Month: March 2019

Sequence 1: The movie opens with random scenes of chaos (riots, fighting, screaming) with an overlay of broken newscasting audio.

Sequence 2: Militant environmentalists liberate chimpanzees that have been held in a lab, believing that the scientists have been harmfully testing on them. A scientist attempts to stop them but is restrained.

Sequence 3: A chimp attacks one of the environmentalists, pukes blood, and spreads the infection that the scientist has dubbed ‘Rage.’

Sequence 4: A man wakes up naked and alone in a seemingly empty world. He walks around the city and there is only trash, missing person photos, and silence. White text reads 28 days later

Sequence 5: The man finds a church full of dead bodies. He is chased by senseless humans with dilated red eyes that seem to want to harm him.

Sequence 6: The man, Jim, is saved by 2 uninfected humans, Serena and Mark, that take him an abandoned store to hide out. They explain to Jim (and to us) what has happened in the last 28 days and that they are essentially occupying the post-apocalypse

Sequence 7: They stay the night at Jim’s family home and Jim’s nostalgic viewing of old family videos compromises their hideout. Mark becomes infected in the ensuing battle and Serena kills him immediately.

Sequence 8: Jim and Serena find an uninfected father and daughter, Frank and Hannah, and stay with them in their apartment. Frank reveals that they are running out of resources and, now that Jim and Serena have arrived, he would like to travel to a military blockade claiming to have a cure for Rage.

Sequence 9: The four travel together to the blockade. Their tire bursts and they narrowly escape a horde of humans infected with Rage.

Sequence 10: They stock up on food and gas during their trip. At the gas station, Jim must kill a young infected boy and is saddened by it.

Sequence 11: They take a break from driving on the countryside. Serena kisses Jim on the cheek.

Sequence 12: They arrive at the site of the military blockade and find only ruins. The father heckles a crow for picking at a dead body. He bangs the gate to make the crow leave but blood falls from the body into his eye. He is infected with Rage but then is killed by the soldiers that were looking for.

Sequence 13: The head of the site, Major Henry West, takes Jim on a tour. Jim sees that they have chained up an infected former officer for study.

Sequence 14: Infected humans attack the military blockade during the first dinner and the soldiers kill the threat. Jim and Serena watch from indoors.

Sequence 15: After, the other officers make sexual advances toward Serena. Jim intervenes on her behalf.

Sequence 16: Major Henry West reveals that he has promised both Serena and Hannah to the officers for both pleasure and procreation. They try to escape and are apprehended.

Sequence 17: Jim narrowly escapes death when they plan to shoot him in the forest. He returns to the mansion as it begins to rain.

Sequence 18: The officers circle Serena and Hannah and demand they change into dresses in front of them. Serena kisses an officer and asks that they leave. Her plan to commit suicide using pills is halted when an officer bursts back in and stops them.

Sequence 19: Jim begins to pick off the officers one by one. He releases the captive infected soldier from his chain and the infected soldier kills many of the officers in the building.

Sequence 20: Now in dresses, Serena and Hannah attempt to escape but are again apprehended and forced to stay as the remaining action unravels.

Sequence 21: Serena almost kills Jim as they reunite (believing that he has been infected) but she hesitates and sees that he is clear-eyed.

Sequence 22: Serena and Jim and Hannah escape.

Sequence 23: Serena, Jim, and white girl reside in peaceful solitude. The movie ends on a hopeful note; they flag down a plane and receive help.

28 Days Later is a gory post-apocalyptic vision of humanity, featuring a white protagonist and an unlikely combination of characters that work with him toward mutual success. Through a painfully long series of events, we witness our protagonist, Jim, navigate the fine line between survival and brutality. Along the way, Black characters essentially appear to fulfill the cinematically flat roles of ‘romantic interest’ or ‘unforeseen evil.’ The film treads the line of the racial and post-racial ultimately revealing an unavoidably racialized undertone relayed both through video and audio.

This frame is a medium close-up of Jim and Serena’s faces. The light hits most of Jim’s face. Serena’s face is visible but not illuminated, though faery lights flare up behind Serena’s head. The camera is eye-level with Jim. Neither Jim nor Serena is dead-center in the frame, but Jim is in the foreground and clearly the focus. Serena and Jim seem close to the audience. Their eyes are both cast to their left and upward. Due to a combination of lighting and coloring, Jim’s face is starkly contrasted with this costume whereas Serena’s face blends and/or is similar to the color palette of her costume. Serena’s expression and positioning make her appear smaller than Jim.

I chose this frame because it best points to the transition of Serena from the badass survivalist we all meet at the beginning of 28 Days Later to the demure damsel-in-distress the film leaves us with. In this frame, we literally see that Serena’s body is obscured both by the lens and by Jim himself. Moreover, this action seems both willful on the part of the director and on the part of the character, Serena. The effect of this in the larger scheme of the film is that Jim appears to have a ‘humanizing’ effect on Serena. Simply, before Serena meets Jim, she is entirely geared for survival, literally murdering someone just at the prospect that they might infringe on her safety. Through her encounters with Jim, Serena loses her cutthroat personality and willfully conforms to a stereotype of white womanhood before our eyes.

Essentially, this seems to suggest that the survival of Black woman rests on conformity. Serena is most valuable when is merely a sexualized body. Though the racialized tone of this sexualization is evident, it is clear that Serena becomes more human when she exists or conforms to the rigid statutes of white patriarchy. As C. Riley Snorton writes in “Gender,” “gender provides an aperture into modes of survival and personal or collective experiences of vitality” (Snorton 91). The future of human polity rests on her body and sexual reproduction; Serena’s survival, therefore, is predicated on her ability to service the future of humanity. Her Blackness is rendered as both hypervisible and invisible by this future-oriented role. As Snorton describes, Serena’s gendering is directly tied to the at-risk condition of her life, presently and historically.

