I finally got around to watching Kick-Ass and, having had the opportunity to read the comic not long ago, the movie was an enlightening experience¹. Spoilers for the movie and the comic follow.

Tonally, this movie took a lot of the more cynical moments of the comic and softened them. I don’t know if the movie needed to remove all of those little touches, but there are some that probably had to be made. For example, in the comic Big Daddy and Hit Girl’s mob crusade is a total sham; Hit Girl’s mother is not dead, Big Daddy wasn’t a cop or a hit man or anything like that, Big Daddy was an accountant-by-day comic nerd-by-night who used his comic collection to fund his crusade and essentially brainwashed his kid into becoming a ruthless assassin in order to have fun. It’s an interesting deconstruction of the superhero mythos, but a tad depressing and almost anti-comics in sentiment for a comic book movie.

Another thing the movie brightened up was Dave’s romance. In the movie, as in the comic, Dave pretends to be gay to get close to this girl, Katie, who wants a gay best friend. The movie differs broadly here as well. In the comic, Katie is more explicitly using Dave and never demonstrates much interest in him; when he reveals that he’s not gay and in fact is basically in love with her, she beats the shit out of him and then gets her boyfriend to beat more shit out of him.

The movie fleshes Katie out more, she becomes interested in Dave over time expressing regret that he’s gay, and even becomes a comic book fan; when he reveals to her that he’s not gay — he also reveals that he’s Kick-Ass to her, which makes the way she takes it somewhat more realistic, and also heightens the drama during the later action pieces — she’s briefly pissed but quickly warms to him, both emotionally and physically. Basically, they fuck a lot², and though the ease with which she takes his confession doesn’t read as believably as I’d like, the relationship works in the big picture.

Basically, what Matthew Vaughn did when writing the screenplay was extract large chunks of Mark Millar’s misogyny, nihilism, and misanthropy. Obviously, there’s a degree to which this was done to make the movie more marketable, but I think even more than that the plot changes were done because the original comic lacked heart. The movie, much more than the comic, wants to be about more than just being a super-hero because it’s cool. Maybe it should’ve been uncompromising and brutal and accused the audience of being sociopaths for ever dreaming about being a super-hero but that movie almost certainly would’ve sucked.

Beyond the changes that occurred in the general plot, one thing that changed pretty drastically in terms of the way the story was told was the lack of flashbacks. Comic books operate similar to serialized television in most ways, and one aspect in particular is the cliffhanger ending; when a comic ends on a cliffhanger — like, say, Hit Girl and Big Daddy demolishing a bunch of drug dealers and running off into the night — the next issue can be devoted to explaining these new characters, their back story, and why they’re doing what they’re doing. The big reveal of the new amazing character, emerging complete from the shadows, it’s one of the cornerstones of comics and so it’s not surprising that Kick-Ass used it a couple times.

In Kick-Ass, it’s used first to fill in the back story of Hit Girl and Big Daddy³ and then later on to reveal that Red Mist was working with the Mob to set a trap for Hit Girl and Big Daddy. This style is great because it lets certain events come at you unexpectedly; in the film both of these things are integrated into the linear plot⁴ and so they feel slightly deflated. Granted, a good story should stay a good story regardless of any storytelling temporal tricks you plan, but that doesn’t mean those tricks can’t enhance the story.

The compressed story lines required for film are at times a crucible from which a tighter story is extracted, but in the process it’s easy to lose something.

Seeing as I’m here, I’ll write a brief paragraph about the fight scenes in Kick-Ass⁵. Hit Girl killing countless mob goons was a sight to behold, but I think that the best fight scene in the movie, hands down, is the one where Big Daddy destroys that group of goons at the lumber factory and then sets it all on fire. Every movement in that scene feels so visceral, the way Big Daddy trundles relentlessly through the gunfire felt so much more genuine than the highly choreographed (albeit impressive) fights with Hit Girl.

Ultimately, I think the film is stronger than the comic, both because of the changes to the basic plot and in spite of the loss of certain comic book storytelling traits. You should go see it if you haven’t already, though if you’ve read this entire post but haven’t seen the movie, well I kinda fucked that plan up for you, didn’t I?

