28 Weeks Later

It is impossible in this day and age to make a military film that involves the USA and not have it be about Iraq.It could be the text or the subtext, but it will be there. And all you really need over the course of the text or subtext is to have a well formed argument. Pro or con, it doesn't matter, just as long as it makes sense and can stand up to a little scrutiny.

Zombie movies have a long history of having social commentary thrust onto them. Most of the blame for this has to do with George Romero's accidental trick casting in Night of the Living Dead. Shoving political discussion into the gaping maw of gore films is generally the worst thing you can do. Sexual politics, sure I can buy that. Economics? Sign me up. Race relations? Erm what? American Foreign Policy? Better make it good.

And that is the problem with 28 Weeks Later. Every bit of subtext in this film is trying to be critical of our current idiotic expedition in Iraq, but every parallel the film makes is completely specious. Like most claims of "we are fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here," the vast majority of Iraq policy commentary in fiction tends to be knee jerk criticism of a bad situation by people that lack the information needed to really address it properly.

And that is 28 Weeks Later's greatest flaw.

First lets take the main idea behind the film--America leads a NATO mission to rebuild and repopulate the United Kingdom after a viral outbreak decimates the population and to get a start on it, the US Army sets up a "Green Zone" in London. The plan falls apart when a woman is found in London who is a carrier for the virus, but not infected. She infects her husband and gory man eating ensues.

We did not invade Iraq to rebuild and repopulate. We needed to rebuild the country AFTER we invaded, but as a reason to set up shop there that wasn't it. We went into Iraq to take out Saddam Hussein. The Green Zone part is the obviously trying to be a corollary to the Green Zone in Iraq, but instead of keeping terrorists out, the London Green Zone is keeping civilians in, which is precisely the thing the virus needs to spread quickly--bunches of people to infect all in one place.

In the film, the General in charge, trying to control a rapidly deteriorating situation, promptly and correctly launches the Code Red plan. This is the right thing to do to protect the rest of the world. Strategically the idea is sound and it is the morally correct thing to do to keep the virus from spreading.

The two main regular Army characters, a doctor and a sniper, see this liquidation of the population as a bad situation and try to get the children of the carrier out of the city to be studied for the possibility of a cure--all against orders. Also the right thing to do until the boy gets infected which is when they should've killed him.

None of this works as Iraq criticism. Showing the General in charge as a competent man and the individual soldiers as people with faces and families does not do the job. If you are criticizing the Iraq situation, where are the parallels in the story to the Bush Administration? If it doesn't fit into the milieu of the film, then why is their so much obvious Iraq imagery (the main character's sniper rifle is painted with a desert-scheme camouflage--Green Zone--US Army shown mowing down civilians--etc)? If it isn't, then you have the problem then that the overall message of the film is that it is better to stand around and do nothing in the face of the annihilation of the human race than to try to fight it because the person trying to find the cure for the disease ends up causing the virus to spread to other countries. One cannot assume that any artist in this day and age would be enough of a sanctimonious prick to suggest apathy in the face of a preventable apocalypse.

On top of this, the film as a dearth of internal logic. Why are the civilians herded into holding areas at the outbreak of Code Red? Why weren't they told this would happen? Why aren't the doors sturdier? Why aren't their soldiers guarding the doors? How does a guy manage to go into a biohazard situation and not get noticed by the guards? Why was a potentially infected individual brought into the Green Zone in the first place? She just as easily could've been triaged and assessed and disposed of outside the safety area. And then you have the soldiers positioned in a perfect Odessa Steps position to slaughter fleeing civilians in a situation where, if the civilians are all corralled into holding areas, the civilians were under control. Why was the electricity cut?

This film suffers from the worst case of idiot plot I have ever seen.

On the other hand, it has its moments of genuine scariness and suspense; something that most zombie movies don't have. And yes, these movies are zombie movies no matter what Danny Boyle says.

The film shoots for the topical and misses and falls into the same trap that most horror movies that try fall in to: inconsequence. If you are a filmmaker, and you want to make a movie that is a commentary on some current event, please think it through.

