The Undead

 Movies  14 Responses »
Jul 182003
 

(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)

The alarming spectacle of ordinarily clever and thoughtful people praising 28 Days Later makes it clear that my taxonomy of zombie movies is overdue.

Zombie movies, like zombies themselves, refuse to die. Ian Hamet, who claims to dislike them, writes:

But I like the idea of zombie movies… The apocalyptic backgrounds, the stripping away of all veneers to reveal what it is that makes us human (or inhuman). The sense that we are our own worst enemy. There’s something rather primal about the notion, which I think is a large part of why such movies are so popular.

Zombie movies appeal in particular to the secret thought that one is the sole sentient human being in a world of pod people. I mean, we all believed that in high school, right? In the most creepily effective zombie movies, like the ur-classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (directed by the great Don Siegel of Dirty Harry fame) and The Stepford Wives, the zombies look normal. They’re our friends and neighbors, our parents and siblings. They live among us! The moment in Stepford when Katherine Ross discovers her best friend has been turned into a house-proud robot is genuinely terrifying, in a way completely different from the mere surprise in which most “horror” movies truck.

E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, distinguishes story from plot as follows: “‘The king died and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died, and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.” Where The Stepford Wives has a plot, 28 Days Later has only a story.

Danny Boyle, its director, wisely ignores the convention of outfitting zombies in whiteface (The Omega Man, Night of the Living Dead), with the result that 28 Days Laterhas the most frightening zombies you’ve ever seen — slavering, blood-flecked, fast-moving, hissing and shrieking like banshees, yet recognizably human. The first attacks made me jump out of my seat. But even squeamish viewers like me quickly become inured to shock, and wait for something more substantial, which never comes.

As Ian points out, any proper zombie movie is survivalist at its heart. Place a few people where it’s kill or be killed and watch Darwin take his course. From this stems the universally-observed convention that the zombies must never turn on one another. The virulent flesh-eating monsters of 28 Days Later scorn the flesh of their fellow flesh-eaters — not tasty, not nutritious, who knows, who cares? It’s an us-against-them world.

Trials of character, however, require characters. The weak, the stupid, and the treacherous must perish, in consequence of their character flaws; the rational must survive, at least for a while. The archetype here is the Night of the Living Dead, almost a drawing-room drama, in which the people, not the zombies, kill each other.

In 28 Days Later who lives and dies seems mostly luck at the beginning, and utterly absurd by the end, when in the climactic scene one bare-footed, unarmed man single-handedly settles the hash of a dozen soldiers with machine guns. This is filmed, I suppose intentionally, so that it’s impossible to tell except in the most general way what’s going on, since you wouldn’t believe it if you could. But the soldiers, though treacherous, do not die from their treachery, unlike Mr. Cooper in Night of the Living Dead. They die — mega-spoiler coming now! — because they keep a zombie chained up for scientific purposes, to see how long he will survive, and our hero unlooses him. They die, in other words, for being rational. And that’s no way to run a zombie movie.

The Immutable Laws of Blog Comments

 Blogs  8 Responses »
Jul 162003
 

1. The briefer and less substantive the post, the greater the number of comments. (Lemma: The briefer and less substantive the post, the likelier a link from Instapundit. Not that I would know.)

2. The more political the post, the greater the number of comments. There are ten people with ill-informed opinions on politics for every one with an ill-informed opinion on philosophy or poetry. This applies to U.S. politics only; nobody cares what goes on in your home town, or your home country if it’s Canada. In life all politics is local: on blogs all politics is national.

3. The more personal the post, the greater the number of comments. There are ten people with ill-informed opinions on you for every one with an ill-informed opinion on politics.

4. The greater the number of comments to a post, the lower their overall quality.

5. A soft answer turneth away trolls.

6. All of my commenters are excepted from all of the above rules.

Let’s Try This Again

 Business  6 Responses »
Jul 142003
 

I hate to disagree with the estimable Craig Henry over at Lead and Gold, and still more with Tom Wolfe, but Craig, in the process of taking pie-eyed Internet triumphalism to task, quotes Wolfe as follows:

I hate to be the one who brings this news to the tribe, to the magic Digikingdom, but the simple truth is that the Web, the Internet, does one thing. It speeds up the retrieval and dissemination of information, partially eliminating such chores as going outdoors to the mailbox or the adult bookstore, or having to pick up the phone to get hold of your stockbroker or some buddies to shoot the breeze with. That one thing the Internet does and only that. All the rest is Digibabble.

