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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Coda: Against George Romero
...braaaains?
Tuesday, 2009-01-06 | Film, New Athens
| As a filmmaker you get typecast just as much as an actor does, so I'm trapped in a genre that I love, but I'm trapped in it! |
| George Romero |
NB: This is a continuation of the article found here.
Some other, intervening remarks were made in the forum, not the least of which found Matt longing for the "time when Zombies were the undead personal honor guard of magicians like 'Papa Doc' Duvalier", when Jim remarked that "the zombie movie has, post-Romero, always had some element of societal criticism to it, and that itself is the device of the horror."
His remark about how the post-Romero zombie movie locates the horror elsewhere is exactly correct, of course. And more's the pity.
Zombies have been utterly deprived of significance and the horror is almost always to be found elsewhere. And this is why, rather than an important part of American folktales and myth, zombies are currently little more than popular novelty--a dress-up game--meant to amuse girls between the ages of 16-24 and facilitate/expedite the initiation of lateral torso motion (i.e. in movie theatres or on dance floors) between them and their male peers.
Consider what I was saying in my previous post about role playing games and the role of zombies in those games. It's more useful to think of Romero's "zombie movies" (and the movies of his imitators) like that: they are social commentaries that just happen to feature zombies. In those movies, there is never a single moment in which zombies are the subject. They are always wholly subordinate to the social commentary. And the social commentary is always some re-presentation of the Alamo-principle (also discussed in the previous post): an unlikely group of people must fail to overcome personal differences and thereby fail to hold their fortification against the mindless brutality of the outside world.
Basically, film makers want to comment on Manifest Destiny and slavery and the fact that the first Americans erected a great and terrible legal/social/economic edifice that made it impossible for solidarity to triumph over racial and cultural difference. And they just happened to stick zombies in because zombies, in the absolutely impoverished imagination of a hack like Romero, are an easy way to combine the casual brutality of nature and the idea of ghosts/revenants from the past into one anthropomorphic package and throw that package at the feet of one's cast.
And thus vodou/vodun are necessarily excluded from contemporary zombie movies: if they were included, the symbolic Alamo is relocated to the Africa's dark hear and the perpetually divided White America (which makes its last stand in a shopping mall, or a police station, etc.) is undermined and eventually destroyed by hordes of angry, jabbering negroes. And no one wants to make that movie. And thus zombies are bereft of any aspect of horror. To attribute anything cultic or truly significant to zombies would be, thanks to Romero, to make a movie that is implicitly racist.
Basically, the legacy of George Romero (who sucks a fat baby's balls) has been to inspire film makers to systematically evacuate any element of horror (i.e. those truly unexplainable phenomena willed into existence by the individual mind or by minds functioning collectively; the thing that Kurtz is talking about in Apocalypse Now) from all zombie movies for close to thirty years in the name of dramatic expedience: as long as zombies are meaningless and symbolize nothing by definition, writers don't have to think too hard about including them in the movie's plot and can focus on developing conflicts among the living.
In reality, however, Romero's legacy has been to make zombies a totally inert figure that cannot actually represent anything at all because if they do, what they represent is a statement of racial and cultural incompatibility. Romero sucks because he painted zombies into a corner from which they cannot emerge.
As I mentioned previously, Craven tried to help the genre recover, but what he was attempting was impossible because of Romero's "work" and "contributions" to the genre. (And, let's be honest: Craven's movie kind of totally fell apart in the third act when the evil dictator and his fearsome junta turned out to actually be magicians, rather than vicious murderers and torturers exploiting the simplicity of the poor.) Wes Craven wanted to restore some mystique and social symbolism to the zombie, but he was forced to abandon the idea of horror (again, in the Apocalypse Now sense) in favor of special effects fireballs and hum-drum Judeo-Christian boilerplate mythos.
At any rate, having been thus rendered culturally and psychologically inert, zombies have become pretty much the exclusive property of teenage girls, i.e. society's hermit crabs (i.e. the demo that, lacking the ability to synthesize a social edifice sui generis must take shelter in whatever empty vessels they happen upon).
Way to go, George: way to fuck it up for everyone.
