Halloween is a scared time in which we respect the dead by
watching them feast on the living. During my zombie movie marathon two films
stood out to me. Land of the Dead and Warm Bodies. In both films the zombies
were humanized. In each film the majority, the dead, was harassed and oppressed
by the minority that hid behind walls and towers. In each film a revolution
occurs to liberate the masses.
In Land of the Dead the revolution is violent.
·
A zombie leader wearing the uniform of a working
class man teaches his fellow zombies how to use the tools of their oppressors
to invade the fancy towering symbol of exploitive capitalism.
·
They succeed but only in occupying on settlement
and gaining the respect of the middle class. The middle class moves to the top
of the power chain.
·
They violently impose assimilation on the
population. Those that don’t want to be assimilated, aka zombified, must flee.
·
In the end society remains segregated between
the living and the dead.
·
If Touisant d’Oveture were a zombie this would
have been the revolution he sought.
|  In Warm Bodies the revolution is non-violent.
·
A curious zombie falls in love with a living
girl. Their love becomes an infectious example for other zombies that haven’t
gone mad from hunger.
·
This non-violent revolution is only non-violent
between two parties: the humans and the sane zombies. The third party, the
depraved zombies, is deemed too extreme and militant. Thus it is dealt with
violently.
·
The societies are bond by love and soon integrate
and eventually undergo transculturation.
·
If James Baldwin were a zombie this is how he
would have sought his liberation.
|
Both revolutions are successful by their own terms. However,
the imagery in Land of the Dead is far more indicative of the intersectionality
of oppression. It uses working class uniforms to signify economic oppression. The
way the camera tends to linger on the front female zombie in the soft ball
uniform signifies gender based oppression while stereotypes about soft ball
players are relied on to hint at heterosexism. It’s no accident that a man that
looks like an angry black buck leads the zombie revolution. These stereotypes
are used for understanding not from laziness.
Warm Bodies however avoids the intersectionality off
oppression and instead plays out an ancient vs modern dichotomy. It claims that
humanity and the rights that go with it are not determined by a pulse or the
circulation in your skin, but in the capacity to love other humans. Thus it
relies on the assumption that society is beyond its “–isms” and that all humans
are treated equally.
Both are good movies. Their differences begin and end with
their genres. Land of the Dead is a drama while Warm Bodies is a romance.
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