In general I don’t like watching horror films so I am unfamiliar with the genre. However I have heard that sometimes the undead that rise up out of the graveyard, immediately behind immaculate suburbia, represent the numb existence of middle England or the habitual drift of American mall shoppers. As someone who for some time went to school in the stifling atmosphere of a relatively affluent small town (though I did not live there) this idea of the newest car registration plate/desserts from M & S/my dad says/ tidy house dwellers staggering forth with their true zombified nature revealed mildly amuses me. Teenagers would sometimes find inarticulate ways to express the impossible divide between the violent underpinning of such an existence and its claustrophobic banality. Sepulcher like they would adopt gothic make-up or desist from eating to the pained yet strangely mute response of their parents.
However in this ‘summer movie’ my observation is that zombies are pressed into service not for incoherent subversion but to assert the right of western nation states to fortress themselves against immigration.
For any western teenager growing up in the eighties most probably the contemporary Hollywood family holds an extra subtly. Nowadays the media likes to highlight the strained cheeriness of a full-skirted narrow waisted 50’s housewife as a symbol of sexism surmounted and lodged safely in the past. An 80’s wife in mainstream blockbusters was some evolution of this and even though she might be feisty and miraculously be a lawyer (glamorous) or engage in complex science you could still see the strings moving. She was most frequently blonde. But the appearance of the wife in World War Z is of the new ilk – simultaneously relatable and aspiration, she wears her silky hair pulled in into the hasty knot of a mother who wants to make herself presentable not sexy. Her hair is not blonde yet she remains clearly Aryan.
I use the word Aryan to jar, to highlight the common laziness that exists in white peoples self-examination of what it means to be white. More specifically I use it to encourage us white folks to seek a purposeful understanding of racism, not to dwell narcissistically upon ourselves; who are already so frequently and unfairly centered. Nor should we succumb to the self-loathing that nestles at the roots of our troubles. Then to be actually useful we need to actively challenge racism in ways that will undoubtedly necessitate personal pain and discomfit, emotionally, socially and otherwise. We need to renounce the comforts that white supremacy affords us at the expense of people of colour. We need to take responsibility for what it means to have a white identity. The vital recognition that whiteness is a social and historical construct does not make it less real or currently inescapable. It points to the potential for and the desirability of the destruction of the white identity. It leads to an understanding of its vital and divisive role in the creation and maintenance of capitalism and contemporary patriarchy. But it is not possible to renounce one’s white identity by some individualistic act of will. Instead we need to make common cause with people of colour in overthrowing white supremacy, undoing patriarchy and replacing capitalism with a society based on non-hierarchical sharing of power and resources. By common cause I do not mean arrogantly monopolising anti-racist struggles or critiquing people of colour, women, trans women, LGBTQI folks or any combination thereof for organising autonomously.
So thus the film begins in Normsville, a husband, a wife and yes two children. What is different is that the father is making breakfast and the mother is going to work. Already a child remarks at this set–up: “All you do is make pancakes in the morning.” It emerges that he has entered into this househusband role as a result of trauma. His well-paid job at the UN, despite its secret agent allure, has exposed him to the ills of the world. Taking these inside him he has become in some sense unwell and is unable to occupy his traditional masculine role. Yet again a new sophistication is exercised in the course of creating the exhortation on behalf of patriarchy. It is recognised that his job role was challenging, that it posed questions, generated ill ease. Many of us will like Brad Pitt (‘s character) for his inability to continue on, unquestioning, unshaken. We can relate to his desire to retreat, to feel familiarity, softness, safety and love. To be free of violence. Thus we are introduced to his character’s moral compunction. He is not a brute. As the film ensues, he does only what is necessary, he is simply trying to protect his family.
And he has dynamism. He questions authority. He is an intelligent employee. It is unlike Contagion that is one long public health announcement – to ‘remain in your home’ and wait for the state to come up with a cure – mitigated only by the eventual presence of the New Age Gwyneth Paltrow on an autopsy table. Here Brad Pitt (and Brad Pitt he remains throughout the film, his face too much a familiar part of American cultural architecture and the film itself too banal to enforce any transformation) defies the curfew and rebelliously states, from his workplace observations of war-fleeing migrants, that it is safer to stay on the move.
