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alonewiththemoonWatched White Zombie last night, in preparation for putting together my Voodoo Dolly piece for the Bela birthday bash. I think I'd only seen bits and pieces of it before, never the whole thing all the way through. Apart from some nonsensical things at the end (I think they were running out of film stock or something and rushed the ending), it's actually quite a good atmospheric movie and Bela was in fine form.
One thing I found interesting right away was that although we think that movies like Shaun of the Dead and Fido are terribly clever in showing that zombies can be put to good use for manual labor, that was in fact the main point of the horror of White Zombie. Bela's character, "Murder" Legendre, creates zombies in order to have a compliant, un-exhaustible workforce on his sugar plantation and in his sugar mill. He also created some zombies out of revenge against those who tried to stop him, but most of the zombies were field hands and factory workers. I don't think it takes much to read something into this in a movie made in 1932; here is the the big capitalist boss man exploiting the workers, keeping them in a state neither alive nor dead and wholly antithetical to being a fully realized human being. Inevitably, because this takes place in Haiti and most of the zombies are black men, the real life horror of slavery is never that far from thought either (side note: black people are the only sensible ones in the entire movie--if you see zombies, get yourself away, and bury your dead deep in the ground out in plain sight, don't tuck the body away in an isolated vault. To the directors' credit, they are portrayed as sensible, a little unusual for 1932 I'd think). One of the scenes that was the most chilling for me takes place when Charles, who covets Madeleine who in turn is in love with her husband Neil, visits Legendre to see if he can help him gain Madeleine's love. They converse in Legendre's business office above the sugar mill, and in the background the heavy wooden creaking of the cane grinding machinery powered by zombies provides an ominous backdrop to their conversation, a never-ceasing reminder of what the personal fortunes of rich men in Haiti are based upon, whether their workers are alive or dead. Charles pretends he is better than Legendre, but he is not, when he wants something badly enough.
And of course that something is a woman, the other disenfranchised class, something to be owned by a man, stolen from her husband. Sexual access to her body is hinted at by Legendre. I feel pretty confident that I am thinking along the right lines about the filmmakers' intended meaning behind the male zombies, but I wonder if they had intended to make any sort of commentary about women in society. One notable thing about zombie Madeleine is that she clearly had some memory of her emotions and that it prevented her from being fully under Legendre's sway. Legendre hinted that on some level, zombies are perfectly aware of what is happening to them, but no others seemed able to overcome his control over their actions to the slightest degree (Charles' actions at the end don't count, Legendre wasn't done zombifying him yet). Was Madeleine as a symbol of womanly virtue and loyalty simply too good to be made fully zombie? I'd like to think of her as a suffragette, throwing off Legendre's control to live the life that she had chosen for herself. But I don't know if that was the intention. I do know that she had a fabulous 1932 wardrobe though!
Finally, these zombies don't eat brains, or any other parts of people. They are only dangerous when ordered to attack. The fear of zombies, for the Haitians and colonials, was the horror of their unnatural state, and even worse the knowledge that the zombies know on some level what has happened to them. It seems that as time has gone by and the zombie has become a mainstream cultural element, we've become accustomed enough to the idea that they are horrible in themselves and now construct them as things that are driven to attack those of us who are normal. The man who was kept half-dead for another's financial gain turns that greed back on the society that valued Legendre's wealth and status and attempts to consume it in the most literal way possible. Perhaps the zombie has become hungry because greed like Legendre's has become so commonplace now that we can all see it in ourselves, and fear being called out on it--or perhaps we realize that much of our comfortable Western existence is built on the labor of those who do work under poor conditions for little recompense, and we are dreading the day that those laborers say enough.
Anyway, that's my rather Marxist zombie analysis. Blame the University of Chicago anthropology department and a teenagehood of listening to early WaxTrax! bands. I'm somewhat tempted to write this up more but I'm sure it's been done to death and beyond, har har. There's a DVD release out with commentary by the author of the book I link to there, I may try to check that out.
Didn't get a ton of direct movement inspiration, but there is one characteristic hand gesture Legendre uses to control the zombies that I can certainly incorporate and that people who have seen the movie ought to recognize.
Also, in the tradition of the armadillo in Transylvania in the movie Dracula, the movie featured the wrong species of vulture in Haiti. The only vulture there is the turkey vulture, but I suppose their large size would have made them difficult to film. Plus who knows how cooperative they are.
