LITTLE PRINCESS ZOMBIES! Wow …
OK, I’m going to get pretty deep into the movie here, so, major spoilers ahead (for a movie approaching the first anniversary of its theatrical release, I’m just saying) including the ending. Also, certain people (read: my wife) who have an aversion to intense examination of the Children In Peril trope might also want to proceed with caution, because that gets a little rough.
Rougher than the little zombie princesses, too. That’s really not too harrowing a visual, all things considered. It comes early in the flick, as I mentioned, and it’s in service of a swerve punchline as an uninfected suburban mom is being chased by an entire birthday party full of zombie-infected little girls and the mom gets to her minivan and drives off and seems on the verge of escape and then gets into a car accident and goes flying out the windshield, hits the pavement, and dies, all of which allows the narrator to segue smoothly from advising zombie apocalypse survivors to avoid sentimentality to reminding everyone to always wear their seatbelts, which becomes a running joke for the duration of the movie.
And running jokes are a crucial part of the movie, because at heart Zombieland is a piece of entertainment that is hyperaware of itself as a work of fiction and specifically a movie that fits in to the history of all movies, horror movies of course but comedies arguably even moreso. To take the notion of a survivalist road movie full of gruesome cannibal horrors and make it a comedy just about requires that everything possible be done to heighten the artificiality of the experience so it doesn’t become too scary. So there’s the narrator’s voiceover, and there’s the narrator himself as the utterly unlikely protagonist with neuroses, phobias, and irritable bowel syndrome, and there’s the narrator’s aforementioned rules for staying alive, which appear on screen not just as text but as 3D text occupying space amidst the scenery and sometimes being affected by the unfolding action.
All that would likely be more than enough, but just to pile it on some more all of the main characters are pop culture junkies. A key part of post-apocalyptic narrative is comparing the world in the time of the story to the world that came before the disaster, and you could examine big things like religion then and now, or human decency then and now, or how technology functions (or fails to function) when the systems break down, or any big important things along those lines. Or, you can keep things breezy and just keep pointing out the dumb pop-culty things that people remember, whether that manifests as Twinkie addiction or Hannah Montana superfandom or compulsive movie-quoting including Bill Murray worship. In fact Bill Murray is in the movie as himself and as yet another survivor, discovered when the main characters crash at his mansion in Beverly Hills. Unfortunately he doesn’t last long because the zombie disguise that has allowed him to escape being eaten gets him fatally shot by the narrator, oops.
And that’s another thing that Zombieland traffics in: the subversion of expectations, as all quality comedies must do. I’ve already mentioned the improbable hero, and there’s also his reluctant ally and his love interest and the third act romantic complication and threatened dissolution of the reluctant alliance, and all of those get subverted because the ally isn’t just a lovable rogue, he’s actually totally insane, and the love interest isn’t a damsel in distress, she’s a con artist constantly getting one over on the narrator-hero, including the romantic complication wherein she steals his car AGAIN to start the third act, and the dissolution happens but lasts for exactly three seconds when the narrator-hero tries o ride off on his new motorcycle and can’t make it down the driveway without wobbling and tipping over and the lovably insane rogue feels sorry for him.
Of course these subversions only work as subversions if you’ve seen enough movies to expect all the standard beats which Zombieland suggests and then zigzags around. And so, again and again, Zombieland always reminds the audience that it is a movie just like lots of other movies they’ve seen, part of a venerable old tradition, which sets up expectations in order to knock them down.
