The Dumb Don't Die, Part 2
"Zombies," climate change, and mythic misfires.
Part 1 of this series sketched out an introduction to how and why so many modern films—allegedly, our contemporary “myths”—fall short of the proper function of true myths.
In Part 2, we’ll look more closely at how those limitations might explain the failures of Jim Jarmusch’s 2019 film, The Dead Don’t Die. This will be more of a straight textual analysis; Part 3 will get into some of the larger mechanics.
Once again: I don’t intend this as a conventional takedown. I’m hoping this serves a larger purpose than cheap shots at a bad movie’s expense. Nevertheless, I did find this movie deeply frustrating, which will probably show in the tone of the essay.
!!!
Obligatory spoiler warning for The Dead Don’t Die:
This essay will describe the ending of the movie in detail.
!!!
The Plot
Small-town zombies kill everyone.12
The End.
Roll credits.
Dramatis Personae
Here’s one of the deeply confusing things about this movie: as a writer-director, Jim Jarmusch is known for his economical character studies. Most of his films are genuinely great because of their loose plots and tight focus on a few interesting personalities.
But for some goddamn reason, he decided to take a kitchen-sink approach to this movie, leaving it impossible to analyze without first describing these cohorts of characters:
Hermit Bob (Tom Waits): Former resident of Centerville; now lives in the woods near the cemetery and steals chickens. Human Sasquatch. Periodically pops up to mutter about how fucked up the world is, while watching from a distance as other characters die. Survives.
The LEOs (Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Chloe Sevigny): Centerville’s constabulary. Nominal protagonists, despite not doing much of anything. Spend most of their screentime showing up to look horrified at the escalating carnage. Killed by zombies.
The Townsfolk (Various actors): Eaten by zombies.
“Zelda Winston” (Tilda Swinton): Recently-arrived Scottish (?) undertaker, who is also secretly a Buddhist katana master (??) and—double-secretly—an extraterrestrial (???). Leaves in a flying saucer at the end of the movie. Survives.
The Hot City Kids (Austin Butler, Selena Gomez, Luka Sabbat): Get lost on their way to being in a better movie and end up in Centerville. Rent a motel room; watch TV with something vaguely resembling concern. Killed by zombies.
The Foster Kids: Spend the entire movie in some sort of halfway house, wondering what’s happening outside while being lightly abused by the staff (who get eaten by zombies), before escaping into the woods. Survive.
“Jim” (Jim Jarmusch, unfilmed): The Gnostic Demiurge, Warden of the Panopticon, (literal) Author of All Misfortune. See below.
Jim Jarmusch, crypto-Calvinist?
Out of all this movie’s indignities, the most egregious are the fourth-wall breaks that Jarmusch chose to write into the script—by including his actual script as an in-universe object.
There are some cheeky winks to this early on; most notably, the opening credits’ (non-diagetic) theme song shows up in the movie proper, as diagetic music playing on the radio.
(“What’s that song?” asks Bill Murray’s Sheriff Roberts. “It’s the theme song,” replies Adam Driver as Deputy Peterson, humming along. Far out, man.)
Toward the end, as things look increasingly hopeless, the characters begin to discuss “The Script” written by “Jim” as the reason for all this horror.
Significantly, “Jim” is not a god who can be supplicated in order to change things. The Script has already been written. The fates of the Saved and the Damned have already been drawn across the stars.
What’s more—Deputy Peterson has apparently been chosen as a prophet, granted the opportunity to see The Script so that he may share the Bad News with the world. This is only introduced in the third act, almost as a throwaway remark, without doing anything narratively interesting. (For example: making Adam Driver’s character an actual prophet undergoing a Road to Damascus experience from the beginning, in contrast with his small-town deputy persona.)
This leaves the audience with the uncomfortable awareness that all of the movie’s events are taking place because Jim Jarmusch—actual human being with a Social Security number—wanted them to happen. There is no narrative distancing. “Jim” is a character in the movie. Jim wrote the script in which “Jim” wrote “The Script,” describing when and how everybody in the movie world will die, horrifically. And there’s nothing any of them can do about it. They’re not characters; they’re prisoners.
For example: in one of the movie’s few memorable scenes, Deputy Peterson, armed with a machete, finds the Hot City Kids dead in their motel room. He decides (or does he?) to dispatch them before they come back as zombies. Fair enough. But does he do it off-screen, discretely? Just a quick blow to kill the brain, as required by zombie lore?
Nope.
Instead, Deputy Peterson uses his machete to chop off the head of Selena Gomez’s character. Fine. Then he holds up her severed head in a clear-as-day wide shot, like the farmer in American Gothic, displaying it to the other characters (and, by extension, the audience).
