Movies: Three kinds of apocalypse.

Yesterday, the wife, my horror flick wingman Dave, and I went to go see the latest recrudescence of zombie cinema, long-time Jimmy Kimmel Live! director Ruben Fleischer's Zombieland. Watching Fleischer's rigorously non-objectionable zom-com actioner, I realized that my taste in end times has changed radically over the years.

For those who haven't heard the news, because you just came out of a coma, in your private isolation ward, in a special secret lab, on the bottom of the ocean, on the Jupiter moon of Io, Zombieland features Woody Harrelson (doing a cleaned up, good guy version of his Mickey character from Natural Born Killers) and the poor man's Michael Cera, Jesse Eisenberg, on a wacky road trip across a zombie infested post-collapse US. Along the way, the boys meet a hottie and her younger sister, Woody gets dangerously close to having to emote, and not-Cera learns that sometimes to win somebody's heart you need to do an awful lot of killing. Built around an uninspired plot, populated with thin characters, and breezily predictable, Zombieland is aimed as people who find Shaun of the Dead too cerebral and Diary of the Dead too frightening.

What is innovative about Zombieland is its tone. Zombieland may put to rest the idea that the engine of zombie cinema runs off steady flow of cultural anxieties, from war to financial meltdown. It is hard to imagine a less angsty, troubled film than Zombieland. Not only do our characters gleefully dispatch zombies with giddy abandon, but when one of the characters accidentally dispatches a pure strain human the most notable reaction is laughter followed by a hasty, "But it is sad though."

What Zombieland has done is take the Merry Looter Scene typical of zombie flicks since Dawn of the Dead and made it the entire basis for the flick's charm. The Merry Looter Scene is the near inevitable scene in a modern post-apoc flick in which our protags go hog wild in a grocery store, shopping mall, whatever. Despite the apocalyptic conditions that prevail, there's something carnivalesque about the scene and, more often then not, the scene involves our protags wallowing in fancy clothes, nice booze, fancy new cars, or whatever else symbolizes that the lowly survivors are now free of the economic constraints the once bound them. Doom's all around them, but in the topsy-turvy world of the zombie holocaust, the bike messenger and the beat cop are now the rulers of all they survey. They aren't really the meek - they've usually had to do a metric assload of killing to get where they are - but they have definitely inherited the Earth. (As an aside, this is hardly novel. As seen in this years Silent Scream Series, the French silent film The Crazy Ray features a carnivalesque apocalypse.)

The thing about this is that it is expresses an essentially conservative, in the most literal sense of the term, impulse. In flicks like Zombieland, 28 Days Later, and the various "of the Dead" franchise films, the world is pretty much the one we recognize, simply more dangerous and more depopulated. More importantly, there's a crucial continuity with the old world. In Zombieland, aside from the rubbish in the streets, the infrastructure of the old world is still intact. (In fact, we even get a gag in which the narrator explains that a particular Texas town looks like it was destroyed in the zombicaust, but it is actually just a dump.) Everywhere they go has power, there are no unchecked wildfires, nobody frets about leaking nuclear power plants, and so on. All that has happened is that the people who were once the losers and outcasts are now free to do as they wish. And what they wish to do is drive nice cars, stay in plush joints, drink A-grade booze, get laid, and play Monopoly with real money. The characters in Zombieland don't want to be on the bottom of the heap, but they want the heap.

Which brings us to Thundarr the Barbarian. When I was a kid, my favorite post-apoc landscape belonged to the short-running Thundarr the Barbarian cartoon (1980 to '82). In the "future" of that show, in the then far-distant year of 1994, a runaway planet zipped between the Earth and the Moon. The Moon split in two, but gravity held each half in about the same position of the current Moon. The Earth was racked by catastrophes and, 2000 year later, is home to all manner of magic and mutants.

