Real Horror Movies
Once in a while, I find myself in a hotel, and since most hotels have cable TV, I get the chance to watch things I wouldn't ordinarily watch. Such was the case recently, when I took a look at the apocalyptic zombie movie 28 Days Later. Now, I must warn the reader that some spoilers lie below, so read on at your own risk.
28 Days Later is part of a subgenre of moviemaking that includes such end of the world films as The Omega Man (which must have been like a wet dream for future NRA president Charlton Heston, running around an abandoned city with a machine gun shooting at anything that moved) and The Quiet Earth, combined with the classic zombie film, best typified by Night of the Living Dead and its zillions of knock-offs.
In brief, the plot of 28 Days Later is as follows: Violent anti-vivsectionists break into a primate lab where research is being done on a virus called "Rage". They release an infected chimp, get infected, and spread the disease off camera. The virus seems to be a rather nasty combination of rabies and ebola, spreading through blood, with the effect of making the victim homicidal. We must suspend our disbelief a bit here, since any disease that acted as quickly as this one does would be fairly easy to contain in a country with an advanced public health infrastructure like Great Britain, given its apparent incubation period of about a minute and the fact that its symptoms are so hard to miss. But back to our story...
28 days later Jim, our protagonist, awakens from a coma to find that the virus has infected most of the population, effectively ending civilization in England and presumably the world (outbreaks in New York and Paris are mentioned).Jim joins up with some other uninfected folks and for a while he fights the hordes of the infected zombies while trying to remain uninfected himself. Eventually, he joins with a lady pharmacist and a father and daughter to locate the source of a radio message that promises hope, and they flee London for the countryside.
What they find is a group of about a dozen soldiers who have barricaded themselves in an old English manor house, hoping to hold out until the infected all starve to death. For a brief time there seems to be hope, but then the movie takes a darker turn, as the despairing soldiers have been promised women by their commander in order to maintain hope and discipline. Apparently they have given up on the future and figure they might as well spend the rest of their lives at least getting laid, even if it's with a young teen girl. The later part of the movie focuses not on Jim fighting the infected, but on Jim fighting the soldiers, who decide to kill him since he won't join in their little rape-a-thon (the girl's dad is already dead, having become infected and then getting shot).
Responses to this turn, if we may judge by the reviews for the movie over at Amazon, are mixed. To be sure, it is an unusual twist for a zombie film, which typically thrive on their black and white ethics (kill or be killed), and many horror film fans were disappointed by the movie's lack of explicit gore and its shift in attention away from the zombies. But I found the plot twist, and indeed the depiction of "Rage" as a disease, to be quite interesting. Rage, as we can see in the astonishingly violent world of today, is indeed infectious. What distinguishes the "infected" of 28 Days Later is that their rage is depicted in such a physical way, screaming and vomiting blood and all. Rage is ugly, and to manifest it physically the way this film does is a fascinating allegory.
But rage is not the most terrifying thing about 28 Days Later. The infected zombies are in fact not terrifying at all; they are sick and dangerous, and there are certainly some scary moments when Jim and his comrades are fleeing from them, but what makes this film most horrifying is the behavior of the survivors, particularly the soldiers.
British soldiers are among the best trained in the world, notorious for their discipline, and when the soldiers first appeared in the film I felt a natural sense of relief. They represented hope, organization, and civilization, all of which had been lost in the chaos of the epidemic. But as I noted above, this quickly turned sour as they made their intentions clear. These men were in fact much more frightening than the zombies, because the evil they intended could not be blamed on a virus but was rather a basic part of their being human. And most of all, it was so believable, their behavior.
In today's world soldiers occupy a fairly exalted place. There are people out there like Osama bin Laden who really do want to kill millions of us, who want to destroy civilization, and soldiers are quite correctly seen as a part of our defense against such monsters. We need soldiers, as anyone who has ever witnessed the use of the military in response to natural disasters can attest. But it is important as well to remember that soldiers are human too, and that they are trained to kill, and that war is never as ethically simple as a zombie movie. By virtue of their weapons and training, soldiers possess very real power, and it is an unfortunate fact of history that human beings with power are inherently corruptible.
We combat this danger with laws and tradition. In the United Stares and Britain, the military is supposed to be under civilian command, and these civilians are, in theory at least, elected officials. And there is no doubt that the militaries of both countries do not, by and large, currently present a threat to their own populations, as the militaries of nations without the rule of law often do; the situation becomes even worse in societies where the rule of law has broken down and the streets are ruled by armed gangs. But the recent Abu Ghriab scandal, no less than the My Lai massacre, demonstrates that none of us, even the soldiers of the most professional armies in history, are immune to the corrosive effects of violence and the sense of power that comes from controlling a weapon.
We need the military, and to be sure the majority of our veterans deserve our compassion and our respect (two things our current administration often seems loathe to give them) but to worship the institution as flawless and to overlook its very real failings is to court disaster. If anything, the need for firm ethics is strongest in wartime or other times of stress, because these are precisely the times when the abuse of power is most likely. And so we should, I think, take the plot twist found in 28 Days Later as a warning; the time to be most careful of our own behavior, and the time to demand the best behavior from our armed forces is not in times of peace when things are easy, but rather in hard and frightening times, when armies of zombies are at the gates, or when the far more frightening monsters are flying airplanes into buildings.
