The Dead Don't Die

Tilda Swinton plays the new funeral home director,  a dab hand with a samurai sword and an other-worldly (even more than Scottish?) presence. What could possibly go straight?

With the three young travelers’  “hipster irony,” Jim Jarmusch exercises the zombie genre conventions on both the topical and archetypal levels, i.e., the today and the eternal. They converge in Tom Waites’ bushman. 

Topically, Hermit Bob is the outsider who has removed himself from normal society, foraging in the wilds. He is disgusted with the materialism and falseness of the current ”fucked-up world” (his last word on the subject). 

The film’s first word on that currency is Farmer Frank’s (Steve Buscemi) “Make America White Again” red cap — the MAGA message exposed. He wears that racism despite his friendliness towards the town’s black man Hank (Danny Glover). Farmer Frank does catch himself for declaring his coffee “too black.” He flaunts the blatant racism while correcting the minor, inadvertent one. Remember when we thought American racism was dead?

In other contemporary reflections, the zombies stumble through the streets, fixated on their cell-phones,” muttering “Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi.” Ziggy Pop incants “Coffee! Coffee! Coffee!” even as he carries a half-full pot, undrunk.  

In the archetypal scheme Hermit Bob is the Biblical prophet, a self-exiled moralist who rails against the corruption of the age. Indeed the film’s theme song is a country colloquial affirmation of the Christian eternal promise: “After life is over the afterlife goes on.” 

The supernatural film genres have always been a dark parody of mainstream religion. Belief in a saviour allows for mobilizing a devil. Before the Commies infiltrated the culture, Jesus was the first of the great body-snatchers. But where Christianity promises a non-material afterlife, a being of spiritual radiance returned to divine roots, the zombies are the cursed antithesis, rotting flesh with insatiable hunger. Their eternity is an agony — which truly is better to give than to receive.

This film makes no reference to normal religion: no pastors, no prayers, no church. Instead, Centerville (“A nice place to visit”)  is vapid, as boring as decency, secular, free from religious sectarianism. Into that vacuum steps the pop culture society of horror freaks. Hick merchant Bobby Wiggins searches for meaning in pulp fiction and in the platitudes delivered by the UPS parody — e.g., “The world is perfect. Appreciate the details.”

The film’s crowning irony is its formal self-awareness. It foregrounds its artifice. Cop Ronnie (Adam Driver) tells Sheriff Cliff (Bill Murray) that the title song seems familiar because it’s the film’s theme.  How does he know “This is definitely going to end badly?” Director Jim showed him the whole script (not just his own scenes, as Bill’s Cliff was given, despite all he’s done for him).  

Hence the film’s blurring of  the usual distinctions between life and fiction. The name of the funeral home director evokes the Zelda (Fitzgerald) said to have been married to Gatsby (Fitzgerald’s husband F. Scott’s literary creation).  Centerville itself derives from the town in Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels. The three hip tourists drive the very same Pontiac LeMans model that opens George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968). Ronnie infers they must hail from Romero’s Pittsburgh, overlooking their Ohio plates. A tombstone for director Samuel Fuller is prominent in the graveyard. As the two lead characters know they are living a script, the film openly admits to being but a performed story. Here lives are roles. 

There again the film walks the two lines at once. Archetypally, we make our life choices with the assumption of free will but aware of restraints and impulses from some beyond. And topically, Americans discover themselves assailed by a nightmarish evil assumed to have been dead and buried forever, now unstoppable save for the removal of “the head.” Though Cliff and Ronnie know they will end badly, they — with American film genre valour — determine to fight to the end.    

Ronnie has an all-American basis for his smooth decapitating sword swing. He “played some minor league ball …. Well, a little Class A, it was a long time ago.” Zelda’s is due not so much to her Scottish origin as from her coming from even further outer space.            But unlike Bobby’s and Ronnie’s faith in the reality of zombie fiction, Zelda knows the truth about Star Wars: “That’s good fiction.” 

But is it just fiction? Ronnie actor Adam Driver knows his Star Wars scripts too, from having acted them. He’s lived there. Anyway, the reality of science fiction enables Zelda to depart our planet safely. 
     The only earthly survivors are the three young teens from the detention center. Their saving grace? They are young, clever, harmonious — and woke enough for the boy Geronimo to keep breaking the center’s laws to reunite innocently with his girl friends. An open humanity trumps the rules whether religious or institutional.