In PONTYPOOL the world ends not with a bang but with the words "in Pontypool the world ends not with a bang but with the words 'in Pontypool the world ends' in a ever-tightening stutter-stop loop that causes cannibalism. It is spoken, the words lead to death, unless they're in French. No time to be running an early morning English speaking radio talk show, as emergency broadcasts (in French) and mass confusion envelop you and your crew, especially in the early hours of the morning on typically white blizzard of a a middle-of-nowhere Ontario town. But there they are, shaggy cowboy with a yen for linking anything out of the ordinary with the collapse of civilization, Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie), his harried but maternal line producer, Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle), cute blank of an intern-assistant, Laurel-Ann (Georgina Reilly), and a lot of voices calling in to deliver astonishing reports that go blank in big flurries of horrible chaos, beginning with riots outside a doctor's office, random attacks among family members and neighbors, groups chanting meaningless phrases over and over as they devour each other.
The stories sound like the ravings of the town's many drunkard fisherman locals and it's not until BBCI phones in that Mazzy realizes his town has become the news, and what was mere minutes ago a punishment assignment (Pontypool the Canadian equivalent of Siberia due to his cantankerous airwave rebellion) becomes the chance to make a name for himself, which he's totally too spooked to do all of a sudden. These three haven't seen any of the things described after all, and they are hard to believe in a town where nothing ever happens. All Mazzy and Sydney and Laurel-Ann have are the callers, and all other lines--police radio, AP wire, 911--are dead, or dying, just static and then alien-like buzzing we belatedly recognize as the emergency broadcast station. It's like the whole world has shrunk around their little studio, leaving them an island in an already island-like town, where they know most of the residents by name, winters stretch forever, and isolated souls move from heated tiny house to heated tiny car to heated basement studio, with windows reflecting an opaque wall of darkness and snow, to paint a horror film that works almost purely with power of suggestion to trigger vivid, weird flights of the imagination.
What really makes it work is the power of imagination coupled to the frustration of never getting the complete story. There was a time when 'showing' mass cannibal carnage in all its Tom Savini-ish Fangoria glory was a subversive act, something to look away from in blanched shock; now it's the opposite. There are still countless zombie / mass plague insanity knock-offs and for a few seconds the 'found video footage' trick was novel but that was 10 years ago, now only Pontypool (2008) finds an original tack, sailing towards the source of the original Romero film's hidden candy shell power, the news broadcasts on the TV the survivors find upstairs in the farmhouse. It's almost too post-structuralist for its own good at times but makes terrific use of uncertainty--are these reports just drunk ice fishermen raising hell?-- and trenchantly delves deep into the way imperiled people instinctively turn to the media to provide a narrative structure for the chaos around them. Without clear visuals, long shots of the calamity, the calm but thrilled voice of an reporter standing in the snow near a firetruck, we have only our own imaginations with which to structure things. At such times radio can reach the deepest vaults of our mind, forming deep cerebral cortex responses not normally our own.
Where else would we turn for information if society crumbled? We all secretly love calamities (as long as they don't happen to us) because suddenly, for once, something is happening and the mood amongst the reporters is always jubilant --careers are made in such moments, ala Wolf Blitzer during the Gulf War--and for once no one can predict what will happen. The whole world seems to wake up in such moments, to be unified in their collective shock and awe, secretly loving the thrill of orbiting closer and closer to a possible armageddon.
What really makes Pontypool a delight beyond this gimmick is the comfortable sense of being in a warm radio booth on a frozen Ontario small town morning, and the early stretches of incoming news as DJ --- begins to think people are all fucking with him - so organic it all unfolds in more or less real time for long stretches without the viewer (me at least) noticing; as the influx of news and shaky narration causes a breakdown in our perception of reality. In other words while not being specifically scary, and always kind of funny, there's a sense that something meta is always at stake, something that might leak out and effect even your blogging about it.
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"Only the medium can make an event" - Baudrillard
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"Only the medium can make an event" - Baudrillard
The news' secret agenda has always been to cast off anxieties and fears about the prevailing social structure's omnipotence off on handy targets: crooks, shady pols, terrorists. So when the TV station reports on a mass insanity uprising, it becomes 'real' in a way it couldn't be otherwise and in the process strengthens the illusion of law and order's ultimate omnipotence. As Jack Torrance would say, cannibalism is okay to talk about in front of their son, because he "saw it on television." It's the same for us. In fact cannibalism's main problem in Pontypool lies in its invisibility. Thus one Romero news broadcast is worth three dozen CGI zombie army ant hill urban killing floors in less interesting but bigger budgeted films. The end of the world can't be accepted as a legitimate event until it is authenticated through the TV. Unless the revolution is televised it cannot exist. This is what Baudrillard and McLuhan can teach Gil Scott Heron.
In Dawn of the Dead (above) Romero yanks even that little buoy of illusory 'objective reality' away; the TV station itself starts to collapse from nervous exhaustion, devolving into petty arguments and agendas. Those who haven't had a chance to directly see it, such as the black intellectual in the final news show, commandeer the zombie outbreak to suit their agenda, labeling it as a cover-up for cop violence in the ghetto. The opening events all take place at the crumbling Philadelphia local TV station, ending with the producer escaping with her helicopter pilot boyfriend, and a black SWAT guy they find who seems pretty cool, and his buddy. When they're later able to find a TV, there's just one continuous talk show left, with two pundits yammering in a progressively more hostile, childish manner. Reality, civilization, has in effect become totally subjective. It was like that once, maybe. But each man was connected to some tribe, some family in those days. Now our tribe is purely virtual, friends from everywhere except our neighborhoods, connected to our family and the world only by cell phones, wifi, and TV and radio signals.
