The Running of the Dead, Part 1

Posted on July 24, 2010 | 11 Comments

•360 Years Later

The first thing a person is going to need to know about Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later, from

2002, is that it’s one big trick. That’s one good reason to like the movie, in fact—that it is

punking you. I don’t think I can explain the movie’s trick right away; we need to do the

groundwork first, but it is the point to keep in mind: 28 Days Later is a bit of the thimblerig.

Don’t let your eye off the ball.

The second thing to know is that of all the zombie movies, 28 Days Later is the one most steeped

in political philosophy. One way to come at this is to call to mind something that George Bush

said in 2006. A reporter at a White House press conference was second-guessing him on some

issue—it hardly matters what—and Bush responded like this:

I listen to all voices, but mine’s the final decision. … I hear the voices, and I read the front page,

and I know the speculation, but I’m the decider, and I decide what’s best.

A lot of people made fun of those sentences. I definitely made fun of those sentences. The word

“decider” is maladapted, obviously, and it’s the bit that most of us kept quoting, but the idea that

Bush was hearing voices is also pretty funny. The thing is, though: “I’m the decider” might

sound inane, but it isn’t just another Bush malaprop. “I’m the decider” is not “misunderestimate”

or “putting food on your family,” because unlike these others it has a clear sense to it, one that

we should bother trying to understand. More: It turns out that this sentence, dopey as it is, has a

long philosophical history behind it. I absolutely guarantee it: People with PhDs in political

theory were whispering in Bush’s ear. They fed him that line. “The human being and fish can

coexist” was his alone.

My suggestion, then, is that if we understand the political philosophy behind that sentence, we

will understand 28 Days Later, too; that what is at stake in this movie, as one of the important

documents of the early transatlantic-Bush era, is what it means to have (or not to have) A

DECIDER. And if we’re going to understand that philosophy, we’re going to need a refresher

course on Thomas Hobbes, who is the single most important philosopher in the history of the

political Right, or at least of one of its strands: not the free-market Right, and not the Christian

Right, but the authoritarian Right, the party of SWAT-teams and strong leadership.

The basic facts on Hobbes are that he was writing in the 1640s, 1650s, 1660s, and that he was a

royalist: He thought that all societies needed strong central authorities and that no-one had the

right to question the state, let alone oppose it. More properly: He thought that governments

should establish the parameters of official belief and that anyone dissenting from the state

religion or state science, even a kind of state metaphysics, should be silenced.

In and of itself, this position didn’t make Hobbes unusual, since there were lots of royalists in the

seventeenth century. What made Hobbes unusual, rather, is how he got to his royalism, the

arguments he used to defend kingship. Run-of-the-mill royalists generally argued that ordinary

people should accept kingly rule because it was God’s will: God likes kings; God is himself a

kind of king; kings are therefore his representatives here on earth. Or they argued that kings were

natural: that human groups always coalesce around strong men; that the first human groups were

families, and then, when larger groups—like clans or tribes—began accreting, one figure began

acting as father to them, and so on, until we reach the condition of modern states, where the king

functions as father-to-the-nation.

Now consider the opposite position: There were, in fact, people in the seventeenth century who

didn’t like kings; they took an axe to at least one of them. But even those people didn’t have any

democratic theory on tap to explain why kings were a bad idea. So the anti-royalists generally

looked around history for counter-examples to monarchy, for examples, that is, of human groups

that didn’t form around strong men. And they found lots of examples: they found tribes, both in

the Americas and in early European history; and they began lifting out of that history the times

and places when ordinary people had assembled, deliberated, passed the conch. The anti-

royalists granted that lots of tribes had had leaders, but thought they could show that these

leaders had themselves been chosen, which meant that power had to be conferred on them by

their followers, which meant that the followers were the original power-holders and so not

finally or fully followers at all.

Those were the ideas that counted as radical in the seventeenth century. Hobbes’s feat, in this

light—and if you pause here, you might see how nifty this is—was that he worked out a way of

starting with Position #2 and getting back to Position #1. He thought, in other words, that he

could grant the radicals their main point and still make you see that monarchy was the only one

way to go. Yes, all power was originally with the people, but even if you are convinced of that

idea, you should still sign on to something rather like dictatorship.

If you want to see how he pulls this off, there are two specific argumentative sequences you’ll

need to understand. The first goes back to two simple observations.

•1A. Everything wants to live. Or, if you put in this in terms of political theory, every person has

a right to defend him- or herself against attack. One of the few observations we can make about

the world that seems all-but universally true—true everywhere at every time—is that people (and

animals and even plants) will do what they need to do to stay alive.

•1B. Being an early human must have sucked. This is actually the heart of Hobbes’s argument: If

you reflect on the earliest stages of human history, you’ll see that it must have been hard to stay

alive. Anybody could have done to you anything they wanted. The only thing standing between

you and every passing rapist was your own fist.

But, Hobbes says, people aren’t stupid, and they want to stay alive. So what must have happened

is that they all got together and agreed, in a kind of contract, to appoint one person who would

settle all disagreements and resolve all conflicts. That would be the king. And here’s the sick

genius of his argument: The contract is a one-time deal; it can never be renegotiated; because

once you have agreed to give all power to the king, just to be sure that your next-door neighbor

doesn’t tear your throat out, you can’t afford to disagree with the king any longer. In fact, it

becomes nonsensical to talk about disagreeing with the king, because the king is the one who

settles disagreements. It is part of the original contract that the king is always right.

