Milla Jovovich: God's Own Avatar (+ Laymen's Guide to the Resident Evil Series)

No modern actress has spent more time running in slow motion while firing two guns at the camera than Milla Jovovich, which considering her start as a neo-hippie musician with an album and small part in Dazed and Confused (1993), reflects cosmic levels of disillusionment. And I love her, from a safe distance. She's the female post-modern Brundlefly (i.e. Jeff Goldblum) slowly dissolving into CGI replication, from hauntingly gravitas-endowed folkie to warrior queen of the Uncanny Valley -- fighting for her last shreds of un-pixelated humanity with a world-weary sequel-after-sequel determination.

I didn't seek them out, but the first four Resident Evil films have been all over Syfy lately, usually on Saturday afternoons, and I've secretly enjoyed them in a half-asleep lollygag. Repeat viewings don't make the films exactly get better, but nor do they get any worse and sometimes not getting worse over time is better than being good in the first place. Having the violence spread between an array of intercut commercials is awesome too -- nothing beats seeing corrupt corporate goons machine gunning civilians smash cut to the new Mitsubishi Turbo. The pulse of the afternoon advertising blocs entrains to the throbbing din of Milla's battles, creating a symphony of post-modernist random meaning generation.


Mee-la YO-vo-vitch as her name is pronounced, plays a character with many clones and lives enough for an afternoon of multiple person play, and considering the amount of blue screen this poor woman has to slog through, that Mee-la keeps it all real and engaging remains quite a feat, especially considering English is not her first language, or French either; she was born in the Ukraine, wherefrom a genetically superior breed of humans seems to flow, like a 'wirgin spreeng.'

I still listen to her The Divine Comedy a 1994 album equal parts Kate Bush, Arthurian bard, Nordic alien-hybrid, and Jane Birkin, and purer than a crystalline decanter full of airy Scotch, but it came out ten years ago. Does she even have time to pick up a guitar now, with so much zombie blood on her hands? I wish she would. The zombies have suffered enough, and my heart has too -- it needs her swoosh of a voice and tick-tock through the medieval graveyard tromp pop to swain and swillow through the once more wood.

She gave us only one other musical document, from the previous year -- the moments when she quietly plays and sings at a party and tries to light a joint and misses by a few inches to hilarious effect in Dazed and Confused (1993). That lighter may have missed the target but even with this small mostly dialogue-free part she established herself idelibly as one of those hauntingly perfect hippie-style goddesses that stir feelings deeper and more ancient than mere attraction, closer to the vicinity of chaste courtly love where the main desire is to be her champion in a joust. The film didn't need her to be great, but with her it was able to break through, like a midnight sun, and it was a great echo of similar moments in films like Marianne Faitfhfull's a capella cafe "As Tears Go By" in Godard's Made in USA (1966).

Bigger movies beckoned, as they will when beautiful, talented, otherworldly girls present themselves and talented Frenchmen take notice there muse hath come. First there was Luc Besson, commencing with The Fifth Element (1997) to weave Milla into existence from a chunk of raw material of 'the perfect being' and allowing her to speak her own (self-invented) bizarre language. She made a great savior of the universe, we therein wanted her to save us, and so felt guilty and caught when she found our dirty little genocides on the historical microfiche she scanned. People mainly remember the crazy orange hair and Gautier white tape suit, but she was never objectified in it - she was more Pris than Rachel, and Besson clearly felt that same courtly joust vibe we did and it carried over to Bruce Willis' cubicle-dwelling cab driver.

