Zombies and Brains: The un-dead and the well-read
The living dead are back in cinemas across the UK, bringing a new onslaught of films about flesh-eating zombies and the unintended consequences of scientific experimentation.
First, zombies terrorise a small town in Texas after an experimental biological weapon is accidentally released from a remote US military base in Planet Terror, released in the UK tonight, on 9 November.
Then a few weeks from now we’ll see the UK premiere of I Am Legend on 19 December (with the national release on 4 January). In this film a biological war leaves Will Smith the lone survivor destined to battle against a breed of mutants.
I love zombie films, but perhaps not as much I love the critics who over-intellectualise these flicks as paranoid allegories for capitalism’s automatons who trawl the strip malls of our consumerist culture like the zombies in Romero’s 1979 Dawn of the Dead.
Yes, it’s true that Marx once called the capitalist system “vampire-like,” evoking images of blood-sucking middle-managers preying on the working class.
But the intellectual elite seem to have run away with their metaphors, descending deeper and deeper into the theoretical esoteric of the “politico-aesthetic.”
Curl up with one of Amazon’s “10 Best Zombie Flicks” and a copy of Mute magazine’s excessively theoretical article Zombie Nation, and see for yourself if the zombie sub-genre is truly a radical satire of capitalists devouring themselves (the ultimate in consumption!).
Meanwhile, the most radical consequence of pop culture’s devouring obsession with zombies is more likely the surprising proliferation of “Zombie walks.”
Sprouting up around the world and mixing cultural critique with flash-mob style, Zombie walks – where people dress up like zombies and gather for marches and rallies of the un-dead – have kicked off from New York and Boston to London and Amsterdam.
Check out a video of London’s Zombie Walk from Leicester Square in August 2007. Also, see www.brains4zombies, the parody of Amazon that is “Your online home for Brains and Brain-Related Products.”
Related
The web editor of the Los Angeles Times opinion page, Tim Cavanaugh wrote a piece on Reason.com this February on “We the Living Dead: The Convoluted Politics of Zombie Cinema.”
Jamie Russell’s Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema, 2005
“Cowardice, Complicity and the Withering of the Soul of America,” Zombie Nation in Counterpunch, 2 November
Waiting for Godot in New Orleans
As US authorities scurry to the rescue of their beloved Golden State, recently scorched by epic forest fires, residents of New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward are still waiting – for their homes to be rebuilt, for their streets to be repaved, and for their neighbourhoods to be repaired and repopulated.
And as the government takes care of their Hollywood stars, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot has arrived in New Orleans.
As the time drags on without reprieve, residents of the city will see free, outdoor performances of Godot this weekend. New York’s Creative Time and the Classical Theatre of Harlem are behind the production.
A play with a history of radical performances, Waiting for Godot has been repeatedly staged at San Quentin Prison in California since 1957. Then, in 1976 a mixed-race production was staged in apartheid South Africa, and in 1993 Susan Sontag staged it in wartime Sarajevo.
Meanwhile, the Beckett-acolyte Tom Stoppard’s newest play Rock ‘n’ Roll– about 1960s Czechoslovakia, socialism, and the Plastic People of the Universe – is up on Broadway in New York.
The political possibilities of theatre are then further explored in London this month with the production of The Lady of Burma (on from 7 Nov – 2 Dec at Riverside Studios), about Aung San Suu Kyi, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning democratically-elected leader of Burma currently under house arrest in her country, amid the unfolding crisis.
Related
NPR’s story on the New Orleans’ productions of Godot
Anthony Minghella on Beckett in New Statesman
Clifford Odets’ 1935 play Waiting for Lefty, has workers waiting for Lefty, the union’s elected chairman, who never comes.
Bollywood does Dostoevsky
Tonight’s newest Bollyood blockbuster, Saawariya, is based on Dostoevsky’s short story “White Nights”.
A love story about a chance encounter between an itinerant musician and a worker in the city’s red-light district, the romantic musical opens in the UK 9 November just in time for Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights.
But it’s not the first time Bollywood has tackled European classics — recall the industry’s adaptation of Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (Bride and Prejudice), where “the Bennet family becomes the Bakshis and Mr Darcy becomes a wealthy American.” Bollywood has also done numbers on everything from Fight Club to Othello (Omkara) and Macbeth (Maqbool).
See India’s national newspaper, The Hindu on “Shakespeare in Bollywood.”
Part of a much larger theme, Bollywood’s adaptations of Western literature and film echoes the similar experience of West Africa, where Greek tragedy in particular has become a model and inspiration for African playwrights. Favourites include: Wole Soyinka’s The Bacchae of Uripides and Sylvain Bemba’s Black Wedding Candles for Blessed Antigone.
Related
The BBC on “Are Bollywood remakes a good idea?” Dec 2006
Kevin Wetmore’s The Athenian Sun in an African Sky: Modern African Adaptations of Classical Greek Tragedy, 2001
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