George Romero's Philosophy of Violence

Romero's entire cinematic oeuvre can be taken as a lifelong reflection on the nature of violence. Violence in fantasy and action, not zombies, has been the one constant in all of Romero's films. His attitude on the subject is certainly complex. In order to study this, I have isolated only Romero's non-zombie films. Certainly Romero's zombie films have much to say about violence as well, but that will remain for future studies.

Romero has two general film structures that he frequently revisits. The one for which he is best known is the co-operation structure. The central issue of these films is the inability for groups of humans to cooperate in the midst of a swarming, supremely cooperative invasion. This broad structure can be found in Night of the Living Dead (Romero, 1968), The Crazies (Romero, 1973), Dawn of the Dead (Romero, 1978), Day of the Dead (Romero, 1985), Land of the Dead (Romero, 2005), Diary of the Dead (Romero, 2007), and most recently Survival of the Dead (Romero, 2009). The other is his self-realization structure. The central issue of these films is self-realization through the release of pent-up emotional energies in violence. This structure can be found in Jack’s Wife (Romero, 1972), Martin (Romero, 1976), Monkey Shines (Romero, 1988), The Dark Half (Romero, 1993), and finally Bruiser (Romero, 2000). In each film the structure is used to investigate a unique issue. However, each of these films follows the same pattern in dealing with its issue. In the following, I will describe how this structure underlies each of the five above-mentioned films and how Romero uses and develops this structure in new ways with each successive film. In doing so, we reveal something about Romero’s techniques, obsessions, and attitudes toward violence that can be applied in more in-depth studies of his work.

Jack’s Wife

Jack’s Wife is the first film to deploy the self-realization structure and thus basically sets the pattern for all the following films of the structure. The film is about a housewife, Joan Mitchell, who gradually begins to realize her life is not satisfying her emotional needs. Joan has disturbing dreams of her husband keeping her in a cage and on a leash like a dog. Meanwhile, her daughter’s boyfriend provokes her to outrage by mocking her old-fashioned values. The dreams and the teasing affect Joan strongly because she’s sufficiently aware that the traditional gender role she has assumed stifles her. As we gather from her conversations with her daughter’s boyfriend, she is of high intelligence but limits her ideas on ideological grounds.

When Joan begins showing interest in witchcraft, however, her dreams take a more defensive and violent form: an intruder is breaking into her home and she has to use her resources to escape him. As she progresses further into witchcraft, she gets closer to defeating the intruder within her dreams. At the same time, she also begins to take control over her life, to the point of having an affair with her daughter’s boyfriend. Finally, the dream comes true and she shoots a real-life intruder, only to discover the intruder is her locked-out husband. She’s now free, no longer oppressed. 

In this plot Romero creates the structure that will, with its interplay between violent fantasy and violent action, inform all his following self-realization films. Joan’s dreams are clearly indicating that her husband is the intrusive presence in her life and, with him, the whole ideological background of gender roles she had been holding. Witchcraft, a traditionally matriarchal religion, empowers her to use violence within her fantasy life, expressing her inner rage or frustration at being oppressed. The violent fantasy, however, liberates her through violent action in a way she never consciously intended. The pattern revealed in Jack's Wife is oppression leading to frustration; frustration to violent inner energies and fantasies; those violent energies to finding a proxy for them that is both frightening and attractive (witchcraft); and, finally, the proxy leading to discovering or freeing one’s true self through the release of the violent energies.

Martin

Despite considerable differences, Martin follows the pattern created in Jack’s Wife quite closely. Martin is about a young man, Martin, who is sent to live with his Lithuanian Catholic cousin, Cuda. Cuda believes Martin is a several-decades-old vampire in need of salvation and destruction in equal measure. Martin struggles with Cuda’s surveillance and paranoia while maintaining a job during the day and a habit of drugging, raping, and killing women and drinking their blood by night. He confesses his vampiric identity to a radio show and explains his difficulties relating to the opposite sex. Finally he falls for an abandoned housewife and vows to commit no more violence, but is killed by Cuda when the housewife commits suicide.

So, for Martin, oppression is a result of the expectations of his family and of traditional masculine values. Slightly effeminate and shy, Martin displays little interest in women or masculine activities. His foils in this are Arthur, the possessive, macho boyfriend of Cuda’s daughter, the womanizing husband of the lady to whom he delivers groceries, and the adulterous lover of one of his victims. Perhaps it is this that leads Martin’s family to view him as so extremely different, namely a vampire. Where he likely only suffered social anxiety originally, the insistence by his family that he is a dangerous vampire has perverted his sexuality so that he seeks unconscious women for release.

Rather than resist the preposterous notion that he’s a vampire, Martin embraces the fantasy and wilfully construes himself as a vampire. A very timid young man, vampirism empowers Martin as much as witchcraft empowers Joan Mitchell. The form of oppression in Jack’s Wife is oppression of women in the traditional gender roles, so the sort of empowerment Joan finds is empowerment to liberate herself from that oppression. In Martin, the oppression is not actually about oppression, but about family and sexual confidence. So, the empowerment Martin finds in vampirism is one of mastery over the opposite sex.

The two films can readily be taken together as unconventional investigations of traditional (violent) horror motifs (witchcraft and vampirism) as potentially liberating, regardless of their lack of basis in reality. Romero’s radical idea in both of these films is to turn a somewhat sceptical eye on their reality, yet allow their value as therapeutic fictions. So, just as witchcraft was Joan's proxy for relieving violent energies, the myth of vampirism is Martin’s. The choice of horror motif, moreover, is particularly apt in each film. As a matriarchal religion like witchcraft empowers Joan to liberate herself from an oppressive husband and be independent, vampires, ever since Bela Lugosi’s turn as Dracula, have usually been represented as suave, attractive, strong men, with infinite powers of seduction. The fantasy allows Martin to imagine himself as a suave, powerful male. Soaked in Gothic imagery out of a Universal or Hammer horror film, Martin’s fantasies of his past are part of his self-mythologizing and thus give him permission for violent action. Where Joan’s violent fantasies are dreams, Martin’s are not only conscious, but he believes them to be genuine memories of his life a century or so in the past.

Martin’s belief that he is a vampire, then, is an empowering fantasy for him. As many young men, Martin feels he is (and is in fact) being watched and having his freedom constricted by his family and by society. By seizing upon the mythologizing power of the notion of vampirism, he liberates himself to do violence to others and, with this ability to overpower, to be confident, efficacious with women. He can tell himself he is performing violence out of the strictest necessity, for, as ‘nosferatu’, he must kill to survive. When Martin does kill for blood it, in turn, affirms his mythologized identity.  When, however, Martin does find a woman to have consensual sex with, he resolves to abandon his vampirism; for, now being freed from his oppression and accepted by a woman, he no longer requires the violent action or the violent fantasy. The tragedy is that his violent self-mythology has caught up with him and ultimately destroys him by Cuda's hand. This idea is developed much further in Romero's next film.