One other point to drive home: Hobbes was a kind of peacenik. We usually think of the peace

movement as belonging on the Left, but Hobbes loved peace; peace was the whole idea; he was a

right-wing pacifist, and in a sense, there have always been lots of these, though “pacifist” is not

usually what we call them. We call them “law-and-order types,” and their politics goes back to

the Hobbsean idea that nothing—absolutely nothing—is more important than suppressing the

possibility that war might break out from within the tissue of society.

So that brings us to Hobbes’s second argumentative sequence, which was that…

2. War is always looming, always threatening to break out from within the tissue of society.

Primal conflict is always lurking in society’s cracks. This isn’t just paranoia on his part. Hobbes

agrees with modern liberals on one easy point, which is that life is full of disagreements, and that

these disagreements can’t help but seep into our social and political institutions. Another way to

put this would be to say that our institutions are shot through with gaps—holes of uncertainty.

All institutions involve ideas, propositions or arguments: “People have a right to life, liberty, and

the pursuit of happiness” or “There is no God but God.” And these institutional ideas will always

lead to an entire series of problems or puzzles, mostly because such propositions can never be

self-interpreting, which means that any institution will tend to generate competing schools or

factions or parties, as people inevitably and in good faith begin to disagree about what the body’s

guiding propositions mean. Worse: Most institutions are involved to some degree in fact-

gathering. Police departments, scientific agencies, central banks—they all collect information

about the world, and that information is also going to need interpreting. None of it is going to

have plain meanings. And here, too, there are inevitably going to be disagreements—

disagreements that on a philosophical level will be interminable. You cannot show beyond a

shadow of a doubt that “all men are created equal” or that “global warming is real.” You just

can’t. Doubt is always possible.

So this is where the king comes in: The king is there to decide. This is one of the classic theories

of the king (or the sovereign or the executive). And you have to keep in mind: This theory has

absolutely nothing to say about what the king should decide. It has absolutely no

recommendations to make about which interpretation the king should choose. The whole point of

theory, in fact, is that the decision is arbitrary. That has to be true by definition, if you think

about it, since if it weren’t arbitrary, it wouldn’t be a decision. It would be a conclusion. There

are all these void spaces in the political system where doubt and uncertainty fester; and a leader

simply has to come in and plug that vacuum. The government, in other words, has to set the

terms for religion—or people are going to war over religion; it has to set the terms for law—or

people are going to war over law; it has to set the terms for science—or people are going to war

over science.

That’s what Bush meant. Someone has to decide, and the decision will always be arbitrary. “The

decision,” it’s true, isn’t Hobbes’s word for this position. The cat who reformulated Hobbes’s

argument around the concept of “the decision” was Carl Schmitt, who was the most important

political theorist among the German fascists. “I’m the decider” is the best evidence we have that

someone was really and truly — dead literally — feeding George Bush Nazi political thought.

But let’s not get hung up on the Nazi business. The interesting philosophical point is that Bush

wasn’t claiming to be right. He was saying: I don’t have to be right. In fact, right-and-wrong is

the wrong way to think about it. The king’s decision—or the president’s decision—can’t be right

or wrong, because no-one can tell for sure. Someone just has to decide, period. Political beings

never choose between right and wrong. They choose between respecting the decision and …

well, something else. Civil war. Chaos. Zombies.

•Of Zombies Fast and Slow

A different movie now, and a confession: I’ve never felt so puzzled by a movie as I was the first

time I saw Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, from 2004. I walked away from that movie

not understanding anything. It was my own personal Mulholland Drive. I had liked it well

enough, but just couldn’t get it to add up. The problem was I went in cocky. I figured: This is, in

its bones, a Romero movie—Romero’s Dawn, the second of the Dead movies, came out in

1978—and I know how such movies work; I’m on my home turf. And then the confusion snuck

up on me. I got all the way through that first screening convinced that the new Dawn was

staying, by remake standards, pretty faithful to the original. It had the mall; it had black actors in

central roles; it had strife among the survivors. Three of the actors from the original showed up

in cameos, and once I’d spotted them, I was pretty sure I was watching an homage. I was in the

mood to watch an homage.

But then I walked away from the movie, trying to get it straight in my head, and I couldn’t make

it tally; I couldn’t figure out what the movie was doing. I went in with expectations derived from,

yes, a certain reverence for Romero, and by those standards everything seemed wrong—or off—

and I couldn’t figure out what had changed.

Or rather one thing had changed: The zombies were fast. But then I knew this going into the

theater, because the press had made a big deal about it. It was the Big Innovation. 28 Days Later

had introduced the novelty. The Dawn remake made it seem like a trend: the living dead, lickety-

split. Three quick thoughts about this:

•Fast zombies are not, in fact, an innovation; I mean, even in ’02 or ‘04, they weren’t an

innovation. The press was just wrong on that count. Breakneck zombies had been introduced

years earlier, in Return of the Living Dead, from 1985, which is also the movie that gave us the

chiming, Karloffian B’raaaaains, spoken like breath across a beer bottle.

• That said, the underlying convention had remained more or less intact. The late ‘80s and ‘90s

were a fallow period for zombie movies, so the few fleet corpses of the Reagan era hadn’t really

led anywhere, and this allowed the press to feel, when 28 Days Later was released, that its

creatures were next-generation zombies. We remembered zombies as slow, and these weren’t.

But then does that change really make a difference? I mean in some sense, it’s obviously an

improvement. Boyle and Snyder ditched that staggering, shambolic gait, which was always the

easiest thing to parody about zombies. The new zombies were limber and belligerent, and to that

extent just scarier. To get caught by a Romero-style zombie always required a signal lapse of

attention. One could reasonably conclude, then, that fast zombies were an improvement in

horror-movie technique, a kind of engineering advance. But other than that, I mostly walked

away from Dawn of the Dead thinking that the change from slow to fast was neutral, that it

didn’t actually change any of the meanings that a zombie could carry. It’s was like putting a new

engine in a chassis you really like: Romero with more oomph, Romero all souped up. And the

Dead shall book.

