Current mood:	restless
Current music:	Rolling Stones, "Gimmie Shelter"

Redemption Song (Or: I Am Not Legend)

The lesson that we should learn--and that the movies try to avoid--is that we ourselves are the aliens.

Having eagerly anticipated the release of I Am Legend, I finally got a chance to see it over the holiday week. What disappointed me about the movie (and, specifically, comparing it with the source material) was not so much the way the story has changed in the transition to the screen; rather, it's in the way the meaning of the story has been changed.

Recall the end of Matheson's story; Robert Neville, lone surviving human in a world overrun by vampires, has been hunting the creatures during the day, holing up in his house for protection from them at night. Finally, he has been captured by the vampires, and awaits execution at their hands. In the last scene, after Ruth departs (having given him some pills to ease his suffering), Neville is left alone with his final thoughts:

He fell against the window and looked out.

The street was filled with people. They milled and stirred in the gray light of morning, the sound of their talking like the buzzing of a million insects.

He looked out over the people, his left hand gripping the bars with bloodless fingers, his eyes fever-lit.

Then someone saw him.

For a moment there was an increased babbling of voices, a few startled cries.

The sudden silence, as though a heavy blanket had fallen over their heads. They all stood looking up at him with their white faces. He stared back. And suddenly he thought, I'm the abnormal one now. Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man.

Abruptly that realization joined with what he saw on their faces--awe, fear, shrinking horror--and he knew that they were afraid of him. To them he was some terrible scourge they had never seen, a scourge even worse than the disease they had come to live with. He was an invisible specter who had left for evidence of his existence the bloodless bodies of their loved ones. And he understood what they felt and did not hate them. His right hand tightened on the tiny envelope of pills. So long as the end did not come with violence, so long as it did not have to be a butchery before their eyes...

Robert Neville looked out over the new people of the earth. He knew he did not belong to them; he knew that, like the vampires, he was anathema and black terror to be destroyed. And, abruptly, the concept came, amusing to him even in his pain.

A coughing chuckle filled his throat. He turned and leaned against the wall while he swallowed the pills. Full circle, he thought while the final lethargy crept into his limbs. Full circle. A new terror born in death, a new superstition entering the unassailable fortress of forever.

I am legend.

The title of Matheson's story, then, refers to this "full circle" change of places: we, humans, are now the "monsters." (Matheson's tale thus occupies a key turning point in pop culture consideration of the vampire: this is the moment when the vampire shifts from object to subject. But that's a tale for another time...) The hero of the story is, by the end, the villain; and humanity, the "norm" at the beginning, has become the exception, the "Other."

Meanwhile, this theme is completely absent from the film. Never do we come anywhere close to the idea that humanity might be the "Other." Never is it accepted that the vampire could become the new "norm." And here certain other changes are important: the vampires in Matheson's story are sentient, nay, intelligent, personable. In fact, they in large part resemble the "people" they once were; memories and even personalities are largely intact, albeit "shifted" (and, in many--but not all!--cases, fractured by insanity; recall the vampire who jumps off the lamp post and flaps his arms because he thinks he's a bat...). The film "vampires," by contrast, are rather more akin to zombies (though zombies who combust in sunlight), especially zombies of the 28 Days Later "running, agressive" type. The zombie/vampires are portrayed as mindless, non-communicative, in other words, completely Other. (In this respect, one scene of the movie is particularly stunning: Will "Robert Neville" Smith captures a female vampire from a warehouse, in order to experiment on her. Enraged, a male vampire attempts to run after him, going so far as to briefly run into the sunlight, only to fall back, singed. In the very next segment, we have Smith recording his notes, and he asks himself why the vampire would expose himself to sunlight. "Behavioral note," he says into his tape recorder, "an infected male exposed himself to sunlight today. Now it's possible decreased brain function or growing scarcity of food is causing them to...ignore their basic survival instincts. Social de-evolution appears complete. Typical human behavior is now entirely absent." Smith decides that the vampires have lost all remnants of human intelligence, including instincts to self-preservation. All sociality is gone, he says, "Typical human behavior is now entirely absent." The film never returns to this idea to contradict Smith's character's assesment of the situation, and so we are left to accept his "scientific" judgment [I'll return to this in a moment] as valid. But can we not give the scenario the more obvious interpretation? The male vampire has just seen his female companion--wife, girlfriend, "mate," if you must--captured by Smith, and is willing to risk his life to protect her. Is there a more social, even human gesture? Is Smith's character not the more inhuman, sending away his wife and child to stay behind and calmly battle the "vampire menace" as a scientist fights the spread of a disease? When it almost seems as if the theme of Matheson's book could crop up unannounced, Smith's dictation of notes in the next sequence is placed precisely to innoculate us against such an idea...)

