Overbored and the Cultural Reich of the 20th Century
J.J. Abrams made another movie. And yes, it’s blockbuster pageantry. He truly is the undisputed champion of supposedly watchable action cinema, Michael Bay’s antithesis I guess. Overlord, his newest production, falls in line with the Bad Robot portfolio, spectacle with just enough substance to warrant any scrutiny.
Overlord is a couple things, but mostly it is a confirmation of Fredric Jameson’s postmodern foresight. We live in an epoch of inescapable throwback pastiche, and while most reboot projects wink (or twitch uncontrollably) at fans, Abrams’s newest enterprise bludgeons the audience with a furious slew of algorithmically-generated tropes, an act of revivalist violence more gruesome than the gallons of red food coloring spilled in this faux-grindhouse slog.
The canonical American action movie troops are all here: blonde tough guy, Brooklyn comic relief guy, good-natured doesn’t like to kill guy, young and dutiful but gets into trouble guy, and likeable but inept guy. Also, don’t forget the French civilian who is actually a secret badass heroine. It’s a ragtag bunch of people who shouldn’t have been called together during wartime, but whoa, here we are,,,,,,,,,,and they have to apparently complete a vital mission to destroy a Nazi radio tower within a few hours in order for D-Day to succeed???
I think it’s pretty obvious that the Bad Robot crew knew that this insipid plot had no potential as just a straightforward WWII action movie. But, Abrams also wasn’t going to be putting together the next Dunkirk, another insufferably piddling WWII film, but at least one that portrayed a fascinating and lesser known turning point in the war. What could rejuvenate the decrepit fanfare of the Hollywood patriots vs. Nazis tradition, particularly for a generation of young people whose brains have been rewired and devolved by fast-paced first person shooter video games?
That’s right assholes, motherfriggin’ zombies.
Before I start to dissect this festering corpse of a movie, there’s some superficial qualms I should air. A Nazi zombie movie could be fun, something ridiculous like 28 Days Later meets Saving Private Ryan. Bad Robot had the premise and the resources to create something entertaining, albeit vastly distanced from groundbreaking. I’m not going to see a J.J. Abrams film because I want Fellini okay, I just thought that maybe blowing up Nazis, and zombies, and Nazi zombies would be fun to watch. Apparently that’s too much for America’s shambling culture industry to deliver.
The zombie factor doesn’t really do anything to veil this film’s unambiguous American propagandizing, mostly because the antagonists aren’t really zombies. The central conflict revolves around a primordial serum that can transform both the dead and living into sadistic super soldiers. There’s no zombification, only devilish super-Nazification, and even that only happens like twice.
The film synthesizes two cinematic forces that Americans have come to fear as existential threats to our strip malls and Chick-fil-A’s:
- The scary other. Lately this entity is racialized, but in this case, it’s the classic bogeyman of the Nazi regime.
- The scary end. The purest apocalyptic fear of war, disease, and collapse, all concentrated into the movie’s zombie-esque baddies.
These aren’t irrational fears. There are very real tyrants, very real environmental degradations that, to be candidly morbid, could push the human race into extinction. But, armageddon isn’t going to arrive in the bite of a Nazi zombie. The more likely instigator of a devastating global crisis will undeniably be the pen of an American lawmaker.
And now we come to the purpose of this movie, to assuage the viewer’s dread, to take their mind off real life villains and turn their attention to the killable ghouls of America’s filmic mythology.
Mark Fisher explains this objective more astutely with a paraphrase of Lacan: “the Real is what any ‘reality’ must suppress; indeed, reality constitutes itself through just this repression. The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality.”
Overlord, and The Imitation Game, and Pearl Harbor, and every WWII movie, and every project of the spectacular American cultural authority exists to dissuade one from noticing those fractures and inconsistencies. The Real that is worldwide immiseration under capital and looming ecological cataclysm becomes shrouded by the victorious realities imposed upon us by Hollywood marketing. One gets off work, goes to the theater, buys their ticket, sits in one of those massive recliners that every cineplex has now, and watches reality, or a fantastic redeployment of reality like Overlord, be performed for them.
As one cankers sitting there in the theater, Overlord indoctrinates via a personal osmosis. It’s as Baurdrillard asserts, “consumption is primarily organized as a discourse to oneself, and has a tendency to play itself out, with its gratifications and deceptions, in this minimal exchange. The object of consumption isolates.” Mind you, Overlord isn’t a captivating movie. But imagine years of Overlords and other more effective propaganda. Imagine decades of one’s relation to the Real repressed; a life of rational underlying anxieties and concerns muddied by the false consciousness of the American culture industry.
It’d probably be very alienating.
It’s ironic that such a blasé horror film could be a facet of a larger terrifying cultural program, and unfortunately, the monotony is likely to persist as long as these big picture replications of whatever 40’s-80’s ephemera is hip at the moment continue to be produced en masse. The managers of media are all 50–60some children of the 20th century. I don’t think popular content will be exiting that era as long as capitalism reproduces itself.