Brother—what?
Okay, yes: it’s a horror movie. Decapitating a famous pop star is a good way to generate buzz. Jarmusch is trolling the audience a bit. Har har har.
Additionally, if he was visually quoting American Gothic on purpose, there’s some potentially interesting Fancy-Pants Film School commentary about the violence endemic in the American Dream. Well done, Jim. Points duly awarded.
But because of the director’s bizarre choice to implicate himself by name in the story, this gratuitous death isn’t narratively constructed as the outcome of character choices, or the impersonal momentum of events.
It happens because “Jim” wanted it this way.
Verily I say unto thee: in the Beginning there was The Script, yea, and The Script was like unto Law, and Jim did look upon The Script, and saw that it was good.
Remember: Deputy Peterson (the one doing the chopping) is explicitly identified as having read The Script. Since all the way back in Act 1, unlike the other characters, he’s been able to recognize the theme music as diagetic sound. It’s been thoroughly established that Adam Driver’s character is plugged into some higher level of awareness.
So according to the in-universe logic, “Jim” instructed him to graphically desecrate the corpse of an innocent young woman who was not yet a zombie.
This, of course, mirrors the real world in a very creepy way. On a metatextual level, the whole set-up has serious “Charlie says” vibes: real-life Jim instructed real-life Adam Driver to pretend to do the same thing as his character.
And he did it. They did it. Because they had no choice. Because it was in The Script.
Sending the audience’s attention in this direction seems like a crazy thing for a director to do. These fourth-wall breaks personalize the narrative in a way that’s hard to ignore. In a movie this relentlessly misanthropic, the creator directly implicating himself in his work could either be viewed as an extremely brave artistic choice, or a colossal mistake.
Either way—even if it’s a bad misfiring of what the director actually intended—it’s almost impossible to interpret as anything other than metaphysical commentary.
These are the facts as written.
The Script says so.
So if Jim/“Jim” is an implacable creator-god—which seems to be the role in which he cast himself—why were these people brought here to die like this? Why was Selena Gomez led down the road into Centerville with the other Hot City Kids, to this grisly end? On what altar are they being sacrificed?
For what reason did Jim/“Jim” make this world of pain?
Story Analysis
This whole exercise is a bit of a red herring, because—surprise!—The Dead Don’t Die isn’t actually a zombie movie.
In one sense, yes: it is a movie with zombies in it. All the appropriate elements are in place. The cannibalistic revenants are (mostly) played straight, almost to a fault.3 It name-checks the right references and performs the expected homages. There’s no real attempt to subvert or expand the genre. Apart from a few stylistic seizures flourishes, it’s very much a by-the-numbers zombie plot with a bleak ending.
Nevertheless, at its lifeless heart, this is not a movie about zombies.
This is a movie about climate change.
We Fracked Things Up
Despite raiding his cinematic closet for hand-me-downs, The Dead Don’t Die does not share George Romero’s interest in the actual Dead.
As a storyteller, Romero was fascinated by the Dead as themselves. Underneath all the midnight-movie mayhem, he was genuinely interested in what it would mean for the Living, on a spiritual level, if the Dead came back to not-quite-life. His artistic choices within the story reflect that interest. If Romero ever thought of his zombies as metaphors per se, he kept his cards close to his vest.
Jim Jarmusch does not have the same motivations.
Again—this is a movie about climate change. The zombies are completely incidental to the plot, which is why none of the characters (let alone the director himself) seem to know what to do with them.
Act 1 of The Dead Don’t Die features news reports of a change in the Earth’s rotational tilt because of “polar fracking”. This is revealed as the underlying cause of the zombie apocalypse: in addition to changing the behavior of animals and messing with daylight hours, the gravitational shift (along with some sci-fi handwaving) also brings the dead back to life.
This could be taken as a Night of the Living Dead homage, in which “cosmic radiation”—brought to Earth by a malfunctioning space probe—is reported as a possible explanation for the Dead’s return. But this plot device serves an entirely different purpose in Night; when compared to Jarmusch’s equally-implausible “polar fracking,” it changes the entire story.
In Night, the cosmic radiation theory is a blink-and-miss mention on a news bulletin—an incidental detail in a report primarily about the zombies. No other phenomena in the movie are attributed to the event. The Dead rise within the first ten minutes of screen time; only much later is the canard about the space probe introduced. The audience is never shown any evidence of a space probe, nor given a “first-hand” (in-universe) account of it. Something that only appears as an indirect report has an air of unreliability to it. Under the circumstances, “cosmic radiation” could be nothing but a last-ditch attempt at a rational explanation in the face of something truly apocalyptic. The space probe is a rumor; the ghouls outside the door are a fact.
