Archive for the ‘Literary criticism’ Category

Mashups

Posted: April 6, 2012 by zombieprofessor in Literary criticism
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The Wall Street Journal looks at mashups going mainstream with a feature article focusing on Seth Grahame-Smith, best known for “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” and “Abraham Lincoln Vampire Slayer.”

Mr. Grahame-Smith wasn’t the first writer to put a bizarre spin on a classic tale (arguably, Shakespeare was a skilled practitioner of genre remixing). But he’s become the mash-up movement’s modern avatar. His irreverent literary reboot landed at precisely the right cultural moment. In recent years, digital remixing and sampling—once viewed as derivative at best and illegal at worst—has grown widespread in music, film, television and fine art. Mash-ups are no longer just kitschy parodies. Literary writers like Colson Whitehead and Michael Chabon have experimented with horror and science-fiction themes. A zombie-infused Regency romance doesn’t sound so ludicrous in today’s mash-up rich environment.

I’ve written before about mashups. The public acceptance of genre-bending is refreshing, and the critics clearly lack imagination. That’s why we know the time is right for Zombielanche, a climate change/zombie mashup feature film.

Walking Dead 2:13: Beside the Dying Hope

Posted: March 22, 2012 by zombieprofessor in Literary criticism, Zombie
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Spoilerama

At last the finale, the day we all knew was coming eventually: The day the farm ceases to be a viable microcosmic civilization for Rick Grimes, his family, Herschel’s family, and their ragtag social contract. And, more essentially, the day we find out the secret that was planted just out of our earshot at the conclusion of the first season.

But first we get a little Planet Earth-style walker footage, with the story of a walker migration told through a series of powerful visual anecdotes. First, the helicopter. Where did that come from? Someone’s flying it, and if you know anything about helicopters you know they are a bitch to maintain. So there’s capacity to keep the thing in the air. OK. That sounds like infrastructure. Good sign.

But I digress. First we have the walkers shuffling in pursuit of the helicopter and, apparently, never stopping. A walker in motion stays in motion. Do they follow flocking rules the same way that birds do? Flocking rules call for alignment—averaging out the distance between members of a flock—and cohesion—steering toward a common long-term location. For birds, it also includes separation—avoiding obstacles and other near-term navigational hazards. While the flock of walkers seems to abide by the rules of alignment and cohesion, they utterly lack in the separation department—as we see when they coalesce behind a fence en masse until the pressure grows too great and they burst through. This inevitable force never met an immovable object.

And what an unfortunate thing to come creeping up just as Rick was dispensing Shane. It makes for a taut opening to the episode: The long shot of Rick struggling through the difficult revelation to his son of if/why Rick killed Shane. With darkness as a backdrop, we’re left with a delicious bit of dramatic irony, waiting for the walkers to emerge out of the darkness behind our heroes. And as soon as we see them, we know it is on.

Things move quickly from here. How apt that Rick and Carl end up trapped in the barn—now it’s the walkers on the outside and the people on the inside, an inversion on the farm when they found it, with Herschel hoarding loved-ones-turned-walkers in the same barn.

The rest of the farm springs to action and the fog of war takes over. As everyone in the house takes to the cars and starts picking off walkers cavalry-style, it becomes hard to account for everyone. Andrea gets separated and no one knows if she is hurt or dead. Rick tries to be noble but gets talked out of it by Herschel, who points out it’s all about the boy. We’re reminded of The Road, where the hope we place in the offspring becomes the only meaning left on a bleak landscape.

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Walking Dead 2.12: Better Angels and Civil War

Posted: March 15, 2012 by zombieprofessor in Literary criticism, Zombie
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Warning: Spoilertown

The title of the latest Walking Dead interests me. “Better Angels” evokes Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural, a speech steeped in good intentions that still couldn’t stop a civil war that was already fomenting and that officially began a month later with the attack on Fort Sumpter.