•I was completely wrong. It turns out that up-shifting the zombies from slow to fast changes

everything; it entirely re-frames the zombie movie as a genre. I find this utterly fascinating. It

seems like a small change, little more than a tweak, like defragmenting your hard drive. And it

leaves nothing untouched.

The Running of the Dead, Part 2

Posted on July 28, 2010 | 11 Comments

PART ONE IS HERE.

…so making zombies fast changes everything.

If you want to see this for yourself, all you need to do is ask one basic question – the one you

should always be asking anyway when watching a horror movie (or a science-fiction movie or a

fantasy movie): What are the real-world associations that the movie is triggering? Nobody thinks

that vampires and Vulcans and elves are real, but they do inevitably call real people to mind, and

the interpreter’s most important trick is simply to let those resemblances through. The questions

in front of us are easy ones, really: What do slow zombies remind you of? And what do fast

zombies remind you of? And what’s the difference between the two?

One word, first, about zombies in general: Zombie movies are always going to be about crowds.

People-in-groups are the genre’s single motivating concern. Other classic movie monsters are

like malign superheroes, possessed of special powers, great reserves of speed and strength.

What’s peculiar about zombies, when put alongside vampires or werewolves or aliens, is that

they are actually weaker than ordinary human beings. They are really easy to kill for a start,

because their bodies are already moldering. Their arms will tear clean off. They go down by the

dozen. You’re in no danger of being outwitted. They can kill only because they have the

numbers, and so that’s the menace that zombie movies are always trying to clarify: The threat of

multitudes.

If, with that point in mind, you look at the classic Romero-era zombie—your standard-issue

undead sluggard, the drunk-going-in-for-a-hug—three things are going to stand out. 1) They

have an insatiable hunger; the only thing they know how to do anymore is eat. 2) In Night of the

Living Dead, which is the movie that, in 1968, set the ideological horizon for the entire genre,

the walkers are the recently dead, which means they are still wearing their funeral gear. They are

dressed in formal wear; dressed conservatively, I mean, in black suits and Sunday frocks. Old

white people are overrepresented. 3) There’s more to say about this last. The young Romero

couldn’t afford any special effects, so just about the only makeup he employs is powder, but this

he uses in quantities typically associated with the Duchess of Luxembourg, to give the zombies a

death-like pallor. The faces of the undead are conspicuously washed-out, extra pale, whiter than

white, and this whiteness is underscored by the film’s casting, since Night is the first American

horror movie to feature a black hero. So that’s one kind of crowd right there: Night of the Living

Dead is trying to evoke for you what it feels like to be up against a white and all-consuming

middle class.

And if that’s the meaning that you think zombies carry—because in the modern zombie movie it

is the meaning zombies have almost always carried—then Dawn of the Dead remake is not going

to make one lick of sense. So let Dawn run and the first thing you’ll notice is that the opening

credits have found footage in them; real video footage; news footage, one imagines, interspliced

with handheld zombie shots. And then that’s an opportunity, right?—because it means that the

movie is introducing upfront its own real-world associations; it’s actually bringing them in,

documentary-style.

So here’s what you see:

Such are the movie’s visual footnotes, the historical context that it nominates for itself: Muslims

at prayer; riots someplace poor—India, perhaps, or Pakistan; and, if you keep watching, armored

police; barricades; minarets. The movie is, at this early point, preparing to dispense with our

exegetical labors, since it is offering its own entirely overt gloss on the zombies, which is that

they are Muslims, or rather violent Muslims, for which, obviously, read “terrorists.” This point is

then confirmed by the movie’s pre-credit sequence—one of the very scariest in recent horror

film—in which we watch a suburb of Milwaukee fall apart, spinning into primal and fiery

anarchy. The shot that most viewers remember shows, in one, an ambulance hurtling off a town

road, plowing into a bank of gas tanks, and from there: blooey. So one might quickly conclude

that Dawn is yet another war-on-terror movie, part of the cinema of national emergency: 9/11 in

the upper Midwest.

That’s certainly true in one sense, but the matter is actually a lot more complicated than this, and

saying why should help us see how improbably and precisely Hobbsean fast-zombie movies

really are. The central concern of nearly all such movies is the general breakdown of order; that’s

what marks them as Hobbsean in some general, not-yet-precise sense. They push themselves to

imagine in detail what is usually called the war of all against all, which Hobbseans think is the

condition of life in the absence of strong governments. A radio announcer early in Dawn notes

flatly that “civil unrest is still being reported.” The tricky point, though, is that the images of

unrule, in Hobbes as in the fast-zombie movie, both are and aren’t racial. This is the unusual

ideological form that they share. Hobbes, in the middle of the seventeenth century, had

unmistakably been absorbing travelers’ reports from the Americas. Lots of thinkers in the period

were trying to figure out the difference between living in a state and living outside of one, and

none of their writing will make sense if we don’t factor in the Europeans’ epoch-making

encounter with native America; the Spaniards and the British and the French were running into

lots of people who didn’t have governments in anything like the usual sense of the word. It is a

genuinely useful shorthand to say that what worried Hobbes was savagery, but the problem with

such conceptual abbreviation is that it risks making Hobbes sound like a run-of-the-mill Indian

hater, when in fact the distinctive feature of his system is that he thinks the problem of savagery

is not confined to other, non-European societies, safely cordoned off behind the quarantine lines

of Appalachia and the Sahara. Any colonist eyeing a patch of Ohio Valley land could concoct a

few reasons not to trust Indians. Hobbes’s incomparably more corrosive suggestion was that

