The absence of the apoetical Zombie/Western

My preoccupation with social context within cinema has lead me (and will generally lead other film enthusiasts) to two pivotal genres in film, which function within social roles, exhibiting characters who operate within these mandates and outside of them. Those two genres are the zombie film and the Western.

Cinematic History (A Primer)
The Western dates back to early television serials moving onto the big screen and really catching on between the 1930's (i.e. Stage Coach through the late '60's (i.e. Sergio Leone films of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West).

Likewise, the zombie films began around the same time with films like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and White Zombie starring Bela Lugosi, and moving through the history of the zombie film when George Romero reignited the genre with Night of the Living Dead and subsequent new school of zombie movies 28 Days Later, Resident Evil, and the Dawn of the Dead remake. (I refuse to call these films post-modern because they still rely heavily on modern narrative and composition, but instead I prefer the term new school because the filmmakers are trying to accomplish something of their own with an established genre of film.)

Where's the zombie Western?
Well, such a genre as a defined collection of films doesn't exist, as the wealth of movies to include in the genre aren't that numerous. A few films, such as Sam Raimi's Evil Dead (Raimi would later go on to make The Quick and the Dead, a sort of Western homage with his own quirky signitures) and Dellamorte Dellamore (1994), directed by Michele Soavi -- a protege of Dario Argento, also known as Cemetery Man.

While neither of these films aren't wholly Western, their filmmakers and several references within the films, owe a great deal to the Western genre. However, each film does inititate some intertexuality with older ideologies of what a zombie film should be and creates a new string of circumstances into a new school narrative. Both deal heavily with the rise of the dead, and each has a hero who must (almost single handedly) destroy the "zombies" in the film. Here in lies a key difference with the Zombie genre:

Zombie films generly rely on a premis established by Romero in his earlier Dead films -- the inclusion of the social striations, or imitations of a class ruling system within a group. Most zombie films focus on a group of protagonists who must both run from the zombies and pursue the reanimated corpses. Within these groups, the issue of class generally surfaces, as it does in post-apocalyptic films, as particular individuals begin to assume roles within their on microcosm of society. The issue of leadership often surfaces creating internal conflict within the group as two (or more) Alpha personlities jockey for control over the subservients.

In Evil Dead and Dellamorte Dellamore the lone hero rises up to vanquish the dead. The Western protagonist often is alone and must combat not only the social order but the Other (zombies) as well. Shane and High Noon center around protagonists caught between these two worlds.


Filling the Void with the Dead
What would make a good zombie Western? A practice often used by Blade II and Hellboy director Guillermo Del Torro is to use Japanese anime to help him visualize angles and character placement. This almagation of film styles and Japanese pop culture may provide us with an easy enough solution, as we turn towards another form of sequential narrative in Japan, the manga. Manga is the Japanese equivilent to a comic book, but calling it a graphic novel may be more appropriate as manga generally includes multiple storylines and entails a greater mass of volume that American comic books.

Priest is a title in Japanese manga, which caught my eye because of it's expressionistic style and also it's dealings with the Western and zombie genre's. No where else had I found such an inclusive book in printed form than Priest. The title deals far more in the occult than Dellamorte Dellamore or Evil Dead, and it jumps timelines incredibly quick as the book actually entails over 100 years of history with parallel storylines.

The obvious problem with mixing the genres is the narrative premiss of inserting the idea of reanimated dead within the Western narrative, because the plots seem perpendicular of each other (which is mere product of social conveniences). But quickly following up on the emergence of the dead, the narrative structure would quickly unfold --

"Our lone hero, an outcast and outlaw, is the only individual able to protect a Western town that exhiled him from the undead menace" Our protagonist is caught between two seperate social conventions -- the townspeople that hate him and the zombies who want to devour him and the townspeople.

Other mandated genre symbols to include to propogate the dual-identity of the film: a cemetery (empty or full) and a freight train.

High Noon

I watched High Noon (1952) again last night, and I must say that I'm just as impressed as when I first watched it.

The opening cinematography where the single cowbow is framed in an underexposed, high contrast shot foretelling the stark reality of the towns people and inevitability of death coming to the tiny, sleepwater town.

High Noon	The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

You can tell where Sergio Leone pulls cinematic references from this movie, as shots of the eyes and series of cutbacks between characters are emminent. High Noon also utilizes the protagonist stuck between his personal moral values and the society (mob mentality). Sam Peckinpah would revamp this idea in his thriller Straw Dogs (1971) starring Dustin Hoffman.

Let's not forget the ultimate metaphore in this film, and one that resonates through Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West (1968): The train simultaneously represents capitalizim, industrialization, and the rise of civilation in the West, while also representing the death and destruction of a vastly untamed wilderness.

The train in High Noon carries a known and convicted murder named Frank Miller (but not this Frank Miller), who previously vowed to kill the hero Will Kane (Gary Cooper) five years predating the film. Once Miller exits the train, he's rejoined by three of his former cronies and begin the slow walk into town.

Death and time loom over this film like a darkening shroud of storm clouds.

The only quarrels I may have is the stiff performance by Grace Kelly, who would later go on to star as Hitchcock's blonde protagonist in films such as Dial M for Murder, Rear Window and To Catch a Thief. Granted that High Noon was Kelly's second leading role.

I didn't mind the use of the clocks throughout the film, whereas several other individuals may cry out that their use becomes redundent or monotonous. The clocks create a visual rhythm, like Darren Aronofsky's use of hip-hop visual montage, establishing tension and drama to the narrative.

Well, I'm off to to Best Buy and possibly Borders for a quick shopping spree of Lucio Fulci films, as per a recommendation (City of the Living Dead, Four of the Apocalypse and Zombie) for some references to continue my zombie/Western film research.

