The year 2019 is one of commemoration: 50 years ago, in 1969, the love and peace hippie culture experienced it's apex at the Woodstock music festival - and the epic chronicle of that event, Michael Wadleigh's WOODSTOCK (USA, 1970) has been duly re-mastered and re-released to celebrate the festival's 50th anniversary - while twenty years ago, in 1999, cinema definitely entered its digital age with the release of the first episode of THE MATRIX (Wachowski Brothers, USA, 1999), which is also celebrated with a 'digitally remastered' re-release. However, 1969 also marked the end of the period that is now known as 'the sixties': the stabbing of a stoned young woman by one of the Hells Angels, hired for security by The Rolling Stones for their 'free concert' in Altamont (in front of the camera of the Maysles brothers who documented the event in GIMME SHELTER (USA, 1970)) brought the flower-power period to a tragic and violent end.
This contradiction between the blossoming of an alternative culture based on love, drugs, free sex and the rejection of property and consumerism on the one hand and hatred of and violence against those who did not share these counter-cultural values was maybe even more tellingly - and shockingly - incarnated by the hippie commune around Charles Mansion who sent out the members this commune to murder the actress Sharon Tate, the wife of Roman Polanski. And since Polanski, the young director of the succesful art movie ROSEMARY'S BABY (USA, 1968) - ironically a film about the kind of satanism that inspired Manson - was himself hailed by Hollywood as the harbinger of a new kind of filmmaking that would appeal to a younger generation that had lost interest in the Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn sort of movies that Hollywood still churned out in the fifties and sixties, one might argue that in the Manson murders, as in the stabbing at Altamont, the alternative cultures of the sixties turned against themselves and brought themselves to an end. The mainstream film industry had to wait for the generation of the 'movie brats' - Spielberg, Coppola, Lucas, Scorsese, De Palma, Cimino - for a 'New Hollywood' to take off.
It is this ambiguous sense of celebration and awe, but also of commemoration and effacing, of historiography and phantasy, of reconstruction and imagination, of, indeed, truth and fiction that is at the heart of this Tarantino movie. As the very title of the film, ONCE UPON A TIME IN...HOLLYWOOD already suggests, the movie is trip down memory lane, but, as the title also explicitly makes clear, the world to the movie returns to is not only a defintely foregone world, but also to a very great extent an imaginary, fairy tale world, or maybe even a mythological world in which, as the French anthropologist Lévi-Strauss had argued, irreconcilable contradictions are overcome and resolved. One of these contradictions is in the very making of the film itself. Honoring cinema's ontological obligation to photographically and hence realistically reproduce reality as it appears in front of the camera, Tarantino refused to use computer-generated images (CGIs) and digital technologies to reconstitute the Los Angeles of the end of the sixties or to create the special effects that have become the stock of Hollywood movies since THE MATRIX. In this respect Tarantino is a Dogma-filmmaker après la lettre, but as Lars von Trier, he does not let this commitment to photographic realism get in the way of building a phantasmagoric resurrection of a Los Angeles not as it actually was or maybe not even as he actually remembers it, but the Los Angeles as he has always imagined and longed for - a fairy tale LA.
This movie's LA is, however, an LA on the cusp of vanishing. In this LA the youth culture of the sixties in general and the hippies in particular only play a marginal - but eventually a lethally threatening - role, quite literally so as one of the hippie girls is repeatedly encountered on the sidewalks by Cliff (Brad Pitt) as he drives his friend and 'boss Rick's (Leonardo di Caprio) car through the city and as it appears that they do not live in the city but on the Spahn Movie Ranch, fifty kilometers north of LA. However, though literally excentric and marginal, these hippies - members of the commune headed by Charles Manson - now occupy a derelict location where just a short while ago Western TV shows were shot: the place and its occupants stand for the gap between a Hollywood film culture of the fifties that already had to concede prominence to TV shows in the sixties and a youth culture that has no interest in Hollywood movies at all (when Cliff arrives at the farm, a group of hippies are watching a pop music show on TV).
