Dante’s Inferno: The Necessary Satire of Homecoming

by Mark Peranson

From his greatest success of Gremlins (1984) through the critical cause c é l è bre Small Soldiers (1998) and many points before and in between, Joe Dante has made his field of play the televisual space where children’s dreams can easily turn over into nightmares. America itself is a young country, possessed by numerous dreams, and currently is living through a nightmare of its own; Dante’s latest film, Homecoming, oozes with the horror of real life, the horror of the here and now. Though is was made as an hour-long episode for the Vancouver-shot Masters of Horror series, now airing on Showtime in the US and Scream in Canada (after a raucously successful screening at the Torino Film Festival), Homecoming is one of the year’s most important films—for its subversive politics—but is also one tightly made B-movie, entertaining and zippy as all hell.

Like many directors of his age, Dante began working for Roger Corman, the only other time he made a film in ten days. In taking on his role as a Master of Horror, an opportunity that provided him near absolute freedom—and the ability to make one of the Val Lewton-type rush jobs that inspired him—America’s sharpest satirist dispensed with the slicing and the dicing, instead offering up a too-long delayed rebuttal to the current American administration’s arrogance and disregard for the lives of its own soldiers. Adapted by Sam Hamm from a short story by fantasy writer Dale Bailey entitled “Death by Suffrage,” Homecoming revolves around an arrogant cadre of veteran Republican policy makers (in an office with a noticeable “Mission Accomplished” banner) who are thrown for a loop when the Iraqi war dead begin coming back to life—not to eat the living, but to cast their vote in the 2004 Presidential election — after being invoked into being, Jacques Tourneur-style, by Republican strategist David Murch (Jon Tenney), who on a Larry King-like talk show challenges a war mom’s patriotism (she’s pointedly named Janet Hofstader, after the man who wrote about the paranoid style in American politics). Murch claims that if the dead came back, they’d tell us they were glad to give their lives for their country…in this particular struggle. And he’d know, since his brother died in Vietnam . (The film was made before the hullabaloo over irate war mom Cindy Sheehan.) Murch is quickly proven wrong, as the zombies start using the media to their own ends. “I was killed for a lie,” the talker says, and vows to vote for “anyone who ends this evil war.”

Unlike Bailey’s story, which concerns gun control and references the fact that dead people often appear on the voting rolls in Chicago, Dante’s film is very clearly about the way the Bush administration has handled the Iraq War (referred to obliquely in the film as “the current engagement”). From this premise, Dante and Hamm spin a straightly told, devastatingly acerbic satire, where Murch and his leggy, BSH BABE license-plate toting galpal June Cleaver (a stunning approximation of right-wing skank Ann Coulter, played by Queer as Folk’s Thea Gill as if she were constantly on coke) try to control the zombies with their TV show spin (after all, they say, “we sold a war based on horseshit and elbow grease,” so surely a bunch of zombies can be controlled). Dante even gleefully gives us a Karl Rove surrogate, Kurt Rand (played by Dante stalwart Robert Picardo), who is initially enthralled by the prospect of a soldier who can’t be killed, yet meets his end in a highly rewarding manner, as a zombie repeatedly smashes his head into a table. (Dante even finds the time to satirize the religious right, and why not?)

Homecoming transforms the classical zombie movie paradigm that began with (the name-checked) George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), the return of the repressed, into the return of the suppressed: political dissent and public disapproval of the Bush government’s handling of, well, everything. (In a clever twist, we come to learn that the real reason for Murch’s action hinges on a repressed episode from his childhood involving his Vietnam War vet brother; Dante’s zombie film is both political and psychological.) Homecoming’s most stunning scene is the first appearance of the zombies at Dover Air Force base, as the undead soldiers emerge from beneath the American flags covering their coffins — the very scenes that the Pentagon has forbidden the media to cover. More than soldiers, though, the zombies represent all the disenfranchised, including those whose votes weren’t counted in both recent elections: as the undead eventually are allowed to go to the polls, and the results start swinging to the left, the Republicans make the call. Dante pulls no punches in declaring the fix was and still is in (after name-checking Florida , he even shows the classic “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline). “We count the votes,” an aide says, “we do what’s best for America . If the voters don’t agree, it’s their problem.”