The plot unfolds. The family is in the car commuting to school and work. Terror suddenly occurs. A wave of humans is rapidly sweeping across the city spreading a violently transformative disease. Infected they are possessed of a wild, maddened strength and driven by an overwhelming urge to grasp and bite other humans, thus transmitting the disease. They are zombies! They bang their heads through windows to reach their next victim and senselessly hurl themselves off buildings following the most momentary of hungry impulses. They are a vast, terrifying, ever escalating horde. Brad’s family flee in the nearest abandoned vehicle.
What is ‘rewarded’ in the course of the action and what is ‘punished’? The plot allows Brad Pitt to secure medicine for his asthmatic daughter from an abandoned pharmacy with risk but no injury. The mother’s attempts to gather food from a ransacked supermarket result in near death for the family. The repeated admonishments from western news outlets of ‘looting’ during the recent climate change induced disaster of Typhoon Yolanda in the Phillipines come to mind. Fleeing they abandon the food and are granted refuge with a family newly migrant to the U.S. They too are mother, father and two children. They are dependent on their son of approximately nine years old to translate the radio news from English to Spanish for them. They share their food and drink with the Pitt family and their little boy comforts Pitt’s distressed girl. Brad Pitt has been on the phone to his former UN boss. His boss wants Brad back on the job. He promises to get Brad and his family airlifted away. But they have to wait. It is at this point that Brad passes on his migrant learnt survival wisdom to the migrant family. They refuse it, apparently making a fear based decision to remain behind. They are destroyed in the next wave of zombies but their enterprising English-speaking son is airlifted to safety, alongside the Pitt family in a dramatic chain of events.
The military power of the American state wings them to safety on the ocean where they meet Brad’s old boss in a battleship. The president has been killed and a US proxy government set up. It is fully militarised. As an army chief walks through all personnel rise and salute. They need Brad to man up and get back on the job. They know he is the best man for it. He refuses. They tell him that if he doesn’t obey he and his wife will be sent to a refugee camp. He complies. There is a tearful farewell. Little Tommy, the orphaned child of the Spanish speaking family, is left in the mother’s care. Brad Pitt bumps fist in goodbye to this safe miniature refugee from the ghetto. In this time of loss he is not cradled like Brad Pitt’s own white, female children but told to be strong. He is told to man up. He is also given a duty. He is to care for Brad’s family. This instruction is ostensibly given in the spirit of love to keep his mind from his own troubles.
Brad’s task is to accompany a Yale educated scientist on a fact-finding mission to Korea. A team of highly experienced soldiers will safeguard them. The scientist explains the detective quality to their mission- they are to pit their intelligence against nature who is a ‘bitch’. He is young, analytical, specialised, arrogant, keen, nervous, visionary – maybe he is an intellectual Jew? He is instantly killed in the field due to his incompetence with firearms. There are no people in Korea – only zombies – they are the enemy who Brad and the soldiers must resist in a stealth style operation.
With Brad back in the driving seat a number of especially unlikely plot developments occur which are glossed over by a series of competently executed action sequences. Naturally the construction of these sequences is supported by a sizeable budget – $190 million to be specific. The viewer is moved along by a sense of anxiety and Brad from Korea to Israel.
The emerging background to Brad’s previous employment is evocative of a C.I.A. officer. Meeting with a man in charge in Israel he questions his motivations by citing a dossier like summary of his character and motivations. Israel is safe because it has a vast wall around it. The Israeli man in charge, a Mossad official, says they felt compelled to build it because of three historical incidents of violence against the Jewish peoples for which they were devastatingly unprepared. He states “ In the thirties Jews refused to believe they could be sent to concentration camps, In ‘72 we refused to believe there could be a massive explosion at the Olympics and a month before October 1973 we saw Arab troop movements but unanimously agreed they didn’t prove a threat, well, a month later the Arab attack almost drove us into the sea.”