But don't take my word for it. Here's the intro:



Admittedly, the cosmic doom visited upon the Earth in that intro is far more epic than a zombie holocaust (that damn runaway planet apparently even stole all our clouds). But that's not really the distinction that sticks out in my mind. Rather, the world of Thundarr seems to have radically split from the pre-disaster world. The show did have one character who constantly pointed out the remnants of pre-collapse world: Princess Ariel's function in the show was to act as a exposition, explaining trains and soda pop and bowling and Cape Canaveral and whatever else might pop up to Thundarr as the plots demanded. (Oddly, the female figure who remains the sole link to Earth's past was a reoccurring motif in '80s cartoons: the mom in The Herculoids was a stranded Earth astronaut who attempted to teach her child about her native home as was Prince Adam's mom in He-Man.) What's interesting, however, is that Thundarr usually didn't give a rats ass. Insomuch as Ariel's book lernin' was useful for blowing up the evil wizard's war tanks or killing any given shoe's baddy, he cared. But there was never this sense that Thundarr or his Wookie-rip-off companion Ookla were ever all that interested in the pre-collapse world. The idea of re-establishing the previous order or even mourning its passing doesn't occur to them. They represent a radical break with the past. The heap has been swept away and replaced. These post-apoc works are the opposite of the Merry Looter flicks. We're going to dub them "Ookla, Ariel, We Ride," or OAWR, works.

As a kid, it was that kind of post-apoc I dug. In my juvenile mind, the post-end looked like Gamma World or Thunder Dome - and as soon as the fit hit the shan, we'd all start wearing football padding studded with metal spikes. There should be mutant animals and plants walking about. Sure, we can have a car or two. Maybe even a gun. But, honestly, what we really need is Year Zero weaponry and some black magic. Good times.

Now, however, I have to admit that Thundarr-style shenanigans now seem hopelessly dated. Case in point, though it is hopelessly unoriginal, Zombieland doesn't seem retro in anyway. The same can't be said of Doomsday, Neil Marshall's retro-tastic post-apoc flick which managed not only to get numerous football safety pad fashion plates in shot, but also managed to work in a bunch of Medieval knights in a castle because why the hell not?

Eighties vintage feel aside, I think there's something else behind my shift from digging surrealistic Thundarr cosmic doom to more Zombieland-style doom-mongering. I think part of it has to do with growing older. When you're a kid, you have no emotional investment in the system that supports you. All of it is confusing, illogical, and often profoundly unfair. OAWR films not only satisfy the fantasy that the adult world gets swept away, but the radical weirdness of the world levels everybody regardless of real-life experience. In contrast, as I've grown older and softer in the belly, I don't mind the idea that life as we'd know it would be swept away in a violent wave of mutilation - but I totally want a comfy bed when I'm not slaughtering undead or fighting cannibal bike gangs or what have you.

So that's what I'm proposing Zombieland doesn't feel as dated as the original Dawn of the Dead because the horror audience is aging and we are too into our apartments and children and cars and our increasingly valueless 401Ks to enjoy the fantasy of the world as we know it getting totally wiped off the face of the Earth. We just want the all the jerks dead so we no longer have to punch clock.

There is, notably, a third way for post-apoc tales. Most post-collapse worlds, be they Merry Looter tales or OAWR works, have a strong element of wish fulfillment in that they posit a simpler world. In Zombieland the characters discuss how great it is that parking is free and we're not plagued with Facebook status updates. The fantasy is that a disaster strips all the superficial crap away, leaving behind something purer and truer; see Walking Dead back cover copy. Few post-apoc works suggest that life will simply just get worse and worse and worse. Nothing is clarified, and if you started at the bottom of the heap, some armed warlord a-hole will most likely just stomp you down even more. Adam Rapp and George O'Connor's Ball Peen Hammer is one of the few post-apoc works that suggests that a post-collapse world would look like Somalia on its worst day. In Rapp and O'Conner's grim graphic novel, there's still a government, but it has grown brutal and sporadic in its presence. Dog packs run the street. A flesh-eating virus is rotting its way through population. There is no power or running water. There are conspiracies afoot; but, with no stable communication systems, nobody can be sure what is going on, or even if those involved in the conspiracy still know what's going on. Worse yet, there's a young generation of kids who feel this state of affair is normal. Honestly, the dark hard-edged weirdness of Ball Peen Hammer is probably the most genuine image of what humanity, without all the social props, would look like. But it is too relentless to pack a megaplex. We're more optimistic about the end of everything.

Link Proliferation: Don't be a slutagator.

Just a quick one today.

Gator Loving

Regulars of this blog know my love for all film crocogator-ish, so I thought it was about time we actually discussed us some crocogatorish loving news. According to a 10-year study of gator nests in Louisiana, some alligators monogamously pair bond.