In a way, such an overt political statement has been a long time coming for this often excessively cynical director. In Dante’s most recent feature-length films, starting with the ‘60s-set Matinee (1993), moving to the brilliant Small Soldiers, and, finally, the very underappreciated balls-to-the-wall satire The Second Civil War (1997)—a film where American revolutionaries actually blow up both the Alamo and the Statue of Liberty, and thus a movie that could not be made today—one sees a trajectory away from coded subversion into something beyond subtle. I get the feeling watching Homecoming that there’s nothing Dante felt he couldn’t include, even implying that the administration artificially deflates the numbers of war dead. (The name of the President is never uttered, though there is a particularly bad Bush impression heard on television, when the President picks up Murch’s talking point and puts it in his stump speech.)

Dante’s most popular film in Europe—rarely seen in North America, where it aired on HBO, though it is now available on DVD—the Paddy Chayefsky-like The Second Civil War is probably the best comparison point for Homecoming. Still, despite its moments of transcendent satire, The Second Civil War strikes me as too eager to bring down the house without saving the least guilty. It ends with a telling voiceover by the film’s most sympathetic character, an old-school reporter played by James Earl Jones, worth quoting in full. As the country disintegrates into anarchy, Jones’ character leaves his office, pondering, “I read years ago that someone once said, ‘Those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.’ Or maybe it’s just that we’re an unfinished work of art, part tragedy, part comedy, part joy, part farce—a work in progress. We’re still painting and writing in blood. And it always seems to come out of a lot of suffering. And someday, after it all dries, it will be magnificent. But until then, like all art, it’s messy as hell.” In Homecoming, Murch’s summational voiceover, after he has met his comedically tragic fate, rails against “this needless, useless lie,” to the strains of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” It, too, comes with a sliver of hope for the future, in the form of violent, revolutionary overthrow. So much has changed in less than a decade.

Cinema Scope: Can talk about the story “Death by Suffrage,” how you found it, and what you changed?

Joe Dante: Well originally, the producers came to me and said, “We want you guys to find your own stories.” So I found a couple stories I liked but they couldn’t get the rights to them. So my friend Sam Hamm and I started looking around and thinking, “You know, nobody is doing anything about what’s going on now, I mean, compared to the ‘70s when they were making movies about all the issues that were prominent in the day, this big elephant in the room, this Iraq War story, is not being dramatized, is not being covered dramatically by anybody.” And I don’t know what the reason is, I assume it’s timidity and not wanting to offend people in red states and all that kind of stuff, or that it was unpatriotic to do something critical of the war. But because this happened to be a situation where nobody had any veto power over the material, I said “Why don’t we just do something about what’s going on now?” So we talked about it a little, and he found a short story by a guy named Dale Bailey which has the basic “Monkey’s Paw” premise that we expanded from, and we handed it in to the producers. We expected maybe they would say, “Well, this isn’t really what we want.” But they were very supportive and so we went ahead and did it. And now, in retrospect, I can’t conceive of any other venue in which we would have been to tell this story.

Scope: Why do you say that?

Dante: Because nobody wants to do this stuff! Because nobody wants to do politics, it doesn’t sell. You can’t do theatrical political movies, they say people don’t go to them. You can’t do them on television, because you’ve got sponsors. It’s very rare, unless you can do some really cheap independent picture, that anybody gets to tell a story like this.

Scope: You had the budget of a cheap independent picture though, didn’t you? So why could you not have done this…

Dante: Because you have to raise the money, and where the hell are you going to get the money? You’re going to go to somebody and say, “I just want to make this one movie, about this particular subject, and I’m going to be able to sell it all over the world”? No!

Scope: You don’t think there’s an audience of people who go to see Michael Moore films…

Dante: You see Michael Moore make a film recently? I mean, his last picture made a lot of money, but he was vilified for it so much that he’s practically in hiding. The right wing has marginalized him to the point where his movie—which is a beacon of truth—has been completely discredited in America . I mean, if you mention Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), people say, “That fiction, that science fiction movie? Forget it! There’s nothing true in that movie!”

Scope: Some people are saying, “Oh, Michael Moore cost us the election.”

