Warm Bodies: What the Dead Tells Us about Life
I just watched Warm Bodies with some friends. It’s an awesome movie and now I understand why it got positive reviews. There are three reasons why I love this zombie movie. First, it is extremely enjoyable and funny. I’ve been trying to recall a romantic movie that is as funny as Warm Bodies but failed miserably. Second, the dialogue is minimal, which really helps non-English speakers like me. I remember when I watched Lincoln and Cloud Atlas and felt like my brain stopped working after the movie was over. The third reason, as my friend put it well, is because Warm Bodies successfully revives what are basically outdated themes—so outdated in fact that they have become cliches.
Love Unites Differences
What can be more cliche than those “love unites differences” or “love reconciles enmities” stuffs? Romeo and Juliet, City of Angels, Twilight, Titanic, you name it, they are all about how two persons from different backgrounds become one because they love each other.
However, no matter how cliche the theme is, Warm Bodies isn’t trapped in that cliche. For one part, Isaac Marion’s (Warm Bodies author) use of zombie and human as the conflicting backgrounds is unique by itself. Love may already been shown to unite two people from different social statuses, two countries, or two opposing political groups; but that love unites the living and the lifeless, only Warm Bodies nails it.
Life is about Love
Warm Bodies actually moves further than love unites the persons who are in love. In it, love also brings the dead back to life. In other words, to put it in a cliche manner, life is all about love, about connection. Even a zombie feels frustrated with the inability to make connections with fellow zombies. As one of R’s groaning means, “Must have been a lot better before, when everyone could express themselves, communicate their feelings and just enjoy each other’s company.”
The moment that connection happens, things get better: a zombie is getting back to life by playing baseball with a human, who patiently keeps throwing ball to him, having the faith that at one time he will learn to catch it; a zombie kid, used to wander and get lost in the airport, gets cured when human kids are willing to play hide-and-seek with her. In a scene that makes the audience laughs, one helps a zombie getting his life back by helping him to open his umbrella.
Pain and emotion are parts of being human
If you’ve ever experienced something terrible or painful, which everyone most certainly has, the chance is you’ve heard something like “emotion is what makes us humans” or “without being able to feel sad you can’t recognize happiness”. Well, though perhaps their truth can be debated, their level of clicheness can’t. I had heard enough of them so that I had had this urge to shout “shut up!” to anyone who said it, until I watched Warm Bodies.
The movie reiterates the old message in a novel way. It brings back the appreciation to mundane, often overlooked, things that are actually essential parts of our human experience: feeling cold, dreaming, seeing people holding hands, feeling remorse, bleeding, feeling broken-hearted.
The dead cannot feel. The only reason we feel those things is because we are human.
Memories are Precious
This is the cliche whose reinterpretation by Warm Bodies I like the most. The reason the zombies eat human brain is to take their memories.
“I just want to feel what you felt. Feel… a little better. A little less dead. “
Memories also help curing the zombies. When they see R and Julie holding hand, and later a picture of two persons holding hand, they gradually get their memories back—the memories of their children, of their friends or loved ones. And when they get their memories, their hearts start to beat.
I find the scenes interesting because I think we sometimes underestimate the value of memories. On the one hand, we place high value on good memories. On the other hand, we try our best to forget negative memories. To remember a friendship or romantic relationship that goes well, we save for ourselves items that help us remember the good times. When the relationship goes awry, we throw away those items that once were imbued with love, care, and affection. I don’t think we can select our memories like that. Our memories, positive and negative, help shape our future self. I fail to see how keeping only good memories or memorabilia will help us becoming better people.
In the book, Isaac pictures Julie as saying of her dead mother, “That’s why we have memory… So things that are gone can still matter. So we can built off our pasts and make future.”
Having said what I like about Warm Bodies, I can obviously move to writing what I dislike—the flaws and imperfection of the movie. I am not interested in doing that. Still affected by the mood from the movie time, I am more inclined to just see the imperfection as something that is characteristically human, something to enjoy as it is. After all, for those who enjoy it flaws won’t matter and for those who hate it perfection won’t count. There are some things that are beyond description, that are describable only by experience.
“…despite the best efforts of historians and scientists and poets, there are some things we’ll just never know. What the first song sounded like. How it felt to see the first photograph. Who kissed the first kiss, and if it was any good.”