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1. It was also a very entertaining movie, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to resort to that lame pun everyone seems to be bandying about. And no, the title of this post is not an example of said pun it’s— oh look over there, a squirrel! [↩]
2. And I’m totally willing to admit I giggled with glee when she said she wanted to fuck Kick-Ass and then promptly made up an excuse to go fuck Dave. [↩]
3. Well, the first version of the back story, the ending reveals that the first version was a fiction thought up by Big Daddy. [↩]
4. Aside from a comic book animation sequence that gives a little more history to Big Daddy. [↩]
5. I’m still not going to use that pun, though [↩]

A movie that I didn’t really pay a lot of attention to when it first came out was Ghost Town. Now, me not paying attention to a movie is fairly unremarkable: I watch considerably more television which leads to me lagging behind the movie world with respect to most movies, especially when it comes to hidden gems.

That said, I usually hear about the movies I need to see through the internet or my real world friends, but sometimes those networks fail me and in this case it led me to watching Ghost Town without any preconceptions or prejudgement.

I’ve seen Ghost Town twice now and the acerbic wit of Ricky Gervais’ character, Bertram Pincus, remains as entertaining and the romantic arc of the story — pairing Tea Leoni with Gervais in an odd yet effective combination — still feel far more natural than most romantic comedies. Having only seen it twice, I hesitate to place it into my much-vaunted collection of so-called “perfect films,” a collection containing Groundhog Day among others¹, but I think it’s nonetheless one of the finest films I’ve seen in recent memory².

Truthfully, Gervais is barely playing a character here. He is playing Ricky Gervais, for the most part, but that works to the movie’s benefit. The character Bertram Pincus is supposed to be unlikeable but not really; any other actor wouldn’t have been able to walk that delicate line between protagonist and prick.

Of course any romantic comedy wouldn’t work if the relationship didn’t mesh, but in this movie it works perfectly. Both Gervais’ and Leoni’s characters have the appearance of incompatibility but grow together in a very natural method. Despite the initial conceit of the dead husband (Greg Kinnear) playing Cyrano to Pincus’ Christian, almost all of the scenes that play out between the two leads are unencumbered by Kinnear’s shtick, leaving the relationship to come together naturally.

I often deride romantic comedies for leaving out the mundane moments that solidify relationships, the beautiful banality of love, and this movie gets it perfect. From Leoni’s character spotting the price tag on the back of Gervais’ newly bought shirt as they share some hard candies, to the jokes they crack with each other as they confide sadnesses from their past, this movie gets the little things just right. There’s a particularly poignant line from Leoni, responding to Gervais’ confession of what he considers his ‘boring and ordinary’ breakup, that gets my point across:

It’s not boring and ordinary, by the way. We just get the one life, you know. Just one. We can’t life someone else’s or think it’s more important just because it’s more dramatic. What happens matter. Maybe only to us, but it matters.

Unlike other romantic comedies that emphasize the grandiose nature of their story, this one revels in the ordinary. Yes, the trappings of the romantic comedy are all there: the initial deceit, the subsequent relationship, the truth revealed, and the final redemption. It’s all there in fairly formulaic structure, but romantic comedies have this structure for a reason, and in this case it’s, in my opinion, a necessary structure to connect the audience to the story which is playing out in such a subversively naturalistic manner.

What it comes down to though — ignoring all the little nuances, ignoring the growth Pincus undergoes, ignoring the side stories that emphasize the main premise³, ignoring even the path the two leads take to their ultimate relationship — I think the movie is made brilliant by the closing lines “It hurts when I smile,” followed by “I can fix that for you.” So subdued, yet perfectly aligned with the characters and the bond they’ve formed. If more romantic comedies were like this, the world would be a better place.

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1. Though they’re certainly not all romantic comedies despite the example given [↩]
2. I’m not claiming that it’s better than all the other movies I’ve seen recently, but for a romantic comedy it is moving without being (too) heavyhanded, romantic without being saccharine, and has sincerity without cloying sentimentality. In other words, it does its job remarkably well. [↩]
3. The ghost stories are mostly filler, but I still found them moving and they certainly emphasized the idea that the simplest acts can mean so much. [↩]

Dollhouse is a hard show to pin down. Through its run — I’m not implying anything by that phrasing, I still hold out hope that it will get a second season — it’s experimented with the implications of the technology at use on the show. It is, in many ways, one of the true science fiction shows remaining. This episode not only tinkered with virtually every form of mind-frakking, but it blew away all my issues with the way last week ended by taking the cliche and playing with it.