Well OK. All the Internet does is “speed up the retrieval and dissemination of information.” And this distinguishes it from the telephone, telegraph, and printing press — how, exactly?

(Update Craig Henry replies. He correctly points out that “technological advances do not automatically create business and social utopias” — indeed, they do not create them at all. Technology Whigs ought to ask themselves once in a while why the breathtaking technological progress of the 19th century was followed immediately by the bloodiest period in human history. But there is a long difference between making this point and doing what Wolfe does, disparaging the technology itself.)

(More: James Joyner comments.)

Cyrano Solicits

 Culture, Language  3 Responses »
Jul 132003
 

All solicitations guaranteed overheard.

Frank: “Spare five bucks so I can go get high?” Whimsical: “I’m trying to get together the down payment on a Gulfstream.” Proletarian: “Help the homeless?” Fiduciary: “I borrowed ten bucks and I need to pay it back.” Aggressive (works only on the subway): “Either you give me money now or I play my tenor saxophone solo from outer space.” Bold: “Got fifty bucks?” Meek: “Could you please spare a nickel…a penny?” Nostalgic: “Brother, can you spare a dime?” Therapeutic: “Spare some change and improve your karma.” Primal: “I HAVE AIDS HELP ME PLEEEEEASE!” Hopeless: “Want to hear a poem I wrote?”

A Handful of Dust

 Philosophy  9 Responses »
Jul 122003
 

Identity, that spectator
Of what he calls himself, that net
And aggregate of energies
In transient combination — some
So marginal are they mine? Or is
There mine? I sit in the last warmth
Of a New England fall, and I?
A premise of identity
Where the lost hurries to be lost,
Both in its best interests
And in the interests of life.

–J.V. Cunningham

Some artist, I’ve forgotten who, was asked how to sculpt a lion. It’s simple, he answered: you take a block of stone and chip off everything that doesn’t look like a lion. The modern technique for sculpting identities is similar.

First you chip off your job, which isn’t your self, not really. It’s a gig, what you have to do to pay the bills. Here the hedge-fund manager and the Starbucks clerk find common ground. I have known many people who worked in finance, some of them multi-millionaires, and to a man they thought of themselves like Sherman McCoy in The Bonfire of the Vanities — in Wall Street, perhaps, but not of it. Yet if everyone is in it but not of it, then Wall Street must really not exist at all.

Next you chip off your appetites, which are not your own but are foisted on you from without by the evil purveyors of tobacco, junk food, and consumable sundries. The rash of lawsuits, tirelessly chronicled by Walter Olson at Overlawyered, against corporations for supplying goods that we want to buy can be viewed as a form of identity-shifting. It isn’t really me scarfing down Big Macs or smoking two packs a day, or it wouldn’t be if the hidden persuaders hadn’t somehow wormed their way inside my sacred soul.

Then you chip off your parents, who embarrass you, your schooling, which you despised, and your religion, which is silly. Why do people still consider the Virgin Birth a miracle when half of the residents of Manhattan were produced by one?

Reduced, at last, to a received taste in art, a few second-hand political convictions, and a nagging smugness that makes you impossible in polite company, you assert that this husk, this handful of dust, your inviolable self, is the most important thing in the world. And you don’t end up with a lion, either.

(Dept. of Faint Praise: “the most philosophical spin on fast-food lawsuits you’ll read this month.” —Walter Olson)

Clash of the Titans

 Law  3 Responses »
Jul 082003
 

Two of my favorite libertarian bloggers have squared off over the meaning of the Commerce Clause. In this corner, from the Cato Institute, Radley Balko:

Nearly every libertarian interpretation of the Constitution I’ve read says that the intent of the Commerce Clause was to facilitate commerce between the states, not to inhibit it. It was meant to set up a kind of “free trade zone” between the states. So if Mississippi, for example, wanted to tax every boat carrying cotton not grown in Mississippi traveling down the Mississippi River, Congress would have the authority to intervene. I’ve never read a libertarian interpretation of the Commerce Clause that says it should be interpreted to mean that Congress can tell businesses how they can or can’t solicit customers.

