Zombie

So I watch Hotel Rwanda and, in the part when we first see shots depicting the ongoing massacre from the point of view of a man in a moving car, I begin to be reminded of an entirely different genre: the zombie movie. Shot for shot, much is the same in this sequence as in the opening of say, the recent remake of Dawn of the Dead. The protagonist speeds past burning buildings, noises of violence, and bloodied crowds of people moving in strange, alien ways as the fact that something strange and terrible has happened to his everyday world slowly dawns on him.

Obviously, I do not mean to imply the director of Hotel Rwanda was paying homage to George Romero or his more recent imitators. Rather, the violence in Rwanda reminds us that the horror of the Zombie movie is that it's plot is merely hyperbolic stand in for real historical events. That throught history, men and women have awoken to find their neighbors transformed into to something else... something that wants them dead. More horrific, it reminds us that sometimes men and women awoke to find themselves those very monsters. Like the Zombie, the mob can engulf us, as well as annhilate us.

I think it behooves us to remember, the zombie is already among us and within us. We are already Zombie, already dead, we must fight to create and protect beauty everyday for the rest of our lives just to ransom some shred of our humanity.

And even this, may not be enough...