The exact consciousness level of a zombie

This post contains some spoilers about 28 Weeks Later and Warm Bodies. 

One of the reasons I ultimately didn't like 28 Weeks Later -- and more to the point, the main reason I regularly tell people I didn't like it -- is because (spoiler alert) Zombie Robert Carlyle stalks his own children.

That's right, he's been bitten by another zombie and so he becomes one himself, divorcing himself from all remnants of his former life. (I know, I know, they're not "zombies" -- they are infected with "the rage"). Yet when he crosses paths with his children, which I believe happens more than once, he breaks away from the horde to follow them.

I allow this complaint to stand in for a number of other problems I have with the movie, because sometimes it's easier just to focus on one thing. But I did really find it to be a serious problem. The movie sets up a world where zombies are unthinking killing machines who harbor no ability to make distinctions between their prey, or to have the capacity to prefer one prey over another even if they could make distinctions. In fact, pretty much every zombie movie you've ever seen sets up that same world.

The reason I didn't dig 28 Weeks Later ends up being the same reason I did dig Warm Bodies, which I saw on Friday night. Some people may find it problematic. I found it endearing, and ultimately, incredibly emotionally rich.

It may be clear from this movie's setup -- a zombie boy falls in love with a living girl -- that the zombies you're getting in Warm Bodies are not your typical shuffling, shambling brain-eaters. Oh, they eat brains alright, but it's for a specific purpose: Eating the brains of their victims allows them to experience the memories of those victims, just for a minute or so. It's like the zombie version of a powerful drug, a drug that temporarily reminds them what it felt like to be alive.

This alone I liked, but Warm Bodies is a unique take on a zombie movie in a number of other ways as well.

The desire to experience another's memories underscores the ways these zombies are still human. And that's kind of what Warm Bodies made me realize: Zombies don't have to be unthinking killing machines. Why couldn't they be just human beings struggling with their new mode of existence? Human beings who feel a newfound compulsion toward cannibalism that they loathe, but that they must yield to in order to survive?

Warm Bodies smartly establishes these former humans as beings in a state of limbo. They certainly aren't alive, but there's another brand of undead that's far more gone than they are. In the parlance of the movie, the zombies we're talking about are referred to as "corpses." However, there are also "skeletons," who look like this:

Essentially, skeletons are corpses who picked all their skin away, like you or I would pick at a scab. Although the movie doesn't specifically state this, you might surmise that the inability to stop tearing away loose flaps of skin escalates at the same rate that they degenerate irrevocably into madness. Corpses aren't really sure what they're doing; skeletons are fully committed to being the eating, killing ids that they are.

Put a bit more directly: Corpses might still be saved.

This idea that the zombies of Warm Bodies might not be lost causes allows for suspensions of disbelief that would otherwise be quite problematic. Like, the fact that our main zombie, dubbed R because he can only remember the first letter of his first name, can speak, a little bit. Like the fact that he makes moral choices. Like the fact that he returns each night to a makeshift home in an airplane, where he plays old vinyl albums that he collected when he was still alive. Like the fact that he falls in love.

If any of these things had happened in 28 Weeks Later, I would have laughed them out of the building. And in fact, because something sort of like this does happen -- a violation of the rules the movie has established -- I consider 28 Weeks to be lesser.

Warm Bodies establishes its own rules, and I quickly decided that I dug them. Zombies movies, on the whole, have always been part of a satirical tradition. They got their start as a means of commenting on us and who we are, and the comments were never positive. That's the big difference with Warm Bodies. It does have that satirical edge, most notably in a flashback scene in which we're all seen interacting with our phones more than each other. But it also has room for the optimism that human beings are characterized by their desire to improve. Zombies aren't content being what they are; they want to fight their basest impulses to become something more enlightened. They want to rise above.

The fact that the movie is narrated by R, as though he were a fully conscious and capable narrator trapped inside the body of the undead, is just one more indication of the kind of zombie movie this wants to be. It wants to explore our capacity for change, and the everyday heroism of overcoming our limitations. That makes us human as much as all our regrettable pettiness.

So I'm okay with a zombie who still sort of remembers what it was like to be human, and wishes he could get there again. It lends extra poignancy to his primitive attempts at rescuing the girl he loves from danger. If it's going to deliver me the kind of emotional catharsis this movie did, I'm okay with a zombie who thinks, who chooses, who decides. 

Besides, R has a really great record collection.

Zombies vs. vampires

I saw four movies yesterday.

As far as I'm aware, this ties a modern personal record. (I say "modern" because when I was a toddler, I regularly watched six, seven movies a day. This was before MTV killed my attention span.) I can see myself having watched five movies in a day once, but I don't recall those particular circumstances, so I won't swear to it.