The same contradiction between what has come to be called the old 'classical Hollywood' and the new Hollywood that should again attract a younger audience to the cinemas is mirrored by the arrival of Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) and Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) as Rick's new neighbours in LA. Whereas Rick Dalton used to be the star hero of the TV series BOUNTY LAW but is now on his way down and only gets asked for guest appearances in other stars' series in which he has to play the bad guy who always gets to be defeated at the end, Polanski - as already mentioned - was hailed to Hollywood to give the film industry a fresh boost that would allow it to reconnect with the new youth culture. And, up to a certain degree, this contradiction is also mirrored in the two main characters of the movie, the 'has-been' movie star Rick Dalton and his stunt double Cliff Booth who, as both confirm in a TV interview in the beginning of the film, 'carries Rick's load'. Whereas Rick is averse to hippies, as he makes abundantly clear several times in the movie, and especially in his brief confrontation with Charlie Manson (Damon Herriman) when comes to explore the surroundings of his and his neighbour's houses late at night in a rather noisy car, Cliff is willing to give the hippie girl Pussycat (Margaret Qualley) a ride to the Spahn Movie ranch, to buy an LSD cigarette from her, and to try and smoke it later on the fateful night when Charlie's hippies attack Rick's house where he then finds himself. Cliff, then, has a streak of hippie culture and, one surmises, if only Rick would have some of his athletic and casual cool, he might have made it in the new Hollywood instead of getting stuck in his fifties and sixties 'classical' manners. Partly because of his 'cool', and partly because most of the movie's story evolves around him, Cliff plays a more eye-catching role than Rick, which only fits the declining career of the latter who is pretty much aware that he has become a 'has-been' (and it testifies to Di Caprio's acting skills that he conveys this second-rate status of his character more than convincingly).
Tarantino, however, definitely takes sides in this multi-layered texture of contradictions, and he is with Rick and his double rather than with the (then) new youth culture that, together with new media like the TV in the sixties and the digital technologies at the end of the twentieth century, would bring the classical Hollywood culture to an end. Cliff's visit to the Spahn Movie Ranch, where he insists on seeing the old owner George Spahn (Bruce Dern) much against the will of the hippie commune, is filmed in a long-drawn way and in wide shots as if a shoot-out were imminent that would be worthy of a Sergio Leone Western (although, of course, the success of spaghetti Westerns also contributed to the demise of 'classical' Hollywood). Cliff turns out to live in a decripit trailer next to a classical, but also seemingly dilapitated drive-in movie theatre (on the screen of which one sees a commercial rather than a scene from a feature film), and it is the classical stunt man Cliff who takes on Bruce Lee (Mike Moh), the hero of the special-effects laden Kung Fu films of that area and wins this apparently 'friendly contest'. But Tarantino's most touching declaration of love for the classical cinema is the scene in which Sharon Tate enters a Westwood Theatre where she noticed a poster of the movie THE WRECKING CREW (Phil Karlson, USA, 1968), in which - the real - Sharon Tate was featured, along with Dean Martin and Elke Sommer. She mimicks the martial art movements that she has learned from Bruce Lee and the real Sharon Tate makes in that movie, but first and foremost she is delighted by the response of the audience to the jokes and acts on screen: it is a celebration of the classical, social and collective film experience that was already vanishing at the end of the sixties when classical genres became the food of TV series and these were watched in the privacy of the home (the Westwood theatre is far from sold out, and most films or series are watched on television in this movie). This Sharon Tate, later in the movie pregnant of a child she has with Polanski - a hopeful joinder of classical and art cinema as the new future for Hollywood? - is obviously the center of the film, as well because of this open declaration of love as because of the looming tragedy that her and Polanski's presence and that of the Manson gang evoke.
However, in a typical Tarantinesk style, the story of the film hardly builds up to this expected climax. The film meanders along many digressions that seem to be motivated mostly by the opportunities they offer to showcase a meticulously (re-)constructed LA with all its billboards, signposts, restaurants, bars, film sets, dwellings, cinemas, streets, cars, clothes, shoes, jeans, sunglasses, that together build up an admittedly very romanticized and idealized image of that city in that period as Tarantino wants his audience to experience it (as he has maybe himself always wanted to experience it). As exciting as the sometimes hilarious or violent scenes of the movie are the almost endless drives of Cliff (sometimes with Rick) through the city, which makes the movie akin to some of the road movies that inaugurated the end of the classical film (most spectacularly Dennis Hopper's EASY RIDER (USA, 1968) a film that is curiously absent in this film, although one long-haired cab driver is scolded as 'Dennis Hopper' by Rick). In this respect, ONCE UPON A TIME IN...HOLLYWOOD is what Frederic Jameson would call a 'nostalgia film' par excellence: a film that is true to imagination and longing rather than to historical factuality.
That goes for the ending of the film as well. Rather than having his darling - Sharon Tate - killed, Tarantino has the Manson gang assault the house of Rick where they meet Cliff - who has just smoked one of Pussycat's LSD cigarettes and can't believe the hippies with their knives are real - and through Cliff their - cruel - end, and of course Rick who kills one of the female hippies with the flame thrower he used in one of his films to kill a couple of German Nazi officers - and maybe thus rekindles in 'real life' the faked heroism of his acting life. But his real redemption comes after this violent reckoning with the Manson gang, when through the intercom of her mansion Sharon Tate tells Rick - who in the beginning of the film had said that he wanted to have a role in one of Polanski's films - that she has always admired him and invites him into her house. Here - as he had done before in his other films - Tarantino uses the fictional dimension of film making to rewrite history and to create a what the historian Nigel Ferguson once called a 'counterfactual' history in which Rick, as well as Sharon Tate are redeemed: history is moulded into the format of the classical Hollywood film that requires, as Rick experienced in his guest appearances as the bad guy in the TV shows, a happy end.
