The pleasures of massacring zombies: notes on Zombieland

1) I think films like Zombieland appeal to us because modern life has become too cluttered and constrained, too full of words, people, laws, the past, schedules, property, corporations, household appliances, work, commutes, and traffic regulations. Wouldn't it be nice to imagine a 28 Days Later scenario when most fellow humans have been reduced to snarling, drooling infected zombies due to a disease stemming from tainted hamburger? Wouldn't it then be fun to stock up on guns and wander around the car-cluttered freeways, the detritus of old strip malls and grocery stores, and shoot zombies as needed? Aside from the obvious downsides, wouldn't such an apocalypse be tremendously liberating?

Thus does Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) seem to have fun as he struggles to survive. He lives by a list of rules, which includes:

1) Cardio (needed for running from zombies).

2) Doubletap (one bullet to the head may not suffice. Shoot twice for greater safety).

3) Beware of bathrooms (because you can be relatively defenseless on the john).

4) Seatbelts (in case you need to crash your vehicle to send a zombie through the windshield).

6) Cast iron skillet (one of several weapons including a banjo, a bowling ball, and hedge clippers that work well for zombie killing).

14) Limber up (for battle. Tallahasee (Woody Harrelson) does not think this rule is needed, by the way).

17) Don't be a hero.

31) Check the backseat.

32) Enjoy the little things (such as using one's car door to brain a zombie when driving by).

One day Columbus happens upon Tallahasee on the freeway. They contemplate shooting each other in a Mexican stand-off, but then Columbus sticks out his thumb, and Tallahasee reluctantly agrees to drive him to Columbus, Ohio (characters use place names in this movie to avoid getting too attached to each other). Since there are precious few uninfected humans around, Columbus and Tallahasee can drink whiskey and drive, not wear their seatbelts, let off steam by smashing vans, and hunt for the ever elusive Twinkie (the film's one massive product placement). Tallahasee specializes in zombie killing, but he has no desires for anything aside from a Twinkie--a good thing since there are no female love interests in the plot for him.

Instead, two confidence girls--Wichita (Emma Stone) and 12-year old Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) happen upon our heroes in a grocery store. As they all eventually band together and seek an amusement park out west, I kept being reminded of Breslin's break-out role in Little Miss Sunshine (2006), where she and her highly dysfunctional family seek a junior miss beauty pageant in a yellow VW bus. In Zombieland, the gang also drive a large yellow vehicle--this time a Hummer.

2) While watching the movie, you can enjoy the Van Halen music, the free-for-all pleasures of slaughtering zombies with impunity, and director Ruben Fleisher's slow motion zombie attack action scenes reminiscent of Timur Bekmambetov's work in Wanted (2oo8), but do not look for much plausibility. I found myself wondering about:

a) Why would a large grocery store have electricity? The zombie outbreak took place recently, within the past several months or weeks, but are some of the few remaining humans running the local power plant? Why does the amusement park have electricity? Could it be because the film would lack enough light without it?

b) How can our merry band of zombie killers drive from the Midwest to Los Angeles without being stopped by abandoned cars on the freeway? They seem to make the journey in one night.

c) For that matter, where is the gas for this road trip coming from?

d) Why is Emma Stone's character Wichita wearing eyeliner? The girls talk of desiring a shower, but no one ever appears to need one.

e) Later on, we learn that Tallahassee greatly misses his son, who died young. Tallahassee cries in front of the gang, and admits that he "hasn't cried like that since Titanic." Good thing he's such a cuddly, lovable killing machine.

3) The makers of Zombieland love to make allusions to other films, including Psycho (when Columbus tries to stop a female zombie with a shower curtain), Babe (when Tallahasee says "That'll do, pig"), and even Adventureland (which features Jesse Eisenberg once again trying to impress a woman in an amusement park). The film is loosely designed like so many summer blockbusters as a kind of carnival ride (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom comes to mind). The film (spoiler alert) ends at an actual carnival in Los Angeles called Pacific Playland, thus making the narrative arch oddly reminiscent of National Lampoon's Vacation (1983).

4) Aside from the film's wit, ultimately, I think, its chief pleasure resides in the viewer's ability to combine all of his or her concerns into one enemy--zombies--and then take pleasure in massacring them. As World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War author Max Brooks puts it:

"I think its been gathering steam throughout the [George W.] Bush years," he explained. "We live in some really uncertain times and I think people are being just bombarded with so many problems and so many fears and so many anxieties, it's kind of hard to keep track of them. And I think zombies, because they're so apocalyptic, are a great way for people to coalesce their anxieties into one threat."

Zombieland not only unites all of these threats, it supplies a violent solution that draws on the Western tradition of gunslinging vigilante justice (perhaps one reason why the film's characters turn around and drive west). In his dystopic out of print science fiction novel Stand on Zanzibar (1968), John Brunner imagined an over-populated future in which people frequently turned "mucker." Oppressed by everyone around them, muckers run amuck, killing everyone indiscriminately until someone murders them in turn. It may seem like a stretch to relate the playful comic horror of Zombieland with this extreme irrational violence, but they exist along the same axis, only zombies render massacres guilt-free and thereby suitable for mass entertainment.

Whatever the means, Zombieland satiates that desire to shake off the constraints of civilization, clear a space, and live happily in the ruins. As the trailer for the movie gloomily points out, we live with the threat of "epidemics, climate change, and dwindling resources." A mere zombie outbreak seems outright pleasant in comparison.