Aisle of the Dead (part 1)

The SF in SF reading was terrific! Huge thanks to everyone who came out, and to Rina Weisman for inviting me. I’ll have video & a more detailed post sometime next week.

(In 2009 I wrote a two-week series of blog posts about post-apocalyptic novels & films for Borders’ blog. Because this subgenre has continued to flourish, I am reprinting the posts here.)

Having covered some novels I think have been important contributors to the Literature of Last Things, let’s turn our attention for the next few entries to movies that have given us some Technicolor insight into the end of the world.

Dawn of the Dead. A postapocalypse film so iconic it’s hard to say anything new about it, George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead has been completely absorbed into the cultural landscape (Bonus Geek Points if you recognized the Robot Chicken end title theme as the mall music from Dawn of the Dead originally performed by The Goblins). This one has it all, because it invented most of it: Shambling zombies who are comical alone but terrifying en masse, shockingly rapid societal breakdown, the Escape Chopper, the abandoned shopping mall (I totally stole this for a scene in Ariel), the foraging & hoarding, the Funny Good Guy Getting Infected, the Bullet In The Head is All That Will Stop Them. Placed in historical context, it’s worth remembering that DotD was released unrated due to its unprecedented graphic grossness (setting off a makeup-effects arms race in the process) — a level of goosh that’s pretty much standard videogame fare nowadays; few have considered that the apocalypse may already be happening in slow motion.

Every zombie trope in existence owes a debt to Romero’s tightly directed film. Even the inventive 28 Days Later is basically DotD with overcaffeinated brainmunchers. Also noteworthy as another in the “technnophiles defending themselves against the barbarians at the gate” theme common in postapocalyptic movies. If you think you can substitute seeing the remake instead, save yourself two hours of your life you’ll never get back and avoid it like the plague it clumsily depicts. The original is a true landmark.

The Road Warrior. George Miller’s reductionist Campbellian (anti)hero myth is a true classic of kinetic roadpunk poetry whose striking imagery and energy continue to be ripped off by lesser talents to this day. This and Bladerunner shaped the feel of movies for a solid decade and more. Mel Gibson became an international star playing Max, a damaged former cop who Just Doesn’t Give A Damn Anymore as he cruises desolate highway stretches in “the last of the V8 Interceptors” across a wasted world in search of more fuel so he can keep on keeping on. Archetypally and structurally identical to Star Wars (Georges Miller and Lucas benefitted hugely from reading their Joseph Campbell, specifically Hero with a Thousand Faces), the film’s lean energy and simple drama played out against bleak landscapes go a long way in elevating the story to the level of myth. A “whiteclad technocrats keeping the fire alight” vs. “barbarians at the gate” storyline helped a lot.

I freaked out when The Road Warrior was released because it looked exactly like the image I’d had for my first novel, Ariel, which was right about to be released. I’ve heard that a very similar thing happened to William Gibson regarding Neuromancer when Bladerunner was released. Zeitgeist, indeed.

The Quiet Earth. This largely unknown 1985 New Zealand film deserves a wider audience. Modest in budget, personal in focus, and quirky in approach, this movie’s premise is that a government energy-grid project throws the world into a parallel universe, killing everybody except those who were right at the moment of their death when the event occurred. The first part focuses on a lone man’s increasing disaffection as he tries to cope; the remainder focuses on three survivors’ efforts to affect another fundamental change as they realize that the universe into which they’ve been thrust is unstable. Also one of the most striking final images of any movie ever.

Miracle Mile. You answer a payphone outside a coffeeshop and it’s a scared private in a missile silo who has accidentally called the wrong number and thinks he’s telling his parents that the nukes are flying and they’ve got about an hour to live. What do you do? You set out on a mini odyssey across the mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles to find that girl you’ve just met and get hold of an Escape Chopper, what else? Hampered by budget cuts and containing possibly the most uplifting depressing ending this side of The Road, Miracle Mile still manages to convey a sense of urgency and escalation as people find their own ways to fight the inevitable. Also notable for being Tangerine Dream’s best film score.

12 Monkeys. For my money the best time-travel movie ever made, Terry Gilliam’s fatalistic expansion of the classic French short “La Jete” stars Bruce Willis, never better as a prisoner forced by the desperate leaders of a remnant humanity gone underground to travel back in time in an effort to learn the source of the plague that has decimated the global population. Willis’ James Cole is haunted by a dreamlike childhood memory of a man being shot to death at an airport security checkpoint. Everything Cole does in the past (our present) to learn about or avert the coming plague only brings that dream image closer to reality.

Unlike the Terminator series, 12 Monkeys does not play fast and loose with violations and paradoxes, but adheres strictly to the logic that any attempt to change the past becomes by definition part of that very past, and every frame of 12 Monkeys is geared toward achievement and explanation of Cole’s opening dream/memory sequence, filling the viewer with an almost unbearable sense of tragic inevitably. And shame on you if you didn’t realize that it has a happy ending. One of my favorite movies.