After Alpha and Echo headed off into the sunset, it all seemed very blasé as an explanation for the byzantine plans Alpha has concocted to test Echo. This was initially justified by the many personalities of Alpha; rather than Alpha’s goal being the imprinting of Echo with a Bonnie to his Clyde, it was simply the goal of one of his many minds. But that didn’t hold out for long. Alpha’s personalities start to break down and intermingle and the megalomaniac personality that embodies the Alpha mythos starts to once again take hold.

But even then, as revealed through flashback, Alpha is doing all of this because he “saw something” in Echo. Basically he had a crush on her and the psychopathic killer that grew up in his body had many bizarre ways of expressing that. As I was watching those scenes, I was reminded of the obsession that Ballard has with Caroline, and how little of it is based on anything he actually knows about her.

So, for the first half of this finale I was feeling a little let down by it all. First Ballard, and now Alpha; all the men in Echo’s life keep getting killed by candarian demons keep ending up being these cliches of male messiah-complexism. But then the second half won me over; once Alpha had imprinted Echo with all of her past personalities at once, thus creating an Omega to his Alpha, she didn’t follow his path to megalomania.

And all of that was basically getting around to the idea that an Active is more than an object. They’re more than a container. Alpha is not Alpha because he was overloaded by 48 personalities. And Echo did not become Omega because of what Alpha did to her. There’s a fundamental base to each person. You can call it a soul if you like, but it’s there no matter what Topher does. So Alpha was always broken, the composite event merely allowed him to express that brokenness. But as Echo has said before, she’s not broken.

The show is mixing its messages here though, because as the audience is seeing that Alpha went evil because Carl William Kraft was always evil, and Echo stayed sane because Caroline was, new Echo is saying just the opposite. “There’s no me, I’m just a container,” which I think belies the message the show’s trying to put across. And before she can further articulate her thoughts on the subject Alpha gets aggressive again, so it’s hard to see if she’d eventually realise that she is more than a container. Regardless, even if Caroline was hollowed out, little bits remained. So Boo-urns for sending mixed messages, but I suppose it would’ve been a less exciting hour if Echo spent the next five minutes examining the meaning of selfness and the permanence of the soul.

I also enjoyed the Boyd/Ballard hook up, and now that Ballard is working with the Dollhouse, I really hope the second season is greenlit so we can see more of them hanging together and hating on the evils of the Dollhouse while working for it. And speaking of Ballard, what he did in this episode also redeemed a lot of my annoyances regarding him. First off, he awesomely got the FBI to cancel their terrorist alert by telling Tanaka exactly what was going on in that building, and knowing it was just nuts enough to get Tanaka to call off the alert. And then, as the episode ended and he accepted his new position at the Dollhouse — which, by the way, it would be really awesome if he became Echo’s handler next year — under the condition that a certain special Active was given back her old self and her five-year debt paid in full: November.

Yes, Ballard finally realised that the Doll he needed to rescue wasn’t the one once called Caroline, but the one once called Madeline; the one he knew and genuinely cared for. I was really proud of Ballard in that moment. Even if it turns out in the second season (come on FOX, do it for me) that he chose November rather than Echo because he wanted Echo at the Dollhouse with him, he still made the right choice, albeit for the wrong reasons.

This episode also let Ballard be an awesome investigator since he was the one that figured out that who Alpha was before he was Alpha was the missing part of the equation.

One of the most interesting things in this episode was the reveal of Dr Saunders’ past. I’ve always imagined it was a possibility that she was a Doll, and it was broadly hinted at when it was mentioned earlier that she never leaves the Dollhouse, so the reveal wasn’t mind-blowing but it certainly put a twist on all her past interactions. As Whiskey, she was the number one Doll, and it was that popularity that led to Alpha slicing her face, in the hopes of making Echo number one, and in turn led to Alpha going in for a diagnostic and the accidental composite event.

Dr Saunders’ acceptance of her past is intriguing though. Since her first appearance, I’ve found her to be one of the most interesting characters and the way she’s dealt with what should be a soul-shattering experience only adds to that. Seriously, Amy Acker can do no wrong. She needs to have her own show.

