View image Just a few pieces from my Days of the Dead art collection that make me very happy. That's Catrina on the right. Meanwhile, in the rear center, the Virgin of Soledad is calming the "orrendas visiones" of Doña Micaelita Dominguez on Nov. 2, 1897.
"The Mexican people, after more than two centuries of experiments, have faith only in the Virgin of Guadalupe and the National Lottery." -- Mexican Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, 1976
I'm sure Paz intended that statement as a tribute to the defiant spirit of the people of Mexico.
Seven years ago, my dear friend Julia Sweeney and I were in Oaxaca, Mexico, for the Days of the Dead (Los Dias de Los Muertos), October 31-November 2, the holiday that has had the most personal meaning for me ever since I found out about it. Discovering that there was a three-day holiday -- the biggest and most festive of the year, surpassing Christmas even in a now mostly Catholic nation -- in which people build altars to remember and celebrate their dead, decorate graves with marigolds and stay up all night drinking and partying in cemeteries, where kids eat sugar skulls and "demons" are invited to join families in dancing and feasting... what a revelation!
View image Señor Deadline sneaks up behind me and fractures my bleeding skull with a golden hammer while I'm seated at my desk.
For somebody who was raised in a culture where death was rarely acknowledged with anything but whispers in hospitals or screams in movie theaters, the Mexican embrace of death with a three-day fiesta seemed to me to move beyond denial to something much richer and healthier. No, I don't believe the souls of the departed dwell in the Land of the Dead and return to visit their loved ones for three days a year -- but I sure think it's a fantastic idea.
I think Julia was still more or less Catholic (her background) when we were in Mexico -- although I'll never forget her exclaiming, in reference to how the Mixtecs skillfully adapted their pagan gods and beliefs to accommodate, and escape the wrath of, the Spanish missionaries: "Wow, they just took Roman Catholicism and ran with it!" (Viva la Virgin of Guadalupe!)
Fifteen months (and one cardiomyopic heart-stoppage on my part) later, we would be in Guangzhou, China, where I accompanied Julia as she adopted her daughter Mulan. While we were in the People's Republic, we learned that Mulan's birthday had been November 2, 1999 -- All Souls' Day, the very time we had been on the other side of the world, in Oaxaca, celebrating the Days of the Dead. (Cue Theramin music here.) Neither of us, I think, is inclined to attribute such a delightful and miraculous synchronicity to any Divine Influence or Plan -- indeed, we revel in the wonder of such an occurrence all the more because it is so spectacularly fortuitous. (Hi Mu: I'm so glad I was with your mom when you were adopted in China!)
I was introduced to the Days of the Dead through a little import shop on "The Ave" in Seattle's University District, La Tienda Imports, where as a Junior in high school I discovered a wonderful white coffin with my name on it ("Jaime"). You pull the string at the foot of the coffin and Jaime's skeletal head pops up through the hole on top of the coffin. This little handcrafted item has been with me for more than 30 years now. In 1976 I saw the extant footage of Sergei Eisenstein's "Que Viva Mexico" at the Second Seattle International Film Festival at the Moore-Egyptian Theatre, and fell in love with the holiday.
A year or two later I would try a mind-altering substance for the first time (courtesy of "The Dude," later immortalized in "The Big Lebowski") deep in the bowels of this same theater on the opening night of that edition of the festival, and then get lost trying to work my way through the "catacombs" to the surface for the midnight premiere of George Romero's "Dawn of the Dead," still the goriest, funniest, and my favorite of all "undead" movies (I was a little too young for "Night of the Living Dead" when it was first released). John Huston's underappreciated-masterpiece adaptation of Malcolm Lowry's "Under the Volcano" also begins with Days of the Dead imagery, in Cuernavaca (and the credits sequence is one of the most eerie and delightful I've ever seen).
So, I've been reflecting on what it is, exactly that scares us so much about the "undead" (in the sense of Romero's "Living Dead" and other zombie-spawn)? Well, first of all, they're ugly, smelly, and have a ravenous appetite for human flesh, of course. But a dead body is a dead body -- an inert object (see poem by William Carlos Williams at the end of this post). The terrifying thing about the living dead is that they're dead but they won't stay that way. It's not their death that horrifies us, it's their life -- their refusal to play by the rules of the natural world. The living dead are very much like the "pod people" of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," only they have a harder time "passing." (They still go to the mall, though, in "Dawn of the Dead" -- because it was "once an important place in their lives.")