Monkey Shines

With Monkey Shines, Romero uses the structure to address the theme of masculinity and the expectations that come with it. The film begins by showing the idyllic male life of the allegorically-named Allan Mann. Mann is in great shape, handsome, successful; he owns his own home; he has a beautiful trophy fiancée and a good job. He has, in other words, achieved everything the American male is supposed to achieve to be a good, stable man. He has all a man could want. Within minutes, however, a truck hits him and he is rendered quadriplegic. In his impotent state, he finds his fiancée has left him—for the surgeon who repaired his spine, no less. Are Successful Males so interchangeable? His mother smothers him with maternal attention. And his caretaker takes over his home. With all the trappings of successful masculinity removed, he’s either abandoned or exploited by women. He is oppressed by femininity, both without (his mother, caretaker, etc.) and, insofar as his outward signs of masculinity have failed, within.

In the scenes following his hospitalization, he is extremely irritable. His frustration and with it violent energies are mounting. Ella the lab monkey, initially a gift to help Mann around the house, becomes Mann’s proxy for his violent energies, just as witchcraft is for Joan Mitchell and vampirism for Martin. As Joan, Mann begins to have violent fantasies about the women who have taken advantage of his impotence. He begins seeing these fantasies enacted through the eyes of Ella the monkey. His violent fantasies, he discovers, have actually been channelled telepathically to Ella and translated into real life violence by her. One-by-one, all of the women who have taken advantage of his impotent state are destroyed by Ella. With each murder, however, Ella begins to dominate Mann. Soon, she's feeding him the monkey treats and he's at her mercy. The proxy for violent fantasy has turned on its originator; all of Mann's violent energies have been translated into a physical form that now turns back on him.

Another elaboration on the structure, extending that found in Martin, is that Mann’s vengeful rage has a distinctly feminine and primitive face in the monkey. Mann must ultimately act against Ella, the very proxy of his violence, to save the one woman who treats him as a real man (i.e. has sex with him). At the moment he acts against the personification of his own violent energies, he regains his ability to move, his potency. He kills the monkey, and, of course, gets the girl. However, rather than a conventionally masculine ending, Mann has exited the horror realizing the Successful Male type he had been inhabiting is a precarious sham. At the film’s end he has achieved a more realistic masculinity that does not depend upon social conventions. His new relationship is one of mutual respect with a less-attractive but much more intelligent woman, a woman who has seen his weakness and loved him just the same. Through violence, Mann has been brought to face the worst in himself and transform into a better person. Romero extends this notion further with The Dark Half.

The Dark Half

The Dark Half concerns a writer, Thaddeus Beaumont, whose creative power is linked to a violent inner nature that takes physical form as a partial twin growing in his skull and is surgically removed during childhood. As an adult he’s a professor of creative writing, writer of serious literature, and, on the sly, writer of violent crime novels under the pseudonym George Stark. When a blackmailer threatens to reveal his identity, he comes public and realizes he can no longer write novels about his uber-violent character Alexis Machine. George Stark then takes on physical form through a handy bit of magic realism and begins a real-life killing spree of everyone involved in suppressing Beaumont’s George Stark identity. The film climaxes with a show-down between Stark and Beaumont to discern which personality will triumph. Naturally, Stark is destroyed.

Romero’s attraction to The Dark Half, of all Stephen King novels, was no doubt its inherent relationship to the self-realization structure Romero had visited three times prior. While the film necessarily contains a tension between Romero’s interests and the source material, the pattern is still discernible. Beaumont’s oppression comes from a literary community that will not accept that a writer of serious literature can simultaneously be a writer of violent pulp novels, let alone that the violent pulp novels are perhaps serious art. Just as Romero is pigeonholed as a horror director, the literary community forces Beaumont to be either “Thaddeus Beaumont” or “George Stark.”

As we begin The Dark Half, Beaumont has already learned to channel his frustrations into violent fantasies and, even further, to channel the violent fantasies into violent art instead of violent action. Beaumont is, however, still split, divided; he may be in equilibrium, but, so long as he continues to divide his personality between Beaumont and Stark, he has not attained the liberating self-realization Joan Mitchell and Mann attain. So long as he persists in equilibrium, he remains oppressed and divided. When he is forced to reveal that he is in fact George Stark and thus to stop writing as Stark to preserve the serious, socially-admired Beaumont identity, his violent fantasies finally begin to translate into real violence in the real world. As with Joan Mitchell and Allan Mann, Beaumont never consciously wills the violence; quite the opposite, he abhors it. Nevertheless, Stark is a manifestation of his inner life, his violent fantasies. As Allan Mann, Beaumont ultimately faces off against the proxy of his violence and only emerges victorious when he accepts violence as a part of himself by fighting Stark. As Stark is physically removed from the world, Beaumont is left not a divided person but a whole, integrated person who, presumably, will be able to write both serious and violent literature.

Curiously, Beaumont’s violent fantasies do not arise in response to external oppression. This is doubtless the influence of King: Beaumont has a dark, violent nature quite apart from any oppression. His violent energies are not the cause of social forces, but a part of himself that he’s learned to compartmentalize, and it is this very tension that oppresses Beaumont. Like Martin, Beaumont’s proxy is kept in check in the realm of fantasy. Once the proxy is removed, the fantasy is no longer contained and seeps into the physical world. Like Joan Mitchell and Alan Mann, Beaumont is horrified to discover that his violent fantasies—so difficult for him to own that he must create both George Stark and Alexis Machine to distance himself—are resulting in violent action. The climactic face-off with the horror of violent action, having, as Mann, to face the proxy for his violence in physical form, leads him to discover his true self as an integral being rather than two halves, uniting his artistic nature and his violent nature. King’s narrative of two dualistic souls fighting for one body, alas, obscures the Romero-esque moment of self-realization in a wave of fantastical sparrows; yet the pattern is still present.

What is most interesting about The Dark Half is how it appears to be self-reflective upon the self-realization structure of Romero’s films. Thad is, after all, denying his need for and pleasure in violent fantasy itself. But in Romero’s self-realization films, violent fantasy is shared by all the oppressed, and any human may potentially be oppressed. For that matter, Romero’s films, like Thad’s writings under ‘George Stark,’ are violent fantasies. The immature attitude of much of Western society toward violence as sin or jest is the root of the problem is The Dark Half, a problem Beaumont ultimately has to resolve on a personal, psychological level, as society is not going to change. That Romero could use his self-realization structure to reflect upon his self-realization films, in a sense, shows what a powerful structure it is in Romero’s hands and just how far he had developed it by this point in his career. Unfortunately, with the next self-realization film, the structure’s development takes a step back.

Bruiser

Bruiser is about a stereotypically nice guy, Henry Creedlow, whose boss mistreats him, whose best friend is stealing his money, and whose trophy wife, he learns, is sleeping with his boss. Even his wife’s pet dog and the cleaning lady take advantage of his good nature. As he goes about his daily business, he has violent fantasies of standing up for himself, such as throwing a lady who cuts in line under a train, seeing her head split open graphically. Upon learning of the many betrayals of those he trusted, Creedlow’s face suddenly disappears, replaced by a blank, white mask of sorts. With his newfound anonymity, Creedlow begins to take revenge, killing first his cleaning lady, then his wife. The film climaxes when Creedlow successfully kills his helpless, hapless boss and escapes police to find work as an office mailboy, his face and identity now returned to him by whatever forces had taken them away.

