Mon Oncle
Friday, June 24, 2005
Land of The Dead (Romero et al, 2005), Mon Oncle (Tati et al, 1958) and Madame Bovary (Flaubert, 1857)
Funny thing. I watched Land of the Dead within a couple hours of finishing the Steegmuller translation of Madame Bovary--that is to say, the final chapters, which go into agonizing detail on the decay of Mlle. Bovary's body as she lies in bed after taking the poison. "Beads of sweat stood out on her face, which had turned blue and rigid, as though from the breath of some metallic vapor." And very soon afterwards Flaubert describes her dead, and with as cruel a lack of ornamentation as possible: "Emma's head was turned toward her right shoulder. The corner of her open mouth was like a black hole in the lower part of her face; her two thumbs were bent inward towards the palms of her hands; a kind of white dust powdered her lashes; and the outline of her eyes was beginning to disappear in a viscous pallor, as though spiders had been spinning cobwebs on her face." Novelists of the 19th century and special effects artists of the 21st share a similar trade, replacing large effect with miniscule detail, and working out from there. If he were alive today, I doubt Flaubert would be very much as impressed by our literature in general as by Spider Man 2 in particular.
You're meant to be more afraid of the living than the dead in a Romero picture. The walking dead are a standing (ha ha) threat, like the weather or the San Andreas fault. Romero works under some frightening Darwinian assumptions--the assumptions every high-school nerd has had to calculate as against reality--namely, that we are programmed to deal with one another in such and such a way in the face of stress or high danger, that weakness will out, and that the whole thing will end in ironic bloodshed and the preservation of faceless resources. This is a simplification he makes, and a dangerous one, but necessary for the movies. What makes his films more interesting is that his Darwinian backsliding always begins with talk. Problems are both escalated and held off by talk. Not great talk, just basic webweaving, a further escalation down the funnel. Night of the Living Dead is all talk, constant talk, about what to do next, about who's aligned with whom and who's going to kill us all with his nutty plans. Barbara's condition of madness gives her logorrea--she talks herself right into the arms of a zombie bloodbath towards the end of the film. The mother downstairs tries to talk her daughter out of her illness. Most horrifying in the film is when words no longer work. The dead can't hear. The daughter goes after her mother with a trowel, as inanimate a thing as a mushroom cloud. Night of the Living Dead is the only movie that terrifies with boredom. The talk becomes too much--after a while, the protagonists sit around watching T.V. and the men on T.V. talk. Then the protagonists talk about what the men said on T.V. I wonder what is the script's page count, glutted as it is with talk.
Land of the Dead is a bit more exciting: it's also a lesser movie. The guts and brains splatter more convincingly, and the weapons are far more impressive. There are shots of broad contextualisation Night never had: long shots of a battered Pittsburg in which a single tower is lit, representing the rich with enough cash to remove themselves from the reality of weather, horror, etc. This, as opposed to the cramped, endless interiors of the little farmhouse of 35 years ago. There is less time for talk in Land.
Another parallel with Madame Bovary: they way in which Emma is ruthlessly administered to, even in death. She's watched, debated over, still made up and primped on her death bed by the servants, though a "black liquid" pours from her mouth like "vomit." Even in death, she is caught in a devouring domesticity, watched after and worried about. And in all of Romero's zombie movies, special care is taken to dress up the zombies in the attitudes they wore in life: a teenage girl in a cheerleader outfit slopes around with her cheek torn out; a large man in blue overalls and a split skull still has tools dangling from his belt. One of the living spies an undead gardener staggering down the street in back of a push mover. "How am I different from that son of a bitch out there?" he asks, before blowing the gardener's head off.
Flaubert created an archetype, something the middle class strivers of his time could cling to for the tragic bits missing from their own lives. Romero has done the same for us. Retail clerks need the imagery Romero has provided, especially during a long Christmas season serving the dead eyed and anxiously propelled. I've been battered a few times this way, back behind the counter. An inability to relate to Romero's undead is barbaric in this context. It means you're one of them.
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Next Day: I go to see Mon Oncle. Why mention it? Just to give Jacques Tati a little kick in the ass. He becomes more boring every time I see him: he's like the guy who invites you to his party and then dresses you down for eating at McDonald's or drinking Merlot. He's a professional pill. Only his sets stay in the mind very long--they embody the seductive power of faceless technology Tati tries so hard to deny. He makes his point better trudging up and down a partitioned apartment building or getting lost in a maze of elevator banks in a skyscraper: in short, when he's actually enjoying himself among the blinking lights. Then you can't see the beady-eyed puritanism on his face, which telegraphs the message "I won't compromise with this. Everything is stupid." It's as if he wanted to extend Chaplain's late career. His buildings are like zombies: horrible, inhuman, fascinating to watch, and all devouring. Watching Jacques Tati play grab-ass in front of them ruins the whole effect.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:01 PM, ,
