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Popular Culture Review
fact, that something has happened to us. Perhaps we no longer understand.
Perhaps we are unable to communicate. Beings with whom we are unable to
communicate will always be a source of anxiety, regardless of where we place
the blame. This is because language is a way of making things present in their
absence. It is, as well, to call a world into being. Together, we share the
language and we share the world. When the first part of this breaks down, so
goes the latter.
What is holding zombies back from communicating with us? They
have ears that can hear, and they have tongues that can articulate—or at least
some of them still have attached ears and tongues. If they are not talking to us, is
it because they are unable to do so, or is it, even more frighteningly, because
they choose not to? If a zombie spoke, would we be able to understand him?
Would we share a world? Have we really even tried to talk to the zombie—
talked in such a way that our talking is not an inquisition, but rather the start of a
real conversation; talked in such a way that we are poised to hear a response
rather than mere sound?
When the reporter lost control of her words, there are those who feared
that the only explanation was that zombiehood had set in. There is precedent for
this in the culture. When the mouth no longer communicates, we struggle to put
it to use—we struggle to understand how we can still be human. And there is no
finer artistic investigation of this fear than the Canadian independent film
Pontypool (Bruce McDonald, dir., 2009).
Pontypool is the most cerebral zombie movie one might imagine. Some
refer to it as a zombie movie without zombies, or the zombie movie that Noam
Chomsky could have written. It is all this, but it is much more. The film is based
on Anthony Burgess’ book, Pontypool Changes Everything, and the action takes
place almost entirely inside a radio station located in the basement of a church in
the small town of Pontypool, Ontario. Filmed on location, the movie came to be
after Burgess adapted his book to create a screenplay that unfolded in the style
of Orsen Welles’ War o f the Worlds. And the movie is, in many ways, a radio
play—fittingly more about words than about visuals.
At the start of the film, controversial shock-jock disc jockey Grant
Mazzy has emerged from a scandal and has relocated from the big city to
Pontypool’s small-town and small-market radio station. He is reduced to reading
information about lost pets and setting up segments from field reporter Ken
Loney (who pretends to be giving his traffic reports from a helicopter when he is
actually just driving around town in his Dodge Dart). Grant has two female
assistants, Sydney Briar (his producer) and Laurel-Ann Drummond (his
technician). The radio broadcast day begins more or less like any other, but soon
Ken is reporting that there are mobs of people gathering and rioting in the
streets. They are repeating nonsense words and phrases, and no one is able to
understand what is going on. Ken takes refuge in a nearby home and encounters
a teenage boy who seems to be mimicking the sounds of his baby brother. Grant
sends the report out live over the air, and the sound of the boy making repetitive