freakpowertix

(Reprinted from my myspace blog: www.myspace.com/freakpowerticket -- NOTE: IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN THIS FILM YET, YOU MAY WANT TO PASS ON READING THIS.)

August 18/19, 2005

I never got around to writing up part two of my George A. Romero encounter:

It's been a while now some of the buzz from that experience has subsided for me. On the other hand, I just returned from the longest visit to the east coast of my life -- 2 weeks -- with a stay in Western Massachusetts, Philadelphia, and New York City. Along the way, I got to share some of my passion for all things zombie with some Pennsylvania residents. One woman I met (Rachel is her name) actually lives in Pittsburgh and, when we exchanged contact info, she wrote on the back of a business card I handed her that she "knows where NOTLD [Night of the Living Dead] stuff is." She also had some friends attend a gala Land of the Dead premiere in Pittsburgh which included special guests Romero, Quentin Tarantino, and Robert Rodriguez, and indicated that some of the establishing shots in the movie were of Romero's hometown. She was also annoyed that some critics seemed to think that the city in the film was supposed to be New York. I have a vague recollection too that another Pennsylvanian, Jennifer (a Jersey native?), likewise mentioned that also she knows where the graveyard in NOTLD is (or some such zombie landmarks). Rachel has been to the Monroeville mall, from Dawn of the Dead, as well, and could speak about interior landmarks that were removed, and those that remain. There was something ultimately refreshing about talking about the role of zombie movies in the lives and history of Pennsylvania residents, as opposed to, say, all of the patriotic landmarks and bullshit! (I was also told by groovy residents in West Philly to check out the Mutter Museum [with an array of medical abnormalities on display] and some crazy exterminator's "Insectorium" in a Philadelphia suburb! Ha. Only one person in that wonderfully hip crowd, acting somewhat embarassed, mentioned the possibility of my even checking out, gasp, the Liberty Bell or Independence Hall!)

In my previous entry, I pretty much got up to the moment of Romero getting introduced during the L.A. premiere. It was all pretty strange, in some ways... His producer introduced the cast beforehand. At this premiere, George was wearing what John Leguizamo calls "dungarees" (I'm adding that one to my vocab list), a denim long-sleeved shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a photographer's vest, and the biggest glasses this side of the late Harry Caray.

If I had actually gotten to interview him, I would have asked him about his affinity with the values and ideas of the 1960s counterculture. No dice with that interview, as it sadly turned out, but an LA Weekly profile a week or so later backed up this impression (he apparently often employs lingo like he's still part of the Beat Generation). The man is 65 years old and he still ties his now gray hair back into a rather long pony tail.

I recall him mentioning some of the strangeness of this experience working with a big studio on a zombie project. He indicated that it had been a positive experience, for the most part (but their release strategy and its marketing probably proved to be another matter entirely). He was self-described as having flown under their radar for such a long time. He mentioned his wife and the actors in the house. I didn't see Christine Forrest-Romero in the audience, but apparently she was there. They've had a pretty close professional relationship over the years, to my knowledge (Also, I always liked her performance during the beginning of Dawn, at the fictional TV station, WGON).



With all of that as a set-up, here are some observations about the movie itself, for what they're worth:

1) It seemed a bit short, which is disappointing, given the casual pacing and epic nature of Romero's original, amazing indie masterpiece, Dawn of the Dead. Such are the major structural changes, since Dawn, in a film industry that doesn't properly know what to do with a maverick genre filmmaker like GAR. It all clocked in at about 93 minutes, and is slated to be expanded, of course, with a special director's cut DVD come mid-to-late October.

2) I really loved the title sequence. One of the highlights of the Dawn remake was their work with the opening and closing titles, so the bar had been raised with credit sequences during these films (nevertheless, there's something amazingly powerful about Romero's talky title sequence in the low-budget Dawn). This time around, they use an audio collage of news clips and emergency-alert bulletins to set the context for what we were about to see. It was pretty immediate and creepy (so was the music by German composer Reinhold Heil [Run, Lola, Run], now a Santa Barbara resident, word. No amazing prog-rock music like the Italian band Goblin's score for Dawn, but none too shabby). Romero also got them to use the old black-and-white Universal Pictures logo from the 1930s, which is a nod to the classic studio horror films viewed during his youth (Frankenstein, Dracula, The Wolf Man, The Mummy), movies that inspire much of his life's work, which began with the midnight movie classic Night of the Living Dead, tellingly also shot entirely in B&W.

