Why hello!
I’ve unacceptably taken a month-long hiatus from my little entries, in spite of watching a bunch of movies I wanted to write about. I’m going to try to crank out a few before the school year picks up speed. This was my first week back, so time is of the essence.
Before getting to today’s movie, though, I’m proud to say that I adhered to my commitment to specify a search strategy and a set of selection criteria within a week of my last posting. This was facilitated by a very productive telephone meeting with my mentor, where these were finalized. I felt very satisfied with myself and my efforts. I subsequently started working on a rough draft of my thesis proposal, and promptly hit an emotional roadblock to working on my thesis that has been difficult, as always, to overcome. It’s partly the result of having a very busy summer, with little time at where-I-live home. I find it really difficult to work when I’m somewhere unfamiliar/I don’t live, especially when I’ve got that weird vacation guilt where the experience feels wasted on me if I work while I should be having fun. Or something. I also keep experiencing this uncomfortable self-doubt where it seems like I can’t possibly really be ready to get started collecting data or writing a final draft of my proposal, because there’s no way I really actually know what I’m doing, because I’ve never had to write a thesis before. Even though, at the end of the day, these things really aren’t all that complicated.
Clearly I need to let that feeling go, and simply get off my ass and get this shit done.
The lucky thing is that my mentor is really pretty special, and very well-suited to help me along. She’s scheduled monthly meetings with all of her mentees, and we had one yesterday. After (jokingly yet appropriately) shaming me for not having collected any data yet, she told me to start emailing her every Sunday to give her thesis updates. This is precisely the kind of accountability I need. Especially now that I’m going to be (finally) sitting in the where-I-live city for a little while, I’m in a place to get work done if I just decide to be motivated. The tiny tinge of fear-of-mentor looming at the end of every week is hopefully the little additional push that will help me actually be productive.
So now I just need to have something to tell her in three days...
Terrifyingly huge graduate school requirements aside, I watched a pretty sweet movie with my little brother while I was where-I-grew-up home again a few weeks ago. Based on my enduring love of zombie movies, he recommended “Zombieland” (2009). It was FABULOUS.
I admit that it’s perhaps a little strange that I love zombie movies as much as I do. I generally hate gore, and routinely cover my eyes during anything too icky. As monsters go, I used to love the cool, sexy intellectualism of vampires above all else—and, “Twilight” saga aside, I still do love them. (“Let the Right One In” (2008) may be one of the most exciting movies I’ve seen in the last few years, for example.) Zombies, on the other hand, are messy, inelegant, and brutish. So what’s the allure?
In a way unlike every other horror subgenre, zombie movies are ultimately examinations of some of the most interesting and problematic questions of human life. They pit humanity’s violent, animal nature against its virtues in a fight to the death. Are we fundamentally beastly creatures driven foremost by our basest hungers, or are we something better than that, even in the most horrifying of circumstances? Vampires gain a superhumanness through their immortality, while other monsters (like werewolves) literally become or are something non-human. Zombies are still darkly, frighteningly human. In this way, they hold a disconcerting mirror to the most gruesome aspects of human nature.
And then, oftentimes, they’re also funny as shit (see also: “Shaun of the Dead” (2004)). Because zombies lack dignity, they’re perfect fodder for comedy. “Zombieland” is a very enjoyable combination of these two aspects of the genre.
So basically, as with all zombie movies I’ve seen, “Zombieland” opens post-zombie apocalypse, where only a few non-zombie humans survive. Jesse Eisenberg stars as Columbus, a gangly, awkward kid who at the outset acknowledges the unlikeliness of his survival. The secret to his success? Lots and lots of rules. Wear a seatbelt. Limber up before entering possible zombie territory. You get the idea. As if zombies weren’t enough, the rules introduce yet another thing that can make horror movies in general really fun: rules, and their breaking. It is within the structure of this pseudo-controlled environment that crazy things happen.
Eisenberg’s character takes his name from the fact that he’s attempting to get to Columbus, Ohio in the hopes of finding his parents. The three characters rounding out the main cast are also named for their destinations as a way of purposely depersonalizing their relationships with each other. In a world where nothing can be taken for granted and “Don’t be a hero” is the most important rule of all, establishing any kind of intimacy with strangers has been deemed decidedly foolhardy.
