澎堤池

声明：本文为个人作业，非授权任何人不得截取、转载、剽窃、或用于商业用途。

As a low-budget film, Pontypool (2008) presents a zombie crisis within a radio station and explores the topics around communication: how does language work, how do people define insiders and outsiders, and how do the ideologies behind words enclose different communities. Deshane and Morton (2018) pay attention the “haunting” history and significance of the marginalized people in Canada, and interpret the movie as an apocalypse of isolating ourselves or reaching seeking out the strangers. Kirsch and Stancliff (2018) analyze the movie with a focus on the semiotic natures of languages.

By introducing a “word virus,” Pontypool first and foremost demonstrates the fact that people can hardly understand the world without utilizing languages. While more and more people are infected by the “word transmission” disease, languages as symbolic systems invade and penetrate in every aspects of our life. People are introduced to an incomplete and inaccurate reality that constructed by languages and can no longer rationalize the Real. Kirsch and Stancliff (2018) points out that the frequently used “ready” terms of (familial) intimacy, such as “honey” and “I love you,” have the greatest potential of violence and contagion in the movie. Deshane and Morton (2018) also suggest that intimate people are more easily infected in the film, since they share the same worldview, sense of community, ideology, and thus discourse.

Indeed, the film introduces audiences with an experience through which understandable words becomes more and more ambiguous in meanings. In the opening scene, Grant’s voice is broadcasting a local gossip about a lost cat. At first, the story is straightforward; however when Grant connects young woman’s name, the bridge and the town together, the information becomes confusing, especially when the aural description is our only source. “Pont de Pool, Pontypool, Panty pool, Pont de Flaque (1:28)” Those similar sounds becomes cognitively meaningless. This “sounds of words become meaningless” process is even more intense in the obituary program (49:20), when Grant introduces a dozen of local residents’ names, their ages, their relationship and way of death. Since the audiences could hardly follow these information as Grant speaks, and understanding these information does help the main plot of the film, the sounds of words, the linguistic essence of words, and the meanings of words dissolve from the Symbolic which we know.

The Symbolic is not only endangered through a linguistic experience, but also challenged by the collapse of orders and meanings. On one hand, the Other per se is in crisis, since the capacity of the state to safeguard the stability is often questioned in post-apocalyptic zombie films; on the other hand, Zombies as non-subjective existence between living and dying, between human and monster, between being an acquaintance and being a stranger directly invalidate the Symbolic which both contains order and chaos (Kirsch and Stancliff, 2018). The repressive state force in the end of the film also signals a failure of ideological apparatuses to maintain order (ibid). Through a fluid division of insiders and outsiders, Pontypool also points out the reality in which people’s identities and meanings are fictionally assigned by the Other. Deshane and Morton (2018) suggest that zombies as a horde are inherent metaphor of foreign invasion, and the film believes that both isolation and insider’s language, which labels and marginalizes outsiders, are infectious and even destructive. The division between insider and outsider is questioned more when survivors and zombies are drawn to the same camp against the state force (Kirsch and Stancliff, 2018).

The zombie experience further emphasizes that a community is neither defined by people’s physical appearance nor geographical boundary. Firstly, social connections and bonds, instead of bodily differences, are the criteria of being an insider or an outsider (Deshane and Morton, 2018). Becoming zombies is a process of becoming strangers, and Laurel-Ann’s infection demonstrates. Despite being a beloved college, she is considered a stranger and a dangerous threat as soon as she is infected; when she failed to join the zombie community, Laurel-Ann as a stranger on both survivors’ and zombies’ sides vomits herself to death. Secondly, different from nationality, which is empowered by national boundaries as colonial and artificial outcomes, the sense of community is generated through shared ideology, recognition on the unwritten rules, and labels. Transmitting through English language, the word virus in Pontypool cannot be confined by locations or physical barricades (Kirsch and Stancliff, 2018). In real life, the widespread of the coronavirus also proves nationalists’ wrong impression on the concept of community and commonality.

Instead, what contagious is the ideologies which are articulated within words and coded in languages, and it is through people’s silent or expressive agreement on certain ideologies that they fuse into a community. On one hand, different meanings derive from the same signified under different Master Signifiers; on the other hand, by changing the meanings of words, people can question and modify the ideologies behind. While English language and whiteness is symbolic of vicious infections and invasion, the nature and significance of this “Pontypool Massacre” can be considered in at least three perspectives. In a Master Signifier of reflective decolonization, such as the article by Deshane and Morton (2018), the infection through English words only is a clear sarcasm on a hegemonic worldview. This narrative is emphasized through the brown-face Lawrence of Arabia performance, signaling exoticism, racism, and other colonial legacies in Canadian small towns (ibid.). BBC Word broadcaster Nigel Healing, nevertheless, insists to describe the whole incident as a separationist riot, demonstrating his late colonial Master Signifier (Kirsch and Stancliff, 2018). For most of the audiences, English language is perhaps a neutral design for the plot and doesn’t carry significant meaning. To disrupt the relations between signifiers and signified in English and the embedded ideologies, Grant and Sydney abandon linguistic common sense and thus remove the division of insiders and outsiders. As Deshane and Morton (2018) put, “All forms of strangeness are removed in this act; there is no outsider; and for a moment, there is no language.” For a moment, a signifier cannot and doesn’t have to find a signified, and speaking and listening English no longer provides meanings to the receivers, just like Grant’s obituary program, like a song by incomprehensible language, and like chatter-chanting music such as Balinese kecak. Although people can no longer understand the reality through the previous symbolic system, they encounter the Real, the realm where word virus not only is incapable of attacking, but also aims to protect. When a pianist gives up pianos as a rationalizing and documenting tool of “music,” he or she may lose 88 pitches, but gains the potentiality to recognize all sounds in the world.

Work Cited:

Deshane, Evelyn, and R. Travis Morton. "The Words Change Everything: Haunting, Contagion And The Stranger In Tony Burgess’S Pontypool". London Journal Of Canadian Studies, 2018. UCL Press, doi:10.14324/111.444.ljcs.2018v33.005.

Kirsch, Sharon J., and Michael Stancliff. ""How Do You Not Understand A Word?": Language As Contagion And Cure In Pontypool". Journal Of Narrative Theory, vol 48, no. 2, 2018, pp. 252-278. Project Muse, doi:10.1353/jnt.2018.0010.