‘Going to end badly’ — a zombie movie for the Trump era

A columnist should sometimes share personal details. In moderation they can be the glue that holds readership. Your writing should occasionally reflect that you have a life, a family, that you had your hip replaced — details in Sunday’s paper — and enjoy pistachio pudding.

Columnists must take care, however, that revelations are adhesive rather than repellent. The example to always bear in mind is George F. Will, who in 2009 wrote a column damning blue jeans as “the infantile uniform” of a nation lost to TV and video games. Standard Will stuff, quoting both Edmund Burke and St. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians. At the end, he admits wearing jeans only once, under compulsion.

My regard for the man drained away. It colored him, forever. The guy who never wore jeans.

So I’m pausing before this admission. I think I’m on solid ground. Only one way to find out.

I had never seen a zombie movie. Not before last month. Oh, I’d caught glimpses, in commercials. I know there’s a TV series, “The Walking Dead.” So I can conjure up images. A lot of lopsided shuffling. Much bloody gnawing of flesh. Not my idea of fun.

But my older boy was home, and he broke down my resistance by pointing out this was a zombie movie with Tom Waits, “The Dead Don’t Die,” directed by Jim Jarmusch. I love Tom Waits.

So I watched. “The Dead Don’t Die” (2019) starring Bill Murray, who has made a sub-career adding his celebrity sparkle to small films, and Adam Driver, because he’s in every movie lately, as Chief Cliff Robertson and Officer Ronnie Peterson. The pair are the senior peace officers in Centerville, which begins to have problems due to “polar fracking” throwing the Earth off its orbit. Daylight and nighttime are scrambled, the ants are confused and, oh yes, the dead live, popping out of their graves to eat human flesh.

The two cops are utterly unfazed in the face of increasingly grotesque madness, a quality that feels very familiar, very 2020s, very Trump Era.

“Guys, shouldn’t we be telling each other that it’s all going to be OK?” says Officer Mindy Morrison, the panicky junior cop played by Chloe Sevigny, sounding like every Democrat contemplating the 2020 election. “That this will all go away, like a bad dream? Ronnie?”

“Gee, Mindy, I’m not sure I can say that,” Robertson replies.

“The Dead Don’t Die” hits the perfect blend of business-as-usual and bone-deep pessimism.

“This is not going to end well,” Robertson keeps saying, as if being forced to lop off the heads of your neighbors with a machete isn’t a bad ending already. One of several delicious Jarmusch refrains. He has a genius for repeating mundane phrases into profundity.

Confronting the first maimed victims, onlookers keep saying: “It looked like he was attacked by a wild animal. Or several wild animals.” By the third “or several animals” I was in awe of the line’s wistfulness, its clinging to normalcy. Too much disembowelment for one wild animal? Maybe there were more.

The chief observes how calm his subordinate is, how “oddly controlled” while having to fight off the legions of the undead.

”Well, I’m just, you know, dealing with it in my own way,” says Peterson. “But I’ve been telling you this is all going to end badly.”

If you notice, I haven’t said much on the impeachment trial in the Senate. Which is very much like that cliched horror movie moment when the cop shows up at the door of the house of horror. The audience relaxes, thinking for a second that Everything’s Going to Be OK. Maybe Republican senators will see the light — I mean, this is their chance to rid our nation of this obscene monster.

But no. Either the zombie sneaks up and sinks his teeth into the officer’s neck. Or the cop looks up, eyes red, and you realize he’s already gone over to the undead. Rescue is not here. Not now.

So apologies for not parsing the awful details of our shameful horror. I’m just, you know, dealing with it in my own way. But I’ve been telling you, this is all going to end badly.

Jarmusch and instrumentalist Carter Logan, who co-produced “The Dead Don’t Die,” perform together as SQÜRL—they did the film’s soundtrack—Sunday, Feb. 2, at 7:30 p.m. at the Art Institute of Chicago, creating a “semi-improvised ambient score” for four silent movies by surrealist artist Man Ray. Tickets are $20.