| |
|||
 |
|||
|
|||
|
|
Diary of the Dead
It would be wrong to group, as many have, George A. Romero’s Diary of the Dead alongside first-person, “found-footage” films like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield. That’s because those films use, for better or worse, this cinematic device to ground their stories with a sense of reality—in the same way that Gothic writers of old often framed their tales with prologues that insisted that the story they were about to tell were true accounts. This approach ups the ante to produce additional dread, as good horror stories do—to make the familiar suddenly ominous and potentially dangerous. Blair Witch and Cloverfield want you to believe that what you are watching could be authentic, that they have released messy, unedited footage of an actual event by people who felt the urge to film their real plights on hand-held cameras. Part of the power of Blair Witch is that it was released with its origins surrounded in mystery: We are forced to wonder, is this real footage by real people or is it simply an effective narrative tool? We are never sure, and the question drives us mad as we become absorbed by the technique. By the time we got films like Cloverfield or the blatant Blair Witch-ripoff Welcome to the Jungle, of course, the effect had become a gimmick—we simply weren’t fooled anymore, and whether or not we accept the found-footage style is a question of whether or not we can suspend our disbelief. Romero’s latest entry in his ever-fascinating zombie series doesn’t require us to suspend our disbelief. It is more comparable to faux-documentaries like Remy Belvaux and Andre Bonzel’s Man Bites Dog and Zach Penn’s Incident at Loch Ness, which use the first-person technique not to dare us to accept the films’ premises as reality but to utilize this approach as part of their narrative plan. They fully recognize, and expect their viewer to also recognize, the method as a literary device. We aren’t intended to take these films at face value, but to simply allow the filmmakers to explore the documentary genre as a means of telling irrefutable fictions. To understand their intended use of the first-person style frees them of the restrains of expected reality and allows them to tell their narratives using an unconventional, but intentionally dramatic, approach. Understand this crucial distinction: If we try to watch Diary of the Dead in the same frame of mind that we watch Blair Witch, it falls apart in hokiness and “aw, c’mon!” moments; if we view it not as an attempt at realism but as a fiction that uses first-person as parable, we recognize its power. There is much unlikely moralizing in Diary of the Dead, many improbable interactions and lines of dialogue in which its characters espouse sentiments and ideas that were obviously written by a screenwriter. But remember: Romero deals with metaphors, to the point that his films always build up to an obvious social theme that’s just short of a voice-over finally saying, “And the moral of the story is….” If he’s become less subtle over the years—1968’s Night of the Living Dead plays like a neorealist’s take on the apocalypse, while 2005’s Land of the Dead had the over-the-top ferocity of a political cartoon—perhaps that’s because he’s reached the point in his cynicism of the human race that he no longer trusts his viewers to pick up on subtexts. Diary of the Dead concerns the journey of various college students in a Winnebago through the first several days of a zombie outbreak. It’s a prequel going back to the “first night,” though the films were ever in direct continuity. The students encounter various parties—some good, some hostile—and find themselves in all sorts of dangerous encounters that continue to diminished their ranks. It’s a fairly standard plotline for a zombie film, but the interesting variation is that these students are filmmakers, and the entire picture is told through the lenses of their cameras. When we first meet them, they are making a horror movie in the woods for a class project; when they learn that the dead are both walking and hungry, they decide to keep filming the events as a documentary even as they rush to safety and encounter obstacles along the way. Already, we see a plausible variation that allows us to accept this first-person premise more than we did for Cloverfield or Welcome to the Jungle (though Blair Witch gets away with it for similar reasons): It’s hard to believe that the average joe would insist on filming an alien invasion, since CNN probably already has it covered. But the students here are filmmakers-in-training—they are simply following their instincts to keep the camera rolling at all times. It’s still an unlikely premise, but Romero at least gives these students plausible motives. The spear-header of the troupe is the horror film’s director Jason (Josh Close), obsessed with filming events to record “the truth” and uploading it onto Myspace—“We have to tell people what’s really happening!” he insists, even though his footage contains no more or less confirmation of a zombie apocalypse as anything else online. But the true innovators of the group are Jason’s girlfriend Debra (Michelle Morgan) and his boozing film professor (Scott Wentworth), both skeptical of Jason’s obsession with keeping the camera rolling throughout the carnage. Debra goes along with the plan because she’s frankly out of options and wants to get home to her family. But the Professor stands as the outsider, a man who declares (in full Herzogian, street prophet mode) that he has seen this sort of obsession before, from journalists in the Korean and Vietnam Wars who depersonalize violence by sugarcoating it for American television viewers through impersonal cameras. The Professor’s life story is never fully fleshed out, but we get hints of it in long speeches that reveal deep emotional wounds, perhaps because he used to be such a journalist taking snapshots of those very wars. I forgot to mention, though, that what we’re seeing here isn’t entirely a first-person film, but a documentary titled The Death of Death, assembled and edited by Debra from Jason’s raw footage. Now this is when it really gets tricky, and we being to clue into Romero’s sly narrative method: Debra comes across as a sane, thoughtful narrator, but how much of her own film derives from the same sort of generic naivety that also drives Jason? Some of her voice-overs seem driven by self-importance as she provides obvious quips like, “I’ve added creepy music on the soundtrack to scare you,” or as she goes to great lengths to point out the depravity of humanity when only her images would suffice. As a narrator, she seems to lack faith in her own footage and constantly upsets the flow of the film with her perpetual evangelizing about humans not being worth saving. But this