Of course, as many critics have remarked, this fictional redemption of the past comes with a price: this idealized and romanticized LA is not disturbed by the civil rights movement, or the protests again the war in Vietnam, that also heavily marked the sixties, historically as well as in the collective memory and imagination. In this respect ONCE UPON A TIME IN...HOLLYWOOD also voluntarily conforms to the norms of the classical Hollywood movie, where social conflicts and political struggle were always carefully avoided and elided from the screen. The famous left-wing critic Jonathan Rosenbaum therefore has compared Tarantino's films with the back-to-the-fifties mentality as it propagated by Trump and other populists. Whether he has a point remains to be seen, and maybe the answer is in the present in which the film culture that Tarantino celebrates and bemoans at the same time no longer exists: the greatest paradox of ONCE UPON A TIME IN...HOLLYWOOD is, perhaps, that is a very powerful and a very powerless movie at the same time. But isn't that the case with all mythologies?
Friday, August 16, 2019
Wednesday, August 07, 2019
The Dead Don't Die - or Do They? Postmodern film philosophy in the flesh
"The world is perfect. Appreciate the details." This piece of wisdom is given by "WUPC" delivery man Dean (RZA) to Bobby Wiggins (Caleb Landry Jones), the young and geeky owner of a gas station and a shop of memorabilia and gadgets of mainly antiquated super-hero and horror movies and cartoons. The advice to mainly pay attention to the details seems to be directed to the spectator of the film as well, because although Jarmusch's movie seems to follow the rules and conventions of the horror movie in general and the zombie movie in particular, the devil is - so to speak - in the details. The setting of this scene already provides some clues to the multiple layers that are conjoined in the movie: the gas station and the shop itself offer typical timeless images of a rural America as one has already seen in countless movies. The shop itself sells toys, cartoon strips, videos and cd's that refer to a bygone past, but the WUPC delivery truck and its driver are clearly contemporary figures.
Similar seeming anachronisms reoccur when, for instance, officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) and officer Mindy Morrison (Chloë Sevigny) arrive at the equally timeless diner where both female staff have been slashed by zombies in their Toyota Prius and Smart car respectively. Not only past and present are merged in this way, as is only appropriate in a zombie movie in which the (un)dead rise from their graves to come and haunt the present, but the future is also present since the strange events that happen - cattle and pets disappear, the cycle of day and night turns out of order, wifi and mobile phone networks stop working, TV broadcastings are disturbed, etc. - are alledgedly caused by a shift of the axis of planet earth, which in turn is caused by fracking in the Artic area. The present, then, is in this movie under attack from both the past that returns to cannibalize it, and the future that threatens to destroy it with a man-made ecological disaster. Indeed, as officer Peterson repeatedly remarks, "This is definitely going to end badly."
This imminent crushing of the present by the past and the future surely gives the film some political undertones. It can be read as a critique of (Trumpian) denial of man-made climate change and of Trump's promises to restore America's past greatness, whereas Peterson's statement that Mexicans are his favorite people can be taken as a rebuttal of Trump's debunking of Mexicans as criminals and rapists. When it comes to politics and critique, however, the film more generally just seems to follow a trope that is familiar from the zombie genre from its very start with George Romero's THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (USA, 1968): the zombies in Jarmusch's movie "gravitate to what they liked best in their lives", as, again, Peterson observes and what they liked best are consumer goods, game consoles, fashion, sports like tennis, or pop cultural activities such as playing the guitar. As 'undead' the zombies prefer to continue to do what they did when they were still alive because they could do those things as 'brainlessly' as zombies. As all zombie movies, THE DEAD DON'T DIE seems to want to bring across the message of philosopher Daniel C. Dennett's dictum that "We are all zombies", as the voice over of Hermit Bob (Tom Waits) rather explictly explains at the end of the movie. The zombie-like nature of the living in our contemporary societies is in Jarmusch's movie accentuated by the rather bland acting style of its protagonists chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Muray) and more specifically Adam Driver's character Ronnie Peterson, who is explicitly scolded by the former for his 'cool' since the zombie disaster broke out.