The ecologists were surprised to find that out of 10 alligators' nests that were studied, seven females chose to mate with the same male over the course of many years. The open habitat and dense population of alligators in this area makes it likely that females encounter many males during the breeding season, further corroborating the idea that mating fidelity is by choice, not chance. As Lance said in a press release: To actually find that 70 percent of our re-trapped females showed mate fidelity was really incredible. I don’t think any of us expected that the same pair of alligators that bred together in 1997 would still be breeding together in 2005 and may still be producing nests together to this day.

Ain't it sweet.

Heads Will Roll

Over at Largehearted Boy, the regular "Book Notes" column features Marc Estrin's historical novel The Good Doctor Guillotin. The novel follows the different lives of five men, all of which meet at the gallows for the first guillotining of the French Revolution.

For fans of popular music (in the folk sense rather than the current mass cult sense) Estrin links to three revolution era songs beloved by the revolting masses.

The Marseillaise needs little explanation. The one intriguing fact is that it was written by C-J Rouget de Lisle on April 25, 1792, the very day our hero Nicholas Pelletier, the patient, the package, was executed. Claude-Joseph wrote it at his table in Strasbourg -- childhood home of the builder of the execution machine.

Ça ira is an enthusiastic, if bloodthirsty, tongue twister in which we find the aristocrats swinging from lamp posts and Marie Antoinette in hell. It was the most popular "people's song" during the Revolution.

La Carmagnole was a popular revolutionary song and dance again concerning Marie Antoinette who, by the way, was unpopular not only because of her "Let them eat cake" attitude toward the poor, but because her Austrian family was likely to attack France to preserve its own and Europe's monarchies. Listen at Wikipedia. There is a wonderful Kathe Kollwitz drawing and set of sketches ("Carmagnole") of a revolutionary crowd dancing around a guillotine in Paris.

Next time you're drunkenly stumbling down the streets of the Financial District, raging impotently at the self-appointed masters of the universe, and promising to wash the nation free of sins of their corruption in a tidal wave of their accursed blood, you now have a couple of songs you can sing at the top of your lungs.

Nifty.

This Is a Picture of a Mummy Monkey

Books: Who the Wild Things were.

The online edition of the Boston Globe has an appreciation piece on Sendak's 1963 classic Where the Wild Things Are.

The piece caught my attention for this little tidbit about the inspiration for the Wild Things:

In interviews, Sendak has said the Wild Things were inspired by visiting relatives, whose appearance in his boyhood Brooklyn home were a source of great alarm to the budding storyteller. Just who were these creatures, barging into the living room and upsetting the domestic routine? (They’d come over for dinner, so young Sendak was told, but was he the meal?) Sendak cites one uncle in particular, named Joe, as a template for the Wild Things, and looking at the illustrations we can imagine him as he appeared to the impressionable child: a rotund, hirsute guy, jovial but prone to overexcitement, toothy, and bulgy-eyed.

A profile piece published last month in the Oakland Tribune described the influence in even greater detail:

The youngest of three children in a Polish-Jewish family, Sendak was not the most robust child. He nearly died from bouts of pneumonia and scarlet fever, and spent a great deal of time indoors, drawing, reading and listening to his father's vivid stories about life in the shtetl and family members lost in the Holocaust. Or he was at the movies, soaking up Mickey Mouse shorts, campy monster movies and silver screen glamour. The result was an incredible mixture of folklore, cinematic screenplays, lurking danger and wild children's stories, which eventually wove themselves into the rich tapestry of Sendak's books.

And the wild things were based on the relatives who came to dinner at the Sendak home.

"They smoked cigars, their teeth were terrible, and they had hairs pouring out of their noses, and what was the matter with them?!" Sendak says in a taped interview available to museum visitors. "Waiting for my mother to get all the food ready — and her being late — meant these people could eat you. If they got to be hungry enough, they would eat you because they handle you so roughly."

But nothing terrified young Sendak as completely as the Lindbergh baby kidnapping in 1932. Famous pilot Charles Lindbergh's young son was snatched straight from his crib. And Sendak, then just 4, insisted that his own father protect him by sleeping in his room, curled up on the floor with a weapon.

