Best Zombies Ever! Stuart Lenig I think I have just watched the best zombie film ever.

Though such a category is dubious, Jonathan Levines Warm Bodies is a contender if such a category should exist. First there is the obligatory content of brain gobbling, horrifying zombie attacks, and the glorious sight of zombies overrunning everything in sight like ants at a picnic lunch. But Warm Bodies runs deeper than that and participates in the often pernicious culture wars debate that threatens the fabric of our society more than every zombie slaughter since George Romero applied flour to the face of an extra in 1968s Night of the Living Dead. Romero created his zombie films in Pittsburgh in the sixties with black heroes fighting off hordes of decayed white people as an elegant commentary on civil rights and the divisive politics of turning people against each other. Warm Bodies goes further, with the zombies as outcasts, compelled to eat flesh, yet quietly and hopefully beginning to have the dawnings of consciousness, of a social

structure, and a competing society. Our protagonist, R (he cant remember his full name) lives in an airport onboard a 727, performing audiophile rituals when listening to music, blowing dust off of records, placing them neatly in slip covers, and lounging in the best seats to get the stereo effect. In his red hoodie, he is not unlike any 20-something bohemian slacker. He is us. His puzzled human companion blurts out, what are you? And that is the question of the film and for our society. If a group are outcasts, are unwanted by society, and society begins to change and the group begins to change, when is the moment of rapprochement? When do we all come together? If Warm Bodies, is successful than it is most successful in extending the zombie debate to new classes. The zombies want to appear normal, to be accepted, to pass as human. Despite some social practices we might object to (like brain eating), they want to be accepted. Just like Arabs, Jews, Blacks, Gays, and anyone else who somehow wanders into the great unthinking zombie land we call the United States.

Ive read the debate about teaching tolerance and whether that is right and whether it can it work. Perhaps not, but since most Americans believe in freedom and democracy, why would we not let gay people or Arab people or anyone who is different (children, the poor, the ugly, the overweight or even zombies) sit at the table of our loathsome club called humanity. Warm Bodies seems a perfect antidote, preaching tolerance by action, acceptance by a will to be a part of the whole, and the deeper understanding that we are stronger for what we love than empowered by what we hate. To the notion of Americanism that promotes tolerance and acceptance of everyone and anyone who can bring capabilities and talents to the pool (the great Jeffersonian ideal), Warm Bodies seems the perfect patriotic film for the fourth, a film that celebrates rebirth and acceptance, even for zombies, or anyone.