The once and future zombie apocalypse

by David Benjamin 

 

“This is the way the world ends; not with a bang or a whimper, but with zombies breaking down the back door.” 

― Amanda Hocking, Hollowland

 

PARIS — It has long been one of my items of faith that actor Stanley Tucci has never accepted a bad script. This conviction was shaken recently when I found, among the flotsam and jetsam in my cable TV listings—and watched, regrettably—a film called Patient Zero, wherein Tucci is cast as a pseudo-intellectual human hydrophobe called, with labored irony, “the Professor.”

Released in 2018, this stain on Tucci’s escutcheon is an incoherent but oddly significant addition to the zombie apocalypse (ZA) genre, which seems to be burgeoning even in its death throes. Perhaps, someday, the last ZA flick will crawl from its grave and devour all its predecessors, leaving behind nothing but ragged celluloid scraps, sticky with Nestle’s chocolate syrup, from the granddaddy of ’em all, Night of the Living Dead.

If you really want to know, Patient Zero is set in—surprise!—a bleak, dystopian future. Humanity is overrun by zombies called “infecteds” who are hard to classify as either living or dead. Their infection is a rabies-like virus transmitted by biting. One nip turns you into a shirtless predator on a permanent PCP high (without the PCP). Your only mission in “life” is to take a bite out of everyone you can overtake and drag to the pavement.

Typical of the genre, the unbitten holdouts are armed against the infecteds, but vastly outnumbered and trapped in a claustrophobic urban fortress. All around their hideout, a thousand ravening freaks mill, gnash and snarl blood-curdlingly.

The differentiating feature of this film’s mutants is that they haven’t entirely lost the ability to think and communicate, although their cerebral skills are badly compromised by the raging derangement of their rabies. To converse with an infected, you have to chain him down and pump him full of Thorazine. 

In this state, the Professor, played by Tucci, elicits the political philosophy of universal zombiedom. “The rage, the rage,” he redundifies, “started here, against the government, the rich, the poor, foreigners, intellectuals, conservatives, feminists, freaks, name it. That’s where it comes from. We became so angry for so many good reasons, and for none. The virus has lain dormant in us since the beginning of time and the extremes of modern stress have caused it to awaken. Therefore, we are all …”

The Professor’s speech breaks off here but not, surprisingly, because of his tragic vocabulary deficit. He’s interrupted by his infected legion, as they breach the citadel. Wham! Just like that, the flying intestines hit the fan. Thenceforth, it’s all predictable. Any teenage video-gamer could guess the plot or—given ten minutes, a pencil and a notebook—improve on it. 

Any student of ZA cinema knows this formula in its myriad variations. Stars who’ve portrayed the more-or-less last human on earth include Vincent Price, Charlton Heston, Mel Gibson, Will Smith, yada yada. In films of this ilk, the auteur’s explanation for humanity’s descent into zombie hell tends to blow with the political winds. One year, it’s nuclear holocaust, overpopulation or flying saucers. Lately, it’s climate change. The first (best) iteration of Jack Finney’s ingenious thriller, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, was variously deemed an analogy for either Communist infiltration or anti-Commie paranoia. Most filmgoers who watched raptly, as Finney’s pod people pursued Kevin McCarthy (the actor, not the Republican), had no idea that there was a metaphor going on.

More recently, a TV series, The Walking Dead, has turned zombie apocalypse into soap opera, which suggests that the genre itself is a dead man walking. 

I can only hope. After all, we’ve heard it before. The Professor’s soliloquy in Patient Zero is an abridgment of the “American carnage” inauguration address of January 20, 2017. In each speech, we learn that we’re “infected” by an inchoate anger so pervasive and contagious that no social or political antidote is effective. The American—no, human!—experiment has failed. and biting time is here. 

In Patient Zero and most of its sanguinary genre, humanity’s last stand depends exclusively on violence and vigilantism. Indeed, when George Romero established the template with Night of the Living Dead in 1968, he depicted a sudden and intractable breakdown of all social norms and institutions, leaving humanity’s salvation to a haphazard handful of heavily armed desperados who roam the lurching zombie throngs lopping off undead heads or blowing their brains out, the only official method of putting the monsters out of commission.

But it’s all in vain. In mid-century creature features, humanity was saved not by a multicultural squad of voluntary commandos, but by scientists and military leaders (cf., J. Robert Oppenheimer and General Grove), who—with a little research and a lot of ordnance (chemical weapons for the giant praying mantises, flamethrowers for huge mutant ants, etc.)— cobble together a last-ditch solution. In the 21st century, however, we all know science is bullshit. We also know that, by its very definition, you can’t lick an apocalypse. So, true to the nihilist ethos of Donald Trump and Prof. Tucci, the campaign to end the carnage with more carnage is a waste of ammo. “The rage, the rage” is overwhelming. 

The few survivors grow fewer until, in many versions of this formula, there’s but one man standing. In Patient Zero, there are two. an unbitten guy and his unchewed girlfriend (cf., Planet of the Apes). This last couple on earth, Morgan and Gina. mount a motorcycle and drive away, knocking hydrophobes aside, escaping to an unzombified wilderness—Idaho, maybe—to become the Adam and Eve of a world uninfected by “modern stress.”

(In real life, of course, the zombies already have Idaho.)

After watching the movie and taking a shower, it occurred to me that, fatally flawed though it was from its conception, Patient Zero bespeaks our times better than most of the educated commentary that descends from our punditocracy.

The actual zombie apocalypse in our midst is a mob of infecteds, inspired by a carnivorous blowhard, who have stormed civilization’s citadel, yearning to sink their fangs into Pelosis and Pences and, along the way, pissing symbolically on its pillars. 

After one recognizes the prophetic similarity between the Trump faithful and the Professor’s disturbingly athletic zombie horde, the parallels pile up. The scene in which Stanley Tucci—excessively tan and chained to a chair, jerking and struggling, spewing venom and throwing a tantrum—has all the theatrical fuss, fury and intellectual depth of a Trump rally.

There are other parallels, but most eloquent is the biting bit. The infecteds are not biting to eat, like old-school zombies gnawing on severed legs and slurping up entrails. Infecteds seem to grasp that they are dead and don’t need food any more. Their only purpose is the rage-driven compulsion to defile, as fast as possible, everyone who still clings to some purpose, then hurrying to the next bite. If there is a method to their madness, it is simply to ensure that when it’s all over, no one’s alive and nothing is left.

As artless and brutish as it is, Patient Zero left me wondering which way we’re looking through the mirror, Alice.

Is a hope-crushing and ill-crafted zombie movie, in which its best actor is disgraced, a metaphor for the state of American democracy? Or is it the other way around?