I’m really keen to see other stuff by Brooker now
His spoof TV listings are still up (or at least some of them) at tvgohome.com. The details for reality show “Daily Mail Island” I seem to recall were particularly good.
Er… what? A giant crowd of people standing outside a fence, the fence outside the TV show set, can’t “end up indistinguishable and grotesquely assimilated into each other” as slow zombies?
The fuck?
I get that your criticism of the criticism is that “it doesn’t work in this very particular context of this specific series”, and I can respect that, but… your example is a bunch of people standing outside a fence? This is textbook slow zombie.
Now @tomchick if you had said
Imagine screaming Beiber fans chasing him down the street in NYC, or paparazzi running after some C-list celeb to get table scraps
Then… sure. I feel you, dog. Here’s what Brooker said in the post @drastic linked a few above:
They HAD to run or the story wouldn’t work. The outbreak had to knock the entire country out of action before the producers had time to evacuate the studios.
Running zombies are, to be frank, cheaper than stumbling ones. You only need one or two to present a massive threat. I love a huge mass of shambling undead as much as the next guy, but we couldn’t afford that many crowd scenes. The original plan was to set the final episode six months in the future, by which time the zombies were badly decayed and could only shuffle (although “freshies” would still run), but budget and time constraints ruled this out. Which would you rather see - running zombies or absolutely no zombies at all?
So I suspect the reasons were more prosaic and budget related than an intentional thematic choice.
Watch the first episode again, when the infection spreads into the live show being broadcast outside the studio. You might also want to watch the last shot again. It’s making a point.
And if you think Booker just happened to set his zombie apocalypse to the backdrop of reality TV without any thematic intent, well, I’m not sure what to tell you. You don’t seem to want to give him any credit as a social satirist. Check out Black Mirror sometime.
-Tom
Speaking of "might want to"s, you might want to read the post directly above yours.
@wumpus, I think you’re missing the scene @tomchick is talking about. It’s not the zombies banging on a fence bit, it’s the crowd of people in the live open-air audience. When the breakout occurs, it’s a full-on panic with people running to and fro, slamming into doorways, and doing the normal crowd panic thing while the zombies are running around biting and assaulting victims. Bloodied humans and bloody zombies in total chaos. Slow zombies wouldn’t have worked in that scene because it would be easy (relatively) to pick out the shambling attackers that weren’t human.
I’ve talked about this in some of my videos, but slow zombies also don’t work given how they’re used as a modern metaphor. When Romero made Night of the Living Dead and basically invented the zombie, they reflected the slow creep of cancer and communism. But today, zombies are relevant again as a metaphor for the extreme virulence of AIDs and ebola and so forth. Or, in the case of Dead Set, the media and pop culture frenzy around reality TV. The zeitgeist that gave us slow zombies is very different from the modern anxiety that zombies tap into. It’s no coincidence that the revival of zombie mythology coincided with 28 Days Later, where zombies learned to run.
-Tom
I propose that any zombie that can starve to death is no zombie.
But for reals, one of the most valuable lessons I took from my college philosophy classes was to determine if an argument was a clash of ideas or terminology, and the whole fast/slow zombie is really just the latter. If we had some kind of superset grouping, of which Romero’s Zombies and newer faster Zombies like the Dawn of the Dead remake, and also infected rage virus victims could all reside, we’d solve this argument. I further propose we call this superset “zedheads” because why not.
I disagree that the argument is semantic. If we want to go that route, zombies aren’t even zombies given that the word comes from voodoo thralls. Seems to me the argument is whether mythologies adapt. People who insist on slow zombies don’t understand that. They’re as misguided as people who insist vampires don’t twinkle.
-Tom
Totally agree it doesn’t matter what you call them. Romero called his creatures ghouls. The Walking Dead calls them walkers. But if you’re going to say a zombie can not only run but doesn’t even need to be dead, then you’re going to need to start defining what’s not a zombie, because that might be a shorter list. I mean, isn’t a vampire just a zombie with an aversion to religious iconography?
The mythology is adaptive, that’s going to be a moving target. You said as much in your post just above. What a zombie represents isn’t going to hold too much weight anyway, since it’s mostly subtext. I liked your series of videos about zombies and their video game representation, breaking them down to component parts. That’s a pretty meaningful way to get down to what zombies do for (and to) us. I think lumping groups of mindless cannibals into a single group dilutes its power. No reason they can’t all be worthwhile subjects but no reason they all need to be a single genus to do so.