Woody Harrelson plays Tallahassee, the first non-zombie Columbus encounters in his trek. I haven’t seen Harrelson in much of anything, so he wasn’t really on my radar. This is apparently a huge tragedy. Maybe he’s just really well-suited to badassery, but he was very fun to watch in “Zombieland”.
Further along the way, Columbus and Tallahassee encounter sisters Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (a surprisingly cast and absolutely delightful Abigail Breslin). The girls dupe the boys out of their weapons and car and ditch them, only to dupe them a second time when Columbus and Tallahassee catch up to them farther down the highway. As you might expect, hilarity/awesomeness ensues. The four eventually unwittingly team up, and decide on a common destination: an amusement park that the girls believe is the only zombie-free place left on Earth.
So... Initially I told my brother I was going to give this movie a 5. I really enjoyed it (and especially enjoyed watching it with him). I laughed out loud many times. Even *I* could watch the splashy, ridiculous gore, so I didn’t feel on edge the way I sometimes due in more brutal or realistic zombie movies. Bill Murray has an *amazing* cameo that delightfully pushes the movie briefly over the edge into zany absurdity. It’s delicious (as if I needed another argument for loving him). The characters are nuanced, the story is interesting (if not wholly airtight—they never refuel their Hummer during their cross-country roadtrip, for example). “Zombieland” is brisk, fresh, true romping fun.
...But the more I thought about it, I’ve had to rethink my initial 5 decision. I’ve reduced my rating to a 4.5 (sorry Booboo), and here’s why: the Selena of “28 Days Later” (2002) standard.
I mentioned in an earlier post that I love the heroes in “Night of the Living Dead” (1968) and “28 Days Later” because of their radically normalizing portrayal of race. In the latter film, I was referring to the character of Selena. I love her.
Maybe it’s a weird thing to say because she appears in a zombie movie, but Selena is one of the most perfect modern feminist characters I’ve ever seen in film. She is an embodiment of a multidimensional model of feminine power. With her short-shorn hair and unforgiving machete, she is unflinchingly self-reliant and as effective (if not more so) at dispatching zombies as any male character in the movie. However, her backpack stuffed with food and pharmaceuticals enables Selena to reveal a different kind of power: when she and a younger girl, Hannah, face rape by a voracious band of soldiers, she feeds the girl a strong dose of painkillers. Hannah asks, “Are you trying to kill me?” Selena replies, “No, sweetheart. I’m trying to make you not care.” In these ways, she exercises masculine and feminine, aggressive and protective power. She is a rejection of stereotypically weak and defenseless femininity without wholly giving herself over to the male paradigm of you’re-only-as-strong-as-the-shit-you-can-destroy. Furthermore—and here’s the real modern feminist clincher, in my opinion—she is not so militantly self-sufficient that she robs herself of the ability to love others. By falling in love with Jim and protecting Hannah, she embodies a breed of feminist who knows that no human is an island, and that it is ultimately in building partnerships with others—friends, lovers, colleagues, whoever—that people are most likely to thrive.
Really, that is the ultimate thesis of any zombie movie: humankind’s better nature is derived from our ability to love and protect each other, even when the world as we know it is over. Losing that ability means losing our very souls.
So it is to Selena that I compare other heroines, especially in zombie movies... And Wichita and Little Rock are pretty badass, but they just don’t completely pass the test. While “Zombieland”, too, eventually supports the aforementioned zombie movie thesis when Wichita shares her real name with Columbus, facing the perils of intimacy, I’m put off by the girls’ reliance on more stereotypically feminine strategies of survival. They play the weak and imperiled damsels in distress, only to screw Columbus and Tallahassee over. It’s effective and perhaps more feasible for two relatively young girls, but I just find emotional manipulation kind of unsavory. It makes the girls harder to root for, because they lack integrity. Yes, of course, most people would probably resort to worse if their survival was on the line, but I have such a soft spot for the startling, genuine courage of characters like Selena that it’s hard to settle comfortably for less.
So that’s were that .5 went.
On that note, goodnight!
<3
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