The finale was great in ways I didn’t expect. I was disappointed by Alpha, though the problem was that the rest of the season built him up too well; it’s very hard to build up a character to those epic proportions and then successfully reveal them to the audience without disappointing in some way. Luckily, a lot of other directions the show took delighted me. Saunders’ revelation, Ballard’s new employer, and Echo’s awakening (and its persistence based on the closing shot of the season) all elevated Dollhouse to a new level and set up a drastically different, yet reminiscent, world for the second season. Which probably won’t happen.

But liking television comes with that risk. A movie has a set goal to tell the story it wants to tell. They can from time to time establish things that can be explored further in sequels but, for the most part, movies are self-enclosed, much like the Dollhouse. Television has to plan for more. Television has to tell an interesting and self-enclosed story while constantly writing a superstory above it all. If the larger story is flawed or uninteresting, you’ll get very little connection with the audience, but if the individual stories aren’t strong enough the audience won’t come back and get caught up in your universe. It’s a delicate tightrope that television writers have to constantly walk, and it’s something that I thought Dollhouse did very well. And even if the show doesn’t come back, we’ll still have that.

A few months ago, a study came out saying that unhappy people watched more television which prompted me to ask if watching TV makes you unhappy and my answer was, of course, no. In fact, I specifically stated that watching TV actually makes me happier overall.

So the recent study that watching TV relieves loneliness was not a surprise to me. In my previous post, I actually predicted it:

Of course, one telling aspect of this study (what you didn’t think I’d turned this post into an opportunity to whine about personal problems did you?) is that it covers 30 years of television and television has only recently become something more than mere escapism. What was once a rare occurrence on television — serialized storytelling and complex relationships — is now a mainstay. Television, in the intervening years, has grown up. It is more than a time filler now. It can and does explore life with equal or greater depth and insight as other more respected media. And in another 30 years, after a generation of people who have grown up with intelligent and thought-provoking television, the data will tell a different tale.

It didn’t quite take 30 years for TV to shift the data, but my point remains. One of the reasons I enjoy television more than I do movies is that the longer form of storytelling allows stronger connections to the characters. This goes beyond a need for social connectedness, though this study shows that this is clearly a factor, and into the ability of television to ask deeper and more fundamental questions than film.

Movies often seem grander in some respects, but I think that most of that view comes from film’s greater opportunity, not greater ability, to ask these sorts of questions. In two hours, a lot of ideas can be examined but they cannot be explored to any real depth. In addition, in two hours characters can be examined, but they will most likely not change in any appreciable amount. But television dramas have characters that change drastically. A movie could attempt such changes, but it would be seen as absurd by critics; in two hours, for those sorts of changes to occur would break the audiences willing suspension of disbelief.

In addition, movies require a real dramatic thrust and driving action, and so the framing of the characters always relies on that structure, unless you’re doing a very indie film with no expectation of heavy distribution. Television, on the other hand, can explore multiple characters by virtue of their long-term status. In a movie that tells the same high level story as Lost or Kyle XY or other character dramas, you might get some amount of time devoted to side characters, but nowhere near the attention to detail that television offers; with television, you can truly get immersed in a world.

It’s that immersive quality that makes television more capable of not only examining a world and its inhabitants but also touching you with the answers it uncovers.

I watched Coraline last night and it’s going to stick with me for a while. The movie was really well done overall — though the structuring of the final adventures reminded me a little too much of the classic video game structure — but what really worked for me was the 3D visuals. I haven’t seen any of these new generation 3D movies before so it was a totally novel experience and was also completely mind-blowing. It went far beyond the gimmicky “ooh something is poking out of the screen” shots that permeate old-school 3D. Those are there to be certain, but the much more breathtaking and beautiful sites are the simple scenes augmented by the third dimension. Beautiful scenery shots transform from paintings to giant dioramas with an almost unreal depth that both unnerves and comforts. Things in the background are not merely smaller, but farther away. It adds to the surreal environment in which Coraline is set, but even for more traditional stories it could drastically alter the movie-going experience and the depth of the visuals available to the director. I don’t see it supplanting traditional two dimensional filmmaking but it’s nevertheless a remarkable vision and, now that I know what I’ve been missing, given a choice between a 2D and 3D playing of a film I’d almost certainly opt for the latter.

There’s been a bit of talk about Tom Cruise’s new movie Valkyrie and how Tom Cruise speaks without a German accent despite playing a German character. I don’t understand that really. Having your characters speak in outrageous accents didn’t make a lot of sense to me. Why exactly is it offensive to have a Chinese character say “Me so solly” and yet it’s expected for a German character to speak like “Zis und Zat”? Aren’t those really the same thing?

