[Marxism] Zombies attack George W. Bush

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2131378/

television
Zombies Attack George Bush
Joe Dante's brilliant anti-war horror show.
By Grady Hendrix
Posted Friday, Dec. 2, 2005, at 4:05 PM ET

Just when things looked like they couldn't get any worse for President 
Bush, here come the zombies to vote him out of office. They arrive courtesy 
of Joe Dante's Homecoming, a one-hour movie made for Showtime's "Masters of 
Horror" series that airs tonight and tomorrow and will be rebroadcast 
throughout December. One part satire of soulless Beltway insiders, one part 
gut-crunching horror flick, Homecoming kicks off when the flag-draped 
coffins of soldiers killed in Iraq burst open and the reanimated corpses of 
dead veterans hit the streets, searching for polling places where they can 
pull the lever for "anyone who will end this evil war."

The mandate for Showtime's "Masters of Horror" series was to give one-hour 
slots to name-brand shock auteurs such as Takashi Miike and John Carpenter, 
granting them total artistic control in exchange for low budgets. So far, 
most of the directors have squandered their creative carte blanche on extra 
boobs and more blood, but Joe Dante has elected to do something actually 
terrifying: engage with the real world.

His characters seem like people we've just watched on MSNBC. There's David 
Murch, a political consultant for an unnamed Republican president who 
sounds exactly like President Bush. His new girlfriend, Jane Cleaver, is a 
bullying pundit cloned from Ann Coulter's DNA. There's also a James 
Carville look-alike and a Jerry Falwell doppelgänger, complete with 
quivering jowls. Dante delivers the thrill of watching familiar figures 
spin the issues and dole out doublespeak, yet he doesn't stint on the 
satisfaction of seeing them have their brains eaten afterwards. He's the 
first horror director to take the bits of media flotsam and jetsam that 
have been drifting around?the flag-draped coffins at Dover Air Force Base, 
the talking-head cable shows, the internment camps, the Ohio and Florida 
recounts, the "Mission Accomplished" banners?and make something 
electrifying out of them.

It's almost impossible to write about horror movies without playing amateur 
sociologist, especially when zombies are involved. Since 9/11, artists and 
writers of popular culture seem the most willing to cope with current 
events, and they've disgorged an unstoppable series of zombie movies: 28 
Days Later, Dawn of the Dead, Land of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead, not to 
mention the book The Zombie Survival Guide and the comic-book series "The 
Walking Dead," among others.

Horror is cheap and disposable. It has to figure out what scares you and 
throw it up on the screen (or down on the page) fast?there's no time to 
cover its tracks. But why all the zombies? Zombie movies have always been 
the richest in subtext, whether it's the cartoonish class warfare of Land 
of the Dead or the anti-Vietnam-war message of 1974's Deathdream. Today, 
zombies are the perfect metaphor for our soldiers in Iraq: They're 
shell-shocked, anonymous, and aren't asked to make very many decisions. 
Unless you personally know a soldier, the war in Iraq has been a zombie 
war, fought by an uncomplaining, faceless mass wrapped in desert camo and 
called "our boys." We talk about them all the time?supporting them, 
criticizing them, speaking for them?but we don't really have a clue as to 
what's on their minds. They often seem like disposable units sent to 
enforce the will of our country. But what if they come back and they're 
different? What if they come back and don't want to follow orders anymore?

What's shocking about Dante's Homecoming is that he dispenses with the 
usual horror subtext completely. Pundits go on TV to defend the living 
dead's right to vote until they find out they're not voting Republican. 
Zombies rise from the grave, wrapped in the American flag. There's even a 
Cindy Sheehan stand-in with a zombie son. Nothing is too recent or too raw. 
Dante has always had an ax to grind?his film Small Soldiers was an 
anti-violence carnival of killer toys and even the lovable Gremlins had an 
anti-consumption message. But Homecoming is on another level of guilty 
pleasures, a junk-food adrenaline rush that debunks the myth of glorious 
war, presenting every ugly wound in gory latex detail, while having nothing 
but compassion for the lonely, lurching, living-dead soldiers.

While Dante's film will no doubt raise hackles, my guess is that most 
members of the military would get a kick out of this flick that praises the 
troops in Iraq while offering up the politicians and pundits who sent them 
there as finger food for the undead. Some big brains have tried to make a 
statement about the War in Iraq, and every single one of them should be 
standing in line, heads hung low, waiting to get their artistic licenses 
revoked. Who would've thought that where Michael Moore (Fahrenheit 9/11), 
Sam Mendes (Jarhead), and Steven Bochco (Over There) got it so wrong, the 
director of Looney Tunes: Back in Action would have gotten it so right?
Grady Hendrix, a New York writer, runs the New York Asian Film Festival.


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