In light of the recent zombie-related story posted a week back, I thought it might be a good time to look at the concept of the zombie in popular culture. Given the zombie-like devotion to vampires right now, I figure another classic monster category is due for an upswing.

Like so many other classic “monsters,” the “zombie” category in books, movies, etc., has been slowly expanding its definition, perhaps more than any other and especially in the last ten years. What used to be the exclusive territory of the mindless, flesh-eating walking dead has broadened to include a variety of afflictions.

For example, the recent remake of The Crazies generally falls into the zombie category, but the threatening hordes are alive and they don’t eat human flesh. In fact, it seems the “zombification” agent served merely to amplify people’s innermost violent emotions so that the afflicted would pursue revenge fantasies they harbored in life (where it is revealed that high-school principals dream of stabbing their students with a pitchfork).

[Fair Warning: this post contains some adult language and spoilers for several movies, including The Crazies, Shutter Island, and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. If this warning scares you, read no further.]

I don’t have a problem with this expansion of the category – but I do think we need to start finding new endings for zombie/apocalypse/pandemic stories. Today’s Hollywood writers have only a handful of ending options in their bandoliers, and an astute viewer can see them coming before the movie is half over.

One, end of the world (implied or real) as the threat continues to spread after a failed attempt to contain it. The containment is invariably draconian, usually with a nuclear explosion. The Crazies (and the sad AVP:R) falls into this category. I think The Return of the Living Dead pioneered this type of ending, at least in modern horror cinema, but even for that classic, I don’t consider it a very satisfying final.

Two, some ultimate “fuck you” from an indifferent universe – e.g., the last survivor from a night of zombie raids and carnage gets shot through a window by a bunch of rednecks. (If you don’t know the origin of that ending, you’re probably reading the wrong blog.) The Dawn of the Dead remake used this motif as the survivors reached the “safe island.”

Three, the protagonist(s) emerges on the other side of the immediate conflict to face either a hopeful or hopeless solution. This is really a variation on the first option, done with subtlety in The Birds and the original Dawn of the Dead, but lately it has become much more about cocked guns and swinging dicks with Ghosts of Mars, Doomsday, and (dare I say) Maximum Overdrive.

Fourth, everything gets better. Reserved only for “serious” fare such as Outbreak. “We found the monkey!”

Each one of these endings, in its own way, is overused and predictable. Not that I claim any special abilities, secret knowledge, or superiority in the area of crafting finales. Endings are tough. And the wrong ending can seriously tarnish an otherwise exemplary work (I’m looking at you, Battlestar Galactica), so there’s lots of pressure to get it right.

For example, I liked Shutter Island (the movie) all the way to the end. It was compelling up to the point that we are told all events have been a ridiculous and overly complicated stage play done for the benefit of our wacky protagonist. It threw cold water on the whole drama, where we found we were invested in nothing. (If you want to see this type of ending done right, see Inception. It’s odd to think of Christopher Nolan outdoing Scorcese, but there it is.)

Compare the vague dissatisfaction of Shutter Island to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. This one is easily the weakest movie in the series, thanks to a screeching Willie and its pervasive (and borderline racist) notions of paternal colonialism, but aside from Raiders, it has the best ending by a mile. For a movie in the tradition of the serial cliffhangers, does it get any better than the hero stranded on an old footbridge, suspended above a pit of crocodiles, with goons closing in on both sides? That ending is the only reason left to watch this movie more than five times, mainly because the awesome ending makes you forget how lame the rest of the movie is.

I recently finished reading William Faulkner’s The Reivers. It was an excellent book, highly recommended. Some great passages stood out in my mind:

“…if all the human race ever stops moving at the same instant, the surface of the earth will seize, solidify: there are too many of us; humanity will destroy itself not by fission but by another beginning with f which is a verb-active also as well as a conditional state…” (193)

The book also has a long passage where he rates the animals of the world based on intelligence, starting on page 121 of my edition (First Vintage International Edition). It is too long to post it all here (and you should be reading the book anyway) – but the comments on cats, who rank third behind rats and mules, were particularly poignant:

“There is the fable … of a period on earth when the dominant creatures were cats: who after ages of trying to cope with the anguishes of mortality – famine, plague, war injustice, folly, greed – in a word, civilised government – convened a congress of the wisest cat philosophers to see if anything could be done: who after long deliberation agreed that the dilemma, the problems themselves were insoluble and the only practical solution was to give it up, relinquish, abdicate, by selecting from among the lesser creatures a species, race optimistic enough to believe that the mortal predicament could be solved and ignorant enough never to learn better.” (121-122)

That is why your cat lives with you, is dependent on you, and yet lifts no paw in assistance or love. That’s “why your cat looks at you the way [he] does.”

