PRESENTS AN EXPERIMENT
IN THE CINEMATIC COMMUNICATION
OF VISIBLE EVENTS

WITHOUT THE AID OF INTERTITLES
(A FILM WITHOUT INTERTITLES)

WITHOUT THE AID OF A SCENARIO
(A FILM WITHOUT A SCENARIO)

WITHOUT THE AID OF A THEATER
(A FILM WITHOUT ACTORS, SETS, ETC.)

THIS EXPERIMENTAL WORK AIMS
AT CREATING A TRULY INTERNATIONAL
ABSOLUTE LANGUAGE OF CINEMA
BASED ON ITS TOTAL SEPARATION
FROM THE LANGUAGE OF THEATER AND LITERATURE


An unexpectedly extraordinary motion picture. If you know me, beware: I am going to buy this movie and show it to you. If you are a music lover, don't wait for me to find you. Watch it yourself now.

You might wonder how the above titles, which open the 1929 film, could precede anything other than a pretentious bore. My most vigorous assurances to the contrary. What we have here, in modern terms, is a 68-minute music video constructed without any specific music or sound at all. Understand how incredible this is. Of course the movie would be shown with orchestral accompaniment, but performing a piece composed afterward as with all scored films. A music video, on the other hand, does not precede the song. Point being that you know a music video when you see one by the way, even muted, the editing and the motion of the images create an undeniable rhythm.

Try watching on mute the scene in Clockwork Orange wherein Alex listens to the Ninth in his bedroom, with the chorus line of Jesuses. It's a short music video — impossible to imagine cutting those images together as Kubrick did unless he were taking dictation from a song. But that's exactly what Vertov did: create a continuous music video for an entire symphony except there was no symphony. He dictated music with film, frame by frame, note by note. I'm trying to say it's a goddamn work of genius. A summer of blockbusters is not so thrilling.


Version I saw is the 2002 Image Entertainment DVD release. The featured score is an original composed by the Alloy Orchestra in 1995, based on Vertov's own notes and instructions, and by many accounts it is the most preferred. I was spellbound.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Dziga Vertov I. Kinoglaz

Much is owed to the revolutionary thrust of the early Soviets in general and Vertov in particular for separating the cinema from older art forms. In 1924 the Jewish-born native of Białystok, from his position as editor of the first newsreel series in Moscow, issued a proclamation on film theory by way of an experimental "Non-Fiction Film Thing" (we would call it a documentary, mostly staged). Put forth under the invented term Kinoglaz — literally Cinema Eye — was the statement of a progressive dogma for the right purposes of the film camera and the proper language of motion pictures.

Lars von Trier pulled a similar stunt with the Dogme 95 movement, to name a recent and equally assholish parallel. But we need our assholes and should get to know them. We learn the most by studying extremes.

Actually while viewing Kinoglaz and skimming some of Vertov's writings I was more frequently reminded of Scott McCloud's invaluable treatise on sequential art, Understanding Comics — not in terms of scope (McCloud is far more catholic in his views on the theory of comics) but in the passion and urgency of Vertov's appeal on behalf of his medium as a distinct, valuable and respectable form.

I probably shouldn't be making comparisons to McCloud. He seems like such a nice guy, and Vertov is a lunatic. (Apologies, Scott.) Consider the fork of departure between Vertov and his only more famous contemporary, Sergei Eisenstein. Both were instrumental in advancing the significance of editing as the grammar of the medium, and both adhered to the constructivist principle that the purpose of art was to serve a social (Marxist) agenda, but while Eisenstein felt there was a future for dramatic fiction in film Vertov was vehemently opposed. As he saw it man could evolve no further by continuing to study invisible aspects of life: the emotional and psychological underpinnings of dramatic fiction. These Vertov did crazily assert “prevent man from being as precise as a stopwatch and hamper his desire for kinship with the machine.” Kinship with the machine...I wonder if Cronenberg is a fan.

For Vertov the eye of the camera bears witness to an absolute and total worldview that encompasses physical motion and visible change to the exclusion of all else. The machine does not think or feel; it moves and effects motion. And that is all that matters to the camera, to Vertov, to the synthesis of man's eye and the kinoglaz.

One sees the utility of this dogma to communist propaganda. Kinoglaz, the film, documents the activities of the Young Pioneers, a Leninist youth organization engaged in camp-making, river bathing, providing charity services, proselytizing and endless endless endless postering. They are busy little beavers. Make yourself useful and do something. Anyone who isn't in motion — the homeless, tubercular, mentally ill, addicted and indolent drunk — is an opportunity for someone else to give a helping hand.

