"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
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