“The Strain,” medicalized Nazi zombie vampires
By: Stan Goff
Tags: Zombie Film, The Strain, Biophobia, Medicalization, Gender

Covid-19 is responsible for me watching more television than I have since I was, like, 10. I recently came across a series called The Strain, which mashed together zombies, Nazis, and vampires . . . with a medical contagion narrative. So I decided to pull a chapter from my book, Tough Gynes, that has some bearing on this trope cluster. (You should by all means buy this book right away and get a few copies for your friends.)

I post this not just to review the contagious zombie trope or sell books, but because the pandemic has, in many ways, fed into the kinds of fears — especially “biophobia” —which have animated all sorts of mischief in the past . . . fear of fresh food, germophobia, and other manufactured obsessions that translate into fear and loathing of the “contaminated” other.

The pandemic — which should be taken seriously, and hasn’t been taken seriously enough — will not help matters going forward, because many people lack the conceptual tools necessary to distinguish the pandemic from these obsessions. We generalize from the specific.

Pass the hand sanitizer.

The book unpacked nine movies that related to the theme of “honorary men,” or violent women characters who, in order to secure their “equality,” became like the violent men of our past narratives — a trope that has done nothing to push back against the violent patriarchy which this trope purports to resist. This chapter is titled Recapturing Normal from the Zombie Apocalypse: Selena. Hope you like it.

Attention: spoilers.

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28 Days Later is two overlapping genres: the contagion narrative and zombie apocalypse.1 Good writing, great direction and acting, excellent film composition and editing, convincing special effects that don’t overwhelm the scenes, and well-adapted background music are all combined with a strong story to make this an edge-of-your-seat classic. That’s not to say that the film is above criticism, as we will see, but at least it’s not Hollywood gruel like G.I. Jane. [an earlier chapter in the book] Before we get to the female lead character, Selena, however, we need to look at the film’s dual genre to establish some context.

As a long time Haiti-phile, I have to start with zombies. The history of the zombie is quite revealing, because it is associated with Haiti, even though zombies are an American invention. As Paul Farmer pointed out in The Uses of Haiti,2 the first independent black nation — one born of a slave rebellion — has been attacked and undermined from its inception by “white” nations that needed a standing example, a “proof,” of some inhering black deviance and black incapacity for self-governance. The policies first of France and then the U.S. were designed to cripple the nation at every turn to make the black deviance narrative appear to be true. And so Haiti came to be associated in the white mind with some fundamental deviance; and this association prepared the “white mind” to project its most lurid fears back onto Haiti.

Between 1791 and 1804, when the Haitian rebel armies were beating the pants off of Napoleon’s best (a disastrous blow to the myth of white supremacy), Napoleon — who was fighting in Europe, too — started to run out of money. That’s why the Louisiana Purchase happened in 1803, adding some or all of Louisiana, Arkansas, Northern Texas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, both Dakotas, and Wyoming, as well as a bit of Saskatchewan to the holdings of the United States. France had claimed this land and sold the claim to the United States to replenish the Little General’s war treasury. Bonaparte lost the war in Haiti less than a year later, and things continued to go downhill for him afterwards.

French slave owners in Haiti, with many of their slaves, decamped to New Orleans,3 and the Haitian slaves — seventy percent having been born in Africa — brought an amalgam of native rituals and beliefs, which were syncretically combined with aspects of French Catholicism. Those beliefs and rituals were further mixed with Native American beliefs and rituals, and this amalgam came to be known as Voudon, or in street speech, voodoo — a popular spirituality. Beliefs and stories about voodoo then circulated among whites, where they were embellished by white people’s often paranoid imagination of black cultures. It wasn’t until around 1930 that the popular idea of voodoo incorporated zombies — the walking dead. White American culture, especially Hollywood, with drivel like The Serpent and the Rainbow, projected its racial fears into the zombie. The rest, as they say, is history.4

This individual racial zombie was then replaced by a new kind of zombie, zombies exhibiting herd behavior. In Night of the Living Dead, the 1968 camp-cult classic by George Romero, hordes of slow-moving but relentless reanimated corpses roam the streets in pursuit of human flesh to devour — brains preferred.

In Romero’s film there is brief speculation that the reanimation of corpse herds is being caused by radioactivity from a returning space probe, but this is a minor sop to causal calculation, the main attraction being the advancing horror of smelly, sluggish, brain-eating cadavers. A few people whose kids had been traumatized by the film wanted the courts to declare Night of the Living Dead a form of “violence pornography.” Given what kids can see nowadays, including the television series The Walking Dead, which is a kicked-up version of Night of the Living Dead, the campaign to nip the “violence pornography” of the zombie in the bud has apparently failed.

