Lena Headey – Memphis Flyer

One of the best stories in the documentary Electric Boogaloo: The Wild, Untold Story of Cannon Films is how ’80s schlockmeister supreme Yoram Globus would go to film market events with a stack of posters for theoretical films that hadn’t yet been made. If he could presell the European distribution rights to a movie called American Ninja, then he would make a movie about an American guy who was a ninja. Something similar seems to have happened with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which started life as a 2009 stunt mashup novel by Seth Grahame-Smith, the mastermind who brought us Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. The combination of public domain intellectual property with the age’s favorite monster briefly caught the internet zeitgeist back in 2009, and now that the book has been thoroughly forgotten, the movie it inspired hits theaters in the doldrums of Feburary. You gotta hand it to a title devious enough to part foolish investors from their money in multiple media. I have seen the future, and it is Snakes on a Plane for everyone!

Night of the Living Darcy — proper ladies spar with suitors and the undead in post-zombie England.

As the British say, it does what it says on the tin. You’ve got Liz Bennet (Lily James), the smartest of the five sisters, fighting off suitors who can’t respect her free will. Mr. Wickham (Jack Huston), who you think is good but who turns out to be bad, and Mr. Darcy (Sam Riley) who you think is bad but turns out to be good. The members of the aristocratic love triangle court furtively while scything through hoards of undead English peasants unleashed when the zombie virus migrated from the New World.

I’ll hand it to director Burr Steers: He got the tone just right. When it comes to seriousness, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is somewhere in the neighborhood of the 1966 Batman TV series. Former Doctor Who Matt Smith steals the picture as the clueless, but pious Parson Collins, serving up massive slabs of ham like he worked at the Blue Plate. Also in on the joke is Game of Thrones Lena Headey as the one-eyed Lady Catherine de Bourgh, the richest woman in England who leads the resistance in a final battle against the “ravenous unmentionables.” The script gets a lot of mileage out of creatively mangling Austen’s prose with lines like “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains is looking for more brains.” Verbal sparring between Liz and Darcy is accented with spin kicks, because proper ladies in post-zombie England are naturally trained in kung fu finishing schools. The women fight the undead with sword and musketry, and mankind with heaving bosoms and flaring nostrils.

It’s all in good fun, and I suppose there’s a feminist reading of this bizarre concoction. But it’s nothing Buffy the Vampire Slayer didn’t do much better in 1999 or so. Ultimately, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies fails to justify its own existence. It is a shambling mound of undead intellectual property grimly stomping its way through the world, devouring all dumb money in its path. Surely, the next step is a video game, where you can play as a zombie, or Darcy’s horse. Doesn’t that sound fun? Don’t answer, just look at the poster.

Game of Thrones is about a vampiric government sleepwalking toward impending disaster. Some would say that is why it has captured the zeitgeist. Others would say you just throw money at the zeitgeist and it does what you want. We are the ruled. The exercise of power in our lives — whether by government or corporate house — is something
we receive.

The premiere episode of the fifth season, which aired last Sunday, returns to the subject of obtaining and maintaining power. It’s appealing because the serfs — us — are mainly offscreen. So many of its favored characters are royals or nobles or secret royals. They are born into agency, then according to their respective empathy levels, proceed to brutally or morally pursue change.

Game of Thrones, Season 5

The audience I saw it with was rowdy. They yelled at man ass and gasped at cut throats. They were wearing costumes — I sat near a lovely Tormund Giantsbane and Brienne of Tarth — drank from fake goblets, and ate chicken legs. As the show started its plot machinery for the year, they maybe wanted a little more action, a little more thrill. Instead, it started contemplatively, giving us a childhood witch’s prophecy that fuels the neuroticism of the evil but sympathetic queen Cersei (Lena Headey). Elsewhere, a eunuch warrior went to a brothel in order to be held. Lancel Lannister (Eugene Simon), one of my favorite comic-relief characters, returned with a monk’s tunic and a shaven head, having found consolation in religion. We saw warrior king Mance Rayder’s (Ciarán Hinds) proud bearing ebb away into vulnerability on his way to being burnt at the stake. These tender moments are good.

But couched in that is something sad: doom. This is a nondemocratic world about to crumble into apocalypse. Ice zombies and dragons are closing in on Westeros from either end. There’s tension between the portrayal of medieval realpolitik — what series author George R.R. Martin calls “Aragorn’s tax policy” — and how reassuring a godlike eagle’s eye view of doom can be. The realistic character work and worldbuilding are spiced not only with heavy dollops of fantasy war, titillation, and sex, but the comfort that a corrupt world is explainable because it’s fueled by the Olympian lusts of a powerful few. Order in a crooked universe is preferable to the anarchy without it.

“The future is shit, just like the past,” says Tyrion Lannister on being freed from the crate in which he’s been hiding on an eastbound ship, recounting pushing his literal feces out of holes in the side. The premiere’s director, Michael Slovis, wonderfully shows off his Breaking Bad roots by giving us first-person glimpses of a passing marketplace through those holes. The eunuch Varys tells him he wants to install dragon mother Daenerys Targaryen (Emilia Clarke) on the Iron Throne to create “Peace. Prosperity. A land where the powerful do not prey on the powerless.” Tyrion answers, “Where the castles are made of gingerbread and the moats are filled with blackberry wine. The powerful have always preyed on the powerless, that’s how they became powerful in the first place.”

Peter Dinklage

This is the bedrock of the show. It soups up its soap opera by making its deaths more realistic and therefore unpredictable. But the emphasis on face-crushing and disemboweling also implies that the world is so brutal it may not be worth sticking your neck out. That’s a defeatist sentiment those of us interested in complex and decadent entertainment may not agree with. It’s the opposite of The Wire, which tried to explain the complex way a social order regenerates itself and traps its participants, who were often dirt poor. Game of Thrones is not revolutionary, even though the horribleness of its hereditary monarchy is a foregone conclusion. You get lost in the details of this lovingly realized, tragic world.

Showrunners David Benioff and Dan Weiss get better each year at streamlining those details. They have removed Viking pirates, vengeful zombie mothers, and much repetition. But the digressions that strangle Martin’s literary narrative also keep its hopelessness from becoming airtight. Streamlining the world makes it more clockwork in its dourness. The moneyed are further removed from changing things, but they are the only ones who can. This may not be accidental. Martin is a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War from New Jersey. Benioff is the son of the former head of Goldman Sachs.

Tearing down corruption is a hopeful thing. When your dragons breathe fire, you want them to
shine bright.