The source of oppression for Creedlow, what keeps him from being himself, is his commitment to a particular notion of ‘success’ that his personality is really not formed to handle. He is surrounded by sociopathic jerks who have no qualms about exploiting him for their own success. One might say that this commitment is his own damn fault, but one could do likewise for Joan Mitchell. Both Creedlow and Mitchell are victims of their social circumstances. Creedlow’s milieu is one of American capitalism. He believes his success as an individual depends upon having a high-paying job, a large house, a limitless credit card, a nice car, good stock investments, and, of course, a gorgeous wife. In this, Creedlow is a newer incarnation of Allan Mann, to some extent. As we first see Mann rising out of bed with his sexy wife to go for a jog, we first see Creedlow going through an extensive morning grooming ritual and entering the bedroom to view his sexy wife. The difference is that for Mann this lifestyle of the Successful Male is a reflection of his notion of masculinity, and he’s achieved it as the film begins. For Creedlow it is a reflection of his notion of identity, and it’s as incomplete for him as his plastic-covered house is. Creedlow ties the notion of being ‘somebody’ with a very materialistic model of success. By marshalling his life in such a way as to present himself to others as this kind of ‘somebody’, he creates his own sense of identity upon this materialistic success. Creating identity is, after all, what Creedlow does. As he refers to himself, he’s a ‘face man,’ a man who finds beautiful women to put in magazines and creates for them an identity from of their outward appearances.

After Romero dedicates the first act to showing us Creedlow’s own ‘face’, the social identity he’s created for himself, he dedicates the second act to stripping it away. First Creedlow discovers that, because his investments have been returning much less than he expected, he doesn’t have sufficient assets to get a limitless credit card. Then he sees his wife giving his boss a handjob at a barbecue in the boss’s yard, a profoundly emasculating experience. Finally, when he confronts his wife about it, she subjects him to a heinous verbal castration: she tells him that he was too wimpy to punch out his boss, or her, for their transgression and that, though she only married him to get ahead, she hates him for not even being successful enough to justify her gold-digging. With these few effectively cruel scenes, Creedlow loses his trophy wife to the boss who totally dominates him and loses his very image of himself as a successful man. With the loss of all the paraphernalia he used to define his identity, he is left stripped of all identity, symbolically rendered by a loss of his facial features.

This magic realist mechanism that strips Creedlow of his facial features is itself the proxy for his violent fantasies. While Creedlow is oppressed by an amoral and self-interested society, he is only capable of violent fantasy. He imagines pushing a woman under a train and sinking an axe into his wife’s head. However, he could never perform any of these actions so long as he was afraid of losing the paraphernalia (wife, house, job) upon which he had built his social identity. A magic realist riff on The Invisible Man, this total loss of social identity to the point of facelessness, empowers Creedlow to perform violence on those who were responsible for inhibiting his success and with it the identity he had chosen for himself.

Where the need for violence is entirely obvious in Jack’s Wife, as the violence frees her from oppression in a very concrete way, the violence in Bruiser is more a matter of principle. The ability to be violent, to defend oneself and one’s principles, “standing up for” oneself, is part of creating a solid identity. There is no integrity without the possibility of violence. Creedlow hasn’t just had his identity stripped away, but even the very power to confer upon himself a new identity. As a magic realist fantasy, we could say his identity has literally been taken away by each person who betrayed and humiliated him. By killing them, overpowering them with violence, he regains his power to create his identity. Hence after killing his wife a portion of his face briefly returns to normal skin. It is as though their perception of Creedlow as nothing is, in a way, what is responsible for his loss of identity. By killing them, he frees his identity from their negating perception.

Having killed all of those who formerly humiliated him, Creedlow regains his identity and chooses to be a quasi-hippie working as a mailboy in an office. Like Mann, Creedlow does not return to his previous idea of success (or masculinity, in Mann’s case). His process of violence is one that leads him to realize that he was never suited for his old identity. He now finds a model of success and identity more suited to his personality. Unlike Mann or Beaumont, though, Creedlow never has to face off with the proxy for his violence to achieve this synthesis. Rather, like Joan and Martin, his proxy simply enables him to reach a state where he is free to be himself. For whatever reason, Romero chose to end Bruiser by showing Creedlow's face vanish and violence erupt at the slightest provocation from his boss, a move that undermines much of what preceded. Whatever its flaws, Bruiser is certainly the purest of Romero's self-actualization films, stripping the structure almost to its pure framework.

Coda

If I have made my case successfully, it should be undeniable that the self-realization structure is present in each of Romero’s non-zombie films. Each of these five films is patterned on the notion that oppression breeds violence and with violence one can liberate oneself from that oppression to arrive at a better state. Martin alone required any mental gymnastics on my part to make the structure fit. This is not because the structure is not present but merely complicated by how very ambitious that film, one of Romero’s best, happens to be. 

While each film has its unique theme that Romero adapts the structure to address, there is an overall attitude or worldview expressed in this films that is remarkably consistent. The myriad ways in which human beings allow themselves to be oppressed or even oppress themselves, must result in violent energies. In Romero’s films, violence itself is not evil, but can be a real response to the ways in which we are oppressed. Violence is not an innately immature solution, but rather our attitudes toward violence are immature. Most of us are unwilling to accept the violence inherent in human nature, lest we not appear as culturally and spiritually advanced as Gandhi. We watch horror movies only to swiftly disavow the reality of the violent fantasy, to say it is not fantasy at all but entertainment and harmless. We would not dare admit the satisfaction of the violence or how similar it is to our own fantasies of abusing our abusers. Of course the fantasy is harmless, but it is a fantasy humans all need and have always needed. We have all had Joan Mitchell’s fantasies, Creedlow’s fantasies, and sometimes even the self-aggrandizing fantasies of Martin. Like Thad Beaumont, violence is a part of us and it is to our detriment that we deny our need for it and its ability to liberate us on individual or social levels. While most violence is senseless, not all is. Romero’s films give us the fantasies. The action is left to us.

The Dark Halves: How Stephen King and George Romero Reflect Themselves in The Dark Half

In 1991, an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Dark Half (1993), written and directed by George Romero, began filming. Though both men are well-regarded artists within the horror genre, the pairing of Romero and King is not the most obvious. Romero has always had a very critical eye for the world around him, whereas King revels in the American world as much as Lovecraft revelled in New England. King’s Christine is not just about a car; it's about growing up in the American way of life, and the vision is pretty optimistic, murderous car or not. Romero’s zombie-besieged farmhouses and shopping malls are his vision of American life's true nature--violent and rotten. The concerns each artist has in the same subject matter of The Dark Half are therefore quite distinct. I think it would illuminate the thematic interests of both to see how they each exploit the narrative.

