American Zombie
Halloween was scary this year. First of all, my coworker Linda brought Kitty Litter cake in to work, and I had to watch people eat it. I don’t care how many tasty ingredients it includes, the idea of Scoop and Snack just makes me gag. But apparently crisis line counselors are made of stronger stuff. When staff found out my level of discomfort, they all had to come into my office and munch contentedly in front of me. This was while I was trying to push the send button on the United Way Health and Independence application, due October 31 at noon, which was scary enough in itself. It will probably take me until Thanksgiving to recover. In the meantime I highly recommend that should we encounter one another, the words “cost per unit of service” do not pass your lips. “Diversity audit” is a good phrase to avoid as well. I also don’t intend to get anywhere near a partially melted Tootsie Roll.
Halloween night I ventured to White Bear Lake, way out in the wilds of Ramsey County, to have pizza at Cathie’s house with Linda, hand out candy to princesses and vampires, and watch bad horror movies on her big screen TV. Cathie and Linda and I have been working together in the Little Nonprofit Shop of Horrors a year and a half now. We’ve done a lot of therapeutic drinking together, but we’ve never been to each other’s homes. This was an important bonding ritual. Besides, I never get many Trick or Treaters at my house. I’m surrounded by too many other townhomes with dark windows, the neighbors don’t know each other, and the kids don’t come.
I have to admit I am a complete horror movie wimp. When I was a kid, I used to avoid changing the channel on the television on Saturdays for fear I’d encounter Frankenstein. Poltergeists know what scares me. Over the shoulder camera angles creep me out for weeks. But I figured with two other people mocking the cheesy effects, I would be sufficiently insulated from my own wimpitude. At least while we were all in the same room. I had never seen Night of the Living Dead, but it was So Very Retro, I thought I could probably handle it. I mean, who can take zombies seriously, right?
Never underestimate the power of an academic.
Night of the Living Dead came out in 1968. Romero claims that the film wasn’t about racism, and that Duane Jones, the black man who played Ben, simply read best for the part. But ten minutes into the film I was itching to Google it into its historical context. It drove me nuts not to be able to pull out my laptop and look up deets while I was watching. You can accuse me of many things, but being a couch potato is not one of them.
At home the next day, I found everything I was looking for, and more, in Stephen Harper’s article in Bright Lights Film Journal. Harper calls Night of the Living Dead “a dramatic appeal for communication and cooperation in the face of paranoia and violence.” Its discussion of identity and metamorphosis, of what it means to be “human” or “thing” in the context of the political and social anxieties of the 1960s is fascinating - as is the analysis of race, gender, and genre. The zombies are supposedly created by radiation from space, and radiation makes the Cooper family quite literally nuclear. The fate of Ben and the fate of Martin Luther King are horrifically aligned. In the still photographs of carnage and the dead at the conclusion of the film, you can see the Vietnam War.
But even though Harper’s primary purpose in this article is to set the film in historical context, he can’t resist discussing the theme of catastrophe and apocalypse, and the way Americans religiously cling to the ideology of patriotism, which Romero vigorously critiques. When Harper does this, however, it is not to a 1960’s context he refers, but to essays of Slavoj Zizek written in response to the bombing of the World Trade Center.
Which is why Linda and Cathie and I found ourselves watching the film with a whole different cast of characters in mind.
The hero is a young black man, Ben, a “clean, articulate guy.” (His real name is probably too foreign-sounding to use.) A gaggle of dead white men come after him, and he holes up in a house with a catatonic blonde, who is scared witless when she and her brother are attacked by a zombie . (This is entirely realistic because all blondes were powerless before pantsuits.) Meanwhile, John McCain and Sarah Palin are hiding in the basement with their special needs child, who has been bitten by one of these reanimated corpses. They have a young couple with them. Eventually, they all realize they are in the same bipartisan house, and will have to work together to get out of it.
Ben and McCain (whose name in the movie is Harry Cooper) start debating over how best to defend themselves. The debates go nowhere. So the media tells them what to do. Get to safety. The National Guard will protect you. Cremate your dead, and shoot all zombies in the head. Harry says the fundamentals of the basement are sound. The efforts Ben has made to defend the upstairs are just too flimsy. Ben wants to get the truck filled with gas, try to make it to a safety station. Harry wants to sit tight.
The young couple switches their support over to Ben, who has the best plan of action. They make a break for it while Ben throws Molotov cocktails at the field full of boomer zombies - you knew he was really a terrorist, didn’t you? - who lumber at them with their arms outstretched, demanding their social security checks. They are all white, but now there are also some women. One, of course, is naked.
The young couple reaches the truck, but when it comes time to fill up the gas tank, disaster strikes. The truck explodes. Boomers feast on roasted college students. We’re eating our children’s inheritance. And also their intestines.
The blonde sacrifices herself for Sarah Palin. (Now that’s not realistic.) But the special needs child stabs her mother with a garden trowel and goes back to chowing down on her father’s arm. This kid is going to need a lot of social services. Who’s going to pay for that?
Let's feed her the Kitty Litter Cake.
At the end, Ben is the only one left alive. Till the sheriff shows up. Beat ‘em or burn ‘em, he says. Shoot anything that moves.
We had some debate at the end of the movie. I saw the look on Ben’s face when the rescue squad came. I think he knew exactly what was about to happen. Cathie and Linda are not so sure. They’re still trying to keep hope alive.
Me, I just don’t want history to repeat itself.