My apologies for being very late with Friday Night @ The Flicks which was due to family commitments and the my muse was also running over time. I do hope you enjoy this very different essay.
Spend Friday Night At the Flicks with Elizabeth Ellen Carter
Zombies seem to be everywhere at the moment – cinematically, I mean ::looks furtively around listening for the sounds of the undead::
From the TV series The Walking Dead, to the films Warm Bodies and World War Z it’s certainly hip to be dead.
So it was great sadness this week to learn of the death of Richard Matheson, a name who may not spring immediately to mind but in the pantheon of science fiction writers such as Asimov, Vonnegut, Bradbury, Heinlan and Dick, Matheson stands tall with a number of titles but it is I Am Legend that I’d like to focus today’s Friday Night @ The Flicks.
Yes, yes, yes, we could go on and on about how the zombie gentre provide an insight into our own fear of mortality and our subconscious yearning to feel more *alive* than we do and that’s all been done to death.
Pardon the pun.
I want to talk about I am Legend – a tale also known under the titles The Last Man On Earth and The Omega Man – in terms of it being a love story.
Will Smith rocks a white robe, er lab coat in I Am Legend.
For those not familiar with the story Robert Morgan (Robert Neville in Omega Man and I Am Legend) is a doctor who is searching for a cure for a virus that has killed millions making him the last man on earth… or so it seems.
The virus didn’t kill all. There are others about – those who used to be human but who have lost their higher selves and now only exist to aimlessly roam and feed.
For some reason Morgan/Neville is immune to this virus, which makes him a target night after night for the undead who want to make him just like them.
Morgan/Neville has paid a high price for being a survivor.
In the 1964 film Vincent Price as Morgan watches and rewatches home movies of his now dead wife and child and plays again and again, a favourite record but when Morgan find another woman who appears to be a carrier of the disease and not a victim of it there may be a hitherfore undiscovered clue to provide the potential for a cure.
It’s a cure based on his blood which has the ability to redeem what remains of mankind from this curse.
“Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends. ” – Jesus Christ
All three films, to a greater or lesser degree, all refect the Christ allegory of sacrificial love despite the potestation of Neville as played by Will Smith (one of his last better films).
Compare this piece of earlier dialogue with at the end the film:
Neville: All right, let me tell you about your “God’s plan”. Seven billion people on Earth when the infection hit. KV had a ninety-percent kill rate, that’s five point four billion people dead. Crashed and bled out. Dead. Less than one-percent immunity. That left twelve million healthy people, like you, me, and Ethan. The other five hundred and eighty-eight million turned into your dark seekers, and then they got hungry and they killed and fed on everybody. Everybody! Every *single* person that you or I has ever known is dead! Dead! There is no god!
Anna: In 2009, a deadly virus burned through our civilization, pushing humankind to the edge of extinction. Dr. Robert Neville dedicated his life to the discovery of a cure and the restoration of humanity. On September 9th, 2012, at approximately 8:49 P.M., he discovered that cure. And at 8:52, he gave his life to defend it. We are his legacy. This is his legend. Light up the darkness.
Get your hands off me you damned dirty ape!
Oops, sorry wrong film.
The Christ reference is even more marked in 1971’s The Omega Man (a reference to a quote from Jesus in the Book of Revelations: ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end’).
In this version, Charleton Heston plays Neville more happily gun toting than either Price or Smith ever did.
In another departure from the source material (Matheson’s, not the Bible), the zombies are organised into a neo-luddite cult and therefore are a more active menace to Neville.
Less a character study then The Last Man On Earth, The Omega Man is more an action flick and which it comes our hero in peril and at the mercy of Mathias, the cult leader.
And no, I’m not the first to notice the cruciform way Neville is subdued.
Black Power Lisa: [Lisa is drawing blood from Neville for a vaccine] Will one bottle be enough?
Maybe it will, maybe it won’t.
Did you know Vincent Price did the narration for Michael Jackson’s Thriller video? This is an early rehearsal shot… just joking.
Is Neville’s gift appreciated or even wanted by those in the ravages of the disease?
Only I Am Legend in 2007 offers such an optimistic ending.
In 1964’s The Last Man On Earth, Neville’s showdown takes place in a church where the undead descend upon him. In The Omega Man Neville is killed with a spear through his side (in another allegorical moment).
But human nature being what it is, inspires us to hope and sometimes hope leads to faith (being the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen).
The hero in Matheson’s story give his life for the sake of humanity – even though he is, in reality the very last example of mankind.
He has everything material that a man might possess – in fact he has everything this world can offer, yet he yearns companionship, relationship and community with other people which ironically, the zombies possess in a crude and rudimentary fashion but lack the humanity and compassion to do more than subsist in morbid self-interest.
Not seen this film? Below is the entire 1964 telemovie, The Last Man On Earth with Vincent Price.