This is a false collapsing of two atrocities against Jewish peoples, when in a state of vulnerability, with the military concerns of the Israeli state to maintain its border controls. The third reference to the Yom Kippur war disingenuously suggests that Israel was not already on a permanent war footing. Then as now Israel served as an outpost for western hegemony in the Middle East; its armed bastions fundamentally dependent upon U.S. military (including propagandistic) support. In addition the very real wall that exists and is being developed around contemporary Israel serves only partially as a military bulwark against Palestine. As a national entity Palestine is concerned with survival in the face of genocidal attacks from vastly more powerful forces and is in no position to contemplate invasion. In fact it is Israel that repeatedly violates the boundaries of Palestine with the existence and establishment of yet more settlements in direct violation of international law. A third of Gaza’s arable land is blocked to Palestinians. Not only does the Israeli state maintain an effective system of apartheid against Palestinian peoples, it is also a profoundly racist society that seeks to limit the amount of non-white Jews seeking citizenship. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pronounced, “The goal is to turn the tables, and take all necessary actions to have the number of illegal immigrants that leave Israel be larger than the number entering Israel.”
The majority of the 50,000 African asylum seekers in Israel are mostly fleeing from Eritrea and Sudan. Of them only two individuals have been granted refugee status, contrasting with global refugee recognition rates that are approximately 80 % for Eritreans and 62% for Sudanese. A pitiless anti-immigrant approach is demonstrated in the detention centres that imprison asylum seekers without any medical care. Migrants have been labelled with the same term applied to Palestinians – infiltrator. The Israeli city of Eilat has launched an anti-migrant campaign hanging 1,500 red flags around the city and hundreds of banners that read: “ Protecting our home, the residents of Eilat are drawing the line on infiltration.” Should these actions not produce the desired results the plan is to escalate the campaign by closing all access to the city.
Inside the wall life is calm, societal infrastructure is functioning. Humans can meet each other’s gaze and feel it returned with humanity. The Israeli state was right to build the wall! And they are not being cruel. They are letting Arab peoples enter and take refuge in a controlled fashion. They welcome in those with whom they normally have enmity in an orderly and forgiving way. The Israeli man in charge says if they do not there will be more of ‘them’ – the zombies – fighting against Israel. He is glad to do so – he is pleased that expediency and compassion are married.
The Arabic, Palestinian scarf wearing, hijab wearing people stream in. They arrive by bus and wait enthusiastically cordoned by crowd control barriers as Israeli military electronically scan their faces. They are grateful and full of love. Smiling and dancing they break into song! Israeli military start to clap in appreciation of this new accord. Brad Pitt becomes worried. He has taken up the detective role appointed to the Yale scientist. Knowing that noise attracts the zombies he calls out. The scarf and hijab wearing peoples singing in their own language are making too much noise! They trigger disaster.
A vast tidal quantity of zombified humans piles up the huge concrete wall. They are so desperate to enter the zone of safety and consume all within that they scramble up upon each other in an urgent attempt to scale the wall. Their collective urge supersedes their concern for their individual wellbeing. Driven by newfound uncontrollable needs they pile up against the wall and hurl themselves to the other side. They are so numerous and violent that their mass affords them safe passage even against the might of the Israeli state.
In the ensuing chaos Brad barely makes it out alive. He does so with the companionship of a brave Israeli woman soldier. Her head is shaved indicating the necessity to compromise your femininity to engage in warfare. By stepping outside the role of wife or mother she is ‘punished’ by the plotline and rendered un-whole through the loss of a hand. Kind, quick thinking Brad administers this as a necessary amputation to prevent her possible passage over to zombification.
Wounded, they move to the cultural and intellectual inheritance of the old world. They find bravery, intellectual endeavor and restraint within a British scientific research institute. Brad has a brain wave. He has a risky solution. Throughout his travels he has been observing, speculating and analysing as well as running around with guns and knives. The British scientists have contemplated it but are unable to undertake because of lack of numbers and resources. Brad provides the necessary leadership and force to fulfil their plan. At heroic personal risk Brad injects himself with a potentially fatal disease. The zombies reject his flesh. They only want fully healthy individuals. An ‘inoculation’ against the zombies has been found. Inoculated military forces will be able to move unscathed through the zombie masses and restore order by any means necessary.