Then Vertov puts the medium to work, using camera techniques like extreme angles and editing techniques like reverse and slow motion to distance the viewer from the emotional content of the images, forcing one instead to regard the fact of motion, the visible process of change. Two lengthy sequences depict a favorite subject: the production of goods, namely bread and beef. But shown entirely in reverse. So you get to watch a beef carcass be given back its viscera and have its skin skillfully reapplied by knife, then be unkilled in the stocks before it trods its way backward into a cattle car bound for the feedlot, etc. Same deal for a loaf of bread making its way back to a field of rye. At first I thought Vertov was just using the old gimmick to astound Russian peasants who'd never before seen moving pictures, but surely his intended audience was more sophisticated. Showing a process to be reversible makes it seem mechanical.

About the postering. In addition to the sheets pasted on every wall from Magadan to Minsk the film is jammed with poster-like intertitles. (I sometimes fool myself into thinking I can transliterate the Cyrillic alphabet, but really there's only like three characters I consistently remember.) This doesn't have anything to do with motion, and indeed Vertov would phase out intertitles from some of his later work, but it would seem to be in line with a constructivist notion of text as image, imparting the functionality of one to the other. Think of the bare lines and stark shapes of Kandinsky as approaching the quality of glyph, and vice versa. (McCloud's "picture plane" says it all.) However in the last reel Vertov makes the connection by juxtaposing intertitles with cartoon schematics for a crystal radio receiver and other electric devices — static diagrams/text to illustrate the machines/principles of Russia's future.

This is the kind of thinking that led to Skynet.


PS. Come for the agitprop, stay for the silhouette animation: a brief sequence of backlit stop motion 2D puppetry à la Lotte Reiniger.

Monday, October 19, 2009

Aelita, Queen of Mars

Soviet Moscow sobers up in the post-revolution dawn of 1921, unaware that the swim of bold resolution and wincing doubt is being glassed by the restless and fascinated Queen of Mars. From her remote palace, atop the "tower of radiant energy" where hangs a preposterous array of plate glass triangles we readily accept to be a fabulous telescope, the beautiful Aelita espies a moment of affection between our good comrade Los and wife Natasha, Muscovites joyously posed on a balcony high above the vibrant winter cityscape — See how the Earthlings touch lips!

Or so our good comrade imagines. As chief engineer at the city's radio station Los has lately grown obsessed over a mysterious, indecipherable signal. His more pragmatic colleagues snort when someone posits Martian origin...but what if? Could Aelita be pining for him?

Natasha meanwhile is about the people's business, devotedly working at a checkpoint station where valiant soldiers returning from the republics are processed and essential goods are fairly distributed to the local proletariat. Patriotic pastimes like performing amateur Marxist theater and painting brightly sloganed posters keep everyone mindful of the rewarding job at hand: Build the great communist state.

But all is not well in the godless motherland. The people are somewhat less prosperous than one might hope in the wake of world war and revolution and civil war, and certain members of the former bourgeoisie are apt to remember the good old days. As a temporary measure the party has instituted a New Economic Policy with certain (regrettable) capitalist features intended as a shot in the arm. The loyal are concerned that this ideological compromise could weaken the people's resolve, and rightly so: Those former fat cats are soon up to their old tricks.

A pair of grifters befriend Natasha and acquire some office at the checkpoint. Before long the people's goods become subject to creative accounting, luxury items like chocolate and wine unerringly find their way into fat hands, and what started for Natasha as seemingly innocent perks becomes entry into an underground high society. Admirably she comes to reject such criminal decadence, but not before Los gets the wrong idea: Their marriage strained by time apart while attending to separate spheres of civic duty, she taking new work in a public orphanage and he at the construction of a power plant, Los returns home at one inopportune moment to discover of Natasha's dallyings and in a fit of jealousy and moral outrage shoots his wife dead.

