Zack Snyder earlier this year gave us a vision of greatness in Justice League, on HBO. His second movie of 2021 is on Netflix, as dark a vision as the first was beautiful, Army Of The Dead, a story about the end of America & of humanity. With these two movies, not only does cinema move to streaming, to your TV screens or even smartphones—goodby to the old ways, but we also get a summary of his career in the two genres young people love most, super-heroes & horror. As genres go, they are distinguished by their shared vision of hell gaping open before us, signaling a generational loss of confidence in the American way of life—perhaps cinema is over because these are the only visions left.
The rich & the poor are the protagonists in these dramas. Remember the most popular joke in Justice League: Flash, a poor young man, asks Batman what’s his superpower. Batman answers: I’m rich. This seems un-American, among other things, but when we see what effect billionaires have on our lives, it’s hard to disagree. Further, the more glamorous & technologically powerful the rich seem, the uglier it makes the poor seem by comparison. So if the rich are new demigods, rising above human nature, whether Iron Man or Steve Jobs, they threaten to debase the poor below humanity—reducing us to collateral damage in movies & consumers of entertainment in reality.
In Army Of The Dead, Snyder focuses on what it’s like to be poor: To always want money, which others have, to live in a world where everything costs money & nobody is self-reliant. But he looks at the poor indirectly, through popular culture, & reveals that the image of poverty in our pop culture is celebrity itself—pop culture is remarkably vulgar, but for that very reason it also displays the restlessness, the mad desires, the lack of self-control, & the bitterness about injustice typical of people who have no confidence in the future. Snyder embraces for once this vision & shows us what catastrophes we should worry about if this becomes the representative or dominant view of America. Hence, the movie’s tagline, Always Bet On Dead—death is inevitable, it’s the only thing you can count on, so act accordingly.
Woke America
Unlike the beautiful, if potentially tragic heroes of Justice League, Army Of The Dead features gaudy, selfish mercenaries who first look like a caricature of diversity. There are too many protagonists for us remember or even care about that much, not least because the ways in which they are distinctive make them uninteresting to the major concern of the plot—the zombie apocalypse could take our attention away from the latest identities available to people looking to distinguish themselves—but they are all recognizable types in our pop culture, & so they bear the burden of our democracy. Perhaps especially inasmuch as they are unimpressive. The usual varieties of race, gender, sexuality are on display, but here’s the first surprise: Instead of the liberal ideal of a college campus brochure comprising civil rights rebels, we see bizarre & broken people. They represent not Progress, but desperation. If History ends once human diversity is acknowledged, then it’s a big disappointment for everyone.
The plot itself caricatures corporate globalization just as the protagonists caricature multiculturalism: A mysterious Japanese oligarch assembles this team of international likable losers & criminals to rob a Vegas casino. But Vegas is now infested by zombies & isolated from America; (by a wall of shipping containers, which is a remarkably American mix of practical thinking & commercial symbolism.) Despair makes them willing to do the job, but conceals their motives. Some worry about family, others about fame, & most of them are down on their luck—they are apart, even if they work together—but why are some of them eager to kill zombies & why are none of them repelled by the thought? Maybe they’re taking revenge; maybe they fear the fate of zombies awaits them, too.
Money & anger may make them equal, but not alike. Worse, their identities seem hardly more serious than puns. A soft German young man is a safe cracker & also flamboyant, because effeminacy & nimbleness can be said to go together. This checks the homosexuality box required for the elite vision of the future, but from the point of view of the plot, it leads a character to his death. If there’s anything like redemption in a horror movie, then it’s moments like the one where this young man puts aside all his frivolities & his contemptible personality in order to sacrifice his life to save a friend. This abandonment of pretense happens a lot in the movie, so that by the end you might end up thinking that the ideology of a diverse, self-created new humanity typical of our times is a delusion; you might wonder whether the delusion isn’t dangerous… Then there’s a Hispanic woman, much manlier than the previous fellow, & she is called Chambers, in reference to firearms, I suppose. You can tell from her name that she will fight to the death, shooting everything that comes at her. She may despair, but she doesn’t panic. So with the other members of this desperate team—they’re in search of identities perhaps more serious than the woke coalition they seem to represent. & why wouldn’t they be? We all seem to be defined publicly by success, privately by a middle-class home & the family way of life. To be a failure in America is to be undefined. Worse, these are mostly young people, without experience, trapped in a situation where most moral-political categories have been abolished, so they don’t know who they are. The best they can hope for is to be a symbol—one of them wants to save poor people through volunteering, another wants to be a social media celebrity for zombie-killing feats, livestreaming the apocalypse, so to speak.
Altogether, they remake the American myth John Ford memorably crafted in Stagecoach, where different American types have to stick together through a desperate journey or die alone. Snyder, like Ford, returns Americans to the Western desert, a vision of eternity which is inherently hostile to humanity, a test of freedom, where we find out whether it’s good or merely another deadly illusion. The American way of life is at stake & the principle of individuation through violence: If you’re willing to fight for your way of life, you’re somebody. These characters only begin to learn something about themselves when they put their lives in danger. But faith in the American way of life is weakening & they learn by dying, one by one, not infrequently betrayed. Diversity turns out not to be strength, despite elite pieties.