This scene, then?
I actually get the point Tom was trying to make, which is that
Zombies only need to make sense within the specific narrative of this story that’s being told, not some bullshit generic global Zombie narrative that doesn’t even exist
And I humbly submit that my example…
Imagine screaming Beiber fans chasing him down the street in NYC, or paparazzi running after some C-list celeb to get table scraps
… is much, much better and more coherent than Tom’s lead example …
even the first episode makes it clear in the juxtaposition – and especially collision – of the gathered crowd of Big Brother fans and zombies. They end up indistinguishable and grotesquely assimilated into each other. The point absolutely would not have worked with slow zombies.
He did mention it later:
Pegg has missed the underlying point of Dead Set, which is a shame, since it’s a wonderfully subversive point. The metaphor here isn’t death, it’s the slavering fanatical idiocy of television and television viewers. They’re stupid, they’re enthusiastic, they’re hysterical, and they’re contagious. That’s the entire point of the miniseries, and the final scene drives it home perfectly. It’s one of the best bows on a zombie package I’ve ever seen.
Why he didn’t connect the (obvious?) dots with Beatlemania or Biebermania, or just paparazzi in general, I dunno. This isn’t about “television and television viewers” it is about the ravenous, slavering desire for celebrity at any cost
Also. If you watch the scene Tom was referring to, the amount of crazy quick cuts and camera obfuscation into “dramatic quick violent thing you can’t quite see is happening” makes it clear that this is more of a camera, effort, money, actor saving event, as Brooker himself said:
- Running zombies are, to be frank, cheaper than stumbling ones. You only need one or two to present a massive threat. I love a huge mass of shambling undead as much as the next guy, but we couldn’t afford that many crowd scenes.
So yes thematically it is nice, and even last night after reading this I came to agree with these two points:
-
Zombies only need to make sense within the specific narrative of this story that’s being told, not some bullshit generic global Zombie narrative that doesn’t even exist.
-
Dead Set is making a point about celebrity more than anything else, and fast zombies work better in service of this theme.
However it is a bit of a convenience as well, to the story, to the filming, to the casting, so I am not fully convinced it was quite as principled and intentional a decision as Tom implies.
This scene is really sublime though, and I agree, this is all about fast, this is paparazzi, this is beibermania at its most extreme:
(warning: violence, zombies, etc)
The asshole show producer using the guy in the wheelchair as an emergency zombie block at the end of that sequence was … fucking amazing. Totally agree with @telefrog we’re seeing Black Mirror level work here, early on. Fame at any cost, no matter who you have to step over (or kill…) to get there.
(And just after that scene, the lover showing up and “choosing” one of the two girls fighting over him … as a zombie. Fantastic.)
Now that everyone’s getting on board the early Charlie Brooker train, can I recommend people check out TVGoHome. Especially the website, but also the shortlived TV show, which was hit and miss, but has some of my favourite sketches in all of TV comedy.
I actually like this a lot as a thought experiment. And I would answer a zombie is a monster that represents the uniquely 20th century and almost entirely secular fear of disease, death, decay, and conformity, all of which are existential threats to individual identity. The specifics of that representation will change with our understanding of disease, death, decay, and conformity, just like the specifics of vampires, ghosts, dragons, and Godzilla have changed!
But there are definitely odd places that the mythology shows up. Have you seen Michael Bay’s Benghazi movie? He shoots some of the attacks as if they were a zombie movie. It’s no coincidence that the soldiers referred to one of the fields as Zombieland. The genre of body horror is a sort of individualization of zombie mythology, where the breakdown of the body is a smaller representation of the breakdown of civilization. I mean, yeah, a lot of this is indeed semantics, but part of studying something is naming it. :)
-Tom
Decay and disease? No. Zombies represent, first and foremost, our fear of other human beings.
I agree: everything else is an added metaphoric layer, but the primal fear that zombies represent is specifically the idea that our friends, our families, and our neighbors will suddenly turn on us, and tear us apart. And I think it’s this tribalistic undercurrent that runs through zombie movies that has made them successful in pretty much any culture.
Not just that, but fear that our own bodies will turn against us. There may be a mindless horde of cannIbals at the doorstep, but we are a small step from joining them. If it’s just fear of some nameless other then you may as well be watching Red Dawn.
What is going on here?
Nothing! Not a thing going on in here! And for pete’s sake, you think you could knock before you barge right in here?
Lololol