In fact, most libertarians agree that the only Supreme Court case to correctly interpret the Commerce Clause was the very first to come across its desk — Gibbons v. Ogden in 1824. There the Court struck down a New York law attempting to establish a monopoly on steamships traveling between New York and New Jersey. Chief Justice Marshall recognized that the Commerce Clause applies only to the trafficking of goods between two or more states, and also that Congresss had no power to regulate commerce within a state (he refused to allow Congress to enforce quarantine laws before or after a steamship docked within a particular state, for example).

And in this corner, late of Cato, now with Reason magazine, Julian “the Apostate” Sanchez:

Well, you know, I don’t much care about the “libertarian” or “non-libertarian” interpretation; I’m more curious about the correct interpretation. And if the “libertarian” interpretation insists that, contrary to appearances, the Commerce Clause does not empower the federal government to “regulate Commerce… among the several States,” then the “libertarian interpretation” is wrong.

Oh, I fully agree that the abuses Radley goes on to cite, wherein “commerce” is read to mean “manufacturing” or “anything that might affect commerce” or “anything Congress feels like passing a law about” are ultra vires. But that’s not what we’re talking about here, is it? This isn’t someone growing wheat on his own farm, or insisting on a 50 hour work week in a local factory. We’re talking about folks in one state calling up folks in another state to carry out a business transaction. If that’s not “commerce… among the several States” I don’t know what is.

The ostensible bone of contention here is “don’t-call list” anti-telemarketing laws, which Radley opposes and Julian doesn’t object to very vociferously, but the more important issue, as they both recognize, is the scope of the Commerce Clause. What we really have on display, however, is two conflicting theories of Constitutional interpretation.

Radley, as he acknowledges offhandedly, subscribes to original intent, appealing to “the intent” of the Commerce Clause to faciliate rather than inhibit commerce between the states. Julian is a textualist: he argues that the power “to regulate commerce among the several States” is, well, exactly that.

Now much as I would like to read the Constitution as debarring all Federal economic regulation whatsoever, I’m afraid Radley’s dog won’t hunt. Laws and constitutions are written by committees, and ascribing intent to groups is a dubious process indeed. If Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton quarreled over the meaning of a particular clause, as they often did, whose “intent” carries the day?

Original intent theory, if we assume that “intent” can be established at all, perversely privileges thought over deed. We are supposed to concern ourselves not with what the Constitution actually says, but with what the Founders thought it said. Even as a principle of literary interpretation, where we usually have only one author to concern ourselves with, this is unsustainable.

I of course agree with Radley and Julian that the Commerce Clause is a painfully slender reed to suspend a full-featured welfare state from, or, as Julian puts it, “that commerce means, as it’s been read to mean, ‘anything that seems like it might possibly marginally affect commerce if you squint real hard.'” Radley complains that “How can you say, then, that Congress doesn’t have the Constitutional authority to regulate the airlines, broadcast media, or any business, really, that has franchises in more than one state, or that does business with other businesses in more than one state, or that does anything at all that even remotely affects commerce in more than one state?” The answer is two-fold. First, there is a principled difference between regulating interstate commerce and regulating anything that might conceivably affect interstate commerce. The Supreme Court eventually agreed in Lopez that there are some interventions that even the Commerce Clause cannot justify, like federal laws against guns near school grounds. Second, some laws have to be fought on substantive rather than Constitutional grounds. As Eve Tushnet likes to say, Repeat after me: Not all bad laws are unconstitutional… not all bad laws are unconstitutional…

(Update: Jonathan Wilde comments.)

Give Us This Day Our Daily Theme

 Navel-Gazing  17 Responses »
Jul 072003
 

(Warning: Meta-content ahead.)