Rick’s eulogy for Dale in which he appeals to everyone’s better angels is an earnest attempt to restore togetherness. It’s like a plea for the former way. But the earnestness is undermined as scenes of zombie butcher are interspersed, just as Lincoln’s speech was undermined by the fact that the South had already seceded from the Union following his election. Dale wouldn’t have been happy to see Andrea cruising around in a truck looking for chances to stick a pitchfork through a zombie’s face. Come to think of it, Abraham Lincoln probably wouldn’t like it either.

Despite the attempt at rhetorically-induced peace, there is conflict coming. Early on we have Lady MacBeth herself taking pity on Shane as he toils alone repairing some kind of tower. She tells him she appreciates him, and that it might be his baby but that, as far as the two of them as a couple go, sorry not gonna happen. But you sure are great!

Lori seems very sincere in this scene. Maybe she’s driven by guilt for planting a homicidal notion about Shane in her husband’s ear; I can’t help but feel that she’s the one that upsets the first rock that starts the rockslide. Why tell Shane it might be his baby? Lori caveats her appreciation by disclaiming her appreciation with “even though things got confused between us.” If a woman said this to me I’d flip. Sounds like a semantically camouflaged way of saying I’ve convinced my husband to kill you.

If Lori Grimes’ motives are in doubt, Carl Grimes’ are not. (In fact it seems that preserving Carl’s innocence is one of the big changes in the show from its comic roots.) Carl just wants absolution from Dale’s death, and for some reason he seeks solace in Shane. As discussed, Shane has a different appeal for a young boy. Of course Carl’s confidence in Shane has an unexpected outcome in the hands of all these “better angels.” Carl gives up his gun to Shane, who gives the gun to Rick and offers some sound parental advice, provoking Rick to give the gun back to Carl so that Carl can eventually use it to kill zombiefied Shane. Got it? By acting like a concerned parent Shane eventually undoes his undead self. This comes full circle when Shane claims he is a better father than Shane.

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Walking Dead 2.11: Stomachache

Posted: March 8, 2012 by zombieprofessor in Literary criticism, Zombie
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Spoiler alert: I had to wait an excruciating three days for my Walking Dead fix but perhaps some of you are later still. This week’s review includes several big giveaways if you haven’t yet seen the “Judge, Jury, Executioner” episode.

There’s a Thom Yorke song that shares the same name as the latest Walking Dead episode.


Somehow Yorke’s crooning isn’t melancholy enough to be the anthem for The Walking Dead Season 2, Episode 11, “Judge, Jury, Executioner.” This episode serves up the death of a conscience, a Darwinian assertion, and taut suspense that left me feeling sick to my stomach.

Things get off to a quick start, with Daryl going Guantanamo on Randall. The Jack Bauer routine results in some key news: Randall’s people include 30 or so rapists. This is grim stuff, Cormac McCarthy bleak. If any cinematic entity could get away with roasting a baby on a spit, it’s The Walking Dead.

Amid the grim decisions, Dale is still trying to keep it real. “Keeping our humanity: That’s a choice.” We’ve heard this sort of thing before. Just as we’ve heard Shane at the other end of the spectrum: While speaking with Andrea outside the shed, Shane claims the people making the rules are the source of the problems, not him.

Well, the rule-makers are about to be tested.

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Walking Dead 2.10: “Shane…Shane…Come back, Shane”

Posted: February 29, 2012 by zombieprofessor in Literary criticism, Zombie
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Spoiler alert: There be giveaways

Could we just get on with the final showdown? The next time Rick and Shane fight, someone needs to die.

Continuing on a theme, The Walking Dead Season 2, Episode 10, “18 Miles Out,” begins with the second season’s unavoidable dualism: Rick and Shane facing off. Rick tries to reason with Shane. But Shane doesn’t reason. Shane is one big muscle. I mean please: His name is Shane. He fucking leaves.

