Dubious Comforts: PET SEMATARY, SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD, and the Republican National Convention

"The person you put there isn't the person who comes back" 

- Jud Crandall (Pet Sematary)

Aunt Cecily: "Do you believe...the dead can come back to life?
Bob Hope: "You mean like the Republicans?"
- The Cat and the Canary (1939)

Like a bad dream of Republican 'small government,' Pet Sematary (1989) depicts the return to a simpler, more 'Christian' lifestyle, marred by slight problems like the non-regulation of big business, i.e. Paul Ryan's ideas of 'limited government' is behind, no doubt, the unregulated road in front of the family house, whereon trucks go speeding past sidewalkless residential streets without speed limit signs, cops, or punishment. Burying pet and children chasing balls, and anyone else your now-limited government can't protect, sweeping them under the rug, becomes necessary. Limits mean sacrifice: once you're run over you're no longer 'our family', but something abject and ostracized, best shoveled under the loamy carpet or kept hidden in a back room, spoon-fed oatmeal by the terrified child who will grow up to be the mom in Pet Sematary. This is the deal of small government, warts and all warts.

Like Medicare and Social Security, Pet Sematary shows how the idealization of a 'real' America  is continually undone through denial of death. King's motifs come tumbling out of America's chock full-o-skeletons closet: anxiety over population control (in the form of animal spaying issues --the run-over cat is unable to get to heaven as he's 'incomplete'); child mortality (the run-over infant comes back to gleefully kill off the cast, all because dad can't handle the pain of losing him); assisted suicide (that old invalid aunt twisted up on spinal meningitis, praying for death); lynchings (neighbors once torched the house of a zombie and its dad); Native Americans (burial site desecration), and so on. Whatever you bury up the hill in a certain spot returns the next day, a demonic somnambulist of voracious homicidal ill will. It's like sending your good Christian values kid away to college and having them come back a vegetarian pothead socialist.

All this deep subtext doesn't mean (the film) Pet Sematary is somehow not bad. It is truly bad. But its badness is perhaps why it's able to deal with these skeletons straight on. If the film were any better it would have to deep-six the abject subtext. Instead it belongs with the invaluable crapola consciousness-raiser Godsend, not just because they are both about the horrid deals distraught  parents might be willing to make in order to allay the grief of losing a child but because they do so right under a blase' horror audience's nose. Naturally we'd have to do whatever it took to bring them back if it was possible, as parents, but since it's impossible we can truly relax into our pain, surrender to grief's kiln-like heat and be suddenly made pliable. If we have any other alternative we have to take it, and thus the medical community and its ancient burial ground kin make wheel-of-life spoke-jammers of us all.

As in Godsend, Sematary's small cast, low budget, bad acting, poor spelling, flat lighting, unimaginative camera movements, and clunky dialogue helps the movie achieve "the sort of shallowness that brings depth" (1) in examining how the reanimation option can cause loads of trouble. And while in Godsend it was the shrill over-and-underacting of Robert De Niro and Greg Kinnear that made it all so unintentionally Ed Woodsian, in PET the leavening Woodsianism comes from the image of a zombie demon kid attacking an old man like a rabid Baby New Year at the stroke of 2012 (above). Any horror is leavened as the kid is clearly just having fun making mean faces. Grrr. 

"President Obama's promise is to begin to slow the rise of the oceans (pause for laughter) and to heal the planet (more laughter). My promise is to help you and your family."  --Mitt Romney (RNC 2012 acceptance speech)

The bodies must be burned immediately. People will have to forego the dubious comforts a funeral can provide" - Newscaster, Night of the Living Dead (1967)

When I heard the above unabashedly anti-environmental attitude from presidential candidate Mitt Romney, I instantly thought of it as the inverse of the announcer in the original Night of the Living Dead, telling viewers to "forego the dubious comfort funerals can provide." In the Romero analogy, Romney would be announcing the reverse: "The health office insists we forego the comforts of funerals, but I say these are our loved ones and we're not going to give them up!" Or vice versa, the utterly short-sighted nonsensical concept that we can better save ourselves by fucking over the earth or, more metaphorically, there's no time to put out the kitchen fire, moms have to make dinner tonight! It matters not if Mother Earth dies while we're eating her, as long as we get a big enough piece before its all gone. Unwashed hordes of illegal Mexican zombies are already gnawing upwards from her toes; Arabs are pulling out her entrails; the Asian markets are scooping up her brains for overseas jobs. If we don't drag the carcass away from them fast we'll end up not just hungry but looking weak to our enemies, which is far worse. Don't they know we're tough? Grrrr!

For all our strength we're still a very, very young country.

