George A. Romero Bludgeons Me With Social Consciousness: “Diary of the Dead”

I don’t get zombies. The physical dynamics of the undead just don’t make any sense to me. Do all corpses get reanimated? What about the ones in advanced stages of decomposition and don’t have muscle and sinew to make their limbs work? Why do they eat when their hearts have stopped beating? And why does their bite turn you into one? Wouldn’t that run the risk of the predator population outstripping the prey population?

 

But you don’t have to quibble with the illogical details of the undead as a concept to want to run far and fast from George A. Romero’s latest zombie opera Diary of the Dead. If you want your cranium to remain intact, you’ll stay far, far away from this film, because Romero’s got all sorts of points to make, and he’s going to beat you over the head until he makes them.

 

Romero got famous for his classic Night of the Living Dead, and since then he’s pretty much been the zombie guy. He could have made Citizen Kane and he’d still be the zombie guy. Rather than rail against this bit of pigeon-holing, Romero has embraced it, cranking out zombie movie after zombie movie to indict the status quo. In Romero’s reckoning, zombies are an ideal metaphor for damn near anything. In his vast and homogenous oeuvre Romero has used zombies to stand in for (as near as I can tell):

• Racists
• The Viet Cong
• Black people
• Brown people
• Taupe people
• Nixon supporters
• Consumerism
• Swingers
• Reagan supporters
• Liberals
• Conservatives
• Illegal immigrants
• Shriners

 

And Romero goes back to the zombie well (big surprise) to make his angry points in Diary of the Dead. Those points? That the media doesn’t tell us the truth. That the Internet has usurped the non-truth-telling media (also bad). That the Internet has disconnected us from each other. And so have cameras. In a way, Diary makes a nice companion piece with Untraceable as Romero shares that movie’s belief that the Internet has made us all passive psychopaths.

 

All of this is played out onscreen as we watch a bunch of fairly-interchangeable film students and their drunken professor (the best part of the movie) race an outbreak of zombieism in an effort to find a safe haven. It’s not exactly the most original premise in the world (though the last time Romero tried to be creative we got the utterly ludicrous Land of the Dead in which Dennis Hopper managed a luxury high-rise in the middle of a zombie landscape), and Romero shamelessly rips off 28 Days Later’s final act. He’s also thrown a meta-twist on things by presenting the movie as footage shot by a couple of the film students. Wow! That’s incredibly fresh and original! No one’s tried that since, oh, say, Cloverfield. But Romero even wusses out on this front, giving us not the raw, unfinished footage of Cloverfield or The Blair Witch Project, but instead a relatively polished final film. Seems one of the survivors cut and spliced and edited all the raw footage into a workable film. This is explained in a voiceover by one of the characters who I think is named Deb, but by halfway through the film I just referred to as “Pretentious Dialogue Chick.”

 

Since there’s not much plot to speak of, I’m just going to go the Slow Burn route and present THE MOST PRETENTIOUS DIALOGUE OF DIARY OF THE DEAD!!! (with counterpoint in italics).

 

• [Pretentious Dialogue Chick VO:] You see, in addition to trying to tell you the truth, I am hoping to scare you so that maybe you’ll wake up. Maybe you won’t make any of the same mistakes that we made. What mistakes, exactly? Not anticipating the reanimation of the dead? That seems like the very definition of a force majeure.
• [PDC VO:] You spend do much time resenting your parents, trying to build your own life, but when the shit hits the fan the only place you want to go is home. Speak for yourself, cupcake. On 9/11 I had no desire to go back to Wisconsin.
• [Offscreen from dude who has separated from the group because he needed to charge his video camera] I should be with them, but I can’t. I can’t because I’m plugged in! Wow. It’s like “plugged in” has a double meaning. That’s deep.
• [Plugged in dude]: Who was screaming? [PDC resentfully] Me. Want me to show you? For the camera? If she’s so contemptuous of the fact he’s filming this, why did she later edit it into a watchable movie? George? Little help here?
• [PDC VO:]   God had changed the rules. And amazingly, we were playing along. Since God is the creator of all that is seen and unseen how do we not play by His rules. Existence is, by definition, His rules.
• [Film Prof:] This is a diary of cruelty. And in wartime, when the enemy can be marked as this son of a bitch or that son of a bitch, then cruelty… becomes justified. Um…what?
• [PDC VO:] The more voices there are, the more spin there is. The truth becomes that much harder to find. In the end it’s all just noise. Yes, multiple news sources with multiple perspectives are a terrible, terrible thing.
• [Prof shoots a zombie, hands the gun to one of his students]: Take this. It’s too easy to use. [Later, PDC films a zombie attack, hands the camera back to its owner] Take this. It’s too easy to use. Oooo. I get it! Wow. Deep.
• [PDC VO:] Seeing things through a lens…you become immune, inoculated. So no matter what happens around us we take it all in stride. Just another day. Just another death. So, documentarians and reporters are all just soul-dead sociopaths?
• [PDC VO:] The mainstream had vanished with all its power and money. Now there were just the bloggers and the hackers. Okay, George? Those are two very different things. You realize that, right?
• [PDC VO:] What is it? What gets into our heads when we see something horrible? A horrible accident on the highway. Something keeps us from just driving on. Something holds us. But we don’t stop to help. We stop to look. No, actually often times it is to help. And wouldn’t it be even worse just to drive past?
• [PDC VO:] Are we worth saving? You tell me. Yes. Maybe not you, but yes.
• [PDC VO:] It used to be us versus us. But now it was us versus them. Only they were us. Um, that noise was my higher brain functions checking out. I’m left with just the lizard-brain now. Thanks a lot George.

 

Diary of the Dead does have one good line. When the group reaches one members’ home someone says, “I want to meet your little brother. Maybe he has a Playstation.” The drunken professor responds, “I’d like to meet your father. Maybe he has a bar.”

 

I felt much the same way after watching this movie.