Because Russians love subplots several are required at this juncture to aid now-fugitive Los in getting his ass to Mars. Fortuitously one of Los's colleagues looks exactly like Los with a fake beard and eyeglasses, and double-fortuitously that fellow has recently vanished (courtesy of the nogoodnik grifters — irony!) allowing Los to assume his identity. Hounded by a ridiculous would-be detective (enter light comic relief) who has abandoned "the case of the missing sugar" for more notable quarry, Los undeterred proceeds to hire a crew to set about the clandestine construction of a missile. Among the men is a former soldier whose own marital bliss has been threatened by boredom for lack of war; a comrade must have work to do! The endeavor is a success and, after the workers are pointedly paid for their labor, we are treated to a thrilling liftoff and interplanetary voyage, complete with flaming toy rocket crashing splendidly by zipline into a tabletop mock-up of the red planet. Los et al merrily hop out.

Aelita has been waiting! Such wonders to behold in her kingdom. The prols wear milk crate helmets and the handmaidens erector set bloomers. Art design was not done by Wassily Kandinsky, but you could've fooled me. The Martian sets and costumes are considered exemplary of constructivism, a Soviet art movement contemporary to German expressionism and similar in the use of highly abstract and spare representations. Basically everything is cut and rolled from stiff plastic or aluminum sheeting, like arts and crafts for severe kindergartners. This served the people's common agenda, I'm told.

But wouldntyaknowit: The Martian laborers are being exploited by the hegemonical elite. Such is the prols' state of woeful alienation that when overpopulation begins to concern the moneyed Elders a novel solution is enacted by way of this priceless intertitle:
So, by the decree of the Elders one-third of the life force will be stored in refrigerators.
The meaning of "life force" in a Marxist parable should be clear; witness a queue of catatonic workers slid down ramps in a loading facility and unceremoniously rolled into heaps. Upon Los's arrival revolution must be less than a reel away. Aelita readily joins to the cause — happily it seems the Queen is merely a figurehead and not party to the oppressive authority exercised by those dastardly Elders! With her backing Los pronounces:
Follow our examples, Comrades! Unite into a family of workers in a Martian Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
They do, and the yoke is lifted. But what's this!? Of a sudden Aelita seizes control of the army, turning back the tide of the people and setting herself up as a true dictator over all Mars. Los bemoans that Aelita has betrayed the revolution, just as did Natasha!

He grapples Aelita/Natasha in a death embrace, and we realize that it was All A Dream. Los comes to in Moscow, rushing home to find his dear Natasha alive and well (he shot at her but missed, you see). Oh, and that mysterious radio signal? Turns out it was just a publicity stunt — a veiled advertisement for car tires. A crummy commercial? Son of a bitch! Issue the moral of the story: Get your head out of the clouds and keep your feet on the ground, Bastian.

I wonder how effective this message was in 1924, given that the fantastical adventures on Mars as depicted are really fun and cool. It's like what Truffaut said about the impossibility of making an anti-war war movie.

A final note on Aelita and Metropolis (1927). It would be instructive to teach these two films together, to better draw out subtle distinctions in the prevailing Weimar and Soviet theories on art, science and class struggle. Viewed through the Queen's lens the significance of Metropolis's famous epigram is clearer.

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Adventureland

This is a really good movie, which is problematic because I want to encourage you to see it, but yet I must grumble about the unavoidable fact that it's a boy meets girl story and well handled though it is I just don't really care about boy meets girl stories anymore. Everything else about the movie is great, so please weight my grumble accordingly.

Adventureland's best elements bear comparison to Clerks as a chronicle of the overeducated and underskilled unexpectedly employed among a wage class they hadn't imagined when writing senior theses on Gogol. Gradually the ringing shellshock of postgraduate ambitions gone awry fades into the tinny repeat of corporate-approved PA music and a lungful of fried dough aerosol alerts you to the choking sensation that someone is taking in the slack on the parental tether.


In other totally unrelated news, I'm tired of watching all these popular movies. Time to crack open some Soviet art house pics.
...
I was in Chipotle the other day and they played Waitress in the Sky by the Replacements. I heard the intro and I was like, Whoa, this sounds just like the Replacements instead of whatever shitty band it's probably going to turn out to be...it sure would be great if I wasn't the only person I know who loves the 'Mats. But then it was the 'Mats! But no one else in the restaurant looked as excited as me. So anyway, listen to more 80s college rock. The Adventureland soundtrack has some prime cuts from the Replacements and Hüsker Dü and power pop influences Nick Lowe, Big Star.

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Whip It

If I were Drew Barrymore this is definitely the movie I would have made. It's good news for movie fans when an established actor turns director because actors love actors. They tend to cast by way of fan service, peopling and overpeopling their feature like the cover of Sgt Pepper.