3) There was a very cool Creepshow/E.C. Comics-like macabre quality to the opening sequence (a nice tongue-in-cheek diner sign introduces the diegetic world of the film, reading "Eats"). These zombies are all characters, too, as I mentioned in my previous entry, unlike most of the creatures in the Dawn remake, for instance. They fit into social types, in a medieval, Hieronymous Bosch/Geoffery Chaucer/Boccacio sort of way (I ran into a Bosch reference in some review or article I read elsewhere, which I really appreciated). They also are shown pathetically, flailingly remembering their human identities, herding together as they were wont to do (I seem to recall a couple, two young lovers in their former lives perhaps, sort of gothy/punky looking, starting things off). This opening reminded me of the cleverest aspects of Tim Burton's Beetlejuice characters and of his animated films (something pointed out elsewhere, but which I thought of on my own before seeing that suggestion). Romero's always displayed a lowbrow, and sometimes corny, sense of humor to offset his most horrific visions, which sort of comes with the genre terrritory.

4) I was really struck by the characters of the mercenaries, lead by Simon Baker's and John Leguizamo's characters, heavily armed, with their Dead Reckoning armored vehicle, jeeps, and motorcycles. Shades of the biker army in Dawn of the Dead, they also fit into a larger social order that I think has some parallels with what we -- the U.S., what our military insists on calling "The Coalition" -- have introduced into the middle east with our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. On top of that, images of street warfare, of extreme, disgusting violence not typically discussed or represented in our media's embedded wartime coverage (or in Hollywood "action" films, for that matter), abound within this movie. I'll discuss that more, a bit later in this essay.

5) The most apocalyptic image in the film is probably the graveyard/garbage dump that Leguizamo's Cholo and his cronies are seen disposing corpses into. That scene features one of the widest angled, most detailed CGI shots of the film. As someone I read pointed out in another piece, that indeed is a representation of Hell on Earth.

6) A couple of friends made nice reference to the fact that Big Daddy is a gasoline station owner/automobile mechanic. Motor vehicles play a big role in the dynamic of the film. One of those same friends noted the fact that Baker's character, Riley, is very emotionally invested in his recently purchased, later stolen, automobile, bought with his earnings as a civilian contractor for Dennis Hopper's Kaufman and the elites of Fiddlers Green. We are in a world not too far removed, perhaps, from wars for oil. What is more, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome/Road Warrior/George Miller movies, and their oil war thematics, are referenced directly during the carnival/gladiators' cage scene that introduces Slack, Asia Argento's character. Kudos to KCSB's Keith Rozendal and Vicki Zeitner for noting and suggesting some of these observations. (I think it was Keith who also made note of the discussion of automobile theft, in Detroit versus Samoa, a pretty funny part of the film, where the character Pillsbury basically says that every car in Samoa gets stolen.) All of this accrues to make for something a bit more than coincidence: dare I say that automobiles are a leitmotif in Land of the Dead?

7) It occurred to me that Romero is also referencing another apocalyptic movie classic, Escape from New York, in Land of the Dead. John Carpenter actually has a Thunderdome type of scene as well, in that wonderfully cheesy low-budget sci-fi movie ( he did it first, take that Mr. George Miller). The main thing to note here is that Romero's normal human characters in Land of the Dead live within the walls of a city fortress, instead of outside of them (as in Escape from NY). Regardless, themes/motifs of borders, barriers, walls, inside and outside, cities under lockdown, and occupation, abound within this film (as with all of Romero's zombie works, and within this modern genre). This time, it just happens to work on an even grander scale than ever before. I have to credit my best friends Samara Paysse and Sara Mason for noting those tensions (and thematics) within the movie.



8) Which brings us to Fiddler's Green. I couldn't help but think of a few things because of this rather curious pastoral name for a tower fortress (which is also clearly an allusion to the World Trade Center buildings, one reason some critics assumed that this city is supposed to be a stand-in for NYC, I'm sure). One matter I never really read or heard before: this seemed to me, at least in part, a reference to the Green Zone in Baghdad, where Western elites reside in former Presidential Palaces, in a safety zone away from the suicide bombs and street insurgency going on wantonly throughout that city, and the entire country of Iraq. Furthermore, this seems to me to be a conflation of Green Zone and of Nero's "fiddling" while Rome burned...

I'm having a bit of a hard time remembering some of the details of this movie, unfortunately. It's not as fresh as it once was (ready for another viewing I am, this will have to wait until the October release on DVD, I guess. I saw the thing twice, wanted to catch it one last time, in fact, but was not able to). It was really telling to me that this movie got released just a couple weeks before our 2005 Fourth of July celebrations, with its obvious criticism of blind and dumb patriotism, with the zombies' already limited faculties being incapacitated by the fireworks/"sky flowers" set off from the Dead Reckoning.