"I can see him now in his underwear top and underwear, with a baseball bat," Sendak says in a taped interview. "I would not go to sleep — that's when my insomnia began — until he was safely on the ground with the bat. And my uncle's great mistake was in saying to my father, 'Philip, who would want your children?' I never forgot the pain of him thinking we weren't good enough to be kidnapped. So that's how distorted a child's emotional conception can be. And I waited all my life to get even with him."

Everyone knows that uncle now — he's the least attractive of the wild things. And now, of course, he's famous, as are all the characters in Sendak's more than 100 children's books and dozens of opera, ballet and theatrical sets, including "Brundibar," the Sendak-Tony Kushner collaboration staged by Berkeley Rep in 2005.

Mad science: How'd you sleep?

What Horror Movie Are We Today? We're "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari."

The Mind Hacks blog has a link to a study titled "Potentially Lethal Behaviors Associated With Rapid Eye Movement Sleep Behavior Disorder: Review of the Literature and Forensic Implications." In plain English, the study reviews nearly 40 cases of potentially murderous and suicidal sleepwalking behavior. The Journal of Forensic Sciences article is behind a paywall, but Mind Hacks teases out some of the cases:

A 63-year-old man with RBD and delayed-onset Shy-Drager Syndrome reported "a progressive 10-year history of abnormal behavior during sleep. He would at various times choke, kick, punch, and spit on his wife while he was asleep. In addition, complex behaviors such as getting out of bed and running into walls while asleep were reported by family members. This behavior occurred while the patient was dreaming, usually of being attacked.

A 67-year-old man had a 3-year history of progressive stiffness and slowing of his left side. Five years before the onset of these symptoms, he began having vivid dreams together with violent movements during sleep. Once he dreamed of being trapped in a house on fire, and he almost jumped out of the window, if not for his wife awakening and restraining him.

A 25-year-old woman with multiple sclerosis "presented with a 6-month history of sudden awakenings from fearful, often vivid…dreams and with terrified screams or violent behavior such as kicking, running to the door or to the window, crying and falling out of bed. If awakened, she always recalled a fighting dream. Once she repetitively banged her head against the floor, inducing a large facial hematoma. On that occasion, she was dreaming that a man was knocking her against the wall.

The post also points to a case where a person accused of homicide and attempted homicide won an acquittal by claiming the acts were committed in their sleep.

Music: They Who Rock Behind the Rows.

If the Flaming Lips had grown up out of the whole No Depression thing, they'd be These United States. This nifty puppet show video is for Everything Touches Everything, title song for their new album. Despite the scarecrow singer existing smack dab in the uncanny valley, it's a fun way to start a Tuesday.

Everything Touches Everything from These United States on Vimeo.

Movies: The corpse of true love never did run smooth.

Deadgirl is a pleasantly bracing satire of coming of age flicks which takes the extreme dehumanization of Girl Next Door and plays it as a slick epater la bourgeousie. The film's being widely heralded as a profound exploration of humanity's heart of darkness, though this seriously oversells it. It's unfair to poor Deadgirl. The flick's absurdist plot, pixilated characterizations, and lightly worn nihilism - all of which are sources of the film's grisly charm - get crushed under the ideological baggage being heaped upon it. It also elevates vacuous moral exhibitionism that confuses its metaphors for the real and then congratulates itself for grand Potemkin stances made under conditions where the right answer was given to them. The best approach to the flick is think of it as dark comedy.

Deadgirl, first feature from the directorial team of Marcel Sariento and Gadi Harel, tells the story of Rickie and J.T., two inarticulate and rage-filled slackers who ditch school one day to drink warm cans of beer and vandalize an abandoned mental hospital. Ah, youth. These early set up the dynamic between our two leads. The Mexican-American Rickie is the reserved, mopey, artistic one. Dirty white boy J.T. is violent, snide, a charismatic in a strictly animal way. Long before the titular plot development makes the scene, viewers know how this relationship is going to pear-shape on them. Rickie's the innocent - even his sexual fantasies center around a JoAnn, a girl he kissed when he was 12, suggesting she's more a symbol his own pre-sexual childhood than a real human woman with which Rickie wishes to make the beast with two backs. (In fact, the only action Rickie will see in a movie filled with rutting is when he shakes hands with Yul Brynner). In contrast, Noah Segan plays his J.T. as a destructive manboy, quickly adapting to all the worst elements of masculinity (from his Nicholson-by-way-of-Slater's-J.D.-from-Heathers delivery to his trailer trash efforts to affect Hefnerisms) filter through his pathetically limited world view. J.T. is an example of the despised becoming despicable.

