MOTHER NATURE IS A SERIAL KILLER: World War Z and Population Reduction

by Christopher Barr

“I took the victims, over the trench I cut their throats and the dark blood flowed in, and up out of Erebus they came, brides and unwed youths and old men who had suffered much and girls with their tender hearts freshly scarred by sorrow and great armies of battle dead, stabbed by bronze spears, men of war still wrapped in bloody armor, thousands swarming around the trench from every side-unearthly cries, blanching terror gripped me!”   - Homer, The Odyssey

Zombies rise from the dead to chase down and eat the brains and flesh of the living.  Relentless in their unguided quest for flesh, like Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, there is no reasoning with this form of hunter.  It just keeps coming, in some cases, swarming packs in the thousands as depicted in the 2013, Brad Pitt movie, World War Z, based on the 2006 Max Brooks novel of the same name.  

SPOILER ALERT – INFECTED AREA

  

In World War Z, the world falls victim (or did we have it coming?) to an unknown virus that kills, then reanimates the millions of people unfortunately infected.  The remaining population run for the proverbial hills or the fortunate on aircraft carriers, in order to evade this unknown fast spreading virus of Zombie killers.  Brad Pitt’s character worked for the United Nations but is forced back out of retirement to save his family, and is tasked to solve this global pandemic and save humanity.  By the end of World War Z, despite the horror and massive loss of life, the environmental future of this planet scored a big win as well as the remaining survivors, just not in a way people would have hoped for.  Ironically, it took death to defeat death.  Mother Nature cleansing herself for renewal and self-preservation, because if we aren’t going to do it, maybe she will with hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis or in this fictional case, running, screaming reanimated corpses.

SPOILER ALERT – INOCULATED, VACCINE SUCCESSFUL, PLOT DETAIL FREE ZONE

This movie found a very interesting way to present its concern about over-population.  Its fictional narrative details a very serious, very real problem.  What are we going to do about the fast spreading population of people on this planet?  We have exceeded our carrying capacity as seen in our many environmental problems, rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, global warming and industrialized pollution along with the increasing demand for fresh water in the first world, the second world and most defiantly the third world.   The fight for food in many countries around the world is resulting in malnutrition and starvation.  Many of the World’s natural resources are being consumed faster than the rate of regeneration.  This may have more to do with wealthy nations squandering and wasting away a lot of the planets resources but over-population is never the less a very serious global problem. 

In Dante’s Inferno, Dante looked at the dead, on one of the levels of his journey with the poet Virgil, as the externalization of their inner lives.  People of his native Florence, in all their horrible self-imposed suffering, all their bottled up guilt and frustrations, these were the everyday people we see today on our streets only now with iPods, cell phones and apathy as their guardians, a place where our concerns for self-discovery, collective understanding and environmental issues are waylaid for our increasing obsession with self-gratification via consumer culture.  With our emphasis in modern society is placed heavily on maintaining our youth, there is little done to prepare us for aging and ultimately death.  

Philosopher Slavoj Žižek says it’s the ‘fundamental fantasy of mass culture, a fantasy of the return of the living dead’ because of some ‘unpaid symbolic debt’.  By avoiding the reality of death, one robs themselves the required time it takes to reflect upon it and move toward a form of understanding.  Self-discovery and self-awareness, as in the case of Dante, requires one to face reality in all its rawness in order for one to live a fulfilling life.  An internal quest not easily achieved but necessary to pursue.  The point I think Žižek is making, is the dead will leave us alone when we begin to adequately start paying attention to it. 

Zombie movies are likely more pervasive in our society because of our obsession with youth and our denial of death,  What’s interesting and telling about zombies is, when we are not running for our lives from them, they bring us together as people, people that want to live.  Albeit, very terrified people, but people who are forced to evaluate their existence and what it means to be alive, asking themselves the Albert Camus existential question, ‘Must life have meaning to be lived?’  Giving into it is certainly an option as well.  Why live with the struggle of constantly out running these things?  

Communitarianism in these movies are what works best, people working together to solve a problem.  We must ‘practice for death and dying’ says Plato, in order to live without the fear of death, understanding that ’it’ is coming one day but not today.  Sigmund Freud says, ”If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exceptions that everything living dies for internal reasons –becomes inorganic again- then we shall be compelled to say that ‘the aim of all life is death’ and,  looking backwards, that ‘inanimate things existed before living ones’.”

These movies, present themselves as horrifyingly grotesque but in some small way are teaching us, as a society, like during the Civil Rights movement, we must work with a common interest to survive, defend our right to live freely - as much as civilization can permit - and safety from all threats that oppose this desire for prosperity.  This is the goal in World War Z, just as it is in AMC’s TV show, The Walking Dead; survivors uniting and sorting out their differences for the greater good and the preservation of the species. 