I hope you've been following the new Showtime series, "Dexter," about a serial killer whose dad was a cop and who now works as a blood-spatter specialist for the Miami police department. Dexter is one of the living dead, emotionally speaking. He's a hollow man. As he says of his sister: "If I had feelings, I'd have them for her." There's something terrifying about that. Dexter, like most sociopaths, is quite good at faking ordinary human interactions (and to some extent we all go through the motions, "acting" emotions we don't really have because, well, it's just easier to survive that way). But Dexter's mask of ordinariness is what makes him so frightening, the knowledge that there's a killer lurking under the skin. And that goes to the heart of the horror of the living dead: They look like us (or once did), but now they are mindless predators. Our greatest fear is not even that they'll catch us and eat us, but that we will become like them and develop a taste for human blood.
Just a few random thoughts about life, death, undeath and the movies on All Hallow's Eve. Now, here's another of my favorite William Carlos Williams poems. It's a favorite because it captures the moment when death seems to make a mockery of life and love, and captures the impulse (all too prevalent in our culture) to simply turn away. (In the Kubler-Ross progression, I guess this would fall somewhere between stages 1 and 2: Denial and Anger). I also love it because it brings home the emptiness and absurdity of death, with its language about potatoes and acrobats; and yet mocks the notion of viewing a natural process as empty and absurd. (Which is more empty and absurd: Death itself, or the human inability to see it for what it is?) But the anguish here is hard and genuine, because it's about betrayal, the inability of love to fulfill our illusions and to conquer or transcend death. OK, enough of my literary autopsy. Although this poem is far from festive... Happy Days of the Dead!
He's dead
the dog won't have to
sleep on his potatoes
any more to keep them
from freezing
he's dead
the old bastard -
he's a bastard because
there's nothing
legitimate in him any
more
he's dead
he's sick-dead
he's
a godforsaken curio
without
any breath in it
he's nothing at all
he's dead
shrunken up to skin
Put his head on
one chair and his
feet on another and
he'll lie there
like an acrobat -
Love's beaten. He
beat it. That's why
he's insufferable -
because
he's here needing a
shave and making love
an inside howl
of anguish and defeat -
he's come out of the man
and he's let
the man go -
the liar
Dead
his eyes
rolled up out of
the light - a mockery
which
love cannot touch -
just bury it
and hide its face
for shame.
-- William Carlos Williams
Love the poem. It's nice to see poems on blogs.
I'll have to agree with you to a point about what makes the undead scary, but I would like to go another step further, they are frightening because they exemplify the down fall of society. Our crumbling apart. To be alone in a world of creatures that only want to kill you - to see the faces of loved ones twisted and empty. That's what makes zombies so frightening, that nothing will be the same. The best of zombie films really use this theme to their advantage. "28 Days Later", "Dawn of the Dead" (my favorite as well), that old one with Vincent Price... oh, what's it called... oh right, "The Last Man on Earth", even "Shaun of the Dead" found places to cause fear amongst the laughs. And some of the best horror films really use the fear of the unknown to their advantage. The original "Night of the Living Dead" no one knew why people were walking again - that's what made it all the more scary. I love this Holiday!
I feel like I should be commenting on your rumination on death, but instead I just wanted to say how much I love Dexter too. The moments where he tries to pretend to have emotions are the best parts of the show.
Thanks for the reminder Jim-- this neighborhood is crawling with DOtD revelers (So. Pasadena CA). Not just acceptance of death, but fun; the artwork's a hoot!
And you reminded me: Julia Sweeney is a fine, FINE woman (recollections of an SNL skit, her as a "Dom", and LOL as she visibly made haste big-time when it was over!)
One of the best Scanners entries, Jim. Kudos.
Good point, Phillip: Romero's movies, especially, are socio-political satires -- with undead "society" eerily mirroring our own. Joe Dante went even further into politics, brilliantly and hilariously, in last year's "Homecoming" (made for the Showtime "Masters of Horror" series). It's a movie (now on DVD) that made a number of prominent critics' 10-best lists, and one that I've been meaning to write about, but the premise is that dead Iraq war vets are pissed at the way they were lied to, and their bodies unconscionably misused, by the US government, the media, and the punditocracy, and they come back in the name of patriotism to put things right. Patriotic zombies killing for moral principles! The ironies abound...
Speaking of Mexico and the Dead! I bet none of you guys have ever seen any old horror mexican films from the 1960's! They were creepy! Like the ones with Carlos Agostí playing Count Frankenhausen! Some of them also included masked wrestling heroes! Like El Santo, Mil Mascaras! Among others!