Army Of The Dead is especially evocative of American paralysis, not to say decadence, now that we have discovered how we react to an epidemic: With lockdown politics that not only cancels freedom, but mostly abandons the poor to their fate. Safety for whoever can get it, economic gains for whoever can profit from the complicated new restraints & the arbitrary, unpredictable restrictions on life—in 2020, we saw a remarkable distinction between the elite class & the rest of America, since the pandemic turned out to be quite profitable & full of opportunity for some, however destructive of life & liberty for others. Viewed from the bottom, things might look so bad as to warrant the hysterical portrait of America this movie gives us. This is the ambiguity of the title—maybe the army of the dead is a diseased enemy we’re getting rid of, but maybe it’s us…
The Revenge Of The Past
Now, another way of looking at rich & poor is to look at aristocratic & democratic virtues, the ones tending primarily toward greatness, the attainment or preserve of a select few, the other toward freedom, which just about anyone can have or claim. Snyder’s idea of greatness is Greece, going back to the origins of civilization, & his most famous movie is 300, the Herodotean founding story of our politics: Patriotism, martial prowess, & daring versus the corruption of a sophisticated empire built on slaves. In Justice League, too, we see an attempt to recover the ancient greatness of Greece in a fight against nihilism. In Watchmen, the enemy of mankind patterns himself on an Egyptian pharaoh, another vision of empire & slavery.
Snyder is always against slavery or dehumanization, but in Army Of The Dead, he seems to concede its inevitability. Olympus is now a casino on the Vegas Strip, as well as the headquarters of a new kind of zombie, war-like, powerful, & intelligent, a corruption of the heroic ideals of beauty, strength, & excellence. Here we see immortality without politics, poets, or philosophers, as the ugliest thing imaginable, the undead. This vision of antiquity is the enemy America must confront.
“Toxic masculinity” comes to life in Army Of The Dead in this image of zombie super-heroes. Snyder builds a gym on every movie set, where everyone works out, presumably not only so that actors look like Greek gods, but so that they experience pain & striving before they act it out in stories. But whereas he attempts to persuade us that strength & striving will make freedom livable, our elites attempt to emasculate America. So he shows us that if men are publicly humiliated & the very word man is stricken from our public language, we might end up with this nightmare vision.
This allows Snyder to show the dark origins of our way of life, which might somehow return to ruins us. Once the team enters the new-zombie run Las Vegas, they learn human sacrifices are necessary to propitiate the monsters. That recalls the violent origins of humanity & suggests, the price to pay for abandoning or losing Greek beauty is not so much aesthetic as moral. Unexpectedly, a plan that’s all about the money turns into a despairing attempt to save something about being human from this menace, which resembles a Lovecraftian death cult or the witches & warriors of Robert Howard’s Conan stories.
Horror
The heist-horror combination might seem an accident, but the confrontation of an ancient past, long forgotten, with a desperate attempt to find a future is surely purposeful. Another apparent accident, at the beginning of the movie, shows us how Vegas turned into hell: The sexual enthusiasm of a young married couple collided with a military motorcade. Private & public, people & government, freedom & power, instead of leading to civilization, lead to madness. Turning Vegas into hell seems the most hysterical Christian vision of Sin City, but it also works as a woke attack on America as a hypocritical façade concealing terrible abuse. There’s something to these visions & it’s worth noticing how similar Puritans & Progressives can be—it allows Snyder to give a strange view of our freedom: What if Americans are gamblers? Gaudy Vegas is already a caricature of ancient beauty, but what if it has nothing to do with excellence or humanity & everything to do with tyranny, with dreaming of unjust gains? What if secretly Americans are abandoning justice?
Snyder is very concerned with what horror reveals about America—it’s not just early 20th century stories like Lovecraft’s & Howard’s—he’s also thinking about the 80s manly horror of James Cameron’s Aliens & John McTiernan’s Predator. He took the tough Latina & corrupt corporate hack characters from the former & the nihilistic destruction of manliness from the latter, down to a man stripping down to fight a monster hand to hand. The common thread in these stories is the agony of manliness, the possibility that all our fighting power is nothing compared to cosmic cruelty.
That could induce despair & reduce man to zombie. Snyder’s directorial debut, almost twenty years back, was Dawn Of The Dead, a new version of the George Romero cult 70s picture about zombies at the mall, or capitalism as brainwashing & consumerism as cannibalism. There are many parallels between Snyder’s first & latest movies, but for now, let’s stick to the distinctions. In 2004, he was looking at suburbia, in 2021, at the poor or desperate—the middle class no longer matters in pop culture or in the loudest political debates. The core of America is either hollow or the young, the audience of pop culture, are blind to it. Snyder is doubtful that all the moxie will prove to be strength, that the young can deal with the burden of being human by themselves. For all its faults, 20th-century middle-class America protected us from these revelations to which individualism leads us…
I’ll conclude with a note about artistic sincerity—the analysis I offered might make Snyder seem ironic, a man who plays with symbols for various aspects of America. But the unique power Snyder has to draw out sincerity from the audience, the earnestness with which he articulates the fears & longing of the young suggest otherwise. It’s not just that he puts everything he can into his art: Writing, directing, producing, & even shooting—he’s the cinematographer, too, to get his vision across to the audience as clearly as possible. It is a still more personal work than that: He lost his daughter recently, his girl committed suicide, so this movie about a father desperate to save his daughter, even willing to die for her, is as heartfelt as it is heartbreaking. It’s typical of his admonitory artistry that he wants his audience to glimpse his own suffering in order to avoid it.