How, then, does the film justify the use of the same title, I Am Legend? Certainly, The Omega Man was made from the same source material, and so it has been proven (as if such proof were needed) that the title can be changed if necessary. Don't be fooled by the banal closing "and we lived happily ever after" monologue; it is not simply that Will Smith's character will become a "legend" to the future humans whose lives he has saved. If such were the case, why use the word "legend" at all? "Legend" misconstrues the meaning, here; a legend is mostly fabrication and exaggeration, after all. Rather, the "Legend" in the movie's title is a reference to the album prominently featured in the movie, Bob Marley's Legend (in fairness, not a true Bob Marley album, but rather the classic "best of" compilation that everybody owns in lieu of an actual Bob Marley album...). Rather than looking for justification for the title at the end of the story, as we did in Matheson's case, Smith gives us the film's justification during his exchange with Anna shortly before the final action sequence: "He [Bob Marley] had this idea. It was kind of a virologist idea. He believed that you could cure racism and hate...literally cure it, by injecting music and love into people's lives. When he was scheduled to perform at a peace rally, a gunman came to his house and shot him down. Two days later he walked out on that stage and sang. When they asked him why--He said, 'The people, who were trying to make this world worse...are not taking a day off. How can I? Light up the darkness'."

In the film, then, violence and agression are attributes of the Other; when they take over, "typical human behavior" disappears. Following the metaphor of the film, these traits of the Other function like a virus; if we can learn to act as virologists, and "inject music and love into people's lives," this agression and violence can be cured. One cannot help but think here of the rather conspicuous shift in locale between book and movie (in fact, both the book and The Omega Man take place in California; the new movie is completely alone in its adoption of New York as a location, a choice which even works against the film's financial interests...); playing upon our fear of a post-apocalyptic New York, torn apart by hate, Smith's character--ironically a military man?--asks, "Can't we all just get along?" It is only when he finally learns to love again, at the end of the film, that Smith quite suddenly develops a cure for the vampire disease, and sacrifices his life so that Anna and her son can safely escape with humanity's salvation...

*****

Here I think I could break off, having (I think) identified the central logic at work in the film. If you've read this far, my thanks, and certainly these last few lines can be skipped if you're short on time. But a few thoughts linger here for me, regarding some of the remaining changes between Matheson and Hollywood. Against this background of the shift in meaning (or rather, the substitution of banal "bleeding-heart-liberal" theme for Matheson's original theme), we can attempt to place the rest of the changes. In Matheson's novel, Robert Neville was nobody special; he's immune to the vampire virus through pure random chance. He is a blue collar factory worker, who loses his wife and child to the vampire disease. Not by any means a trained scientist, he attempts to give himself the sort of science education necessary to cure the disease; this is never anything other than a hopeless endeavor, fueled by sheer optimism. Neville learns enough to identify the disease, but he will never cure it. Will Smith's Neville, by contrast, has to be able to cure the disease: and so instead of a factory worker, we have a world-renowned biologist. He cannot lose his wife and child to the disease--this would be both too great a failure for the hero, and contradict the "hate as virus" theme--and so instead they die in an accident, after he has already sent them away. Why is he military? Matheson's character certainly wasn't. Perhaps only to give the character access to both greater knowledge and allow him to remain in Manhattan during the military lockdown? This doesn't make much sense, it seems unnecessary. And why is he immune? He just happens to fall within the correct "percentage" of humans; on the one hand, this could still be Matheson's "dumb luck." But instead of "some random guy," we are now being asked to believe that the very military scientist working on a cure for the disease is, coincidentally, one of the few humans naturally immune to that disease. The answer finally clicks into place at the end of the film: Anna and Neville have a brief spat over religious faith which reveals that Neville "lost his faith" when the disease killed off so many people. When Smith finds love at the end of the movie, and is ready to sacrifice himself so that Anna and her son can escape, we see that his faith has returned too; he now tells her that this is all "part of God's plan."

Ah. So now the pieces fall into place: Military. Scientist undergoes a conversion. God's plan. Love vs. hate and destruction. New York. Such a constellation of concepts can only place us in a post-9.11 America.

In this respect, the film I Am Legend falls between Matheson's book and The Omega Man. Charleton Heston's Robert Neville was also a military scientist--but it was because he was part of the military's team working on a cure that he became immune. They developed a cure "just in time," but Neville had to use the only existing trial sample himself. Most of the new film's deviations from the book can be traced back to Omega Man, but it veers away from the "Heston-Neville as Christ figure" ending of the earlier film (perhaps, in a post-Mel Gibson world, to avoid conflating the vampires with Jews, allowing them to function instead as secularists and fiundamentalists?). Thus, Smith does not "give us his blood" to save us, dying for us as a messaih. Rather, he does his part and then dies in service of the cause, a martyr for the faith. But he's a martyr for the good guys, and thus not one of the fundamentalists...Could we ask for any clearer an indication that Matheson's original "we are the Other" theme has been avoided?!

[More can obviously be said, especially regarding Anna and her son, who are obviously a very different sort of visitor than Ruth was in the original! But a) I've fallen off into complete off-the-top-of-my-head speculation at this point, and so this entry would only continue to get less organized; and b) one risks giving more space to a mediocre movie than it deserves...]