Words To Live By

The worst draft in the world is infinitely better than the best unwritten story.

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Writing About Zombie Cinema

I'm racing to finish an essay on feminism in zombie cinema. Pursuant to this, I just wrote the following paragraph:


Without too much difficulty we find, particularly in the films of George Romero, a reliable anti-Objectivist critique: the purely self-interested characters are inevitably killed by their selfishness and greed.  Money, that most extrinsic of things, never appears in a zombie picture except ironically, usually in cast-away handfuls.  The most consistent element in zombie stories, for that matter, is the search for a self-sufficient place free of zombies; this is the embodiment of the search for the Objectivist paradise, Galt’s Gulch.  Without exception, this attempt to ‘go Galt’ ends in blood-spurting disaster.  One can venture further into these ideas before reaching the wilderness of concepts impossible to test: surely we can discern the outlines of a Marxist polemic in Land of the Dead, and for that matter a whiff of Engels’ reification theory, Napoleon in this case represented by a particularly cogent zombie?  Is not the original Dawn of the Dead a potent anti-consumerist statement, and also an extended essay on materialism -- not to mention a violent interpretation of Gide’s Familles, je vous hais!, with its closed doors and locked homes, the zombie cast as anarchic child?  Beyond that level of critique of zombie cinema it is difficult to venture, without surrounding oneself in perilously attenuated assumptions.
 ...I don't want you nutty kids thinking I'm just in it for the scares.

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