The Walking Dead has herd zombies, but it also employs another theme — the patriarchal survival fantasy, in which the key to survival (redemption) is still the Man with a Gun, even when it involves women and women with guns. Because a bite contaminates you and makes you a zombie, The Walking Dead is also a contagion narrative.

This will take a little history, too.

All good fun.

In 2002, Barbara Duden and Silja Samerski introduced a new term: pop gene. The pop gene is short form for “popular gene,” and it doesn’t mean the gene with the most friends. Pop gene doesn’t refer, except in passing, to actual genetic science either. Pop gene is a vague yet potent impression of what genes are, the popular imagination of genes which has only a fleeting familiarity with actual genetic science. In the pop-imagination, the pop-gene is one form of collective magical thinking. The “gene” becomes symbolic, an idea, independent of actual genes, and an idea with tremendous power.

Samerski and Duden are both also interested in the history of the experience of pregnancy, and how — over time — this experience has been transformed into a “risk management” exercise requiring the mediation of highly specialized experts. The pop-gene has driven this risk management medicalization paradigm. So what about zombies? Hold tight. We’re getting there.

Samerski, a German, traced the use of the term risk in her own culture and found that in the early twentieth century, risk was a merchant’s term. As cars became ubiquitous, risk was associated with the dangers of car traffic.

But today, sick people, pregnant women and healthy persons, they all live under the shadow of “risk”. When I read the science page of my newspaper, when my health shop informs me about food options or when I go for a routine check to my gynecologist — everywhere I am in the danger of absorbing risks. For years, my neighbor lives in anxiety because of her increased risk of breast cancer. She worries incessantly about every medical check up and studiously pores over all the guides on “Breast fitness — How to reduce your risk of breast cancer”. Almost none of my friends escaped becoming a risk carrier as soon as they were diagnosed “pregnant” by a gynecologist. I remember very well when one of my friends desperately rang my doorbell after the physician had urged her to choose between two risks: The risk of giving birth to a handicapped child and the risk of an abortion induced by the test.5

This loss of autonomy to experts, based in some cases on the internalization of the pop gene, has transformed many people into obsessive “risk managers.” It is relatively new; but it points to the ways that popular misconceptions can be transformed into popular obsessions.

Now, at last, we come back to zombies and contagion.

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In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Western Europe and the United States were gripped by something called “the social hygiene movement.”

The popular (mis)conception then, which still prevails today, was what we might call the pop germ. [today we may have the pop-virus]

Ever since Pasteur’s germ theory and the partially successful employment of carbolic acid as a surgical disinfectant during the American Civil War, the discovery of the role of particular microorganisms in medical pathologies has been translated into the popular imagination as germophobia. And the way to protect oneself from “germs” is through sterilization/extermination.

The fact that the overwhelming majority of microorganisms — a classification by size only — are either benign to humans or beneficial has not blunted this fear. In fact, to this day, one can see television ads representing “germs” as disgusting cartoon-monsters, the solution being the liberal application of this or that product to “leave surfaces germ free.”

The social hygiene movement of the early twentieth century simply extrapolated this phobia from microorganisms to whole societies, with a synergetic boost from social Darwinism, which led to a vigorous American

eugenics movement. Affluent white people not only saw “social hygiene”

as a public health movement, but poor and racially-othered people as the

equivalent of “germs.” Germs and “genes,” the pop gene of that era seen in

the light of selective breeding, these ideas — including aggressive support

for eugenics — were advocated by liberal and conservative alike well into

the twentieth century, until the special earnestness of Hitler’s eugenic programs was exposed after the war, temporarily slamming on the brakes on open support for eugenics.6

Even after Hitler’s illumination of the eugenic moral hazard, however, the metaphorical power of disease and sociopolitical hygiene retained its force. J. Edgar Hoover frequently referred to communism, for example, as a “virus.” Today, the rapid spread of a story over the internet is called “viral.”

The contagion narrative in film has its symbolic roots in this history, and more generally in the way cultures have understood purity and pollution, as in Mary Douglas’s anthropology, to define boundaries for millennia. Priscilla Wald calls the specific form of contagion narrative that became popular in the 1990s and increasingly popular in the past few years, an “outbreak narrative.” She relates this popular narrative to the serial discoveries of various communicable diseases, HIV in particular, followed by traveling maladies like SARS and Ebola.

