George A. Romero's
Land of the Dead
****
out of ****
“Do
you know how a lot of New Yorkers keep talking about the fact
that they want to leave the city but never do? Do you know why
they don’t leave? I think that New York is the new Concentration
Camp, where the inmates themselves have built the camp and they
are their own guards. They have this pride in this thing they
have built: They have built their own prison, and they exist in
a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners.
As a result, they no longer have, having been lobotomized, the
capacity to leave the city they’ve made, or to even see
it as a prison.” –My Dinner With André
I
wish you could have heard the banter from movie patrons in the
line I was in, as we waited to view George A. Romero’s Land
of the Dead, the long-awaited fourth installment of his series
of social allegories that use the outlandish notion of a zombie
apocalypse to create not-to-outlandish notions about the current
social and political conditions of the United States. The general
consensus by the gore-hungry fans was that the film would have
“way more action than Dawn of the Dead.”
Most of the conversation were variations of this riff, and I was
forced to wonder if these audience members even knew that the
Dawn of the Dead that they were speaking of was, indeed,
a remake of a much quieter, bolder 1979 film by a certain George
Romero.
They
must have, because they knew Romero by name: “After all,”
I heard so many young people excitedly proclaim, “It’s
by the Master!”
Indeed
it is: Land of the Dead is not only the return of the
“master” of the fleshing-easting-zombie genre (which
Romero himself created), but it is also one of the best films
of the year, by a director who I rank with Scorsese, Coppola, Malick, and
Altman as one of the greatest American filmmakers of his generation.
The reason for this praise is indeed not because the Master has
stepped in and demonstrated how to properly create an efficient
zombie action movie, which really, anyone could feasibly do with
a digital camera and a few friends willing to dress up as walking
ghouls. No, this praise is because Romero eschews the shallow
concerns of his public and reminds us all of why he invented the
zombie film to begin with: To wake us up to whom the “real”
walking dead are in the United States. Just as Romero has previously
used the zombie as a metaphor for contemporary topics in the United
States (in the now bona fide classics Night
of the Living Dead, Dawn
of the Dead, and Day
of the Dead), he uses them just as effectively here,
and creates allegory that is—ahem—biting, both literally
and figuratively. Indeed, these dead walk so that they can teach
us how to awaken from death ourselves.
The
miracle is not only that George Romero found the funding to return
(it has been twenty years since his last Dead film),
but that he so masterfully crafted his critique right under our
noses: In an age when actress Maggie Gyllenhaal's sincere and
heartfelt comments that perhaps America bears some responsibility
for 9/11 are considered betrayal and anti-American, Romero has
boldly taken this notion to a level in which American audiences
will see exactly what Gyllenhaal was talking about, in a way that
will leave them hard-pressed to argue. This, of course, will make
Land of the Dead a controversial film, but as a man who
famously cast an African American actor as a hero in a horror
film that was released around the same time as Martin Luther King’s
assassination, Romero should be used to the cries of outrage—and
indeed, proud of them.
I
think I realize why most of the people in today’s audience
didn’t get the colossal joke that Romero was making about
our society in his previous films: By now, a black actor is token
in any film, horror or otherwise. But to have a black actor proclaim,
“I’m boss here!” to a white male in the 1960s
was something considerably more radical. As was the location of
the mall in which the survivors settle down to live in the original
Dawn of the Dead: Malls were a new phenomenon in the
1970s, and a film to feature humans basking in their resources
was clearly a statement on greed and consumerism. Today, a mall
is so engrained in our culture, it is simply a common place to
shop, eat, and, gossip. Which was Romero’s sad, grim prophecy
in the first place.
Because
Land of the Dead is a film for this generation, its themes
and motifs will be so clear that they’re likely to reach
out of the theater screen and slap us in the face. It should be
the same impact that audiences in the 1960s felt with Night
of the Living Dead; that, or as this film reveals, we have
grown into such a detached society that Romero had to ditch all
subtly for this generation and make his points entirely, completely
clear. Some might use this lack of subtly as a reason to criticize
Romero’s work here; I prefer to think that it demonstrates
an absolute insightfulness on the director’s part.