In Luc and Milla's next film together, The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999), she continued the savior angle and evinced great androgynous schizophrenia, so nuts you can feel some old testy-mental god rattling her inner ear with shouted orders like an impatient, sugar-addled schoolboy. I know the feeling --every three years I become a supernaturally enlightened Buddhist monk crazy man: power flows through me and all is love and holy light--and how difficult it is to slow down for the normal unconscious and asleep people, to not give away money and possessions to the first needy homeless man along the road. Milla gamely and bravely lets that same level of crazy flash across her beautiful features. She takes it all very seriously, which annoyed blind-to-their-own-sexist double standard critics, but for Milla seriously never means placid or lady-like; she encourages us to wonder if maybe France was saved by the novelty of her madness. The French, unlike Americans, have a great sense of humor when it comes to their own mortality, and they worship gamins in a way America still hasn't grown up enough to understand.

Many critics felt that this was Milla's vanity project, that she had Besson wrapped around her finger and that she was out of her depth and Besson was letting her get away with it. But that's crap, my brothers. Besson and Jovovich both make it eternally theirs and, again, there was the sense that she was perfect for the role because of her courtly chaste love-inspiring beauty and grace. Messenger was the culmination of a slow build of global devotion. We were ready to storm castles in her name. On the other hand, the film couldn't help being a solid downer, with Milla being sold out by the dauphin in the name of diplomacy and caution and everyone in the French and English armies look so alike it's hard to know who to root for. A third is that Milla plays Joan as such a schizophrenic, replete with eye twitches and brown outs, making it hard to know whether to root for her after awhile. But her notion of God is so like an alien abductior that it's all looney tunes enough to make one wonder why Besson felt the need to show court scheming and intrigue behind her back at all. Why not just stick with what she sees and feels, so that the arrest seems to come out of nowhere? The court stuff is well-photographed super snooze compared to Milla's wild jerky eyes and the awesome grey mud.

Ancient Aliens enthusiasts such as yours truly love to contend that benevolent Nordic aliens and fifth dimensional projections from Arcturus have intervened at key moments in our history in order to keep the spirit of a free democracy alive. A Nordic 'angel' appeared to Washington at Valley Forge to convince him to keep going, and Joan's spirit guide/life coach might well be the same Nordic angel. Recent theories on 'star children' as a newly emerging race of genius ESP children sent here to lead us into a brighter tomorrow might actually play out if one such star child kept her ESP brilliance into adulthood, and was charismatic and enough of an innate showman to genuinely lead an army to victory. I already know her initials: MJ

The idea of Milla as someone to fight for in a gallant Arthurian way (rather than as some obtainable 'prize') has continued into a long and financially lucrative collaboration with current husband, director Paul W.S. Anderson. So while we're here, let's take a gander at the entirety of the RES series, bearing in mind the importance of rock bottom expectations and intercut car commercials:

Resident Evil (2002)
** 

Before it devolves into tedious first person zombie shoot-em-up this first film offers an elaborate set-up that promises better things: the Umbrella underground facility; the uncertain allegiance of the 'Red Queen' and her gassing all the employees; Alice (Milla Jovovich) waking up in a bath tub with amnesia with a "property of Umbrella Corp." stamp on the inside of her wedding band; the impeccable Michelle Rodriguez as a SWAT team member; the laser grid, etc. Then it becomes the same old zombie schtick that was already old by 2002. Director W.S. Anderson seems so hung up on perfecting Milla's slow mo kicks at mid-air pouncing zombie dogs that he forgets any kind of narrative momentum. If her kiss with Michelle Rodriguez had gone on for a few seconds longer, that film might even be a classic, instead it's like wasting a sunny day watching someone else play a video game.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004)
**1/2

Bonus points for picking up right where the last film left off, with the zombie plague spreading all through Raccoon City and for turning one of Alice's buddies into a giant killing machine programmed to keep the peace. There's a fascinating moment where this shambling freak massacres a whole SWAT team surrounding a strutting black dude (Mike Epps) who isn't even scratched because (as we learn from the monster's video game-like monitors) he's unarmed and hence deemed a civilian, a wry statement right up there with the one in Angels and Demons, of how carrying a gun is much more likely to get you killed than save your life. The cast here includes Jared Harris, late of Mad Men, as a doctor who has a cure and will help our locked-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-gate heroes escape (these including cop hottie in black boots Jill Valentine played grandly by Sienna Guillory [below]) if they find his daughter (Sophie Vavasseur) who's the source model for the Red Queen hologram. So there's more shit going on here than just a people trapped inside a multi-layered / many screened computer game.

