jane dark's sugarhigh!

Down with the quickness

I had meant to stay home last night, studiously reading the exhaustive new evaluation of the economic impact file-sharing exercises on music sales in the US. It was researched and written by gentlemen who are very comfortable with the word "econometric," as well as the halls and verdant lounges of University of North Carolina and the Harvard Business School. It has cool charts and maps at the end.

It is quite a long document (52 pp pdf), meticulous, measured, and of classical demeanor -- so it should come as no surprise that it was prepared (as Steve noted immediately) with "Aural support from Massive Attack, Sigur Ros and The Mountain Goats." If you'd like to save time, I recommend reading the abstract, and then Sections I, VI, and VII. For the truly clock-sensitive, read these two sentences: "Downloads have an effect on sales which is statistically indistinguishable from zero, despite rather precise estimates. Moreover, these estimates are of moderate economic significance and are inconsistent with claims that file sharing is the primary reason for the recent decline in music sales" [Italics Lars Ulrich's].

However, I ended up succumbing to the incongruous lure of Sarah Polley ("the Canadian Winona Streep") in the sin duda feeble remake of Dawn of the Dead, a film recommended otherwise only for having inspired the Variety headline, after it office-boxed the fuck out of Mel Gibson Is Crazy last week, approximating "Zombies Knock Off Jesus." The raw facticity of this seemed in question when Steve and I discovered a total of four other customers in the theater.

We were in for a surprise...

At the conclusion of the end credits (not amazing for the Blair (t)witchy handicam breakdown, but for the way that the dark-blood-red-on-black credits themselves are almost entirely illegible, which requires more chutzpah in Hollywood than full frontal of ugly guys) exactly half the audience started applauding and yelling.
"That was the best zombie movie in all history!"
"That was retarded!"
"It totally redefined the zombie movie."

The opening itself will send me back to see the flick again this week, with its trifurcated array of placid suburbiana (shown first in a lovely schematic high-overhead of such orthogonal justice as to embarass American Beauty's similar but maundering effort), ripped and chaotic action, and intercut (mostly close-up) compositions of such oddity and brevity that the brain is just starting to shift from whoa to some traction when the next kinetic corpse hurtles angularly across the picture plane. The sequence has such intensity, asks so much of the mind, that, for the first time in years, I forgot we hadn't seen the credits yet -- when they started, I was stunned. I leaned over to Steve and said "this is the best movie I've ever seen."

The remainder can't match such density, but the entire film is an onslaught. It's premised on the same mechanism: not leaving enough time at the end of, the beginning of, or between sequences to recompose, either for characters or viewers. In that regard it's the triumph of montage over mise en scene, not in the MTV-indexed sense of methedrine editing as mimesis for the mind shuttling ecstatically over the aimless surfaces of data excess, but in the sense of exactly what it is that films can do that theater cannot. The assault on consciousness is in the cut.

The film does, as has been noted, lack the devotion to consumer critique of George Romero's original; indeed, it's a bit surprising that the director (who the hell is Zack Snyder? I'm gonna gay-marry that kid) maintains the mall setting. The mall is the locus classicus of the last-human-alive fantasy, which is irrevocably a commodity-fantasy: always about being the sole consciousness adrift in a world of pure things, a world in which thingfulness has overtaken all the other humans (in a less total way, this fantasy of entering commodityworld is rehearsed in the shopping montage at the heart of a thousand films, most brutally Pretty Woman. In such cases, we don't play witness to the dream of the last human -- of the lone being with agency in a world of things -- but the humbler dream of achieving agency regarding things in the first place: not the realization of sole consciousness but of bourgeois consciousness. This is the difference between the French Revolution and the apocalypse).

This version foregrounds its own refusal by limiting the inevitable festival of mall-pillaging by the heroes -- the apocalyptic shopping sequence -- to a few slight underlit seconds. The mall serves as a series of arenas, not as a social issue; with its insistent shots of slatted metal gates and holding areas, it's far more a gauntlet of jail cells than a vast doo-dad depot (as in the original, and the superb Quiet Earth). Watching the original's awkward, stumbling zombies traverse echoing commercial space was its own pleasure, the awful comedy at the heart of the matter. They had to be slow; they were things now, making their ineluctable orbit through the world of things.

In the new Dawn the zombies are fucking track stars.

This concerns, in part, nothing more than kinesis; with its sequential arenas and bordered visual fields into which creatures are perpetually about to race, the film does far better with video-game structure than dedicated flicks like Resident Evil, or aggressive wannabes like XXX. In the most crowded and overwhelming combat, the camera leaps to its schematic perch well above the action, summoning up the rounds of Robotron in which the bad guys flood the screen, and there's no choice but to shoot a path through them if one wants to move at all.

But, beyond gamer's bliss, the velocity of the zombies is about speed itself. If the world is composed of the quick and the dead, the zombies are awfully quick; in their way, they are more alive than the few human survivors. They have not been overtaken by thingfulness, but by creatureliness. They are feral, bloody, and stoked: revels without a cause, evil without a pause.

They are not blurs, you understand, not impossibly fast; they can't outrun cars. They are just...swifter than humans. They have no need, after all, to rest; zombies do not need to catch their breath, recover from muscle fatigue, stop for pain. Nor do they need to collect their thoughts, make emotional sense of loaded conversation, register their experiences. In short, they are to humans as movies are to the theatre -- and, as I intimated earlier, this is the film's entire strategy. It knows that the endtimes concern not rapture but speed (reading Virilio again?), and that cinema was born to run at this post-human speed.

By editing out the human pauses of theatre, of mise en scene, and cutting relentlessly from one creaturely burst to the next, the moments in which the human gathers itself, composes itself, are excised from the screen and disallowed for the audience. As a film, it is absolutely filmic; of its viewers, it requires total creatureliness. This may explain its multiple nods to Sam Peckinpah (particularly Pat Garrett), or why the only character allowed much characterization ("Steve Marcus") is pointedly the creep. Nothing, I fear, can explain the Richard Cheese lounge-against-the-machine version of "Down With The Sickness" mid-film (genius) or do justice to the apparition of Jim Carroll's "People Who Died" (weepingly le choix juste) during the closing credits, before it dissolves into the original of "Down With The Sickness" and the last burst of speed overtakes the tale entirely.

At the movies, I have not felt more at the movies in quite some time.

Posted by jane at April 1, 2004 11:14 AM | TrackBack