loon pond: Andrew Ford, and a taste for zombies, vampires and disaster films

(Above: a couple of ways to have sex. Not recommended for longer term relationships).

In the end we all die.

And that perception - dimly perceived and through a glass darkly - runs through everything. Including the cinema. When we end, the world ends, at least for all practical personal purposes.

Which is why it's a pity Andrew Ford's It's the end of the world but not as we know it misses the point so often when it comes to the cinema, and its attachment to end of the world scenarios, and instead conflates and confuses the genre with vampirism and zombie-ism.

Along with the recent apocalypse trend there has also been a notable outbreak of the undead. Zombies and vampires are said to be indicators of our times - zombies rise from the grave when society is in turmoil, vampires when the economy prospers. It's odd that so many undead should mingle together like a cocktail party at the Rapture.

Not really. The first zombie film, the much cherished if dreadful White Zombie was indeed made in 1932 in a time of economic turmoil, but it's actually more directed at things dear to the male psyche - in particular a man having a female zombie in a trance so she will cheerfully act as a love slave, within the limits of love slavery specified by the cultural values of the thirties. But we all know what it means in the off screen scenes.

Revolt of the Zombies is more discursive, but it too ends with the baddie trying to use his zombie powers to enslave the difficult and fickle Claire.

Even when you get to the better outing from Val Lewton in 1943, I Walked With a Zombie, the main thrust of the voodoo is to turn women into zombies, so men can do naughty things to them, in an off-screen setting inhabited by the male mind.

It's only much later that the psycho sexual overtones (with a strong element of trance/hypnosis) gives way to a general slaughter of zombies, a kind of relentless ongoing killing fields ideally suited to first person shooter video games. George Romero's Night of the Living Dead started this trend in 1968, cannily mixing zombies and the apocalypse, and Romero drank six times from that particular well. An important element in this zombie twist is that the reanimated dead, or captured converted mindless humans (a bite or a kiss will do for the conversion) have claims on a kind of perverted immortality.

While a few critics - in the way of critics - tried to dress up Romero's work as resonating with the Vietnam era, it was more likely driven by the need to give the feeble zombie genre a twist, and it worked. Now you can take them out with cricket bats or chain saws, and the killing and the skewering takes the sublimated sexual violence into a different place.

The earliest vampire films also offered up the notion of 'vamps' or femme fatales. Cinema has always been the place where men (and boys) can explore their dangerous fixations about women in the safety of the dark, and vampirism got going early - the 1913 The Vampire, derived from a Rudyard Kipling poem, followed the femme fatale storyline, and 'vamps' and their 'vamping' became an accepted style in silent cinema.

It was Murnau's Nosferatu that swung the genre around to the idea of men, ghosts, wraithes, whatever, wanting to stick their fangs into the necks of women, preferably virginal. The many Dracula shows kept the idea alive, as did the cheapie Hammer Horror shows, and throughout a simple minded Freudian fixation on sublimated sexuality was the name of the game (here for a more extended summary of the genre).

Again immortality was a key component - you got eternal life, while missing out on a few banal human qualities, and you got to molest young women. Perfect. Sure there were stakes and garlic and sunlight and mirrors didn't work, but hey take the rough with the smooth.

So Ford, by trying to link zombies and vampires with the current crop of 'end of the world' movies, does dirt on their proud perverted sexual cinema history. Similarly he rather misses the point about end of the world disaster films:

Those who like to claim that a belief in man-made climate change is an expression of a "secular religion" are on the right track when it comes to the sorts of images filmmakers create to depict the end of the world.

These cinematic moments are riffs on images that described the biblical apocalypse. Martin and other artists who painted scenes from the Book of Revelation created artistic visions that have become indelibly linked in our minds to our imaginary apocalypse. We collectively believe that the end of the world will actually look like that.

But the ''man-made global warming equals secular religion" argument misses the point that the art of the sublime, and its contemporary manifestation in Hollywood cinema, and with it our imagining of the end, is an expression of Western Christian belief not of some pop culture neurosis.

Not really. Disaster films have been around since the start of cinema, and again space, time and tedium prevents detailing the many wondrous examples that have littered the screen, but you can find a good summary here - ranging from bog standard fires and hurricanes through to the science fiction riffs and the golden age of Irwin Allen. It's not just the current fuss about climate change that keeps them going. We've always loved a good disaster, because from time to time, the world has seen the odd disaster or three.

What they offer indeed is a pop culture neurosis, to do with death and extinction, on occasion elevated to the species level, as you'd expect of children of Noah, but at heart so we can enjoy the pleasures of melodrama.

Anthony Lane in The New Yorker and his review of 2012, Only Make-Believe, provides a better insight into the peculiar cathartic benefits of disaster films:

The best thing about time is the nick of it. Such is the binding rule of melodrama, which decrees that all escapes shall be narrow, no more than the breadth of a hair: to save oneself and others at one’s leisure, with room to spare, would be an insult to the satisfaction of the moment. The rule was most famously observed by D. W. Griffith, in 1920, when, in “Way Down East,” he had Richard Barthelmess pluck a supine Lillian Gish from a chunk of ice floe just before it reached the lip of a waterfall. The rhythm of the scene has never really been improved upon—Griffith even found space for some dreamy, drifting closeups of Gish, in her dead faint—and there are filmmakers working today who strive mightily to match him. Their leader is Roland Emmerich, the director of “Independence Day,” “Godzilla,” and now “2012,” and a firm believer in the closest possible shave.