Europeans, too, remained permanently capable of savagery. The distinction between an Iroquois

and an Englishman was finally rather thin. Hobbes’ procedure is easily named: He begins with

what is plainly a racial perception—Cherokees and Amazonians are savages—but then he

deracializes it. And that’s also how fast zombies get made. The Dawn remake openly instructs

you to think of zombies as Muslim terrorists—not strictly a racial category, but racial in its

functioning—except then it isn’t actually about Islam or the Taliban, not even allegorically so,

since none of the zombies substantially resemble Sunnis or Shiites or Arabs or Middle Easterners

or Afghans. The rampaging dead are neighbors and fellow countrymen, almost every last one of

them, to the point where, by the time the movie is over, those opening credits could seem like an

odd intrusion. The fast zombie, in other words, is the terrorist minus the vexing overlay of race.

Like radical Islamists, but not radical Islamists: Americans. Like terrorists, but not terrorists:

You.

…none of which is to say that the movie isn’t authoritarian. Quite the contrary. Authoritarianism

reveals itself to be a universalized fear of savagery, a generalized racism in which the category of

“the lesser race” expands uncontrollably to include all people. It is racism extrapolated into

paranoia, though one of the many curious things about Dawn is how compulsively, in that

opening documentary footage, it preserves its racial sources. The movie, when all is said and

done, has so little to do with terrorists that it could just as well have dispensed with the Islam-

baiting, but it doesn’t. And the same is true of Hobbes, when he says that tribal life was nasty

and short, and especially when he says that it was brutish: a remark that smacks of colonialism in

a book that has almost nothing to say about colonization.

Hobbes also says that “Man is a wolf to man”—Lupus est homo homini—and this gets us rather

more directly over to the fast-zombie movie. The philosopher is interested in the problem of a

certain transition. What makes society possible? How does any group of people make the leap

from primal chaos to safety and comfort and achievement? And his answer is: Authority—

authority so strong that you can’t talk back to it. Civilization requires someone you are not

allowed to argue with. It should be clear by now that this is a politics driven by fear—not by the

other emotions commonly found on the Right; reverence for the old traditions, say, or love of

country—but by sheer blithering panic: a Politics of the Heebie-Jeebies. Hobbes himself was

completely upfront about this. At one point he wrote that: When I was born my mother gave birth

to twins: me and fear—or words to that effect. His undying accomplishment in the history of

political philosophy was to open the Right up to complete pusses.

To this observation we need merely add that it is the business of fast-zombie movies to instill

this particular fear in you, and that’s why speed changes everything. Slow-zombie movies are a

meditation on consumer society—on a certain excess of civilization, as it were; and fast-zombie

movies are pretty much the opposite. So the simple question: In the Dawn remake, how do the

zombies look? And the simple answer is: They look like rioters or encamped refugees. If you say

that zombie movies are always about crowds, a person might respond: Yeah, I see, the mob—but

if you’re talking about George Romero and the slow-zombie movie, the word “mob” isn’t quite

right, since white people in formal wear aren’t exactly the mob, and, casting a glance at

Romero’s original Dawn, shoppers aren’t either, except on the day after Thanksgiving. Fear of

the mob has usually been the hallmark of an anti-democratic politics. The phrase “mob rule”

remains common enough; eighteenth-century writers used to call it “mobacracy.” And that’s not

what Romero’s after. Romero is worried that the crowd isn’t democratic enough, and one of his

more remarkable achievements, back in 1968, was to start a cinematic conversation about the

dangers of crowds that ducked the problem of “the mob,” that bracketed that concept out. This

couldn’t have been easy to do, since the one term substitutes so easily for the other. And the

pokeyness of the zombies is central to this feat, because corpses that look like they’re wading

through gelatin are going to seem grinding and methodical or maybe doped and so not like

looters or protestors or the Red Cross’s Congolese wards. By making the zombies fast—or

rather, by merely accelerating them back to normal human speeds—Snyder allows his dead to

seethe and roil. Once the movie’s survivors decide they have to leave the mall where they’ve

been hiding—once they head out, in armored buses, into the teeming parking lot—they have

entered an American Gaza.

Here are some more things that happen in Snyder’s Dawn: A recently infected, still human man

placidly asks to be killed, like the perfect McCarthyite, who, upon looking up from his books and

realizing he’s been reading Trotsky, asks his children to shoot him. The survivors come up out of

a manhole and discover that the zombies have turned suburban Milwaukee into a ghetto: black

people mill about the trash-strewn street. The survivors look on aghast as a mixed-race baby is

born—and promptly kill it. The soft-spoken white guy, played by a Brit, emerges as the group’s

leader and sanest voice. But then the most important thing about the Dawn remake is what

doesn’t happen. The movie, again, is set in a mall, and the uproariously unsubtle joke driving

Romero’s original was that if you’re trying to stay hidden from brain-dead consumer-drones, the

mall is the worst place to go. The movie is accordingly full of zombie shoppers, banging into

Orange Julius stands, condemned to wander for eternity the aisles of J.C. Penney. But in

Snyder’s Dawn there are literally no images of shopping zombies. What there is instead is this:

One notes the redneck wifebeater and the Raising-Arizona moustache. One also notes the face

pressed up against the glass, its longing slack and resigned. Snyder’s zombies are the people who

can’t get into the mall, which is thereby transformed, unironically, into a refuge and citadel, the

last beleaguered outpost of civilization: BestBuy recast as the Alamo. This all adds up to a

completely gripping lesson in what it means to change a genre’s convention, since Zack Snyder

undertakes the central change—from-slow-to-fast—from within the shell of Romero’s own

movie, using Romero’s own scenario, Romero’s own setting, roughly Romero’s own

characters—and that one change is enough to reverse the movie’s ideological polarity. It would

have been much, much harder for Snyder to make the zombies odiously poor and black-even-

when-white if he hadn’t first made them fast. One begins to wonder what would change,

unpredictably, if we started tinkering with other conventions: What if zombies were all really

tall? Would that matter? What if superheroes wore fur stoles instead of capes? Come to think of

it: Why do superheroes wear capes? What if werewolves turned into coyotes or lynxes or

armadillos?

