by Forest Lewis
“I have something to tell you about Mr. Darcy,” a zombie says to Elizabeth Bennett in the movie Pride and Prejudice and Zombies just before its head is exploded by a gunshot.
Talking zombies? Yes. The movie includes not only zombies that talk but zombie families, zombie church and a whole zombie society led by a sinister zombie aristocracy. Most of them certainly do look like zombies—they have the torn up half rotten face that is the sign of any zombie across the genre—but because they talk and—gasp!—have feelings, a certain amount of cognitive dissonance develops. Because isn’t a talking feeling zombie an inherent contradiction in terms?
The England of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (PPZ) has been under attack by this zombie culture for 75 years before our storyline begins. The plague that begat the zombies originated in such foreign places as India and Africa. Thus the secret racist message of the film is established: though they appear to be zombies, they are in fact metaphors for brown people. These zombies, like any zombies, must be exterminated with extreme, um, prejudice, before it’s too late. “We must not let them establish a system of governance!” Lady de Bourgh declares.
It is 2016 and racism is just loving life down at the Cineplex.
Zombies, of course, have always been a vehicle for misanthropy if not out and out hatred of select people groups. They are at the very least a stand in for the mindless hoard, the run of nameless and faceless humanity that clogs our highways and snarls our Christmas shopping; they are the stupid people that get in the way. Tourists, refugees, immigrants, consumers and soccer hooligans have all been alluded to by various zombies in such examples from the genre as Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, World War Z, Shaun of the Dead, and Colson Whitehead’s excellent zombie novel Zone One. A zombie is an empty vessel: you decide what your zombie means to you (Chuck Klosterman claims that Zombies mean the internet), but an innate contempt of persons is the subconscious dynamo that powers the genre.
A contempt that would be, coincidently, very familiar to Jane Austen.
Jane Austen must be one of the more misread authors in literature. Her books are routinely portrayed as mere “girl books:” marriage plots filled with gossip, romance, dancing, betrothals and very eligible female heroines. If you watch any of the myriad adaptations then you can’t be blamed for thinking so. The movies are as filled with misty beautiful English landscapes as they are with immaculate coiffure. They skim off what sells in Austen and disregard the rest.
And what of the rest? It is mephitic excoriating irony. I am not the only one who has argued that Jane Austen hates her characters. D.H. Lawrence has said as much and there is also a collection of essays by D.W. Harding that detail Jane’s various antipathies (Regulated Hatred and Other Essays on Jane Austen). Her sister burned most of her letters after her death because she did not want their friends and neighbors to learn what Jane really thought of them. She was much more subversive and critical of her society than most give her credit.
PPZ then would seem to be a more faithful adaptation of Pride and Prejudice than what we’ve seen before. One can easily imagine which characters Jane would have turned into zombies. Placing her drawing room social comedy in the midst of a zombie apocalypse has the potential to be rife with radical interpretive zingers and brilliant juxtapositions. So one would hope.
Unfortunately PPZ, aside from being a covert racist allegory, is generally forgettable vanilla-paste. Part of this problem is due to the pg-13 rating. If it were rated R it could turn the zombies all the way up, letting them be as gory as per usual. As it stands, however, much of the action happens off camera. And there is a lot of action.
One component of any eligible young lady’s virtue is hand-to-hand combat and zombie slaying. The Bennet sisters are trained in the ways of Shaolin. They clamor around zombie-crammed ballrooms and cut off heads, but the choreography is incoherent and dull. These scenes are intercut with talky scenes straight out of Austen that come off as chintzy pastiche, no doubt because that is what they were meant to be.
For the movie is, essentially, parody; a dumb, subliminally racist, not-very-funny parody. Actual un-zombiefied Jane Austen is far more humorous and perverse.
Forest is a carpenter/writer living in Minneapolis. He writes a weekly horoscope for Revolver. Those can be found here. Follow him on Twitter @interrogativs
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