The Dead Don’t Die (Well)
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“Official poster for The Dead Don’t Die.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., uploaded 11 Jun. 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dead_Don%27t_Die_(2019_film)#/media/File:The_Dead_Don't_Die.jpeg. Accessed 17 Oct. 2020. |
Paterson (2016) was actually the second film by director-writer Jim Jarmusch that I watched—The first was his 2019 horror-comedy The Dead Don’t Die, which I have always essentially thought of since first watching it as a zombie movie set in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon. It’s a very low-key off-kilter and absurd film, which would seem to make it recognizably Jarmusch-like. I think it’s a very funny movie, though not in a laugh-out-loud sort of way. Instead, the humor comes from the way that certain lines get repeated (“Was it a wild animal? … Or several wild animals?”) and the way that most characters are so disaffected and stoic for most of the film. There’s a clipped quality to almost everyone’s delivery that makes even somewhat more innocuous lines land in a funny way, and the physical performances are also very good. They’re generally stiff and awkward to match the delivery. Some of these, to me, positive qualities are things I noticed on my first or second viewing back around February and March of this year, but the physical performances really only struck me on this third rewatch. I think Bill Murray in particular is very funny in this film, and the humor comes from how he stands and moves as much as what he actually says.
It’s really hard to put into words what it is about this film’s pervasive awkwardness that makes it so funny, but one good example would be a very early interaction between Murray’s small-town sheriff character and Tom Waits’ “Hermit Bob.” Murray’s sheriff and Adam Driver’s deputy characters have gone out to the woods to check in with Bob since he’s been accused of stealing a chicken from a local farmer (Steve Buscemi). After exchanging a few words—and one gunshot—with Bob, the lawmen are headed back to town, but Bob stops them when he calls out from somewhere in the bushes. Murray and Driver stop stock-still as Bob yells, “Fuckya!” Then they move on and we cut to the opening credits. I have never heard anyone say the words “fuck you” in quite such a weird way. It doesn’t sound at all natural, and that’s basically the whole movie—awkward posture and awkward delivery that seem to be very much intentional.
The reception to The Dead Don’t Die has been very mixed, and I do think that this isn’t a movie for everyone. Even with my limited experience with Jarmusch’s filmography, I think it’s probably fair to say that almost any other film of his might be a better intro to his work unless you have a very specific sense of humor. If you’re like me and think that repeated fourth-wall-breaking jokes involving the movie’s “theme song” (the excellent “The Dead Don’t Die” by Sturgill Simpson), the phrase “dead hipsters from Cleveland,” and Buscemi’s character wearing a hat that says “Keep America White Again” are funny, then you might enjoy this movie. It’s also not particularly scary and is only somewhat gory when compared with what you might usually expect from a zombie movie, which might make it either the perfect zombie movie for some people or the worst zombie movie ever for others—again, depending on your specific taste.
From what I’ve read, the criticism of the film tends to focus on a couple of key areas: the humor (which I’ve already touched on), the ending, and the fact that the movie doesn’t really break new ground with regard to its interpretation of zombies as a symbol. Those last two kind of intertwine, so to really get into them I need to spoil things. What I can say here, sans major spoilers, is that I do agree with the last point of criticism. The Dead Don’t Die toys with certain ideas—like climate change and the current, intensified political climate of the US—but it ultimately doesn’t use those things in a way that adds new meaning to what zombies have come to represent. Instead, it settles for the same criticism of materialistic culture that’s been around since at least the 1978 Dawn of the Dead which centered its zombie action on a shopping mall. The zombies in The Dead Don’t Die gravitate toward activities and material goods that were important to them in life, and the film seems to outright confirm that it’s doing a Dawn of the Dead-style critique of consumerism in a final spiel by Waits at the film’s conclusion.
Now entering spoiler territory…
The problem with what Waits says, though, is that the message about human beings already being ghosts or zombies because they sold their souls for material goods doesn’t necessarily fit with the rest of what the movie has to say. There’s a big focus on “polar fracking” as the cause of the zombie outbreak, though toxic rays from the moon may also be to blame and/or a contributing factor according to Waits’ character at one point. And although there is an extremely brief montage including someone looking at what seems to be a new pickup truck when Waits is offering his closing read of the film’s zombies, the rest of the movie is not nearly materialistic enough to back up what he’s claiming. The characters we see just aren’t interested in material goods in the sort of obsessive way that you might associate with a critique of that sort of consumer culture. The zombies are obsessed with material things, but the living characters we spend our time with are not. Instead, the film shows us one thing but then tells us another.