MyloJosh Plochmann!
I myself have had a soft spot for the Mexican Day of the Dead folklore, ever since I played the videogame Grim Fandango -- which in my opinion is the best-written game of all time. (And also stands as evidence against Mr. Ebert's assertion that games are not art. Not to bring up that hornet's nest again...) As you said, it's exactly that acceptance and celebration of death that is extraordinarily refreshing.
On another topic, I have to say I disagree with you about Joe Dante's Masters of Horror episode. Although I do agree with many of the points it made, the way it sets up all pundits as straw men (or in the case of the Ann Coulter doppelganger, maybe "scarecrow" would be a more accurate term) is just a little too easy in my opinion. You can't satirize that which is already preposterous.
Grim Fandango is a hoot. Lovers of film noir, quirky Día de Los Muertos artwork, Humphrey Bogart, and of well-written humor and intrigue should probably give one of the best adventure games ever made a chance. Roger probably should, too.
However refreshing you view the holiday, though, I think it contributes to the general ignorance often found in rural "common knowledge". If you think Christian fundamentalists' guilt by association hinders their decision-making in matters of daily living and universal interests, think of what a poor Mexican mother has to deal with when she honestly believes her (let's assume) overly controlling mother is peering over her shoulder from the great beyond for every move she makes.
It is common to find in Latin American culture a regard towards the dead not as loved ones who are looking out for you, but as those of higher ground who are spying on you and actively intervening in the lives of the living (that's what it is, isn't it? To assume the dead live... sorta?). Their invocation is used to pass judgment over others and restrict unseemly behavior. What it is then, specially in the lowest economic classes, is a form of rationalization of control (meaning whatever parental figures deem are values that'll keep you from engaging in unruly behavior) with the dead as the basis of this argument. Think of the villagers in the otherwise expendable "Crime of Father Amaro".
Catholic guilt is pretty much ingrained in all its subjects and Mexicans are no different. Calaca figures might be fun to look at, but bear in mind that as they are practiced, these festivals are mostly an acceptance of the dead, not an acceptance and certainly not a welcoming of death itself.
This highlights a lot of the problems I have with the current crop of "mediums" and "psychics" claiming to speak to the dead relatives of people in obvious need of grief counseling.
They perpetuate this happy-sunshiney view that being dead is a lot like being a little high, and further, that those you loved who are dead can think of nothing better to do with eternity than hang around you, affirming your existence with vague platitudes. But that kind of gormless self-help crap mixed in with unchallenging "spirituality" is the best we can expect, I guess, when serious conversations about death are kept to a whisper.
Just an FYI, if I remember correctly from my Huston class in film school, it was Huston's adopted son who did the credit sequence of "Under the Volcano". And now that I think of it, that film might be a candidate for Opening Shots. The image that has stuck in my mind from that film is during the opening sequence, when the main character is walking thru the open market during the Days of the Dead, and there is a closup of his face as he's looking at some wares, and you see skulls reflected off each lens of his sunglasses, turning it into a Gaze of Death. Quite striking.
Jim,
Unfortunately I don't have Tivo, so I'm never able to watch the things I want to. Masters of Horror was one that I wanted to. I've always loved Joe Dante (where the heck did he go?) Now I'll make certain I have to see it. The only MofH I've seen is the Takashi Miike film. I'm a big fan of his dark twisted worlds, and "Imprint" (which I found on-line somewhere... ssshhh) just about took the cake.
Otherwise, my Halloween was sadly uneventful. Watched "The Shining" (always wonderful) and "Halloween" (which sadly continues to lose the test of time battle - though I look forward to Carpenter's MofH as well).
You can't satirize that which is already preposterous.
is there anything more important to satirize than the preposterous which many people don't realize is/consider to be preposterous?
Alonso writes: ... these festivals are mostly an acceptance of the dead, not an acceptance and certainly not a welcoming of death itself.
Absolutely! Celebrating the dead is by no means the same as wanting to be dead. And, as you describe, for a film about the ambivalent feelings a woman has about her mother returning from the dead, see Pedro Almodovar's "Volver."
zac, Kevin:
If I may re-frame the question, slightly: Does A-- C------ even know when/if she's being preposterous anymore, or is that simply her perpetual state of existence?
Editor & Publisher reports:
Knowingly voting in the wrong precinct is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison.Her conduct has raised questions about whether she may, in fact, have turned into her own idea of a Liberal!