My Wednesday Plans

Tomorrow night I'll be here, catching the show and the pre- and post-festivities. I can't tell you how juiced I am.

I just rewatched Day of the Dead and, while I think it has some obvious charms, it's still clearly the lesser of the three films for me. More complete remarks are in a draft post I hope to finish tonight. The other draft post concerns Rosetta, but that probably won't come tonight. I wrote a couple of pages after seeing the Batman movie to try to work through why it left me so unmoved, and I'd like to put them up later tonight as well.

It's funny, though, and I've spent a little time over the past week wondering about why I've given up on comic book movies generally while clinging to Romero's oevre. One of my first thoughts after emerging from the theater last week was that the odds are heavily stacked against me liking War of the Worlds. Based on where I felt my mind drifting during Batman, I think that I'm getting to the point where When the Fate...of the World...Hangs in the Balance...I am just bored out of my skull. I couldn't have felt less invested in the saving of Gotham City. I seem to have liked Revenge of the Sith more than most of my correspondents, and perhaps that's because there's the plausible possibility of the hero's failure (which becomes, of course, reality). Katie Holmes deciding she can't be part of any relationship that involves a person wearing masks is not a credible stand-in for dramatic tension or heroic failure, no matter how bright the Irony-Signal shines in the moonlit night sky.

This is the summer where thirtysomething man-boys wax rhapsodically about how much wookiees meant to them during those formative years. All right, I'll play. My parents split up right around Easter of 1983. I was finishing sixth grade. Return of the Jedi came out that summer and I was all over it. I saw it three times in the theater. In contrast to that space fantasy holdover from my preteen years, my family life paradigm was shifted and reinvented every month or so. Plus, that fall I started seventh grade at the junior high, which threw the 75 or so of us from my elementary school in with unfamiliar kids from four or five other feeder elementary schools. Everything was possible. For a kid like me, it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to move away from the robots and spaceships dork that I'd cheerfully embodied. When I met a new friend with a worldly high school brother who perpetually wore those cheap concert t-shirts with the black body and white three-quarter sleeves, it was a chance to hear a lot of new music and to get a VHS dub of Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead.

Sure, to my thirteen year-old eyes, the attraction was largely the thrill of holding something generally-forbidden or antisocial. Gorewise, I'd never seen anything like it. The stories were compelling, maybe less so than that of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but substantially moreso than the other ripoff films that followed in the wake of Star Wars and Raiders. For my friends and I, the dystopia of Romero's films made us put ourselves in his characters' places in a way that few, if any, other films had managed to do. Sure, at the beginning, it was the same sort of quasi-Red Dawn survivalist hokum that kids would be spinning a year down the road. Where would you hide? Where would you get weapons? Who would you save? But it always went further than that with Romero's films for us because the films steadfastly refuse to rest on the us/them distinctions that let kids think they can be a Wolverine and rule the hills if they get some guns and cheerios. I couldn't have articulated it then, certainly, but Romero's zombie films have always been all about destroying the Other that fuels both horror movies and real-life genocides. We're all just a bite away from being the Other.

I'll now invoke that cliche about movies that grow with you. Imagine the montage: me watching the films at 13, mulleted and talking with my pals about the safest place to go. Then me watching the films at 18, getting the subtexts a little better. In my twenties I watch them more infrequently, preferring cleaner escapist fun for the first few years and misplacing that old VHS dub during a move. And then my late twenties/thirties, when DVD makes fantastic versions of these films cheap and widely-available and I'm impressed by how much is in there behind the blood.

Apart from the Romero movies, I never got into gore. I can't tell any of the Friday the 13th movies apart. Apart from his recut of Dawn, I've never seen an Argento film. Still, I count Romero's films as among the most meaningful to me because they're so clearly more than genre films, and I'd rank his first two Dead films in the top ten American horror films, in the same rarefied air as Bride of Frankenstein, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Freaks, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Rosemary's Baby.

Both Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead open with the female leads waking from nightmares. It's not just lazy repetition. What they're dreaming of is a doomsday that has come true, and the innocent desire to wake up and discover that it was all the mind's trickery is all the hope that remains. Can I tell you that I've never dreamed of flying in an X-Wing or fighting a lightsaber battle? Sure, that Joseph Campbell hero's journey bullshit might run rampant through our myth patterns, but it never ran freely through my subconscious. Nor have I ever literally dreamed that I was a superhero. But over the last twenty years, I've dreamed at least ten times that I was in Romero's broken world where there's no more room in hell. Man, waking up from that dream is something else. It runs deep. And tomorrow night I'll probably get the chance to shake his hand and tell him thanks.