In contrast, Don’t Die wastes no time in establishing the geological shift as inarguable reality. Characters notice the changes in animals and daylight long before the zombies rise up. The news report on the diner’s radio is focused on polar fracking, not zombies. There’s even a line (as subtle as the motto on Farmer Miller’s hat4) about dismissing the concerns of scientists. Direct contact between the Living and the Dead doesn’t happen until much later, in Act 2.
This, then, is the inciting incident for the plot: not reanimated corpses rising from their graves, but catastrophic global disruptions caused by fossil-fuel extraction. The zombies are a sideshow to the real apocalypse.
According to this narrative logic, people can stop the end of the world by Trusting the Science and resisting the fossil fuel industry: no fracking means no planetary shifts and, therefore, no zombies.
So what’s preventing this necessary action from being taken in the movie?
To answer this question, the director draws our attention to the zombies themselves.
Night of the Living Dumb
Apart from the bizarre fourth-wall breaks, the fatal flaw in this movie is the decision to make the zombies talk.
Part of what made Romero’s monsters so terrifying was their recognizable human form, completely stripped of any real human needs.
Romero’s zombies exist to feed. They don’t get tired; they don’t get hurt; they don’t need nutrients or calories to keep going. They don’t have self-awareness. Whatever is driving them relentlessly to eat, and eat, and eat—it’s something incomprehensible, according to our biological understanding of life. Their sole motivation is the mana of human flesh as a dark sacrament. The metaphysical implications are unmistakable.
In stark contrast, there’s absolutely no uncertainty about what Jarmusch’s zombies want. They’re saying it constantly. Each zombie has an individual fetish object—very physical, very mundane—that they repeatedly invoke in a death-rattle mutter: “Coffee.” “Candy.” “Wi-fi.” “Guitar.”
This immediately severs any metaphysical association Jarmusch’s creatures might have with the Dead. They’re not united into a relentless superorganism by some horrible spiritual hunger, the way Romero’s zombies are. They each have their own unique desires. They want the stuff of this world.
That’s human behavior.
Apart from the gaping plot holes this opens up (if all the zombies really want is coffee, candy, and Wi-Fi, why are they eating people?) it also brings the movie’s head-smacking political commentary to the forefront—especially since Jarmusch tips his hand in one of his previous films.
In his 2013 vampire flick, Only Lovers Left Alive, the word “zombies” also appears. But in that story, it doesn’t refer to the walking dead: it’s a modern-day vampire’s disdainful term for mortals. From the vampire’s perspective, humans lack full awareness, and are constantly preoccupied with their own petty needs; therefore, “zombies.”
“Zombies” are stupid people.
The same logic holds for the “zombies” in Don’t Die. Apart from the genre-mandated cannibalism and absent pulse, Jarmusch’s zombies behave like mindless people: shambling from one consumer fix to the other, unaware of the world around them, stuck on autopilot. Too stupid to know they’re dead.
Destroying the world.
Combined with the inciting incident of “polar fracking” and climate change, this snaps the movie’s moral logic into focus.
To borrow a popular phrase from the time this movie was released: the director woke up and (literally) chose violence.
Jim Jarmusch is out for vengeance.
Look at who lives and who dies, in the world that “Jim” rules over. All the outsiders who condemn the society of Centerville, either passively or actively? They all survive.
Hermit Bob has the last lines of the movie, spitting out his disgust from his refuge in the bushes: “What a fucked-up world.” Tilda Swinton’s extraterrestrial-in-disguise carts off in a flying saucer in the third act, practically over the heads of the LEOs trapped in their squad car by a swarm of zombies—not deigning to help in any way, offering nothing but an implied interstellar “Fuck You.” The Foster Kids are blameless innocents whose only narrative purpose is to be vaguely oppressed by The System; they spend most of the movie hiding in a closet before escaping into the woods, back to nature, literally and symbolically leaving civilized society to its fate with hardly a backwards glance.
Who deserves to get dismembered, according to both the in-movie Script written by “Jim” and the real-life script written by Jim? Everybody else. All the stupid people who can’t stop chasing “WiFi” and “guitar” and “coffee.” They’re dragging everyone else down to die. The Townsfolk, the LEOs, the Hot City Kids—it’s too late for all of them, man. They were too complacent. Didn’t pay attention. Didn’t stop the “zombies” soon enough.
Now there’s nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide. No point in trying to save anyone. It’s the end of the entire world. The whole thing is swinging off its axis. And it’s their (our) fault, because they (we) didn’t pay attention.
What if, like, we’re the real zombies?