I do not remember a time when the words “Skywalker” or “Alderaan” sounded nonsensical and silly. In fact, I don’t know if that time ever existed. They seem like perfectly natural names – a future surname and the name of a planet, celestial in theme but seemingly normal in the natural evolution of language. They were what we would call things, once we ventured into outer space. The name “Chewbacca” was so perfect, he already had his own nickname.

Now, “Starkiller” – that doesn’t sound right. It sounds crude, immature, like the caption, written in pencil, under a comic filled with bulging muscles and bouncing breasts and scrawled in a junior high notebook.

Lucas should get an award for the Star Wars nomenclature (although he damaged his rep with later names like “Dooku”). The names in his universe – at least his first trilogy – are equally iconic and natural. Even with the Ewoks. I remember both times – pre-Ewoks and post-Ewoks – and there was never a time in between when I had to get used to that word. It fit.

The challenge in properly naming things in a sci-fi or “speculative” universe cannot be underestimated. A bad name is like a bad special effect – it takes the reader or viewer right out of the world. Margaret Atwood, for all her diffidence to the label “sci-fi,” should take a lesson from that. For that unabashedly sci-fi epic Star Wars accomplished something she could not. In her book The Year of the Flood, she has a variety of hybrid animals running around, the products of gene splicing, with names like “rakunk” (the combination of a raccoon and a skunk, get it?). One of her characters eats something called a “Joltbar” – seriously. Did she come up with that name in the cab on her way to her publisher’s office?

I am not one to criticize – and I am still reading the book, which is entertaining for the most part (and the Website for the book is a great example of cross-platform marketing). It has some big ideas, expressed well, but as a reader, those names bother me. They strike me as lazy – or the crass attempts by an amateur with paparazzi sensibilities newly introduced to the joys of portmanteau. Maybe she should venture out from the protective shell of “speculative fiction” and see how real sci-fi writers do it.

I recently finished reading Honey for the Bears, by Anthony Burgess. Of course his most famous work by far is A Clockwork Orange, although his other writing is highly regarded – and I have to say, Bears was an excellent read, highly recommended, and not just because it has words like “sphingine” (resembling a sphinx).

Still, for me, Burgess falls into a certain category of writers – they are, despite an extensive bibliography, known mainly for one novel, and for whatever reason, I have a difficult time reading outside their one famous work.  This group includes Kingsley Amis, David Lodge, John Wain, Muriel Spark, and (perhaps to a lesser extent) George Orwell. I have started and failed to finish the Enderby novels, Down and Out in Paris and London, and The Anti-Death League. Sometimes the beginning is slow or ungripping – it was a bit of work for me to get through the first few chapters of Honey for the Bears, for example. Other times, the middle parts start to drag. A few middle chapters in One Fat Englishman were a slog.

I am not sure how to classify this phenomenon. Maybe it is just a British thing – could it be I am an insufficient Anglophile? I do recall one of my English professors, the great Dr. Phillip Parotti, once saying he had similar difficulties at first getting through Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, but that American doorstop didn’t give me any problems. Perhaps I am that annoying fanboy who knows Sir Alec only as Obi-Wan Kenobi. Could that be true, even though I watched the whole of the original The Ladykillers (over the course of a few days)?

J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise is like MySpace pages or user comments on a blog entry about Glenn Beck or Michael Vick – it’s a good place to lose your faith in humanity. According to Ballard’s novel, it would take about three months for polite, civilized society to devolve into violent splinter groups of thugs and cannibals.

That devolution time may seem a little compressed from a Western vantage, but the book advances the theme that technology hastens our descent – which in this case is an automated high-rise arcology. Not that technology by itself is the cause, but as it fills a bigger role in creating and maintaining social structure, it frees us to explore all our wayward or deviant impulses.

