Mindless Ones

You know you’re living in some kind of pop-cultural saturation point when you find yourself reviewing a coffee table Slasher book…

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I’m not going to talk much about zombies, I’m afraid. Zombies aren’t the problem.

Post credits Walking Dead opens on Andrew Lincoln’s Sheriff’s Deputy chomping on hamburgers with his partner, Shane, played by Jon Bernthal, and shooting the shit about their marriages. Both men badmouth their wives, Shane makes some huge and rather unpleasant generalisations about women, and Lincoln goes on to describe his wife as cruel and a bad mother. What Darabont seems to be going for is Tarantino, what he comes up with is charmless dialogue peppered with misogyny. Unfortunately the show goes on like that.

All the female characters are either shit-talked, absent, evil zombies/bad mothers, and/or reckless. Men? They’re gun wielding, authoritarian, tough and very much in charge. There’s a scene late on where Shane tells off his wife for wanting to help other people, accuses her of jeopardizing the life of their child, and not only does she come round to his way of thinking, she also decides that this is in fact a very sexy moment*.

Whether the show continues in this vein or not remains to be seen. There’s a lot of room for it to paint a picture of women as human beings. It’s also worth bearing in mind that while Lincoln describes his wife as a bad mother, the possibility that he will be plagued by guilt for being absent when the zombies came leaves the door open for a more thorough examination of masculinity and the male role. So at this very early stage I’m willing to give Walking Dead the benefit of the doubt, but the fact that there is precisely one scene where the show demonstrates what could be construed as a positive view of women doesn’t bode well.

There’s no doubt that Darabont can direct, the plot is strong, and the show does understand what’s nasty about zombies, but we’ve come to expect compelling dialogue and a nuanced approach to gender politics from our quality US dramas. So far Walking Dead exhibits little of either.

*ADDENDUM: It’s been noted in the comments that I have mistaken Rick’s family for Shane’s (thanks, Basque). While I’m embarrassed by my lack of perceptiveness I have to say that adding infidelity to the list of sins committed by women doesn’t exactly weaken my case.

No Star Wars was Sean Witzke’s attempt to countdown his 100 favourite films. A really wonderful series of posts. Got me thinking about all sorts of things.

Like the Coen Bros. I’m not sure I entirely agree with Sean when he posits that their films are on some level about the inexplicable. I see where he’s coming from, but that’s not how I’d choose to phrase it because inexplicability has strong connotations of the supernatural, and while the supernatural is certainly present in their films, I think they’re getting at a number of less reductive things, most obviously an epistemological gap between the world as it is and what it’s possible for people to know or understand. Historically that gap has been filled by God, supernatural agencies, etc… but as students of philosophy (as well as having a Jewish heritage, and therefore likely to have some religious issues to work through – see A Serious Man) the Coen’s will be well aware of other more down to Earth attempts to do away with the problem, hence a number of their films taking, however implicitly, less overtly fantastical views on the subject. For example, unpredictability, incompleteness of information and psychological dissonance all feature heavily in the Big Lebowski as serious obstacles to a fuller comprehension of the world, but God isn’t in the picture, although the idea of the omnipresent narrator is affectionately played with.

But to go back to Sean’s point, watching Fargo last night I was struck by the fact that, while nothing about the film seemed to require supernatural explanation, it worked hard to paint the disconnect between the characters’ worldviews and the messy, unpredictable reality they faced – an epistemological gap that manifests as a persistent incompleteness of knowledge – as in some way mysterious and sinister. The entire context of the film (a thriller) pushes for that kind of atmosphere, but the movie’s snowy landscapes and pitch black nights, with their suggestion of hidden things, and form from formlessness – echoed in the silence of the film’s most sinister killer – layer in a feeling that while the film’s events might ultimately be explicable, there is still a fantasmal otherness to them.

What’s interesting is that while Marge could discover all the salient facts, and while she demonstrates time and time again that she has the ability to assemble them in a way that makes sense and lines up with reality, even if she did so (and I guess we’re supposed to think that she will given her role as police chief), we have to wonder whether she would be left any less disturbed or perplexed? The problem here is less epistemological, in that it isn’t necessarily tied to the extent of one’s knowledge or what is knowable, and more existential, at least it is if you take the view that existentialism is more about description than factual content, which it would be hard not to do given that existentialism doesn’t deal in quantifiable facts. Looking at Fargo one is tempted to argue that the film is saying that while its plot can be *entirely* explained by mundane causal processes, and that those processes are at least potentially knowable, this point of view is in some strange, fundamental way inadequate. It fails to account for the awfulness of death and murder and the sheer bloody absurdity of it all. The why not the how. The problem is that why might not be answerable. It might not even be a proper question.

Or something.