Along with the nick of time comes spectacle, and for spectacle, we now have the imaginings offered up by CGI. But how to make that work at the box office?

In an American context, what you need is a nuclear family which will survive against all odds, the perfect example being Deep Impact, where a budding young nuclear family manage to get themselves up to the top of the Appalachians to avoid the impact of the comet-induced disaster.

This is of course the original Noah survival myth told over and over again, but refracted through the kind of survivalist thinking which once found another perfect expression in Ray Milland's 1962 Panic in Year Zero! (this time a nuke sends the family into the hills to learn how it is if you want to get by in the backwoods of Montana).

On one level it's easy to blame Christianity for all this - I do it all the time - but of course if you've lived through World War 11 or Hiroshima or the Holocaust, you're unlikely to dismiss this as simple myth-making.

We all experience the end of the world at some time - and we know it's coming with our own death - and we seek to subvert it, and you don't have to be Joseph Campbell to appreciate that the kind of deep mythology at work in the movies transcends one strand of religious thinking to satisfy the needs and desires of audiences worldwide.

From a male point of view. Hollywood depends on it, relies on it, and plans for it.

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

That's why, unlike the Christian mythology of the rapture, in the movie mythology there will always be the old testament Noah survivors. Sure there'll be people who lift a glass of wine to the sky before being swept away by the incoming tidal wave, sure there'll be the crewman who gets killed in the third reel, or the best buddie who dies in the fifth:

Guy Fleegman: Yeah, but that's when I thought I was the crewman that stays on the ship and something is up there and it kills me. But now I'm thinking I'm the guy that gets killed by some monster five minutes after we land on the planet. (Galaxy Quest).

But we're invited to identify with the survivors and why wouldn't you? Because you can always get out of the most difficult pickle in the nick of time, a form of thinking which infests the debate on climate change.

But enough of the generalizations, because Frost makes the mistake of thinking that disaster movies are a kind of psychic social code - "what are we trying to tell ourselves?" - when in fact storytelling from the time of the first storytellers has always looked to disaster (look no further than Grendel) as a form of perverse and cathartic entertainment. Once you experience the end of the world, you leave your seat, and head home hopefully for the quiet life.

Like all fads, they come and go according to the seasons and the box office, and while currently in a healthy condition, disaster films are just as likely to fade from view for a time, in much the same way as serial killers abdicated the big screen so they could infest television police procedurals. After the western died, it migrated to outer space, so you could end up with a western like Joss Whedon's Serenity. Who knows when the current batch will do an Irwin Allen and slink away for a few years, while bog standard 'end of your boat or building', a la Batman, will reign supreme?

The current and not so current crop of end of the world movies (Transformers and Lord of the Rings included) are riding a CGI wave, and they draw their inspiration not just from the romantic and gothic imagery Frost notes in eighteenth and nineteenth century paintings but from works which look as far back as the destruction of Troy, Babylon, Carthage and the tower of Babel. After all, Troy, as well as being a disastrous bore, was just a disaster movie with swords and sandals. (and where better to look for celebrations of this kind of destruction than amongst the medieval artists who were astonished and bemused by the surreal, the bizarre, and the black death).

But you have to know what you're doing when playing with the end of the world, and Alex Proyas's Knowing showed he clearly didn't have a clue, especially with his attempted riff on the Garden of Eden as his ending. Not all disaster movies make money. Some are just disasters.

Let's leave it at this: so long as there's Hiroshima or the black death doing the rounds, disaster films will attract an audience, but they won't be necessarily be working the same side of the street as a kinky psycho sexual vampire show. Fang me baby is not quite the same as bash me over the head with a cricket bat, but it's way different from 'ma, look at me, I'm on top of the world', followed by a ritual blowing up of that world.

Enough already. It's Friday, and the end of the world is much more interesting than work, but thankfully work will end and the weekend will follow, giving you satanist x-boxers time to enjoy butchering zombies, and hopefully survive the end of virtual worlds, and then start work all over again.

Work! Is it any wonder we love disaster movies, and movies with a little kinky vampiric or zombie sex.

And now as usual a little culture, in which as usual it's all the woman's fault:

The Vampire by Rudyard Kipling

The verses--as suggested by the painting by Philip Burne Jones, first exhibited at the new gallery in London in 1897.

A fool there was and he made his prayer
(Even as you and I!)
To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair
(We called her the woman who did not care),
But the fool he called her his lady fair
(Even as you and I!)

Oh the years we waste and the tears we waste
And the work of our head and hand,
Belong to the woman who did not know
(And now we know that she never could know)
And did not understand.

A fool there was and his goods he spent
(Even as you and I!)
Honor and faith and a sure intent
But a fool must follow his natural bent
(And it wasn't the least what the lady meant),
(Even as you and I!)

Oh the toil we lost and the spoil we lost
And the excellent things we planned,
Belong to the woman who didn't know why
(And now we know she never knew why)
And did not understand.

The fool we stripped to his foolish hide
(Even as you and I!)
Which she might have seen when she threw him aside--
(But it isn't on record the lady tried)
So some of him lived but the most of him died--
(Even as you and I!)

And it isn't the shame and it isn't the blame
That stings like a white hot brand.

It's coming to know that she never knew why
(Seeing at last she could never know why)
And never could understand.

Oh go suck on it Rudyard.

(And here's that image of a pesky female vampire)