Since this is the ending, the apparent mishandling retroactively makes the rest of the film feel less satisfying, and it’s also hard to counter this interpretation since the film is being explicit about what it’s trying to say. While Waits’ “hermit” is kind of a weirdo, he also seems to have been set up as very perceptive throughout the movie—He’s there behind the scenes throughout the film, noticing “clues” like ant colonies going berserk and mushrooms growing in the wrong places. He sees the moon glowing weirdly and flocks of birds acting up, and he quotes from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick in an effortless sort of way. He’s presented as a wise man of sorts who knows what he’s talking about, so his interpretation of the zombies reads as truth. The one line that suggests to me that this final say on the film is possibly just a joke is when Waits says that people have sold their souls for “Nintendo Game Boys,” which as a specific claim is so weirdly out of synch with the current consumer landscape that it almost sounds like it’s meant to be a joke. But is it really? And does the speech being funny mean that it’s not meant to be taken as gospel within the context of the film’s universe?
I watched a review by YouTuber Nyx Fears (May Leitz) the other night (linked below) as I was gathering my thoughts for this piece to see if she could give me any ideas about how to deal with this film’s rough edges, and in addition to the actual review, I saw some great comments below the video offering different readings of the movie that manage to do a better job tying the film’s zombie apocalypse to the political and corporate greed angle that it otherwise neglects than Jarmusch himself may have done. That being said, though, there’s no getting around the presence of Waits’ final words, which sound particularly authorial. This speech doesn’t exactly try to combine the materialist critique with the presence of polar fracking, but the implication could be, as at least one of the aforementioned YouTube comments suggests, that the criticism in the film is of people distracting themselves with consumer goods while the world ends around them. But!
How exactly does the individual American stop the government and/or corporations from fracking the poles?
In the real world, it’s become increasingly clear that the steps taken by individuals to try to protect the planet—not using plastic bags, keeping up with their recycling, using the right light bulbs of all things—are actually ineffectual and have been a sort of smokescreen created by the entities with the actual power to save the planet in order to distract from their own inaction. We’re led to obsess over the numbers on the bottoms of Gatorade bottles and the like (most of which plastic rubbish apparently doesn’t even get recycled), while corporations like Exxon have for years been aware of the long-term damage their work has on the planet but have continued anyway in the name of profit. The most damage done to the planet is coming from a small number of large corporations, which individual people are powerless to stop. Intervention in the looming end of the world requires government regulation, not for individual people to stop buying iPhones. And arguing that people aren’t allowed to pursue creature comforts, in general but particularly in the face of an existential threat like climate change, makes you just sound like a jerk. And, again, no one in this film (not even the zombies, ultimately) seems all that obsessed with anything too material or too extravagant.
I used to not like the whole ending of The Dead Don’t Die and not just Waits’ capper on the film’s messaging, but I’ve come around on it in general. As I said before, I think the acting and humor really are great, and even if the ending still feels sort of weird, Murray’s and Driver’s performances in particular bring it home. This feeling only arrived with my third rewatch, though, and some other pandemic-related reflection between my second and third viewing also caused me to come around on the specific choice that Chloë Sevigny’s deputy character makes at the end when the trio of law… people are trapped in their car in the cemetery by the zombies. I haven’t talked much about her character in this piece, but Sevigny is kind of a straight woman to the rest of the cast if we consider their removed, stoic performances to be stand-ins for typically more uproarious sorts of comedic antics.
While everyone in the film is just kind of a regular person and not an action hero, Sevigny feels the most human of all out of the main three. She’s the one that gets physically ill when the first murders by the zombies turn up, and she’s the one of the main trio that breaks down the most realistically in the face of their inevitable deaths. In the cemetery at the end of the movie, she makes the seemingly rash choice to climb out of the car and die after seeing her grandmother among the horde. The first two times I watched the movie, this choice seemed kind of weird and abrupt (sort of like the choice to go to the cemetery, which one would reasonably expect to be the epicenter of zombie activity in the town, in the first place…), but my thinking has changed. Like I said before, I think Sevigny’s reactions are the most human in the film, and this final choice to simply accept death is still one that makes sense. It just took time for me to appreciate it.
Real life morbidity inbound…
I can’t escape the fact that I watched this movie about what is essentially an unstoppable plague brought on by irresponsible government action at a particularly… fitting time. As I said, I watched The Dead Don’t Die back around February and March, which was also around the same time that the US was finally wising up to the fact that we were entering a true pandemic. Up until then, we (and I include myself) had sort of been in denial about exactly how bad things could get here. I actually took a trip in early to mid-March, and though I was extra cautious about washing my hands at that point, I still hadn’t really reckoned with what was going on. I came home from that vacation and then never went back to work physically since everything started shutting down immediately after that.