And so, you would think I would have seen the Children In Peril trope coming because, one way or the other, how could it not show up? And I admit, when they foreshadowed it, I deliberated how much to expect a later reveal. (As if I were watching the movie with someone else and needed to decide how cocky to be about predicting things. I was, in fact, alone.) The lovable crazy rogue, played by Woody Harrelson, explains his zombie-killing motivations in the first act by saying he had a puppy named Buck whom the zombies killed, and hence. This is accompanied by an absurd over the top flashback set to “Puppy Love” of Woody feeding the dog pancakes and giving the dog a bath and wrestling with and kissing the dog in the yard. All of that pairs nicely with a shot of Woody driving an SUV past a zombie feasting on a corpse in the middle of the road, and slamming the corpse with the open driver’s side door. (Zombie slapstick is pretty tough to beat.) And yes, of course, I’ve seen M*A*S*H and the chicken episode (ok, no, I haven’t, but everybody knows that episode) and whenever a fictional character tells a story of personal tragedy involving an animal that would be even worse if the animal were a human being, I’m on alert. But … but … as Zombieland continued the subversive thought parade I started to think maybe Woody’s character really was motivated by the death of his dog which is a cute little metajoke in and of itself.
Well, no, of course not. By the end of act two Woody gets caught telling stories about Buck that can’t possibly apply to a dog and it’s supposed to be a big, humanizing, straight-faced emotional development beat and it shouldn’t work because it’s such a cliché but the thing that saves it is they do the whole “Puppy Love” flashback again except this time it’s not Buck the puppy it’s Buck the 3- or 4-year-old kid and (a) he is adorable and (b) suddenly things like making pancakes and giving baths and wrestling and kissing don’t seem comically excessive they seem normal and real and (c) they never show Buck-the-kid getting killed by zombies but the audience knows from Woody’s sobbing that it happened which means you can’t not think about it and it’s all the more horrible for being all in your head.
So here’s where things get really crazy. For two acts it’s been this deliberately goofy, smart-ass, smirking comedy where every indicator seems to point toward all the protagonists (a group which sadly does not include Bill Murray) surviving and even finding a happy ending. Then they pull out the whole Woody has a dead kid and “nothing left to lose” angle and, hang on, what kind of movie is this after all? Woody and the narrator-hero have to go save the female love interest and her obligatory little sister from an amusement park crawling with zombies (including one zombie-clown because see all evidence above and how could you make a super-referential zom-com and not put that particular double-nightmare meme in it?) and Woody does the madman-cranked-to-11 thing to attract the attention of all the zombies and give the narrator-hero a chance at the rescue, which leads to what felt like twenty minutes of nothing but gunplay and meat-splatter. And that culminates in Woody locking himself inside a game booth with grates on the windows, having expended all his rifle ammo, armed only with two hand guns and several clips of ammo, and the film slows down and the music swells and the zombie army swarms the booth and Woody just fires and fires and fires through the grates and reloads and fires and fires and fires again and the zombies keep coming and it is a Last Stand of all Last Stands.
Totally lighthearted gross-yet-funny Zombieland up to the Buck-was-actually-his-kid reveal: everybody lives.
Fairly dark black-humor Zombieland after the Buck-was-actually-his-kid reveal: Woody dies, right? They put it right there in the narrator’s voice-over: “When the zombies took his son he had nothing left to lose.” That spells tragic-yet-glorious death, I would have bet the popcorn-and-Milk-Duds farm on it.
But obviously that’s me, and once again we run smack into Everything IS Different Now. I think losing a child is the ultimate personal tragedy. I think losing a child (a toddler! in unthinkably hideous fashion!) is something you don’t ever come back from, and which makes happy endings categorically impossible. But (and I clearly need help remembering this from time to time) I am not a movie.
So yeah, they cut away while he’s still outnumbered by zombies and the ammo is running low and the booth itself is losing structural integrity, but Woody lives, and the shot when they come back to a small mountain of deader-still zombies and Woody standing triumphantly atop them is rad. But I’m still trying to figure out if letting Woody’s character live constitutes a gonzo double-reverse subversion of the genre expectation, or if I’m just a victim of my own overthinking as usual. I lean towards the former, if only because I want to believe that Zombieland was a deliberately dumb movie (in certain ways) written by somewhat smart guys. If I ever meet Mr. Reese and/or Mr. Wernick, I’ll have to ask them.
Zombieland is SOO AWESOME! It's ONE of favorite movies! It's SO COOL!
ReplyDelete