If our military does not hold itself to high ethical standards, we will quickly find that the country they are supposed to defend will not be worth defending.
28 Days Later is part of a subgenre of moviemaking that includes such end of the world films as The Omega Man (which must have been like a wet dream for future NRA president Charlton Heston, running around an abandoned city with a machine gun shooting at anything that moved) and The Quiet Earth, combined with the classic zombie film, best typified by Night of the Living Dead and its zillions of knock-offs.
In brief, the plot of 28 Days Later is as follows: Violent anti-vivsectionists break into a primate lab where research is being done on a virus called "Rage". They release an infected chimp, get infected, and spread the disease off camera. The virus seems to be a rather nasty combination of rabies and ebola, spreading through blood, with the effect of making the victim homicidal. We must suspend our disbelief a bit here, since any disease that acted as quickly as this one does would be fairly easy to contain in a country with an advanced public health infrastructure like Great Britain, given its apparent incubation period of about a minute and the fact that its symptoms are so hard to miss. But back to our story...
28 days later Jim, our protagonist, awakens from a coma to find that the virus has infected most of the population, effectively ending civilization in England and presumably the world (outbreaks in New York and Paris are mentioned).Jim joins up with some other uninfected folks and for a while he fights the hordes of the infected zombies while trying to remain uninfected himself. Eventually, he joins with a lady pharmacist and a father and daughter to locate the source of a radio message that promises hope, and they flee London for the countryside.
What they find is a group of about a dozen soldiers who have barricaded themselves in an old English manor house, hoping to hold out until the infected all starve to death. For a brief time there seems to be hope, but then the movie takes a darker turn, as the despairing soldiers have been promised women by their commander in order to maintain hope and discipline. Apparently they have given up on the future and figure they might as well spend the rest of their lives at least getting laid, even if it's with a young teen girl. The later part of the movie focuses not on Jim fighting the infected, but on Jim fighting the soldiers, who decide to kill him since he won't join in their little rape-a-thon (the girl's dad is already dead, having become infected and then getting shot).
Responses to this turn, if we may judge by the reviews for the movie over at Amazon, are mixed. To be sure, it is an unusual twist for a zombie film, which typically thrive on their black and white ethics (kill or be killed), and many horror film fans were disappointed by the movie's lack of explicit gore and its shift in attention away from the zombies. But I found the plot twist, and indeed the depiction of "Rage" as a disease, to be quite interesting. Rage, as we can see in the astonishingly violent world of today, is indeed infectious. What distinguishes the "infected" of 28 Days Later is that their rage is depicted in such a physical way, screaming and vomiting blood and all. Rage is ugly, and to manifest it physically the way this film does is a fascinating allegory.
But rage is not the most terrifying thing about 28 Days Later. The infected zombies are in fact not terrifying at all; they are sick and dangerous, and there are certainly some scary moments when Jim and his comrades are fleeing from them, but what makes this film most horrifying is the behavior of the survivors, particularly the soldiers.
British soldiers are among the best trained in the world, notorious for their discipline, and when the soldiers first appeared in the film I felt a natural sense of relief. They represented hope, organization, and civilization, all of which had been lost in the chaos of the epidemic. But as I noted above, this quickly turned sour as they made their intentions clear. These men were in fact much more frightening than the zombies, because the evil they intended could not be blamed on a virus but was rather a basic part of their being human. And most of all, it was so believable, their behavior.
In today's world soldiers occupy a fairly exalted place. There are people out there like Osama bin Laden who really do want to kill millions of us, who want to destroy civilization, and soldiers are quite correctly seen as a part of our defense against such monsters. We need soldiers, as anyone who has ever witnessed the use of the military in response to natural disasters can attest. But it is important as well to remember that soldiers are human too, and that they are trained to kill, and that war is never as ethically simple as a zombie movie. By virtue of their weapons and training, soldiers possess very real power, and it is an unfortunate fact of history that human beings with power are inherently corruptible.
We combat this danger with laws and tradition. In the United Stares and Britain, the military is supposed to be under civilian command, and these civilians are, in theory at least, elected officials. And there is no doubt that the militaries of both countries do not, by and large, currently present a threat to their own populations, as the militaries of nations without the rule of law often do; the situation becomes even worse in societies where the rule of law has broken down and the streets are ruled by armed gangs. But the recent Abu Ghriab scandal, no less than the My Lai massacre, demonstrates that none of us, even the soldiers of the most professional armies in history, are immune to the corrosive effects of violence and the sense of power that comes from controlling a weapon.
We need the military, and to be sure the majority of our veterans deserve our compassion and our respect (two things our current administration often seems loathe to give them) but to worship the institution as flawless and to overlook its very real failings is to court disaster. If anything, the need for firm ethics is strongest in wartime or other times of stress, because these are precisely the times when the abuse of power is most likely. And so we should, I think, take the plot twist found in 28 Days Later as a warning; the time to be most careful of our own behavior, and the time to demand the best behavior from our armed forces is not in times of peace when things are easy, but rather in hard and frightening times, when armies of zombies are at the gates, or when the far more frightening monsters are flying airplanes into buildings.
If our military does not hold itself to high ethical standards, we will quickly find that the country they are supposed to defend will not be worth defending.
posted by Unknown at 10:00 AM
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