That is all.
7.15.2010
7.10.2010
Saturday
You're the last man on the planet. What do you do? Some days the phone just won't ring and I ask myself. Smoke in non-smoking restaurants? Jump on the tables? Drink all the top-shelf booze? Go to the mall and dress up in all the clothes I never would have worn or paid for. Probably all of the above. You never know about these types of things.
There is a certain generation that waits with somewhat bated breath for a zombie apocalypse. We consider the ease with which we would finish off our friends and family. The difficulty of dispatching significant others. The truly committed wonder about their prospective children. Their existence. Their end. But all the talking in the world doesn't account for the fact that you just don't know until you're there.
Daybreakers had an interesting take on Armageddon in that you could be absorbed into the coming maelstrom and survive whole. Your old thoughts and actions would persevere through the change, as would everyone else's, leading to a strange new blood economy. The politics of Daybreakers were infinitely more interesting to me than the action set-pieces. Vampires have that over zombies and werewolves. A zombie is pure, embodied hunger. No emotion. No meaning. Shambling forever onward to the next meal. Werewolves have time as men, but they linger on either puritanical regret or perverse enjoyment. There's no middle ground. Vampires have the curses of constant hunger and undead status but also the hard balance between pure evil and utterly mortal regret. This strange dichotomy has led to an overtly political animal in both literature and film. The vamp du jour is often part of a greater vampire hierarchy (thank you White Wolf) that mirrors either European human monarchy or the distinctly Asian feudal system. True Blood introduced a more contemporary take, what with the Old Western sensibilities of having Sheriffs with various jurisdictions. This all hooks back into that idea that a vampire is, at beatless heart, a human being with wants, needs, and desires. Both zombies and werewolves are regularly delegated to animal status. In fact, the most dangerous assumption one can make about a recent convert, be they ghoul or lycanthrope, is that their humanity is intact. While vampires also lose their humanity in the change, we see just as often that they have retained the most important parts, such as loyalty and empathy. The change to vampirism is one of evil overcoming good, whereas the change to lycanthropy or zombism is one of the mad lizard brain overriding the human one.
In I Am Legend los protagonistas were all the last men alive. Conversion was never the concern. Only survival. Depending on your version (and there have been so many), the leading man either focused on extermination or reclamation. But the sad truth was that he could never reclaim the world he had lost. There's only one of him. As abusive as Will Smith's version was to the source material, it did contain a shockingly poignant scene where he attempts to chat up a mannequin. While this may indicate a certain level of hysterics (the crying kind, not the laughing kind), it also shows that he is, in some way, aware that this is the end. There is no one left.
So what would you do at the end of time? The world has ended. There is no future but for cockroaches and stars and there you are. You stand at the lip of the greatest of precipices. You jump or fall, it doesn't matter because for once there really is no starting over. If nothing meant anything would you dance and sing or sit and cry? Or would you just wait and see and pray for a miscalculation, that maybe somewhere underground in Idaho an intrepid group of survivors has forged a new destiny for mankind as mole people, at least until the radioactivity washes away? I think I might find that last undetonated nuke and beat on the warhead with a hammer. Why leave anything half-finished?
There is a certain generation that waits with somewhat bated breath for a zombie apocalypse. We consider the ease with which we would finish off our friends and family. The difficulty of dispatching significant others. The truly committed wonder about their prospective children. Their existence. Their end. But all the talking in the world doesn't account for the fact that you just don't know until you're there.
Daybreakers had an interesting take on Armageddon in that you could be absorbed into the coming maelstrom and survive whole. Your old thoughts and actions would persevere through the change, as would everyone else's, leading to a strange new blood economy. The politics of Daybreakers were infinitely more interesting to me than the action set-pieces. Vampires have that over zombies and werewolves. A zombie is pure, embodied hunger. No emotion. No meaning. Shambling forever onward to the next meal. Werewolves have time as men, but they linger on either puritanical regret or perverse enjoyment. There's no middle ground. Vampires have the curses of constant hunger and undead status but also the hard balance between pure evil and utterly mortal regret. This strange dichotomy has led to an overtly political animal in both literature and film. The vamp du jour is often part of a greater vampire hierarchy (thank you White Wolf) that mirrors either European human monarchy or the distinctly Asian feudal system. True Blood introduced a more contemporary take, what with the Old Western sensibilities of having Sheriffs with various jurisdictions. This all hooks back into that idea that a vampire is, at beatless heart, a human being with wants, needs, and desires. Both zombies and werewolves are regularly delegated to animal status. In fact, the most dangerous assumption one can make about a recent convert, be they ghoul or lycanthrope, is that their humanity is intact. While vampires also lose their humanity in the change, we see just as often that they have retained the most important parts, such as loyalty and empathy. The change to vampirism is one of evil overcoming good, whereas the change to lycanthropy or zombism is one of the mad lizard brain overriding the human one.
In I Am Legend los protagonistas were all the last men alive. Conversion was never the concern. Only survival. Depending on your version (and there have been so many), the leading man either focused on extermination or reclamation. But the sad truth was that he could never reclaim the world he had lost. There's only one of him. As abusive as Will Smith's version was to the source material, it did contain a shockingly poignant scene where he attempts to chat up a mannequin. While this may indicate a certain level of hysterics (the crying kind, not the laughing kind), it also shows that he is, in some way, aware that this is the end. There is no one left.
So what would you do at the end of time? The world has ended. There is no future but for cockroaches and stars and there you are. You stand at the lip of the greatest of precipices. You jump or fall, it doesn't matter because for once there really is no starting over. If nothing meant anything would you dance and sing or sit and cry? Or would you just wait and see and pray for a miscalculation, that maybe somewhere underground in Idaho an intrepid group of survivors has forged a new destiny for mankind as mole people, at least until the radioactivity washes away? I think I might find that last undetonated nuke and beat on the warhead with a hammer. Why leave anything half-finished?
6.15.2009
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