I'm not gonna be den mother for you guys.

I'd really love it if there was a spin-off TV series following the adventures of these two as they

criss-cross the county hunting zombies and have lots of Unresolved Sexual Tension (tm X-Files fandom, back in the day).

I've been watching Dawn of the Dead again. Every now and then, I have this need to just put it on and let it run over and over again for a few days. (Pardon a brief tangent here, but as far as I know the Evil Dead II DVD is the only DVD movie that hits the end of the film and starts over automatically at the beginning, instead of bouncing back to the DVD menu and making you hit 'play' again. I really wish more DVDs did that auto-loop though. Surely I can't be the only person who wants to just put a movie on and ignore it for six hours?) It seems superfluous to say that the movie is good, but it's a fact that that's not why I watch it for days on end. I love, love love the DVD transfer, all radiant and crisp and vibrant. Sure, the zombies look unabashedly stupid in such a clear, high-contrast transfer, with their day-glo red blood and green face paint. But I have a total weakness for that suburban late-70s aesthetic, all orange carpet and imitation wood. Maybe because that was the texture of my early childhood -- rural North Carolina was still catching up on those trends when I was a wee one, in the early-80s -- or maybe because it really was kind of successful in evoking the warmth and comfort it was designed for.


It's also a stand-in for spending time with actual people, though, because at some level I think of Frannie and Peter as friends of mine. Something indefinable about both performances seems to reach through the screen and start a conversation. While Flyboy and Roger, the spaz and the jackal, are relentless in their dopiness and obnoxiousness respectively, Fran and Peter seem in their silences to be listening, and thinking. The other two -- not so much. ("We got this, man, we got this by the ass!" Seriously, what?)
I love Fran, in particular, rescuing Roger with a well-aimed shot from the rooftop. I love her "just take the car, assholes" moment during the lock-out sequence, especially given how good she looks with a gun on her hip and how entirely she embarrasses dense Flyboy on that particular mission. I love how she tells the boys how it is at the start, and I love Peter when he points out to her snorting boyfriend that she's right about all of it (and he, by inference, is a moron, particularly with that eyeroll at him when she "And I don't want you leave me without a gun again" -- the look says, "I did leave you with a gun -- talk to the dipshit here about that one").

I love the quiet friendship that seems to form between Fran and Peter, especially once Roger's gone -- it's all in looks, silences. Does it occur to Fran that Peter is clearly superior to Steven in virtually every way? I think it does, though I may be projecting. But I think they're both essentially good, and so there's nothing she or Peter would imagine doing about that. And that may be one reason why the trio feels so emotionally strained, with nothing to think about but one another, no future but one another.


And don't get me wrong, I love a sassy dame zombie fighter as much as the next third-wave feminist, but the reality of Fran, the fact that she doesn't thrive in the zombie apocalypse, but she copes, the fact that she doesn't already know how to use a gun, but she learns, the fact that she is planning from the beginning for the day when Steven's incompetence catches up with him and she will have to be Flygirl... I'd like to think I'd live up to Frannie's example if and when the zombies come.

The film is rife with things that make me itch, some of it because it's an artifact of another time, some because it's a complicated movie about a complicated world, and some because I am a feminist and George Romero -- well, like I said, it's an artifact. But putting Dawn on again is a bit like spending time with some old friends. It feels a bit like going home.