For instance, as a former child star of the 80s I would definitely grant the role of the likable pop, an unspoken honor, to Daniel "voice of the Wonder Years" Stern. Remember that time on the Simpsons when Bart had a Wonder Years voiceover moment?
[To earn money for his comic book, Marge suggests that Bart get a job.]
BART: Me!?
VOICEOVER: Get a job? Were they serious? I didn't realize it at the time, but a little bit of my childhood had slipped away...forever.
HOMER: Bart! What are you staring at?
BART: Uh...nothing.
VOICEOVER: He didn't say it and neither did I, but at that moment, my dad and I were closer than we ever —
HOMER: Bart! Stop that!
BART: Sorry!
I wish Daniel Stern were narrating my life.

Since the flick is about Austin and Austin roller derby you've got to have an authentic local representative. Cue fully bearded Andrew Wilson, aka Future Man, the forgotten Wilson brother, as team coach. I honestly didn't recognize him till the end, having never expected to see the big lug outside of a Wes Anderson movie. Next thing you know Rob Zombie is gonna hire Pagoda.

On loan from Tarantino is that playful Kiwi stuntwoman — a no-brainer. But the most truly irrefutable choice is Juliette Lewis as the badass queen bitch of the derby. (I'm suddenly struck by the realization that in the past week I've seen both Mickey and Mallory kicking fresh butt.) Jammed as this movie is with cameo characters, a familiar assignment for Barrymore, she finds a personal moment for many of them and the cross-generation confrontation behind the rink between Lewis and Ellen Page is the best.

Naturally Barrymore takes upon herself the greatest risk of looking foolish by playing the team's unabashedly physical space cadet. (She jokes at one point about making little Ellen the team mascot, but really it's Drew who acts as mascot for her own movie.) This leaves the leadership slot open to SNL's Kristen Wiig, who deservedly adds a semi-dramatic breakthrough part to her resume of consistently spot-on comedy.

With all sincerity: Jimmy Fallon's finest hour.

The only lifeless corner of the movie, oddly enough, is our dear Junebug; Page's character feels underwritten as if taken for granted. Best friend Alia Shawkat upstages her in wryness and spunk in every scene — Maeby knows how to quickly carve out a sharp supporting role among bigger players. Page meanwhile seems to be waiting for the heavy drama to fall on center stage.

Barrymore knows how to throw a crazy party (she ought to), which is what Whip It amounts to even despite the fact that Page shows up without her dancing shoes. It's a damn fun time. As a director her feelgood sensibilities are impeccable and we should be so lucky as to have Ms Barrymore lift up and bear forward the torn denim standard of Riff Randell.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Murder City Devils at Riot Fest

They played hard. Familiar as I am with the Devils' swan song live album and its shambolic roar — the death throes of a great sad beast — I was unprepared for the focused assault of last night's reunion performance. Taking the stage the four boys on guitar and vox made a line with their backs to the audience, as if for a moment of silent invocation. The show ripped open with the challenge-as-creed Get Off The Floor (If you're not going to dance what the fuck did you come here for?) and slammed shut with Murder City Riot. It was professional. Eight years to the month since the Devils folded (at the height of their power at the end of their rope) and the raw anguish of songs written by kids has worn into well-seasoned pain. Clint Eastwood is tougher now than in his poncho days.

Spencer himself is leaner and steadier, even having secured his storm-tossed sea captain beard into a more wolfish projection. He seems to have found a measure of grace. Still he howls I heard or read the only love is lost love, but with a new preface: "I've never been so wrong."

The Devils' ode to Johnny Thunders benefited most from a live interpretation, with its tyrannosaur bass line brought to the fore and Spencer's revealing point of clarification: "It wasn't New Orleans that killed Johnny. Johnny did it to himself. He was a FOOL." The song has become a cornerstone of the Devils' message to the kids (as I see it), along with Bear Away and Bride of the Elephant Man: Struggle and empathize with the struggles of others / Use that empathy to find a way not to destroy yourself but to somehow carry on.

The unequivocal hero of MCD is Iggy Pop of the Stooges. Many people are said to have "saved rock and roll" at one time or another...Spencer told it this way: Iggy found the very lowest form of art and reveled in its utterly indefensible quality; likened to the first caveman artist to paint not a handsome buffalo but an inarticulate scribble in shit. (Relatively sober throughout the night, here the old Spencer fumbled a bit for words. Appropriately enough.) In the same breath Mr Moody identified Kenneth Anger as a parallel figure in American underground film. I'm not yet conversant with Anger's work, but now I think I've put it off long enough. I like the sound of you rolling, rolling in that broken glass.