It can even amplify our deep-seated psychoses. If I had read this book ten years ago, I might have thought it odd that Ballard’s bourgeoisie took pictures of their hedonistic exploits, but that would have been before I saw the pics from Abu Ghraib, where the perpetrators inexplicably documented their crimes, apparently for their own edification.

Of course ten years previous (1999) was a more innocent time, when videos of women crushing kittens and small animals were all the rage on the Internet. And those videos may rise again, if the Supreme Court goes the Scalia Way on U.S. v. Stevens (the Scalia Way is the way that works only if you have your bloated head up your own fat ass far enough to prevent you from noticing the inherent contradictions in your own twisted belief system).

Maybe three months is too long for devolution. It gives us too much credit. The Internet, it is just a personal echo chamber that gives the illusion of relevance to any and all comments and activities (including these words I am typing right now…) while also making it easier for people for decontextualize their actions.

Look at any Internet story on Michael Vick, and you’ll realize there are innumerable people who think they are being funny or original or vaguely clever with the comment “dogs is tasty.” That would be disheartening enough, but it gets outright depressing when you realize the level of dialogue isn’t much better in the hallowed halls of the Supreme Court or Congress.

I remember, back in the day, there were always rumors about big colleges accepting more freshman than the school could handle – but then forcing these wide-eyed fledglings through an intensely difficult Biology 101 class in order to eliminate the weaker students and cull the freshman population to a more manageable level.

I don’t know if that’s true or not – it could be another urban legend like the college roommate with the chloroform and penchant for anal sex.

But the underlying theme of this “science as a bludgeon” story reveals a deep-seated fear and distrust of science, at least by one interpretation. It’s little wonder that the U.S. population as a whole has the reputation (deserving or not) of being scientifically ignorant, given that institutions use science as a wedge, separating one type of person from another, thus creating the perception that science is something in which only a select few can participate.

After reading Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett, I was struck by how the plot plays out, in a microcosm, for larger events in the U.S. What starts the  main sequence of events in the book is a fear of communism – or more specifically, fear of unionization. The fear that workers will start asking for their rights with one, unified voice.

(One could question whether this is a real fear of communism or a ploy of the wealthy and powerful in order to guard against threats to their power – but that is another discussion.)

In Red Harvest, to avoid such a catastrophe of worker rights, the big guys enlist strongmen to break the unions and the workers – and it quickly becomes a case where the cure is worse than the disease. The empowered thugs now want a piece (or more) of the power they cleared for the big guys.

It seems we are always finding new devils for deals. For example – and stay with me on this – the U.S. pardons General Shiro Ishii and other physicians at Unit 731, where the Japanese tested deadly biological agents on living human subjects before and during WWII,  because we were afraid the communists would get ahead of us in developing bioweaponry. Ishii should have never seen sunshine again – but we gave him immunity because we wanted that forbidden knowledge.

History is replete with such examples where our fear of communism has overcome reason, morality, and human decency and led us to support goons, thugs, and dictators. And the town in Red Harvest comes to embody the moral corruption of its leaders – and to the extent that it infects visitors – and make them all “blood-simple.” (I like that “town as a character” theme, one I have tried to develop in Martin Garvin – and one I keep coming back to in some of my other writing.)

For Red Harvest, it speaks to the strength of the book that you can go all “English professor” in its analysis. For society in general, it’s amazing what a little fear of communism and socialism will motivate people to do – and how it can convince some to abandon what few scruples they might have left in their character. And it’s a great way to excuse any behavior. I guess that’s why it has never left the playbook of the world’s fearmongers.

I recently finished reading The Case of the Midwife Toad, by Arthur Koestler. It was a good book, definitely worth the read. The work focuses on the dispute between the neo-Darwin clan and Lamarckian proponents of the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

The personal disputes that formed the core of the book’s narrative stirred feelings of ambivalence for me. On the one hand, it is a little comforting that scientists, even the most brilliant, engage in the same petty squabbles and petulant exchanges you would associate with guests on the Jerry Springer show. In other words – them scientists is just like us.

But the details of this exchange are also troubling – these feuds among scientists create the holes where ideologues (i.e., creationists, antienvironment activists) hammer in their wedges, pumping up technical debates to create the illusion of a shaky foundation and uncertainty on fundamental issues. And then they drive their own beliefs through these gaps.