Dante: Which is bullshit. First of all, who knows who won the election? I mean, you’re going to sit around and actually tell me that these people won the election in Ohio ? Where the guy who’s in charge, and the people who make the machines said, “We’re going to deliver the election to George Bush.” The thing that’s amazing to me, and the thing where this movie came from, is that you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see what a fucking mess we’re in and what we’ve done to the image of this country around the world. And it didn’t just happen last week, it’s been happening steadily for the past four years. And nobody made a peep about it. And The New York Times and all these people, they actually abetted the lies and crap that went into the making and selling of this war. And now that they see that the guy is a little weak, they’re kicking him with the toe of their foot to make sure that he doesn’t bite back. And it gets cowardly, and it’s sick, and I think nobody’s done anything about it. And this pitiful zombie movie, this fucking B-movie is the only thing that anybody’s done about this issue? That killed 2000 Americans and untold amounts of Iraqis? It’s sick, it’s fucking sick.

Scope: In a way, the only other movie recently to deal with the war is Land of the Dead (2004).

Dante: Yes, but here’s the thing. If you’re going code the message to that point, which is the way we’ve all done it—the way that all the horror movies have done it—that’s fine, but, you know, it’s not going to reach an audience like a movie that’s overt… and this movie is not exactly subtle, the one I made. I mean, it’s really obvious what it’s about and what’s going on. And it seems to me that you have to be. Somebody has to start making this kind of movie, this kind of statement. And everybody is afraid to do it. It’s not commercial, and people are going to be upset. Good, let them be upset. Why aren’t people upset? Everyday people go through their normal lives and they go ahead and they pick up the mail and they take a bath, they walk the dog, and they do all this stuff and every minute they’re doing it somebody’s dying in this war, and for nothing. To establish what, a religious theocracy in Iraq ? It doesn’t seem to me quite worth it.

Scope: But making something overt, after, you say, years of coding it or sneaking subversive messages into your film, was it cathartic?

Dante: Yes, it was! It felt like we were making a movie about something. Though it’s still coded.

Scope: You don’t say Iraq or Bush.

Dante: No, we don’t say Iraq , we don’t say Bush, and there are legal reasons why we don’t say a number of other things, but, yeah, people can judge who they think the people represent or who they don’t, that’s fine. I’m happy with it on that level. It’s fine if the right wing doesn’t like the movie, they want to vilify it, they want to say it’s in terrible taste—which it is—then fine. Great! But let’s bring it out. Let’s have it up on the table. This last bout of bad luck for Bush weakened him, and that’s the only reason any of these spineless opposition people have had a chance, had a change of heart to be able to say, “Well, maybe we can say something about the guy now.” He was Teflon before, everybody wanted to have a beer with him. I don’t want to have a beer with him!

Scope: The most striking scene, I thought, is when the zombies first emerge at the air force base, which brings home the fact that the Pentagon doesn’t want you to see the returning war coffins.

Dante: Yeah, and I think there’s a lot of powerful imagery in this movie that has nothing to do with me. It’s just, these are the images. I mean, when you see those coffins, which is a sight that’s generally been withheld from us, there’s a gravity to it. And even though there’s comedy in the movie, there’s something so serious and depressing about the subject that it never gets overwhelmed by satire. There’s a basic core of truth to it that I think makes it emotionally effective.

Scope: There’s also real anger to the film.

Dante: Yeah, I think so. I’m angry. I’m not the only one, I’m just the one who got to make the movie. But I represent a lot of people who don’t like the fact that the country that they grew up in is saying “Fuck you!” to the rest of the world, you know, without asking me. I didn’t tell anybody that it was okay. Nobody asked me if we should go to war.

Scope: Were you making the movie for these people?

Dante: You make movies for yourself, you don’t make movies for other people.

Scope: The satire in the film is interesting because of how the film builds and you keep crossing lines; how certain things that happen in the film might seem like satire if they weren’t true.

Dante: Have you seen Network (1976) lately? Everything has happened. Everything has come true. And Arthur Hiller made a picture called TheHospital (1971), also written by Paddy Chayefsky, and he was talking the other night at a revival that I went to about how they wanted to make the picture as outrageous as possible, so they tried to think of the most impossible situations that could just never happen, including going into an emergency room and needing care and having somebody come up and say, “You can’t get any care until you fill out these forms.” And it’s all come true! Satire is like science fiction, you interpolate what’s going to happen in the future. How many people are looking forward to the future now? When I was a kid, the future was The Jetsons. We’re gonna have jet cars and moving walkways and robots and it’s all gonna be thrilling. Now I think people go, “Well, what’s the future? Everything’s gonna get smaller, which is nice, we can have a little recording thing, we can download Desperate Housewives onto our tiny iPods. I’m so excited to be alive!” It’s just not exactly what we’re looking for, you know? We were supposed to go to the moon and stuff, and now we’re just gazing inward.

