Dead Bovary

Seen: Land of the Dead
Read: Madame Bovary
Yesterday I finished reading the 1940s translation of Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and finally got a chance to watch George Romero’s Land of the Dead.
Madame Bovary is a sympathetic depicition of ordinary human life, and a warning tale against romanticisation. The world is not like popular fictions of soaring romance and high drama, and to expect such things is to invite disaster.
The novel follows, with some sympathy, the plight of the desperately flawed title character, whose dissatisfaction with her ordinary life leads her to an escalating series of poor judgements which eventually results in disaster.
Land of the Dead is Romero’s take on dehumanisation of the Other, with explicit parallels to Israel/Palestine, Apartheid, the Civil Rights Movement, and the widening income gap.
It starkly asserts that a society based on fear of the other will rapidly consume its own soul. Notably, however, Romero does not place much confidence in the ability of good intentions and egalitarian spirit to resist this corruption.
(Of course, it depicts the disenfranchised as a literal bunch of flesh-eating zombies, so it’s not entirely a straightforward parable.)
Hmm. If I was better at this pithy-blog-writer thing I would find a clever gimmicky way of relating these two together, for a cheap laugh if not for insight. But they really are quite different. Oh well. If anyone has a witty suggestion, chuck it in the comments, huh?
Both are highly recommended, although if you don’t like seeing zombies eating faces and intestines you might want to skip the Romero one.