There’s the persistent question of Lori and how she navigates this love triangle. Somewhat mercifully, we see early on that Rick is not going to be conned by Lori’s run at Lady MacBeth. He tells Shane what his wife told him—that Shane is dangerous. While there are plenty of undercurrents to this, it isn’t a precursor to a MacBeth style murder-him-while-he-sleeps moment. Rick is going to try reasoning it out, until gravity takes over and they descend to blows again. The only thing that prevented homicide this time was the surprise walker infestation that overran the scene. But after Shane threw a hundred-pound wrench at Rick’s head, the will to kill is now on the table.

Of course the show’s creators have to leave this impending collision between Rick and Shane to simmer a bit further first. In the meantime we have a few other things to look forward to:

  • Suicide pacts  So if Lori isn’t Lady MacBeth, what is she good for? She impotently implores Beth to stay strong for her family. “We can make now alright, and we have to.” This proves counterproductive with Beth, who shortly afterwards tells her sister “I want to go, in this bed, tonight.” Will there be accomplices? Maybe Andrea walks someone else up to the existential edge and back. As Camus said, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.” Is the farm about to turn into Jonestown?
  • Can any rule endure?  “There are no rules, Shane,” Rick says. Though we know Rick has one rule: Protect his family.
  • What is up with the walker in the field? Does Shane somehow identify with it? Does Rick see it? Is it a sign this place is actually crawling with walkers? Is it Shane’s worse fear: Wandering brain-dead in the wilderness? Why am I reminded of The Stranger?

The episode ends the way it began, with the two men in dialogue. “If you’re gonna kill me, you have to do better than a wrench,” Rick says. “If you’re gonna be with us, you have to follow my lead. You have to trust me.”

But I thought there were no rules?

Three episodes or less to the next collision. There can only be one Nietzchean Superman.

Walking Dead 2.9: Lori’s Lady MacBeth Moment

Posted: February 20, 2012 by zombieprofessor in Literary criticism, Zombie
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Spoiler alert: Don’t read this if you are waiting to see the Feb. 19 episode

Walking Dead fans who have lamented a shortage of gore and terrifying things at times during Season 2 were given just what they wanted at the beginning of this week’s show. The walker ripping its face off as it pushes through the broken windshield trying to get to Lori is one of those frightful images that makes this series so scary. That we don’t get these moments before each and every commercial break is a good thing. The pacing gives us time to come to care about the characters.

Speaking of the characters, a few of them are going through changes following the philosophical turn we analyzed last week.

Shane and Andrea now have a hostage who they can plot to kill, in direct defiance to Rick’s renewed attempt to fight for the sake of humanity and common decency. The idiot stranger who jumped off the roof and was almost left to be dined on by walkers—Randall—seems like he could have a Nordberg-esque existence. Sometimes characters are props and I suppose that’s fine. Do I smell a dramatic arc for next week’s episode?

One of the subtler signs that things have changed: At the 17:35 timestamp, Herschel (probably still drunk and having just seen a man get his face eaten) uses the word “Walkers” for what I believe is the first time, a word he rejected using back before the barn incident. His idealistic worldview is gone.

With the group severed from the fools’ errands that defined this season before the barn incident, this little slice of humanity is now teetering on an existential precipice. What I found most telling in this regard was the ending, when Lori and Rick are finally alone and Lori makes a case for getting rid of Shane:

“You killed the living to protect what’s yours?….Shane thinks I’m his. He thinks the baby is his. And he says you can’t protect us. That you’re going to get us killed. He’s dangerous, Rick, and he won’t stop.”

The will to power is in full effect. So too are the echoes of Lady MacBeth as Lori tries to steer her husband toward murder. As Lady MacBeth says in Act I, Scene iv:

That I may pour my spirits in thine ear,
And chastise with the valour of my tongue

It’s one thing for Rick to kill a stranger to protect his own people. It’s something else to kill his own people to protect his own people. But if anyone has the valorous tongue needed to talk Rick into offing his former best friend, it’s Lori.