The Running of the Dead, Part 3

Posted on August 2, 2010 | 5 Comments

PART 1 IS HERE.

PART 2 IS HERE.

•28 Days Later: The Set-Up

28 Days Later was a key moment in the history of the zombie movie—the moment when the

genre reorganized itself around a taut antithesis, such that its monsters could henceforth march as

the avatars either of consumerist hyper-civilization or of that civilization’s very negation, its

sacking, though, of course, even Romero’s middle-class zombies were cannibals and so

suggested a certain preemptive undoing of the antithesis, a welling up of savagery in the North

American heartlands of consumer society, in some socialisme-ou-zombiïsme kind of way. It’s the

kind of complexity at which horror movies excel, a sociohistorical rabbit-duck operation in

which you can look at a figure and not be sure whether you’re seeing Martha Stewart or an

Ostrogoth.

It should be easy, at any rate, to say what kind of associations the zombies carry in 28 Days

Later. Boyle’s zombies are fast; that’s really all we need to know in order to guess that they’ll

generate the same meanings as Snyder’s terrorist-savage dead. But we don’t have to guess; 28

Days Later comes with a decoder ring.

We know that Boyle’s zombies are terrorists, because his movie has almost exactly the same

opening as the Dawn remake: video footage of riot police, Muslim street violence, European

protestors getting rowdy. The movie’s sequel, meanwhile, will narrow that range of associations,

arranging a full-bore Iraq War allegory in which the zombies are the insurgents.

We know that they are savage because the dialogue says as much: Late in 28 Days Later, one of

the characters contemplates a zombie he’s captured and chained—for study—and says: “He’s

telling me he’ll never bake bread; plant crops; raise livestock.” The movie’s idiom is overtly

civilizational: Zombies, like Huns or the Inuit, are people incapable of settled life. Here, then, is

a picture of these Other People, the Loaf- and Lambless:

Sociologically, of course, the correlation posited here—in the feral, careening body of the fast

zombie—is bunk. Terrorists do not come from the world’s pre-agrarian populations. Hunter-

gatherers do not have access to car bombs. The Taliban fund their operations by selling some

entirely successful crops. But allegory can take whatever shortcuts it likes; bundling is one of its

great tricks … so the Khoi-San Al-Qaeda it is … the Arctic Circle Hezbollah. And to this already

doubtful pairing, 28 Days Later will add a third term, since the movie’s initial villains—or not

villains, exactly, but the fuck-ups who precipitate the great catastrophe—are animal-rights

activists, the stupid Left, which doesn’t understand animality, doesn’t understand violence,

doesn’t understand “rage”—the movie’s key word, that one—doesn’t understand the dangers of

freedom. The Left doesn’t understand that if one breaks down too many barriers, everything will

spin out of control. Such is the alliance that the movie brings into view and demands that we

fear, the standing threat to our ordinary lives: angry Muslims, obtuse student-activist types, and

Hottentots.

But then we’ll also want to say what counts as “our ordinary lives.” Just what is it that these

aboriginal suicide-bombers and their hippie dupes are out to destroy? Dystopian science fiction

typically forces us to imagine the totalitarian thickening of some institution or another—either

the state or corporate capitalism or the corporate-capitalist state—but zombie movies are in this

respect oddly like utopias in that they are more interested in subtraction, in what society would

look like if one peeled away this or that seemingly basic thing. 28 Days Later begins,

accordingly, with a long sequence in which we are asked to contemplate a world from which

various institutions have vanished.

The end of the family: Very early on, the movie shows a large, street-side message board,

entirely papered over with flyers, Xeroxed photographs, hand-drawn pleas to the missing, all

clearly modeled on the post-traumatic Litfaßsäulen of Manhattan. And the last flap of paper we

see tacked up to this 9/11-wall is a child’s drawing, something that looks a lot like art therapy for

abused kids: A scrawled house, two stick figures in pools of paraffin blood, as though Crayola

had begun marketing a crayon called “major artery,” and the blocky caption: Mommy…Daddy.

The end of religion: The first place the movie’s hero seeks refuge is a church, which is also the

first place he is attacked by zombies.

The end of Britain: As the hero wanders through the abandoned streets, he steps over scattered

heaps of Union Jacks and Big Ben souvenirs. Those patriotic icons catch the eye, but the

negative space around them is just as important, since the emptied-out city has become a

commonplace of the New Zombie Movie, the visual summation of its various excisions and

sociopolitical loppings: the major metropolis as ghost town. For a production company, that’s an

expensive stillness to get on film, laborious to stage even in morning’s early, pre-commuter light.

And it’s a little bit of a red herring all the same, since movies like 28 Days Later don’t trust cities

to begin with. “It started as rioting,” is how one of the characters recounts the zombie outbreak.

“Except it was different this time, because it was happening in villages. It was happening in

market towns.” It’s the phrase “this time” that we’ll want to pause over, suggesting as it does that

the fast zombies had precedence, but only in the cities. London and Manchester have always

housed the Furies. What is new is the extension of Brixton tumult into the shires and the B&Bs.