Part of me wanted to stand back from the pit to take in the full view, to catch every nuance of the Devils' on-stage dynamic and relish the response of the crowd as a whole. I might never get to see them again. But that is the instinct of a tourist, of a person busy fossilizing memories behind a camera. I don't have any photos of the show, and already the sounds are fading away, but I know I was there and I danced.

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Zombieland

Does not suck!


Well, that's it for Zombie Week (duration obviously negotiable). Until next time, remember: Aim for the head!

Resident Evil 5

Game is set in Africa and all the zombies are, logically enough, black. I'd prefer to believe that this is a reasonable design choice at a time of post-political correctness. Yet it can't be helped that the zombified residents of an African village look and behave pretty much exactly like the extras from Birth of a Nation. So after pointing my shotgun into the face of the one hundredth consecutive jiga boo the little twinges of transgression start to add up.

The really unfortunate thing is that the designers have done nothing to counter possible accusations of latent racism. The characters with speaking roles are all white, save one minor soldier who is clearly African-American. Your female partner, Sheva, is supposedly African but evidently of a more Mediterranean stock than the local sub-Saharan natives. There are no non-zombie locals. No children either (save one menaced white girl) or other humanizing suggestions of culture.

In a series that has also been criticized for its condescending attitude toward gender roles (see article, which applauds the "female gendered space" of Super Metroid) Capcom is not doing itself any favors by pleading ignorance with respect to racial sensitivities.

As usual the Japanese have stolen an American cultural item and gotten it all wrong. (Where did they get their ideas about Brooklyn plumbers?) Typically the results are more amusing. I object to the zombie being used in this way, contrary to its nobler purpose.

Monday, October 5, 2009

World War Z + The Zombie Survival Guide

Of the classic Universal Monsters five are associated with a respected work of literature (Drac, Frank, Hunch, Phantom, Invisible Man) and three were cooked up by harried screenwriters on assignment (Mummy, Wolf Man, Gill-man). The latter trio, as we know them today, are original creations of the cinema.

Not that they are without some important literary precedents. The creature from the black lagoon was inspired by the Beauty and the Beast fairy tale, the werewolf is an archetype owed to Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and as for the mummy, well...there is Bram Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars, which is the basis for several scarifying Hammer ventures of the 70s, but it's doubtful whether the creators of the 1932 Boris Karloff stiff were familiar with the novel. Instead, the international press is largely responsible for the notion of the mummy as monster, having invented a "curse of the pharaohs" to drum up Egyptomania following the 1922 discovery of King Tut; such hoopla proved enough to pad out a hasty script.

The modern zombie is also an original spawn of the silver screen. I have mentioned that the zombie epidemic has progenitors in 50s sci-fi lit, which makes for a fine pedigree if you're willing to connect the two, but as far as most genteel folk are concerned (with reason) Zed has staggered through his forty years of life an unlettered wretch. After all, who wants to read about giving a ghoul the ol' claw hammer-to-the-forehead when you can watch it or play it? Try out this excerpt from my unpublished zombie novel: And then he killed one with a rake, and then he killed one with this old Tandy 1000 monitor, and then his girlfriend got bit so he had to stab her with an apple corer, and then he killed like three at once... It goes on, but I'm afraid there's not much in the way of romance or nuance for you lovers of vampire fiction (you might prefer my unpublished piece of Twilight fan fiction). I guess when you take away the visual splendor of the rancid neck wound a zombie does not make a very compelling character. The most "sophisticated" usage of Zed in the movies is as dummy target for satire, but even then the lurid humor tends to rely on sight gags, and the stories have always been limited to one very restrictive premise.

George Romero did the zombie a great service by creating the genre with a vein of social commentary, but also a great disservice by establishing the almost unbroken tradition of the zombie story as the story of a small band of survivors isolated from broader events. It is a perfect formula as far as low-budget horror filmmaking is concerned; by design it avoids the complex and far-reaching social, political and economic implications that a widespread plague of living death would have on the present-day global community. That is, every zombie movie avoids the most interesting implications of its subject because it is a really hard problem to figure out, and one not at all suitable for treatment on film. Someone was going to have to be brave enough to write the definitive literary treatment of the zombie epidemic, and it would necessarily be a work not of horror so much as social science fiction.