However, in this film this "we are all zombies" theme - again, a familiar recurring trope in the genre - seems to be no more than a sort of obligatory afterthought, a coda that is quite literally added to the movie through the concluding voice-over of Hermit Bob. Rather than being a comment on the contemporary state of Western society in general and American culture and politics in particular, THE DEAD DON'T DIE seems to offer an ironic reflection on the current state of cinema as an 'undead' medium. That the film is first of all a self-reflective movie is already made clear in one of the first scenes when Robertson and Peterson drive back to the police station after a confrontation with Hermit Bob who is being accused of stealing a chicken from farmer Frank Miller (Steve Buscemi): when the radio plays the song The Dead Don't Die by Sturgill Simpson and Robertson says it sounds very familiar to him, Peterson explains this by pointing out that it is the theme song of this movie. Later officer Peterson who seems to be the real protagonist of the movie, tells Robertson that he was already sure from the beginning that things would definitely end badly because he had been given the whole script of the movie to read (whereas Robertson says that he only got his own parts to read). These are ironic instances of the typically modernist strategy of "laying bare the device" through which the spectator was supposed to be made aware of the artificial and make-believe nature of the cinematic illusion. Other examples of such self-reflexive moments are when the camera tilts down over a tomb stone in which the name of one of the main actors, "Bill Murray" is engraved.
The days of modernist cinema are, however, already over for a long time, and these instances of "laying bare the device" nowadays sollicit a smile rather than a shock, they amuse rather than estrange, they have become part and parcel of today's knowledgeable film spectator's competence who no longer needs to be educated in a Brechtian or Godardian way about the technological, artificial and illusionary nature of the cinematic image. Jarmusch's movie positions itself rather squarely - and not surprisingly - in a postmodern tradition by abundantly and extensively referring to and quoting from, or, to put it more poshly, "paying tribute to" numerous horror, zombie, and science-fiction movies from Murnau's NOSFERATU (Germany, 1922) the iconic poster of which is printed on Bobby Wiggin's T-shirt, through Hitchcock's PSYCHO (USA, 1960), mentioned in a conversation between the juvenile delinquents in the local detention center, to Tarantino's KILL BILL (USA, 2003) to which the samurai sword swinging undertaker Zelda Winston (Tilda Swinton) is an obvious "tribute", and Steven Spielberg's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (USA, 1977) and E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTIAL (USA, 1982) is paid hommage to with the space ship that in the midst of the zombie carnage comes to collect Zelda. Romero's THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD has already been mentioned, and one might also think of classics as John Landis' video-clip for Michael Jackson's Thriller, or pick your own favorite zombie or horror classic. To a large extent, then, THE DEAD DON'T DIE consists of images, figures, tropes and themes that had already been invented and developed by other, earlier filmmakers from the classic and modern periods of the history of film.
In this sense, one could certainly see THE DEAD DON'T DIE as an example of the postmodernist ennui - and resignation - with the contemporary filmmaker's (and artists in general) feeling that everything has already been invented and tried in the past and that the only thing left for the contemporary filmmaker to do is to ransack the past and to recombine it's ideas, images and artifacts into maybe eclictic but hopefully refreshing, amusing, or entertaining ways (as Jarmusch does with fragments and figures from the films mentioned above). However, postmodernism's past is not just a reproduction of images (or texts or other artifacts) from a bygone period, but rather a reconstitution of that past as how this past is being imagined by a present generation who projects their own (collective) memories that are fed by movies, pictures, novels, as well as by contemporary phantasies and desires, onto that past. In postmodernist art and cinema, the past not only cannibalizes on the present, but the present also invades, colonizes and cannibalizes the past. It is certainly no coincidence that Fern (Eszter Balint) and Lily (Rosal Colon), the staff of the local diner, discuss Jack Clayton's THE GREAT GATSBY (USA, 1974) before they get assaulted by zombies, conflating actors (Robert Redford) with characters, fictional with historical figures (Gatsby), and authors with fictional characters (Fitzgerald). The (last) Marxist philosopher and culture critique Frederic Jameson had pointed out THE GREAT GATSBY as a paradigm example of what he called the postmodernist "nostalgia film", that is, a film that sollicits a longing to experience a long gone and disappeared past but not as a historically accurate reconstruction of that past, but as a past as the contemporary audience imagines it. A nostalgia film like THE GREAT GATSBY, instead of offering a realistic account of the twenties "as they really were" rather makes those twenties "as they really were" disappear from the collective memory and consciousness: it acts like a zombie that cannabilizes the present collective memory by eating away the substantial part of the past, thus creating a sense of time in which past and present collapse and the future is nothing but the eternal return of the same. Indeed, a time in which "the dead don't die".
