Zombies, and such

The mantra of zombie-apocalypse fiction is essentially this: watch people go mental as the world goes to shit around them. And my god, we can't get enough of it these days.

Somehow, in the last 10 or so years, Zombies went from the realm of hammy horror movies to the obsession of not only geeks, but a good chunk of the young populous. The once small sub-genre of horror has now become a monster of popular culture in its own right, spawning fiction that has more or less transcended the horror parent-genre from which it came. It's even inspired some very specific and quite successful satire.  So why do we love zombie apocalypses so much? Because we all reckon we could survive one. 

It wasn't always like this. Zombies were popular pre-2000, yes - but only as much as other recurrent horror themes, like dream invasion, maimed serial killers or crazy Texans with chainsaws. The zombie movies of old, the Night of the Living Dead series being possibly the most notable, were just horror movies. And as serious as horror movies try to be, sophistication and artistic integrity has always been sacrificed for the gore factor. Zombie movies, like other horror movies, used to have a very simple task - scare people and freak them out on a basic, visceral level.

Today zombie fiction is prolific - and some of it is pretty good at that. Both the comic and television series of The Walking Dead are doing immensely well and are quite compelling. The subject matter was treated quite realistically and with much consideration in World War Z. And it's been lampooned very successfully in both quintessentially English and quintessentially American ways in Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, respectively. Our Zombie obsession extends beyond even fiction - we have best-selling educational guides on how to survive a zombie apocalypse. 

Shaun of the Dead - somewhat funnier than the Scary Movie series

Starting at around about the time Lost came out, the popularity surrounding zombie apocalypse fiction skyrocketed immensely. Despite the fact that show itself wasn't about zombies, it did well to popularise many of the themes that we seek from zombie apocalypse fiction today. It portrayed people put in a desperate (though not impossible) situation and losing their sense of human decency as the comforts of 'civilisation' were removed. We subsequently came to love Zombie fiction for two main reasons - survivalism and psychology. 

It is interesting to note that what sets Zombie fiction apart from other horror fiction is that humans are given a fighting chance. The Resident Evil franchise, 28 Days Later,  I Am Legend (the Will Smith version, not the one with Moses in) and pretty much all other zombie fiction depicts humans as having a damn good fighting chance. 'Healthy' humans are portrayed as being able to defend themselves, establish stable communities and, in some cases, even fight back the horde. The same cannot be said for much other horror fiction. The Halloween and Nightmare on Elm St. series tease the audience with hope that the protagonists can survive, but they are invariably overwhelmed by a boogeyman that proves to be too powerful for them.

Zombies are slow and dumb. Their advantages lie in the fact that they only have one weak spot, are unperturbed by fatigue or exposure, and in their overwhelming numbers. They are a manageable threat, and as a literary antagonist do not have any surprises that supernatural boogeymen or overly-intelligent axe maniacs traditionally have (by virtue of vaguely defined abilities). We seem to have zombies figured out, and for that reason, given a little bit of common sense, we believe we would survive in the face of the apocalypse. Pack camping gear, grab a melee weapon, avoid drawing attention, and, in the face of danger, go for the brains.

The seemingly widespread nature of this zombie survival knowledge adds an extra layer of enjoyment when flexing our 'well I could do better than that' reflex. When we read action based fiction, we realise the protagonists are probably more prepared than we are for the situations they get into. When we get into Drama shows, we acknowledge that human emotion is rather complex and that we don't have full control over how we might react to a given scenario. But Zombies? The pack from Shaun of the Dead should have picked a more fortifiable position than the local pub. Rick from The Walking Dead should have probably should have realised that Shane was a massive prick a long time before he actually did. And in the same series, the character of Glenn seems to be an homage to us, the well-informed zombie pop culture consumer. In a rather meta-fictional way, he's got a knack for avoiding zombies for no other reason than he is a massive geek.

Glenn from The Walking Dead  - 'What'd you do before all of this?' 'Delivered Pizzas'.

With this, though, we come back to where we started - watching a group of people lose all sense of human decency. This is a staple of survival fiction. If civilization falls down, if basic assumed comforts are taken away, a group of people will turn on each other and it will get nasty. Stuck up city types grow indignant at the lack of homely comforts and sometimes get violent. Hermits are forced to interact with other people in uncomfortably close quarters, and sometimes get violent. Police Officers, teachers and other authoritarians get ignored, and sometimes get violent.

We have become fascinated with the idea of human behavior under dire straits. Recent times and increasing existentialism has made us really want to examine the idea of humanity and human decency. Do we sacrifice our moral codes for the sake of survival? Is human decency and basic consideration other people just artificial constructs of our society, or should we live by these moral codes, even in the face of the end of the world? Do we euthanise the bitten infected little girl who's about to turn? What about when we start running low on food? Do we kill people, leave them behind so that we can make it to the next town?

