The Rage Virus Evolves

Politics | Recovery | Current Obsessions

This week’s Space the Nation podcast on 28 Years Later gets into some of these issues, though I spend a lot longer nitpicking the franchise universe. Consider this a companion piece. Spoilers abound.

28 Days Later is a favorite movie that I seldom revisit; I don’t like what it does to me. It asks, relentlessly, What do we become when survival demands violence? In the last act, our hero Jim becomes feral, covered in blood and gore as he visits vengeance upon the soldiers who planned on gang-raping Jim’s companions; we cheer for him. He has become what he was running from but his rage is righteous. In withholding judgment on that contradiction, the film makes us sit with our own answers.

28 Days Later director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland are still clearly interested in that same question with 28 Years Later, but the inquiry is muddled by world-building contrivances. The plot borrows a classic post-apocalypse structure: Survivors living through a new dark age (a boy and his sick mother) set off to find a remnant of the modern era just passed (a doctor with a cure for mom). It’s the details that set me off into comic book guy insolence; here, I will keep to the heaviest lift: the fucking zombies. The zombies who fuck.¹

Love-making among the rage-virus infected isn’t subtext—it’s the mechanism that introduces an uninfected baby, allegedly protected by “the magic of the placenta.” My STN co-host Dan Drezner suggested the fecundity of the infected was evolution at work: some mutation making some of the infected slightly less violent and thus capable of tender feelings—or at least of obeying a less violent biological imperative first. But I don’t have a problem with hate-fucking. Who among us, etc. I can sort of buy the infected getting (more) nasty. But I can’t imagine both of them being alive at the end of it.²

A bigger problem, if the infected giving birth is a product of evolution: generations of uninfected children raised in an environment where the O.G. infected are the norm. Are there zombie moms raising a “normal” kid in a flesh-eating nursery? If they do survive to adulthood, do these uninfected kids grow up and find other uninfected humans to procreate with, or do the DTF risk a love bite with a sexy and somewhat less rageful mutant? I mean, I was in my 20s once, too, but still.

All of this happening under the watchful eye of NATO, patrolling and surveilling the quarantine, presumably franchising the live stream out as reality television. Or maybe it’s repurposed as a sitcom: an uninfected son as an Alex P. Keaton–esque black sheep, navigating his back-to-nature parents and their hippie lifestyle.

For a film that seems very interested in generational trauma and how parents shape their children’s future (with hints at a deeper examination of religious fervor in the upcoming sequel), the idea of the infected not transmitting their sin to their progeny is... a loose thread? A dropped ball? An unexamined bit of an idea, stuck in my craw.

Punch-up by Nigel Farage

According to the filmmakers, the film is also a commentary on Brexit; that works as long as you don’t get trapped in the rules Garland and Boyle have laid out for their own universe. The series’ in-world explanation of how the virus works (too fast to allow long-distance travel) makes a strict quarantine of the British Isles unnecessary. I realize it’s my fault for getting so stuck on that detail, that every subsequent Horror Movie Logic misstep infuriated me.

Like many almost-great genre pieces, especially sequels, the trick with 28 Years Later is to just accept the premise. Somehow, Palpatine returned. Somehow, the British Isles are completely quarantined and abandoned; no scientists are working on a cure; no supplies are being dropped; no one in the rest of the world can summon enough interest to investigate. Garland told the New York Times that the movie grapples with “the world’s capacity to ignore places that are in terrible trouble.”

And, of course, that capacity is immense. But are Boyle and Garland really asserting that the rest of the Western world would abandon white people like that?

However, the scale of 28 Years Later’s Brexit metaphor is not infected Britain versus the uninfected world, but the uninfected community on the real-life Lindisfarne, also known as the Holy Isle³, versus the infected mainland.

In that frame, Boyle and Garland are laying out a vision straight out of the Leave campaign itself—and the argument of conservative white nationalists here in the U.S.: The infected are at our doorstep. We must protect our way of life. Who believes more strongly that they survive the zombie apocalypse than trad wives and liver kings?

The island is communal, collectivist, and weirdly utopian—if also laced with a touch of wild Wicker Man energy. Their isolation is their saving grace; their backwards, paranoid and racially homogenous society is flourishing compared to a mainland overrun by a filthy horde of violent sub-humans. (And they're breeding now!)

I don’t know what to do with this. I know that’s not the politics they’re endorsing because I’ve read the interviews. I suspect the plots and commentary that will complicate that Tory-sympathetic bedtime story await in the next chapter of the franchise, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. You can see hints at where the creators (along with Nia DeCosta, who will direct this time) want to go.⁴

That egalitarian all-white commune on Holy Isle has some ragged edges, after all: An uncommented-on tradition involving a silent witness to gatherings who wears a stylized “infected” mask. The camera whips around a scene of drunken revelry violently, destabilizing us (as well as our young protagonist Spike, drinking for the first time).

Then there’s the cost of the society’s apparent veneration of masculinity: Our protagonist’s father pushes Spike to go on his first infected scouting trip too young; his father’s dalliance with another woman precipitates Spike kidnapping his mom for that trip to the doctor. Less subtle are the montages Boyle affects during violent clashes throughout, pictures of British soldiers and boys, scenes from the battle in Henry V, a merciless reading Rudyard Kipling’s “Boots” (Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin' up an' down again;
Men—men—men—men—men go mad with watchin' em).⁵

These dark strokes could build toward a sequel with a daring thesis: The infected are actually the purest among us.

Benediction by bactine

The architect of the bone temple in the coming movie certainly believes something like that. Played with elegant, surprising precision by Ralph Fiennes, he is a doctor with a gentle bedside manner made disturbing by the context. He is patient and kind, stained by prophylactic iodine rather than blood. He bestows a final peace to Spike’s willing mother, whom he diagnoses as having cancer that he cannot treat. He offers death as a sacrament, building his own holy island—landlocked but no less isolated—from the remains of infected and uninfected alike.

I want to get past some of the pragmatic concerns regarding Fiennes’ character -- things like, Is he sure she has incurable cancer? Euthanasia sure? Once I get past my adolescent resistance, I’m still annoyed, but I am thinking about the movie.

Maybe because I don’t like how it answers the question it inherited from 28 Days Later: What are we willing to give up to survive?

Is their answer that the peace of death is better than giving up our humanity to survive? The infected keep their rage alive through generations; the uninfected preserve their community only through isolation so total it might as well be death. And the doctor in his bone temple offers the final, literal mercy: annihilation as grace.

If that’s what passes for peace, I’m not sure it’s the kind of survival I can cheer for.

Want to help me survive the next journalism apocalypse, soul intact? Consider upgrading to a paid subscription here.