A new metaphor for the love that eludes

Monster movies pretty much tend to serve similar purposes. They show us a negative human trait, distilled. The one trope that holds true to virtually every vampire movie is that the bloodsuckers themselves are embodiments of self-interest. They lack compassion, generosity, empathy -- every action they take is devoid of altruism and in service to the satisfying an appetite. They are fantastical versions of a sociopaths, but with bumpy foreheads. And this is true of throughout the history of the vampire legend-- even when they had a whole lot more in common with other incarnations of the idea of "the undead," namely, zombies than, say, Eli from Let the Right One In.

Most of the origins of vampire legends can be traced back to Eastern Europe. Not long ago, Joan Acocella published this handy summative report on the evolution of the vampire legend, from yesteryear through today. To me, it's impossible to conceptualize the vampire without acknowledging its heritage, from risen, shambling, rotting corpse all the way on up through Spike, the undead's answer to Billy Idol, from Buffy. The best I could find about the equally rich zombie legend heritage was this Wikipedia page. As with vampires, I can't really talk about zombies without pointing out what I know of the heritage of the legends. While vampires are a distinctly European monster, zombies hail from Africa. Or more specifically, they stowed away on slave ships and arrived on American shores as avatars of empowerment for the leaders of the amalgamated patois-religions throughout the Caribbean and the American South. Powerful Vodou priests would raise the dead and have these mindless laborers do their bidding. Let it not escape us that by "powerful Vodou priest," I mean "slave." And so, by extension, I also mean to point out that inherent in this origin of the zombie legends is the notion that the primary purpose of the zombie was to scare the everlivin' shit out of the white folks. They are slaves of slaves, but they are also vehicles of retribution against the smug, pale-faced captors. That they are the bogeyman of the Confederacy is as important now as it ever was.

Since these early days of The New World's restless corpses, the zombie legends have been appropriated a million times over. No longer do we understand zombies as the slaves of powerful magicians--they've come to serve as metaphors for all kinds of things. So many analyses of zombies in film have bitten written that I need not do more than hit the highlights here: they represent anxiety over biochemical warfare or the AIDS epidemic, depending on the analysis in question, in 28 Days Later. They're the rapid soul-death of modern middle class life in Shaun of the Dead. They cast allegorical shadows of Iraq War military occupations in 28 Weeks Later. And it's no coincidence that Romero's Night of the Living Dead apocalyptic zombie vision preceded the Cold War detente which began in 1969. Night of the Living Dead was released in 1968, when tensions were still relatively high. In other words, zombies are one of Hollywood's favorite candy shells in which they coat the bitter pills of social unrest, so as to make such niggling worries more consumable for a general audience.

But all these subsequent iterations of the greater zombie collective body do not erase their slave culture narrative history. Or at least, they shouldn't-- not for an informed audience. Zombies carry a very specific genetic code of meaning that incorporates all of the versions of the story I've listed above as well as many others. That's an important thing to remember if you're going to take it upon yourself to grow a new branch to the zombie family tree. And a paucity of historical references may well be the only real bone I have to pick with Make-Out With Violence.

MOWV is a locally-made production, filmed on location in Hendersonville, a little suburb to the northeast of Nashville. In all honesty, it's remarkably accomplished. It's low-budget, for sure. But its soundtrack, written and performed by The Non-Commissioned Officers (to which I'm listening as I write (for mood), and which, I might add, I bought just a few hours ago directly from Leah High, who steals the show as Addy, the zombie's best friend) covers a wide tonal range, from sad to spooky to atmospheric to giddy/youthful. In wholly apropos fashion, its recurrent melodic schema occasionally even goes so far as to broach something like a Lynchian, Twin-Peaks-ish sound reference now and again.

Also, I found myself marveling at the dialogue throughout. For such young and relatively inexperienced filmmakers, the collaborative writing talents of The Deagol brothers, Cody DeVos and Eric Lehning display a not unimpressive sense of restraint. The script is pointedly understated and it keeps the exposition to a minimum-- for which I was deeply grateful. Moreover, it manages to capture the spirit of the teenage clique-- complete with idiosyncratic inside jokes (one character, for instance, is always called by both her first and last names: Anne Haran -- which rhymes and is therefore funnier.) -- without dumbing down the characters because of their youth. Or making them speak in some kind of Dawson's Creek-esque elevated shrink-speak diction.

But the story is a curious one in the lineage of the zombie movie. As it goes, one girl, Wendy, from a tight-knit group of friends goes missing in the summer after their high school graduation. The town searches for her. She is not found. They presume her death and have a funeral-like service. And then we cut to a shot of her body washed up on the edge of a river. She twitches. She stands. And then a couple scenes later, a couple of the kids find her strung up between two trees. They take her home and proceed to care for her all summer long, in the house of a friend who is out of town. She rots. She eats a rat. She breaks a toilet and a few champagne glasses. She lunges after one of the living kids a couple of times in an effort to eat him, too. But most of the time, she is relatively docile, as zombies go. And the usual social drama of teenagers continues around her.

Wendy does not trigger an epidemic, nor does she reflect any greater political anxieties of our culture. Instead, she is a whole new brand of zombie. She is the eternally unavailable girl, made only moreso by her death. Patrick, one of our band of compatriots, had long nursed a crush on the girl, when she was still pre-undead. Wendy, of course, had a boyfriend and showed no real romantic interest in poor Patrick. But Patrick quickly becomes the primary caretaker of our zombie invalid, as she lies in her bathtub bed. Despite his devotion, she remains aloof, if a little hungry, in her deadness. Though the physicality of their relationship becomes a reality, as he bathes her, puts make-up on her, tests the limits of her deathly numbness, Wendy remains utterly unmoved by Patrick's dedication. It is only through the titular make-out session, in which Wendy eats Patrick (weirdly reminiscent of the scene in Drawing Restraing 9 in which Bjork and Matthew Barney flay each other underwater, and then eat each others' skin, by the way), that his love for her reaches any sort of perverse fulfillment.

This story, in and of itself, is duly compelling. For a bunch of non-professional actors, these kids do a bang-up job. As I previously mentioned, I could watch Leah High all day long. However, I really do wonder how this film fits into the zombie tradition. While I quite enjoy this new spin on the trope, its failure to tie it back to its literary, cultural and filmic heritages raises a few questions. And, well, it's also likely that the script's admirable restraint left a hole or two in the narrative fabric. What I'm wondering is this: why is Wendy a zombie? How did she get that way? Is someone controlling her and the clues that would relay the identity of her puppeteer went over my head? Or is she more of the zombiehood-as-a-disease school? If so, why doesn't she try harder to pass her funk along? What, exactly, is it about her that makes her have more in common with the zombies of folklore and legend than, say, Bernie (as in the Weekend-at Bernie, I mean)? And who the hell tied her up to that tree, anyway?

So, OK, it's not perfect. But it's still, by far, the best conceived, best executed local film I've seen at the Nashville Film Festival. And well, it's just so hard not to love a zombie movie.

UPDATE: I forgot to include this gem in my abridgement of the zombie lineage. Clearly, it is a much needed step in the ladder.

The real inner conflict resides in the body.

When I was in high school, I had a dream that continues to haunt me. I was in a house comprised of all hallways. All the rooms were long and narrow and gloomy and painted this awful, dingy, nauseous green. I navigated the hallways until I found the kitchen, another hallway, though this one was lined with kitchen appliances and cabinets. All sick and green. I began to open the doors to microwave, dishwasher, oven... and out of each tumbled a full-grown, naked man. They were beautiful-- white-skinned and dark-haired. Well-muscled. And significant quantities of some milky fluid burbled out of the appliances as they lurched forward from their tucked and cambered postures. And blood. Needless to say (or maybe needful, I don't know), all the men were dead. As is often the case in my dreams, I felt screams well up in my chest, but I just couldn't scream. This non-screaming happened here. And so, in lieu of screaming, I found a scabby-looking screen door at the end of the kitchen-hallway and I banged through it, barely breathing. I found myself on a big expanse of a beach, a swollen, tumescent sky above. I ran to the water, hoping to wash off the blood and fluid that had spilled all over me in the kitchen, but I found more of these beautiful dead men washing up onto the shore. The entire ocean was amniotic and cloudy. I don't suppose I've ever had a dream in which I've felt that level of terror-- before or since.

The imagery of this dream does not strike me as particularly subtle. Though I was probably only about 14 or 15-- and still miserably virginal-- it's clear as day that I was already feeling some anxiety about birthing babies. Dead bleached-out corpses, falling from narrow openings amidst assorted bodily fluids? Yeah, they are tough to miss, my still-born sons. Next week, I'll be 31 and my worries about using my body to produce children have shifted a little. It's not so much a horror show of death and blood anymore-- and more about a simpler vanity, I suppose. I still get carded virtually every time I buy alcohol-- and though I find this ridiculous, as I most certainly look older than 21-- I must admit that I kinda like the fact that all my body parts are still in the right places. I must also admit that I LOVE the social cache that my body parts being in the right places afford me. God help me, I love male attention. Preferably, male attention of my own choosing, but even less desirable male attention is nice, so long as it doesn't cross boundaries. And I worry, to an embarrassing degree, that all that will dry up when I get that post-baby belly-sag and breast-droop. I worry about it so much that I'm finding it difficult to apply language to the thought. And I'm shuddering a little to think of it.

Now, the irony here doesn't escape me. I spend an awful lot of time thinking about sex-- how to get it and what it means, why it's such a powerful force and how it's a filter for virtually everything in my life. And so, I find this insane bodily tug-of-war--- between the ways our bodies goad us into reproducing and a real physical tremulousness at the actual prospect of birthing a baby-- pretty funny. Surely, it's totally stupid that I have such a massive libido and also so much trepidation regarding the natural effects of indulging said libido. But whatever. No human drive is ever simple.

I bring all this up now because, a few weeks ago, I watched a little film called Stephanie Daley, and I found it so difficult to watch that I haven't been able to write about it since. Now, very few films make me squeamish (unless it's got vomit in it, and I feel like I've covered my vomit issues aplenty in this blog). On the list of films that have gotten to me is probably Requiem for a Dream (I really did have to fast forward through the gang-bang-followed-by-vomit scene-- give me exploding track-marks any day!) and well, Four Rooms-- though this is back to vomit again (there's no goddamn WARNING!!!). But in all honesty, I was really on the verge of fast-forwarding though a long, brutal sequence of this film. I managed to weather it, but it's tough, I'm telling you.

The basic story is about a 16-year-old girl and her shrink. The shrink is hugely pregnant and, we learn, found herself in such a state very shortly after suffering a still birth. The girl stands accused of murdering her baby while claiming to not have known she was pregnant in the first place. In many ways, it's clear that the writer/director, Hilary Brougher, drew inspiration from some sensational headline or other. But, ultimately, it's a story of two women dealing with the flip-sides of the birthing conundrum: when you don't want it, it comes so easily, to the detriment of your whole life-- and when you pine for it, it eludes you in the most painful way possible. It's a thoughtful exploration of quiet aches and particularly female aches they are.

However. My goodness. There is a scene in this film. It's pretty much muted out and you get only brief smatterings of sound. It's shot primarily through the gaps around the door of a public bathroom stall. And it's all close-ups of this girl's face while she's giving birth into the leg of her ski-pants. If you ever want to know what it feels like to have your guts ripped out through your vagina, please consult Amber Tamblyn's face during this scene. Her confusion, her physical pain, her utter all-alone-ness are palpable in the most disturbing way. Since when does the sheer emotion on the face of another human make me turn away in the same way that a puke scene would? Well, it's never happened until this film, during which I found my own head buried in my sofa pillows. I can only assume this is the case because the idea of forcing a kid out of my own body engenders no small amount of anxiety in my person-- as foretold by my scary dream.

For all you girls who've done it? Good god. You're all my heroes-- though I'm still not sure if I'll ever wanna be you.

When life calls you a freak, find some scholars who are thinking thoughts similar to yours and make freak-ade.

It's true that in my every day life, acquaintances who stumble upon my blog gain a whole lotta insight into my strange perspectives. At a recent family wedding, a cousin to whom I'd sent my URL admitted to me that, as he read my post about Anne Sexton's poem, "The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator," he kept thinking that he shouldn't be reading the sorta stuff I write-- that somehow, he was invading my private world or something. Secretly, I was a little thrilled to have excited such a sentiment. If I wasn't looking for intimacy through language, I don't quite know what I'd be doing with myself, even if that means exposing parts of myself that are not readily available to all who know me in real life. After all, I am not so presumptuous to assume that my public persona is anything other than basically, mundanely normal.

That said, I certainly do have my obsessions. In a deeply personal sense, I'm working very hard to carve out a life for myself in which I question social norms that do not seem to serve me well-- and then to go one step further, and question my own assumptions that, likewise, are not doing do my life any favors. To that end, I think and write and obsess a lot about how to be a sexual person and an self-possessed woman at the same time. And I mean, a lot. You might have noticed

So, then, it's really heartening when I find a cluster of articles that show that there are other brains out there in the world who've tapped into the same rivulet of thought that I've found. Here's a quick list of cool stuff the internet-cat dragged in:

1. This one that explores whether or not jealousy and feelings of sexual propriety are as ingrained as we've all grown accustomed to thinking they are.
2. This one that wonders, in the context of contemporary life, whether the very concept of monogamy serves us all that well in the first place.
3. This one in which the hyper-moralizing of American politicians acquires an air of hypocrisy, as, well, politicians, even Republican ones, are subject to the whims of their own physicalities-- as are the rest of us.
4. This one that points out how sheltering kids from all things sexual is detrimental to their education, their self-esteem, their reproductive health, their very senses of identity...
5. And THEN! Now, I know your excitement must be reaching a fevered pitch with all this fascinating text abounding, but someone wrote a book about how American culture is frighteningly invested in restricting sexual choice and denying relevant information about the very fecundity, variety and plurality of sexuality to assorted subsets of mentally solvent folks. And here's a review of that book.

