Download Shaun of the Dead: A Postmodern Zombie Comedy and more Study Guides, Projects, Research Music in PDF only on Docsity!
Shaun of the Dead
CREDITS: Directed by Edgar Wright; Screenplay by Wright and Simon Pegg; Cinematography by David M. Dunlap; Edited by Chris Dickens; Music by Pete Woodhead and Daniel Mudford; Production design by Marcus Rowland; Produced by Nira Park; Worldwide distribution by Universal Pictures in 2004. US theatrical distribution by Rogue Pictures in 2004. English dubbed version released on VHS by Buena Vista Home Entertainment in 1999. Running time: 99 minutes. CAST: Simon Pegg (Shaun), Kate Ashfield (Liz), Nick Frost (Ed), Lucy Davis (Dianne), Dylan Moran (David), Nicola Cunningham (Mary), Peter Serafinowicz (Pete), Bill Nighy (Phillip) When Shaun of the Dead was released in 2004, it won popular and critical praise on both sides of the Atlantic. Rotten Tomatoes recorded an aggregate score of 92% based on over 200 reviews.^1 The San Francisco Chronicle called it “a remark- ably fresh and inventive British import [that] transforms the unintentional camp of the zombie subgenre into a full-on, hilarious comedy.”^2 The Boston Globe admired the film’s “express-train editing and NASCAR-swift camera work” as well as its “fever-pitch” performances.^3 The New York Post wryly dubbed it “a drop-dead comedy.” While Edgar Wright’s movie never won an Oscar (comedies rarely do), it earned back five times the budget cost and was later ranked by the Guardian as the twenty-fifth best comedy of all time.^4
In addition to its merits as a movie, Shaun of the Dead is a good place to look for insights into the nature of comedy in general and British comedy in partic- ular. It illustrates many of the theories of humor discussed in Chapter 1, several of the comic forms described in Chapter 2, and at least one of the comic archetypes identified in Chapter 3. Furthermore, it draws on Britain’s strong traditions of parody, social satire, and comic acting, illustrating how movies can both focus on national issues and appeal to a transnational audience. Shaun is a twenty-nine-year-old underachiever living in North London. Day after day, he follows the same mind-numbing routine: He crawls out of bed, stumbles half awake to the corner store for the morning paper and a Diet Coke, then on to his meaningless job, returning to an uneventful evening at the Winchester pub or playing video games with his boorish housemate Ed. It takes him nearly one- third of the film to realize that his neighborhood is filled with zombies. That’s because he’s only partly conscious and already lives in a world of the living dead. Two parallel sequences, shot before and after the zombies run amok, show little difference in his neighbors or his attitude. It’s as if the director is winking at us behind Shaun’s back, signaling that the poor bloke doesn’t realize that he’s in a movie, let alone a zombie film. The movie’s characters and storyline are established early on. Shaun’s girl- friend, Liz, wants more time together, less time at the pub where Ed is always an annoying presence. As they sit opposite each other discussing this, the camera positions Ed behind and between them, blithely playing a video game. Shaun’s messy life is further complicated by strained relationships with his more respon- sible housemate Pete; with Liz’s friend David; and with his stepfather, Phillip. To escape all this, Shaun goes out drinking with Ed. On Monday morning, he wakes up with a hangover and sees the note he scribbled to himself in the night before falling drunk on the kitchen floor: “Go round mums, get Liz back, sort life out!” These words more or less define his motivation as a character. They may also re- mind us of Steve Kaplan’s formula for comedy: “an ordinary guy or gal struggling against insurmountable odds without many of the required skills and tools with which to win, yet never giving up hope.”^5 Just how high the odds are stacked against him finally becomes apparent some thirty minutes into the film when Shaun and Ed spot a girl in the back- yard garden. At first, they think she’s just drunk, and they share sexist jokes as she staggers toward them. When she jumps on Shaun, knocking him to the ground, he cries out to Ben, “Do something!” Ben goes inside, returning with a camera, and takes a snapshot of the two reclining figures. All the while, the girl is baring her teeth, snarling incoherently. A defensive shove from Shaun sends her reeling backward. She falls, impaling herself on an umbrella stand. As she rises, the camera shows us the two men through the hole in her torso. Suddenly, another zombie appears, bigger, meaner. They start throwing household items at