Sequencing

Sequence 1: The movie opens to a digital-water fusion that, by the way of written text, tells the 3 Laws that robots follow.
Sequence 2: In a typical apartment, a black man gets ready to leave for the morning.
Sequence 3: Title text reads ‘Chicago 2035.’ We learn that the man is Detective Del Spooner, of Chicago PD. We see robots among the humans and a billboard ad announcing the debut of a new generation of robots.
Sequence 4: Spooner eats with his grandmother, Gigi, and expresses disdain for robots.
Sequence 5: Spooner chases a robot that was performing a duty for another human. He is later verbally reprimanded at work.
Sequence 6: Spooner is called to investigate the suicide of Dr. Albert Lanning, the founder of U.S. Robots and Mechanical Men. He interviews a digital recording of Dr. Lanning, which has limited responses as well as Dr. Lawrence Robertson, co-founder of USR, and Dr. Susan Calvin, a robot psychologist.
Sequence 7: While interviewing Dr. Calvin and scoping out the building, a robot comes to life, violates the 3 Laws (by attacking Spooner) and escapes the USR facility.
Sequence 8: He captures the robot and brings it in for questioning. The robot does not admit to murdering the man, expresses human emotion, and identifies himself as ‘Sonny.’ Dr. Robertson reclaims Sonny as property shortly after.
Sequence 9: Spooner looks for evidence at Dr. Lanning’s house. The robot-controlled security changes the demolition time from the early morning to minutes after Spooner’s arrival. He escapes death but loses any evidence.
Sequence 10: Spooner confronts Dr. Robertson. Dr. Calvin prepares to decommission Sonny at Dr. Robertson’s command.
Sequence 11: Spooner is attacked by tainted N-5s and we see he is part-robot. The N5s disappear before the police arrive to help. Spooner is put on medical leave because his boss believes he’s mentally ill.
Sequence 12: Through flashback, the film reveals that Spooner hates robots because, after colliding with another car, a robot decided to save Spooner over a young girl in the other car.
Sequence 13: Spooner talks to Sonny for more clues and Dr. Calvin decommissions Sonny.
Sequence 14: Spooner visits a warehouse site of retired robots and learns that the N5s want to revolt. He is chased from the site by the tainted N5s.
Sequence 15: N5s initiate militant control in the city. In troop-style formation they enforce curfew, take over the human police force, and send the human population indoors.
Sequence 16: Detective Spooner and Dr. Calvin enter USR headquarters. It is revealed that Dr. Calvin did not kill Sonny. Together, they confront VIKI, who has corrupted the N5s, and inject her with nanites to end her control. Detective Spooner reconciles with Sonny.
Sequence 17: Movie ends with Sonny standing over a ‘sea’ of N5s.

Scene Selection

Digital representations of Blackness and Otherness are not only eschewed based on historical representations of Black people, but also by the ideologies of the creator, current events, and countless other miniscule factors. However, when Black people are centered in the film in traditionally positive roles—for instance as the protagonist or the underdog hero—some of the ability to control these narratives is transferred to those characters. In I, Robot, Will Smith plays a detective and, despite his anti-robot rhetoric, is a remarkably likeable protagonist. Smith’s position as an agentic contributor to I, Robot complicates questions of who controls digital representations of Blackness.

The selected scene is a close shot of Detective Del Spooner’s forearm. The surrounding sequence offers exposition that connects Spooner to Dr. Lanning, gives heightened context for his abhorrence of robots, and allows us to sit with the superhuman ability he displayed in the previous N5 battle scenes. The shot is slightly angled from above, almost as if the audience is viewing Spooner’s arm as Spooner. The lighting shifts from sunlight to shadow across his forearm. His palm and leftmost forearm are illuminated and his arm hair is visible. The shadowy area of the shot holds his lacerated forearm and wiring runs beneath his skin. It is difficult to see the exact appearance of the wiring because of the poor lighting. His arm rests on his knee and his pant-covered leg is visible but blurred in the background of this shot. Set in the foreground, Spooner’s finger presses down the nozzle of a spray can but it is off-center and blurred. His left thumb is cut off in the shot.

In this shot, the film’s larger argument about the controlling, alien nature of technology is further extended through Spooner’s body. The sunlight falls against the ‘human’ fleshy part of his skin, immediately referencing the natural aspect of his body. Likewise, his wired interior is cast in shadow, such that the exact character of Smith’s Otherness remains obscured. Further, this scene is sequenced among scenes of Dr. Calvin preparing to decommission Sonny. The alienness of Spooner’s body is only underlined by the strangeness of Sonny presenting as robot yet human. However, the intimate angle of the shot serves to draw the viewer in and to, in turn, humanize Spooner’s body despite his part-metal composition. Even with this ‘humanizing’ effect it is evident that Spooner’s alienness is at the focus; the blurring of his fingers and body indicate that while his humanity is valid, his alienness is more visible.

This tension between the validity of Spooner’s humanity and the visibility of his alienness speaks directly to the tensions that proliferate among digital representations of Blackness. Spooner is human but he is changed, irreparably (and forcibly) marked by his history. Similarly, representations of Blackness reflect that oscillation between the mark of history, the truth of now, and the invisible wires that keep us all afloat.

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