How the city is represented in 28 Days Later
Jim’s walk after waking up from a coma shows a very different London to what both Jim and the spectators are used to seeing. The role of the city has changed dramatically and for Jim is quite an alienating experience for him as the city has been recoded, but he hasn’t yet been recoded to fit in with this new city he is now in. This scene engages with the various models of how our bodies and the city engage with each other (Grosz, 1995).
Starting with Grosz’s causal model whereby the bodies take priority over the city, therefore the city reflects the body (Grosz, 1995). The causal model can be seen when Jim sees the souvenirs of the Big Ben scattered across the floor.
Monuments like Big Ben had value due to the people coming to visit them and being in awe of them; however, in a zombie apocalypse this value is drained from the buildings since people now no longer have the time to stop and look at these monuments and in turn, they are no more of a value than the souvenirs that lay strewn across the city floor. This shows how the causal mode is in operation here as it’s the people’s needs and their new routines that have altered the coding of these buildings as opposed to the city recoding and the people of the city having to keep up with the cities changing recodification.
Equally the alternative model that Grosz (1995) puts forward is also evident. With this mode, rather than there being a binary and superiority between the body and the city, there is a dialogue between both the city and body and cities reinscribe the bodies and in turn the bodies recode the city. The emptiness of the city reflects not only the change of its inhabitant’s routines (people fleeing the city or going into hiding)
but also the blankness of the zombies that now inhabit the city. These blank spaces in the city comes to represent the undead as opposed to the living (May 2010) and this gives rise to the bodies of the city struggling to work these spaces of the city. As a result, these new recoded spaces impact the people’s behaviour as the city is no longer a safe place and you must know how to survive without even the basic necessities that the city used to offer.
Interestingly the use of camerawork in this scene shows the blankness of the city and Jim’s lack of recodification means that he must adapt to the behaviours of the other bodies in the city in order to survive.
Looking at these two wide shots used in the scenes, it shows how Jim is dwarfed by the blankness of the city and he is ultimately the last human to be untouched by this blankness and recodification of the city, as he was in coma, and he still has his ‘human-like’ qualities, such as picking up the money on the floor; unaware that like the city this money has been drained from all its values as a result of people’s routines changing and both the city and bodies reinscribing each other to match this new way of life. These shots also show how intimidating and overwhelming this blankness and reinscribing of the city is for Jim and how in this instance it is in fact the city that is superior to Jim and even though the City has been reinscribed through the bodies changing behaviours, Jim’s behaviours haven’t yet changed in this part of the film and the city is now draining Jim of all his ‘normal’ routines and reflecting the blankness that the city took from the zombie and inscribing it onto Jim.
The modernity of the city isn’t presented as something that is full of promises and almost like an artistic movement like Baudelaire (1863) suggests. Instead, it shows us the end point for modernity, which is a dystopian city, once we can no longer satiate our desire for the new the city ultimately suffers from this desire. Our appetite for the new is our downfall, as we see in the start of the film scientists experimenting on primates, without these experimentations is highly likely this apocalypse would never have taken place and the city and the bodies within wouldn’t have been recoded.
Overall, the city is presented in a variety of ways, the city recodifies itself in order to represent the bodies new routines but in turn the city also takes on the blankness of the zombies and therefore affecting people’s routines as the city no longer has the meaning and to some extent the value it once had. For Jim who has woken up this new city he quickly has to adapt to this blankness of the city and recode himself in order to survive. This recodification of Jim is arguably the central plot of the film whereby, he manages to recode himself to be the main protagonist and is able to get through this blankness and in turn survive the zombie apocalypse.
Reference:
28 Days Later, 2002, [Film] Directed by Danny Boyle, UK: DNA Films Available via: BOB
Baudelaire.C, 1863, The Painter of modern life, [eBook] United States: Phaidon Press Available via: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/architecture/ockman/pdfs/dossier_4/Baudelaire.pdf [Accessed 30th March 2022]
Grosz, E 1995, Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies, London: Routledge
May.J, 2010, Scary Cities: Urban Geographies of fear, difference and belonging. Zombies Geographies and the undead city, 11(3), (16th March), 285–298, Available via: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14649361003637166 [Accessed 29th March 2022]