The narrative of The Dark Half concerns a professor of creative literature, Thad Beaumont. He writes literary novels under his own name and violent crime novels under the pseudonym ‘George Stark’. When a snoop learns Stark’s true identity and tries to blackmail Beaumont, Beaumont goes public and gets some media attention. With Stark effectively dead, Beaumont begins work on his literary masterpiece in comfort. But this is interrupted when Stark enters existence and begins killing everyone involved in his ‘death’, leaving the police at Beaumont’s door. All Stark wants is for Beaumont to write a new violent crime novel so he can exist again. The problem is that it's now either/or: if Stark exists, Beaumont's has to go.

The most obvious and most important difference between King’s and Romero’s representation of the narrative is Stark’s appearance. For King, Stark is a huge, muscular, blond man, looking nothing like Beaumont, but rather like the hero of Stark’s novels, Alexis Machine. For Romero, Beaumont and Stark are twins, the only difference being that Stark slicks his hair back, wears all black, and is physically stronger. 

I think the reason King portrays Stark as being very different in appearance is because King is using the duality of Beaumont and Stark more allegorically than Romero is. The narrative, for King, allegorically expresses his own often conflicting attitudes toward the creative act and toward producing literature for an audience.

King’s position in literary hierarchy is, to put it simply, in the lower rungs. He’s a successful popular writer to most critics, a crowd-pleaser with no real literary talent. He is, as far as they’re concerned, George Stark. I don’t think King would agree that he is, or at least has always been, George Stark. There is ample evidence in his writing that he aspired to be an artist. Christine is certainly a literary novel to a degree, and it is in fact quite a good novel. In his early career King wrote his unapologetically populist novels under the name ‘Richard Bachman.’ The Dark Half was written after he let Bachman go and began to write as King only. That King had literary ambitions and had a pseudonym for populist novels does, of course, mirror Beaumont in an obvious way, though King was never as pretentious as Beaumont. Beaumont fancies himself the next Updike. What all this suggests is a certain attitude toward the production of literature. King has two conflicting desires that it seems impossible to simultaneously fulfill. The first is the desire to write 'great books,' masterpieces like David Copperfield. The other is the desire to just write, to just let loose and write with the heart, the guts, and the balls. No concern for perfect word choice or the harmony of the phrase or the quadruple meaning of a line, just visceral storytelling dripping with blood, shit, and semen as needed.

I suspect many writers suffer from these conflicting desires. Some writers like Dickens and Georges Simenon could write from the guts and still write great books. Others, like Flaubert, could take years to write a short novel. Producing literature is hard work and producing visceral storytelling is easy, exciting, freeing, and, best of all, lucrative, because gutsy, ballsy writing sells. In The Dark Half, King explicitly states that writing does not come easy for Beaumont (whose name, incidentally, resembles Flaubert’s). When he writes as Stark, on the other hand, Beaumont falls into a trance and writes frantically. What I think interests King in this duality, then, is how it allegorically represents the duality he feels in himself between the two distinct approaches to the act of writing.

There is further evidence throughout The Dark Half that suggests this duality. King references several literary writers, like Oliver Goldsmith, Saul Bellows, Hunter Thompson, Hemingway, Burroughs, and occasionally writers of non-fiction, like Chomsky, that it appears King himself really does read, or at least has read. He also references pulp crime writers like Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Horace McCoy quite approvingly. In his Afterward, King states that the crime novels of Shane Stevens are ‘as striking’ as McTeague and Sister Carrie, and are some “of the finest novels ever written about the dark side of the American dream.” (King 1989: 433) King seems at pains to decide between writing pure, critically valueless pulp novels and writing critically praiseworthy literary novels, and at last settles for the hope that we will mature enough to elevate what is fun and for ‘pure entertainment’ to the level of art. Unfortunately, many in the critical establishment remain dubious. For King, the answer is embodied in the text: do away with the cowardly pseudonym and write whatever you want, which, for better or worse, is just what he did.

I suspect, further, that the novel’s main theme is also somewhat allegorical. The passage that most embodies this theme is, “The overflow of make-believe into one’s own life seemed to be an almost unavoidable side-effect of story-telling—like getting calluses on the pads of your fingers from playing the guitar…” (King 249) The act of writing, in The Dark Half, is a ritual, “There had been no mystic decision to write the Stark novels longhand, although time had turned it into a kind of ritual” (King 249) Later, more explicitly, “Writing is not what we’re doing here, not really. Writing is just the ritual” (King 403). Writing is also a quasi-spiritualist ritual Beaumont uses for accessing Stark’s mind long-distance. Writing is a ritual that summons things into being. This is an allegorical way of speaking which I find to be rather flakey, but which many writers believe to varying degrees of literality. They speak of their characters as real people who, once created, pretty much take over the story with their reality. For some writers, it just feels that way; others sorta, kinda believe their own bullshit. In The Dark Half, the metaphor is very literalized, as Stark, and with him Alexis Machine, become real enough to embody the soul of Beaumont’s excised potential twin, medically known as ‘fetiform teratoma’.

The belief that characters are who they are and will do what they will do presents an escape from concerns over art versus entertainment. Like Dickens or Shakespeare, the characters are central. Writing is merely the ritual that grants us access to them, just as Thad uses the ritual of writing to read Stark’s thoughts. One is no longer responsible for writing either penny dreadfuls or literary masterpieces, but only for revealing the characters as they are and honestly reporting what they do.

Thus, everywhere throughout The Dark Half, King affirms Beaumont’s relationship to Stark as creator and creature. Stark’s difference in appearance is important also because he is not another side of Beaumont, but something created by Beaumont. His appearance conforms to how Beaumont imagines he looks. Beaumont’s ‘dark half’ is referred to in the text not just as Stark, but as his own imagination, “[t]hat eye, glowing in the dark half of him, the side which was in constant shade… that was like a God, and he was glad they could not see it” (King 157). As when Beaumont subconsciously makes Stark write ‘THE SPARROWS ARE FLYING AGAIN’ in a murder scene, there are hints in the text that Beaumont is, in a sense, writing Stark’s reality with his mind. So what King is doing with The Dark Half, most of all, is investigating the relationship between the artist and his character through a magic realist lens.

Where King makes Beaumont and Stark distinct in appearance to emphasize the different sorts of literature they allegorically represent, Romero has no such allegorical interests. There are doubtless very pragmatic reasons for adapting a Stephen King work, such as mainstream success, but I think Romero had personal reasons for adapting this particular King novel. These reasons, his thematic interests, are difficult to see in this particular film as a standalone project. However, in light of Romero’s previous films, we can see The Dark Half continues his explorations of a particular family of themes, and, even more, gives Romero an opportunity to reflect upon his own career and films.

Throughout Romero’s career, he has had two types of film, each type dealing with a different family of thematic concerns to which Romero repeatedly returns. One of these is obviously the zombie films, which allows Romero to study the nature of human cooperation in modern society. The focus of these films is always on how the humans treat each other rather than how the zombies treat, or eat, the humans. The other films are his dark dramas like Jack’s Wife (1972), Martin (1976), Monkey Shines (1988), most recently Bruiser (2000), and, between Monkey Shines and Bruiser, The Dark Half. Below I will briefly discuss the thematic concerns of this set of films in order to show how The Dark Half fits into this group of films and, thus, how Romero adapts King’s material to his long-time thematic concerns.