THE DEAD DON'T DIE, however, is not just a nostalgic pastiche of a by now almost lost movie genre. As the French philosopher and anthropologist Edgar Morin had argued in his book Le Cinéma ou l'Homme Imaginaire: Essai d'Antropologie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1982), there is an intimate relationship between the cinema and the "undead". Movie characters are, after all, not living creatures of flesh and blood, but lead a shadowy existence in which they are condemned to repeat the same actions, expressions and utterances over and over again (at least when the film in which they appear is screened). As the rather bland performances of Peterson and Robertson there is therefore not a radical, categorical difference between a human and a zombie-like character in a movie, and the transformation from human to zombie is - although not painless - quick and easy. Zombies, then, are the perfect allegorical representations for movie characters, as is shown when Peterson and Robertson watch them from their seats in their patrol car enchroach upon their windshield. Just as Jean Baudrillard once observed that the American landscape is transformed into a movie image when seen through the windshield of a moving automobile, the windshield of the patrol car functions as a film screen on which the shadowy figures of movie characters appear. Once they step out of the car and enter the world of the zombies, these film characters - already zombies for the spectator of this movie - will fataly join the mass of zombies as well. And they will be doomed to eternally return to and rampage and cannibalize the present.
This allegorical interpretation of the story and imagery of THE DEAD DON'T DIE leaves one with a very bleak vision on the current and future state of the cinema, indeed. There are, however, a few suggestions that there might be some hope for a renewed future. First, there is the Hermit Bob. He is no part of the small town community, lives in the woods, and feeds himself with what he catches and gathers. He seems to be untainted by the rampant consumerism that turns citizens into brainless zombies in the contemporary world, but, more importantly, he is also an outside - "distant" as the film theoretician Noel Burch would say - observer of the events in the civilized world. He watches what's going on in town through his binoculars and provides these with a running voice-over comment. He is in the position of a filmmaker/camera man, and - as the French film semiotician Christian Metz once argued - through that position also the imaginary embodiment of the film spectator who eventually sees what the camera man saw and recorded when the spectator was not (yet) present, and sees it when the camera man is not present (during the projection of the screen).
Hermit Ben is the incarnation of the classical film spectator who takes what he sees through the optical stand-in of his or her eyes as a direct and correct depiction of what is and happens in front of it (the "profilmic event", as film semioticians used to call it) and who focuses on the content of his or her vision, oblivious to the technologies that mediate between the "profilmic" and the spectator's view. But, as already mentioned before, Hermit Ben's comments on the carnage he wittnesses from his safe distant observer position are no more than a marginal afterthought that have no impact on the course of events whatsoever. They are simply and quite literally, beside the point. Moreover, in THE DEAD DON'T DIE this classical film spectator is allegorically represented by an old, anti-social, isolated - and, not unimportantly, white, male - tramp,who looks like a rather repugnant remnant of the 1960s "back to nature" hippie culture - this belated "film buff" character could hardly be a promising beaken for the future of cinema.
But then there are the three juvenile delinquents, Stella (Maya Delmont), Olivia (Taliyah Whitaker) and Geronimo (Jahi Di'Allo Winston). These - Hispano and African-American - youngsters are, contrary than Hermit Bob - involuntarily isolated from the small town community, kept away from the consumer goods and leisure time activities that turn the "free citizens" into zombies, and also watch the events in town from behind their (rather constrained) "window on the world". In the midst of the mayhem caused by the zombies they manage to escape, and although this might seem to be one of the loose ends of the film - they don't reappear in the movie after running away behind the bushes - the very name of Geronimo suggests that there attempt to escape might be succesful: Geronimo was, after all, an Apache chief of the late 19th century, who became famous for his capacity to escape and make himself undetectable for the American army (until he surrendered in 1886). This escape might be either the launch of a brandnew start (of a more diverse and non-conventional filmmaking, for instance) or provide the producers of the film with a reason to come up with a sequel, which is, as is well known, only the start of an "eternal return of the same", or a revamping of zombielike moviemaking. And, after all, Geronimo was an extremely ambiguous figure: he was not only a celebrated escape hero, but also - and maybe foremost - a much feared warrior who, out of revenge for the killing of his family by Mexican soldiers, killed scores of Mexican and American army men. A return of Geronimo as a zombie, "gravitating towards what he liked best in his life time" would certainly reinforce the meaning of Robertson's hunch that "this is definitely going to end badly".
