There is something in “The Dead Don’t Die” that is unlike a lot of Jim Jarmusch’s output. Certainly, the roaming zombies are a new feature, something that is (arguably?) absent from his previous work. And the sheer density of celebrities and jokes in this film feels higher than average, for someone who largely makes indie films on the cheap with his friends. It helps that you are friends with Tom Waits and Bill Murray, but hey, for a movie that is confronting aging and death head-on, you need a few old folks to round out your cast.
If this film suffers at all – and perhaps I’m tipping my hand too much with this observation – it is from a gross mischaracterization of what the film actually is. Dressed in Romero trappings and filled with an ensemble of semi-competent small-town oddballs who are all trying to survive these monsters, this film is presenting itself as a horror movie, and fortunately, Jarmusch does have the chops to pull off some very eerie imagry. There’s a few scenes that stand out, where the town is in full dead-rising-from-the-grave mode, that are truly upsetting, gory, or both, and so many scenes could have slotted in nicely with Dawn of The Dead, or the comedic antecedent to Jarmusch’s particular sense of humor, Return of The Living Dead, which seems to have more of an influence on the vaguely sciencey explanation as to what is happening than almost anything else. (Apparently, Polar fracking has caused the earth to go off its axis, which led to the environment collapsing, causing the dead to rise.)
And, perhaps, that is the real point: it may read like a zombie movie at first, but this is a comedy about confronting death, something that is a far more difficult needle to thread. So much so that the only other example I can think of – Bubba Ho-Tep – was made by the Phantasm horror master Don Coscarelli, again a film that presents as horror but is about so much more. The Dead Don’t Die lays it all on the line in the opening scenes, where two officers are investigating a strange, gun wielding man in the woods, only to find out that is is just harmless “Hermit Bob” with a pellet gun, and the officers drive back discussing if they should ever “take him in” in spite of the fact that one of the officers went to middle school with Hermit Bob; meanwhile the other officer pontificates about the movie’s theme song.
The film is built as much on the horror elements that are sprinkled throughout as it is on a series of recurring and well timed absurdist jokes, that break the fourth wall often enough that it hopefully sets you up for a few of the stranger and more dada moments that come later. One character is in an entirely different movie than the others, so much so that to say which one sort of spoils some of the better jokes involved, but is absolutely worth it when those movies temporarily collide. The dada is so strong in this film that the two leads come off less like officers and more like the are inside a Sam Beckett play, with almost nonsense dialog following that meanders, comes back to the wrong point, skips around, addresses the script directly, and then, when they run out of ideas, even deploys a joke or two. But when taken as a whole, the comedic strangeness of their post-modernist idea of a zombie movie is so compelling that I could absolutely envision a stage version of this that would be as effective.
I must call out some decisions that I find brilliant, and are at the core of the horror at work. Rather than the tired trope of calling for, “brains,” these zombies are driven by their basest desires in life. Instead, Carol Kane cries for, “Chardonnay!” upon rising from the dead. Iggy Pop and his dead girlfriend cry for coffee, while another random zombie calls for Xanax. This is such a spot-on observation that modernizes the zombie-plague analogy in such a pointed way that you almost don’t need the scene with the zombies carrying their devices looking for Bluetooth and WiFi signals, because it seems too hack compared to the insights this change brings to the film. But the zombie dragging a keg of beer to the point that it is pulling his own arm out of its socket, or the zombie so dedicated to an idea that she poses and mutters, “fashion,” to a non-plussed Tilda Swinton, ahem, I mean Zelda Winston, suggests a horror that is more thoughtful in a very simple way. (And, in many cases, with tongue so firmly placed in cheek that I was surprised that there wasn’t a scene where there was a zombie that was just chewing on a pile of tongues.) It is this idea that, in life, we latch onto an obsession so desperately that it becomes our single obsession in death, is a perfect analog for a world where our solipsism is slowly killing us.
So much so that it is this idea that propels the creepiest scene in the film. I guess I should give an auxiliary nod to horror-auteur Larry Fessenden’s turn as a motel manager who goes zombie. When he begins to chew on a human leg like it’s a chicken leg, and turns his eye to his three very-young tenants from Ohio, and says a single creepy word, “Cleveland,” and that alone sets up a horrific and gruesome reveal later that is very chilling and does deserve honorable mention among great moments. Jarmusch excels at things implied, and Larry’s scenes (and the aftermath of his scenes) are horrifying to consider.
But the scene I want to highlight involves the child zombies at Bobby’s Store, a scene that had the perfect mix of gore and FX on the actors and great sound design carrying it along. Each child is muttering the brand name of their favorite candies, and they tromp like dead children in a candy store, while the undead clerk – a man who turned zombie and quit his delivery driver job to finally run the candy store he always wanted – watches the kids with dead eyes this whole time. Even when we get what we want, we aren’t necessarily happy.
That single horror scene has stuck with me, and for any movie to accomplish that is certainly worth it. But as the various elements of the movie begin to wrap up, our two dada cops are forced to face the very unpleasant reality that everyone – not just the zombies, but every single person – is going to die, and our characters handle this truth very differently. It’s not that we die through meaningless accidents or uncontrollable circumstances; in The Dead Don’t Die, it will be our own desperate obsessions that will be the actual cause of death, and even then, we will become burdens on those left behind as the need to put us down again becomes increasingly difficult. One by one the cops have to actually process the death of every other character in the film – even their own – with one notable exception that is worth saving for the film to share. (No spoilers, but I’m sure you can guess pretty quickly who is the better survivor, compared to everyone else.)
Of course, its a zombie movie, so by processing death, I mean getting into a huge final shoot-out with the unholy living dead, because what better metaphor is there? But even this shootout is laden with strange layers of humor: filmed in obvious day-for-night in a graveyard, and full of more meta-text jokes and references than anywhere else in the film, the scene almost resembles a bleak 70s western more than a zombie movie. That we get to see two police officers strategically (and with little remorse) slowly put down most of a small American community is sort of the final joke. In a film with plenty of anti-government and anti-authority ironic messaging, it is hard not to see the humor is making you root for the officers who have learned to see their town as horrible middle-American monsters, and you now want them to kill all the poor working class folks that have turned against their white male protectors.
Fortunately, Jarmusch gets to have it both ways, as our officers are actually torn to pieces by angry mob justice, be it zombie-induced. It isn’t hard to imagine that the desires of that zombie crowd were, in some way, also being fulfilled, but it’s hard to reduce, “Fuck Tha Police,” into a single word a zombie can mutter, so it is much easier to show it.
In a way, even the title is misleading. It’s not that the Dead Don’t Die, but rather, the Living Are Already Dead And Refuse to Acknowledge It. I could go on and on, as there’s a lot to unpack and it is worth revisiting. But in my mind, with the fourth wall breaking, the fantasy elements, and the farcical dialog, it all leads to the idea that the movie is trying to address confronting death in as many symbolic ways as possible, so much so that the only way a film like this could end is for us to have to come to terms with how unexpected the end is. The film hints at / tries to set up a number of possible zombie movie tropes, but it all falls apart in the final shootout. But that’s life, isn’t it? We have plans and we want to end somewhere that makes sense, but other people die unexpectedly, and you need to come to terms. And, then, you die too, in a way you didn’t anticipate, and you die with the awareness that someone probably outlived you, in spite of the advantages you might have had from the start.
That’s a pretty bold statement to make for a comedy, even a horror-tinged one, and I think it’s a message we’re ready to consider. Politics are awful, our environment is collapsing, and the outside world does look like a horror movie most of the time.
But are we prepared to face death head on, or are we just covering with a dark sense of humor and a few Star Wars references?
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Austin Rich 