All of these films follow a similar pattern. They begin with a character who holds some set of oppressive ideas and who is, in one way or another, actually oppressed. The nature and source of the oppression varies according to the theme Romero is investigating, but the theme is always about some sort of social oppression. In response to the oppression, the character has violent fantasies. Through some instrument in the real world, these violent fantasies are involuntarily transformed into violent action. This process leaves the character liberated from both the oppression and the oppressive ideas. In order to illustrate this pattern, I will describe the structure of both Jack’s Wife and Monkey Shines to show that, despite being radically different films, they share a structure and family of thematic concerns.

In Jack’s Wife, Joan Mitchell (Jan White), a housewife, is stifled by her husband and the traditional, patriarchal values he embodies. After her husband strikes her, she begins having dreams about a threatening intruder breaking into her house. Around the same time, a friend turns her on to studying witchcraft. The more she studies witchcraft, a traditionally matriarchal religion, the freer she becomes from traditional attitudes. Meanwhile, the dreams become increasingly threatening and she becomes increasingly active in her own dreams. Ultimately, a real intruder appears to be trying to break into the house and, confusing dream and reality, Joan shoots the intruder, only to discover it is her husband. The form of oppression Romero is interested in with Jack’s Wife is clearly patriarchal oppression. Joan isn’t free to think or do as she wishes. In her frustration, she fantasizes, in this case through dreams, of violence. As she studies witchcraft, she is empowered to do things she normally would not have done. Finally, witchcraft gives her the confidence she needs to translate the violence that would have remained pure fantasy into the real world, killing the dream-intruder and her oppressor simultaneously. Thanks to the violence witchcraft has enabled her to perform, she is left free from her husband and free from oppressive values.

As Romero’s first film of the self-actualizing model, Jack’s Wife is somewhat primitive. Monkey Shines is a much more sophisticated instance. In this film, a successful lawyer, somewhat allegorically named ‘Allan Mann,’ (Jason Beghhe) with a nice house, sexy fiancée, and impressive physique, is hit by a truck and rendered paralyzed. Once paralyzed, his fiancée leaves him, his mother begins to take care of him like a child, and a live-in nurse takes over his house for herself. Frustrated with his powerlessness, Mann has fantasies of killing these women who take advantage of his impotence. The (female) helper monkey a cousin gives Mann psychically receives these fantasies and enacts them in reality. The more the monkey enacts Mann’s violence, the more she begins to dominate him. When the monkey tries to kill the one woman who treats Mann like a man, Mann summons the strength to kill the monkey. He then recovers and enters a relationship with the surviving woman.

In Monkey Shines, then, the same structure we find in Jack’s Wife is present. The difference is that Romero is interested in a different form of oppression. Instead of patriarchal values oppressing women, Romero is now interested in how traditional notions of masculinity, shared by men and women, can oppress a man. So, Mann’s physical weakness and inability to make money leaves him in self-loathing and permits him to be abused by the women in his life. Like Joan, Mann has violent fantasies, though his are more consciously directed against his abusers. And like Joan, Mann’s violent fantasy becomes violent action through a proxy, in this case a female monkey. Where Romero hones his structure is in making the proxy for violence something that then begins to dominate the protagonist. Mann has to face and destroy the monkey in order to regain his masculine strength. The ordeal leaves Mann self-actualized, represented in his ability to walk again, but shown really in his new girlfriend, an intelligent equal rather than a trophy fiancée.

There are obviously many subtleties to be examined in the development of Romero’s thematic concerns from film to film, and much vagueness that needs to be clarified. However, for the purposes of this essay, this brief overview is sufficient. The continuity and development of a structure for addressing a family of thematic concerns, namely themes that pertain to oppressive ideals, is all I needed to elucidate for our needs. Now it remains to show how Romero tries to mould the narrative of The Dark Half to this structure and these themes.

With The Dark Half, Romero begins with a man, Thad Beaumont (Timothy Hutton), who has already mastered his violent fantasies and has already given them a proxy. He has created a pseudonym in order to channel his violent fantasies into violent fictional action. When he is forced to publicly reveal that he is George Stark (Timothy Hutton), he effectively kills Stark and decides not to write violent literature any longer. With his outlet for violent action removed, his violent fantasies channel themselves into the real world, in real action, through the now-real proxy that is George Stark. Beaumont must face and destroy this proxy for violent action in real life, using violence himself, just as Allan Mann had to do with the monkey.

In this description, there are a few points from the structure I defined above that appear to be absent. First of all, it is not evident what the source of Beaumont’s oppression is. There are certainly issues in his life, but the violent fantasies predate these issues. That being the case, it is also not evident that Beaumont has liberated himself from any oppressive ideas by the film’s conclusion. There is clearly tension between King’s material and Romero’s thematic concerns, and this obscures Romero’s structure, but I don’t think it erases it.

One important issue that Romero would not be able to excise from the material even if he tried is the opposition between literary fiction and popular or pulp fiction that is so central to King’s text. Far from trying to remove this central theme, Romero exploits it for his own use. Beaumont’s oppression is due to this opposition between writing literary novels and pulp novels. Only, for Romero, the opposition is tweaked slightly. The various literary references are dropped and the issue becomes one not of literary classification but of violence. Beaumont is frustrated by the inability to write novels that are both violent and still deemed serious. Beaumont remarks that he had writer’s block and found writing violent fiction helped him get around it. What necessitates writing under the name George Stark, however, is the need for Beaumont to compartmentalize his aptitude for writing violent literature and preserve his literary reputation.

Looking at a few of the changes Romero makes to King’s material will lend some support to my contention that Romero shifts the focus to violence. For one, Romero introduces multiple instances in which Beaumont reveals a violent side, none of which occur in King’s text. The first is in the scene, totally absent from the novel, in which Beaumont meets his blackmailer face-to-face. Beaumont quickly and threateningly grabs the blackmailer’s wrist as the man reaches for a book; then he offers his autograph politely. The violence is present, just quickly diffused. Later, when speaking of the blackmailer, he suggests cutting off the man’s penis and stuffing it in his mouth, an action Stark later performs. Where King’s Beaumont is a clumsy man who has no real capacity for violence, Romero’s Beaumont is not. Given the importance Romero bestows upon having the potential for violence in his other dark dramas, this is not surprising.

This clarifies to some degree reasons Romero may have had for transforming Stark into a doppelganger. Romero makes Stark literally a twin of Beaumont. King’s approach to Stark’s ‘resurrection’ is always nebulous and spiritual, so to speak. The fetiform material having been hidden from Beaumont’s parents by the arrogant surgeon is presumably discarded with any other medical waste. Romero’s approach is quite the opposite. Romero makes a point of telling us that Beaumont’s parents were given the fetiform tissue, told what it was, and then proceeded to give the tissue a burial. The burial, naturally, is in the very same plot the photographer stages George Stark’s mock grave. This suggests a certain material component to Stark and with that a biological component, such that Stark is literally twinned with Beaumont. Where King’s notion of a ‘dark half’ is also rather spiritual, sometimes referring to Stark and sometimes referring to Beaumont’s inner creative forces, there is no ambiguity in Romero’s film. For Romero, the ‘dark half’ of Beaumont is his evil twin, Stark. But by referring to Stark as a ‘dark half’, Romero also tells us that this is a physical manifestation of Beaumont’s violent nature.

