Swimmer One: Comments

Titanic VS Dawn of the Dead

If you like our song Regional, and feel in any way uplifted by it, don’t read the following. It may ruin your enjoyment of it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I realised the other day that I love Dawn of the Dead and Titanic for much the same reason. This is not a joke. One of the questions both films ask is how you’d behave if you knew you could soon face a very unpleasant death, and that the people who were supposed to protect you had completely lost control of the situation. Left to your own devices, could you keep a cool head? Would you do the right thing? Or would you panic and try to save yourself, and leave everyone else to die?

In other words, both films are, pretty obviously, about civilised society collapsing. In Titanic, civilisation collapsing is held up as a good thing in some ways, since the ‘civilised’ society that built the Titanic is one that is prepared to let third class passengers die so that the rich can get to the lifeboats first. It’s a story about rich and powerful people who, out of vanity and arrogance, build a tower of Babel celebrating themselves (a ‘ship of dreams’, as the film puts it), and are punished. The film’s heroine triumphs because she finds something that’s worth more than power, money and status – love and adventure. Which is corny, obviously – as is the whole film, a lot of the time, especially when that terrible Celine Dion song kicks in – but I still love it. I saw it three times when it came out. (But then I’ve always been obsessed with the Titanic, so maybe I was bound to like it; I love A Night To Remember and Beryl Bainbridge’s book Every Man For Himself too)

Dawn of the Dead is, obviously, much bleaker (I’m talking about the George Romero version here, although I quite like the remake too). Its ship of dreams is a shopping mall, a kind of shrine to consumerism. Four very ordinary, unheroic survivors of the zombie takeover, having gone on the run rather than stay and help others, hide out in a mall, and tell themselves that it can provide everything they need. Not only can they survive the apocalypse, they can live in luxury. As in Titanic, it’s the main female character who points out that the ship of dreams, built by men, is more like a prison than a palace. In the end, as they all come to realise, it’s a folly, a place that can only provide what they need while civilisation prospers. As soon as civilisation falls apart it is basically a big, elaborate tomb. Dawn of the Dead is, at the risk of sounding really pretentious, a sort of spiritual sequel to Titanic (and yes, I know it was made nearly 20 years earlier). What’s at stake in Titanic is just the collapse or survival of an old social hierarchy. In Dawn of the Dead it’s the whole of humanity.

I was thinking all this while watching the DVD of 28 Weeks Later, one of my favourite films this year. It’s obviously heavily influenced by Dawn of the Dead (in fact, it is to 28 Days Later what Dawn was to Night of the Living Dead – a more ambitious sequel that, instead of continuing the story with the same characters, does it with different characters but bigger ideas). What I particularly love about 28 Weeks Later is that it shows how people behaving badly in a crisis can actually lead to a much bigger collapse, bit by bit. It starts with a man (Robert Carlyle) making a split second, cowardly decision – to save himself from the ‘infected’ (people with a rage virus who are, basically, zombies who can run) rather than try to save his wife. In trying to cover up his mistake from his children, he causes another infection, which, because of the incompetence of the authorities (the US army, in this case – and the parallels the film is making with the botched invasion of Iraq are obvious and powerful), leads to the deaths of thousands of people. His children then make the situation even worse, simply because they feel their parents have abandoned them and don’t want to be separated.

It’s in incredibly bleak film. It says, essentially, that all it takes to cause the end of the world is for one person to make a selfish, anti-social decision, and for everyone else to be too incompetent or self-serving to sort it out. No villains are required. If you’re in the right frame of mind, its total, unremitting pessimism is actually hilariously funny. I do wonder if there will be a lot more films like this, now that the full horror of climate change is beginning to sink in, and the collapse of civilisation seems like a more realistic scenario than ever – not to mention millions of desperate, hungry people roaming the earth, destroying everything in their path.