The dead, when angry, will make of any city a Baghdad, and of any hamlet a city.

If you’ve gotten even this far into 28 Days Later, fifteen or twenty minutes, you no longer even

need to read Hobbes. The movie has already spared you that effort. But the clearest Hobbsean

moment in the film comes just a few minutes later, when a guerrilla band of human survivors is

breaking the very bad news to the movie’s hero and Rip Van Winkle, who was in a coma and so

slept through the Fall of Civilization.

Hero: What about the government? What are they doing?

Survivor: There’s no government.

Hero: What do you mean? Of course there’s a government. There’s always a government.

The oddly pungent quality of that exchange—the thing that pushes it decisively over into

Hobbes’s territory—is the sense of complacency in what the hero says: “There’s always a

government.” The movie wants to snap you out of your usual blithe confidence in the

government as the sun-that-will-always-rise. It wants you to stop taking the government for

granted. That is how a movie can give you a crash course in seventeenth-century political

philosophy, at least at the level of your gut. Fast-zombie movies offer up emotional lessons in

Hobbesean thought, forcing you to contemplate the state of nature more effectively than Hobbes

ever managed to, simply by bringing it to life before your eyes. The idea, I think, is that once you

have had to play that scenario out in your heads—life without government—then you should

learn to love government, love the government that promises to keep you safe, love it deep

down, learn to feel grateful for it, learn not to question it, because you have had to imagine how

sad you would be if it were gone. Occasionally, a young woman catches herself daydreaming

about someone really close to her dying—not because she wishes it—not at all—but because she

is compulsively rehearsing in her head how terrible the loss would be. So she envisions, despite

herself, that her boyfriend is dead, and then she rushes over to the living boy and surprises him

by saying: I love you so much! 28 Days Later is like that, except it’s the government who has

died in the daydream’s car crash or cancer bed. The movie opens up for you the morbid

headspace to mourn the government, even though we currently still have one.

The Running of the Dead, Part 4

Posted on August 10, 2010 | 13 Comments

PART 1 IS HERE.

PART 2 IS HERE.

PART 3 IS HERE.

28 Days Later: The Set-up, continued

Let’s rewind a few sentences:

Occasionally, a young woman catches herself daydreaming about someone really close to her

dying—not because she wishes it—not at all—but because she is compulsively rehearsing in her

head how terrible it would be. So she daydreams, despite herself, that her boyfriend is dead and

then she rushes to the living boy and surprises him by saying: I love you so much! 28 Days Later

is like that, except it’s the government, and not your boyfriend, who has died in the daydream’s

car crash or cancer bed. The movie opens up for you the morbid headspace to mourn the

government, even though we currently still have one.

There’s a variation on that same sinister reverie that zombie movies regularly spin; we can call it

Having to Kill Someone You Love. In 28 Days Later, the harsh lesson goes like this: If a living

person turns in your presence, “you have ten or twenty seconds to kill them. It can be your father

or your sister or your best friend.” Scenes of this kind, in which intimates get euthanized, are all

over the zombie film. They are as basic to the genre as transformation scenes are to werewolf

movies. They are, indeed, an adaption of those very scenes: accelerated and moonless turnings in

which the dog never makes it out of the vet’s office; lycanthropic kittens drowned in sacks.

But then what we’ve just spotted is a continuity, a convention that carries over from slow

zombies to fast. Both types of zombie movies go in for transformation scenes; nothing has

changed on that front. And this, in turn, prompts a rather interesting question: How does the

Hobbsean orientation of the fast-zombie movie reframe the genre’s usual conventions? 28 Days

Later may break with the Romero-era zombie movie in a few basic ways, but most of Romero’s

conventions it actually takes over intact. The possibility we now need to consider is that those

innovations are so drastic that they change the meanings even of those features that the movies

most obviously share, simply by supplying them with a new context.

The best way to follow this out is simply to watch 28’s first mercy killing: A survivor gets

infected, looks left, imploringly, past the camera; one of his comrades immediately leaps across

the screen—to put him down—except all she has is a machete, and the viewer has to sit through

seven sharp, moist swats. That the woman is black and the man white brings to the surface the

scene’s historical provocation: A black woman hacks a white guy to death with the Third

World’s iconic weapon, the curved blade that Africans and Caribbean islanders have lying

around, the knife for whacking bush and coconuts and political rivals. In 2002, the image might

still have brought Rwanda to mind, which reference-point is not wholly irrelevant, since one way

of summarizing 28 Days Later would be to say that it is asking you to imagine Britain as a

“failed state,” when that last is the current Hobbsean term of art.

Now the important point is that if we were watching this scene in a Romero movie, we could

probably guess its effects, since Romero specializes in setting up equivalences between zombies

and human survivors; in forcing viewers, that is, to conclude that there isn’t very much

difference between people and zombies after all (since the condition of zombism is the condition

of our stupid, little lives, &c). We could say something similar of 28 Days Later: the scene is

quite conspicuously brutal, and the woman with the blade manifestly displays the ferocity of her

zombie-opponents, and though this familiar line wouldn’t exactly be wrong, it wouldn’t really be

right either. The scene presents an unusually good opportunity, in fact, to specify the fast-zombie

movie’s Hobbsean labor: When the living people in Romero start acting like zombies, this

discredits them; it makes them scary. And that’s not true of 28 Days Later. The woman commits

murder right in front of us, and that act doesn’t discredit her, doesn’t make her scary. Her

situation is scary, but she isn’t, because the killing has been explained in advance by the movie’s

Hobbsean frame, to the effect that people living without a government don’t have any choice but

to act like zombies or savages. The obligation to kill is part of the horror. Hobbes’s entire point is

that people living in a stateless condition don’t get to choose to be good people; life without a

government requires brutality from everybody. When you slowly realize, watching Night of the

Living Dead, that nearly all of the survivors are as violently brain-dead as the zombies, it’s a

crushing experience—anyone who remembers that movie’s final credits will know what I mean:

They force you to reevaluate everything that’s come before. But in 28 Days Later, the realization

comes early and is no kind of surprise; it is simply built into the scenario.

