December 16, 2007
i am legend
A perplexing film, at once relentless in its linear drive and all over the place. For the first 75 minutes, it's just Will Smith's Robert Neville, the last good man, versus the denuded and albinofied zombies; it's all very kill whitey, though the film seems obdurately unaware of this blazingly obvious fact. Also never mentioned: in the background of Neville's Washington Square townhouse are masterpieces presumptively boosted from MoMA (Henri Rousseau, a couple Van Goghs, etc; he seems to favor Post-Impressionists). The film shares the trope of institutionally marked art rescued by individuals in civilization's collapse with V for Vendetta and Children of Men; do we smell an ideologeme on the rise?
These seemingly incidental elements perhaps make more sense against the film's closure, as the cure is delivered to the lone community of survivors, in a walled enclave in Vermont. For all the fortifications, inside the gates is idealized small-town America. No museums here, no furreign paintings or any other cosmopolitan corruptions. It is, let us say, contamination-free. Goodness has survived after all, and in a dizzying inversion, it's white as an unsullied snowdrift and just as rustic, coded into the town with its autumnal New England crispness, its white-painted wooden church steeple rising salvifically in the exit shot. It could be any day in the history of virtue, except it's not — as the overvoice informs us, it is September, 2012. In fact, it is September 10th as the cure is delivered, the last day of the era of contamination...
Posted by jane at December 16, 2007 07:10 AM | TrackBack