Indeed,
Romero’s allegory is unquestionably jarring here: His characters
say things like, “I want to live in a world without wars,”
and “We don’t negotiate with terrorists.” These
are lines ripped out of our headlines, and Romero puts them to
good use by pointing out that they have literally become clichés
in our war-torn lives, to the point that we don’t even think
about them anymore. We can read in the news about men and women
dying every day in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Africa, and we are hardly
affected anymore (or as a character puts it in last year’s
Hotel Rwanda, “In America, we see the news, say,
‘Oh, God, how terrible!’ and then go back to a meals.”).
Romero intentionally uses images of violence and gore to affect
us, to jolt us into the realization that we should be utterly
ashamed that B-movie gore can repel us and our daily headlines
no longer can.
Romero
seems to be making two statements here, and both are tragic appeals:
1) The echo of Gyllenhaal’s statements that in order to
prevent another September 11, we have to be willing to consider
ourselves as part of the blame, and 2) our government doesn’t
want us thinking so deeply about these topics, and have therefore
created a bird cage for us to live in, in which we do not have
to seriously ponder over what is going on outside of our borders.
We are happy with our own reality, safe and secure inside the
walls of our country, which has really become our prison. These
two dilemmas are seemingly the cause-and-affect for one another:
It is our own sins that create terrorists, and it is our self-imposed
ignorance that keeps us from fully realizing this. Thus, our ignorance
only fuels more terrorism.
This
might be the first official American film dealing directly with
9/11 to ever be released theatrically (there have been a few television
movies and a collection of short films by foreign filmmakers),
and it is as honest an examination of that sad day and its causes
as any literal film about it that I could image. Roger Ebert has
said that if anyone was going to make a successful film about
9/11 that would leave any impact at this point, with emotions
still so high, it would have to be either A) a small film or B)
a film that serves as a metaphor, using imagery and allegory to
recreate the events of the “Day the World Changed”
(another expression used in the film). Romero has done the latter,
and Land of the Dead is a powerful essay on the motivations
of all responsible parties, and of the impact that our choices
left on the world ("I don't want to hear your story; everybody
has a story!" a bitter hero reveals at one point).
Rather
than discuss the plot and Romero's filmmaking techniques, which
other critics have done very adequately, I prefer to discuss the
film’s ideas and let the plot and the craft reveal themselves:
There is some damning of the current administration going on in
this film, to be sure, but it does not put all the blame on Bush
and his cohorts. Romero is wise enough to shoot even farther,
into the greater roots of the problem, taking us back decades
past (which is a possible compensation for the lack of a 1990s
zombie film from Romero). The government is not exempted, but
Romero is not pointing fingers so much as suggesting that we're
all responsible for what happened, and we cannot pin
the cause on one man or one intelligence failure: He's leveling
the playing field from the simplistic, "They are enemies
of freedom, and we are good," and makes clear that there
are no good guys. We have all contributed to our monsters and
terrorists. Zombies, like terrorists, can quickly be dismissed
as mindless demons bent on our destruction, but Romero reveals
that sometimes, demonizing only creates a level of underestimating
that creates problems of its own.
When
I describe the film’s story without mentioning zombies,
it sounds a lot like what is happening both in the Middle East
and in America today: The people in power, in an effort
to benefit only themselves and their wealthy friends, suck the
surrounding lands of their natural resources. The inhabitants
of their natural resources, assumed to be uneducated and therefore
only considered a nuisance, vow revenge, take the resources left
over by their enemies and learn how to implement them. The people
in power, of course, remain so detached from the world outside
that they don’t realize that these nuisances have had a
leader among them for a long time, a revolutionary who has emerged
from the ashes and is quietly forming an army of his peers and
training them for the day of reckoning.
In
the meantime, the walled-in city consists of two sectors: One
that utilizes the natural resources (which includes “essentials”
like fine wine, cigars, and Pringles) and lives in luxury, and
the other, impoverished sector that is thrown the scraps of these
riches and never stir to action because of the fear of the outside
world that their rich leaders have instilled in them. The rich
therefore grow richer and forget both the outside world and the
poor around them, and the poor believe that they are destined
to the curse of poverty and have allowed themselves to be distracted
by creature comforts themselves, including game shows, gambling,
booze, and drugs. The bigwig at the very top, of course, spends
so much time trying to keep his city under control with his fear
tactics that he A) overshoots and creates domestic terrorists
rising angrily out of the city’s poverty, and B) never notices
when the uneducated victims of their outside pillages gather their
army and move to attack their main tower of commerce.