This point is then amplified in a bit of a dialogue a few scenes later. The hero and the woman

with the machete are looking at an old photograph, from Before, a smiling middle-class family,

cinched in close together, laughing father, beaming mother, ungrudging teenager caught in a

group hug. The hero remarks that they look like “good people.”

MACHETE: Good people? … Well, that’s nice, but you should be more concerned about

whether they’re going to slow you down.

HERO: Right, because if they slowed you down…

MACHETE: …I’d leave them behind…

HERO: …in a heartbeat…

MACHETE: …yeah.

HERO: I wouldn’t.

MACHETE: Then you’re going to wind up getting yourself killed.

The movie, in other words, turns the photograph into an occasion for a colloquium on the

domestic virtues: sentiment, fellow feeling, and the like. The hero is talking like a Christian or

benevolent liberal, and it is another one of the distinctive features of zombie movies as a form

that they render that position—the position of a generic goodness—utterly impossible. The hero

has to be weaned of his decency, and we will know that he has achieved this new moral

consciousness when we witness him kill a (zombie) child.

The point is complicated, though. By the time the movie ends, the liberal and the killer will have

moved in together, into a northern cottage, with the girl in the photograph as their adopted

daughter, and so have reinstituted a humanist ethics or at least a coziness; their values get un-

transvaluated. This gets us back to Hobbes and the authoritarian Right, whom we can now

distinguish from the Nietzscheans by pointing out that they precisely don’t want the condition of

pre- or post-humanist savagery to persist. They don’t want people to have to be beasts. Indeed,

they want people to be able to act like Christians or benevolent liberals, but in order for this to

happen—and this is the properly political, which is to say structural and so anti-ethical moment

in Hobbes’s thinking—in order for this to happen, in order for you to be a decent person, there

has to be some fundamental shift in the political order, or rather, politics as such has to be born.

Political society has to constitute itself. The problem, then, for a Hobbsean is that liberals and

Christians fail to grap the close conjunction between their decency and the exercise of force, fail

to grasp that kindness and the police go together, that the police make kindness possible, which

means that kindness will never be able to substitute for the police.

28 Days Later has worked out a way of telegraph this idea visually, in what is probably the most

clever sequence in the entire movie. The two survivors—the Hero and Lady Machete—have

worked out that there are other living humans in London, at least a few of them, hiding in an

apartment high above the city. They sneaky-pete their way up the building’s stairwell and down

the corridor toward the apartment’s door, where they see this figure…

…who turns into this figure…

…who turns into this figure…

It’s all something of a sick joke: First we encounter an unmovable paramilitary cop; he mutates

into a balaclav’d thug, marching straight for the camera, in a shot borrowed directly from slasher

movies; and this killer then peels off his mask and reveals himself to be … Brendan Gleeson, an

actor of excellent good cheer, boozy and lummoxing, a kind of human wassail. The idea here is

that open-hearted, hospitable middle-class people and the riot police actually go together, though

not usually in a single person. Such, at least, is the Hobbsean take on the issue. What the movie

has done is taken the two sides of bourgeois society, usually experienced at a confusing distance

from one another, and welded them back into a single figure—the softie and the cop, the teddy

bear and the guy who’ll push your face in—and thereby bodied forth the interdependence of

those positions, which is what liberals putatively never get.

•28 Days Later: The switcheroo

So we can say that 28 Days Later forces us to imagine a certain crisis, the complete breakdown

of political order into terrorism and savagery. And in the history of political thought that idea

comes with a built-in solution: Strengthen the state, strengthen the police, the military, the

executive. Expand the emergency powers of the central authorities. It is this fantasy that the

movie puts into play. The first half of the movie follows a group of survivors as they straggle

across a de-populated England trying to get to whatever is left of the state: the Army’s last

uninfected platoon, garrisoned in an old manor house, chanting the Hobbsean mantra: “We are

soldiers. … Salvation is here. … We can protect you.” One of the civilians has preemptively

echoed the point: “The soldiers could keep us safe.”

At this point I might as well just out and say what the movie does to this fantasy, which is that it

explodes it into little bits. That is the single most important fact about 28 Days Later, that it

drives you into the arms of the soldiers, convinces you to look to them for refuge, and then turns

the soldiers into monsters in their own right, mostly because they plan to begin a breeding

program upon the bodies of the two surviving women and so immediately default on their

promises of asylum. There are obvious precedents for this: In the later stages of the movie, Boyle

begins borrowing shots from Apocalypse Now, and these are so many visual nudges, reminders

that the underlying scenario is straight out of Heart of Darkness: The last outpost of civilization

turns out to be a whirring freak show. So a borrowed plot, though it is fascinating all the same to

watch a certain Conradianism well up unexpectedly within the horror movie. For Colonel

substitute “Major” and for Kurtz substitute “West”—that’s the movie’s human villain—“He’s

insane!” someone shouts—Major West, which name is of course allegory reverting back to

plain-speech.