point is crucial: These obvious sermons aren’t Romero’s narrative flaw, but Debra’s. Her documentary plays just like one of those made-for-You Tube conspiracy films a la Loose Change and Zeitgeist: The Movie, which seem less interested in presenting their ideas than they are in proclaiming how clever the filmmakers are for having these ideas in the first place. Romero as the gatekeeper probes deeper than either Jason or Debra by allowing these contradictions of play out. He understands that when Debra wonders, “Do we pull over during an accident to help or to watch?”, she’s guilty of her own accusations by manufacturing The Death of Death at all. Romero’s thesis seems to be that the camera is a weapon that, yes, can inform, but in the wrong hands it serves as an irresponsible way to detach ourselves from reality. That Romero so seamlessly incorporates media footage from Katrina and the Iraq War reinforces his hypothesis: How many of us can really say that we feel like we view reality when we watch such clips under the voices of our favorite pundits? We ultimately realize that Diary of the Dead isn’t a film-within-a-film as it is initially presented so much as it is like a three-ringed narrative, with Jason’s footage in the center, Debra’s documentary in the middle, and Romero’s own vision on the outer-ring. Characters espouse various sentiments that confirm their own sense of self-importance; would they be in such a hurry to chatter philosophically to each other if a camera wasn’t pointed at them, even those who do not agree with Jason’s obsession to film everything? The camera thus becomes an enticing drug indeed. In the meantime, the protagonists are compelled forward by a road-trip framework that works well enough on its own terms to generate plausible suspense: By now, we all know the zombie conventions—recent dead are retuning to life and eating human flesh, you turn into one if you get bitten, and they are only stopped if you destroy their brain—but one of the interesting elements that Romero displays here how these students are completely clueless, having only heard sound-bites on the radio about the pandemic. They have to discover the rules along the way. This could have made for a routine film, but the director turns it into a clever method for creating character development—could this be the first post-Romero zombie picture that proceeds as if no one in it has ever seen a film by George Romero? Romero shoots the proceedings with surprising cinematic flair and skill, incorporating long, first-person takes and improvisational dialogue that generate suspense by allowing the characters to build mood and tension based on their unstable interactions in an increasingly hostile world. There’s a passage in Debra’s house that should have been obvious, but it slowly creates an ominous tone, suddenly assaults us with an unbroken zombie attack, and then ends in shocking, sudden violence. We’re certain that we’re in for a shock, but we’re simply unprepared for the frantic succession of interactions and their bloody payoff. Also note a long, unbroken shot of the Winnebago’s initial encounter with the walking dead, which begins with a turned-over, burning truck in the street and ends with the student driver plowing over persons wandering around on the road who may or may not be zombies. Romero points the camera at what’s happening in front of the windshield, but he includes in the shot the trembling, gripping fingers of the driver and uses the screams of other students and the thumps of the dead under their tires as an effective soundtrack. It is the first time any of these students have seen a zombie, and Romero finds exactly the right note of macabre awe. What’s amazing is that Diary of the Dead was shot on such a limited, shoe-string budget (a puny $4 mil) but that it nevertheless reveals Romero in the fullness of his talents; as good as the studio-produced Land of the Dead was, it lacked the independent flair of his previous Dead films and this one. It seems that Romero is simply a filmmaker who works best when he’s putting a film together by the string of his teeth. It’s also curious to note that Debra’s documentary is named The Death of Death. It’s a clever title on its own, but it is also the subtitle of a six-part miniseries that Romero wrote for the DC Comics zombie title Toe-Tags. That interesting series was set after the events of Land of the Dead, and since Romero wasn’t limited by budget restraints, he pulled out all stops with the most ambitious premise of all his zombie canon—genetically engineered zombie freedom fighters and undead elephants engaged in a three-way battle with the mindless dead and what was left of the corrupt United States government. The comic, which Romero officially considers to be part of the series, took his themes of the evolving dead and America’s unsalvageable capitalism about as far as they could plausibly go without turning into complete farce, so it is appropriate that Romero has decided instead to work backwards here, to when the zombies are first rising. In doing so, he’s able to scale down the increasingly generalized caricatures and instead explore the more disturbing themes of an individual’s quiet dehumanization in a time of great crisis. Still, that Romero used the title The Death of Death for both Diary, which takes place at the zombie war’s beginning, and Toe Tags, which occurs in its last days, suggests a marriage in the two pieces’ themes. In a way, they cement the entire series together—the filmmaker Jason plants the insensitive seeds with his obsessive filmmaking that make us all zombies, and Damien, Toe-Tag’s zombie hero, is finally able to find the self-control to become fully human again, even as he completely embraces his zombie identity. All the films in the middle—Night, Dawn, Day, and Land—document society’s slow but unstoppable shamble to its own demise; in the makeshift world that replaces it, perhaps the inhabitants of Romero’s apocalypse finally embrace their capacity for goodness. Diary ends with a hauntingly grotesque image that almost makes the bleakness of Night of the Living Dead seem upbeat, but we cannot forget that by the events in Toe-Tags, Romero’s cynicism for humanity turns into a hope that we’ll one day get the message. Because really, that Debra’s documentary exists at all means that she was alive to finish it and that someone within Romero’s zombie universe was around to watch it. Ponder for a moment on this utterly optimistic prospect. Cast: Weinstein Company presents an Artfire Films and Romero-Grunwald Production. Written an directed by George A. Romero. Running time: 96 minutes. Rated R, for violence/gore, language, and brief nudity. Original United States theatrical release date: February 15, 2008. Questions? Comments? E-mail me: danel_the_tinman@hotmail.com |
||