I’m still working on my post-apocalyptic zombie pop song. Meanwhile, Swimmer One offer you Regional, the lyric of which was, as ridiculous as this may sound, partly inspired by both Dawn of the Dead and Titanic. It’s about a person retreating to the hills, rejecting society and its values, but missing his lover, who he remembers as beautiful, idealistic, and non-conformist (a bit like Jack, Leonardo DiCaprio’s character in Titanic, maybe) but who has, at some point, given up on shouting from the sidelines and joined society. The key to the lyric is that the person singing it is completely deluded, and that you shouldn’t trust anything he says. The idea of being able to rise ‘above all this pollution’ is ridiculous, as is being ‘safe from floods and earthquakes’. All this is possible, theoretically, but only temporarily, and only if you ignore the bigger picture – floods, earthquakes and pollution affect everybody, in the long term.

The narrator of Regional, though, has convinced himself that, as an outsider, he is living a purer, more conscientious life than all those caught up in mainstream society, with its restricting rules and regulations. He wants his lover to return to that life. But actually she’s moved on; she’s realised that to make a positive difference to society you have to participate, get to the centre of things. It’s a song, I suppose, about the limits of youthful idealism – how, ultimately, you will be judged by how you treat other people, how you actually behave in a crisis, how you participate on a day to day basis, and not by what you claim to believe in. If the couple in the song were on the Titanic, or fleeing a zombie plague, the narrator would be the one ranting loudly about the injustice of the whole thing and whose fault it all was, but probably not doing anything particularly constructive or helpful, while the person he is singing about would be the one quietly trying to save lives, regardless of whether they were rich or poor.

As a conceit, I’m still not sure that the lyric works, or whether I’ve done any of the above clearly enough for anyone to get the joke. The point is, I always thought it would be funny to write a really uplifting, euphoric pop song with a big, anthemic chorus, but a lyric that, without you even noticing at first, completely undermines the whole thing. Pop songs need simple ideas to carry them, after all, but life is never simple. I liked the idea of a song that shouts ‘everything’s going to be ok’, the way so many anthemic pop songs do, but which, as you come to realise the more closely you listen to it, has a completely unreliable narrator. Which all anthemic pop songs do, really. Don’t trust Snow Patrol. They are probably lying to you. Be wary of anyone who claims to be subversive too. They are, in pop music, often a lot more conservative than they would care to admit.

This is a mean thing for me to do, possibly. People like big, euphoric, anthemic, life-affirming choruses, after all. Hell, I like big, euphoric, anthemic, life-affirming choruses myself. I’m just not, unfortunately, very good at writing lyrics to fit them, because I can never quite bring myself to believe in them (I do wonder whether, if Swimmer One had a different lyricist, we’d be played on radio more often). But I’m too much of a sceptic, or a killjoy, or something.

I can never decide whether this is a good thing or a bad thing, artistically - or, put another way, for someone attempting to make a living out of writing pop songs. The reason I love 28 Weeks Later, ultimately, is that it feels realistic to me (and yes, I know it’s completely implausible that Robert Carlyle could really follow them all the way to the underground station and then, and only then, try to bite them - whatever; it’s symbolic). I think that if something terrible like that did happen, everyone would fuck up and everything would be fucked. And if I had to choose between Dawn of the Dead and Titanic, I would choose Dawn not for the obvious reason - that it doesn’t have a Celine Dion song in it, and is less cheesy generally, and has more zombies – but because it has a more depressing ending. Let’s face it, that helicopter has hardly any petrol in it. And there are zombies everywhere. Where on earth are they going to go?

That said, I really like Amelie. And my favourite David Lynch film is probably The Straight Story. What can I say? Life’s complicated, isn’t it?

The next blog will be more coherent than this one, I hope.

Andrew

Permalink • Save in De.li.cious

In the original film,’Dawn of the Dead’ the zombies moved very slowly and were most menacing when they collected in large groups. In the remake, however, the zombies are fast and agile, and are, on the whole, closer to the quick-moving, psychotically violent victims of the ‘Rage’ virus in the 2002 British horror film

Posted by myrtle beach realtors on 03/24 at 01:11 PM

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Titanic VS Dawn of the Dead

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