But then most people aren’t going to be chasing down the literary history while watching a

movie, so perhaps it’s more appropriate to explain 28 Days Later as a basic exercise in emotional

manipulation: It sets you up to want the soldiers, to be desperately pro-military, and then once

you get your wish and end up face to face with the Tommies, it makes them creepy—not exactly

like the monsters—the distinction will matter—but in their own way fiendish. It forces you to

experience them as oppressive. No-one calls soldiers “grunts” because they’re polished. And to

call them “dogfaces” suggests only that the enemy had better be shooting silver ammo. Such,

anyway, is Boyle’s con, his trick. He seems to be making all of the Right’s moves—and just

when the time comes to put the Right’s solution in place, he undoes it instead—and thereby

makes clear that he was playing a different game all along.

Let me take another crack at it: 28 Days Later swaps out the problem of sovereignty or political

order and puts another, entirely different problem in its place. At its most basic level, this is a

point about the plot, and so about your actual, minute-by-minute experience of the movie, if

you’re watching it for the first time. It looks like it’s going to be a straightforward trek movie, in

which the credits will roll once our heroes find the army unit. In a different kind of movie—the

kind of movie that Boyle lets you think for a while he has made—the soldiers would constitute a

happy ending. But as soon as the survivors arrive at the army’s aristocratic headquarters, the

soldiers mutate into a new problem. Authority stops being the solution and becomes instead the

crisis. The hero, in other words, will have to learn to fight the soldiers—and not the zombies he

thought he was fighting all along. Here’s another way of gauging how curious 28 Days Later is:

The movie’s longest fight sequence, its protracted-final-action-horror showdown, involves the

zombies barely at all; it pushes them to the periphery, in a clear indication to the audience that

they should stop worrying so much about the goddamned zombies already. More: By that point,

the hero is, if anything, aligned with the zombies; he is literally fighting alongside them. Boyle,

having carefully tutored you into the statist position, is violently reversing course, and will now

insist that you take up the anti-statist position. 28 Days Later has the structure of a movie arguing

with itself; it is a grindhouse paradox or splattery antinomy.

This plot point—expectations established, then violated—in turn houses a rather sly visual

puzzle. It’s a variant of the machete problem: That final fight is spiked with a series of uncanny

shots in which it becomes increasingly hard to tell whether the hero has been infected or not,

whether or not he has turned zombie.

•The camera pans slowly around an army truck, and catches the hero pressed up against its slats,

still and seething, his eyes blotted out by shadow. The sound track supplies what is either a loud

wheeze or a soft grunt: a growl. From this point on, we are watching a horror movie run in

reverse, in which the hero is inserted into the shots typically reserved for the monsters and the

soldier-villains are tricked out with all the visual conventions of victimhood.

•The hero flits past the camera, barely more than a shadow himself, which is another monster

shot: two seconds borrowed from an Alien movie. And by bringing in an actual raging zombie

just a little after that, the movie makes you wonder for real whether the hero hasn’t been

infected, because it puts the contagion on the scene, dangerously close.

•The fight moves to the manor house, where there are two figures on the rampage: the hero and

the zombie who doesn’t bake, now unchained. The hero spends the entire sequence wet,

bloodied, and shirtless, his face distorting in the old building’s blown glass windows.

The eye’s confusion is actually a political test. The hero is trying to destroy the bearers of

authority; our ordinary word for that is revolution. So by the end of 28 Days Later there are three

positions available to the characters where earlier there were only two: 1) The savage or the

terrorist; 2) the state and its protections; and now 3) the revolutionary. So in these shots the

movie is posing another tough question: Is the hero zombie or human? Can you tell the

difference between a savage and a revolutionary? Or more to the point: Can you tell the

difference between a terrorist and a revolutionary? That’s a profound question, one that has lost

none of its moment.

You can also pose a version of that question from inside the revolutionary’s head. The

revolutionary has to ask himself what he is doing when he unleashes his own rage or taps into the

rage of other people. Can you set that violence loose, direct it, and still rein it in once it has done

what you needed it to do? The movie becomes a meditation on the basic problem of

revolutionary violence. And the movie doesn’t stay up in the air on this issue. It resolves the

paradox by deciding, via its own writerly dictates, that you can do this—you can direct violence

to good ends. It comes down on the side of the revolutionary, although revolution is depicted

here as a good old-fashioned quest to rescue the maiden from the lair.

It all comes down to this: 28 Days Later, the movie that for all intents and purposes created fast

zombies, was already the movie that demystified them. The subgenre stands permanently

indicted by its own author and source. Boyle’s movie is not the progenitor to [REC] and

Quarantine and the Dawn remake and Justin Cronin’s vampire-zombie novel The Passage; it is

their accuser, the one that calls them out on their despotism and aufgehobener race-hate.

A movie that initially expends all of its ingenuity getting us to love sovereignty ends by getting

us to love instead sovereignty’s overturning. And there is one more gotcha secreted away inside

of that big one: Boyle is an Irish director born in England. All we have to do is keep that in mind

and then think about who survives in this movie. At first, there are three adult survivors: an

Englishman, a black woman, and an Irishman. The hero is Irish, though the dialogue never once

pauses to remind you of this. The first word he speaks, other than “hello,” is “Fadder” —

hesitantly addressed to a zombie priest, both question and greeting: “Fadder?” In fact, the actor

playing the Englishman is also Irish, so he’s nearly a Dubliner in disguise. The more important

point is that the movie kills him off, but then it’s already killed off all the adult English, which

means that the people left to repopulate England are the Jamaican woman and the man from

Cork, and that the seeds of the new nation will barely include Angles, Saxon, Normans, or

anyone else who has typically kept that land in copyhold.