J, my fellow hound owner friend (Go! George!) brought up “World War Z,” the zombie apocalypse movie http://bit.ly/Qs8zC7 (on Sept. 24), saying it was a capstone of zombie representation in today’s undead obsessed culture. How so?
Many ways. Let’s take running. In scene after scene zombies flail away in comic-menacing bluster, bodies as if rebuilt by a methed-up Victor Frankenstein, looking in a not too far-fetched way like clots of desperate-faced joggers in Central Park, the mid-pack shufflers in the New York City Marathon. A capstone of our mass society, the likely end result of four generations of industrialized culture, which yields the conundrum: sanitized corruption of human potential, the wicked byproduct of which fouls the Earth to such a point that even those who have an individualistic bent cannot extract themselves unless they are among the privileged elite who from their fortified cities defend to the death the right to throw off the masses (think those streams of zombies in the WWZ trailer above, with no place to go, yet will never stop in their reckless climb up and into these fortresses only to suffer the release of a certain death once inside.)
The Hollywood story, of course, sees an antidote. Here is where the audience (which sees itself not as a zombie, rather in our “American Idol”-entertainment culture we are conditioned to see ourselves as the Other, one who is superior to the poor MF-ing zombies, weak and pathetic, not at all like me) is given the sappy bromide: Hands across America, we are all one, aren’t we?, Brad Pitt, he will bring us all to the Promised Land, one of concord and hope.
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Steaming toward Steamtown. Nineteen days and counting!
Next: Running for Your Life: And All the Rest is Literature