These questions have popularised the standard profile for the protoganists of  survival fiction. He (or she) is invariably a strongly moral person who is forced to question whether or not he is meeting the bottom line for survival, or whether or not he is being brutal enough to protect the group he is leading. And they are a character who sometimes does abandon his morals. Despite the mistakes of the protagonist, good invariably wins out (except in some rare cases).

For this reason we derive some sort of hope from it. We get a payoff as an emotionally invested audience that human beings aren't just animals at the end of the day. When it all goes bad, we can be like the hero, we can defend humanity in the face of brutality. We like to believe so, anyway.

Jack of Lost - the protagonist mould into which Rick Grimes  from The Walking Dead and Shuan from  Shuan of the Dead are cast.

Given global warming, the impending energy crisis, recent economic disasters, increased awareness of ongoing global conflict and the end of the world slated for 2012, we can't help but be pre-occupied thinking about what would happen if an apocalypse came to pass. And as cynical as our parents claim us to be, we still want to believe that we could survive, and uphold human decency in the process. Zombies give us a well defined scenario that we can prepare for. We like it because at the end of the day, if a Zombie apocalypse happens (and by some stroke of luck it happens exactly in the manner in which we're expecting), you can be damn sure that we'll survive, shotgun and shovel in hand.

Batman is better than Superman

Unless you're a die-hard fanboy (ahem), it is very hard to read a Superman comic or watch a Superman film and feel connected with the big blue boy scout. It's taken me three awesome Batman films, all of the films leading up to The Avengers and the recent reboot of the DC comics universe for me to realise this - but it's become almost impossible to write a compelling Superman story. 

Batman stole his chips

Let me start by backtracking my blasphemy just a little. Superman has been many times referred to as the superhero - the first, the most righteous, and arguably the most powerful. He is the moral compass of the DC universe and the light which many other superheroes follow. He is invulnerable as well as being (pretty much) infallible in his morals.

But it's for precisely these reasons that the Superman franchise has become stale.

This becomes particularly clear when you examine the last two Christopher Nolan Batman films What made The Dark Knight and The Dark Knight Rises so compelling was that the Joker and Bane bested Batman - intellectually, physically and spiritually. One of the core elements that made Nolan's films so compelling was that you really did not know if Bruce Wayne could pull through. The grit and reality with which he portrayed that struggle was what we wanted to see.

This 'come at me bro' ends badly for the Bat.

The first problem with Superman is there is never much of a contest (in any believable context). In Superman Returns, despite the plot having to fall back to the anti-deus ex machina that is Kryptonite, he still pulls through and lifts an entire island of Kryptonite and throws it into space. And the Death of Superman comic story arc was supposed to present the Doomsday monster as his final match - culminating in a violent and bloody death. But this was all completely undone when a) he came back to life and b) subsequently defeated an entire army of Doomsday clones in a later Superman/Batman story arc. 

What films like the recent Amazing Spiderman and The Dark Knight Rises have is a true sense of heroic struggle. Peter Parker has to grow as a person and become stronger physically in order to actually get to a point where he can save the day. Bruce Wayne not only gets his back broken, but has to confront human indignity at almost every turn before he manages to beat Bane. In both of these movies we see the kind of conflict that makes us slump back in our seats and say 'crap, he might actually not make it out of this one'.

Andrew Garfield gets curb-stomped rather alot

And this is the second and essential reason why people don't connect with Superman - no conflict means no growth. In the first Superman movie, he looses and like a petulant child, disobeys his father's dictum to 'not mess with humanity' and decides to turn back time. With Doomsday, as with Superman Returns, the writers decide to take advantage of how ambiguous Superman's powers are and pull an extra can of whoop-ass out of the bag at a convenient plot point. 

None of these instances in Superman's history have inspired us to really feel for the guy. We connect with losers. And strangely enough the problem isn't that he never looses (nor do any of the other superheroes). The problem is we don't know how he could loose. No one has done a good job of defining the limit to his powers and put him in a context where he really has to struggle to break those limits. And no, Kryptonite doesn't count because it is an overused deus ex machina and its speculative effectiveness was nullified in Superman Returns.

In fairness - Superman II and Superman Returns show him getting curb stomped in a much similar fashion to other successful superhero movies, but neither really show how any personal realisation helps him overcome the conflict. This inner journey is what we crave from superhero movies. Ultimately we've grown to a point where we don't just want big effects, seeing superhero beings destroy the cityscapes. If we just wanted that we'd just go and see The Avengers again. There's a deep philosophy behind being a superhero and the idea of power being inherently tied to social responsibility. We're aware of this, and we get disappointed when we don't see it in a Superhero story.

So what would make a good Superman story? I have some ideas - but my not being a professional writer basically shafts all my ideas into the realm of fan-fiction (let us never open that box of despair). But the essential crux is that one would not only need to put Superman into some sort of dire situation, but one that takes a hell of a personal journey to fight back from. And given the stigma that already exists with how uninteresting he is, Zack Snyder is going to have to pull one hell of a cat out of his bag for Man of Steel.