If
all of this sounds obvious, then it cannot be said that Romero
has created anything less than a story in which its heroes and
villains are clear. Romero eschews the gloss of the recent Dawn
of the Dead remake and directs very straighforwardly, making
his themes and motifs quite palpable (though he does include the
creative, spontaneous zombie gags that we are used to in his work).
What is not so obvious is whom we end up rooting for. Taking a
lead from the original Night of the Living Dead, Romero
has famously cast his hero as an African American. I do not want
to create a stereotype here, but Romero freely admits that a key
theme in all his films is the United States’ handling of
minorities (it is certainly no coincidence that all of the bigwig’s
henchmen are minorities, and there are scenes that chillingly
echo the Minute Men fiasco that is happening on the U.S./Mexican
borders right now). This black character always is Romero’s
“odd man out,” the loner who drifts into the picture
without any friends and seemingly emerges as the protagonist.
There is no question of who the black, “odd man out”
hero is in Land of the Dead; the real question is, do
we choose to accept Romero’s interpretation of events?
I
think we can, because Romero’s central premise is that 9/11
and American’s apathy are the products of two evils that
could have been avoided: Poverty and greed, respectively. They
feed off of each other. Romero is not demonizing America by dumbing
its representation down into simplistic abstractions, but he is
leveling out the blame in a very balanced manner by breaking down
the simplistic "us vs. them," "terrorists vs. righteous"
mentality and suggesting that all participating parties are both
terrorists and righteous in their own ways, that all actions have
consequences, and that we should honestly consider our tragedies
as consequences, not as “attacks.” Certainly
Romero doesn’t ask us to root for international terrorists
who will commit acts of horror on our soil, but he makes it very
clear that there are some people who do root for them, and that
it is probably our own fault that they are considered heroes by
more than a few.
Some
have dismissed the ending as anti-climactic; I won’t give
it away here, but I will challenge this notion by suggesting that
perhaps "anti-climactic" is Romero’s point and
not a fault. He asks the question, do we really need to elongate
a war when neither side is willing to change its position? We
have our standards, and they have theirs. We are both simply looking
for places to live, both looking for our own freedoms. If we cannot
agree with one another, we should at least learn to agree to disagree.
The killing cannot go on forever, or else we will only herald
the destruction of us both and sink to the demonized stereotype
that we have used to label our enemies. As the human characters
move about the film, lost in their strip-clubs and clothes stores,
I’m forced to wonder who is more zombie-like. As the zombies
learn to use our weapons and gain a leader to guide them away
from cannibalism and into righteous rage for the afflictions they
have experienced, they are ever more human. To kill each other
is to become one another. One of the film’s final images
is a reimagining of Death’s dance in Ingmar Bergman’s The
Seventh Seal, and this is no coincidence: On our path
of destruction, Romero says, there will be no winners: Only foolish
souls holding hands and dancing mindlessly towards oblivion.
There
is more to be learned for Land of the Dead, and I invite
you to learn it for yourselves. It is a film that should be screened
on the steps of the capital building, with our current administration
being forced to watch by duct-taping their eyes open. It is a
return to form for George A. Romero, our greatest social commentator,
who has been gone for far too long. He has crafted an allegory
that staunchly advocates pacifism, and it is on par with all the
great American films that have done likewise. That it is cleverly
disguised as a fast-paced horror/action vehicle should not keep
you from seeing it; the true horror, as usual, is that Romero
is chillingly, brilliantly perceptive, and more than likely correct:
By the time the human villain screams at the intruding zombies,
“You have no right to do this,” we know that the zombies
have earned the right to scream back, “Neither do you!”
Click
here to read my review of Night of the Living Dead
(1990 remake).
Click
here to read my review of Day of the Dead.
Click
here to read my review of Dawn of the Dead.
Click
here to read my review of Night of the Living Dead.
Cast:
Simon Baker: Riley Dembo
Eugene Clark: Big Daddy
Dennis Hopper: Kaufman
John Leguizamo: Cholo
Robert Joy: Charlie
Asia Argento: Slack
Pedro Miguel Arce: Pillsbury
Universal Pictures and Atmosphere
Entertainment MM presents a film by Exception Wild Bunch. Written
and directed by George A. Romero. Rated R, for graphic depictions
of gore and cannibalism, language, and very brief nudity/sexuality.
Running time: 92 minutes. Original United States theatrical release
date: June 24, 2005.
