David Patneaude's Blog: Different Worlds - Posts Tagged "zombies"
Zombies As Metaphor
I just posted a review of WORLD WAR Z (below), and did it as a straight critique of the story and the storytelling, but I think it's also fun and more meaningful perhaps to look at this zombie story on another level, kind of like INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS was about more than aliens taking over or replicating human bodies and THE INVISIBLE MAN was about more than a fictional man becoming invisible. Those stories about real-life humans losing themselves to convention, to sameness, to ordinariness, to numbness, to uncaring sociopathy, to being relegated to a less-than-human state. So maybe WORLD WAR Z is about more than zombies. Maybe it's about the spread of other, real-life kinds of deadly epidemics--willful ignorance, superstition, intolerance, hate, blind allegiance to buffoonery, denial of facts and reason (past, present, and future), the perpetuation of dumb-ass conspiracy theories, and a general failure to evolve, to be what a human is capable of being. Maybe it's metaphor/allegory/symbolism. And in that case it's not just fictional face-value scary. It's real-life frightening.
Review: In need of a book for a flight home from Los Angeles, I picked this one up at the Burbank Airport bookstore. Not usually a reliable source of promising reading, but in this case I managed to pick something worthwhile. Zombies? you say. Worthwhile? you say. Well, yes. When the zombies come packaged in a high-concept, well-researched, well-written novel that anchors the fantastic and speculative in human realities, a good read is born. At the time I bought the book I didn't pay any attention to the fact that it was soon to be a movie (starring Brad Pitt, no less). So now that I do know about the movie, I'm interested in seeing how the film will overcome what I felt was the book's shortcoming--the lack of a main character. The story is told as a series of interviews (dozens of them) with survivors of the zombie war. They're consistently interesting, sometimes gripping, and often creepy, and all together comprise a comprehensive picture of the world war between humans and the rise of the reanimated. But other than the interviewer, who takes a personality-deprived backseat to each interviewee, there's no protagonist. There's no one to identify with. There's no continuity in character. So I'm curious about one thing: What role will Brad Pitt have? A reanimated interviewer?
All in all, a good book, an accomplished method of storytelling, such as it is. I just missed getting inside a main dude's head.
Review: In need of a book for a flight home from Los Angeles, I picked this one up at the Burbank Airport bookstore. Not usually a reliable source of promising reading, but in this case I managed to pick something worthwhile. Zombies? you say. Worthwhile? you say. Well, yes. When the zombies come packaged in a high-concept, well-researched, well-written novel that anchors the fantastic and speculative in human realities, a good read is born. At the time I bought the book I didn't pay any attention to the fact that it was soon to be a movie (starring Brad Pitt, no less). So now that I do know about the movie, I'm interested in seeing how the film will overcome what I felt was the book's shortcoming--the lack of a main character. The story is told as a series of interviews (dozens of them) with survivors of the zombie war. They're consistently interesting, sometimes gripping, and often creepy, and all together comprise a comprehensive picture of the world war between humans and the rise of the reanimated. But other than the interviewer, who takes a personality-deprived backseat to each interviewee, there's no protagonist. There's no one to identify with. There's no continuity in character. So I'm curious about one thing: What role will Brad Pitt have? A reanimated interviewer?
All in all, a good book, an accomplished method of storytelling, such as it is. I just missed getting inside a main dude's head.