Scope: I was also thinking about the scene where it’s argued, “How many voters can it matter anyhow? There’s only a thousand people dead!” And the Karl Rove figure says that there are all these dead people being kept off the books.

Dante: There’s a lot of discussion about how the Pentagon arrives at their numbers, and how many people are in Germany injured that aren’t on the books and how many people died not in Iraq but died later and didn’t get counted. It’s all a bunch of numbers. But it’s not! It’s not a bunch of numbers. I remember when Ted Koppel did that Nightline where he just read out the names of all the people who died and everybody got upset! How could you do that? You’re undermining the President! Doesn’t anybody remember that there’re people out there doing this? That there are people out there dying as I speak this sentence? Doesn’t that bother anybody? It sure bothers me, and I think it bothers a lot of other people, and I hope that this movie bothers a lot of people that disagree with it and makes them really pissed off, as pissed off as the rest of us are.

Scope: What do you think happened to the media?

Dante: Since 9/11 they just caved in. They just caved in and did anything these guys wanted. And the myth of the liberal media, give me a break. I mean, there isn’t any liberal media since Walter Cronkite retired. I mean, the media now is, the TV media, is like the right wing talk show media, you know? They say liberals can’t have good talk shows because they’re not, you know, outrageous. Democrats are people who spend so much time thinking about what to do and how to solve a problem that they get run roughshod over by the guy who says “Well I’m just gonna go in there and do it!” Which is true. There’s no doubt about it. That’s one of the big differences between people who sit around and think about a problem and people who just go ahead and do it. And I’m sure that in a lot of situations there’s a lot of merit to being able to just go and fix a problem. But if we thought we were fixing a problem by going into Iraq , I fail to see how we’ve fixed anything. When Saddam was there, yeah, he was a tyrant, he was a murderer, but I guarantee you if he was still there there’d be a hell of a lot more Iraqis alive than there are now. And you’re not exactly talking to Henry Kissinger here. I’m not a politician, I’m just a person who watches the news and grew up in a country that I see slipping away from me, and being taken over by the religious right and people who want to take away the freedoms that we supposedly gave our soldiers’ lives for in previous wars.

Scope: The names you’ve chosen in the film seem to have some significance obviously. There’s the June Cleaver thing. There’s the Hofstader thing also…

Dante: Well, the Hofstader thing, when we wrote the script, Cindy Sheehan was a glint in her publicist’s eye. I mean, there wasn’t anybody like that. Obviously there were a lot of women out there who were the mothers of people who had died, but it was only when we started shooting that Cindy Sheehan emerged. And it was weird because everybody said, “Oh, you based that on Cindy Sheehan!” No we didn’t! It was just a coincidence. But I guess it was inevitable that somebody like that would show up.

Scope: You talked about how you wanted to make this film, you wanted to make something that was about the here and now in a non-subversive, non-coded way…

Dante: Well, it’s less subversive than hiding it. But the mere fact that it exists is subversive in this culture. Nobody else is doing it. It is non-coded, but it. . . well, all of it’s coded, but not much. But if this spurs other people into making more and better versions of this, then it will have done its job. I want to see more discussion of this. I want to see more controversy. I just don’t want to see people knuckling under like they’ve been doing for the past five years. Senator Hagel, who’s a Republican, just came out and criticized the President for putting the knock on people against him. He’s saying “They’re lying about the beginning of the war” and all this stuff and he said Bush is just politicizing it. And he’s a Republican! This particular administration is now at its lowest ebb and people are starting to think, “Well great, it’s all over for them!” Well it’s not over for them, they’ve got three more years. Three more years to do more damage. More damage to the Supreme Court, more damage to the environment, more damage to all the things that they seem to want to destroy. And they’re going to find a way to be effective, believe me. People need to not let their guards down just because they’re having a bad couple of months.

Scope: Is the film’s protagonist based on anyone in particular?

Dante: No, not really. We needed to have a character who could be the eyes and ears of the audience basically, and has to undergo—basic drama—has to undergo a change. And I don’t think he’s based on anybody in particular. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying there’s no Republicans with consciences. That’s not true. And I think the Republican party’s been hijacked. There are certain people who are based, no, just a couple of people are based on real people. But it’s, I’d say, a composite group.