Superheroes and the Villainous Real

by Christopher Barr

"Look at us!  Are we not proof that there is no good, no evil, no truth, no reason? Are we not proof that the universe is a drooling idiot with no fashion sense – Mr. Nobody on the fundamental philosophy of the Brotherhood of DADA”
-Grant Morrison, Doom Patrol, Vol.2: The Painting That Ate Paris

Would the superhero movies of today survive in 1970’s cinema?  Superman: The Movie (1978) made it through the tail end of that decade.  Could Tony Stark and Bruce Wayne work together as Woodward and Bernstein did, to uncover the details of the Watergate scandal that would lead to President Richard Nixon resigning his office?  Could Peter Parker have the courage to walk into that small Italian restaurant bathroom, get the hidden gun above the old toilet, walk back out to the eating area and shoot both Virgil Sollozzo and Captain McClusky in cold blood to protect his family?  Of course not, these were different times and contexts, the point being that movies from the 70’s were quite grounded in reality, in spite of their fiction.  Taxi Driver, Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, Chinatown, The Clockwork Orange, The French Connection and the above referenced, The Godfather and All the President’s Men, to name a few.   The whole decade screamed Howard Beale’s rant from Network, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”

As in all decades of cinema, 70’s cinema was a product of its time and at that time, people wanted answers.  It was a time when people asked questions.  They wanted to know why their government was constantly misleading them and the films they watched echoed that sentiment.  That’s not to say people didn’t want to be transported to a galaxy far, far away but for the most part it was serious cinema.

Fast forward to today, three decades and change later, we ‘first-worlders’ live in a technopolized advanced iSociety, where this Internet is a virtual transportation window that can feed you information beyond anything that anyone in the 70’s could have dreamed.  Assuming as mankind advances technologically we intellectually stay in tandem with this form of progress of the human race.  So why are we stuck in this superhero littered playground, where Earth’s Mightiest heroes are saving the world from cookie-cutter, trite, evil villains, during a politically, ecologically and spiritually dark time in our civilization?  When did we decide to stick our ‘well groomed’ heads in the sand while issues of the world are no longer just third or second world issues but are pushing at our door steps.  I see people aimlessly gazing around and wanting to be ‘told about the rabbits’ instead of global warming and global resource robbery.  It would seem that, we like our movies like Iron Man and Spider-man big and loud and our real world issues, small and absent.

We are in a time in our history, where being distracted from actual real life offerings is not only popular but socially necessary to reject the Delphic oracle’s mandate that one ought to ‘Know Thyself’.  That life mantra that encourages self-interrogation of beliefs and ideals and suggests us explore our possibilities in this life, both with originality and creativity with a splash a spiritual enlightenment.

With the bombastic stream of TV channels and endless commercials, inert Facebook status updates and continuous text messages with faces down and thumbs mowing through techno-connecting, with actual people waiting to pick up where their conversation was rudely cut off.

Superheroes in cinema, as fun as they can be to watch, are guardians of capitalism.  Protectors, not from global annihilation, but consumerism and globalization.  They take advantage of our innocent youth and draw us in to their product placements and movie tie-ins, giving us a false sense of hope of who we should aspire to be.  Or maybe these little episodes of fantasy do actually give us a break from existential angst, Wolverine style and the banality of everyday living, Kick-Ass style. 

Nietzsche's 'Man of Steel'

by Christopher Barr

 "I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?  All creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and do you want to be the ebb of the great tide, and return to the animals rather than overcome man?  What is the ape to men? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. And just so shall man be to the Superman: a laughing stock or a painful embarrassment". -Nietzsche

Frederich Nietzsche wrote this in his philosophical book Thus Spoke Zarathustra.   Can man surpass himself?  Reach beyond our belief structures and be more than a man?  Master his moral compass and liberate himself from limiting value systems, maintain strength and independence while aspiring toward creativity and originality?  Is this even possible for a man to rise to such heights that he overcomes himself?

These are some of the questions that Clark Kent, Superman aka Kal-El’s alter ego must ask himself in the new Superman movie "Man of Steel".

Nietzsche didn't believe such a man existed among us, other than certain historical individuals he thought could serve as models of this seemingly unattainable enlightenment, such as Socrates, Shakespeare, Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, among others.  Like the Buddhist’s journey to Nirvana, it's likely that this form of enlightenment lies in the journey and not the destination.  One must walk through the door as one must walk the path.  Not to suggest that the journey to enlightenment is a pleasant one.  Rather, it’s a destructive process where one eradicates one's previous notion of what one believed to be true.

Kal-El is an alien from the dead world, Krypton.  As an infant he was launched in a spacecraft towards Earth, a distant planet with a suitable atmosphere, and where Kal-El's dense molecular structure ended up giving him superhuman powers.  So the journey of Clark is to realize his potential, and like all mentally evolved beings, use it for the betterment of all livings things.