Not to say that's what the Republican ticket and Paul Ryan's Ayn Randiness necessarily represent but it's interesting because we have to go back to the Monkey's Paw's 'careful what you say' word choice, and avoid 'getting everything you want' which would mean a return to a Handmaid's Tale kind of fundamentalist American patriarchal religious oppression on one side or an overly permissive socialist Welfare State on the other.  Neither side really wants either of those options and so we must preserve our state of conflict at all costs. The trick is to realize this and move into a state of conscious awareness, like the Buddha of professional wrestling - it's just a fight for show - for balance.

Both sides have forgotten that the real enemy is the media who paint the opposition in vivid brushes to make it seem as if the comfort a funeral can provide is really after all not 'dubious.' The media's obsession with repetition and bottom lines and computer game tie-ins has led to the idea that zombie movies are just heads blowing up and armies shambling through stairwells ala RESIDENT EVIL. Romero's films, and King's, on the other hand, understand that without the issue of family and the 'right to undie' or the 'right to unlife' there's no 'meat' to the story, which is why RES EVIL is--for all its budget and gloss and nonstop action--so uninvolving, while PET SEM is--for all its low budget badness--so awesome. In Romero's zombie films, we have the mom with the trowel in the first film; the girl in the ghetto protecting her zombie husband from the man and getting bit for her trouble in DAWN; and in Romero's most recent installment SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD, an old patriarch determined to recognize that life begins at death, to the point of his posse killing anyone who disagrees. These aspects are what matter, what lingers after the endless shots of exploding heads have faded from our minds. 

Shot in 2009, SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD is less a sequel than a 'concurrent' - it takes place several weeks into the original zombie epidemic. Society is still in the midst of its collapse and two crotchety Irish landowners occupy a small farm-based island off the New England coast, wrestling over the abortion-encoded issue of whether to shoot the undead or to just chain them up and let them deliver mail or rake leaves. The poster image for it all (above) is a hot Irish lass in sexy black riding coat with sexy black riding gloves, long flowing hair and blazing blue eyes staggering around a lush green corral with a beautiful black steed she's supposed to eat --and both sides of the argument watching her, hoping she'll take a bite out of it. It's a great moment: National Velvet of the Living Dead. The zombie movie has evolved here into something a bit more aesthetically pleasing than we expected, at least in this one image, until the bites start.

Another key in SURVIVAL and PET SEMATARY is the use of intertextual imagery - namely paintings which 'come to 'life' the way the buried do. Portraits are, as we learn from John Berger's "Way of Seeing," the proprietary gaze writ large, the establishment of a permanent record of one's existence and property, meant to last beyond death and age, the way stars in films of the 1930s still look vibrant and young. And there's a fine line between wanting to return to any kind of past glory and actual denial of death. Zombie movies are that fine line's ultimate erasure. Cinematic mortality's dawning self-awareness is the ultimate compromise between the 'undead' photograph of a loved one coming to get you (Barbara) across the graveyard of memory and the real of our cursed plane with its spatial existence ever-threatened both from interior growth-decay and exterior danger. To live you need to kill and eat smaller creatures and avoid being killed and eaten by bigger ones. But in the movies, all death goes up onscreen, and so we floating in the cheap seats can live, for just this 90 minutes, in perfect freedom from bodily concern.

A key scene marking Romero's film as a critique of the conservative mindset involves the 'mixed race lesbian' from the National Guard abducted and forced to have dinner (prepared by a zombie wife [below left] literally chained barefoot to the kitchen stove)  with the pro-(undead) life patriarch, who poses next to his John Wayne-ish portrait and end table filled with old photos of dead relatives (the old school tradition of 'post-mortem photography') and tries to woo her and her niche demographic over to his side, so maybe she'll extend an ankle for a shackle all her own. The dead people in the photo are great metaphors for the conservative slavishness to past cultural mores, the PET SEMATARY-ish longing to return to the land of rose-tinted hindsight. The patriarch here has almost no room in his heart for any living person at all. In death they are infinitely more receptive to the message of reverse-progress. Necrophilia is, in the end, all about control. An alive girl is nice and all that but...

"Sometimes death is better."

And yet: if once it all goes black you can go back, what returns? Babies, zombies, remakes, sequels. "Corporations are people, my friend," and corporations ruthlessly pursue self-interest, therefore successful films must be remade, and man must kill again and again, just to eat the same meal he enjoyed last week. That's understandable. What's not is the assumption that grabbing it all for yourself is somehow a good thing for America. Demanding to be adored by the masses for your greedy self interest only seems ironic if you're not a rich insecure scion who's mad because he can't tell the ghost of his dead father how much he hated him. That may be the ultimate irony of bipartisanship, that both sides would be lost without the other to blame in order to keep their rabid constituents happy - and sometimes the more angry you are at the other side the more it's really you're angry at someone else, but they're gone, and only their damned vampire photograph remains, mocking you from the mantelpiece, until the first face Fox tells you to hate, you hate.

NOTES:
1. a compliment Godard once paid to 40s poverty row films from Monogram and PRC, which this film resembles -- See my piece on Monogram's Voodoo Man (1944)