Some of the big money from the first film's box office shows up in large scale scenes along the wall built to keep Raccoon City's contagion from spreading and there's some natty wall-climbing CGI demons, a motorcycle through a stained glass window, and a big final brawl between Umbrella's top two killing machines, nice troop helicopters, and an interestingly Teutonic corporate villain (Thomas Kretschmann). Anderson seems to figure out some of his own weaknesses and gives up trying to be the action movie Kubrick and the film opens up a result. Never underestimate breathing room.

Ultraviolet (2006) - *

Then, in between Resident Evil films, this...  The feeling of flop sweat pervades, with nary a single interesting fight or character or uncliche'd moment and every actor glazed over with enough slick CGI 'make-up' to cause viewers to wonder why they bothered with actors at all. Written and directed by Kurt Wimmer, a good-looking dude who clearly has some mojo magic that convinces money to throw itself at him (he also wrote the dismal Salt and wrote and directed the dismal remake of Total Recall), more than anything this film, along with the equally abysmal Charlize Theron movie version of Æon Flux from the year before, seem meant almost to make W.S. Anderson look like Walter Hill by comparison, and Elektra with Jennifer Garner seem a modern marvel. 

Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) - ***

The contagion has spread all across the world by this installment - and Alice rides across the Road Warrior-inflected deserts of the American southwest in search of answers before coming to the rescue of a band of hearty young survivors (including Ali Larter) when they're attacked by a murder of zombie crows, a powerful bizarre moment that reminded me of big splash pages 80s John Byrne/Chris Clarendon X-Men. Meanwhile a crazy industrial scientist spies on her from satellites and prepares his own magic invulnerable monster formula. It ends on a pretty wild cloning note, to become the best in the series up to that point, perhaps because it's directed by Russell Mulcahy, an Aussie behind such 'hits' as Highlander and The Shadow but way more grounded and skilled as a storyteller and director of actors than Anderson. Bonus points for a joint lit in a very moving moment by a SWAT survivor from the previous installment (Oded Ferhr) whose dimly smug smile annoyed me in the previous film but is finally put to good use in his moment of stoner triumph. 

Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010) - ***1/2

The series was on a roll now and even Anderson steps up to the plate, as if inspired by the lurch forward in quality delivered by Mulcahy in the previous installment; it's inspiring to watch a director like PWSA slowly learn from his mistakes and criticism to deliver sequentially better work. It's a great mix of elements that adds up to much more than the usual slow-mo 3-D shoot-outs and zombie storms. Anderson delivers: a weird aircraft carrier finale involving monsters and freezer tubes; a hundred Alice clone attack on a Japanese corporation; a crash landing on a roof reminiscent of Escape from New York; cool trilobite-style gem-studded mind control devices; a gigantic axe-wielding monster, and detailed attention to continuing human story lines from the past films. It all adds up to the best entry in the series.

By now, though, after eight years of playing Alice for her husband, and having born unto him a child, Milla actually looks older and wearier than she did in the previous entry. Less and less are the CGI airbrushes able to disguise her slightly curled down nose, weakening chin, crow's feet. I mean this only as a high compliment. The younger girls here are airbrushed to near Maxim levels, as part of Umbrella-Disney Corps continued process of filling in the Uncanny Valley with a billion CGI-make-up smoothings.