The film portrayed this journey quite aptly.  The film is about bettering yourself beyond what you believe to be possible.  Superman is a walking, breathing manifestation of this philosophy for life, iconoclastic freedom from the shackles of conventionalism and normality.  Most are born unique and die as clones, copies of their environment and their parents inherited belief systems.  The point is to walk your own path in a World that potentially kills such revolutionaries, mentally, spiritually and in some cases physically.

Superman, when fully realized, is also a surrogate parent to us all.  Like how a child requires his or her parents to guide them toward their own independence, Superman, metaphorically, is there as protector.  He is like a Doctor from Centers for Disease Control studying a highly infectious, deadly Ebola virus from the central African rain forest to protect the world from disaster.  The world needs people like this simply because not everyone can do it.

Its only my optimistic hope, like the ‘S’ on Superman’s suit, that viewers see past the distracting explosions and chunky plot and rise to the heights that they can overcome themselves.

Star Trek into Recurrence

by Christopher Barr

I’m not a huge fan of Star Trek, like the director of Star Trek (2009) and Star Trek into Darkness (2013) J.J. Abrams, I’m more of a Star Wars fan.  I’m not sure why that is but at that time in my life, like Alien vs. Aliens, I was more of an action junkie, intravenously connected to explosions and machismo.  So I usually leaned toward the latter and assumed the former was artsy whateverness. Now, since growth and mild maturity I’ve come to love Alien over Aliens and appreciate Star Trek on more of an adult intellectual level.

The Wrath of Khan was a film of my youth.  I was in my early teens when I first saw it in a smoky, smoke-permitted theatre.  I’ve seen it over the years on TV as well but it, like many of my childhood and early teenage year movie experiences, faded into a backdrop of cultural change and a technological viral explosion.  The Internet and the life-like cartooning of computer generated imaging and 3D, (thanks Cameron for the movie ticket hikes)  post-film experience movies weather the screens with busy colorful explosions, choppy plots and lens flares (keep the good flare fight up Sir J.J. of Abrams).  But the less hectic past can often force its way through all the distractions of texting, facebooking and tweeting and remind us of whom we once were, during a time when one still viewed fresh ideas and imagined new possibilities.    

Three months prior to the theatre release of Star Trek into Darkness, I went on a Star Trek film festival with myself (that sounds geekly perverse, like I was sitting on my lonely stained hand-me-down sofa in a dank basement with my Buck Rogers hand cream and Battlestar Galactica, Cylon issued tissue paper)  Set phasers to stun people.  So I watched the Wrath of Khan, which I haven’t seen at this point for years, and I can safely say, with what knowledge I do possess on film studies, that it’s a masterpiece of science fiction cinema.  Equal to what The Empire Strikes Back is to the Star Wars universe.

Star Trek into Darkness is a neo-tribute to those old Star Trek movies at best.  With no realistic future in site, we, as a culture, are robbing the past of all its richness and raping its then-meaningful contexts.  We are then retrofitting this creatively bankrupt idea into a-sometimes-exciting, but ultimately meaningless afterbirth, then glossing it and dressing it in millions of dollars of advertising and force feeding it as new and fresh, to a socially and mentally blind audience.  It’s odd to me that forward thinking has become the new past thinking.  I’m a big fan, psychoanalytically speaking, of drawing from the past to examine the present for the betterment of the future, but on a creative and film making level this is blatantly weak. 

This movie, so says its predecessor, has altered time and space and has put the crew of the U.S.S Enterprise (alone with everyone else in existence) on a new historical path, a whole shiny new timeline.  Abrams’ first Star Trek movie made it justifiably acceptable to travel to the past and change the future for new adventures for the crew.  Except, Into Darkness, wasn’t a new adventure but rather an old one redressed for the ‘modern audience’, an audience that is put into the position of Spock Prime, Leonard Nimoy.  The only person in this very twisted universe that knows the old timeline as he lives now in the new Abrams timeline.  Spock Prime tells New Spock in Star Trek into Darkness, that he was sworn not to reveal details of his time line but then tells New Spock that the Enterprise have faced Khan in his time line and he’s crazy and not to be trusted.  This gives New Spock expositional information that in turn is used to defeat Khan from the new time line (wait, my head won’t stop spinning).

If you don’t learn from the past, the past will repeat itself.  This film and many like it in recent years, have become like the ancient symbol depicting a serpent or snake-like dragon eating its own tail, Ouroboros, film cyclically eating itself.  Frederich Nietzsche’s Eternal Return states that one must change within oneself to escape the trappings of the banality of existence.  Like Bill Murray in the film Groundhog Day, that change must first be learnt, analyzed, understood then applied.  That change must come within.

The movie has spectacular special effects and has some pretty talented young actors, great for an excuse to scoff down warm popcorn at the local over-priced multiplex.  As Spock would say, ‘The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few’.  Maybe the ‘many’ would like a future filled with hope and promise during a decline in civilization, maybe films like this will remind us of a past when there was a visible future over the horizon.  Hopefully Mr. Roddenberry isn’t turning over in his existential ashes on the Pegasus rocket floating in space.