There are some correspondences being made, I think, between the victims of occupation -- say dehumanized Arabs/Muslims in occupied lands or U.S. detention -- and us ordinary Western civilians. A movie like Shaun of the Dead did a really good job illustrating how we all end up zombified in our day-to-day lives and work routines (echoes of Pynchon's TV-watching ghosts/zombies in his great 1990 novel Vineland). The image of a patriotic spectacle like the sky flower/fireworks display disabling the "walkers" also points to us Americans/Westerners -- as well as the marching band zombies in the beginning of the movie, the softball player zombie, and so forth. On the flipside, the zombies are massacre victims, of a sort (just consider what happens to them once the fireworks are set off), sitting ducks, garbage/waste, and fodder for target practice. In regards to the scene that reveals their bound bodies hanging upside down, from ropes, literally with targets wrapped around them: I think that this creates some of the strongest allusions in the movie to military detention/prison misconduct in Afghanistan, Abu Graib, Guantanamo. It certainly also enrages the leader of their insurrection, the zombie Big Daddy.

On another level, Romero seems to be suggesting that life under military occupation, overseas, is not that much different, perhaps, than life under post-9/11 Patriot Act lockdown here at home. The slum/ghetto denizens of the film are enchanted by another kind of spectacle than fireworks, which keeps them equally enthralled and controllable: prostitution, violent gladiator games, substances (those aren't just for the elites, like Kaufman's whisky bottle, right? Substance abuse seems implied by the carnivalesque scene early in the film, which reminded me of Terry Gilliam's Circus-Circus mockup in his Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas masterpiece). Whatever, Kaufman knows how to keep them docile, it seems



There are explicit 9/11 references in the script, of course: Mr. Kaufman, nicely played by the wacko and brilliant Dennis Hopper, gets to the mouth the lines about not "negotiat[ing] ... with terrorists;" the Fiddler's Green recalls the WTC towers, which is in line to be blasted by the hardware mounted on the Dead Reckoning; and, in concert with that, Cholo mentions that he's going to wage a "jihad" on them if he doesn't get his ransom for the Dead Reckoning, in revenge for Kaufman's betrayal.

Furthermore, y'all might want to consider the pecking-order within Kaufman's city: a) wealthy elites, living as if the end of the world is not even "very fucking nigh" (a quote from Danny Boyle's brilliant Romero tribute/reimagining, 28 Days Later), living obliviously, and 'large' in their shining tower; b) the uniformed military, who provide security on the perimeters and within the layers of this walled and moated city; c) the "civilian contractor" type mercenaries, who violently raid the zombies world outside the city walls for essential supplies (and other substances); d) the oppressed and huddled masses within the slum walls of the city, who have practically no social services, with a handful of agitators urging uprising, without much impact; e) the zombies, who actually rise up before the previously mentioned human segment of the population. I guess you could say that the human city dwellers outside of Fiddler's Green stand in for us sad-sack middle-class Americans under post-9/11 global capitalism. We certainly have a crappy social safety net, but are still better off than the lowest of the low, the poor, the proletariat, people of color, the colonized subaltern, residents of the global south/the third world. That's who the zombies seem to stand in for, most of all, this time around (maybe they have always ultimately stood for such people in Romero's zombie movies?)



It's no coincidence that, again, race matters are forcefully represented yet again within a Romero zombie film/social allegory. You have the black Big Daddy character, who leads the once hopeless zombies in their insurgency. The Latino character, Cholo, is hoping to work his way into the elite society of Fiddler's Green, but quickly learns that all of his wealth (acquired doing risky runs for contraband substances, like liquor, and secretly dumping the bodies of Kaufman's murder victims) adds up to not a whole hell of a lot in a society based on bogus "invitation only" rules and "waiting lists." Near the end of the movie, one of his last lines of dialogue is a reversal of the typical turn of the phrase about wanting "to see how the other half lives." The very white magnate, Mr. Kaufman (named apparently after a powerful commercial leader within Pittsburgh, PA), in the end, is done in by Big Daddy, by Cholo, by Kaufman's aggrieved black driver/bodyguard, and an ignited gasoline tank.