I’d understand those sorts of accent in a film which is based on English speaking events, but the events of Valkyrie all took place in the real world in German. The fact that those events have been transcribed to English means that the audience should simply accept that some invisible translation has occurred for their sake. (Also, I know that many Americans during World War 2 spoke German fluently as a disguise, why couldn’t Germans have done the same thing?)

A couple reviews I’ve read — mostly through blogs, traditional media wouldn’t dare be so glib about a WW2 movie — essentially cast aside the movie because of the “unauthentic” accents. The people the film is based on spoke perfect and unaccented German. It was their native tongue. So it makes sense to me that any retelling of this story in the English speaking world would either be entirely in German (unfeasible for commercial reasons) or use English as the primary language and treat the characters as if it was their native tongue (what seems to have been done). Then again, I haven’t seen the movie so I should probably just shut my mouth until I can decide how distracting the American accent is.

The cool thing to do now in TV and film is to go “dark.” That is, to take a character down a turbulent, depressing, and possibly disturbing path to bring greater depth to them. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but there is something wrong with the idea that merely having “dark” stories brings character development or that it improves the quality of your stories. (There is also the implied assumption that to bring depth to your character you need to take this darker path; if you need an example of excellent character growth without the trappings of “dark” storytelling just watch The Office.)

Of course, dark stories come in different shapes and sizes. The Dark Knight was a much grimmer and darker look into both Batman and Joker’s psyches, and it delved into their interdependence on each other. That’s good dark. In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the characters endure a crushing war which drastically changed many of the characters and it explored the complex relationship between politics and religion and science. That’s good dark. Oldboy is the story of a man imprisoned for 15 years for reasons unknown who is given a week to discover why; Oldboy examines solitude, the influence others have on you, the monsters inside everyone, and many other disturbing and difficult questions. That is good dark.

But there’s a very bad trend, which seems most pronounced among sequels and spin-off shows, with a very different, and lazy, technique of telling darker stories: the deal with the devil. In Stargate Atlantis, the Atlantis expedition will on occasion tentatively join forces with the Wraith, the enemy du jour of the Pegasus Galaxy. On Star Trek Voyager, the crew reluctantly joins forces with the Borg to stop a common enemy more powerful than both.

The deal with the devil isn’t necessarily bad, but it needs to make sense. Team Atlantis wouldn’t join forces with the Wraith, or at least they shouldn’t because it doesn’t make sense; the Wraith are not a morally ambiguous group, they were designed to be essentially pure evil. The Atlantis team, and similarly the crew of Voyager, are bastions of sanctimonious self-righteousness and to have them coordinate with these evil groups reeks of story superseding character.

The point of dark stories is not to be cool. It’s not to be dangerous. It’s certainly not to tell dark stories. As always, it’s all about the characters. If your characters have inner demons requiring exploration of inseemly qualities, or they aren’t portrayed as a paragon of propriety, then their story can naturally progress toward those darker stories and possibly come back from it a stronger person and a richer character. But TV shows, and obviously movies as well, shouldn’t use it as a crutch to sustain their weak plots by sacrificing their characters, and viewers shouldn’t accept it.

This post has gone through a number of revisions. First I discussed why the actors in the upcoming film Watchmen need to really understand and embrace the atypical nature of Watchmen the comic to ensure the film doesn’t fall into the trap of becoming a “comic book movie” but with the recent announcement of (most of) the cast I’m relatively at ease regarding that. Then this post was to be a rant on Zack Snyder, the director of the film, his lack of experience, and his dogmatic relience on the original comic for visual details. Then Comic-Con came around and Zack Snyder represented himself as someone who knew what the fuck he was talking about and that eased. (He still seems to have some issues with deviating from vision of the text for the purpose of retaining the message of the text, but at least he’s shown that he’s a real fan of the comic and understands why it’s great.) So I figured I’d discuss the reason I began to write this post in the first place.

Watchmen is a great comic. It’s a zeitgeist for a time which our world managed to avoid, filled with mounting conflicts on a global scale and the constant fear of mutually assured destruction. Watchmen is set in a world where superheroes really fight crime through vigilante justice; most of them are good-hearted people who want to make a difference in their city. The key difference from the classic superheroes is that they have no mythic origins, they have no extraordinary powers. They saw this terrifying world and decided to make any difference they could. These are people who took on a battle larger than themselves not because they thought they could win but because it had to be done.

