Lockdown - cinematic echoes

Lockdown – Cinematic Echoes

Sean of The Dead is a comedy zombie film set in North London, using locations near to my place of lockdown. One of the conceits it indulges in is the notion that it is not easy to tell a zombie apart from the ordinarily decrepit, or from an exhausted bus passenger gurning in semi-oblivion. 

Navigating the streets after the zombie epidemic strikes is basically to indulge in social distancing – dodging away from people/zombies in your path (zombies, in this film, move very slowly).

I am reminded of scenes from this film on my walks in similar streets, as cautious individuals, couples and family groups string out across pavements and mostly empty roads, everyone calculating a non-conflicting path (apart from a few who claim right of way for their own determined progress). We are simultaneously extras playing the parts of the unaffected (to ourselves) and zombies (to others).

Pub or restaurant windows displaying logos or menus, TV programs, photos on phones, the passing of dates of holidays not to be taken – all constant reminders of a world temporarily abandoned- recall for me one of the recurrent themes of the Jurassic Park  films.  There’s always a moment when the characters come across a place which was trashed or left because of the last, or last but one, dinosaur devastation.

The camera lingers over abandoned gift shops, scattered with meta-referential souvenir goods (such as actual Jurassic Park T-shirts), abandoned vehicle parks, abandoned quarters, all suggesting the disrespect that catastrophe has for civilisation, or some version of it.

Netflix has been showing a large collection of animated films from the celebrated Japanese Studio Ghibli. They are full of loving and beautiful recreations of natural features (forests, meadows, seas, clouds, animals of all sorts) and actual or imagined machinery, especially aircraft, fantastic or real.

One film is a ghost story, Spirited Away, in which a couple and their young daughter stumble into a sinister magic realm , at the centre of which is an abandoned fairground. Through the fairground and beyond runs a ghostly train, on tracks that seem to run below the surface of a flood. The passengers are few, and they are, literally, shadows. 

I think of this train when I see the empty or nearly empty buses and trains that regularly ply the roads and railtracks of London.

April 2020