The Rant Aisle

I wonder if either of my readers remembers 1987. Ninjas were everywhere. Always underfoot, especially when it got hot and dry (”ninja weather” they called it), they’d get in your attic, nest, and pretty soon you’d have a guild of deadly assassins coming and going at all hours, and good luck finding an exterminator that is a master of Praying Mantis Style. My point is this: there was a time in the not-too-distant past that ninjas were cool. Now they’re nothing more than an ironic joke. What’s worse is that we’ve learned absolutely nothing from this and we’re in the process of doing the exact same thing to another pop icon.

Right around the early ’80s, Frank Miller was sane and working on transforming Daredevil from a Spider-Man also-ran into one of the most respected characters in comics. It’s easy to forget now, but Miller used ninjas entirely unironically. From Daredevil’s own femme fatale Elektra to the Hand, ninjas were all over that book like Reggie Evans on balls. They spread from there to infest the entire Marvel Universe. Before long, the ninja was the standard foot soldier of evil, sort of an orc with an Asian bent. Need a credible threat for a superhero? Throw a baker’s dozen ninjas at him and see what happens. Soon every team had a ninja, and if they didn’t then a character would get retconned into one, none more shamelessly than Wolverine. (Seriously, did anyone actually buy his ninja history? What sort of respected assassin wants to train a feral manimal who flips out at the first sign of trouble? Do ninjas normally recruit at soccer riots and I just never knew? If there’s a ninja out there named Nigel, drop me a line, because this is really bugging the shit out of me.) Pretty soon the cool ninjas were outnumbered. We were glutted at an all-you-can-eat ninja buffet, and that’s never a good thing to be.

Then a book appeared that both paid homage to and satirized the Marvel paradigm. That book was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. By attempting to have its cake and eat it too, the turtles soured some of the more casual fans on the concept, leaving only the purists to insist “no, it’s actually a really good book!” The book struck me as sort of a brother to Cerebus, both books having started out as parody but evolving into something else as they went on. The problem with the Turtles is that no matter how good the book got, there was always an undercurrent: this book is about humanoid turtles trained to be heroic assassins. Because the Turtles have been such an important part of pop culture for so long, it can be easy to forget how ridiculous the concept is. Some producer didn’t forget it, and decided to make a cartoon that played up the dumb aspects and left the good stuff out. Eastman and Laird optioned their property, and who could blame them? But the side effect was that the time of the ninja was officially over. The Turtles were valley-boy douchebags who acted like pizza was a form of Italian smack and in the process tarred all ninjas with the same brush.

So what’s my beef here? Why am I complaining that about a phenomenon that’s turned ninjas from the masters of every form of combat to a t-shirt punchline? Because now they’re doing it to something I love.

We’re in the middle of an all-out assault on pop culture by ravening hordes of cannibal undead. Every comic book has zombies, there are a million no-budget zombie movies released every second, and there’s no sign of stopping. What’s the problem? After all, isn’t the zombie movie the cinematic equivalent of pizza? Only the Turtles want pizza every night of the week and we saw what happened to them. And unlike food, fictional creations run into serious danger of devolving into self-parody. There are only so many variations of cannibal corpses an audience will tolerate, even as forgiving an audience as the one that zombie movies have cultivated. At some point, you have to sit down and say, “Am I going to watch this new straight-to-DVD zombie movie, or am I going to watch Dawn of the Dead again?” And if you’re capable of looking at yourself in the mirror, chances are you’ll say Dawn of the Dead.

The frustrating thing is with just a smidgeon of creativity you can make a zombie movie without any actual zombies in it. Whatever metaphor you were using zombies to represent, something else can fill the void just as easily. And if you weren’t planning to use them to represent anything, congratulations, you’re a hack. Here’s your award, keep the acceptance speech short and I look forward to reviewing your work in the Yakmala section.

The zombie in film usually represents some repellent yet unconscious aspect of (usually) American culture, whether it’s racism (Night), consumerism (Dawn), the military industrial complex (Day) or the widening gap between rich and poor (Land). The zombie, as an antagonist, has several features: it’s dead but it still moves around, it wants to kill and/or eat the living, it has no individuality, there are a whole lot of them and any injury it inflicts will cause the victim to become another one. The idea that it has to be dead seems like window dressing to me, after all, the infected in 28 Days Later were alive and that’s one of the three best zombie movies of all time. So we’re left with hordes of homogenous creatures that can make you join them against your will. Go watch Assault on Precinct 13, Dog Soldiers, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and hell, even The Searchers and tell me those aren’t zombie movies.

You can only go to a well for so long before the water gets too muddy to drink. With zombies, we’ve been splashing around in that thing for so long it’s like one of the pools in Most Extreme Elimination Challenge. Would you drink that water? Me neither.