I give Afterlife high marks because it seems at times made by a John Carpenter fan, from the ominous simplicity of some parts of the score to the idea of trying to escape from both a prison and a city rolled into one place: San Francisco. At one point I swear I could hear Kurt Russell hissing "Maggie, he's dead, come on." The 'under siege' zombie narrative, with a ragtag dwindling group of survivors dealing with an external threat, however, has become the most inescapable story of horror, with the ultimate deadly serious and self-important Walking Dead series being the official last nail in the empty coffin. The arc of banding together with fellow survivors after the apocalypse is comforting to fantasy-retreated loners and if Anderson doesn't quite get to the realization of Verhoeven's Starship Troopers (i.e. such a fantasy is the gateway to fascism) at least he's really run with the whole insidious corporation angle. If you think I'm off the mark here, see if you can get a few minutes into Ultraviolet and Afterlife will seem like Citizen Kane.

Resident Evil - Retribution (2012)

***1/2

As with all the installments, it continues immediately where it left off from the first, backwards in slow motion across the under-attack aircraft carrier until Alice wakes up from falling overboard and into a suburban idyll mirroring the one at the start of Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake. Herein Alice is married to Oded Ferhr and they have a deaf child, and slowly realizing it's all part of a weird sprawling simulation-lab underwater lair. Explaining too much of the plot loosens it's 'anything can happen in billionaire corporate black box research' vibe, so I'll say no more except to recommend you see it alone, without your judgmental friends or lovers around. The story line manages the return of all Alice's allies from past films: Sienna Guillory, Michelle Rodriguez and the always vaguely familiar Boris Kodjoe not to mention the bad guy from the previous film is now on her side and sends super spy Ada Wong (Binging Li) to her rescue. There are new monsters and old and I appreciate that Anderson has the good taste to make the simulations real, rather than just some Matrix or Sucker Punch bit of nullification. Even Milla seems reborn, though I'm not crazy about the leather bustle. Is Anderson abusing her like Welles did Hayworth for some imagined transgression? It just doesn't look comfortable, or particularly practical.

A bit like the Underworld series, there's a sense that the filmmakers are like hey, whatever we do the critics are gonna hate it but the fans are gonna see it over and over - so let's please the fans. Thus artists who began as tired hacks become, in a sense, transformed through a decade of experience, benefitting from the rare opportunity of getting to work again and again with their same people, and not stagnating or phoning it in or overthinking it. And I love that the big final battle is almost all women on both sides, and yet it never feels like some sexy catfight but a genuine dangerous showdown. Keep up the good work, ladies!

Milla's done other stuff, some of which I've written about:

The Fourth Kind (2009)

*

Milla gets to make grave diagnoses.... Resident Evil's Alice has filled her with holy power so she can say, "Something is going on, there's something strange going on in Nome" and have it ring with menace, or "conversion phenomena is something not a lot of people understand," implying she does! She understands less as time goes on, but is still miles ahead of the spooked and reactionary sheriff... or is she? A tense stand-off and a violent knife murder seemed shuffled in to keep you from nodding off and Milla's blamed for everything! Milla's haunted eyes are beautifully lit, so we can contemplate her hybrid status as we go along, and realize yes, Virginia, aliens are among us, and some of them are very, very adorable." (full piece here)

A Perfect Getaway (2009)

***1/2

I loved PERFECT GETAWAY, but my expectations were rock bottom as I think I was confusing it with reviews I'd read of TURISTAS! (more)

Faces in the Crowd (2011)

***

Milla witnesses a murder from the infamous 'melancholy slasher,' gets knocked out, and wakes up with face blindness; her husband is soon being played by an array of different actors, changing with each shot; her clique of cool girl friends don't change much (and one of them,Valentina Vargas, steals all her scenes as a lady so badass she says of one night stands: "when you wake up and don't know for a minute where you are or who is sleeping next to you - I live for that!") but half the time Milla doesn't even see herself in the mirror, and when you're as hot as Milla that's tragic, but even scarier is that if the murderer came into her house and said he was her husband she wouldn't even know he wasn't. And Milla expertly evokes that horror, showing the end result of a life in films that has not been joyous. She's fought and dealt with horrors for quite awhile. She's scrappy, but by now hasn't she paid her dues? Dear God, please give your favorite avatar a nice warm rom-com break, and a chance at another album.