Hence, a scientific debate on the effects of global warming on wildfires and hurricane activity becomes grounds for a very nonscientific pundit like Glenn Beck to dispute the whole phenomenon of climate change.

Science is vulnerable to attack from systems that deal in currency outside its own value system. Science deals in doubt, skepticism, and likelihood, while religion and politics traffic in certitude, complete certainty, the absence of doubt (to the point that they cannot see their hypocrisy from one day to the next).

So ideological groups are able to exploit a quality of science – plus our tendency to error on the side of excess – in order to promote their agenda, as faulty as it may be. As long as scientists engage in petty spats like what was detailed in The Case of the Midwife Toad, then they will remain at risk of being railroaded in public forums – and losing on the larger issues of public policy.

We have lost our sense of the mundane. That was one of the great things about Philip K. Dick. He didn’t make science fiction about the Space Prince or the World Conqueror or the President of the Universe. He wrote about the janitors, the technicians, the laborers. The ones who get stuff done. They were the ones dealing with the extraordinary. And no one seems to be carrying on the legacy.

Case in point, what was the overarching theme from The Incredibles? “There are only a few special people in the world. And you are not one of them.” Why would the fastest being on the planet need to compete in track and field, except to rub our noses in our own ordinariness? And why would his parents need to see him do that? At the beginning of the film, they didn’t want Dash to compete because they feared exposure, not because it would eliminate any sense of competition to the proceedings (i.e., he would mop the floor with all the kids who were actually trying). On the other hand, Syndrome was a modern-day Prometheus, hoping to bring exceptional qualities (fire) to us ordinary people. And he was the bad guy.

Moving on, I thought Star Trek the franchise needed a mundane makeover. Dispense with the Captain Worship. Especially after the top-down disaster that was Star Trek: Enterprise. Focus on the men and women who really make the ship run – the people cleaning the air ducts, mopping down the transporter rooms, polishing the communications consoles. Really, Captain Worship is just one step above Wesley Worship, and no one wants that.

Well, the new Star Trek film (which I thoroughly enjoyed, by the way) still carries our obsession with those at the top. I had my initial doubts about the movie, mainly because Alias was a show about worshipping Jennifer Garner, and I feared J.J. Abrams would carry that over – Kirk would wear a fluorescent-orange wig, cop an attitude to infiltrate the Klingon High Council, and the rest of the crew would have nothing to do but marvel at his mad skills. Star Trek didn’t go that far, but still, I feel we’ve lost our appreciation for the mundane, which is doubly troubling because one, most of us have to live in it and two, we are growing blind to the important stuff that happens in this space. Maybe that’s why everyone nowadays thinks they’re going to be famous.

I’ve been thinking (too much) lately about the first Die Hard movie. It’s a movie that dabbles in almost every cliche it can find, yet it manages to hold itself together. The end – the very ending, where every stereotype gets its comeuppance – is wrapped up as neat as a Christmas present, and John McClane saves the greatest gift of all for his new best buddy Sgt. Al Powell.

At the start of the movie, Al is unable to draw his gun, the equivalent of castration for an 80s action movie character. (The boring details – Al was on patrol, saw a kid with a toy gun, it was dark, he killed the innocent kid, Al’s scarred for life, blah blah blah.) Then came the raid on the Nakatomi Plaza – with lots of blood, death, and bureaucracy – but Al and John, even though they spend the entire movie apart (sort of a reverse Kirk-Spock a la Wrath of Khan), are able to cut through all that red tape to make a spiritual connection.

It is the strongest bond possible between two guys in a 1980s movie, an audio-only love connection featuring two star-crossed contestants on The Dating Game for supercops. And at the end, they recognize each other across a crowded room, and John gives Al back his mojo, in the form of his ability to shoot things. With Karl rising from the dead (perhaps it was his severe German stoicism that fooled the EMTs?), enormous assault rifle in hand, Al (in the film’s most uplifting moment) is able to whip it out and gun down another human being. Through his relationship with John, Al has reawakened his inner killer, and one can hope that this Aryan terrorist is just the first of many more deserving victims dispatched by the hand of the new and improved Al.

Unfortunately Al had only a minor role in Die Hard 2 and was absent from Die Hard with a Vengeance. By this time (an era we can refer to as the Urkel years), Al was obviously in need of another dose of John McClane. Seems you have to nuture your bloodlust, otherwise it comes with an expiration date.