So, what is achieved by Romero’s modifications is an emphasis on Beaumont’s relationship to his own potential for violence. His oppression, therefore, arises from two related ideas, shared by society generally, that violence is contemptible in behaviour and that graphic violence has no place in serious art. When Beaumont’s means of coping with his frustration is removed, his violent fantasies are channelled into reality. What Beaumont liberates himself from at the end of the film is his compartmentalization of his violent nature into an Other, which, separated, directs itself at him and his family. He destroys that Other with his own violent action. Where King adds an ambiguous ending in which the sheriff wonders whether Beaumont’s wife can ever trust Beaumont again, Romero simply ends the film upon the destruction of Stark and the vanishing of the sparrows. Romero’s ending is unambiguously a happy one.

By transferring the emphasis of the narrative from literary style to violence, Romero also makes the narrative reflect upon his own career much as King makes the narrative reflect upon his. Romero’s niche has always been in the horror genre, a genre that is essentially violent, arguably the most violent of all fiction genres. His films have had critical acclaim, but there is a reluctance to view these films as serious works of art rather than as, to use Kael’s phrase, ‘great trash’. They are viewed as shallow and usually treated superficially. Just as Beaumont does in the film, many strive to deny the potential for violence as a part of themselves and to distance themselves from violent fantasy. This idea is as oppressive in Romero’s worldview as patriarchal values. In Romero’s films, violent fantasy is an important part of dealing with our own oppressive ideas and offers a potential path of relief. I am not suggested Romero advocates violence at the least provocation, but that violent fantasy appropriately channelled is a means of understanding and surmounting what oppresses us individually and socially. And his films, just as George Stark’s novels, are violent fantasies that we all can share. We deny them at our own peril.

All this is not to say Romero’s The Dark Half is a great film. The Dark Half is a decent film, but one of Romero’s worst. His clever modifications transform King’s narrative enough to put The Dark Half in Romero’s family of self-liberation films, but this structure is obscure and all but invisible without comparison to Romero’s previous films. Nor is The Dark Half a great novel. It is without a doubt a fascinating novel, but neither as sophisticated nor as rich as some of King’s earlier work. Though Romero and King are very distinct artists, however, The Dark Half is curiously a career midpoint they share. For King, The Dark Half is an optimistic novel looking forward to a new era of creativity in which Richard Bachman is retired and King can write from his brain and his balls simultaneously. For Romero, The Dark Half is a film in which he tries to reach the mainstream but sceptically doubts society is ready to accept his worldview that violence and violent fantasy are a valuable part of human nature not to be denied. For both artists, The Dark Half is an opportunity to move their career into new territory. But that territory has never been deemed generally, or by me, as being as good as what they had done prior. I do not think King has ever yet written another novel as good as Christine, nor has Romero ever yet made a film as good as Monkey Shines or Dawn of the Dead (1978). Still, from comparing The Dark Half the Stephen King novel and The Dark Half the George Romero film I hope we have learned more about the thematic concerns of two very different artists who both happen to labour in the horror genre, and their anticipated paths forward in their respective arts.

Works Cited

King, Stephen. (1989) The Dark Half. New York: Viking Penguin.

Survival of the Dead (2009) - 3.5/4

Throughout Romero's oeuvre, there have been two persistant themes. One is generational conflict and the other is the need for cooperation. In the Dead movies, it is cooperation that has been especially emphasized. I argued elsewhere(1) that one of Romero's major contributions to cinema is his expert and highly-realistic depictions of arguments. There are arguments in so many of his films because so few characters in his films are able to cooperate. In Night of the Living Dead, Ben and Cooper, the two alpha males, won't cooperate. In The Crazies, the townsfolk, the military, and the scientists all have difficulties cooperating with each other. It's perhaps most pronounced in Day of the Dead, where the soldiers and the scientists rarely cease yelling at one another. In Romero's films, only those capable of cooperation stand a chance at survival. Hence the few survivors of Day of the Dead. The zombies are a frightening and offensive contrast to bickering humans. However stupid, the zombies all share a single goal: eating living humans. They never interfere with one another. Humans, presumably, have a shared goal of survival; but, as is Romero's point, it never goes down that way.

Survival of the Dead is in the tradition of Romero's previous invectives against non-cooperation. The story concerns a small island where two Irish families, the Muldoons and the O'Flynns, have lived side-by-side, with a history of contention, for a good many generations. Six days after the zombie infection begins, O'Flynn has taken to shooting all zombies in the head and Muldoon has taken to preserving them in the hopes of finding a cure. Outnumbered and banished from the island, O'Flynn advertises the island as a safe-haven via the internet. The ad catches the attention of a small group of soldiers, with whom O'Flynn returns to the island to destroy both zombies and Muldoons.

There are a lot of ideas going around in Survival. One gets the feeling that Romero brainstormed and threw everything that interested him, concerned him, had him thinking into the soup without much concern for how readily they can be resolved. To beat the metaphor, it's a delicious if decadent soup. The visual and dialogue ideas are fun. The thematic ideas are interesting if at times a little confused. Some are followed through; some aren't; and many conflict.

For one, there's the issue of sentimentality. All throughout Romero's Dead films, the question has been lurking: Could you kill your friends or family as zombies? Survival addresses the question more directly than Romero's previous pictures. The first scene of the film is of Sargeant Crocket (Alan van Sprang) trying to make a superior officer 'mercy kill' a zombified soldier. The officer's inability to do so sends him directly into the clutches of a zombie, while Crocket coolly dispatches all the zombies. Yet, a little later Crocket and his team encounter a group of men who have placed several living zombie heads on sticks. Not only is Crocket apalled at the cruel treatment of the zombies, but Romero makes all the zombie heads African-American and the perpetrators white rednecks. Although it's possible Romero only wanted to make these men sufficiently unsympathetic for us to not mind if Crocket kills them all, it also seems that Romero is stipulating a racist element to the mistreatment of the living dead. So sentimentality toward the living dead seems to be a bad thing, yet mistreating them is also depicted as morally depraved.

This confusion extends to the conflict between O'Flynn and Muldoon. The first we see of O'Flynn (Kenneth Welsh), he is demanding the zombified children of a Muldoon family be killed. When the mother refuses, she, a living woman, is killed by his men. O'Flynn thus appears highly misguided, if not an outright villain. But it's O'Flynn who represents anti-sentimentality. Muldoon, on the other hand, starts out very sentimental. He doesn't want a single zombie to be killed because they may just be curable. His position appears, initially, reasonable and noble, if somewhat too soft-hearted (the zombies are, after all, trying to eat everyone living). However, the more we get to know O'Flynn, the more likable he becomes. His strength, surety and wit make him an extremely sympathetic character, despite his heartless approach. Muldoon, on the other hand, comes across as inconsistant, aggressive, and frankly perverse. His home is filled with portraits of family members taken after death along with, most prominantly, a gun-toting self-portrait. He loves dead things just a little too much. Once the film is over, it's still not clear how Romero feels about sentimentality. He seems to admire the practicality in Muldoon's position, but not the sentimental motivation or the necrophiliac personality. Muldoon is willing to kill living outsiders, but not the dead; his perversion tends toward a necropolis. O'Flynn, however, seems a bit too cold, even eager, about killing the zombies. The point, again, is cooperation. Both Muldoon and O'Flynn take extreme positions. There's no reason why some zombies can't be killed and some kept in hopes of a cure. The inability of the two island patriarchs to compromise and work together is what brings ruin to the island.