And if you do nod lissen... den to hell with you!

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Post-Structuralism of the Living Dead: PONTYPOOL (2008)

"Only the medium can make an event" - Baudrillard

In PONTYPOOL  the world ends not with a bang but with the words "in Pontypool the world ends not with a bang but with the words 'in Pontypool the world ends' in Pontypool a ever-tightening stutter-stop loop that causes cannibalism. It is spoken, and having spake, the words lead spaken to death, unless they're in French. No time to be running an early morning English speaking radio talk show, as emergency broadcasts (or pirate interceptions, in French so who can tell?) and mass confusion envelop you and your crew, especially not in the early hours of the morning on a typically white winter of a a middle-of-nowhere Ontario town (the title). But there they are: early morning DJ Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), a self-styled outlaw with a yen for conspiracy theory; his harried but maternal line producer, Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle); and cute blank of an intern Laurel-Ann (Georgina Reilly), and a lot of voices calling in to deliver astonishing reports that go blank in big flurries of horrible chaos as people chant meaningless phrases over and over then each other.

The stories sound like the ravings of the town's many drunkard fishermen and it's not until BBCI phones that Mazzy realizes his town has become the news; what was mere minutes ago a punishment assignment (Pontypool the Canadian equivalent of Siberia due to his cantankerous airwave anarchy) becomes a matter of being too spooked to make his Wolf Blitzer mark.  These three people at the station are the only ones we see for quite awhile, and they haven't seen any of the things described and they are hard to believe in a town where nothing ever happens, or even if anything did. All Mazzy and Sydney and Laurel-Ann have are the callers, and all other lines--police radio, AP wire, 911--are dead, or dying, just static and then the alien-like buzzing we belatedly recognize as the emergency broadcast signal. It's like the whole world has shrunk around their little studio --they're an island in an already island-like town. Pontypool, where they know most of the residents by name, winters stretch forever in a haze of booze, depression, and shuffling from heated car to basement to home, with windows just reflecting an opaque wall of darkness and snow.

What really makes it work is the power of imagination coupled to the frustration of never getting the complete story --we strain at the bits of the movie's limited known, and we recall the way breaking news drips slowly with newly emerging facts buried in an avalanche of idle speculation to fill in the minutes. There was a time when 'showing' mass cannibal carnage in all its Tom Savini-ish Fangoria glory was a subversive act, something to look away from in blanched shock; now it's the opposite --showing us almost nothing becomes a new form of subversion.. There are still countless zombie / mass plague insanity knock-offs and for a few seconds the 'found video footage' trick was novel but that was 10 years ago, now only Pontypool (2008) finds an original tack, sailing towards the source of the original Romero film's hidden candy shell power, the news broadcasts, the way the professional newscasters with their cigarettes and thick glasses and bustling assistants behind them all both offer reassurance and terror, their steady cool and news voices only serving to make the pronouncements about 'packs of ghouls' more terrifying.  Pontypool rocks that same tack. It's almost too post-structuralist for its own good at times but makes terrific use of uncertainty--are these reports just drunk ice fishermen spinning yarns?--and delves deep into the way imperiled people instinctively turn to the media to provide a narrative structure for the chaos around them, and even the media finds itself compelled to provide one. Without clear visuals, long shots of the calamity, official press conferences, the calm but thrilled voice of an reporter standing in the snow near a firetruck, we have only our own imaginations with which to structure things. At such times radio can reach the deepest vaults of our mind, forming deep cerebral cortex responses not normally our own. I first heard of 9-11 on a radio at work, for example, hearing Peter Jennings describe the towers falling and planes crashing into Washington, I imagined the world consumed in fire, civilization ending all around us -- when I finally saw the footage, horrifying as it was, it was almost a relief.