The outbreak narrative — in its scientific, journalistic, and fictional incarnations — follows a formulaic plot that begins with the identification of an emerging infection, includes discussion of the global networks throughout which it travels, and chronicles the epidemiological work that ends with its containment.7

The standard outbreak narrative described by Wald ends with the triumph of science over these threats that have penetrated our boundaries, and sets up the scientific establishment in a kind of guardian role for a world where traditional boundaries begin to seem dangerously permeable. In film, we see this narrative in And the Band Played On and other “based-on-the-true-story” accounts.

Outbreak and contagion narratives are always in danger of reinforcing the medicalization of society wherein cultural, moral, and even legal norms are giving way to medical descriptions of behaviors considered aberrant, with medical solutions near at hand — which include copious pharmaceuticals and some institutionalizations. ADHD, for example, describes a set of behaviors that were in greater or lesser force apparent in children before they were confined for six hours a day in compulsory schools; but rather than ask if children should be thus confined, we describe the reactions of many children to that confinement as pathological, then prescribe drugs to inhibit these reactions. Again, this process of medicalization surrenders our autonomy, practical and moral, to a collection of experts in the radical monopoly called Medicine.

Contagion narratives draw the line between the healthy and the infected

as boldly as older films drew the line between the Good Guys and the

implacable threat, and set up a new risk equation where The Threat, now

existential, can come up anywhere, at any time.8

There is more than one way, medicalization aside, to characterize contagion narratives. Returning to Night of the Living Dead, let’s compare Wald’s contagion narrative and the triumph of science to the zombie story.

The irredeemability of the infected/the zombie creates a situation wherein

what is called for is not science, but a reassertion of naked violence like

the kind that drives Walking Dead and 28 Days Later. In some cases, this

contagion narrative serves up male post-apocalyptic, survivalist fantasies. In this regard, contagion/contamination/zombie narratives like World War

Z, Resident Evil, and Dawn of the Dead establish the basis for tempo-task

mass killing which allows men (and their Hot Chicks with Guns [a trope covered earlier in the book]) to prove their mettle by dealing out death (to the dangerous dead). These can be cross-categorized with other post-apocalyptic genres — post-nuclear and alien invasion, e.g., Mad Max, Independence Day, and Cloverfield.

28 Days Later, even though it departs from other male post-apocalyptic, survivalist fantasies, and even though it is, in its production values, superior to most, and even though it significantly departs from this genre in particular and powerful ways, is exactly that — a male post-apocalyptic, survivalist fantasy. The inclusion of Selena, played to the hilt by Naomie Harris, not a token female at all, and a black woman to boot, as a co-equal lead with white male protagonist, Jim, makes the fundamental masculinity of this narrative far less apparent than it usually is. 28 Days Later is also a film that has an explicit anti-christological theme with regard to the uses of violence and is resolved in the most conservative sense by redemptive violence and violent masculinity.

Karl Martin wrote a detailed exposition of the (pseudo) Christian themes in 28 Days Later,9 in which he showed how and how often Director Danny Boyle (Trainspotters, The Beach, Slumdog Millionaire), a former altar boy, ironically employed Christian music, metaphor, and imagery to translate Alex Garland’s (The Beach, Ex Machina) screenplay for 28 Days Later into this highly popular 2002 Gen X thriller, whose majority audience — and this is important — was young white men under thirty years of age.10

The film opens with a restrained, partially-tranquilized chimpanzee, surrounded by television monitors displaying newsreel footage of horrific mass violence. We pan over to the security monitors and see a black-clad team of Animal Rights activists breaking into the facility to liberate the chimps. We don’t know it yet, but within minutes, if we put on our thinking caps, we will realize that this government lab is developing a biowar weapon in the form of a virus, called Rage. Infection transforms the host into a hyperaggressive, highly contagious beater and biter, who strangely enough recognizes others of “the infected,” as we come to know them, and does not attack them. In fact, we have the Herd Zombie trope here, for pack monsters internally compelled to attack only those who are uninfected. Think Walking Dead or I Am Legend. Mary Douglas’s thesis about in-groups is super-amplified.