Am I going overboard with the Shakespeare comparison? Probably—it wouldn’t be the first time the Zombie Professor took things too far. Are there simpler readings? Definitely. The Atlantic looks at this week’s episode as a trio of love stories and doesn’t seem to think much of the Rick/Lori/Shane triangle. I agree with them that Shane’s sometimes over-the-top belligerence could be reigned in. Apparently, so too do the show’s writers: Andrea tells Shane he should use a “lighter touch.”

But what’s more interesting to me is the possibility that Shane is right, that the group is focusing on the wrong things. “They want to play house….They are bound to get us all killed,” he says to Andrea. Could Shane be turning into a kind of Thug Cassandra?

(Probably not. After all, Rick knows something that none of us do; if anyone has prophetic wisdom, it’s the sheriff.)

Which brings us back to Lori’s Lady MacBeth scene. Lori may be right that Shane is violent…but her claim that “he’s going to get us killed” is weaker than Shane’s identical claim against Rick and Herschel. Rick and Herschel have consistently stood for grandiose notions and gallant quests, while Shane is about saving his own ass.   The three of them need one another to maintain balance in their fragile civilization. That’s why I don’t think the MacBeth comparison is overdone. Lori is threatening the group’s existence by trying to contaminate her husband with the same “you killed the living to protect what’s yours” thinking that has been driving Shane.

This doesn’t look like it’s going to end well.

Yes, the world is ready for a climate change/zombie mashup

Posted: February 18, 2012 by zombieprofessor in Literary criticism
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I’d like to look at two artifacts side by side.

First, AARP released a rather hilarious Betty White commercial involving zombies.

Second, one of the most promising movie concepts in years is heading straight for us. I haven’t been this excited since Snakes on a Plane.

Thanks in no small part to the novels (and now the movie) of Seth Grahame-Smith, we are clearly into the genre-bending age of this latest infatuation with zombies and vampires. This moment is akin to the first time somebody thought to combine Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” and “The Wizard of Oz.”

This kind of permissive genre-mashing is a good sign for new innovation in the zombie space, and for the Zombielanche project in particular.

The Walking Dead 2.8: Going Nietzsche in “Nebraska”

Posted: February 13, 2012 by zombieprofessor in Literary criticism
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Be warned: A couple spoilers in here if you haven’t seen the Feb. 12 episode.

Anyone following the Walking Dead has been waiting since Thanksgiving weekend for Season 2 to pick up again with Rick, Shane, and Herschel and their teetering grasp on humanity. The appropriately named “Pretty Much Dead Already” episode that left us all hanging over leftovers featured Shane’s revolt against Rick’s moral authority and Herschel’s fool’s hope. The culminating heartbreak and disillusionment over what all they found in the barn was one of the finer scenes in zombie history.

Which leaves us to pick up the pieces in “Nebraska,” though it turns out what we want is not what we get. The namesake scene—as Rick, Glenn, and Herschel meet the strangers Dave and Tony in the bar—speaks for itself.

Dave: Every group we came across had a new rumor about a way out of this thing.

Tony: One guy told us there was a Coast Guard sitting there in the gulf sending ferries to the islands.

Dave: The latest was a rail yard in Montgomery running trains to the middle of the country. Kansas. Nebraska.

Glenn: Nebraska?

Tony: Low population. Lots of guns.

Glenn: Kind of makes sense.

Dave: You ever been to Nebraska, kid? There’s a reason they call them flyover states.

Laughter. Rick takes a shot.

Dave: How about you guys?

Rick: Fort Benning, eventually.

Dave: I hate to piss in your cornflakes, officer, but we ran across a grunt who was stationed at Benning. Said the place was overrun by lame-brains.

Glenn: Fort Benning is gone? Are you for real?

Dave: Sadly I am. The ugly truth is, there is no way out of this mess. Just keep going from one pipe dream to the next, praying one of these mindless freaks doesn’t grab hold of you while you sleep.

What was the quest for Sophia but another Nebraska? Or (apparently) Fort Benning. Or the CDC? Which gets at what makes this show so compelling: the mix of suspense and existential dread.

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