“Be careful in claiming that death is opposed to life.
To live is a type of death, a very strange one.”
—Nietzsche, The Gay Science—
“Zombies are the only modern myth”.
—Deleuze and Guattari—
Zombies have devoured our cultural imaginary. It is not only the proliferation of books, video games, graphic novels, films, and zombie walks, but even our everyday vocabulary has become infected: we have “zombie categories” (Ulrich Beck), “zombie capitalism” (Chris Harman), zombie economic theory (Paul Krugman), philosophical zombies (David Chalmers), zombie banks (too big to die), zombie industries (moribund but not ready to be liquidated) and zombie politics (lifeless ideas that still circulate). We have zombies meet the classics (witness Jane Austen’s 2009 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, with a film version due out in February 2016) and an academic publisher that has a series called “Contributions to Zombie Studies”. Cuba has not been immune to the zombie craze, with Alejandro Brugues’s film Juan de los muertos (Juan of the Dead, 2011), an irreverent and slaptstick view of contemporary Cuba that weighs in on various themes: family tensions, tourism, ideology, cynicism and mistrust, plus a sardonic glance at certain institutions like the CDRs, the police, and the press. And, as far as I know, Juan de los muertos is the first zombie film ever made in a socialist country (Kung Fu Zombie, from 1982, was made in Hong Kong).
As a comedy, the film quotes or satirizes other zombie films (comedies or not) like Shaun of the Dead (2004), Dawn of the Dead (1978), 28 Days Later (2002) and Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979), the latter by Lucio Fulci, which features underwater zombies, with the added chutzpah of a zombie attacking a shark. Brugués also quotes from Cuban films as well: Memories of Underdevelopment, Life is to Whistle, Guantanamera and Vampiros en La Habana. Ultimately, however, the film has a somewhat standard approach to the genre: how to survive a zombie apocalypse. Fortunately, Juan and his sidekick Lázaro are the ultimate survivors. At the beginning of the film, while they are fishing in Havana harbor, Lázaro asks Juan “Do you ever feel like you should just keep going and row all the way to Miami?” Juan calmly responds: “What for, man, I’d have to work there. Besides, I’m a survivor. I survived Mariel. I survived Angola. I survived the Special Period and that thing that came after. Here we are like the taínos (Indigenous inhabitants of the island) waiting for the fruit to fall out of the tree. This is paradise and nothing will change that.” Right after Juan fishes a zombie out of the water and Lázaro finishes him off with a harpoon shot to the forehead.
Soon, the zombie plague will spread throughout Havana, testing the skills and ingenuity of Juan and Lázaro, who, with a mix of guapería and entrepreneurial zeal, set up a business for hunting zombies, charging Cubans in pesos and tourists or foreigners in CUC. The zombie extermination team also includes La China (a gay cross-dressing mulato), el Primo (a hulk of a man with rippling muscles who must work blindfolded because he faints at the sight of blood), Vladi California (Lázaro’s ne’er do well son) and Camila (Juan’s daughter, distrustful of her father, who becomes an acrobatically expert killer of zombies).
Juan of the Dead also draws on Cuban bufo theater (here it borrows from Vampiros en La Habana). Influenced by Spanish theater, the zarzuela (light opera) and the tonadilla (a satirical musical comedy popular in 18th century Spain) bufo theater relied on a series of stereotypes: the negrito, a comic black character usually played by a white actor in black face; the gallego, a Spaniard of Galician origin, who is a bumbling, clumsy character unable to resist the sexual allure of the mulata; the mulata, a mixed-race woman who is a temptress, usually of the gallego; the negra, a black woman, often older, usually associated with sorcery and witchcraft but not sexually attractive; and, el chino, a Chinese man, hardworking and industrious, but always made fun of by the way he speaks Spanish. Despite these stereotypical portrayals, Cuban bufo theater was an attempt to envision Cuban identity and nationality on stage. In an ever-changing 19th century, with Cuban nationalism asserting itself in one of Spain’s last colonies with slavery still in existence, bufo theater represented an entertaining and deeply flawed attempt to negotiate Cuba’s growing sense of uniqueness and nationhood within the parameters of a colonial, racist, and sexist society.
