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The Dead Don’t Die
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It’s Gonna End Badly
As heretical as this will sound to some devotees of
American writer-director Jim Jarmusch, I prefer the fairly obvious humour of The Dead Don’t Die to the overly solemn
“poetry of everyday life” approach of his preceding fiction feature, the
overrated Paterson (2016). It’s hard
to divine exactly what impulse (or mix of impulses) led to this embrace of
comical zombie horror by Jarmusch and, as usual, he is not giving much away in
interviews about his real intentions. But the result is an intriguing combo of
giddy light-headedness and a bit of good, old-fashioned, punk nihilism.
The Dead Don’t Die is, in many
respects, Jarmusch’s gift to his faithful fans. The cast, especially, is a flick-book
of familiar faces trailing all the way back to Permanent Vacation in 1980, and proceeding through virtually every
station in his filmography, whether fiction or documentary. There’s his partner
and collaborator Sara Driver, Iggy Pop, Eszter Balint, Tom Waits, Steve
Buscemi, Rosie Perez and many others. The front line of the cast is equally
down-by-home: Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloë Sevigny and (most delightfully of
all) Tilda Swinton.
Very little happens by way of plot. As is often the
case in Jarmusch, there’s a basic, initial situation that is gradually unveiled
– an encounter, a crisis, a change in the general state of things – and then
there’s a series of diverse reactions to that situation. Dead Man (1995), which remains his masterpiece, boiled that template down to its purest,
most mysterious and poetic form: the character of that dead man (Johnny Depp)
announced in the title spends most of the film, in fact, dying.
In The Dead
Don’t Die, the sleepy, entirely ordinary American town of Centerville is –
as its heroes take a while to realise – being turned into zombie town. Some
casual snippet of media news informs us that the same thing is happening the
world over – so, say goodbye to any meaningful, Utopian escape route.
Police members Cliff (Murray), Ronnie (Driver) and
Mindy (Sevigny) come to no greater insight into this global plight than that
they should try to avoid being eaten, and stay firmly bolted (if they can)
inside the jail. Still, through their ample front window, they can enjoy the
spectacle of Zelda (Swinton) calmly slicing her way through zombiefied
impediments with her trusty samurai sword – which looks like a detail right out
of Nicolas Winding Refn’s TV series, Too Old to Die Young (2019).
On one level – probably the major or overriding level
for many viewers – the film gears itself to a deliberately semi-infantile level
of nerdy, cinephile fun: the character names (“Cliff Robertson”, “Zelda
Winston”) are frequently nutty, and the printing visible on tombstones includes
a winking tribute to one “Samuel M. Fuller”. To appreciate the full extent of
Jarmusch’s mischief here, you’ve got to pay attention right from the opening
“Focus Features” logo: a few, fleeting frames of the zombie horde have been
subliminally inserted there, as well.
All the same, there’s a disquieting note to these
wacky proceedings. Other bunches of reasonably likeable characters are set up
by the film – a group of teens (led by Selena Gomez) on vacation, another trio
in juvenile detention, the old-timers who frequent the local diner, a nerd who
runs a comic-book and paraphernalia store – who sometimes just drop out of the
unfolding plot until we later find them dead, or undead. Jarmusch refuses to
shine an optimistically hopeful light anywhere in this narrative tunnel.
The Dead Don’t Die positions itself
squarely in the tradition of George A. Romero’s zombie classics made between Night of the Living Dead in 1968 and Survival of the Dead in 2009 – rather than, say, TV’s The Walking Dead (2010– ), or many other international and multicultural
variations on the zombie formula. Apart from all his brilliant play on the
“rules” of the genre (how do you kill
those darn things?), it was Romero who, with anarchic zeal, single-handedly
turned this branch of horror toward socio-political allegory – even as he subtly
shifted the terms of his allegory from one movie to the next.
In Jarmusch’s case, however, he is clearly not looking
to generate spin-off sequels for a franchise. And there are moments when one
suspects that he’s unable to invent anything much that Romero hasn’t already
covered before in this field – such as the detail of zombies “returning to
whatever they liked doing when they were alive”, i.e., in this case, gazing at
their mobile phones!
