Galadriel's Choice.

Scary GaladrielYou know that bit in LOTR when Frodo offers Galadriel the ring and she thinks about it a bit and then goes all scary and then gets all sad and normal again before saying, 'No, Galadriel will fade and go into the West'? First of all, it's a bit Craig David to refer to herself in the third person like that. Second, I've come to realise this is the defining metaphor for growing old. Here she is being offered everything she could ever conceivably want: power, immortality, a life without fear. However, knowing as she does that she can't make the selfish choice without corrupting herself or the sacred balance of the universe, yadda-yadda-yadda, she says no. And that's just like getting old. Sure, you can be a dick about it and cling onto the dream of your youth, when you were amazingly wonderful and important, if only to yourself. But that, as Sauron learned the hard way, does not get you invited to Elrond's birthday party. Alternatively, you can be unselfish and let the natural course of things diminish you gradually, without eradicating whatever it is you still believe in. This is probably how it feels to be a cliff: you stand there every day getting eroded, and after a while you're pretty much unrecognisable even to yourself – but you're still a cliff. There's a certain comfort in thoughts like these. And that's probably why I find myself – most often in the shower when I've noticed some new travesty inflicted by my body's ongoing attritional war with time, whispering to myself, 'No, Galadriel will fade and go into the West.' 

Dead End Geek.

Excuse me while I blow your mind with this here epic treatise on the psychopathology of the geek, and why the geek kings need to stop dragging the reputation of geeks everywhere through the mud with their lazy, fatuous reversion to cliché. And if you’re thinking of complaining along the lines of tl;dr, then please don’t. George Orwell’s essay 'The Lion and The Unicorn' is 23,000 words, and people still read that.

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Zombie Love.

There was an article in The Guardian a while ago wondering why Resident Evil Afterlife was doing so well at the box office despite its poor critical reception. This immediately merited a deluge of bitching in the comments about the supposed intellectual elitism of the journalist. The main gist of the rebuttal was that this is just a good pop corn movie, so can we please just enjoy it as such.

But I’m not sure our pleasure is as simple as that. Pleasure rarely is. Personally, I think that we love all things zombie because zombies are comforting, and the reason zombies are comforting is because they don’t have a subtext. Compare them with the other main monster groups: vampires are a metaphor for sex as death, werewolves are metaphors for our sublimated feral nature, aliens are a metaphor for otherness and Frankenstein’s monster is a metaphor for the hubris of Promethean ambition. Zombies, on the other hand, do precisely what it says on the tin (of zombies): they want to eat your brains, and they will follow you slowly and predictably and with surprising, almost endearing, patience in order to do so.

Sure, they can make us shriek if they lurch unexpectedly out of a doorway. But they also make us laugh. And if you get caught by a zombie, well, ultimately it’s your fault. You were too slow, or too cocky, or you were distracted by having sex. It’s as simple as that. And, in an age when we’re seriously afraid, of everything, a little simplicity, a little controlled fear presented to us in a safe and unambiguous package, can go a very long way.

Of course, every zombie needs someone who understands him. And that’s why God made Ash.