Patriarchy is another part of the problem. It's the problem of generational conflicts Romero has been emphasizing since Jack's Wife (1972) and Martin (1977), if not Night of the Living Dead (1968). O'Flynn and Muldoon each occupy another age, another way of doing things, that involves tribalism and conflict. The younger characters, such as the soldiers and O'Flynn's daughter, albeit rather mercenary in character, are able to cooperate and reach agreements. Even Crocker, the team leader, functions more like the leader of a democracy than a chieftain. Zombies, Romero has explicitly stated, are a previous generation rising to destroy the current one. Survival as a whole depicts the disorders of older generations destroying the budding one. Muldoon's major perversion is his obsession with past generations. O'Flynn, at least, is a progressive, but still a tribal leader. He is viewed almost as Ulysses, the aged patriarch who returns home to take the throne and finds his once-beautiful land in a fallen state, an apocalyptic world in decay. The ulyssean solution to retake the throne and re-establish his patriarchal authority is, for Romero, no solution at all. The ability to get away from patriarchy and its tribalism, to cooperate, is the only salvation for the newer generations, and indeed for the few survivors of Survival.

One interesting feature of Survival is the dialogue. Or rather the whole approach to the narrative, in which the dialogue falls, that could best be characterized as 'coolness.' That's polite for 'cliche.' Ready-to-hand coolness is usually cliche, because coolness is created on screen before it is instantiated in life (2); it involves a considerable degree of contrivance. The dialogue and mannerisms in Survival seem so calculated for coolness, particularly amongst O'Flynn and the soldiers, that it reaches a new level--that other area of linguistic contrivance--poetry. Perhaps my favourite exchange occurs when we see a hauntingly beautiful zombie (Kathleen Munroe) ride by on a horse, the Boy (Devon Bostick) exclaims, "She's beautiful!", Crocket responds, "She's dead," and O'Flynn concludes, "She's my daughter." Elegant tricolons don't occur so readily in real life, but it sure makes a beautiful rhetorical stroke on the aural canvas. Similarly, the first we see of the character Tomboy (Athena Karkanis) is mid-masturbation in public. However liberated and coarse she's supposed to be, no woman is going to do that. It's utterly contrived, but in the overall tone and cool vibe of the film it's another stroke of poetry. Such contrivances can be annoying, as it is evidently manipulative; but at this extremity and with this mastery, it's pure poetry. The highly cinematic dialogue and mannerisms of these characters is something to be savoured.

Perhaps it's due to this cool and cinematic approach that Survival has another peculiar feature: Whatever is out of frame in Survival is usually invisible to anyone in-frame. However sharp Crocket's senses, he is totally unaware of a zombie right beside him until O'Flynn kills it. This move happens again and again. Anything could be occuring right out of frame and we don't know until a character reacts or it is brought into frame somehow. Survival is as far from the stark realism of Night of the Living Dead as the Dead series has gotten. Romero has dashed headlong into a brazen popular expressionism. It will work for some viewers and it won't work for others; for this viewer, it proved a very charming development.

Survival also boasts some of the finest performances Romero's ever gotten in one of the Dead films. While Romero has gotten good performances in non-zombie films like Martin (John Amplas) and The Dark Half (Timothy Hutton), his Dead films tend to have weak performances, with Day of the Dead containing the worst. Kenneth Welsh gives an excellent and energizing performance as the impish tough-guy O'Flynn. Welsh's quick way with words, charm, sly looks, and deceptively hobbled walk communicate a good deal about the character. The other truly outstanding performance comes from Athena Karkanis. While the other actors in the film tend to embody their characters a little too hammily, everything Karkanis says and does seems utterly natural, despite its poetic contrivance. She moves through the picture like a sexy, female David Hemmings.

So that's Survival of the Dead, a hodgepodge of Romero's late-in-life experiments with ideas and styles both old and new. For any who think Romero has long been over the hill, perhaps the final image and words of the film will draw a cynical nod. For myself, it drew an appreciative smile: Romero's creativity is alive and well, and Survival of the Dead may just be the most lyrical zombie film ever made.
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(1) - I argued in my out-of-date essay, "What's So Great About George Romero?", that the essence of Romero's films is in the arguments amongst the characters. At the time the essay was written, I hadn't seen all of Romero's films. There is much wrong with the essay, but the claim that conflict is essential to Romero's oeuvre remains, I think, a valid one.

(2) - "The Film, the World, and the Fantasy"

What's so great about George Romero?

I.
Romero is generally praised for two major points. The first is his innovations within the horror genre. He invented the flesh-eating zombie; he introduced a highly realistic, almost documentary style with Night of the Living Dead; he ushered in remarkable, new gore effects with Dawn of the Dead, etc.. The second is his social commentary, particularly critiques of consumerism and capitalism. This is not so beneficial to him. His horror innovations are confined within his genre, for one, and are more mechanical than central to his vision. Whereas his social commentary is criticized, rightly, for being heavy-handed and just too sincere to be artistically serious (Oscar Wilde once said that all bad poetry is sincere).

What, then, is Romero's strength? It is at the level of the pen, first of all; and it is in a particular area, to wit, dialogue. And not just any dialogue, but the dialogue of heated debate, i.e. arguments. No-one, in the history of cinema, has written more realistic, grueling arguments amongst their characters. Many have tried, but have always written themselves down to the level of cliches--whether literary or cinematic--Romanticism, and poetic stylization.

Romero's arguments occur at all levels: between the protagonists and the perceived threat, amongst the protagonists themselves as a group, between individuals within the protagonists' group, and perhaps even within protagonists themselves. In what follows, I'll present an overview of the role of argument in Romero's films.

II.
Romero's use of argument naturally begins with Night of the Living Dead. The living dead don't talk, they just keep coming. They never stop. Fighting against the zombies is not entirely unlike being trapped in an argument with a relentless opponent; the stubborn opponent who will never give in, no matter how well you've made your point.

The zombies, a physical manifestation of argument, mirrored by the real arguments within the farmhouse. At first leadership is gladly yielded to Ben. But when Cooper arrives, there is a constant atmosphere of tension, poised for or in the midst of argument amongst the protagonists. They argue heatedly, realistically, without succumbing to the pressures of cooperation, kindness, and apology that plague most films--including very good ones. There is a sense that neither side is willing to give in a little, not even to the point of listening to what the other is saying.