One thing I found interesting right away was that although we think that movies like Shaun of the Dead and Fido are terribly clever in showing that zombies can be put to good use for manual labor, that was in fact the main point of the horror of White Zombie. Bela's character, "Murder" Legendre, creates zombies in order to have a compliant, un-exhaustible workforce on his sugar plantation and in his sugar mill. He also created some zombies out of revenge against those who tried to stop him, but most of the zombies were field hands and factory workers. I don't think it takes much to read something into this in a movie made in 1932; here is the the big capitalist boss man exploiting the workers, keeping them in a state neither alive nor dead and wholly antithetical to being a fully realized human being. Inevitably, because this takes place in Haiti and most of the zombies are black men, the real life horror of slavery is never that far from thought either (side note: black people are the only sensible ones in the entire movie--if you see zombies, get yourself away, and bury your dead deep in the ground out in plain sight, don't tuck the body away in an isolated vault. To the directors' credit, they are portrayed as sensible, a little unusual for 1932 I'd think). One of the scenes that was the most chilling for me takes place when Charles, who covets Madeleine who in turn is in love with her husband Neil, visits Legendre to see if he can help him gain Madeleine's love. They converse in Legendre's business office above the sugar mill, and in the background the heavy wooden creaking of the cane grinding machinery powered by zombies provides an ominous backdrop to their conversation, a never-ceasing reminder of what the personal fortunes of rich men in Haiti are based upon, whether their workers are alive or dead. Charles pretends he is better than Legendre, but he is not, when he wants something badly enough.
And of course that something is a woman, the other disenfranchised class, something to be owned by a man, stolen from her husband. Sexual access to her body is hinted at by Legendre. I feel pretty confident that I am thinking along the right lines about the filmmakers' intended meaning behind the male zombies, but I wonder if they had intended to make any sort of commentary about women in society. One notable thing about zombie Madeleine is that she clearly had some memory of her emotions and that it prevented her from being fully under Legendre's sway. Legendre hinted that on some level, zombies are perfectly aware of what is happening to them, but no others seemed able to overcome his control over their actions to the slightest degree (Charles' actions at the end don't count, Legendre wasn't done zombifying him yet). Was Madeleine as a symbol of womanly virtue and loyalty simply too good to be made fully zombie? I'd like to think of her as a suffragette, throwing off Legendre's control to live the life that she had chosen for herself. But I don't know if that was the intention. I do know that she had a fabulous 1932 wardrobe though!
Finally, these zombies don't eat brains, or any other parts of people. They are only dangerous when ordered to attack. The fear of zombies, for the Haitians and colonials, was the horror of their unnatural state, and even worse the knowledge that the zombies know on some level what has happened to them. It seems that as time has gone by and the zombie has become a mainstream cultural element, we've become accustomed enough to the idea that they are horrible in themselves and now construct them as things that are driven to attack those of us who are normal. The man who was kept half-dead for another's financial gain turns that greed back on the society that valued Legendre's wealth and status and attempts to consume it in the most literal way possible. Perhaps the zombie has become hungry because greed like Legendre's has become so commonplace now that we can all see it in ourselves, and fear being called out on it--or perhaps we realize that much of our comfortable Western existence is built on the labor of those who do work under poor conditions for little recompense, and we are dreading the day that those laborers say enough.
Anyway, that's my rather Marxist zombie analysis. Blame the University of Chicago anthropology department and a teenagehood of listening to early WaxTrax! bands. I'm somewhat tempted to write this up more but I'm sure it's been done to death and beyond, har har. There's a DVD release out with commentary by the author of the book I link to there, I may try to check that out.
Didn't get a ton of direct movement inspiration, but there is one characteristic hand gesture Legendre uses to control the zombies that I can certainly incorporate and that people who have seen the movie ought to recognize.
Also, in the tradition of the armadillo in Transylvania in the movie Dracula, the movie featured the wrong species of vulture in Haiti. The only vulture there is the turkey vulture, but I suppose their large size would have made them difficult to film. Plus who knows how cooperative they are.
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no subject
Date: 2007-09-06 07:28 pm (UTC)George Romero's twist on zombies was that they were a reflection of our society, normal people turning into drones, and rampant consumerism. It was the spoof Return of the Living Dead that focused the attention on eating brains, because by eating the brain a zombie could ease the constant, horrid pain of its existence.
Lots of good takes on zombies out there.
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Date: 2007-09-06 07:36 pm (UTC)