If World War Z is the Best we Can do as a Culture I am Very, Very Frightened

 

            World War Z is the kind of movie that makes me feel like a resource-sucking waste of space for sitting in air-conditioned theatres watching movies instead of doing something with my life.  Not because it’s bad — though in a sense it is, intensely.  Or rather, not because it is bad in the way most of us usually index badness.

 

            This movie isn’t bad, doesn’t lance the blister of soul-draining meaninglessness that lurks beneath my relationship with pop-culture, because it is poorly-made.  No, this movie is bad because of its systematic, clockwork adequacy.  I have encountered very few things in the course of my life that are this suffocatingly okay.

 

            There is running and shooting and the making of serious faces, because people find all those things absorbing.  There is some creeping around dark corridors while zombies jump out and go “iiririllrllrrrerrg!”, because people like that too, just not too much or too intense with the “iiririllrllrrrerrg!”, because we need to keep this PG-13.  There are actors.  They say things.  They shoot guns.  Zombies are sweeping over the globe infecting everyone everywhere, and the actors who are in the movie and say the things and shoot the guns make concerned faces about this — you see how all the things that are in the movie are, like, tying together? One of them is Brad Pitt, and he protects his nice American family womenfolk.  Some of the other people fail, at various points throughout the film, to accept Brad Pitt’s recommendations as to best practices in zombie outbreak survival and management, and they die horribly, with the wrote degree of sadness or manful tooth-grinding attached depending on whether they were in the armed forces or not.  Some of them are people who live in places Brad Pitt travels on his quest to find a way to stop the zombie outbreak, and those people are proper fucked, because the plot follows Brad Pitt like an ill-favoured zombie-fuelled wind of destruction, so as to create action scenes for Brad Pitt to square jaw his way out of.

 

            But, despite all the things that happen in this bulletpoint apocalypse populated by the actors who say the things and shoot the guns, this isn’t really a story.  This is a movie executive’s well-oiled minimum input satisfaction machine: Everything in this movie is just precisely good enough, good enough to keep us sitting, to prompt us to tell our friends “yeah it was a fun way to pass the time at the movies I guess”, to stimulate us like the dormant zombies Brad Pitt encounters when we get to the creepy-infested-government-facility entry on the film’s checklist, waiting open-mouthed and drooling for something to happen.  (To give them credit I understand the infested government facility thing was a late addition at considerable extra expense and I thought it was one of the film’s best bits.  An inventive change from the usual big action scene finale.  Nothing is ever all bad, I guess, or even all meh.) It’s just so good enough, so cut and dried, oddly safe for a film about shrieking biting menaces who are coming to turn all of us into more like them.

 

            The plot is that there are zombies and OMG they are killing the shit out of us, and Brad Pitt has to travel the globe and find a way to make them stop — thus justifying the “World War” in the title, I suppose; where the novel World War Z by Max Brooks is a series of vignettes set all across the world and featuring different unconnected characters that together make up a journalistic history of the war against the undead, the movie strips this understandably tough-to-film premise out completely in favour of following Brad Pitt in his gallivanting to South Korea and Jerusalem and etc, as he demands answers in an earnest voice and merrily spreads destruction in his wake.  This is all held together by the movie’s precisely calculated sense of how often there needs to be a zombie outbreak in order to keep people from checking out.  Yes, this movie basically uses zombies like kitten yarn.  Apparently we can last about five minutes, maximum ten if there are people making intense faces and talking about military things in the interim.  So I guess we can be flattered and relieved that the people running World War Z’s stimulation engine have determined us to have attention spans roughly six times the length of those belonging to your average goldfish; I know I was.

 

            The characters are equally reducible, with no rough edges that might slice on the way down an audience’s delicate collective gullet.  Brad Pitt is a family man who is protecting his family because they’re the most important thing in the world, dammit.  Stoic soldier people are soldier people who are stoic.  Brad Pitt’s loving wife is a person who mostly says Brad Pitt’s name a lot, and the names of their beautiful beautiful American daughters who are young and helpless and don’t deserve to be killed by dirty foreign zombie viruses but don’t worry Brad Pitt will protect them; Brad Pitt has got that shit covered; do you see how we started this sentence talking about Brad Pitt’s wife and now we’re talking about Brad Pitt again? Do you see what the movie did there? It certainly hopes so.  The zombies growl and moan and sob out these long, haunting wails, but don’t worry they’re just walking virus vectors; we can totally shoot them.  Nothing is ambiguous.  Nothing makes demands on us.

 

            You know what? I enjoyed the time I spent watching World War Z.  Quite a lot.  I enjoyed and was grateful for the time with friends, and the film is, well, it’s a fun way to pass the time at the movies I guess.  Because it is very acceptably pulled together; that’s its power.  It’s just that as an exercise in the storytelling of sufficiency the movie scares me, and it scares me in a way that I cannot reconcile.  I cannot reconcile it because I love this big, flashy storytelling.  Examples of this kind of popular culture – not necessarily zombie narrative specifically, but big action-adventure science fiction — have substantially improved my life, provided me some of the geographies for the places my imagination roamed in middle school, when I had almost no one, and provided points of connection and reconnection for communicating with the friends I made and regained through high school and university, and you know what? A lot of it is just plain fun.  But I am also very conscious that many examples of such storytelling are animated by a ravening hunger, that underneath their pretty lights and iconic characters is an insatiable lust for gold, a howling skeletoal fiend with a hollow stomach dancing on a pile of coins with his mouth open to the sky, and that any instance of this entertainment will only be as complex and engaging as is deemed needful for the slaking of this endless want.  I love this stuff, and most of the time I think there can be good in it some places.  But I also hate its inherent calculating, exploitative cynicism profoundly, and find myself increasingly unsure of what it is worth.  And the two feelings are never far from one another these days.

 

            I look at Wikipedia and I see that this minimum input satisfaction machine cost a cool 190 million US dollars to produce, and I just don’t know what to do with that information.  I’m not sure I’m okay with it.  I’m not sure what not being okay with it would mean, and, conversely, what being okay with it would mean.  Am I a tool of the Man if I’m okay with it? Well, if you frame it that way …  kind of, yeah.  What do I do if I’m not okay with it? Stop going to movies with friends? What a phenomenally pointless, joy-killing gesture.

 

            I am naive as can be in the ways of economics, but I know that, for reasons probably not unlike those that prove trickledown economics to be bullshit perpetuated by the sickeningly rich, money spent in one sector in no way equates to money not spent in another, so I’ll spare us the over-simplistic “190 million dollars not spent on a big action movie could, like, feed a developing country for a decade” speel on the grounds that it insults everyone’s intelligence.  But, well, if nobody anywhere in the Global North could find any better use for 190 million bucks than the creation and distribution of World War Z, I think that would constitute a pretty definitive litmus test for the irrelevance of western civilization.

 

            I’m in dangerously prescriptive territory here, to my mind, in terms of the evaluation of what cultural objects, what pursuits, are and are not worthwhile.  I am young, privileged, and have never really suffered, I don’t think, but it is still my belief that fun, good, honest fun, is a priceless thing, a worthy thing, and that creative endeavour is too, in some nebulous indefinable way, even if only the most delusional English major believes it’s changing the world or whatever.  But what about when the fun is produced by formula, a formula that then gets plugged into the minimum input satisfaction machine in order to rev it up with just enough juice to keep us shuffling contentedly on? Is this question gonna keep me away from the movies? Of course not; what a ridiculous notion.  It’s just that I don’t know how I feel about that.  It’s just…  It’s just …

 

It’s just so much for so little. 190 million US dollars.  Ouch.