And isn't the future not already - in the film quite literally - 'tilted' towards disaster caused by human-made technologies? Needless to say that in the case of cinema these are the digital technologies that according to many 'old-school' critics have deprived cinema (and photography) from it's realist destiny and turned the imaginary immersion into fictional worlds into brainless playing of First Person Shooter games (of which Peterson's and Robertson's chasing of the zombies seems to be parody and it will be no coincidence that they must aim at the heads of these creatures). However, and this probably why in this allegory the success or failure of the kids' escape remains undecided, the "death of cinema" has been proclaimed at the arrival of almost all earlier new audio-visual technologies, such as television, video and DVD, and the cinema has (still) survived them all, be it in more adapted forms and a changed position in the field of audiovisual entertainment that it now must share with the YouTubes, Netflixes, VRs, and laptop-, mobile phone- and other, almost ubiquitous screens. And maybe the samourai warrier Zelda will return on earth from the high-tech world the spaceship has (probably) brought her to, to deliver planet earth from the zombies that meanwhile have populated it.
If one follows the advice of the WUPC delivery man Dean and pays attention to the details of this film, the film opens layer after layer, and every reference and quotation opens up new readings and interpretations, to the extent that the - rather simple and, to be honest, rather clichéd story and its characters disappear from sight. But isn't that exactly the utimate achievement of a zombie-movie: that it cannibalizes on and sucks out its own subject? In this sense, one might consider THE DEAD DON'T DIE as the ultimate, not postmodernist but hypermodernist or post-postmodernist movie.
August 7, 2019
Similar seeming anachronisms reoccur when, for instance, officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver) and officer Mindy Morrison (Chloë Sevigny) arrive at the equally timeless diner where both female staff have been slashed by zombies in their Toyota Prius and Smart car respectively. Not only past and present are merged in this way, as is only appropriate in a zombie movie in which the (un)dead rise from their graves to come and haunt the present, but the future is also present since the strange events that happen - cattle and pets disappear, the cycle of day and night turns out of order, wifi and mobile phone networks stop working, TV broadcastings are disturbed, etc. - are alledgedly caused by a shift of the axis of planet earth, which in turn is caused by fracking in the Artic area. The present, then, is in this movie under attack from both the past that returns to cannibalize it, and the future that threatens to destroy it with a man-made ecological disaster. Indeed, as officer Peterson repeatedly remarks, "This is definitely going to end badly."
This imminent crushing of the present by the past and the future surely gives the film some political undertones. It can be read as a critique of (Trumpian) denial of man-made climate change and of Trump's promises to restore America's past greatness, whereas Peterson's statement that Mexicans are his favorite people can be taken as a rebuttal of Trump's debunking of Mexicans as criminals and rapists. When it comes to politics and critique, however, the film more generally just seems to follow a trope that is familiar from the zombie genre from its very start with George Romero's THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (USA, 1968): the zombies in Jarmusch's movie "gravitate to what they liked best in their lives", as, again, Peterson observes and what they liked best are consumer goods, game consoles, fashion, sports like tennis, or pop cultural activities such as playing the guitar. As 'undead' the zombies prefer to continue to do what they did when they were still alive because they could do those things as 'brainlessly' as zombies. As all zombie movies, THE DEAD DON'T DIE seems to want to bring across the message of philosopher Daniel C. Dennett's dictum that "We are all zombies", as the voice over of Hermit Bob (Tom Waits) rather explictly explains at the end of the movie. The zombie-like nature of the living in our contemporary societies is in Jarmusch's movie accentuated by the rather bland acting style of its protagonists chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Muray) and more specifically Adam Driver's character Ronnie Peterson, who is explicitly scolded by the former for his 'cool' since the zombie disaster broke out.
However, in this film this "we are all zombies" theme - again, a familiar recurring trope in the genre - seems to be no more than a sort of obligatory afterthought, a coda that is quite literally added to the movie through the concluding voice-over of Hermit Bob. Rather than being a comment on the contemporary state of Western society in general and American culture and politics in particular, THE DEAD DON'T DIE seems to offer an ironic reflection on the current state of cinema as an 'undead' medium. That the film is first of all a self-reflective movie is already made clear in one of the first scenes when Robertson and Peterson drive back to the police station after a confrontation with Hermit Bob who is being accused of stealing a chicken from farmer Frank Miller (Steve Buscemi): when the radio plays the song The Dead Don't Die by Sturgill Simpson and Robertson says it sounds very familiar to him, Peterson explains this by pointing out that it is the theme song of this movie. Later officer Peterson who seems to be the real protagonist of the movie, tells Robertson that he was already sure from the beginning that things would definitely end badly because he had been given the whole script of the movie to read (whereas Robertson says that he only got his own parts to read). These are ironic instances of the typically modernist strategy of "laying bare the device" through which the spectator was supposed to be made aware of the artificial and make-believe nature of the cinematic illusion. Other examples of such self-reflexive moments are when the camera tilts down over a tomb stone in which the name of one of the main actors, "Bill Murray" is engraved.
