Zombie Love: Relinquishing Fear… one horror movie at a time

In my quest to be my best Self as a parent, and pursue my own happiness in the process, readers of this blog may be aware that I hate horror films… and have seen a number of them this year with my younger son… who loves them.

Will and I set out to see The Crazies on Sunday morning, but were stopped by the LA Marathon, which ran a Berlin Wall of sorts through the middle of LA, leaving us on the wrong side of the movie tracks.  I thought, maybe this one just wasn’t meant to be, but unfortunately it was also at one other theater in a reachable location and so by afternoon, I was breathing deeply and reminding myself that, “it’s just a movie.”

It’s funny what scares us.  When Will was just born he had the smile of the Buddha and I will never forget that smile.  And if a central tenet of Buddhism is to relinquish, or see through, fear and desire, it seems plausible that Will’s movie-going predilections may also dovetail with my own need to work through my fears.

The Crazies, it turns out, is both terrifying and intelligent… which makes it all the more terrifying.  We open with a country western gloss on the final song in Dr. Strangelove (“we’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when…”) a quote most young people would not recognize, but which cues us into the ironic and cynical nature of the filmmakers, or at least their take on this story.

Without belaboring the plot, Will said, as we were driving back home after the film, “It’s interesting to see this right after Hotel Rwanda, because both films are about genocide.”  He also asked me if I thought our government would really engage in genocide on innocent people if something like an accident (in this case the release of a biological weapon) happened.  I said I thought that it could and asked him what he thought.  He wisely replied, “I don’t know, and that’s why I’m not signing up for that job.”

As I kept trying to distance myself during watching the film, The Crazies kept pulling me back in, making me believe the characters (good performances have a way of doing this) and leaving me to jump, squirm and sweat, all the while slyly quoting everything from North by Northwest to A Nightmare on Elm Street.

I’m sure it’s just me, but by the last image, as the two surviving characters head toward the city through a desolate and cut wheat field, I found myself thinking it a visual nod to Anselm Keifer, who once said, about a project of his being inspired by his childhood in post-Nazi Germany, “I did not have any toys. So, I played in the bricks of ruined buildings around me and with which I built houses.”

Movies like The Crazies may be a way that consciousness can help us avoid enacting a disastrous fate, but if you just like to be scared—it’s a good ride.  And if you’d like to be less scared, join me in spirit as this Clockwork Orange-like reconditioning helps me find my courage without, hopefully, losing my compassion… or my mind.

The Crazies would be an excellent double-feature (double-renter) with District 9 with which it shares both themes and an uncanny ability to place us in the place of the oppressed.  According to Will, it’s also an interesting pairing with Hotel Rwanda.

Finally, in the surreal world in which I live, the movie left me thinking about how George Romero was the producer of The Crazies, and how his Night of the Living Dead was the original film that set up my zombie-phobia, and how, ironically, he was the producer of the one television episode I directed (for more on that see “Divine Tears”).  And to cap the surrealism off for me, as the credits rolled, I realized that one of the stars of the movie is a parent at Will’s old elementary school—and so I now picture them killing zombies at one moment, and dropping their kids off or working at the parent workday the next minute.

As Richard Wright once said, “It’s a small world.  But I wouldn’t want to paint it.”

So, let’s dedicate today to facing our fears, hopefully relinquishing them in favor of loving kindness and compassion, or at least dark humor—in the service of all our collective (and too often traumatized) children.

Namaste, Bruce

p.s. Sometimes I think Will is rather grown up, but in the middle of The Crazies he whispered that the tooth he’d been hoping would fall out so it need not be pulled obliged him and he handed me the tooth in the dark.  I put it in my pocket and we didn’t remember it until dinner, because we got so swept up in the film… but when I fished his tooth out of my pocket, it turned out to be a popcorn kernel.  The baby tooth is gone, along with most of my baby as the teenager emerges more fully with every passing R-rated movie, but does the tooth fairy pay up for a popcorn kernel?

p.s.s. today’s kid art, by Will, was inspired by The Book of Eli, another horror film I get karmic parenting credit for suffering through—one that traverses a post-appocolyptic desert southwest and ends on a Jungian common island (a retrofitted Alcatraz) of all the world’s religious texts… and a west coast counter point to Shutter Island solemnly resting in the Atlantic of our disintegration, a film also evoking the holocaust, madness and the fragmentation of Self.  The Crazies, in Iowa, is heartland crazy befitting the heart-mind that must wake up in order to heal our collective situation.

Tags: fears, film and parenting