"Stories of what I see" - Happy, Coming Up, Act 2
RSS Add-Me
a page in your diary
George A. Romero has a new zombie film out, Diary of the Dead. The Romero zombie films by rights ought to have finished when the original trilogy (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead) came to an end, but appropriately for a film series featuring corpses who simply won't stay down, Diary is a fifth instalment from the zombie meister.
Diary of the Dead is a "found footage" film fiction. It purports to be an editing together of tape, mobile phone, internet and security camera moving images all shot or stolen by a middle-class American film school student caught up in the first wave of the zombification of the American nation. Society is falling to bits as, for some inexplicable reason, the dead rise and start chomping on the living. What I found striking about the film (which my companion, a fan of the original trilogy, hated) was its ability to disappear into a black hole of its own fictitiousness. Diary is the film which a too-comfortable, slightly lazy, insular-looking American film student would make about the end of the world. The apocalypse as seen not through the eyes of a visionary, but through the lens of a postmodern film consumer/maker who knows how to point his camera, knows how to shoot but who is incapable of investing what is going on with any real meaning. The terrifying thing about this is, and this is where the new film's real horror lies, that the events depicted, the end of the world as we know it, might not actually have any human meaning at all.
I couldn't help thinking of the threats we face - from dirty bombs to ecological catastrophe to economic breakdown - as I watched the film. We might well be living in the end times, the end of the "civilised" world as we know it, and what will document our foreclosure? Home-shot YouTube videos, HD documentary footage, security cameras, mySpace pages full of footage shot or found and posted by people who haven't a fucking clue what's going on. In a way, we are now not merely the producers and consumers of found footage, but our very selves have been found through the consumption and production of such footage. We're second, third, fourth, fifth upwards hand versions of something which probably never existed in the first place. The terrible truth of postmodernity is that everything is a fabrication, and that we've all (dis?)appeared in a whirlpool of invented being. The best way of looking at this is to realise that it has always been thus, and simply say "aw shucks, well at least we know now."
Who are these endlessly interchangeable American teens and early twenties who populate US horror films, soaps, home-made videos and, doubtless, shopping malls and homes? Fit but featureless, inarticulate, air-headed but strangely morish and watchable - frustrating to anyone over 40 but perversely desired by them all the same, these young Americans are now the models for the youth of the "developed" world, and there's plenty of Europeans and Asians who look, act, feel the same way. Pasolini's nightmare of petit-bourgeois blandness is swarming over the globe and Romero's Diary suggests that it is upon their slacking shoulders will fall the enormous chore of recording the disasters ahead. It may be tempting to reject those films - Diary, Cloverfield, Blair Witch - that posit stories told by and about them; they may irritate the hell out of us but like Wilde said about realism/non-realism, is that merely Caliban's rage at either seeing or not seeing his face in the mirror? Creativity is now Prospero's island with Prospero departed (the ghost of his Authority still haunts) and the bastard children of Caliban and Ariel - pretty, airy but all too brutal - putting on masques in the development some consortium has built on the isle.
What is it about zombies? What kind of mirror are they? In Diary, they wander through the footage from a million mass-manufactured video devices, ravenous clowns at the birthday party which might turn out to be your last. Diary of the Dead has inconsistencies - but to somewhat paraphrase Orton, "you can't be consistent in a world that is inconsistent, it just isn't consistent." The deserted hospital doesn't make much sense on a logical level, but it’s the ghost of the truth of America's healthcare system; the sense of conspiracy in the media coverage isn't developed - but conspiracy theories never are, they appear/disappear at random.
The best scene of Diary involves an impassioned discussion between three of the young film crew (two of them are face-off filming it), in which they counter-accuse each other and grandstand dramatically. All of the moves, all of the vocal inflections have been rehearsed from a million daytime TV shows, a million horror movies consumed and returned to the shelves. Nothing anyone can do or say can be done without it seeming artificial; our new downplayed slacker habits are merely the reverse procedure of the turns of an old ham (which is why the kids are accompanied by a self-dramatising drunken English Eton thespian-type).
Diary of the Dead is a film of the dead, made by the dead for the dead. But yet it is our lived present as rehearsed through our self-produced media. It's a mind fuck, and a nihilist work: is it my imagination or are there more occasions than ever before in Romero where a person either shoots themselves or a loved-one in the head to prevent incipient zombification? The Kurt Cobain solution to a deadened reality bite. Real horrorshow.