I also feel pretty confident saying this is the first time I've watched movies featuring zombies (Diary of the Dead) and vampires (Let the Right One In) in the same day. Diary of the Dead -- or, George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead, depending on your level of formality -- follows the recent Cloverfield/Quarantine model of crazy events spiraling out of control, being captured by someone who'd been filming something else entirely. Let the Right One In is the 2008 Swedish chiller that's already being hailed as one of the best vampire movies of all time -- enough that they are remaking it this year as an inevitably horrible Hollywood film. (Though the director of Cloverfield is directing, so I have some hope.)

But I'm not here today to talk about the merits of these films, only their thematic similarities. As I watched them yesterday, it got me thinking how much vampires and zombies actually have in common. They are both undead creatures. They both spread their infection through the bite. They both feed off humans, though vampires are clearly only in it for the blood, while zombies like chomping whatever flesh and bone they can get their hands on. (And don't think I consider this some great revelation that no one else has ever identified.)

Of course, vampires and zombies differ in many important ways as well -- vampires are sexy and usually have personalities, while zombies are vacant and erratic.

But one of the biggest differences between them -- and this is where I think I've struck an original thought -- is what the people in their worlds know about them. And I realized something very funny about vampire movies and zombie movies:

In vampire movies, all the characters know what a vampire is.

In zombie movies, none of the characters have ever heard of a zombie.

To make this a little more explicit, vampire movies almost always contain the word "vampire"; zombie movies rarely contain the word "zombie." It's almost as though the word "vampire" refers to a known creature in the mythozoological universe, whereas the word "zombie" refers to a genre of film, meaning that using the word stigmatizes and demystifies the actual zombies in the film.

Yesterday's films were a perfect example of this phenomenon. In Diary of the Dead, the word "zombie" is never uttered. The characters refer to the happenings in generic, descriptive ways, like "People who are dying are not staying dead" or "He's become one of them." In Let the Right One In (and this is not giving much away), the little boy starts to get suspicious of the behavior of the 12-year-old girl next door, and asks her directly, "Are you a vampire?"

This familiarity/unfamiliarity extends to knowing the rules that govern both types of creatures. In Diary, they have to learn as they go. "Shoot it in the head! That's the only way it will stay down!" We've seen characters figure out the whole "shoot it in the head" thing in dozens of zombie movies. No one knows it instinctively. In Let the Right One In, the actual title refers to one of the known rules about vampires -- that they have to be invited in to a person's home. When vampires appear in vampire movies, no one needs to tell a person what they have to do to protect themselves. In under five minutes flat, they're wearing a necklace of garlic and sharpening a stake in the shape of a cross.

Now, I may be playing dumb here a little bit. There may be a very simple explanation for all this. After all, the concept of vampires, in all cultures, has been around for millenia, and the Oxford English Dictionary records the first usage of the actual term in the year 1734. Conversely, the zombie has its history in Afro-Caribbean culture, and the word itself did not enter English usage until 1871. But does the relative newness of zombies excuse the fact that no one seems to know about them?

Let's take it one step further. In movies where there are aliens, everyone knows what an alien is. If they see something they can't identify walk out of a space ship, of course it's an alien. They don't have to learn the concept of "alien." But people are always having to learn the concept of "zombie." If people know aliens from the alien stories in our collective subconscious, and people know vampires from the vampire stories in our collective subconscious, how come none of these movies posits a world where there are zombie stories in our collective subconscious? The world of Diary of the Dead does not have a single zombie movie in it?

(I should pause here to acknowledge that there are, in fact, plenty of zombie movies where they use the word zombie -- but these tend to be the ones that are tongue-in-cheek, better categorized as "zom coms" than horrors.)

This is something for a much longer discussion, but every film, regardless of genre, must first ask itself: "What exists in our world?" You could drive yourself crazy with this question. In the world of Spider-Man, does the Superman comic book exist? Or is this crazy spider dude the person who is actually introducing the characters to the concept of a superhero? If they're aware of the concept of a superhero, which superheroes do exist? I'll be interested to see how they tackle that when the Marvel characters start to appear in each other's movies, namely, the Hulk and Iron Man. If Iron Man was like nothing they'd ever seen, and the Hulk was like nothing they'd ever seen, but they both exist in the same world, which phenomenon appeared first? Let's say it was the Hulk. When Iron Man came along, why didn't somebody say, "Ah yes, this guy is kind of like the Hulk. He's an unusually strong creature who has the ability to fight bad people in a way that's beyond heroic -- almost super-heroic."

You can even extend it to real people. If Mel Gibson is playing a character in a movie, does the actual Mel Gibson exist in that world? What if Mel Gibson's character has a reason in the story to refer to Danny Glover, the real actor? Was that version of Danny Glover ever the star of a movie called Lethal Weapon? This can be dangerous territory, as Steven Soderbergh found in Ocean's 12, where Julia Roberts (playing a character named Tess) is conveniently mistaken for the actual Julia Roberts -- and it's one of the main plot points.

Sometimes these debates are better left rhetorical.