Sometimes an arterial spray is just an arterial spray

George A. Romero's Land of the Dead

Certain movies, regardless of their content, are automatically labeled social commentary. Any hood drama is social commentary. Most movies adapted from plays—by simple virtue of having been plays and thus high art—are considered to be social commentary. These are just two examples.

Many directors, writers and producers, having spent time in one or more of these genres get automatically grandfathered in and all of their work, the entire gaping maw from music videos to video wills, is considered deep social commentary (because, after all, it was created by a social commentator!). Each film is then studied and restudied.

And so it is that every movie ever touched by Woody Allen, Spike Lee, John Singleton, David Mamet, are all considered penetrating critical works. The less obvious are just the more cleverly disguised.

Except they aren’t.

For every “Annie Hall”, there’s a “Curse of the Jade Scorpion”.

Every “Boyz ‘n tha Hood” has its "Shaft".

Every "Glengary Glen Ross" and "Wag the Dog" has its "Heist" and "Ronin".

Every "Do The Right Thing" has everything else Spike Lee has ever done.

As much as we may love these latter examples, they aren’t social commentary. They aren’t satire. They don’t have their finger on the pulse of the Common Man. They aren’t a withering indictment of modernity.

Sometimes a crappy noir homage, a blacksploitation remake, two caper flicks and an assload of black comedies are just that.

Then come the inevitable comparisons to Vonnegut and Twain that these withering indictors—these pulse-takers of the common man—ultimately garner. I won’t justify them other than to say this: Even Vonnegut has his Hocus Pocus; even Twain, his “Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County”.

Or simply: sometimes a jumping frog is just a jumping frog.

Yes yes, and 300 words without even mentioning the film I’m actually reviewing. Here’s the bridge: What John Singleton is to the hood, what Woody Allen is to neurotics and New Yorkers, what Twain is to every red-blooded, progressive, freedom-loving American, George A. Romero is to the B Zombie movie.

Both its progenitor and most confident auteur.

He is, essentially, the whole genre. Judging by the Entertainment Tonight segments and from years of hearing my friend Ben talk the finer points of zombie flicks, it seems Romero—and, hence, the genre—has lots to say about your elected officials and your way of life in general.

I haven’t seen much of his work, so I took Ben and the hype at face value, expecting George A. Romero to be Elizabeth Cadie, Jonathan Swift and Jesus Christ simultaneously.

I expected to emerge changed.

Being conditioned to look for a bold statement, that’s exactly what I did. Look.

“Land of the Dead. Well hell, that’s a statement right there, right? Isn’t it? It has to be. Like ‘this land is your land’, except it’s not anymore, because it’s overrun. Yeah. By evil. Yeah. Utterly inhospitable to life. Yeah. Because of the zombies, but also because of repression. YEAH. And denial of rights. GOD YES,” really cheering myself on now, “brought about by the Patriot Act. And globalization. The failing dollar. And McCarthyism. Good God: taxation without representation! America really is the Land of the Dead!”

Before the opening credits, this was already the most broad and convincing social satire I’d ever seen. Unbelievable. A master stroke.

Except it wasn’t. And once the zombies popped up and people started fleeing from them, I had to double back. That reading didn’t quite work. Not much about globalization here. Or the Patriot Act. No Texan Presidents at all really.

“So: the zombies are the victims here, not the people they’re eating. Right. Okay. So the zombies are killers, but only because they are the lowest of the low. They are this way because of repression. Because they cannot exist within the system, they must exist outside it. YES. They are the proletariat. Oops, that’s Marx, can’t be that. So: Like: The pursuit of wealth has made them animals, made other humans mere objects—mere stepping stones toward greater power. Power being wealth. Wealth being capital. Das Kapital. Damn.”

If the only rhetorical subtext you can find in an American film is Marxist, you’re probably barking up the wrong tree. That dog don’t hunt around these parts, even in liberal Hollywood.

Nancy Reagan made sure of that.

Point being: if you have to try that hard to find the angle, it ain’t commentary and it sure ain’t satire.

Even at a very immature, very ignorant 16, I knew The Crucible was appreciably different than The Scarlet Letter. I didn’t know why, but if I had been an immature, ignorant 16-year-old growing up during the Red Scare, I think I would have nailed it.

So here I was, watching flesh torn gorgeously from bone, heads lugubriously lopped of shoulders during a time of unrest, paranoia, red alerts, Amber alerts, Wal-Mart and the Patriot Act, and I just couldn’t see it. The satire.

So I made the tough call and gave up the search.

Thus I conclude: Dennis Hopper saying “we don’t negotiate with terrorists” is not enough to justify calling an entire film into social commentary.

Or simply: sometimes a zombie is just a zombie.

That is not to say these zombies are without worth. In a time when the expedient answer for any technical problem in Hollywood is a computer generated effect, “Land of the Dead” shows just how woefully inadequate that technology is, even with a fairly high budget.

Romero uses CG for some things but not others. There are very few CG shots in all. John Leguizamo’s weapon of choice is some kind of bolt shooter. Most of the rest of characters just use guns. When John kills a zombie, it’s CG and it looks laughably bad, obviously fake, like the whole of “Star Wars” Episodes I through III.

When everyone else kills a zombie, Romero is actually placing explosives into a latex cavity with fake brains and fake fluid and fake blood. The latter way of exploding heads—the way directors have been exploding heads since the golden age of Hollywood—is so much better and more realistic as to not even be a contest. And when a zombie takes a big bite out of a forearm or twists off a woman’s head, sending her pearls scattering—Mister, you better believe that ain’t a computer.

Maybe that, finally, is the commentary I was looking for.

No matter how fast your workstation is, no matter its rendering capabilities, it’ll never beat a real fake head, exploded with care, in the old way, like Lucio Fulci used to do.

Read the full thing here.