What's with all the zombies lately?
That could be a question about one of the hippest retro fads that pop culture has going these days. Inspired by horror genres of past, zombies have lurched back to preeminence in books like "World War Z," video games like "Left 4 Dead" and blockbuster films like "Zombieland." Even the highbrow producers at National Public Radio recently devoted a segment to a University of Ottawa study titled "Mathematical Modeling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection." Indeed, the undead have become so popular, they've spurred "zombie walks" in cities and spawned Weird Al-ish parodies through Jane Austen knockoffs like "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" and bands such as the Zombeatles (with their hit "Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead").
Frighteningly enough, though, that question about zombies could also be asked of America's political culture.
It was only a year ago that "zombie" first entered the colloquial economic lexicon during the collapse of the financial institutions that were cannibalizing the economy. From a balance-sheet perspective, many of these firms were dead. But they were quickly reanimated as zombie banks with trillions of taxpayer dollars.
Like a typical zombie outbreak, the initial plague spread.
On Wall Street, we have zombie executives -- those who destroyed the economy but nonetheless kept their same jobs and now continue paying themselves huge bonuses. At the White House, President Obama hired zombie advisors whose zombie economic ideologies and records manufacturing recession conditions should have killed their careers, but who now sit in high government office letting out moans in support of the zombie banks.
On Capitol Hill, the scene this Halloween season looks like Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video. Decrepit zombie politicians with the funk of 40,000 years stalk Congress with the very zombie lobbyists that the election was said to disempower. Lately, they are working in tandem to construct zombie health insurance companies -- for-profit corporations eternalized by public subsidies, customer mandates and almost no regulation or competition. At the same time, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that should have already concluded keep plodding on with an unchanging zombie strategy -- all while media zombies push zombie myths about death panels and birth certificates, effectively feasting on the last functioning lobes of the American brain.
Call me a zombie pundit, but I agree with "World War Z" author Max Brooks' suggestion that the concurrent rise of zombie pop and political cultures is no coincidence.
"Zombies are an apocalyptic threat, we are living in times of apocalyptic anxiety (and) we need a vessel in which to coalesce those anxieties," he says.
In fact, I'll go out on a severed limb and take it further: If zombies specifically represent the apocalyptic downsides of immortalized mindlessness, then today’s zombie zeitgeist is not merely a result of scary quandaries created by stupidity. It is a reaction to both those problems and the sense that they can never be thwarted.
Here we are, a year after a financial implosion that should have driven a stake in the heart of free market fundamentalism. Here we are, a year after an election that was supposed to pour holy water on Wall Street vampires, exorcise the economy's demons and challenge the ancient mummies of neoconservative foreign policy. Yet here we are, with virtually nothing changed, watching the same zombie crises indomitably stumble forward.
And so what do we do? We flee to entertainment venues that let us enjoy the campy thrill of confronting the undead -- even though we've lost the ability to do that in real life.
"The zombie is a way for us to explore massive disasters in a safe way," Brooks says. "You can't shoot the financial meltdown in the head, but you can do that with a zombie."
© 2009 Creators.com
"Zombieland" may be the only movie in which the hero -- and he is a hero -- admits to suffering from irritable bowel syndrome. Is that oversharing? Or is it an earnest confession, the kind of intimacy you're willing to risk with a group of strangers -- in other words, us -- when you're living in a world that's become overrun with flesh-eating zombies?
I'd say it's more of the latter, a measure of the good-natured, sometimes even buoyant, spirit of "Zombieland," which is the feature-film debut of director Ruben Fleischer. (The writers are Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick.) Jesse Eisenberg is the shy young man with the gastrointestinal troubles -- we know him only as Columbus (the city he hails from), because in this terrifying new United States, where most of the population has been turned into clumsy, flesh-chomping creatures whose mouths spew black goo, there's no time or need for real names. At any rate, that's the rule established by Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), the tough-talkin', gun-totin' Twinkie-lovin' zombie killer whom Columbus meets, and tags along with, early in the film. It's not long before, in their swaggering innocence, Tallahassee and Columbus are duped by two grifter sisters, Wichita and Little Rock (Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin) -- their tactics are smack in the middle between mischievous and hardhearted.
And then, of course, these four rootless individuals become a makeshift family; even though each is on his or her way to a different place, they discover, despite their initial annoyance with one another, that they're happier hanging together than going their separate ways. Plus, it's nice to have company when you're blamming zombies with shotguns and automatic weapons (which our hardy crew, luckily, has an almost inexhaustible supply of).
Because bonhomie is the true subject of "Zombieland." Fleischer has made a movie that comes off as easygoing, but actually shows a remarkable amount of discipline: The picture is beautifully paced, with an exhilarating, comically violent opening, a halcyon middle section where, in what could be viewed as a sideways homage to "Rebel Without a Cause," our rootless wanderers share a brief respite in an empty, lavish mansion (I won't tell you whom it belongs to), and a finale filled with light and color and movement (as well as piles of vanquished zombies). "Zombieland" is wickedly funny in places: In the opening sequence, Columbus outlines, in voice-over, the chief rules for surviving in this dangerous new world. To illustrate one of his maxims, a vehicle driven by a friendly-looking mom type is besieged by a troupe of little zombie girls in pink princess costumes, their mouths dripping with outrageously exaggerated black, bloody goo. It's every parent's nightmare kiddie birthday party.
But the picture has good manners, too: As Columbus tries to fend off a cute-girl zombie, he accidentally jams her foot in a door. "Sorry!" he mutters automatically. Eisenberg is a low-key actor, perhaps a bit too low-key: Although he's given effective performances in pictures like "The Squid and the Whale" and "Adventureland," he's beginning to seem like a performer who knows how to strike only one note. But in "Zombieland," he at least stretches and bends that note, poking fun at his character's nerdy, overly cautious demeanor. Similarly, Harrelson takes devilish glee in sending up his character's machismo ("Time to nut up or shut up" is his favorite expression). His delivery is both relaxed and pocketknife-sharp, but there are also places where he doesn't need to say a word to set us giggling: He has a way of tempering his near-psychotic stare with an easy, "What, me worry?" grin, and the combination is a kind of genius.
Stone, who played a groovy, down-to-earth high-schooler in "Superbad," is even sexier and more sultry here: She has a great, slightly gravelly voice, the voice of a girl who's smoked way too many cigarettes -- and in a world in which few of us are allowed to indulge in the pleasures of tobacco, maybe the sound of smoking is the next best thing. But even if Stone's Wichita is a straight-talking presence, she's not, we learn, such a tough girl after all. And that's fitting in a movie that's as unapologetic about its affection for the zombie-movie genre as "Zombieland" is. Parts of the picture are brushed with a cozy glow, the kind of coziness you sometimes get in science fiction -- John Wyndham's marvelous novel "Day of the Triffids" comes to mind -- when a small crew of hardy survivors is forced to face a harsh world. "Zombieland" is a romance, a comedy, a road movie and a freewheeling schlock horrorfest, all in one. But one thing it doesn't trade in is paranoia: Its growling, groaning zombie villains aren't particularly menacing. This isn't so much an us-against-them parable as an inclusive joyride. Even in the United States of Zombieland, we're all in this together.
Open Salon box office in review (10/18/09)
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