Pontypool zeroes in on this issue by presenting the entire 'event' from within a radio station on a single day. It is only Mazzy and co. who can determine to what an extent they should continue to connect their listeners. In this town we learn the 'eye in the sky' for local morning traffic is an old dude with binoculars on the hill, playing chopper sound effects so we get the impression he is in a helicopter, which for some reason makes us feel warm, loved, guided into work by a heavenly hand. A weird musical family shows up dressed as Arabs to sing bizarre but hopelessly square 'Arabian' songs, the dad firing a plastic Uzi for accent. This isn't given much commentary in the film but it's a good metatextual meltdown signpost. We learn that the Pontypool crisis involves the repetition of phrases until they become meaningless, a weird infection of thinking transmitted through language, maybe. It rewards deep contemplation if you approach it with enough McLuhan and the sorts of things most people in country's with socialized education know in their popular culture the way we know Michael Jackson and Disney. McLuhan's concept of language as "a form of organized stutter" backs a post-structuralist collapse, where meaning and syntax become derailed, causing human brains to go crashing into the morass of subjective looping, where each new repetition increases in violence until they rend one another limb from limb. Is this something to do with Quebec separatist intellectual terrorists? The French language seems suspiciously immune.
While the chants of the crazies may seem meaningless, what we glean from Pontypool is that everything has meaning, and the power of chant is no fluke. Anyone can use repetition to either make themselves calm (the rosary, meditation) or drive themselves crazy (All work and no play make Jack a dull boy, sections of Mingus' Black Saint and the Sinner Lady) or both (dervishes). What makes Mazzy interesting as a character is that he is aware of this power, and does not use his DJ opportunities lightly; even his school cancelation snow day news carries poetic, grim observations, and he predicts the coming crisis all based on one odd morning encounter, even knowing he may be starting the very fire that concerns him). And he gives both women cute innocuous valentine's day cards, indicating that beneath his gruff exterior and contrarian shock jock tactics (mild compared to America's) beats the heart of a regular sentimental guy, a Canadian in other words, a bit of a rotgut and cigarettes-style innocent. In other words, this is not an American film. There's no in-fighting, cursing tantrums, misogyny, lectures, or grandstanding. Sydney's anxiety over what her DJ's going to say is moderated and modulated moment to moment as he pushes the envelope but then eases back; her riding him to be less incendiary is tempered by an almost motherly need to keep him feeling grounded, trying to encourage Laurel-Ann to feed him the news slowly and get confirmation first so he doesn't start a panic.
This is perhaps the film's key concept and also perhaps its one dubious theme, the conception of language as a virus, that it's not the news driving us crazy burt the saying that the news is driving us crazy which is driving us crazy, which is very Cronenbergian, making us wonder if his themes are somehow as much related to Canada itself as to his own clinical doctor experience. The movie seen on streaming masterfully sets itself up as a virus, through which there are no coincidences in whatever you happen to be doing as a passive viewer. The media breakdown can extend to your life -- is there a virus within Pontypool itself, that scrambles the very particles of code within its signal? Or was my girlfriend, in the throes of a phone interview with some comedian in the other room, tripping on the extension cord for the WiFi, causing the Netflix stream, as well as internet, to go out in a single flash right at a key moment in the film? It was so perfectly timed during my viewing this past week that I became as unnerved as old Mazzy. Let's pause and ruminate on what version of the new 3-D that will be, when the film makes your TV explode at a key plot juncture.
In that meta sense, the film reminded me of both the NYC blackout in 02 and the 9/11 smoke plume days, though only in the blackout did we really not know what was happening. I could only pack a small bag with my passport, a flashlight, and some granola bars, and take my dog to Prospect Park, not sure if we'd ever come back, and finally find someone with a transistor radio instead of an iPod. On 9/11 I was at work that morning, and after the images on AOL stopped coming we found an old clock radio in the supply closet, tuning in to Brian Williams who gave our TV-less office a riveting radio narration of the towers falling, and all sorts of reports about attacks on the Pentagon, bombs taking out the state department, etc. He stayed calm as he described the towers coming down, but I imagined them falling horizontally down upon the surrounding buildings, causing a chain reaction domino effect sending whole rippled of skyscrapers tumbling all the way up to Midtown.
The surreal apocalyptic insanity that the radio broadcast created in my imagination reminded me of the 1939 War of the Worlds broadcast, which I used to listen to constantly while driving around NJ, regularly winding up on the same roads the Martians were using. I knew the tower bombing wasn't fiction, but my mind made it so, expanding the bomb blast damage to take out most of lower Manhattan and all of DC. When I was able to cut out for lunch and go to a friend's house with a TV, I was almost disappointed.
Sure that's sick, but that's the thing -- when the news envelops you then you don't really know what the hell is going on, you don't know what is real because you can't see it so your imagination fills it all in and does a much more apocalyptic job of things. You need electrical power, devices, connections, reports, and images from far enough away that you can see what's been destroyed and what hasn't. None of that is possible without a vantage point from far enough away yet close enough to see. Because there's one thing that can reach even the deepest of burrowing loners and isolationists, the media, the radio waves, thought, sound, speech. Pontypool's climactic moment of inter dimensional communication is when emergency broadcast interruption comes roaring through the station, cutting out the broadcast to announce those listening should refrain from speaking, using terms of endearment or embracing loved ones, or using the English language, ending with "don't translate these words" which Mazzy reads, translated, over the air waves- Is this, then, a structuralist terrorist attack. Oh yes Quebec resistance, how very French of you!
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| Top: Lisa Houle - Pontypool / Bottom: Anna Karina - Alphaville |
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