Juan of the Dead evokes some of those stereotypes, with some interesting variants: the negrito figure is bifurcated into two characters, La China (Jazz Vilá) and El Primo (Eliecer Ramírez). The first, La China, with a sharp tongue, is a mix of el chino and the negro catedrático (a bufo figure who was black that pretended to be eloquent and erudite but stumbled on the words). However, La China is male, flamboyantly gay, and not at all clumsy with words; in a sense he is a catedrático who is eloquent and a mulata, since his sexuality is open, flirtatious, and even hilarious at times, even if at another level s/he is a stereotype of the queen. With a bit of imagination one could argue that s/he represents a queering of the mulata figure. El Primo, a hulking body-builder type, is certainly the stereotype of the physically potent black male, except that he faints when he sees blood. He barely speaks three lines in the film, again alluding to his physical prowess but non-existent verbal skills (evoking the negro bozal, the African slave who speaks a broken Spanish or none at all). Both he and La China are killed off fairly early in the film, following the all-too familiar convention of eliminating black characters before many of the others (whites).
One could also argue that the mulata figure of bufo theater are played by Sara and Lucía, both white, as they represent desire and sexuality, at least to the main protagonists, Juan and Lázaro; both, however, die fairly early on. The gallego figure is literally played by Spanish male tourists who are with Cuban women (mulatas) that are jineteras in a brief scene that culminates with a “slapstick” battle with the lights out. In this case the gallego figure does not seem to have evolved much from the nineteenth century.
They are people who survive by their wits, not to mention occasional petty crime, and are completely uninterested in conventional life or employment.”
In the bufo spirit, if not the character stereotype of its time, both Juan and Lázaro play the wily and pícaro criolllo figures, Juan being the mulato and Lázaro playing the white, Sancho Panza sidekick. They are people who survive by their wits, not to mention occasional petty crime, and are completely uninterested in conventional life or employment. They are likeable rogues, Juan a little more mature, Lázaro rather adolescent in his humor (often homophobic) and sexuality.
Being set in a Caribbean country, does Juan of the Dead represent a return to the roots of zombie lore? The word zombie (zombie) supposedly derives from the Kikongo words nzumbi or nzambi, that refer to spirits or God. Both Haitian Vodou and Cuban Regla de Palo Monte have deep roots in Congolese religion and culture. In Vodou, the idea of the zombie is rooted in slavery since the concept of controlling a person’s soul (ti bon ange) so that they can be under your power is a perfect analogy of the relationship between master and slave. As many have pointed out, Haitians do not fear zombies (they are harmless, and not the flesh-eating creatures created by Western cinema), they fear becoming one, since it is a horrific reminder of what it meant to be a slave. In Vodou, these Congolese roots are reflected in what is known as Petwo (or Petro) rites, as opposed to the more “benevolent” Rada rites.
Cuban Palo Monte combines what in Haiti would be known as the Rada and Petwo rites, and in some instances includes some elements of the Yoruba-based practices of Regla de Ocha (aka Santería). In the case of Cuban Palo Monte the practice is based on the initiate’s relationship to a spirit that resides in an nganga or prenda. The spirit in the nganga works for its owner, bringing good fortune and blessings, or, conversely, can cause harm. The nganga is a large iron receptacle that contains many elements: earth, water, blood, sticks and other wooden objects, herbs, bones (animal and sometimes human), metal, dolls, etc. It is considered a kind of microcosm of the world that guIides the palero/a through his life path. Joel James, perhaps referring to that wide mix of elements that resides in the prenda, has called Cuba a “Great Nganga”. Juan of the Dead might be read, perhaps, as an nganga that has toppled over and released its muerto, except that in the case of the film we might see it as los muertos de la nación (all the dead of the nation).
Palo is a religion and a practice that is profoundly linked with the dead, not surprising considering that most West African religions (and particularly those that made it to Cuba), have deep roots with the ancestral world. Although all of the major Afro-Cuban religions (Ocha, Palo, Abakuá, Arará) exhibit intimate ties with the world of the ancestors, Palo above the other three privileges this relationship. The spirit that resides within an nganga and works on behalf of the palero is that of someone who died, so one could argue that Palo is founded on a constant conversation with the dead. In his study of Palo, Todd Ramón Ochoa’s informant Isidra links the world of the dead with Mama Kalunga, the “deity” of the ocean within the Congolese cosmos, which is consistent with the Bakongo belief systems. Brugués’s shot of zombies underwater has eerie associations with these Palo beliefs, even though the film does not make any overt references to Palo.
Ochoa describes how Isidra sees Kalunga: “Kalunga is ambient: Kalunga surrounds, Kalunga saturates, Kalunga generates, and Kalunga dissipates.” This ubiquity of the dead linked to the ubiquity of the ocean works powerfully in the film. There are many scenes shot near or on the water that reinforce this: the opening and closing scenes of the film, other scenes shot along the Malecón, still many others where the ocean is seen in the background, Sara’s attempted escape from the Malecón, the image of the Virgin of Charity on the getaway car turned into a raft, Lázaro’s harpoon as ideal weapon to vanquish zombies, the ebb and flow of the undead in the streets in their shuffling tides of attack.