Romero is an American director. It is debatable whether Wright is criticizing or paying homage to American culture in his film. Lindsey Decker presents a case for both views while linking Shaun of the Dead to traditions of distinctly British comedy.^7 Decker demonstrates its debt to early Ealing comedies, with their sendups of British determination in the face of adversity. In Passport to Pimlico (1949), for example, the citizens of postwar London tire of maintaining a stiff upper lip and rebel against the central authority. All the while, what keeps them going is their commitment to a united front. Shaun evokes this British spirit of community when he quotes Bertrand Russell: “The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.” Then he goes back to quarreling with David in the pub. Decker also finds moments of Monty Python humor, comparing Shaun’s walk to his corner shop to the “Dull Life of a City Stockbroker” sketch from Monty Python’s Flying Circus and drawing parallels between Phillip’s cheerful attitude after being bitten by a zombie (“I feel fine”) and the “Bring Out Your Dead” scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). Like other scholars who have analyzed the film, Decker discusses the phenom- enon of “laddism,” the name given to a British movement of young working-class men in the 1990s. Proponents of lad culture promoted a form of masculinity op- posed to the new images of male sensitivity, which they considered humiliating and emasculating, a construct of feminists and their sympathizers. Ed’s beha- vior, his drinking, gaming, and flatulence jokes, may be aligned with this laddish trend. In contrast, Pete’s admonishments (grow up, get a life, “Since you’re not working at the moment, could you please clean up a bit”) and David’s compas- sion for women (“You still haven’t met his mum?”) carry an anti-laddist tone. Since Pete may be seen as a righteous prig and David as a smugly self-satisfied coward, the film’s position on this issue is open to debate. Decker finds another local issue represented in the film’s background. During Margaret Thatcher’s reign as prime minister in the 1980s, British manufacturing jobs were replaced by service work. The opening title sequence tracks through a montage of service workers pushing shopping carts, ringing out lines of customers at identical cash registers, all mindless and dead-eyed, much like zombies. A se- quence of television images near the film’s end reinforces this idea. Now that the living dead (renamed by newscasters as “the mobile deceased”) are no longer a threat, their mental vacuity makes them “ideal recruitment for the service industry.” Dirk Etzen analyzes Shaun of the Dead as a test case on the nature of film comedy.^8 After reviewing the literature on humor, Etzen identifies two main lines of thought. One camp argues that humor is essentially social; it functions to con- trol group behavior through embarrassment (the superiority theory described in Chapter 1) or to alleviate social stress (relief theory). Another camp argues that humor is psychological, based on a perception of contrasting points of view in a playful context, as in inversion jokes and puns (incongruity theory). Etzen finds
both kinds of humor in Wright’s comedy, sometimes in the same scene. When Shaun slips in the corner store, we laugh because his clueless action is socially awkward (like falling on a banana peel), but we also find it funny because his be- havior is incongruous (he should be noticing the blood slick on the floor instead of reading the Coke can in his hand). Etzen concludes that the human capacity for mirth involves both social and psychological dimensions, that “anything we find funny will have at least overtones of both.” “What makes the fun of movies funny is when these two things come together in perception, in a playful way.”^9 Etzen’s analysis emphasizes the universality of Wright’s comedy. We don’t have to be British to find it funny. However, to appreciate its parody of horror films or its critique of consumerism, it helps to be familiar with the genre and recent consumer culture. Furthermore, we may miss much of the social and political satire if we don’t know about British laddism or Thatcher’s service economy. If we recognize much of the cast from the British television comedy Spaced, directed by Wright and written by Simon Pegg between 1999 and 2001, the experience of watching the actors perform together again is all the richer. Shaun of the Dead demonstrates how comedy can be both national and transnational. For students of cinema, it is a good entré to the feast of global comedy.
Notes
- Shaun of the Dead (2004), Rotten Tomatoes, https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/ shaun_ of_ the_ dead/.
- Carla Meyer, “The Undead Meet Their Match: Brit Slackers,” film review, San Francisco Chronicle, September 24, 2004, https:// www.sfgate.com/ movies/ article/ The- undead- meet- their- match- Brit- slackers- 2723011.php.
- Wesley Morris, “Clever ‘Shaun of the Dead’ Rises above Recent Zombie Films,” film re- view, Boston Globe, September 24, 2004, http://archive.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/ 2004/09/24/clever_shaun_of_the_dead_rises_above_recent_zombie_films/.
- Phelim O’Neill, “Shaun of the Dead: No. 25 Best Comedy Film of All Time,” film re- view, Guardian, October 18, 2018, https:// www.theguardian.com/ film/ 2010/ oct/ 18/ shaun- dead- comedy.
- Steve Kaplan, The Hidden Tools of Comedy: The Serious Business of Being Funny (San Francisco: Michael Wiese Productions, 2013), 27.
- Shaun of the Dead (2004), Connections, IMDb.com, https://www.imdb.com/title/ tt0365748/ movieconnections/ ?tab=mc&ref_ =tt_ trv_ cnn.
- Lindsey Decker, “British Cinema Is Undead: American Horror, British Comedy and Generic Hybridity in Shaun of the Dead,” Transnational Cinemas 7 (May–Oct. 2016):67– 81.
- Dirk Etzen, “The Nature of Film Comedy, or Why Is Shaun of the Dead Funny?” Projection 6, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 1– 17.
- Etzen, 14– 15.
