Zombie Love

Ah-hemm . . . Well . . . [scratching nape of neck diffidently] . . . Well I suppose I do have some egg on my face!

Seems that "New Moon" movie far outpaced my most generous allowance for it--over $707 million gross!

http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=newmoon.htm

To be quite honest, I kind of poo-poo'd the whole thing. In fact, I literally and outloud said that the producers themselves had poo-poo'd the whole thing out their cloacae. I really just could not grasp the appeal of it.

For starters, that whole "Ed-ward" thing seemed misguided from the get-go. How much response could a heterosexual woman actually expect from a dead man who insists on being called "Ed-ward"? And the face of the fellah they got to play him . . . Well, it sort of defies convential theories about the primacy of symmetry in the aesthetic experience. The promo photographs made him look like the doctor had delivered him with a corkscrew instead of a forceps.

But I was wrong. Nothing can be more plain to me now. Quite apart from the simple cash giving out from the thing, you'd be truly staggered by the sincere devotion of its legions of fans. "New Moon" websites, DVDs, magazine articles, fan fiction, beer coasters, the whole thing is simply OFF THE HOOK.

http://www.newmoonmovie.org/

Needless to say, as a man regarded as a media savvy-insider with a fair amount of skin in the game himself, this was cause for serious reflection. I really had to get a grip on the whole thing or get ready to face the reaper and throw in the towel alltogether. And after months of reflection and reading and re-reading popular media theory, I think I may finally have a response: Zombie Love.

Really, when you think about it, it's obvious. There could hardly be any other answer. The people have spoken clearly, and what the zeitgeist (pardon the pun) wants is to Romance the Revenants. It fits in perfectly with the historical trajectory of the interesection of economics and entertainment in our culture. When was the heyday of the classics of the horror genre? The 1930's and 1940's--the Great Depression, son! What was the subtext of the ur-mythos created by those films, the Draculas, the Wolfmen, the Frankensteins? That our shattered self-control and total submission to poorly understood and possibly monsterously inhuman forces within us is not only inevitable, not only understandable, but maybe even beautiful. Find the concept of being laid off humiliating? You won't if you can see the romantic appeal of a rabid fanged and clawed man/animal. Feel your human worth devalued by some silk suit-wearing corporate shill in Washington trying to deny you health care? Not likely if you can delight yourself with erotic phantasies of being fondled by a 400-year old corpse.

It's all so clear now, how did I not see it earlier? But it's not too late to make some dough out of all this. The news is still full of teabaggers and the like, modern-day angry villagers ready to storm the castles of their misapprehensions and let 'em burn, baby, burn! I have a meeting next week with some folks over at Summit to pitch a zombie romance thing. Yeah, I still have some details to hammer out yet, but that's not what these pitch sessions are about. They're all about the Big Picture, the Vision thing. I can see it all now, Angelina Jolie starring opposite Mitch McConnell. . . . But we'd better get some ice on him quick. The high heat of a Washington summer sure can do a job on a stack of stagnant braunschweiger.