All except for one. Doctor Manhattan is a God among men. His powers seem limitless and we are to him little more than particles of dust flitting about in Brownian motion. He has all the trappings of superheroism but because he is inherently inhuman he becomes a complex compelling character whose decisions sometimes impress and often horrify. But the story of Watchmen isn’t about Doctor Manhattan. It is the story of the people who didn’t wake up one day with superpowers and then decide they should fight crime. They didn’t need a convoluted catastrophic event like an uncle being killed by the robber they could’ve stopped earlier to make them take the leap into the selfless, unforgiving, and sometimes overpowering, world of crimefighting. These people walked down a street one day, saw a mugging that everyone else ignored, and stepped in.

Watchmen is quite probably the greatest comic ever made. Because the characters feel real, and because the questions of morality and power are substantive and have a real, though ambiguous, contribution to make. And for reasons which are intrinsic to the paper; it must be read to be understood. So when I heard about a Watchmen movie I first felt elation. The idea of it happening was fantastic. Of course then I realised it’s the implementation that would destroy it. The odds of the film doing justice to its source material are so mindbogglingly high that anyone genuinely and purely excited without a hint of doubt or hesitation isn’t a true fan of Watchmen.

So I finally buckled under the pressure of critical praise and my long-abated desire to do so and saw Little Miss Sunshine. The longer it took me to get around to it, the more I feared I would be disappointed. All the praise that was slopped onto Napolean Dynamite before I saw it got me overexcited and I didn’t want Little Miss Sunshine to suffer the same fate. Fortunately, there was a difference between the two movies: Little Miss Sunshine didn’t suck.

Unlike its indie darling predecessor, the film’s characters don’t feel like they’re quirky for the sake of being quirky. Each eccentricity feels real. Each action follows from the character not the script. Not only that, throughout the whole desperate hilarious affair you actually see characters change. And when the sea change comes upon them, it’s not a instant but the culmination of past events. One such moment of change is the dance scene. Oh the dance scene.

If you’re going to have your movie and its characters pivot on an awkwardly bad dance sequence, do it the way Little Miss Sunshine did it; when that scene started, I had flashbacks to Napoleon Dynamite and feared the worst. And once again Little Miss Sunshine did what a good movie should do: it surprised, it warmed the heart, it made you feel like all the pain in the world is worth it for these few moments we have together.

On a tangent, the movie’s soundtrack is really good and the song which finishes off the movie is a variant of DeVotchKa’s “How It Ends.” I’ve been a fan of DeVotchKa ever since I downloaded “Una Volta” a couple years ago. Their music truly defies categorization and is filled with the same melancholic yet bucolic sense as this movie. In fact, this movie reintroduced me to DeVotchKa as I hadn’t listened to anything new of theirs in quite some time so that alone was enough to make me enjoy this movie. But that’s not the only thing this movie did. I feel reinvigorated regarding independent film. It’s been a long time since I’ve headed down to cumberland to see the newest limited release film and this movie reminded me of why I should.

I wish that were a misleading inflammatory title but it’s not; the world is filled with douches. Already, people on digg are submitting misleading titles which link directly to spoilers for the entire final book of the Harry Potter series. Now, I’m not perfect; I laughed just like everybody else at that video of that asshole spoiling a midnight Harry Potter book release but enough is enough. You guys are douches. The whole world is a stinking pile of douche. (By the way, douche is the proper plural of douche, but it just sounds weird to say “you guys are douche.”)

I really wish that there were some people out there who would respect people’s desire to read a book without holing themselves up to avoid people spoiling it for them! Unfortunately, everybody seems to gain an inordinate amount of pleasure from these heights of douchebaggery. I don’t care if I read these spoilers because I’ve never read a single page of Harry Potter nor have I seen any of the movies but I can understand not wanting to be spoiled. When the super-sized spoilers for the Lost season finale came around a couple months back I ducked away. I didn’t want to know what happened because the mystery and the ultimate reveal is worth the wait. Do some people overract to being spoiled? Absolutely. But should you ruin it for the moderate readers who don’t want to be spoiled? But did you want to be told the twist to Fight Club or The Usual Suspects before you watched it?

Maybe I am unnecessarily exaggerating. Maybe this is only the increasingly immature voice of the digg mob with their five-year-old mind set. But I can’t explain it. Do these people have no restraint? No desire for suspense? No respect for the creator’s wishes? No respect for your fellow human being? Has the internet so completely destroyed your moral core by its anonymity? Or is it that the internet abolished any patience you may have once had through endless spoiler websites? Whatever the cause, I know that saying this will do nothing to change the mind of the degenerate spoiling assholes out there. But maybe, just maybe, some of the people out there simply following for the sake of the joke will consider that purposefully ruining a story these people have dedicated thousands of pages of reading time to might not be something you want to do.

I could write something here about how great the songs were or how Hinton Battle, who choeregraphed and starred in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer musical episode, choerographed it, or how the blood splattering over the audience was awesome, or how the show both honoured and poked fun at the original Evil Dead series, or how the tickets were only twenty bucks but that would only waste precious time you should be spending getting tickets. Go now.

Preface

I feel that I must preface this post with a history. This post originated over eight months ago during a sheep brain dissection lab I had for a psychology course. The original question was “do sheep zombies need to eat sheep brains?” and from there the discourse progressed. After the creating the title (which was a solid twenty minutes of dictionary lookups and googling) I pretty much ran out of steam. But then, just a couple weeks ago my interest was renewed for no known reason and I began writing. And boy howdy did I write. Not only is this on the long-winded side of my typical post, but when I initially created this post I put it in the category of “Humour” which I seem to have been left by the wayside in favour of a more serious discussion of the topic. Though I know there are flaws and forgotten topics along the way, I’m sick of seeing it in my list of drafts and so I release it from the black hole that is my perfectionism.

Zombies

Zombies. The black sheep of the supernatural monster world. They’re the youngest of the group and shrouded in mystery. In their origins zombies were simply reanimated dead controlled by a Voodoo master. In fact, they were often used as mindless slaves for manual labour. Over time, the zombie was twisted into its current, more menacing, state: that of an undead creature with no intelligence of its own and a desire only for survival. Zombies represent a fear most people who live in an individualistic culture share: the loss of identity. A zombie is simply another blob in the horde seeking sustenance. Like the Borg of Star Trek, the zombie horde seems to absorb any and all things in their path and in the process lose any semblance of individualism.

Many zombies survive by the eating of living flesh, though their taste for brains is the one proclivity which resonates with movie goers. It’s obvious why brain eating becomes the most noticeable feature of zombies; as humans, we fear the thing which takes away that which we treasure the most. So, while many zombie films do not treat the brain as the most desired part of human anatomy, for our purposes here we will imagine a prototypical zombie for whom this desire is paramount. In particular, we will discuss why homo-chauvinism perpetuates through zombie culture.

So the question we’re going to ask today is whether or not zombies exist in other creatures and if cross-species feeding can occur. Why is it that zombie films never show a cute little puppy dog being gobbled up? Why do we never see a group of fleeing humans come upon a serene farm only to be attacked by zombie sheep? It’s not because these images wouldn’t have an impact on the viewer; they could be terrifying in one instance and hilarious in another. Is there some secret zombie dogma by which all films are compared? Do the creators of these films lack the imagination to shock the viewer with something original? What is it that zombies really require? If it were truly brains, then animal brains would be a hot commodity when humans became scarce. Similarly, zombies never seem to attack each other for what little brain remains after their conversion.

Perhaps it is not the tissue itself but the contents therein; what if zombies eat intelligence? From a purely philosophical point of view, this could very well be. If we take the zombie horde as an analogy for mob mentality, then we can see they are what becomes of us when we sacrifice our intelligence; when caught up in a situation where mob mentality takes over, intelligence has little to do with your actions. This analogy can be seen by noting the origins of zombies. From a human-made virus infecting people with unending rage, to the literal undead raised by some witches curse, almost every reason used to explain the origin of zombies arises from humanity. Additionally, unlike almost every other supernatural monster, the cause is always recent.

Conclusion

After all this discussion what is the ultimate answer? It is my belief that, given the right circumstances surrounding the origin of the zombies, animals could be zombies and, again given the right circumstances, those animal zombies would be free to engage in cross-species feeding. However, zombies have an allegorical representation which the auteur is beholden to respect. Because of this, most zombie movies are not likely to entertain the notion of inter-species postmortem encephalophagia.