I feel guilty when I go a day without posting, and I’m not the only one. My friend Mark Riebling says that he considers skipping a day on his blog a moral failure, which gives him a lot to answer for, although in Mark’s defense he has book contracts to fulfill and a full-time job to hold down. Say what you like about Bill Buckley’s writing — the man, well into his 70s, still hies himself to the keyboard seven days a week to knock out the daily theme. We can all admire him for that, if nothing else.

Now why should I feel guilty when I don’t blog? Why, when my girlfriend comes home from work and asks, “Did you blog today?” do I feel compelled to mumble something about “working on a couple big posts,” all the while feeling cut to the quick?

It’s not as if I owe my readers anything. Don’t get me wrong: I love, I positively adore, every last one of you, but you get what you pay for, after all. Character is habit, as Aristotle says, and the task is the thing. You set yourself to write a blog. Mirabile dictu, a few people come to read it, but that’s beside the point. Maybe other bloggers are different, but I would feel the same way if I resolved to a keep a journal and then didn’t write in it every day (and I have) or if I tried to put up a shelf or assemble a piece of furniture and wound up punching some holes where none should have been (and I have). It doesn’t matter if nobody reads the journal or sees the holes. You know the holes are there, and it bothers you, or it should.

So will I be posting every day? Not necessarily. Poor Brian Micklethwait must rue the day he made that deal with the devil, although he has kept his end up impressively, if imperfectly, considering he runs another blog and contributes to a few more into the bargain. But I do promise you this: I will be wracked with guilt on the days I don’t.

Kate and Spence

 Movies  8 Responses »
Jul 042003
 

Of the numerous cyber-eulogies one of the best is Colby Cosh’s, describing her beauty as “harsh,” which is exactly right, and the sense she gave of being “bound by no known rules, certainly not those of fashion or politesse,” which is true but incomplete.

Watching Hepburn in comedy is like watching a great athlete. Kobe, Jordan, Gretzky, seem to occupy some interstice of time, inaccesible to the rest of us, that gives them an extra half-second to decide what to do. Hepburn, in the same way, always seems to buzz in some strange interstice of social relations, as if she already knows what someone is going to say, pronounces herself bored with it, and goes off on a tangent before he even opens his mouth, leaving him gasping for air. (I’m thinking of Bringing Up Baby and, especially, Holiday.) The conventional characters call her dizzy, when in fact she is dizzying.

Colby also amusingly cites a report from a local AM station that Audrey Hepburn had died, for the second time. Well, I used to know someone who thought there were three Hepburn sisters — Audrey, Katharine, and Tracy.

Speaking of Tracy, I have to take issue with Colby’s parenthetical remark that he could be “trusted to be big-hearted enough to slump back in his chair and enjoy the show. He seemed perfectly comfortable in the presence of a female superior.” This is exactly backwards. No male lead could be perfectly comfortable in Hepburn’s presence, and Tracy least of all. The comedy, on the contrary, derives from his acute discomfort, from Hepburn’s awareness of it, and from her futile attempts to mollify him, like her disastrous essay in making breakfast in Woman of the Year. Tracy and Hepburn always make up in the end, of course, but it is an uneasy alliance, and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? gives a nice picture of what their marriage might be like, twenty years on.

Of her male leads it is Cary Grant, not Tracy, who is, if not exactly comfortable with Hepburn, at least insouciant and urbane. He makes a few half-hearted attempts to restore sanity to Bringing Up Baby, but about halfway through decides to throw up his hands and just watch the show, and by The Philadelphia Story he has stopped trying altogether. Grant is a peculiarly affectless male lead, always giving the impression that sex would be fine, only it’s so much bother and he might muss his hair. This lends a certain chilliness to his collaborations with Hepburn, brilliant as they are, and is why they will never be beloved, as Tracy’s are. He is only outrun, while Tracy, the endearing palooka, is outclassed, but neither one could keep up with her. No one ever could.

Demurral

 Navel-Gazing  9 Responses »
Jul 022003
 

It has come to my attention that in certain unswept corners of the Internet I have acquired a reputation for knowing everything. This is untrue. I have forgotten the specific gravity of feldspar, and I never learned how to program COBOL. My Welsh is also terribly rusty. Everything else, I know.

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