Don't get me wrong - I still love Superman. Despite the fact that he's a wildly imaginary character, I look up to him. There's something in his infallibility and his bravery and his strength that gives you something simple and grand to aspire to. But I'm a particular type of romantic that way. I realise that the rest of the world has a tendancy for not being giddy at the thought of having a big red S emblazoned on their chest.

The thing about Bond

I think (or would like to believe) that as a literally mature society, we realise that James Bond is particularly stylised action hero. That is to say, we know that there cannot exist a secret agent who is able to fight off an machete wielding psychopath, get poisoned, suffer a heart attack and be defibrillated, only to return in an immaculate tuxedo minutes later, ready to play poker with all the witty quips a sophisticated British gentlemen should have at all times.

Despite his evolution in recent times into a 'grittier' and 'more believable' character (culminating in the dirty tortured and generally bad-ass Daniel Craig incarnation) I can't quite seem maintain my suspension of disbelief. In the lead-up to the release of the much-anticipated Skyfall, I began re-watching Casino Royale with the intent of finishing the evening with Quantum of Solace. A strange thing happened - I couldn't finish Casino Royale. Craig, despite his more 'real' portrayal of Bond, was still too unbelievable for comfort.

First - a brief history. Ian Flemming created the character James Bond out of his experiences in Naval Intelligence during World War II. What resulted was a thoroughly romanticised image of a 'secret agent' who was all of suave, impulsive and deadly with a sharp wit to boot. The mix of all these things created a rather exciting character that made for some riveting film making. To describe the effect that he had on popular culture, one can only really fall back to an cliche - "men want to be him, and women want to be with him".

"I'm very well dressed, and you're about to die"

This romanticism of the spy industry worked back in the 50s when we weren't so obsessed with 'gritty realism'. We would happily watch the likes of Sean Connery and Roger Moore face off with any number of foreign and very nasty henchmen and come out without a single scratch, physical or mental. Being in the mood for suave seduction after having killed one (or several) men was a staple for the first half of the Bond franchise.

With the 80s through to the 00s, Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan brought a more tortured air to Bond in an attempt to make him more three dimensional. Both Dalton and Brosnan had a bone to pick. Bond's otherwise incredible aloofness was portrayed as a psychological necessity of the mental scars accrued by a man who has love and lost far too many women and killed far too many men. 

These portrayals worked in their own contexts. In the 50s, 60s and 70s, we never demanded gritty realism or psychologically complex protagonists in our genre films. We went to the cinema and saw Bond because we expected gadgets, explosions and scantily clad women. In the interest of satisfying an increasingly intellectual audience, Dalton and Brosnan began to move that trend along to modern day. But remember that even they existed in an era when the cast of The Expendables were all at the height of their fame. We didn't care too much about realism in action movies at that point.

Dalton, angry Bond

Given the recent wave of films, books and video games, however, we've been demanding a lot more grit and reality out of our action heroes. Since then and now, we have had Die Hard, The Matrix, The Dark Knight, all the Call of Duty video games and extensive media coverage of both Gulf Wars. All of these things have given the public an increased insight into the nature of 'action', and therefore what is and what is not possible.

Couple this with a general increase in the quality of education in literature and we have a movie going audience where the old action movie tropes just won't cut it. Even for your average "show me some explosions" Joe. It becomes very hard not to ignore the image of Austin Powers when watching Sean Connery work his magic on screen.

In this context, I concede the creative step between Die Another Day and Casino Royale was a good one. Both the Daniel Craig films have presented a more believable Bond who is more well adapted to our modern tastes. This Bond sweats, destroys pristine white shirts with some fairly gruesome blood stains and actually has open wounds and raw knuckles that persist after each fight. To top it all off, Eva Greene as the main Bond Girl of the film doesn't take killing so lightly, ending up sobbing in the foetal position under a cold shower after witnessing Bond kill several men.

So why did I stop halfway through Casino Royale? The answer lies in when I stopped - on the train to Montenegro when Vesper Lynd and Bond are introducing themselves to each other for the first time. That conversation in content and execution had reeked of all the elements of Bond that didn't age well. 

Lynd put it well when she expressed her disbelief in the idea that Her Majesty's Secret Service chooses to wage the success of a mission on one man's poker skills. As much as the script makes efforts to convince Lynd (and therefore the audience) that this is, in fact, not the dumbest idea in the universe, the core concept stated in simple terms still stinks of the overly fantastical.

Bond himself is still an Oxbridge educated man who enjoys his fine liquor and high flying lifestyle He eats fine lamb on a first class European train trades quip for quip with the sassy leading lady.  We are supposed to believe that a man who is horrifically scarred by war and dangerously cynical can still indulge himself in these aristocratic niceties and bourgeoisie conversations.

I concede that changing either of these two elements, the plot devices or the man himself, would be removing the 007 out of a 007 story. But despite how valiant Eon Production's efforts are in modernisng the international man of mystery, I'm not sure I can enjoy him on the serious level that Eon is trying to pitch.

Or maybe I'm thinking about this too much.