Dublin Opinion

I don’t know about you, but for the past couple of weeks and perhaps for longer, zombies have been popping up everywhere. Not literally, of course. Zombies don’t exist. They are creatures from popular culture created to scare ourselves by praying on our deepest fears - not only the fear of death itself, but also the fear of contamination, of disease, and of the loss of a conscious self, free-will, and independent thought. The zombie lore also speaks to a fear of alienation, of becoming the ‘other’ where the difference is not projected onto the alien, but to the non-zombie – those rugged individuals who are fighting for their very lives against the sameness of the droning masses. The zombies are ordinary lifeless and unengaged workers trying the suck the brains out of plucky wannabe middle managers.

The other week it was my wife’s 40th birthday, and Conor kindly gave her a copy of Shaun of the Dead, the very funny skit on the Romero flick Dawn of the Dead. Conor has already paid homage to the original by touring the shopping mall in Pittsburgh where the original Dawn of the Dead was shot. Shaun of the Dead, however, is full of neat precursor scenes and parallels, where early episodes pre-figure later events. In one the eponymous hero has to fill in for the manager of the electrical appliance shop where he works and one of his first duties in the morning is giving the worker’s a pep talk.

“As Mr. Sloan always says, there is no “I” in team, but there is an “I” in pie. And there’s an “I” in meat pie. Anagram of meat is team…I don’t know what he’s talking about. Look, that’s it.””

While the ‘talk’ is unsuccessful its clear that the role Shaun has to be play has changed. Just the day before he was a worker like them, who would have had to listen to the ridiculous ‘no I in team’ nonsense. Today, however, he has to give it, and we can see that the other workers are uninterested, unmotivated, bored, and well, hanging just like zombies outside a television shop thinking that the faces that appear on the multiples screens are just the flabby flesh plate covers of delicious bowl of brains. The day after that, of course, he’ll have a similar experience. Except that instead of giving a pep talk, he’ll be forced to keep the zombies in line by bashing their heads in with a cricket bat, a management strategy he soon comes to relish.

That’s not to say that Shaun of the Dead is a capitalist propaganda film which pits entrepreneurial individualism over the effort of collective action, but narratives, even zombie ones (or perhaps especially zombie ones) have a tendency to reflect the prevailing orthodoxy in society in ways that we are often barely conscious of when we sit down to absorb them with our bucket of popcorn. Of course, because its so prevalent there is also the desire to subvert it, or to use it to make a comment against the prevailing orthodoxy.

The other night I watched Let the Right One In, the 2008 Swedish vampire film that has become a bit of a hit. It’s not exactly a Roy Anderson lite version of the vampire genre but it does look great and provides a satifying and thoughtful scandinavian twist to the overworked storyline. Lots of traditional vampire elements are there: the blood lust, the sleeping during the day (in a bathtub with a sheet over it), the combustive effects of direct sunlight, the hoarding of material wealth, the seductive allure of dark red-ringed eyes and the centuries old vampire remaining always the age they were whenever they were ‘turned’. The issue of what happens when a vampire enters a house uninvited is also addressed head on. The result is messy. What is thankfully missing is all usual baroque pomp. This is Lutheran Sweden, after all. The furniture if flat packed, the colour muted and neutral, the lines plain and functional. Now vampires are not zombies. In terms of characteristics they are very much unzombies – they are often effusive, arch, articulate and aristocratic. They won’t slobber towards you with mouths agape and try to paw you with their lusting hands. They’re more likely to crack a witty one-liner and then lunge at your engorged jugular when you throw your head back in laughter. But they are technically undead, they do not have a ‘soul’ and similar to zombies they are all about appetite (although they may have more subtle ways of going about satisfying it). In the Let the Right One In though this and a couple of other aspects of the genre are turned on their heads. The boy at the centre of the drama asks Eli some questions after he has found out about her vampire nature and that she has been 12 for a very long time. ‘Are you dead?’ he asks, to which Eli replies, as they match each others flattened hand on opposite sides of glass door, ‘of course not’.

She also cares, and can over come appetite to protect him. Before he knows that she is a vampire he cuts open his hand with a pocket knife so that they could ‘mingle’ their blood. When she see his blood dripping to the floor she freezes, and her stomach rumbles loudly. Despite the apparent danger it’s a comic moment, but also tender. She can’t resist slurping up the blood from the floor like an unfed cat but she can scream at him to leave immediately.

The title of the film also alludes the central theme of the film. Oskar is surrounded by family and school friends, but he seems to be in danger from each of them. He is viciously bullied in school and his parents are separated. His mother leaves him alone at home when she goes out to work and he only feels safe and happy in his father’s company up until one time he is visiting him and a ‘guest’ comes to into the house. We don’t know what happens with this stranger, but we know its not good. I don’t want to spoil the film if you haven’t seen it, but I just wanted to make the point that the idea of the vampire is that they are usually perceived as a danger. In Bram Stoker’s version, the attraction of the dark stranger is dangerous for the woman who is all set to get married to the up and coming real estate agent. His presence upsets the bourgeoisie applecart. In Let the Right One In, the vampire is a vicious killer driven by appetite, but it is not unthinking, or uncaring. Eli describes herself as a killer but she is also a protector, who does the things to help Oskar that those who were supposed to be protecting and caring for him should have done.

Another zombie related event, if it can be called that, is Manuel Estimulo’s ongoing account of the war between the Nazis and the zombies on the Spanish islands of La Canarias. In the latest dispatch from the war on the waterfront Manuel describes how Herr Mengele brought him to the house of the evil Dr. C to further his investigation into to the whereabouts of his surgical instruments. While explaining it, however, the topless beach volleyball zombies turn to attack them and Herr Mengele has to call in an air strike from the boys from Brazil.

Herr Mengele was put his hands on my shoulders and turn me round to look down the beach, where I straight away see the collective breasts of thousands of topless volleyball playing zombies, escept they were not playing the volleyball any longer, so their breasts were now serious instead of happy. They were in battle formation and heading up the beach in our direction. Herr Mengele reach into the back seat of his 4×4 and pull out his Prussian sabre. Then he hand me my samurai sword.
“You have to slice off their head, Señor Manuel. Nothing else will do. And don’t let them bite you.” he rolled up his sleeves. “But first . . . ”

The first installment is here, and the second here - just in case anyone would like to read them in order.

Today we find out that Big Brother is being axed by Channel 4. It was inevitably really once Davina McCall agreed to act in the zombie version of the program Dead Set, written by Charlie Brooker. The question is, is it dead, or will it persist zombie-like on one of the satellites constantly evading decapitation?

To be continued….hopefully