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43 43 2 The Body as Site of Struggle: The Crazies, Monkey Shines, The Dark Half, Bruiser George Romero’s attention to the body is not limited to the shambling figures of the living dead, and in a way, it is his other films, those not in the Living Dead series, that provide a wider sense of his preoccupation with the body. The persistence of this preoccupation is evident, for example, in his 1973 picture The Crazies, Romero’s fourth theatrical release. In many ways, The Crazies resembles Romero’s Living Dead films—the plot is centered around the accidental discharge of a military biological weapon codenamed Trixie, a chemical that drives people insane. Throughout the film, the affected population slowly turns into a mass of hysterical individuals , often seen roaming around distractedly. As with the Living Dead films, the official response—a military blockade of the town and an effort to quarantine the rapidly degenerating population—seems draconian and generally more menacing than the infected themselves. Indeed, the main plot of The Crazies follows a small group of people as they seek to evade the military officials and make their way out of the affected area. What makes The Crazies a particularly interesting narrative experience is that we are, in essence, invited to root for a group of individuals that, should they succeed, will likely spread a deadly, mind-altering virus to the entire population. The theme of contagion in The Crazies resembles that of the Living Dead films, though here the infected are not ravenous , decaying corpses but generally gentle humans who have simply lost control of their senses. On the surface, the “crazies” within the town are nothing like the bloody horrors of the living dead, but in a fundamental Unconstrained Bodies in the Films of George Romero 44 way, they resemble the living dead in that they are also bodies no longer constrained or defined by cultural norms. Indeed, in a way the crazies represent an expanded sense of the unconstrained body in that they display a wider spectrum of desires and appetites than the generally single-minded zombies of Romero’s Living Dead films. The behaviors of the crazies run a wide gamut, from the loathsome to the innocent. The film opens, for example, with an infected father murdering his wife and then chasing his children before setting his house on fire. In this vein, one of the more disturbing scenes occurs later in the film as another father becomes infected and then forces himself upon his daughter before being pulled away. This act of incest and perhaps the disease as well push both father and daughter over the edge. The father commits suicide immediately afterward, and the daughter is later seen wandering through a field, surrounded by soldiers in matching white hazmat suits who attempt to capture her. As they surround the deranged girl, she approaches them, softly muttering; the image resembles Bernie Boston’s iconic 1967 photo of protesters putting flowers into the barrels of the guns held on them by National Guard troops. In the end, however, the girl is gunned down brutally, and her compatriots, who had been watching from afar, make their escape. While Romero’s attention here is still very much on the body, it is clear that the body functions in a different, though no less political, way. In The Crazies and the other films considered in this chapter, Romero focuses on the body as a site of struggle between our deeper urges and motives and those cultural constraints that make us “civilized” people. Consistently, Romero’s attention is on the artificial cultural conditions that craft our humanity, but instead of using the body as an external threat in these films, Romero recognizes that there is an equally important struggle occurring on the inside. In The Crazies, for example, the various acts of insanity we witness on-screen seem to be manifestations of deeply held, though forbidden, desires. The father’s incestuous lust for his daughter or the earlier father’s murderous rage against his family are two of the darker examples, but the film generally portrays the crazies as less dangerous and more innocent in their unbridled desires. For the most part, the crazies themselves resemble a kind of “free love” hippie movement with erratic and unpredictable individual and collective acts. In one scene, for example, as the infected townspeople fight back and begin chasing a group of soldiers across a field, others of the infected are...

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