Ochoa also mentions an aesthetic that paleros adhere to in the practice of their craft: “the volatility of substances, speed of decision, the use of force against adversaries, and unsentimental action taken to transform fate.” This is a perfect description of the group that Juan and Lázaro form to be hired out to kill zombies (for a fee, of course). Juan and Lázaro embody the ndoki, the dead spirit of the nganga who work to protect the palero/a, in their case hired to “use force against their adversaries”, and unsentimentally take action “to transform [the] fate” of those around them.
In very Cuban fashion, Juan and Lázaro use the instruments at hand to do the job; remarkably absent are the use of firearms, so prevalent in Western zombie films. In Juan of the Dead, the weapons of attack are low-tech: oars, machetes, baseball bats, sling shots, TV antennae, and, of course, Lázaro’s speargun. In Spanish we would describe their actions by saying darle palo a los zombis making everyone a “palero” of sorts. Machetes, probably the weapon of choice in the film, are very prevalent in the making of ngangas, and, of course, evoke the machete-wielding mambises of the Cuban wars for independence, as well as the great hero-warriors that have fought for Cuban sovereignty: Maceo, Gómez, Agramonte. Céspedes, Martí, Moncada, and Quintín Banderas.
Given these historical antecedents, one might wonder if these muertos of Cuban history weigh still too heavily on the living. In this they evoke the famous words of Karl Marx in his 18th Brumaire:
“The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
Is Brugués, albeit indirectly, suggesting that Cuba has been crushed by this “nightmare of the dead generations” as embodied by the presence of the zombies? What do these zombies infer in terms of conjuring the “spirits of the past” and what they might say about the present or the future?
Marx’s well-known 18th Brumaire text begins as follows: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Brugués’s film is certainly a farce in many ways, but is it a farce disguised as tragedy, or one that ties to laugh away the tragedy? Or put another way: is the bufo theater distracting us from some of the tragic consequences of Cuban socialism? Are the reactions by both Juan and his cohorts, not to mention the government, “borrowing slogans, names, costumes and language” from the past or merely re-affirming their roots in resistance and struggle?
Zombie films lend themselves to metaphor and social allegory, especially those of George Romero. In his long and unique filmography Romero’s work has been seen as a critique of conformity, Vietnam, consumerism, the media, militarism, macho individualism, and the surveillance state. Can the same be said about Juan de los Muertos? As a film made in a socialist society what are the social ills being highlighted? A pessimistic and anti-socialist view would say that the zombies represent a kind of return of the repressed of socialism: an out-of-control bureaucracy, the rigidity of one-party rule, the vapid repetition of Marxist-Leninist dogma, the inefficiency of centralized economies, the fossilized ritual of five-year plans, the suppression of individual liberties, a dull, lifeless and censored press, stifling norms in the arts, the stultifying spectacles of Party Congresses, and the numbing vehemence of ideological discourse. Others would argue that as a society Cuba has been zombified by Fidel and the Cuban state. One could see the interminable wait concerning Fidel’s health as a metaphor that permeates the film: poised between life and death, he is analogous to the undead, who are also in-between figures. In a short story by science fiction author Erick J. Mota, the narrator says: “According to Panchito, all the people up there must be zombies too. The directors, the generals, the Council of State, the ministers —everyone. That’s why they say Fidel is ill. He can’t give speeches that last more than a hour because he’s a zombie.” Even as a zombie Fidel is exceptional: who ever heard of a zombie speaking, much less for an hour?
But is this what we see in the film? There are certainly barbs at many Cuban institutions, from the CDRs (which seem more concerned about theft of cassette players from cars than the zombie outbreak), to the press, which claims the unleashing of the undead is due to the U.S. and their desire to infiltrate dissidents into Cuban society. The film plays this claim for laughs, and its satire on the press is consistent with many zombie films, where the press is often wrong, misleading, or gives incorrect information on how to battle zombies. Where is the well-known Cuban solidarity and organization in dealing with catastrophe like hurricanes or other natural disasters? How about the ever-present Cuban police? (Earnest, but ineffectual). The government? The best they can do is organize a mass demonstration in front of the U.S. Interest Section, but the zombies keep coming. If we understand the zombie menace as external threat then Cuba’s preparedness and defensive capabilities should be unquestionable in being able to quell the chaos, but such is not the case. Hence we must read see the zombies not as “other” but as internal (the zombies are us).