In all the action Brad has lost contact with his boss on the US battleship. When he re-establishes contact he discovers what we, the viewers, have seen playing out alongside the story of his efforts. With Brad presumed dead his family are no longer attached to personnel considered essential to the war and have been sent to a “Safe Zone” in Nova Scotia. Not unlike Hitler’s obscene recommendation in Mein Kamf only ‘healthy eaters’ are fully deserving of life in society. Only those directly enforcing the laws of military society are allowed to remain in a place of comparative safety. As a woman to be married to a man who is enforcing the rule of law will ensure your survival. To be linked to a dissenter, to be widowed or otherwise single is to risk death. Both times the message of the precarity of her situation (and all the fascistic violence therein implied) is delivered via the mouths of tokenistic black male characters.
In the British labs more aspects of zombies are portrayed. The scene is reminiscent of the plight of Sarah Baart (her slave name, not her birth name) who was a Khoisan black woman captured as a slave and exhibited for entertainment and scientific study during early 1800’s Europe. That legacy is alive in multi-faceted ways, including the continued and numerically disproportionate use of women of colour in non-consensual medical experimentation. Now a black female zombie is held behind thick glass. She is wild, fierce, crazed, angry. In the spectrum of black skin colouration hers is at the darkest end. Her eyes bulge. She bangs her head against the glass in a fury. She is as a caged animal. She is a specimen. This is necessary. Her captivity is valuable and necessary to humanity as a whole. The white people look though the glass at her in a detached fashion. They are inured to the site of an angry black woman banging her head in frustration.
In a separate and contained area of the research labs former British (all white) research scientists have become zombified. There are about 80 of them – a small number in zombie terms. They are a weak and enervated bunch as their imprisonment, unlike that of the black female subject, has resulted in listlessness. Nonetheless if encountering fresh human flesh they will still be stirred to violent action and are thus dangerous. Meanwhile they rock back and forth, fruitlessly gnashing their teeth whilst making faint, pointless indecipherable noise. They too have become enemies of societal order. Yet they are a different sort of zombie. Their intellectual capabilities are no longer fruitfully directed to subduing the enemy. They have become the enemy. Are they dissidents? Intellectual dissidents? The plot quells them leaving them imprisoned to meet a slow death.
Military might again swoops Brad over seas, this time across the oceans that divide the old world from the new. He has vital information and is about to be reunited with his family.
So he retraces the steps of earlier European settlers of the Americas. Perchance he meets his family in the explicitly named Nova Scotia. As they joyously greet him at the shore the lighting and styling evokes their white ancestral beauty, reminding of the celtic twilight. It is a modern Aryan/white story to which Hitler, after initial balking, might well warm.
Little Tommy is this time treated like a child, with tenderness. After an initial hesitation, reminding us of his otherness, he is drawn into the family embrace. He has been adopted by Brad and Angelina! He will learn their ways and be good, upright and integrated. His past, unlike that of Brad who may revisit the old world for information and understanding, has been annihilated.
Now we are shown the annihilation of masses of people who have had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. We can only assume that these are the deaths of the world’s poorer people, the majority of who are people of colour, some of who are white. In fact we can assume that the majority of the world’s population has died. If it is military might of the wealthier nations that assures survival then most of us will be out of luck. Simultaneously these mass deaths of genocidal scale are justified, yet a distance from their execution circuitously created. To please liberal sensibilities Russians and rightwing christians are given as examples of those undertaking these acts. In nighttime vision footage, reminiscent of the Gulf war, vast stadiums full of herded zombies/people divested of their humanity are set on fire. They are beyond repair, excessive in number, hungry, violent – what other recourse of action is possible? A reasonable final solution must be found.
“I will state flatly that the bulk of this country’s white population impresses me, and has so impressed me for a very long time, as being beyond any conceivable hope of moral rehabilitation. They have been white, if I may so put it, too long; they have been married to the lie of white supremacy too long; the effect in the personalities, their lives, their grasp of realty, has been as devastating as the lava which so memorably immobilized the citizens of Pompeii. They are unable to conceive that their version of reality, which they want me to accept, is an insult to my history and a parody of theirs and an intolerable violation of myself.” James Baldwin