Fleeing a pissed off stray dog that catches them in the tunnels under the asylum, the two boys find a captive woman, naked and bound to a medical gurney, in a hidden chamber. At first they assume that the woman is dead, but J.T. quickly discovers that she is only sorta dead. Inexplicably, J.T. wishes to keep her and, being a wuss, Rickie is unable to bring himself to call the cops. In short order, J.T. figures out that the dead girl - who remains nameless throughout the picture - is zomificated (though these teens seem to live in a world where no zombies movies, comics, or books have ever been produced since nobody uses the "zed word"). And, without much concern for the possible medical complications that would arise from fluid sharing contact with an inexplicably animate corpse, begins using her as a masturbatory aid or sex slave, depending what status you grant zombies as "people."

Of course, their secret gets out. J.T. invites stoner amigo Wheeler to join in on the fun. Then two rich kid bullies, who apparently wandered into this film from One Crazy Summer, discover J.T. zombie grotto. Complications ensue, deaths are involved, and the rapidly decaying relationship between Rickie and J.T. turns violently ugly.

Visually, Deadgirl is a surprisingly assured first feature. Though the inky blackness of the sub-asylum tunnels occasionally defeats the directors, Sariento and Harel produce a flick that is always professional and, occasionally, quite beautiful. The acting is sufficient to the flick, though I say that recognizing that the flick has tons of weird tonal shifts - from the squalid grotesque to near slapstick - and everybody should be applauded for managing to keep up at all. Segan's J.T. is a standout - Segan seems to be the only guy who not only handles the bizarre shifts in tone, but embraces them as an excuse to expand his character. Others, like Shiloh Fernandez's plodding Rickie, just hold one tone, refusing to break character even as the movie's loopy internal logic drags them from one scene to the next, breaking the logic of their characters for them.

I would say that there's just one problem with Deadgirl. Unfortunately, it is a doozy. The film wants the petrol that comes from it's shocking premise, but it doesn't want to pay the cost of truly engaging that premise. It wants to be a dark, stylish, slick, and sick entertainment; but the figure of the dead girl and grim implications of J.T.'s treatment of her loom too large in the mind of the viewer for them to come along. Despite the centrality of dead girl to the plot, what her unique status means in terms of moral engagement and how Rickie and J.T. react to that status as moral actors isn't really important to the story. The characters in the flick are written as incurious, almost thoughtless beings. There's a layer of irony that allows us to see their limitations, this also allows us to see the limitations of the zombie girl trope. It's a fake moral choice with a built-in out: For the viewer, there's never a reason to side with J.T. His position is insane and inexplicable from the get go. Even from a strictly self-interested perspective, you'd have to have a pretty specific skeez to overlook all the reasons J.T.'s option is a crap idea. Because we can't imagine siding with him, there was never really a moral conflict. Instead, we fall on the predictable idea that good guys just do good and bad folks just do bad. Rickie doesn't do the bad thing because he's a good guy and J.T. does the wrong thing because he's a bad person; and we side with Rickie because he's the good guy. But the viewer acutely feels the need for something more. The desire to see the creepiness of the abuse at the center of the film thematically justified nags at the viewer and undermines the filmmaker's more modest intentions. Like the boys in the film, they want the dead girl, but they want it consequence free. And - as any viewer of the film could have told you the moment J.T. decides to keep her - that isn't how it works out.

Contest: Booty call.

Thank you everybody who entered the ANTSS Every Damn Comic of Solomon Kane Ever Contest. The fickle finger of fate has pointed out our winner: Pauline the Pirate Queen!

Avast Pauline, email me a mailing address at [my blogging pen name]44[that "at" symbol]yahoo[the dot]com. I'll get the books packaged up and on their way.

Contest: I Kane, I saw, I conquered.

Just a reminder: Throw your hat in the ring for not one, but two big prozes in ANTSS Kane Komics Giveaway! Winners will be selected at random tomorrow morning.