But that's it - we can't always be near a TV with CNN, but even if the power goes out we can find and old battery-operated radio. We all secretly love calamities (as long as they don't happen to us) because suddenly, for once, something is happening and the mood amongst the reporters is always jubilant --careers are made in such moments, ala Wolf Blitzer during the Gulf War--and for once no one can predict what will happen. The whole world seems to wake up in such moments, to be unified in their collective shock and awe, secretly loving the thrill of orbiting closer and closer to a possible armageddon.

What really makes Pontypool a delight beyond this gimmick is the comfortable sense of being in a warm radio booth on a frozen Ontario small town morning, and the early stretches of incoming news as DJ --- begins to think people are all fucking with him -- so organic it all unfolds in more or less real time for long stretches without the viewer (me at least) noticing; as the influx of news and shaky narration causes a breakdown in our perception of reality. In other words while not being specifically scary, and always kind of funny, there's a sense that something meta is always at stake, something that might leak out and effect even your blogging about it.

The news' secret agenda has always been to cast anxieties about the prevailing social structure's solidity off on handy targets: crooks, shady pols, terrorists, which then makes the news a comfort - you see which way the finger of blame points, and you make sure you're standing behind instead of in front of it. So when the TV station reports on a mass insanity uprising, it becomes 'real' in a way it couldn't be otherwise and in the process strengthens the illusion of law and order's ultimate omnipotence. As Jack Torrance would say, cannibalism is okay to talk about in front of their son, because he "saw it on television." It's the same for us. In fact cannibalism's main problem in Pontypool lies in its invisibility. Thus one Romero news broadcast is worth three dozen CGI zombie army ant hill urban killing floors in less interesting but bigger budgeted films. The end of the world can't be accepted as a legitimate event until it is authenticated through the TV. Unless the revolution is televised it cannot exist. This is what Baudrillard and McLuhan can teach Gil Scott Heron.

In Dawn of the Dead (above) Romero yanks even that little buoy of illusory 'objective reality' away; the TV station itself starts to collapse from nervous exhaustion, devolving into petty arguments and agendas. Those who haven't had a chance to experience directly see the looming chaos, such as the black intellectual in the final news show, commandeer the zombie outbreak to suit their agenda, labeling it as a cover-up for cop violence in the ghetto. The opening events all take place at the crumbling Philadelphia local TV station, ending with the producer escaping with her helicopter pilot boyfriend and two SWAT guys. When they're later able to find a TV, there's just one continuous talk show left, with two pundits yammering in a progressively more hostile, childish manner. Reality, civilization, has in effect become totally subjective. It was like that once, maybe, before cross country railroads and telegraphs. But each man was connected to some tribe, some family in those days. Now our tribe is purely virtual, friends from everywhere except our own neighborhoods. 

Pontypool zeroes in on this issue by presenting the entire 'event' from within a radio station on a single day. It is only Mazzy and his producer who can determine to what an extent they should continue to connect their listeners to their callers. In this town we learn the 'eye in the sky' for local morning traffic is an old dude with binoculars on the hill, playing chopper sound effects so we get the impression he is in a helicopter, which for some reason makes us feel warm, loved, guided into work by a heavenly hand. A weird musical family shows up dressed as Arabs to sing bizarre but hopelessly square 'Arabian' songs, the dad firing a plastic Uzi for accent (I had the exact same one as a kid). This isn't given much commentary in the film but it's a good metatextual meltdown signpost. We learn that the Pontypool crisis involves the repetition of phrases until they become meaningless, a weird infection of thinking transmitted through language, an idea that rewards deep contemplation if you approach it with enough McLuhan, whose concept of language as "a form of organized stutter" underwrites the film's post-structuralist collapse, where meaning and syntax become derailed, causing human brains to go crashing into the morass of subjective looping, where each new repetition increases in violence until they rend one another limb from limb. Is this something to do with Quebec separatist intellectual terrorists? The French language seems suspiciously immune.