The days of modernist cinema are, however, already over for a long time, and these instances of "laying bare the device" nowadays sollicit a smile rather than a shock, they amuse rather than estrange, they have become part and parcel of today's knowledgeable film spectator's competence who no longer needs to be educated in a Brechtian or Godardian way about the technological, artificial and illusionary nature of the cinematic image. Jarmusch's movie positions itself rather squarely - and not surprisingly - in a postmodern tradition by abundantly and extensively referring to and quoting from, or, to put it more poshly, "paying tribute to" numerous horror, zombie, and science-fiction movies from Murnau's NOSFERATU (Germany, 1922) the iconic poster of which is printed on Bobby Wiggin's T-shirt, through Hitchcock's PSYCHO (USA, 1960), mentioned in a conversation between the juvenile delinquents in the local detention center, to Tarantino's KILL BILL (USA, 2003) to which the samurai sword swinging undertaker Zelda Winston (Tilda Swinton) is an obvious "tribute", and Steven Spielberg's CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (USA, 1977) and E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTIAL (USA, 1982) is paid hommage to with the space ship that in the midst of the zombie carnage comes to collect Zelda. Romero's THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD has already been mentioned, and one might also think of classics as John Landis' video-clip for Michael Jackson's Thriller, or pick your own favorite zombie or horror classic. To a large extent, then, THE DEAD DON'T DIE consists of images, figures, tropes and themes that had already been invented and developed by other, earlier filmmakers from the classic and modern periods of the history of film.
In this sense, one could certainly see THE DEAD DON'T DIE as an example of the postmodernist ennui - and resignation - with the contemporary filmmaker's (and artists in general) feeling that everything has already been invented and tried in the past and that the only thing left for the contemporary filmmaker to do is to ransack the past and to recombine it's ideas, images and artifacts into maybe eclictic but hopefully refreshing, amusing, or entertaining ways (as Jarmusch does with fragments and figures from the films mentioned above). However, postmodernism's past is not just a reproduction of images (or texts or other artifacts) from a bygone period, but rather a reconstitution of that past as how this past is being imagined by a present generation who projects their own (collective) memories that are fed by movies, pictures, novels, as well as by contemporary phantasies and desires, onto that past. In postmodernist art and cinema, the past not only cannibalizes on the present, but the present also invades, colonizes and cannibalizes the past. It is certainly no coincidence that Fern (Eszter Balint) and Lily (Rosal Colon), the staff of the local diner, discuss Jack Clayton's THE GREAT GATSBY (USA, 1974) before they get assaulted by zombies, conflating actors (Robert Redford) with characters, fictional with historical figures (Gatsby), and authors with fictional characters (Fitzgerald). The (last) Marxist philosopher and culture critique Frederic Jameson had pointed out THE GREAT GATSBY as a paradigm example of what he called the postmodernist "nostalgia film", that is, a film that sollicits a longing to experience a long gone and disappeared past but not as a historically accurate reconstruction of that past, but as a past as the contemporary audience imagines it. A nostalgia film like THE GREAT GATSBY, instead of offering a realistic account of the twenties "as they really were" rather makes those twenties "as they really were" disappear from the collective memory and consciousness: it acts like a zombie that cannabilizes the present collective memory by eating away the substantial part of the past, thus creating a sense of time in which past and present collapse and the future is nothing but the eternal return of the same. Indeed, a time in which "the dead don't die".
THE DEAD DON'T DIE, however, is not just a nostalgic pastiche of a by now almost lost movie genre. As the French philosopher and anthropologist Edgar Morin had argued in his book Le Cinéma ou l'Homme Imaginaire: Essai d'Antropologie (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1982), there is an intimate relationship between the cinema and the "undead". Movie characters are, after all, not living creatures of flesh and blood, but lead a shadowy existence in which they are condemned to repeat the same actions, expressions and utterances over and over again (at least when the film in which they appear is screened). As the rather bland performances of Peterson and Robertson there is therefore not a radical, categorical difference between a human and a zombie-like character in a movie, and the transformation from human to zombie is - although not painless - quick and easy. Zombies, then, are the perfect allegorical representations for movie characters, as is shown when Peterson and Robertson watch them from their seats in their patrol car enchroach upon their windshield. Just as Jean Baudrillard once observed that the American landscape is transformed into a movie image when seen through the windshield of a moving automobile, the windshield of the patrol car functions as a film screen on which the shadowy figures of movie characters appear. Once they step out of the car and enter the world of the zombies, these film characters - already zombies for the spectator of this movie - will fataly join the mass of zombies as well. And they will be doomed to eternally return to and rampage and cannibalize the present.
