George A. Romero's Diary of Misplaced Anger

by Andrew Jupin

Since its inception, the medium of film has been a tool that grants filmmakers the option of implanting their social and or political opinions into their work. This is something that is possible in both documentaries and narratives, and it can also span any and all genres. Often times the better, more effective social and political criticisms are buried in very subtle fashion within a film’s subtext. Leaving things out in the open and blatantly obvious to the audience can become nagging, especially when the film feels like it’s beating you over the head with the filmmaker’s opinions or ideals. One particular area of film that is very successful at burying social commentary is horror.

At first glance, the Horror is a complete throw-away genre. Often times it is the genre that people—especially the naive film scholar newbie—will take the least seriously. And why shouldn’t they? After all it is just blood, guts, murder, monsters and breasts, right?

Right?

Thankfully the answer is a resounding “no.” The realm of horror has actually produced some of the greatest works of cinematic social commentary the world has ever seen. The Mother of all horrific social innovation came in 1968, when an independent, amateur filmmaker from Pittsburgh introduced the world to the threat of a different kind, an undead kind.

The filmmaker was of course George A. Romero and the film was his seminal Night of the Living Dead. In the film, Romero tells the story of a group of people—a new version of the modern, American family if you will—who are trapped inside a farmhouse as the recently deceased are beginning to rise once again and preying on the living. Romero’s commentary on the new combinations of families beginning to take shape around the time of the film are subtle and clever. What better place to start a new kind of family than a quaint, super-American farmhouse? Everything is set in place: the dining table with its dainty tablecloth, the television in the parlor for the family to gather around after a hearty meal. The only problem is that the ‘people’ outside—the zombies or in the analytic sense, the old, the backwards thinking, the repressed—are trying to break into this new household and destroy it before it can begin.

And so the story goes. The outsiders eventually do break in, cause chaos, and in the end, the sole survivor of the Farmhouse Family is destroyed by the living—the Ignorant Living who exist amongst the Outsiders—on the assumption that he is one of the undead. Or is it because he is African American? Romero leaves it out in the open.

Romero’s zombie legacy has carried onto into other socially critical films, some masterpieces, some who get the job done in a sense and some complete and utter failures. The masterpieces include the aforementioned Night and his follow-up: 1978’s Dawn of the Dead. The failures unfortunately include Romero’s twenty-first century career revival (no pun intended), 2005’s Land of the Dead and his most recent outing into the zombie-verse, the cinema verite docu-terror, Diary of the Dead.

Before I go too far into this diatribe, I just want to make it perfectly clear that if you are looking for the usual Romero horror flare here, the guy still has it. The thrills, chills and gore have all returned and they all make the movie—for the most part—pretty fun, albeit it familiar and semi-mind numbing.

The reason I bothered to give the minor horror history lesson further up was so I would be able to contrast it to the direction and style Romero has given to his latest film. People remember George Romero’s zombie films for two reasons. One, because of all the great gore effects and carnage. Two, because of his biting social commentary and perfected execution of satire just when the moment calls for it. The cracks in the foundation can be seen as early as his middle-of-the-road third zombie film, Day of the Dead (1985). But the real collapse is his over-the-top, Bush vs. The Rest of America overtones in Land. In the film, Denis Hopper plays a billionaire who the people look to as their leader; even when all he does is sit high above the streets of the city, far away from the carnage down below, removed from any and all trouble or strife. Sound familiar? In the end it is the zombies—this time representing the downtrodden Americans—who rise up and eventually overthrow their demonic ruler.

The out in the open angst is even worse in Diary. In the film, a group of students are on the set of a senior thesis mummy movie—really?—when news of the zombie epidemic hits the radio airwaves. The director of the film decides that he should continue shooting throughout their long journey through the Pennsylvania back roads in order to capture and preserve their experiences and to show the world what is really happening. During the film, the camera shakes its way through hospitals, safe houses, dark woods and mansions all filled with the usual zombie attacks. Also along for the ride is Romero’s blatant hatred for news media. He makes it more than obvious by having every character repeat at least twice—and our filmmaker hero many more times—that broadcast news can’t be trusted, that producers put a spin on every story that comes across their desk, that the audience is being manipulated and that they need to seek out alternative sources of information (like You Tube and Myspace apparently.) This is the extent of most of the dialogue that happens on camera when they aren’t talking about how important it is that they stay alive and make sure to expose the truth.

One key scene in particular was very reminiscent of a much more well-done scene from Night. In the opening moments of Diary, news footage is shown of a domestic murder suicide. A husband has shot his wife to death and then turned the gun on himself. The reporter, who doesn’t know she’s being filmed at the time, makes crass remarks about how the family is Hispanic. We get it. The white-run news media judge minorities and will make decisions based on race to improve their ratings. This instantly reminded me of the scene from Night that I mentioned earlier involving the surviving member of the farmhouse party, who is black. The white sheriff orders his white deputy to shoot the man in the head before they even know if he has been turned into a zombie or not. Did they do this on purpose? Did they shoot him because he was a zombie or because he was black? Romero doesn’t give a straight answer in this first film. He leaves it up to the audience to decide, but reveals a little more of his opinion by juxtaposing the black man being shot with images of zombies being hung from trees and shot, and the dead man’s body being thrown onto a burning pile of exterminated zombies.

It’s almost as if Romero doesn’t trust what he is capturing on film to get his opinions across. Instead he now feels the need to hammer the point home by bludgeoning his audience with useless character dialogue; dialogue that just blurts out what Romero wants to say. His messages and opinions that, forty years ago, were concealed under a thick level of brilliant filmmaking, critical imagery, and the calm, cool, collectedness of a savvy horror director.

If Romero was an angry filmmaker in 1968 and still able to produce a calculated work like Night of the Living Dead, then he must be a severely pissed off filmmaker today to create an obvious film like Diary of the Dead. A filmmaker so mad, he lets precision and form take a knee while pretty-faced, fresh meat actors act as squawk boxes for his social soapbox of unrest. Take a breath, George.