There's so much that can be said about this movie. Given its brevity, it is richly dense with nightmarish images and memorable characters. I haven't written much at all yet about Asia Argento's solid performance in what's proven to be a breakthrough role for her, as the character called Slack. I'm not remembering her dialogue as much as some characters, but I believe that there were references to her once training for military service, before being assigned to the role of prostitute in their society, by Kaufman. She's even revealed to be secretly helping the Irish rebel, Mulligan, who's trying to build an insurrection within their ghetto walls. Another in a series of interesting and strong characters played by women and people of color in Romero's movies... Lest we forget Romero's insistence on equal opportunity casting, there was also the woman who drives the Dead Reckoning and the 3 commandos assigned to Riley's crew (Slack and Robert Joy's Charlie). The commandos include one white guy who tanks out pretty quickly, another woman, and the Samoan character, Pillsbury.

I should wrap this up.

These thoughts could easily springboard into a full-fledged academic type of essay. I still want to say a few words too about meeting Romero.

Before that extra-textual occurrence, however, I want to point out some of the handful of images and other matters from this film that stand out in my mind:

The river crossing: wow. Freudian, for one. A horde from the murk. Creepy. Inexorable. Echoes of a key scene in what apparently is considered to be an Italian horror classic, Zombie, by Lucio Fulci.

Shots of the zombies fanning out afterwards, like rats, from a god's eye viewpoint, near the top of the tower perhaps. An earlier shot from the same vantage point showed nothing but empty streets, I seem to recall (this reminded me of the tail-end of the stylish bravura opening of the Dawn of the Dead remake, from the helicopter's viewpoint, overlooking the highway that film's main character attempts to flee on).

I already mentioned the apocalyptic Boschian graveyard scene, near the beginning, and the Abu Graib echoes with the dangling zombie cadavers, which enrages Big Daddy. The power of his wartime imagery (dare we forget that Romero's friend and collaborator, Tom Savini, a gore makeup pioneer, was also a Vietnam veteran?), for me, are also heightened during the sequence when the Dead Reckoning blasts the cannibal holocaust on the other side of the bridge. Just like what you read in honest depictions of warfare: once the missiles hit, body parts fly (towards the camera, in fact). "This ain't no party, this ain't no disco, this ain't no fooling around," as Talking Heads say in their great song, "Life During Wartime." That's certainly not how our sanitizing, embedded, and complicit media tend to represent things in its war coverage, during these Fascist/Foxist/Faux News bullshit days. It's a pretty brief scene, but absolutely horrific if you really think about it. Violent, horrifying images like that: our soldiers and Iraqi civilians are seeing such real carnage day after day under Coalition occupation.

Finally, in brief, five more standout things about the movie itself: 1) Simon Baker's Riley finds a pretty chilling scene of feasting zombies, in the flashlight illuminated warehouse (complete with one "walker" inserting its hand fully into the mouth and throat of some dead sucker). 2) The overrunning of Fiddler's Green: "Eat the Rich," is right. When I spoke with him outside of the movie theater, I mentioned to Romero that he is certainly the most Marxist director working within this genre: Big Daddy breaks through the reinforced glass of the glorified high-rise shopping mall, Fiddler's Green, with a jackhammer, for chrissakes. And all of these zombies are taking up arms, primarily the tools of their caste/trade (butcher's knives and hammers, a baseball bat, perhaps, and then later guns and machetes). It's not like you want to see this bloodbath happen, exactly, but if it's going to happen at all, you'd rather see it happen to these evil pricks, instead of to other, less fortunate people. I couldn't help but laugh at the image of the tearing of one rich woman character's bellybutton piercing, made all the more pointed by the context of the "tres chic" Hollywood screening I first caught the flick at. (And doesn't Tom Savini's "Blade" character, from Dawn, make a cameo during this orgy of violence?) 3) Seeing the transformed Cholo character, near the end, was very, very cool. John Leguizamo so totally rocks! 4) Robert Joy's performance and characterization of the crippled and maimed character, Charlie, was quite good, sweet, amusing, and endearing. And he didn't even use massive firepower to get his shit done (a telling point in Romero's script). 5) Back to Asia Argento: she must seem like family of a sort for Romero, as he's had such a long association with her father, Dario. It was cool that she gets to play something much more than a sexual object in this film (a ways away from offensive Hollywood frat-boy junk like Triple X). Romero also seems to recognize her as a stand-in for youthful Generation X energy and vigor, and, let's be blunt, beauty and pure sexual hotness. I mean, we still get a glimpse of that amazing angel tattooed all over her pelvis, upon her character's release from the jail holding-cell! Uncle George! (And Argento has very good chemistry with Baker, a relationship I ended up appreciating much better than, say, Sarah Polley's character with that Weber guy's in the Dawn remake.)...