Government conspiracies, the basis of the Deep State Paranoia genre, are a popular device for contagion and monster narratives (Alien, Stranger Things, Resident Evil), but in 28 Days Later, the plague that is presumably created by the government (and, significantly, let loose by anti-government activists) destroys the known government. Immediately after the activists release the Rage virus on the world, we go to a scene 28 days hence, where our protagonist, Jim (played by Cillian Murphy), lies emaciated in a hospital bed hooked up to dead monitors and dried out IVs. When he escapes the hospital to eventually join up with two of the uninfected, he demands to know, “What about the government?” Selena informs him there is no government. “There’s got to be a government,” he insists. “They’re in a bunker or a plane.”

Civilizational breakdown becomes a key theme in the film, contrasted with what Martin calls the “pseudo-Christian community” of Jim and three of his fellow uninfected survivors.

Selena, then, is the female lead. Young, black, trained as a pharmacist — when we first meet her, she and another survivor named Mark are Jim’s rescuers. She leads the three, even in close combat with “the infected,” like a military commando. She is smart, decisive, efficiently ruthless, and painfully realistic. She is pretty, without a doubt, but not overtly sexualized in the opening scenes, where she is clad in a trench coat, with a kind of centurion’s helmet hairdo, carrying a machete in her hand at all times. In practice and temperament, Selena is a soldier. When Mark is bitten in a confrontation with the infected, she unhesitatingly dispatches him with her machete in a gruesome splatter scene, telling the surviving Jim that if she suspects he’s infected, she’ll do him “in a heartbeat.”

This is the Tempo Task trope.

The tempo task is a soldier character’s meat and potatoes. The Russian

film director Sergei Eisenstein coined the term “tempo task” as part of his critique of D. W. Griffith’s filmic paean to the KKK, The Birth of a Nation.

The tempo task is a set-up in the film’s story where time is running out, and for the victim — then generally a white woman “Beautiful Soul” — to be saved, the rescuers had to set aside the rules as well as their moral scruples to get the job done in time. Ann Kibbey translated the tempo task to the post-9–11 conjuncture, when we used the same rationale to justify torture.

Liberals . . . have had difficulty in believing that a much-discredited American film genre, the Western, could suddenly be structuring and mandating U.S. political rhetoric. It is — from Bush’s “Wanted dead or Alive” Bin Laden poster, to Colin Powell’s insistence that “time is running out” as we cut to the chase, to the numerous U.S. television and print media that report daily on the “Showdown” or “Standoff” with Iraq.11

The justifications are always hypothetical situations where the bomb

is about to go off in the subway. “Would you, oh effeminate snowflake that

you are, refuse to torture the evildoer rather than pull out his fingernails to

discover where the bomb is and defuse it before it kills thousands?” While

such urgently constructed scenarios are nearly non-existent in reality,

they are the stuff of many films, including the execrable Zero Dark Thirty,

directed by Katherine Bigelow, about the U.S. assassination of Osama bin Laden.

Bigelow introduced just such a last-minute torture scene to discover the whereabouts of bin Laden before he could get away, even though no such

thing happened in conjunction with the actual operation. It was gratuitous

pro-torture propaganda.

A zombifying contagion like the Rage virus is an ongoing tempo-task, a situation where all the old moral scruples have to be set aside. In the beginning of the film, Jim is reluctant to embrace the tempo-task mentality or Selena’s keep-up-or-die soldier’s commitment to survival. In fact, as Martin notes, Jim begins by exercising a decidedly Christian sensibility — at least from Director Boyle’s perspective.

Jim roams the empty streets of London after waking to an empty urban landscape from his hospital bed, and he eventually — as the sun gets low — heads to a church. He mounts the church steps, and we see a massive cross hanging by the wall, and alongside it graffiti that says, “The end is extremely fucking nigh,” a mocking paraphrase of the last chiliastic street preachers. Jim continues in, finding the pews stacked with corpses — where others have likewise sought the church for their fruitless refuge. When Jim calls out, two of “the infected” — the first he’s seen — pop up from the piled dead and begin scuttling toward the stairs. Then the priest himself arrives, infected, hissing, hacking, and red-eyed, convulsing with mindless reptilian aggression toward Jim until, at the last moment, Jim knocks the priest away with a sack of canned soda, muttering to himself as he runs away, “I shouldna done that.” Hit a priest, even though . . .