This allegorical interpretation of the story and imagery of THE DEAD DON'T DIE leaves one with a very bleak vision on the current and future state of the cinema, indeed. There are, however, a few suggestions that there might be some hope for a renewed future. First, there is the Hermit Bob. He is no part of the small town community, lives in the woods, and feeds himself with what he catches and gathers. He seems to be untainted by the rampant consumerism that turns citizens into brainless zombies in the contemporary world, but, more importantly, he is also an outside - "distant" as the film theoretician Noel Burch would say - observer of the events in the civilized world. He watches what's going on in town through his binoculars and provides these with a running voice-over comment. He is in the position of a filmmaker/camera man, and - as the French film semiotician Christian Metz once argued - through that position also the imaginary embodiment of the film spectator who eventually sees what the camera man saw and recorded when the spectator was not (yet) present, and sees it when the camera man is not present (during the projection of the screen).
Hermit Ben is the incarnation of the classical film spectator who takes what he sees through the optical stand-in of his or her eyes as a direct and correct depiction of what is and happens in front of it (the "profilmic event", as film semioticians used to call it) and who focuses on the content of his or her vision, oblivious to the technologies that mediate between the "profilmic" and the spectator's view. But, as already mentioned before, Hermit Ben's comments on the carnage he wittnesses from his safe distant observer position are no more than a marginal afterthought that have no impact on the course of events whatsoever. They are simply and quite literally, beside the point. Moreover, in THE DEAD DON'T DIE this classical film spectator is allegorically represented by an old, anti-social, isolated - and, not unimportantly, white, male - tramp,who looks like a rather repugnant remnant of the 1960s "back to nature" hippie culture - this belated "film buff" character could hardly be a promising beaken for the future of cinema.
But then there are the three juvenile delinquents, Stella (Maya Delmont), Olivia (Taliyah Whitaker) and Geronimo (Jahi Di'Allo Winston). These - Hispano and African-American - youngsters are, contrary than Hermit Bob - involuntarily isolated from the small town community, kept away from the consumer goods and leisure time activities that turn the "free citizens" into zombies, and also watch the events in town from behind their (rather constrained) "window on the world". In the midst of the mayhem caused by the zombies they manage to escape, and although this might seem to be one of the loose ends of the film - they don't reappear in the movie after running away behind the bushes - the very name of Geronimo suggests that there attempt to escape might be succesful: Geronimo was, after all, an Apache chief of the late 19th century, who became famous for his capacity to escape and make himself undetectable for the American army (until he surrendered in 1886). This escape might be either the launch of a brandnew start (of a more diverse and non-conventional filmmaking, for instance) or provide the producers of the film with a reason to come up with a sequel, which is, as is well known, only the start of an "eternal return of the same", or a revamping of zombielike moviemaking. And, after all, Geronimo was an extremely ambiguous figure: he was not only a celebrated escape hero, but also - and maybe foremost - a much feared warrior who, out of revenge for the killing of his family by Mexican soldiers, killed scores of Mexican and American army men. A return of Geronimo as a zombie, "gravitating towards what he liked best in his life time" would certainly reinforce the meaning of Robertson's hunch that "this is definitely going to end badly".
And isn't the future not already - in the film quite literally - 'tilted' towards disaster caused by human-made technologies? Needless to say that in the case of cinema these are the digital technologies that according to many 'old-school' critics have deprived cinema (and photography) from it's realist destiny and turned the imaginary immersion into fictional worlds into brainless playing of First Person Shooter games (of which Peterson's and Robertson's chasing of the zombies seems to be parody and it will be no coincidence that they must aim at the heads of these creatures). However, and this probably why in this allegory the success or failure of the kids' escape remains undecided, the "death of cinema" has been proclaimed at the arrival of almost all earlier new audio-visual technologies, such as television, video and DVD, and the cinema has (still) survived them all, be it in more adapted forms and a changed position in the field of audiovisual entertainment that it now must share with the YouTubes, Netflixes, VRs, and laptop-, mobile phone- and other, almost ubiquitous screens. And maybe the samourai warrier Zelda will return on earth from the high-tech world the spaceship has (probably) brought her to, to deliver planet earth from the zombies that meanwhile have populated it.
If one follows the advice of the WUPC delivery man Dean and pays attention to the details of this film, the film opens layer after layer, and every reference and quotation opens up new readings and interpretations, to the extent that the - rather simple and, to be honest, rather clichéd story and its characters disappear from sight. But isn't that exactly the utimate achievement of a zombie-movie: that it cannibalizes on and sucks out its own subject? In this sense, one might consider THE DEAD DON'T DIE as the ultimate, not postmodernist but hypermodernist or post-postmodernist movie.
August 7, 2019
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