Honest Discourse

In retrospect, The Captive Mind is a great book. Though it could've done without the profiles of Gamma and Delta, two of the writers that Milosz uses as examples of intellectual laziness and moral weakness. The real tragic stories are Alpha and Beta (these are real people that for some reason Milosz did not want to name, but are easily identified). These were men of great feeling and talent who were brought low by the moral morass and intellectual short cuts that Diamat creates.

One can see the parallels between these men and their struggles and the political situation that is occurring in our country today. Whether or not this is a good thing or not is a difficult problem to suss out. On one hand Milosz maintains that intellectuals are easily swayed by counter-intuitive systems (they can justify anything with their intellect, no matter how stomach turning), and on the other, America has no real intelligentsia. The closest thing we have are celebrities and talking heads on the TV news. Chomsky is as much of a joke as Anne Coulter, and no matter how much sense George Clooney might be spouting about Darfur and the peccadilloes of the Republican party , it doesn't change the fact he was in Batman & Robin.

The writers out there are not writing about our social and political problems. Art has become apolitical; either it is completely without substance, pure artifice (Warhol, Pollack, that guy who did the squares), or it is made to titillate and shock (that guy who pissed on a sculpture of Jesus, that sculpture of Britney Spears giving birth). The closest we get as a culture to actual constructive dialog about the state of our country is through mass entertainment (which I just wrote as inert tainment for some reason--damn you Freud), but this is powered more by corporate funding of entertainment than it is by actual concern about the human condition in America (thus Chomsky and Coulter--the two mouthpieces of the political divide).

Where is the American Tolstoy, or Grass, or Mishima, or Orwell? Our writers are too busy writing books that are more about being books than they are about saying something about us. Our intellectuals are too busy thinking up new ways to over complicate things than to come up with ideas that help our society. The days of Twain and Steinbeck, Frederick Douglas and MLK have passed us by and we are left with intellectuals and artists with very narrow lines of sight, such as Andrea Dworkin and Irving Kristol, Jonathan Safran Foer and Don Delillo. These artistic and intellectual navel gazers do a disservice to their country by not engaging the public in honest discourse or, at the worst, engaging them in DISHONEST discourse. This dishonest discourse is the trap of Dialectical Materialism, the trap that Milosz wrote about, but instead of the Stalinist Method, you have a method based entirely of discriminating against the under-educated (which is an artificial scale if there ever was one).

American intellectuals are radical and militant by nature, neither concerned with the everyday problems of the world or with honest practice. Our intellectuals wave their credentials in front of the public's faces, say "I know more than you", and proceed to vent their ideas onto the public with out any course of redress or dialectics--because if you are not a Ph.D. holder or fellow intellectual, you obviously have nothing to bring to the table so you better just nod say "yessir" and bow to my big, overeducated brain. This paradigm is a detriment to our society--it diminishes our democratic system and our populist nature. You cannot have the American flavor of populism with monolithic, discriminatory intellectual practices.

Writers come in all shapes and sizes and types. But the social commentator in American letters has either died out or not changed with the times. Don Delillo recycles the same worn-out criticisms about the very American populism that could save our political soul from the ravages of Dominionism, fascism and intellectual laziness. Foer, the current golden boy among the po-mo writers of America, proceeds to crawl further up his own ass with every book he writes. By not engaging the public in discourse, and recycling old intellectual chestnuts and not developing, they present their works of art as either artistic thought pieces or art for art sake. So the public, criticised again and unengaged by the artistic self-fellatio, buys a Dan Brown book instead (hate to say it, but score one for the public).

Then, on top of all of this, you have a monolithic media culture that does its best to keep the populace somnambulant. American Idol, Dancing with the Stars, ER, CSI, The Office, The Daily Show, Rush Limbaugh, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News--all spewed upon the masses as alternatives to each other when they all just spout the same laziness or encourages it by its very nature. Shows of actual artistic merit are few and far between. It would be better to be a universalist show, describing the human condition on a nebulous scale (ie Seinfeld, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer), than it would be to be a show that encourages the turning off of one's brain. Read Hemingway before you read Dan Brown, watch Buffy before you watch Idol, because the days of Steinbeck and All in the Family (actual commentaries on the America in the era in which they were created) are over.

We are at the point of needing a renaissance for our discourse, a popular culture that has rigor and virility and does not shy away from entering into dialog about society's ills with its audience.