Speaking of that phone behaviour, one of the most
intriguing published responses to The
Dead Don’t Die to date has come from the distinguished critic Marcos Uzal
(now newly appointed Cahiers du cinéma chief editor), in his Cannes 2019 report (“La foire aux auteurs” or “Auteurs’ Fair”) for the French magazine Trafic (no. 111, Autumn 2019). He takes
it as given that Jarmusch’s zombies represent the fatally “stupid”, average
consumer-citizens of the USA today – in contrast to the attitude of Romero who,
by the time of his sublime Land of the Dead (2005), was imagining the undead collective as a new proletariat, imbued with
memories of past oppression and an instinctive, revolutionary consciousness.
Uzal detects a curious note of lacerating
self-critique in Jarmusch’s assembled look-back through his career: the
“slowness of zombies” is, after all, the same “existential manner” that his
characters have always had while shuffling through a city or a landscape –
except that now their wandering is rendered “imbecilic and pointless”. For
Uzal, the core of Jarmusch’s nihilistic, dead-end poetry here is in the implied
contrast between the zombies’ sluggish movements and the “intelligence and
precision of gesture” associated with Zelda’s Tarantino-esque sword massacres.
As unlikely as it may seem, The Dead Don’t Die had me pondering a particular, relatively recent
development in the academic sector, both in Australia and elsewhere. I am
regularly called upon by tertiary institutions to assess various kinds of
“practice-led research” PhD projects – where a traditional, written thesis (or
exegesis) is presented alongside a creative work. It’s an increasingly popular
avenue of expression, especially (in my experience) for young artists just
starting in the game or, at the other end of the age-and-experience spectrum, already
well-established artists returning to the university fold in order to either
diversify their job opportunities to include teaching, or quite simply to
explore a new or possible context of funding and support. Like those zombies,
we all gotta eat!
The balance between theory and practice in such art-meets-research
projects is often a tricky thing to determine and evaluate, but I am always up
for the challenge. Many questions assail my mind during this process. Is the
theory part just a pretext or alibi for someone to make a work – which would
likely be the same, whether or not it had the exegesis attached? Or is the work
itself just an illustration of certain intellectual precepts that have been
derived from an authoritative reading list?
Occasionally, the creative part of such projects materialises
as an imaginary screenplay – perhaps not quite destined for production in the
form I receive it, but a screenplay nonetheless. Such scripts often exhibit the
extreme self-consciousness of a meta dimension – that is to say, not only do events reflect certain ideas about
narrative form, but the fictional characters may even “break the frame” of
their roles to explicitly discuss these theories.
It is commonplace, in fact, for characters in these conceptual
situations to talk about “knowing the ending” already, or to seek advice on
their properly three-act destinies from a handy screenwriting manual – not
entirely a new gag, since back in the 1959 Hollywood comedy The Gazebo, for instance, Glenn Ford was
already putting in a call to Alfred Hitchcock for some assistance on the outcome
of the movie’s tricky plot.
Now, I would not have been at all surprised to
encounter the screenplay of The Dead
Don’t Die in the course of a “creative writing” or practice-led PhD. Its
meta-patter begins early on, when Ronnie deflates Cliff’s déjà vu feeling about the song playing on the car radio – the soppy,
country ballad “The Dead Don’t Die” by Sturgill Simpson – by matter-of-factly
stating: “It’s the theme song” (which we will indeed hear many times). In case
you don’t get the general, reflexive point of that gag when it first appears, Ronnie will keep repeating for us that “This is all
gonna end badly” – and backs up this supposition with the revelation that he’s
“read the script” already.
There’s a strangely naïve, illustrative aspect to this
strand of humour in The Dead Don’t Die.
Maybe it goes with the general tone of infantile fun. Or maybe it’s Jarmusch’s
preferred way of telling us – as Tom Waits also does, in his role as the
secluded, bearded observer of this apocalypse – that we’re truly living in a
“fucked-up world”.
MORE Jarmusch: Broken Flowers, Ghost Dog, Mystery Train, Night on Earth, The Limits of Control © Adrian Martin September 2019 |