Over the months since then, I’ve had a lot of feelings, as has everyone. It began with a sort of panicked but also deliberately-cultivated insomnia—I started staying up extremely late with my bedroom door locked because for some reason I only felt safe and in control of my life under those conditions. I briefly kept a journal of my thoughts and impressions so that after this is all over I would have a record of what I actually saw and felt to combat the media spin that will no doubt come. We’ll probably ultimately have all pulled together and pulled ourselves up by our collective bootstraps or something quintessentially, stupidly American or something like that—something which writes right over the individual and collective irresponsibility and the many, many unnecessary deaths.
I’ve had a lot of privilege in avoiding the pandemic thus far, but sitting in a box all day every day has also left me feeling antsy. The end feels inevitable—very The Dead Don’t Die-esque—since the odds do not seem to be in my favor in the long-term. I’ve felt a bit of what Sevigny’s character experiences in that police car in the film. You’re safe for the time being, but the numbers keep going up (more zombies around her, more infections and deaths around me), and the whole thing starts to feel unavoidable. There was a point over the summer where I (nonseriously) considered whether it would be better to just go out and lick a flagpole or something and just die already. Obviously that wouldn’t really be how things would shake out. It almost certainly wouldn’t be a quick death if I died, and I could very much end up like the many people who have survived COVID officially but have been left either with permanent health conditions like a recurring “fog” on the brain or other symptoms that come and go and/or persist for a “long-haul.” But!
The point is that I actually ended up finding the mind-space Sevigny’s character ends up in more realistic than I originally thought since I experienced it for myself.
More recently, I read a Medium essay that I’ll also link at the end of this post called “I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There.” by Indi Samarajiva about Sri Lanka’s civil war and what it’s like to live in a society undergoing a sort of apocalyptic scenario. I posted the article to Facebook and offered some comments I’m going to repeat here because I think that they also tie in with what Sevigny’s deputy experiences and what I felt over the summer and still feel to some extent. In the article, Samarajiva writes, “As a nation you don’t mourn your dead, but their families do. Their communities do. Jesus, also, weeps. But for most people it’s just another day. You’ve run out of coffee. There’s a funny meme. This can’t be collapse, because nothing’s collapsing for me.”
When I posted the article to Facebook, I used a portion of that quote and then added, “This is an interesting perspective—kinda hits on something I’ve felt at times over the years (like when I saw a car crash *just* behind me), which is that life, even at its worst, is so boring that it’s easy to feel like the worst never arrives. Media conditions us to expect only the spectacular.” And also: “It’s like ‘hurry up and wait’ but for the end of the world. I’m sitting here waiting on edge, and maybe it’ll come and maybe it won’t for me personally. But it comes every day for somebody.” While I definitely don’t want to suggest that I have it worse than the people who have actually experienced COVID and hardships as a result of it—and especially not those who may or may not have been sick but have been losing their jobs and homes—the waiting for what has started to feel like an inevitable infection (and maybe even death) has become interminable. Life is boring but also threatening in a way that boredom usually isn’t. It’s like being a cow watching the other cows getting on a truck to go somewhere en masse (if cows were aware of such things)—or like sitting in a cop car in a cemetery filled with the living dead in a “realistic” fictional earth. No one is a warrior: No one wrestles with this thing and “beats” it. There’s only surviving and not surviving, and surviving doesn’t necessarily mean a lot since, to quote (of all things) Disney’s direct-to-VHS Aladdin: The Return of Jafar from the early 90s, “You’d be surprised what you can live through.”
One way of looking at The Dead Don’t Die’s unsatisfying ending is that it is kind of inevitable. Jarmusch spends so much time in the film painting this portrait of a town filled with (mostly) extremely ordinary people. I don’t think there’s ever a sense than any human character in the film is capable of pulling off anything approaching sustained action hero-style antics. Everyone feels mortal, and so the ending was always inevitable. They would all die eventually, and Jarmusch doesn’t necessarily make that satisfying—because of Waits’ bad summation, because this is just how Jarmusch rolls creatively in general, and also because, probably, selling an audience on “and then everyone died” as a plot beat isn’t easy or even really doable since we crave more satisfying resolution, even to grim stories. It’s probably closer to what the reality will be, though. A single lucky (read: rich) person out of a whole mass of humanity will get to board the real world equivalent of a UFO to safety while the rest of us shamble on with only our Nintendo Game Boys as a small comfort. Where I clearly differ from Waits’ character’s interpretation (which may be Jarmusch’s interpretation) is that taking comfort in what small distractions we may have left is not universally, unambiguously a bad thing when our deaths start to feel all but guaranteed.
Happy Halloween!
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