8th
Dead Set (2008)
Charlie Brooker’s Dead Set (2008) is as fine an update and addition to the zombie genre as you could hope to get. It doesn’t entirely eschew the pretentious PoMo trappings that blighted the horror landscape in the post-Scream nineties and early-noughties—in the first five minutes one character says of another: “She’s got a face like a Manchester Morgue,” and this just seconds after another has reflexively disclosed his motivation to work within the mainstream culture in order to subvert it:
“If just one of them says “Wow! I hadn’t seen it that way before; he’s really opened my head!”
This is a bit of a shame, but even so, and in the same vein as some other decent examples of recent British horror (Dead Man’s Shoes, Eden Lake), Dead Set substantially works within and so conjoins with the generic conventions established during the belle epoque of the 1970s.
If Dead Set does shift from the paradigm established in George Romero’s now-classic trilogy—Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985)—it is only inasmuch as it amplifies the overwhelming sense of irremediable apocalypse that was the native condition of the Dead-trilogy’s story-world. Brooker’s continuation of the mythos is both admirably literate and judiciously restrained: transplanting Dawn of the Dead’s satirical attack on the mindlessness of late industrial capitalist consumerism into a critique on the vapidity of contemporary (un)-reality-TV and celebrity-obsessed narcissism; it is to Dead Set’s credit (as it was to Dawn’s) that this level of the show is not egregiously sign-posted at every turn but consists in the very dynamics of the narrative, and so unfolds organically.
By setting itself within the elimination-based reality-TV show Big Brother—a show notorious for the exploitative and humiliating contempt with which it treats its contestants, and this is expressed to hilarious effect through Andy Nyman’s virtuoso turn as Patrick, the show’s colossally obnoxious producer—Dead Set amplifies both the zombie genre’s potential for satire, as well as the brute force of its suspenseful narrative. The concentric structures of incarceration and surveillance become markers giving shape to a reality which is no longer defined as the real world looking in—pointing and sneering at an ersatz version of itself in all its paltry squalor—but of a diminished world looking out at the wider world gone mad. If Romero’s zombie movies are rooted in the material conditions of social conflict (political unrest, consumerism, militarism, the poverty gap) Dead Set’s protagonists, by contrast, find themselves fighting on the very borders of the real.
The sadistic culture of voyeurism, then, is catastrophically turned upon its head so that the irreal world of the freakshow becomes the real world’s last oasis of sanity; its self-deluding performers the ultimate defenders of the human race itself. The peculiar and contradictory cultural space of Big Brother—a kind of gaudy mass-market Panopticon which proffers the illusion of enfranchisement in the authoritarian culture of surveillance while simultaneously disavowimg political responsibility by leveling this pernicious reality to the platform of a circus sideshow—is at once ruthlessly exploited for a white-knuckle thrill-ride, and stripped down to the truth of its own scabrous assumptions.
When the last place on earth you’d ever want to be, becomes literally The Last Place on Earth, well… it doesn’t get much scarier than that.
((Now be sure and head over to the Inevitable Zombie Apocalypse to read Cory’s review of Dead Set too…))