That person turned out to be the son of the guy who gave us Frankenstein's monster in tails singing Puttin' on the Ritz. If your dad spent every night at the dinner table humping himself and butchering show tunes I suppose, yes, you'd give a great deal of thought to the end of human civilization. In 2003 Max Brooks published a utilitarian-looking field handbook entitled The Zombie Survival Guide: Complete Protection From The Living Dead. The cover is adorned by an understated coat-of-arms: crossed machete and M1 carbine. Contents are direct, matter-of-fact and thorough in dispelling common myths about zombies and zombie attacks, detailing the pathology of the virus that causes zombification and the physical attributes of the infected, outlining proven tactics for defense and combat against the four classes of zombie outbreak, listing suggested weaponry and gear for individuals and groups, and instructing where and how to attempt to rebuild civilization from scratch in the event of Class 4. Included as a lengthy appendix is a record of all known or alleged zombie outbreaks in human history, summarizing archaeological evidence from every inhabited continent dating back as far as 60,000 BC and written accounts from the time of the Punic Wars to a series of documented incidents in Los Angeles in 1993 and 1994.

A strain of well-educated madness was required for the compiling of such a meticulously fabricated and utterly convincing document. For Brooks it was merely a warm-up. In 2006 we learned the true depths of his (it must be said) genius. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War should be commonly referred to as "Max Brooks' World War Z", the way we now say "Bram Stoker's Dracula" and "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein". The Gothic flavor of those novels could not be more different from the sober journalism of WWZ, despite the structural similarities between the epistolary novel and Brooks' collection of transcribed and annotated interviews, which highlights once again my assertion that the zombie is the product of a more modern era of disenchantment and all-too-real postwar horrors (of which the television and internet media make us painfully aware, every day) that eclipse credulous Christian frettings about spooks and devils.

The book is modeled after Studs Terkel's oral history of World War II, The Good War; a collection of accounts of survivors from around the world and all walks of life that, taken together, relate the events of twenty-some years that span the initial outbreak in central China in the spring of 2011, the total collapse of global order by the autumn of 2012, the decade-long campaign waged by the re-marshaled US Army to reconquer North America from two hundred million zombies, and a further decade of rebuilding and reckoning in a shattered post-apocalypse. The Zombie Survival Guide appears as an in-world prewar publication, like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Brooks covers the foresight and readiness of Israel (allow some author bias), the ironic boon of the institutions of apartheid in South Africa, the reversal of economic fortunes between Cuba and the US with the flow of white-collar refugees into the well-defended island and Castro's expedient embrace of capitalism, the evacuation of slow-to-respond Japan to frigid Kamchatka (zombies freeze solid in subzero conditions), the mysterious disappearance of the entire population of North Korea, the nuclear saber-rattling between Pakistan and India brought to a head (but not how you expect), the observation of global ecologic catastrophe by the stranded crew of the International Space Station, the deluge of refugees from the world's two most populous countries up onto the defensible Tibetan plateau (humanitarian crisis is too polite a phrase), the resurgence of the democratic Chinese government-in-exile in Taiwan, the religious revival and restoration of a theocratic tsar in Russia, the reoccupation and siege of Europe's castles, the specter of German guilt in the face of mass death policy-making, the lunatic resolve of the French to reclaim Parisian sewers, the plausible appearance of a Waterworld of flotilla nations and the total autonomy and might of sovereign nuclear submarines. That's not even half the ideas sketched in this volume of bewildering creativity. I finished reading the book six months ago and still I don't have the stamina to try to fully convey its scope.

Let me reiterate that each of these events is conveyed by a different person's oral account of his or her personal story of survival, so rather than reading like a think tank's report on a hypothetical scenario every section is invested with deep and universal human drama. As comedy and tragedy go hand-in-hand, and as Brooks is inescapably his father's son, he does not leave us without the occasional moment of sublime levity, such as when Paris Hilton's latest reality show — Totally Zombie-Proof Celeb Party Compound in the Hamptons! — fails to live up to its name.

Max Brooks' World War Z reads like a symphony of commentary — a hundred individually humble voices, simple observations, many commonplace and a few profound, that when played in the context of one another gather into an immense and haunting emotional force. The book's most powerful passage reflects this analogy; talk to me after you've read it.


A Major Motion Picture is in the works... Well, if Watchmen turned out OK contrary to all my doomsaying, then just maybe there is hope for the cinema's first zombie epic.