On this note, I'll now mention that, last Friday, I went to a gathering of giggling women, during which I doubtlessly spouted off about how the last thing I want from a relationship is a situation in which I and some other poor sap feel it necessary to regulate each others' bodily functions. And, while most of my audience was at least politely sympathetic, one girl said something along the lines of, "Well, that's OK for YOU, freaky, weird girl that you are...but NORMAL people WANT to own each other (italics are my additions)." So, honest to god, it's such a damn relief to find reasonably articulate people writing articles and books that don't succumb to the ever-suspect conventional "wisdom" that espouses the paucity of sexual choices available to us. Especially if you throw them into contrast with the likes of Wendy Shalit and her paleolithic girls-n-modesty diatribes.

Thank heavens for scholar/freaks. I would feel so alone, were it not for them!

What remains

I feel I can safely say that the image of contemporary California held in the public consciousness has little to do with old Hollywood westerns. I mean, with the shopping malls, and Clueless, and the beach-dwellers of The O.C.... well, they're just not all that Clint Eastwood-y anymore, you know? But the romance with the Manifest Destiny, the old West-- and its denizen, the bow-legged cowboy, is still alive, isn't it? Or at least I would be led to believe so by the likes of Deadwood (which I gather is an original and smart take on the topic, though I haven't seen it and can't really comment upon it even remotely-- damn, HBO is pricy in these parts!). But then along comes a movie like Down in the Valley-- which is a sharp, eagle-eyed look at the stinking corpse of this very romance.

In the accompanying materials on the DVD, there was a rather elucidating Q&A session with Ed Norton, the star/producer and David Jacobson, the director, in which Norton recounts a conversation he had with Jacobson early on in production in which Jacobson said something along the lines of, "I'm not interested in the sociological, I'm interested in the psychological." Norton, himself, is clearly more interested in the sociological implications of this movie--as am I, of course-- but it's interesting that the director denies that they were even a consideration for him. Because, if it's nothing else, this is a movie about community and context. And those who intrude thereupon.

Basically, it's a movie about a teenage girl so wrapped up in her sultry San Fernando Valley ennui that she sets out to entangle herself with a self-deluded cowboy in the guise of the ever-adorable Ed Norton. OK, so this is an actor who is never good-looking that we could consider him a sex symbol and yet he has so much on-screen charm, intelligence, affability, and, well, muscly arms that his appeal is undeniable. And Evan Rachel Wood--well, I have yet to see this girl in something wherein she hasn't been shockingly good. I mean, her features are delicate and childish and yet she's got this complicated vulnerability/ferocity that makes me really glad that a pretty blonde teenager can still get taken seriously in Hollywood. And though both of their characters have loose-cannon tendencies, she is really the one calling the shots in this story-- and she's also the one who evolves the most.

And I suppose (because I'm me and I always talk about this stuff) I'll address the issue of a teenage girl/grown man sex: Yes, it happens. Yes, it's appropriate to the story. It's only interesting in this case because it's yet another example of the so-called impressionable young girl employing her own sexual agency-- she chooses this man and makes him fall in love with her, makes him desire her. There is no way in hell someone could interpret this situation as one in which he takes advantage of her. If anything, it's the other way around. But, for once, in this case, their intimate interactions aren't so interesting to me when there is iconic Americana at stake.

I, unlike the director, am much more interested in what's happening in this little San Fernando Valley than I am in what's happening inside the heads of these folks. Given, their despair, their malaise... it's palpable. But what happens when that old image of the lone wolf cowboy find himself caught up in this family on the verge of splitting at its seams? And if this cowboy seems to maintain that particular and peculiar variety of innocence that is destructive in its very ignorance, well, he is somehow simultaneously both very American and very out of touch with American people. And what is there to do with a vision of America that we can neither live up to nor live down? Well, if this movie is any sort of example, we treat it as an aberration and then we destroy it.

And, I know, it's hard to talk about cowboys these days without bringing up our shit-kickin' president-- or at least, it's hard for me to think about the word "cowboy" without also calling up his very visage. But this movie isn't about the war, or global vigilantism. It quieter and smaller and about a girl who loves a man who is at odds with his community-- because (spoiler alert)we learn he not so much the outsider that he purports to be. He is both huckster and victim-- and what makes this movie so great is that he exists so fully in that paradox.

This movie is in love with its smoggy, dusky landscape... and its blanched California faces. And, truly, it's a rank, sunbleached, old cadavre of a western-- but an engaging, thoughtful, wrenching chapter in that story that's as old as American pioneerism.