While the chants of the crazies may seem meaningless, what we glean from Pontypool is that everything has meaning, and the power of chant is no fluke. Anyone can use repetition to either make themselves calm (the rosary, chanting) or  drive themselves crazy (All work and no play make Jack a dull boy, sections of Mingus' Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, chanting) or both (dervishes, chanting). What makes Mazzy interesting as a character is that he is aware of this power, and does not take his DJ power lightly; even his school cancelation snow day news carries poetic, grim observations, and he predicts the coming crisis all based on one odd morning encounter, even knowing he may be starting the very fire he's railing against by railing against it. And he gives both women cute innocuous valentine's day cards, indicating that beneath his gruff exterior and contrarian shock jock tactics (mild compared to America's) beats the heart of a regular sentimental guy, a Canadian in other words, a bit of a rotgut and cigarettes innocent. In other words, this is not an American film. There's no in-fighting, cursing tantrums, misogyny, lectures, or grandstanding. Sydney's anxiety over what her DJ's going to say is moderated and modulated moment to moment as he pushes the envelope but then eases back; her riding him to be less incendiary but tempered by an almost motherly need to keep him feeling grounded, trying to encourage Laurel-Ann to feed him the news slowly and get confirmation first so he doesn't start a panic.

This is perhaps the film's key concept and also perhaps its one dubious theme, the conception of language as a virus, that it's not the news driving us crazy burt the saying that the news is driving us crazy which is driving us crazy, which is very Cronenbergian, making us wonder if his themes are somehow as much related to Canada itself as to his own clinical doctor experience. The movie seen on streaming (on Netflix) masterfully sets itself up as a virus via the internet, through which there are no coincidences in whatever you happen to be doing as a passive viewer. The media breakdown can extend to your life -- is there a virus within Pontypool itself, that scrambles the very particles of code within its signal? Or was my girlfriend, in the throes of a  phone interview with some comedian in the other room, tripping on the extension cord for the WiFi, causing the Netflix stream, as well as internet, to go out in a single flash right at a key moment in the film? It was so perfectly timed I became as unnerved as old Mazzy. Let's pause and ruminate on what version of the new 3-D that will be, when the film makes your TV explode at a key plot juncture.

Sure that's a sick idea, but that's the thing -- when the news envelops you then you don't really know what the hell is going on; you don't know what is real because you can't see it so your imagination fills it all in and does a much more apocalyptic job of things. You need electrical power, devices, connections, reports, and images from far enough away that you can see what's been destroyed and what hasn't. None of that is possible without a vantage point from far enough away. Because there's one thing that can reach even the deepest of burrowing loners and isolationists, the media, the radio waves, thought, sound, speech. Pontypool's climactic moment of interdimensional communication is when emergency broadcast interruption comes roaring through the station, cutting out the broadcast to announce those listening should refrain from speaking, using terms of endearment or embracing loved ones, or using the English language, ending with "don't translate these words" which Mazzy reads, translated, over the air waves- Is this, then, a structuralist terrorist attack. Oh yes Quebec resistance, how very French of you!

Top: Lisa Houle - Pontypool / Bottom: Anna Karina - Alphaville

But the French, as Godard's Alphaville (1965) computer knows, are too stubborn and contrary to be as ingenious and post-modern as Pontypool, which does for the 1939 Martian broadcast what the Blair Witch Project did for found nature films, i.e the very lack of reliable 'authorized' source information gradually reduces the one on the microphone to the sole remaining authority. John Connor at the end of Terminator 3 achieved this but with nuclear certainty, while Grant Mazzy ingeniously understands that, unless the revolution is televised, it does not exist, so as long as it is only chaos, a mere riot, he can talk it out of existence with nonsense. Without a pundit chattering out in the cold and another one warm and looking at them from a screen, and us looking at them, then there's no certainty about anything. Let go of language and everything is revealed. Not even the credits can end your transmission. So stick around for the end credits very very....

jlll;;p[koom

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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)

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