A Life Aquatic with Wes Anderson

(Be forewarned that the following is an incomplete review, criticism and subtext into a film. Very little editing or construction has been done to this blog. Thank you.)

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

Wes Anderson has struck gold yet again, with his own brand of humor and film making, on his fourth release, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

The makeshift father/son relationships, which began partly in Rushmore and moved on through Royal Tenenbaums, are here as well, as a once-famous oceanographer, Steve Zissou (played by Bill Murray), who is losing his luster among the rich producers and upper-tier society that backs his frequent adventures, must go on one last adventure of self-discovery.

Life Aquatic revolves around a sort of mocku-drama, similar to the documentaries of Jacques Cousteau and other adventuresome wild life hosts, in which pretentious characters must learn to coexist.

The film takes a strange turn of Moby Dick preportions, when Zissou's friend and longtime partner gets allegedly eaten by a jaguar shark. With Zissou's first installment of his jaguar shark documentary tanking, and the bitter taste for revenge in his mouth, Zissou scrambles together cash and crew to go on the great shark hunt.

The viewers of the film, much like the Zissou's upper-class audience begins to question the sanity of the aging oceanographer and also the validity behind the alleged jaquar shark.

Throughout the films, Anderson provides us with little glimpses of animation unseen in previous films (perhaps a new endeavor, a test run before he tries his and at more animation, much like Richard Linklater's use of rotoscoping in Waking Life coming full force in A Scanner Darkly). These little glimpses build and build until Anderson floods the audience and his protagonist with a crescendo of images and finally a glimpse of the great and massive beast, the jaguar shark.

Bill Murray has done it once more, immortalizing his own performances and summoning our attention to another breakout character. Murray seems perfect for Anderson’s film because their chemistry and sense of humor mirror each other so closely. Murray and Anderson always wait to the crucial moment to allow their generally dry, quirky characters to open up, creating a pivotal relationship with the audience.

Like two of his earlier performances (Lost in Translation and Tenenbaums), Murray plays a straight, dry humor Nabokovian protagonist to his younger female foils, and despite the actresses (and characters) losing the advantage in experience, they often are able to out manuever the wily, learned man. It's like watching a live-action psychological unfolding of a Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon.

But that seems to be the equation that facilitates Murray's humor the most. And for Anderson.

All four films explore relationships impossible to fulfill, mostly because of age differences, i.e., Rushmore, Tenenbaums, and Life Aquatic, or cultural differences in Bottle Rocket.

Burroughs, Stefani and the exterminator

OK, so the mental imagery of the above three ideas is somewhat conflicting, unless you consider Burrough's Naked Lunch and the exterminator, and then also consider Gwen Stefani as the bug to be exterminated but in the process you find some sort of addiction within yourself.

(If you're intersted in Burroughs' work, I suggest you look at David Cronenberg's 1991 film version of Naked Lunch. The plot is an amalgamation of Burroughs' life and plot from the book.)

A little convaluted? Maybe. But in my recent exposure to Stefani's latest single, "Hollaback Girl," I've realized the importance of music videos, hooks and for the most part, a good looking focal point as the face for your product.

"Hollaback Girl" is such a horrible song with little substance other than a single choice expletive repeated throughout the chorus. But there's something that catches the listener's attention, hook, line and sinker. Or just the hook in this case. Stefani's latest single delivers a catchy riff in the context of her "melody," which undoubtedly hooks the ear.

The new single surpasses her old work, with titles like "Rich Girl," but fails to ascend any further than her fame with No Doubt, a band that could have ended after the Tragic Kingdom album and had a spectacular career, but instead followed it up with forgetable titles.

Sometimes you seek some solace from these catchy beats and choruses, the little songs that get stuck in the back of your head and will stop nothing short of a labotomy. So call in the exterminator. There should be a little guy inside your brain on call that can come in and destroy little parts of your brain that retain trivial pieces of information. I'm sure there have been studies done of information saved and forgotten in that giant wet-wired gray matter, and it's interesting speculation when you ask yourself: Does the brain ever really forget information or retain it indefinately?

Maybe that's food for a short story -- but I'm sure a novel would be no problem either.

I've been getting into a lot more science fiction lately, reading anyway. I've read a short story by Philip K. Dick, author behind such adapted movies as Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, and Paycheck, and two novels -- one of which is a sort of throw away novel with little implications and the other was Man in the High Castle, which is a clever, kitchy premiss revolving around World War II. Since reading Dick, I've gotten a little more into William S. Burroughs' work. I've read Junky (or the varient spelling Junkie) and currently reading Nova Express.

The writers during the Beat generation have moderately fascinated me with their various styles of changing the way we read certain works, but Burroughs' emulates this like no other in his prose. The fragmentary thought processes from his traditional writing and also his use of the cut-up method (by which the author cuts prose into little snippets of words and phrases and then pastes them together in a fairly random order). The cut-up method isn't so much an abstract prose style, but more of a collage using a single source, rather than multiple sources -- a cut-up work of multiple sources would be intense and enormous prose, probably even more undiscernable than Burrough's own work.

My only complaint with Nova Express isn't so much that his style escapes me (I can see some method in the madness), but Burrough's tends to repeat phrases and images throughout the book -- a repetition that I believe hurts the overall conceptualization of the text, rather than helps.

Well, that's all for me. The new issue of Zygote should be up fairly soon, as it's scheduled to be up today (May 16, 2005). So be sure to check it out for a new Tripp original.

Also on a side note, Wal-Mart will be stocking their shelves with the fourth season of Seinfeld tonight when I get off of work. One of the only highlights of working late, is that I don't have to wait until the day to go purchase the new releases -- and thus avoid any appearance in public.