One could interpret the zombie hordes as representing Cuba’s uncertain future, overwhelmed by the forces of globalization in a free market frenzy that leads to a stampede of tourists, foreign investors, and multinational corporations primed to make the island a source of profits. Is that what Juan is referring to when he says at one moment “Que en el final el capitalismo nos va a pasar la cuenta” (When all is said and done, capitalism is going to make us pay for it)? Perhaps, but either one of these interpretations is a reminder that Juan de los muertos does not lend itself to scoring easy ideological points, negative or positive.
Chris Boehm, in discussing the hit TV series “The Walking Dead”, argues that the apocalyptic tenor of zombie massive destruction has an unexpected utopian side to it, which he poetically labels “apocalyptic utopia”. A zombie apocalypse destroys life as we know it, providing a kind of “clean slate” to begin all over again. It is not an entirely “clean slate” since zombies still represent an existential menace to the survivors, but what shows like “The Walking Dead” offer is a view of how we as humans react to these end times, and how we try and reconstruct a sense of order, justice, and society from the ashes (and carnage) of the zombie onslaught. What the catastrophe teaches us is that the utopian project functions on the fantasy that once the mythic threat to its realization is eliminated (class enemies, social divisions, imperialism) then social harmony will automatically ensue. One then must reconstruct things from the point of view of exclusion, from otherness, embrace what the disaster has wrought: our society’s divisions (and otherness) is internal, not external. To try and make these divisions vanish will only unleash more destructive “monsters”. That is why David Beisecker says “A zombie apocalypse is thus not your garden variety apocalypse; it’s one in which we are brought down from within, battle royale in which what we have been fights to contain ‘what we have become’.”
The film’s ending, for all its wiseass humor, seems to validate a fidelity to the event a la Alain Badiou. The French philosopher defines an event in politics as something that opens up new possibilities and shatters old ways of seeing the world, allowing us to create change in unprecedented ways. In addition, it unleashes a truth process that creates a political subject that did not exist before the event. Zizek adds: “an event is thus the effect that seems to exceed its causes —and the space of an event is that which opens up by the gap that separates an effect from its causes.” In Cuba’s case the event is the Revolution (should it always be in caps?). At the end of the film Juan is suppose to board a kind of automobile/boat that will take him, Lázaro, Camila, and Vladi California to Miami. But he intervenes to save a young boy from his zombie father, and, instead, puts the boy in the car/boat and decides to stay. He returns to the Malecón with his trusty oar (his preferred weapon for bashing the undead) and challenging the approaching zombie horde leaps into the air to beat them back while the soundtrack plays the Sid Vicious version of “My Way”. As Juan leaps the ending turns to animation (quite effectively done), and gleefully he uses the oar to maim and decapitate zombies. The final shot is of a zombie with a hole though his torso, wearing a jacket that reads “Hasta la victoria siempre” (Ever onward to victory), perhaps an unwitting reference to Lacan’s notion that truth processes punch a hole in our sense of conventional knowledge. The quote, from Che Guevara’s letter to Fidel (when he left Cuba to pursue revolution in Bolivia, has become a key slogan of the revolution. Is Juan’s way Che’s way?
Juan’s decision to stay is “heroic” if not a bit suicidal and exemplifies the words of the national anthem “Morir por la patria es vivir” (To Die for the Fatherland is to Live). Has Juan maintained a fidelity to the event (Revolution)? What about the zombie onslaught, is that not an event as well, especially if we understand it as an “apocalyptic utopia” mentioned earlier? Earlier in the film Lázaro says “hay que irnos, alzarnos a la sierra” (we have to go, up into the mountains). The reference to guerrilla warfare here is metaphorical since they are in Havana, but the sentiment is definitely one of fidelity to the event. Badiou says that political subjects are always between two events: “They are never simply confronted with the opposition between the event and the situation upon which events of the recent or distant past still have an impact. The political subject is, then, the interval between the past event and the coming event.” In Juan de los muertos the coming event has happened, we are poised at the unfolding of the new event, where new possibilities (and catastrophes) await. In the final shot one can see through the hole in the zombie surrounded by other undead and the horizon where Mama Kalunga dwells, in the ocean. Bufo and palo, Juan and Che, Marx and his ghosts, zombies and the living: Cuba wobbles into the future echoing Beckett’s words “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Simon Chritchley says that philosophy does not begin in wonder as Aristotle would have it, but in disappointment. So do revolutions.