The Crazies takes this approach to another level. Not only is there a form of zombie on the loose, but there are multiple factions of heroes; and all are in argument with one another. The townsfolk are in argument with the military, violently protesting. The military agents are each in argument with the town leaders. The scientists are in argument with their military employees. The protagonists, fleeing from the military, are arguing amongst each other. Worst of all, the virus causes spontaneous violence: sudden, inexplicable argument. Out of all of these people, nobody is really listening to what anyone else has to say. It can be quite uncomfortable to watch all the heated arguments; one wants to withdraw, or to step in and command these people to be reasonable, to stop, to "smarten up" and be reasonable. This is, of course, testament to Romero's skillful writing.

Dawn of the Dead follows a similar approach to Night of the Living Dead, with the exception of the brutal arguing in the broadcast center at the beginning of the film and is therefore not worth dwelling upon.

Day of the Dead, however, is the pinnacle of this early period. The arguments are so heated and so relentless that they, as Ebert noted in his review, upstage the zombies. The zombies still represent the relentless, stubborn nature of human argument. They're always at the gates, pressing at the boundaries, just waiting to break in; and they never stop. Inside the compound, the constantly shouting characters create a hostile environment of such reality that many reviewers openly despised the film. Why? Because arguments are unpleasant; they are unpleasant to be in, unpleasant to hear, to watch, to the point that arguing parents can traumatize children. What the reviewers of Day of the Dead missed is how these arguments represent real humanity at its worst: stubbornly arguing. It is frustrating, as frustrating to watch as being involved in the real argument. While Romero doesn't work with the best actors and he has never brought out the best acting with his direction, his writing and his direction brings out the fullness of the tension between them and between they and us. Never has human argument been rendered so truthfully on screen.

With later efforts, like Monkey Shines, Romero made this notion of heated argument much more subtle. It is here represented not as human nature, but as the dark, primal side of humanity that is normally hidden. The monkey's presence draws the primal rage out of the protagonist and he begins lashing out heatedly at everyone who gives him the slightest reason.

This writer, alas, has not seen Martin--arguably Romero's most personal film--nor Romero's post-millennial films and is therefore unable to comment on this trait of argument in Romero's more recent films. It should be noted, however, that Romero's two King adaptations (Creepshow and The Dark Half) did not contain this trait; to claim they did would require mental gymnastics of a self-defeating order.

III.
What we may derive from the above light analysis is that the Romeroan worldview, as it were, is a rather cynical one. Even before it happens, one knows the scientist's discover in The Crazies will never make it to its destination. And this cynicism derives from this World In Argument depiction pervading Romero's early films. As long as people continue to argue, they damn themselves. When there is free exchange of views and ideas and the struggle for domination is relinquished, his characters stop arguing and start surviving. Hence the conclusion of Day of the Dead, which offers some hope.

The great breakthrough in Romeroan cynicism comes with Monkey Shines, a minor masterpiece. Romero no longer seems to see humans as doomed to relentless argumentation, as represented by his zombies. Rather, their struggle for power and for ideological domination and position is seen as an animal instinct that can be overcome; and it's overcome by respect of others as equals.

Respect, in Romero's films, comes in a variety of forms, but it has always been there. It receives one of its most positive expositions in one of the few calm interludes in Day of the Dead's madness, when our female protagonist allows the pilot and engineer to express their views even while she disagrees. What they say is not as important as that she listens.

Whereas in Monkey Shines, respect takes a sexual form. It is the respect males and females accord one another as males and females, not berating, challenging, or struggling, but an equal regard. The protagonist, whom we see in the beginning has a trophy girlfriend, is not treated as an equal male force throughout the film. He thinks he is by one female, the monkey, who turns out to be a master manipulator. The conclusion shows a male and female in a relationship of respect.

Again, this dynamic of argument and respect does not arise in Romero's King-written films; and their presence in his post-millennial films will be left to the reader to discover.

IV.
In short, what's so great about Romero is that he's developed, both in a semantic taxonomy involving flesh-eating zombies, evil monkeys, doppelgangers, amongst other things, and in his creation of fully emotional characters, a truly complex and fascinating worldview embracing a dynamic of conflict and respect with the natural consequences each of these entails. That, I hope I've supported, deserves respect.

I expect to revise this in the future, once I've seen Romero's complete oeuvre.

Monkey Shines: Mann's Females

An alternate title to Monkey Shines could have been Man and His Females. Perhaps with a deliberate pun on 'man,' seeing as how our protagonist is named Allan Mann.

We are first introduced to Mr. Mann in an idyllic moment: he rises in the beautiful morning sun, smiles at his beautiful girlfriend's beautiful curves, he stretches his beautiful body, then goes for a run and is hit by a truck.

Suddenly this perfect man who had dominated the world is rendered totally impotent. All he can move is his head. He depends upon a machine to move about, but this machine is limited. For everything else, he has only women.

Female 1 - Linda: Linda is his girlfriend. She seemed to be totally his, totally in love. She was his as long as he had power, vitality, a future, and offered her security. She is a purely primitive female. She exchanges her now impotent male for the very doctor that repaired (ineptly, it turns out) her ex-boyfriend's spine. Strike number one against Allan's masculinity. One testicle gone.

Female 2 - Dorothy: Dorothy is the obsessive mother. Where Linda saw in Allan's impotence something disagreeable, Dorothy sees an opportunity. Many years ago she, like most mothers, lost her little boy to the independence of adulthood. Now Allan is like a child again. He could well need her to feed him, to bathe him, to do everything for him. And to feel needed, like she has her baby who depends on her again, she will do everything. This is emphasized in how her first act when she has Allan alone is to watch old childhood videos of Allan. She's exploiting his weakness and rendering him utterly weak. Strike number two against Allan's masculinity. There goes his other testicle. He's totally emasculated.

Female 3 - Maryanne: Maryanne is a lazy harpy. She is not cut out to be a nurse, yet she assumes caring for a quadriplegic will be an easy task while she gets to live in the luxury of this man's house and live off the luxury of his mother's money. Allan is at Maryanne's mercy and since he's emasculated is totally dominated by her.

Female 4 - Ella: Ella the monkey is the final straw. She is a feminine power so potent that Allan risks entirely being subsumed by her. His mind begins to be linked up with hers. He begins to have mood swings. All the while it appears he's in charge, in fact this is the passive dominance of Ella. By the end she's turned the tables. She effectively removes all the previous females to become the dominant female of Allan's life. However she cannot cope with Allan becoming a whole man again. It is ultimately Allan's recovery of power (sheer motor skills) that triumphs over Ella.

Female 5 - Melanie: Melanie is the female that offers Allan the potentiality of his masculinity. Because she regards him as a masculine power, she imbues him with the subjectivity of a male force; and in doing so gives him the power to regard her as a subjective female force. She restores his testicles as it were when she sleeps with him. And he returns the favour when his recovery of motor skills allows him to remove Ella. The film ends with Allan restored to his masculinity, albeit humbled, more the equal than the possessor of his female mate--and yes, the film does encourage us to see humans in this scientific manner.

There is no denying that Monkey Shines is, despite the description above, a tragedy. While there is a traditional comedy ending of the male and female protagonists together, promising marital bliss, the truly major female of the film has been savagely betrayed and even more savagely murdered by her insecure male. The tragedy is, of course, that it could not have ended happily for Allan and Ella; it was destiny.