Far out, man.
The only thing left to do is go down swinging: bashing in the heads of your former neighbors—the morons who caused all this mess—before succumbing to your fate, as honorable conduct demands.5
The wrath of “Jim” knows no mercy. So it is written. So it shall be.
In the cosmos that “Jim”/Jim creates, these fictional people are dying horrifically for our real-world sins. Artistically, this is intended as a sacrifice of atonement.
What a fucked-up world, indeed.
Conclusion
Maybe it’s just a bad movie.
Nevertheless, I think it illustrates two important things.
First: not all movies are prophetic. Not all creators can capably handle the mythic themes they’re grappling with. One of the things that separates a truly great work of art from a derivative imitation is the ability to straddle the divide between the mythic and the mundane.
Night of the Living Dead does this remarkably well, despite outwardly being a crowd-pleasing “dumb” movie. (Whether this was accidental genius or something more is, again, the subject of my book.)
By comparison, despite technically sharing a genre with Romero’s work and directly referencing his original canon, The Dead Don’t Die falls flat on its face. It fails as a mythic narrative, and as a good “smart” movie, and as a good “dumb” movie. Too gimmicky, complicated and self-satisfied to serve as pure entertainment; too narratively contradictory and mean-spirited to be intelligent; too tied down by materialism to be mythically transporting.
Second: part of the reason that Jarmusch’s film fails so egregiously is because of the lack of mythic language around climate change. Without an effective vocabulary for what’s happening to the world on a metaphysical level (because “the world” is not just a physical thing) creators like Jarmusch are left with this impotent rage, which they take out on their characters.6
This movie is wrestling with something very real. But because our culture demands that we screen everything through the filter of materialism, we’re left with these pat morality tales and strained-to-breaking allegories, told from a scientific perspective.
It’s not good art; it barely qualifies as effective propaganda. Our culture and our world suffers as a result.
We can do better.
That does it for Part 2.
Stayed tuned for Part 3.
Take that, Apocryphal Ernest Hemingway.
Couldn’t be arsed to write a summary myself, so here’s what Our Machine Overlords™ came up with (written in the style of Oscar Wilde, for no particular reason):
In the quaint yet dreadfully unremarkable town of Centerville, where time itself seems to loiter without purpose, an unnatural disturbance awakens the slumbering dead. The cause, it is whispered, is some ghastly ecological mischief wrought by the folly of man—a shift in the planet’s tilt, no less!—though one suspects the universe simply grew bored and sought a diversion.
The town’s lawmen, the laconic Chief Cliff Robertson and his existentially fatigued deputy, Ronnie Peterson, confront the crisis with the weary indifference of men who have seen far too much yet understood far too little. “This will end badly,” Peterson intones, with the prophetic certainty of a Greek chorus that has misplaced its enthusiasm. The dead rise, not for vengeance nor for reckoning, but rather for habit, shambling toward the remnants of their past desires: coffee, wi-fi, Chardonnay, an irony so profound it might have been scripted by Fate Herself.
Among the living, a panoply of eccentrics parade their peculiarities: a gas station attendant who worships cinema as sacred scripture; a nihilistic undertaker with an accent as sharp as her katana; a reclusive hermit whose wisdom is mistaken for lunacy. Each reacts to the undead in a manner dictated by their nature—some with panic, some with resignation, and others with the kind of detached bemusement that is, perhaps, the only dignified response to so absurd a world.
Yet, as the night lengthens and the dead feast, a grim realization settles over our hapless protagonists: resistance is not merely futile, but rather unfashionable. The dead, after all, are merely an exaggeration of the living—mindless in their obsessions, relentless in their appetites, and utterly indifferent to the art of conversation. And so, as the credits roll and the world spirals further into its own exquisite decay, one cannot help but wonder—was it the undead who changed, or had we, all along, been just like them?
There’s meant to be some black humor in zombies craving the consumer goods they enjoyed when they were alive—but it’s reeeally hard to appreciate the smirking irony of Zombie Iggy Pop searching for “cawww-feeeee” (‘cause he was also in Coffee and Cigarettes, geddit?) while one of the zombies’ victims is just out of frame, sobbing and pleading while being eaten alive. Jesus Christ, Jarmusch. Take a walk outside.
It’s this kind of movie, unfortunately:
Good one, Jim.
Jarmusch has an interest in the samurai code of honor running throughout his filmography, but it feels badly misplaced here. The ending suggests that our only moral obligation is to accept the inevitable and die with courage, but not actually try to save anyone else. Wild stuff.
See also: Don’t Look Up (2021), a companion film to The Dead Don’t Die, and a similar artistic failure.