Warm Bodies: Longing for Something That Isn’t There

(3) Memories are repressed nostalgia. In one of the more inventive scenes of the movie, one feature of being the undead is the ability to eat the brain of another human and gain their memories. So, rather than spending countless boring hours at some beach-side campfire with s’mores and your best friends sharing stories [while a blonde-haired surfer is serenading the group with his impeccable guitar skills] – why not eat their brains? It’s more romantic when you think about that. The consumption of the brain, in some ancient cultures was the exact belief that you were gaining the very soul of that person. So, what are memories if not held onto former versions of our self. Memories are history. In one sense, they tell us who we were, for others, they tell them who they still think they want/should be. Interestingly, they are also keys to how they were/are being shaped by society. Memories are identity. In one fail swoop, ‘R’ becomes someone else. ‘R’ is no longer a zombie, but now he is a human with dead flesh. What are his memories but if not inherited from an ‘other’. Meaning, there is a critique here against collective memory which is tied in with cultural identity [like all Jews somehow having to remember the holocaust, or all black people having to remember the slave-trade] – that what we inherit we become. Something is to also be said here of implicating ourselves in ‘church history’. That in reality, we are forced to feel things about events we never experienced. We are forced to react to certain events as if we were actually there. So, in a simple sense, in the form of question, does ‘R’ actually have his own feelings for Julie or are they inherited ones?

All movies are window into reality as we know it. But even a window limits our ability and knowledge of that which it shows us. Just as some of the theorists below show, windows aren’t always that helpful.

This “window” idea figures into the very form of cinema itself. One of my favorite film theorists, André Bazin, often compared the cinematic “shot” to a framed window that hints at a vast reality just outside of view. While other theorists saw the framed shot as something that restricts or limits what can be seen (i.e., what is inside the shot), Bazin theorized that the film image—through its suggestion of off-screen space—was about being “part of something prolonged indefinitely into the universe.” Siegfried Kracauer, another of my favorite film theorists, agreed that the film image was by nature indeterminant, ambiguous and open-ended—a fragment of reality suggesting endlessness.

We are left here with the possibility that movies, as escapist as they are, enforce their paradigms upon us. However, maybe they don’t such a thing at all, but rather, more like mirrors, reflect back to us what we have forgotten we already know about ourselves.