In a latter scene, before Selena has killed Mark, as the three companions head out to find Jim’s dead family, the background music is Perry Alleyne singing “Abide with Me,” a Christian hymn. It is coming back down that same road, Mark dead now, that Selena delivers her soldier’s speech to Jim: kill without hesitation if you want to live. Christian church fails to protect. Christian morals fail to protect. As Karl Martin says,

The gospel hymn’s lyrics follow Jim’s actions so closely that it seems as though this might be what is playing in Jim’s memory as he finds his parents. Secondly, the lyrics of the gospel hymn stress comfort offered to the individual in the midst of a crisis. The repeated use of the first person is one indication of the private nature of the comfort offered. The temptation sung of in “Abide With Me” seems to be to give up in despair. Perhaps following the pattern of his parents, and much more than the other two survivors, Jim seems tempted in this way. Early in the film, neither Mark nor Selena seems tempted to despair. Rather, they are focused on violent resistance to the infected . . . The Christian message of the hymn may bring comfort to Jim . . . but it provides little guidance in a world swarming with enraged plague victims.12

The message of the film is traditionally gendered, even with the early gender subversion of Selena as the warrior and Jim as the nurturing nice guy. Selena and Jim meet Frank and Hannah, father and daughter, holed up in a fortified high rise apartment. Selena and Jim enter the apartment under duress, “the infected” hot on their heels in the dark, dingy stairwells, but once inside, they encounter Christmas lights and Christmas music playing. Frank — appearing as a formidable black-armored behemoth — removes his makeshift armor and emerges as a smiling, soft spoken, middle-aged man who asks teenage daughter Hanna to find the crème de menthe for a toast to their guests.

They settle in, and when Jim and Selena are talking, she castigates Jim for calling Frank and Hannah “nice people,” telling him that his concern ought to be whether they’ll slow him down. This disagreement about who would or would not leave people behind highlights again the contrast between Selena’s soldier/survival ethic and Jim’s basic (Christian) altruism.

Over time, however, after the four companions go in search of “salvation,”

as advertised on a repeating radio broadcast, and after a kind of faux-family shopping spree and another confrontation with “the infected,” they take off through the countryside to the background of “Ave Maria” (that’s right) and end up camping at an old church ruin (yes), where they see four healthy horses (two adults and two juveniles) cavorting in a field, a reflection of how they themselves are becoming a family.

With the “In Paradisium” of Fauré’s Requiem in the background, this is when Selena has a change of heart, as she grows increasingly close to Hannah. In this pivotal scene, she admits to Jim that she was wrong in earlier saying “surviving is as good as it gets.” She has learned to love, and she even pecks Jim on the cheek. Frank has become the father (Jim even calls him “Dad,” when Frank shakes him to interrupt a nightmare), Selena and Jim the older brother and sister, and Hannah the younger sister. Selena, the soldier who eschewed any form of family, is now embracing it again, moving her back into the “correct” gender column. This is what Martin calls the formation of a pseudo-Christian community in the film.13

Off they head, the family of four, to the intersection described by the soldiers in the radio broadcast, promising, “Salvation is here. The answer to infection is here” (italics added). And so our family seeks salvation no longer from pseudo-Christ, but from soldiers. While this is certainly a common refrain in film — officially-sanctioned violent men with guns standing watch on the frontier between civilization and chaos — 28 Days Later flips this tired script and makes the soldiers they encounter more dangerous than the zombies.

Frying pan. Fire.

This is where the film appears to become really transgressive even as it slips into a deeply conservative convention, perhaps reflecting the moral confusion experienced by the writer’s generation, Alex Garland having been born in 1970.

Selena and her companions have reached the roadblock designated in the radio broadcast, whereupon Frank, the “father” of this little group, is infected by a drop of blood from a corpse. Just as Selena is screaming at the reluctant Jim to kill Frank, and just as Jim is about to do the deed, a flurry of shots from unseen assault rifles riddle Frank’s body.

The soldiers are here, and they transport the grief-stricken Hannah, Selena, and Jim back to their base — a converted palatial estate — where they are met by their new “father,” Major Henry West. West greets them with an incongruously light-hearted welcome, considering they’ve just lost their beloved Frank, and once they’ve settled in and begun taking showers, we see the soldiers — in an ominous foreshadowing of the group’s new danger — taunting one of their more effeminate comrades (the cook, who wears a frilly apron, and is called “a fucking Doris”) by playing stupid, reckless games with Frank’s car. A sense of that frat-boy threat which women know only too well.

Selena’s character, after her transformative softening at the idyllic campsite, becomes even more vulnerable now, crying to Jim in despair over Hannah’s grief, showing us how Selena is being transformed, with Frank dead now, into Hannah’s mother.

In a scene immediately following a defensive “battle” against an assault by a herd of “the infected,” which pumps up the saurian hyper-macho Corporal Mitchell, Mitchell re-enters the building, and in a scene dripping with that feral locker room innuendo, disarms Selena, taking her machete and using it to balefully mime his own erect penis. It is now that we realize Selena and Hannah are about to become Damsels in Distress [a film trope mentioned earlier in the book].

After the symbolic disarming and threat of rape, Major West — read: the bad father — takes newly-adopted son, Jim, to the side to explain that the radio message was meant to gather women as sex slaves for the soldiers. So Selena’s development, if we track it here, is from survivalist soldier and leader, to daughter, to mother, to Damsel in Distress. Just as importantly, this transformation of Selena serves the film’s overall purpose not in showing Selena’s development, but in giving Jim his chance to become the new father.

Jim is locked up with the rebellious Sergeant Farrell, who informs Jim that West is as crazy as the proverbial “shithouse rat,”14 and that Great Britain has been quarantined — that the virus has not, as earlier believed, destroyed all of human civilization.

Farrell and Jim are to be taken to a killing ground and shot by the vicious Corporal Mitchell and another soldier. When Mitchell’s comrade shoots Farrell, depriving Mitchell of the sadistic satisfaction of bayoneting Farrell, who Mitchell hates, Mitchell attacks his comrade, and Jim takes advantage of the momentary confusion to make his escape by diving into a hillside of putrid corpses.

Golgotha.

Place of the Skull.

Then comes a resurrection scene . . . but not for a Prince of Peace.

Jim hides in a pile of corpses, and when his former captors aren’t looking, he “rises from the dead,” whereupon he sees a plane fly over, confirming Farrell’s story. Jim is now transformed, ironically by love, into a steely-eyed fighter, and a pathetic-fallacy thunderstorm sends him half naked, ripped and stained, marching through the elements toward rescue and retribution.

Selena and Hannah, meanwhile, are being dressed up by the soldiers in preparation for being sexually broken in by their captors. Selena, the former and formidable zombie-fighter, is now disarmed, though not without a new kind of (feminine) agency. She promises to sexually cooperate if the soldiers leave her alone with Hannah for a moment, whereupon she gives Hannah a fistful of valium. Hannah asks if she is trying to kill her, and Selena says, no — as a good mother who is doing the best she can for her daughter, she explains, “I’m making it so you don’t care.”15

As we approach the climax of the film, Jim is sounding the siren at the

roadblock, calling out West and his soldiers for a jungle fight, just as Selena

and Hannah are being prepared for their first gang rape. Jim is no longer

the former bike messenger, nor is he the gentle counterpoint to Selena’s

stone-cold warrior. These roles are now flipped, as Jim is transformed into A Man — determined and deadly — and he has acquired . . . of course . . . a gun. He kills one soldier at the roadblock, then returns and releases a captive zombie to run amok in the palace.16 As the soldiers are picked off by the released zombies, Jim advances toward his confrontation with chief rapist, Mitchell. The transformed Jim drops down out of a skylight, bashes Mitchell’s head against a wall, then — in a state of righteous Rage (yes!) — Jim kills the odious Mitchell by gouging out his eyes with bare hands.

Jim, in an Oedipal struggle, is displacing West as the father, to rescue/win the women.

A final escape scene ensues, where West, conveniently offscreen for three scenes, reappears (Not Dead Yet trope) to shoot and wound Jim. Hannah gets rid of West by driving him with the car into the arms of a rage-zombie. A frantic clip-scene of attempted resuscitation!

Cut.

We are suddenly transported to an idyllic cottage in the country, where Jim is the (wounded) dad, Selena is the (nurturing) mom, and Hannah is the (cheerful) daughter. The world has been restored to a microcosmic (gender) order.

A plane flies over and spots their ground signal, which we saw Selena making earlier— Olde Tyme mom style — at a sewing machine.

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Just as this writer’s generation was caught between its normative inheritance from the generations before it, the social tumult into which it was born, and the fragmented moral pluralism of the 1990s and 2000s, this is another film that reflects a clumsy reaching for some feminist sensibility by men who think they know more about feminism than they do.

A white man generates, albeit with a few minor transgressions, a white man’s fantasy of a feminist “honorary male” (in extremis), and resolves his plot by returning to the normative gender order, the man coming into his own through redemptive violence, and Getting the (now male-protected) Girl(s).

Bad message maybe, but not unpredictable. Good movie, though.

Footnotes