Dead Set (2008)
Posted by Matt Foley on November 26, 2008 in Blog tagged withSince the blog has been a bit quiet of late I thought I would upload some photos from the Charlie Brooker written zombie series Dead Set (2008). I have only seen an episode or two but it really looks like it works excellently as a witty, visceral response to the cult of reality T.V. The script is as pithy and swear-ridden as you would expect from Brooker. It is also very gory. Tthe zombies are suitably deadly; they move at high speeds, eat anything going on the human body and their construction seem to be a mix of the relatively recent zombie films 28 Days Later and the WIll Smith version of I Am Legend. As you may expect, the best way to kill them is to go for the head. In fact, the zombies in the film work well but are not particulalrly revolutionary in the way they have been imagined. What makes this T.V. series engaging is the slick direction (think of a low budget 24), the script, the setting and the characters (particulalry Jaime Winston’s). In other words, not necessarily the tropes associated with the archetypal genre film. Also, Davina McCall gets her neck chomped and then goes postal..
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I think I find the images of Davina so striking because, obviously, I have never seen a TV presenter of my generation as a zombie and also she is so integral to Big Brother that it actually makes the film seem more real. This brings up questions about decoupling and whether or not we really see reality TV stars and presenters as ‘people’ or whether, due them being on a T.V. set, we regard them as some sort of fictional Other to our daily lives. Dead Set is so like Big Brother in its fictional staging of it that such questions are hard to answer. Either way, the DVD is out now and I recommend it for fans of zombie flicks. Has anyone else seen it yet? Do you, like me, feel that it doesn’t matter that it uses over-worked zombie tropes, as the film-making and handling of the setting is so well executed?
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Off topic more or less, but the one thing the coverage of Dead Set did remind me of was reading Ben Elton’s ‘Dead Famous’ a few years ago. A much earlier spoof of the Big Brother template that revolves around the discovery of an unsolved murder in a setting that, theoretically, should make such an event impossible – cameras everywhere. What results isn’t a ‘Gothic’ narrative per se (though the humor is frequently black and the thematic content is quite serious at times) but it’s focus on the ‘impossible’ domestic crime and the exploration of characters through their own highly reflexive self-representations makes it feel like interestingly like a very modern take on the related genre of Sensation Fiction.
As for Dead Set itself… I haven’t watched any of it yet (though my partner was an avid, if occasionally grossed out, follower). I’m not sure the use of over-worked zombie themes would bother me particularly: there’s something appropriately zombie-like in the generic conformity of these tropes which, despite obvious individual ‘weaknesses’, continue to proliferate successfully. Even exceptions to the rule (Resident Evil 4 perhaps, to take an important recent example) still deviate by presenting something else as fundamentally zombie-like to the point where the deviation is largely moot.
The observations about Davina are interesting though… it almost sounds as if the horror element’s staged crossing of the 4th wall makes the ‘reality’ element of the format even more ‘real.’ If that makes any sense.
Also, off-topic but still important, I feel. As someone interested in the crossover between videogames and the Gothic, I was very intrigued as to your referencing of Resident Evil 4. I think you’re right, and there’s some mileage to be had out of it.
“Even exceptions to the rule (Resident Evil 4 perhaps, to take an important recent example) still deviate by presenting something else as fundamentally zombie-like to the point where the deviation is largely moot.”
The presentation of the game’s setting: traditional, rural, Catholic Spain, with its accompanying political and historical context, is transformed, or rather, ‘zombified’ by the new pop-culture zombie conventions, which update it as something contemporary, something that might sit comfortably alongside Dead Set. But the origins of this traditionally Gothic setting are lost in the cultural force that the game employs, making the update null and void, more like a conquest and replacement of the landscape with a dislocated digital variant. For example, the game relishes in trapping you in its church, with Catholic imagery discarded and forgotten, for the single reason of staging a ‘last-stand’ style showdown between yourself and hundreds of ‘possessed’ village farmers. Resident Evil 4, I think, loses anything Gothic (capital G) to the conventions: narrative, image and so on, of both zombie films and its own series franchise.
I think that’s a persuasive reading. It’s almost as if the game plays upon the user’s expectations with regard to the ‘seat’ of power within the ‘evil’ landscape. At first this seems to be the village church (the early game forecasts this as a key location as Leon watches villagers proceed there in response to tolling bells etc) in a manner that confirms a typical ‘catholic’ powerbase. As you say though, the church is ultimately empty of any particularly significant power and instead points the player towards other locations. The most important end ‘experientially extensive’ of these are the castle and the offshore island.
The castle (seat of the child aristocrat whose name escapes me – Salizar?) is, of course, another familiar Gothic topography and the game revels in its Gothic tropes: this is where new antagonists such as evil monks begin to appear along with animated suits of armor and the player experiences a memorable sequence in the castle’s landscaped garden mazes. The castle too is ultimately incapable of providing a conclusion or a final confrontation with the true source of power and the player’s adventure’s next take them to the offshore island base.
This is a very different gothic terrain with little connection to the traditional ‘Gothic’ prior topographies seem to have promised. The Ganados (‘zombie villagers’) are now in military garb and the player makes their way through derelict barracks and laboratories, fighting experimental hybrid monsters as the typical Resident Evil theme of suspect bioengineering begins to affirm itself. It’s all very Doctor Moreau.
With all this in mind, I wonder if the game’s progression of different topographies and the attendant distancing of the gothic ‘power’ within the landscape represents an intentional relocation of the Gothic. In this way it undermines expectations established by its own opening as the sense of isolation and containment (closed paths, repeated visits to the same village site, no way back across the bridge, the character’s own ‘why here?’ dialogue etc) within the limits of a stereotyped and ‘backward’ Catholic Europe setting is progressively undermined. The gothic elements are globalised away from the merely Gothic topography. I think this is intentional and something the game plays upon. It is, after all, the kidnapping of the president’s daughter that draws the hero to the game’s topography: a merging of classic Gothic damsel in distress plotting and global terrorism. On the plus side this literal and figurative journey back outwards from the initial topography and it’s *G*othic qualities allows for a great sampling of gothic qualities. On the other, it’s somewhat moot as the game sticks to the conventions of its series and genre (in the case of resident evil the two are fairly proximate), undermining them only to reintroduce them.
Interesting stuff – albeit not as nuanced as it could be and not having much to do with Dead Set (sorry!) – I agree that something interesting might be made of it. There’s an interesting article on Resident Evil and the survival horror genre by Richard Hand, though it predates the release of 4.
What I forgot to say also (though it’s largely implicit) is that the game’s movement progressively outsources power within its topographies: from the local church adjacent to the village, via the castle of the feudal landowner to the offshore Island wherein the globalisation of the gothic power, beyond the simply Gothic, is rendered explicit.
Well, I can’t be much help on Resident Evil 4 but i thought I would add that the other pleasing aspect to Davina becoming a zombie, and this was a guilty pleasure, is that the celebrity becomes homogenised as part of the pack. There is now no social difference between celebrity and non-celebrity and the core to either is bestial and not immune to the zombie virus. Egalitarianism is finally realised, albeit in a horrid way.
i feel hunt about you haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa