Warm Bodies

Thrashing around in the Throes

That Asian-Looking Chick 2 Comments

“Mr. Hammond, after careful consideration, I’ve decided not to endorse your park.” (Jurassic Park)

What a great conclusion! What valleys of chaos traversed to reach it! (Hmm, if we were to return to our wilderness home in France, would we find T-Rex and Velociraptor tracks in our wake?) Humans seem to thrive on mayhem. What is it about disaster – especially violent disaster – that mesmerizes us?

“I wonder if robots will ever watch Terminator and figure out that they’re supposed to kill the humans,” Callaghan mused as we were eating our salad the other night. “Maybe it’s the movie that’s going to trigger everything!”

Indeed. When it comes to entertaining ourselves with disaster, it’s not enough for people to kill other people. Nature killing people isn’t enough, either. We need robots to kill us, too.

For me, it’s clowns… call me a traditionalist, or maybe just a person with a weak imagination. For those of you who were wondering, the incessant buzz over World War Z extinguished my preoccupation with zombies. Main-streaming the topic to that over-budgeted extent in a “summer action blockbuster” production finally killed it for me. (I enjoyed Zombieland, but even that was borderline. We did try to watch Warm Bodies recently, but we lost interest not even halfway through, and couldn’t finish it. When it comes to zombie movies, nothing does it for me like Shaun of the Dead.) World War Z might be a great movie, and I might really like it, but its making dethroned zombies from the top of my list of dark, fantastical obsessions. My horror sensibilities are stimulated most effectively in the more obscure tunnels of pop culture. Reading the hundredth little article on the production troubles of WWZ, I turned back to clowns with a perverse nod of respect and restored to them their hold on the freak-out center of my brain.

Clowns scare me because those colorfully diabolical characters embody the insane. Insanity means complexity, and the more complex something is, the more there is to fear. Clowns also tend to be smart, and that makes them terrifyingly unpredictable. Zombies are brainless and therefore completely predictable, engendering fear in the opposite way. (If we use this comparison as a political analogy, which would be the scarier party, then, the Clowns or the Zombies?)

Plus, clowns’ origins can be found in nature. This explains everything:

 

Am I right?

Dear Fellow Airplane Passengers:

That Asian-Looking Chick 2 Comments

We wish we weren’t THOSE PEOPLE on your flight, but we are. We’re sick. Not only that, but we’re the worst kind of sick for flying – we’re coughing. Yes! Surprise! We are your in-flight airborne virus carriers… and we’re so sorry. It’s been cold and rainy here, and we caught this bug (of the sore/scratchy throat, coughing, losing our voice variety) from a neighbor just this last week. The timing couldn’t be worse, we know.

We’re uncomfortable, but we’re more concerned about you than about ourselves, really. It’s just unfair to have to sit on an airplane with sick people. Believe me when I say that we’ve been trying to speed up the healing process for your benefit. We’ve been to the doctor, who put us on a variety of medications. We gargle with hydrogen peroxide twice a day, trying to kill germs in our throats, and we’re taking lots of vitamin C. We’ve been eating fresh oranges. We’ve been drinking lots of water. We’ve been huddling up to the kerosene heater, keeping as warm as possible. We’ve also been resting a lot… even while having to get so much done in our last days here.

Laughter heals. We tried to watch the new Arrested Development, but so far, it’s failed to make us LOL (we gave it a good three-episode shot), so we’ve put that on hold and settled back into Hart of Dixie, which had started to drag a little toward the end of season one, but has blossomed into a fluffy delight in season two. It’s coming through with exactly the simple, cute lightness we need right now! And we love Rachel Bilson, who we think possesses good comedic timing and resembles a young and even prettier Brigitte Bardot. (Our opinion!)

 

Rachel Bilson

Rachel Bilson

 

So we’ve been trying. But we’re still coughing. You will give us dirty looks, and we will understand. We’ll try not to cough in your direction; we’ll keep our heads down. We loaded up our tablet with a zombie movie: Warm Bodies. Nothing like a zombie movie for traveling! That, and Kit-Kats.