Scope: Is there something specific about this current administration, or this current state of American politics, that’s caused you to make a film that’s less coded? Because the sense I get from all your films is there is always an attempt to speak to what’s going on.

Dante: There is, but usually in the context of some other kind of entertainment. This is about what it’s about. Also it’s only an hour long, it’s not like you have a lot of time to do subtle doodling in the margins. You gotta tell your story and you gotta get off. So the more obvious you can make it the better. But I think Sam did a great job with the screenplay. It’s got a classical structure that I think works, and the characters are good and I think it works as a story. Even if you want to pull the politics out of it, it’s still a good story.

Scope: Was there anything you thought you couldn’t put in the film?

Dante: Well, there were things we couldn’t put in the film because we didn’t have the wherewithal. . . I mean, you know, there’s not a lot of money or time to make these things. One of the big worries of the producers was that we really have to make these things in ten days because it’s an assembly line; one guy’s finished, the next guy starts and you can’t start going over or the whole thing, everybody, the whole budget is busted. So they had a specific producer whose job it was to make sure that the scripts weren’t overly ambitious. And of course every script was overly ambitious because every director wanted to do this and that and then ultimately had to settle for, “Well, this is all we can do. This is how big the glass is, you can’t overfill it.” So we had sequences that we dropped and ideas that didn’t make it into it, but I think we’re pretty happy with the way it turned out.

Scope: Do you consider Homecoming a B-movie?

Dante: Dario and I were having a disagreement about what’s a B-movie. He sees it as a derogatory term, I don’t. I like B-movies. Some of my favorite movies are B-movies and some of the best horror movies, like the Val Lewton pictures, were all B-movies. That term actually is kind of obsolete now, because those were made for second features and now nobody does double features anymore. It’s probably more a budgetary level, so yes, I suppose they are B-movies. But so is Armageddon (1998). So is Independence Day (1996)! All those movies are actually B-movies with A-level budgets. I personally think the B versions of those movies are more pure, and more sincere, and more interesting than the multibillion dollar copies that have been made. But a B-movie is just sort of a state of mind, really.

Scope: Did you test screen this?

Dante: No.

Scope: You would have to if you were making a Hollywood film.

Dante: If we were making a feature, oh sure, if we had to make a feature or even a TV pilot or something, we would have to go to the mall in Pacoima and run it for teenagers, who are going to be mad because there’s no teenagers in it. You look at horror movies today and they’re compromised because they have to be about people who are 25 and under, because that’s the audience. So they go, “Well, we want to make this picture, but we don’t want to make it with people in their 30s and 40s because the kids don’t relate to them!” Well, scratch most of the great horror movies ever made because they’re not about teenagers. The Blob (1952), okay. But even those kids were supposed to be teenagers and they were like in their 30s. But I think it’s been a problem, the youthinization or whatever of the audience. It has been deleterious to doing good horror pictures. I mean, how many screaming co-eds can you watch before…? And then there’s been the parody movies, Scream (1996) and those kind of pictures, where it makes it extremely difficult to engage the audience in any kind of serious way because they’re so aware of the clichés, and they’re so jaded, and they’ve seen so many of these pictures, that it makes it difficult to do something fresh.

Scope: In what sense do you consider Homecoming a horror film?

Dante: It’s not scary in a normal sense. It’s probably the least scary of all the episodes of Masters of Horror. But it is horrific in its basic overtones. It’s more all-encompassing because it’s the world we live in. So there was never any attempt to knock ‘em out of their seats with horror, because I think the horror is situational, it’s a horrible situation and we’re all in it. Which makes it worse I think than just a scare. I think it’s very fitting considering the situation.

Scope: Is there any possibility of a theatrical release?

Dante: There could be a possibility in Europe , but I don’t really know. My impression is that the financial end of it, with the Guild deals that would have to be changed in order for the picture to go theatrical, would be prohibitive. And there’s no negative, as it’s finished on HD. You could make a print off that, but would it be cost-effective? I don’t know. My thought is that if you charge admission for it, then a whole set of scale, you know, legal things kick in. But if you ran it as a benefit and just took donations, for some cause or something, then I think you could probably do it. But I don’t think a regular theatrical release. Plus it’s only 60 minutes. When I grew up, they made 60 minute double bills. And they were talking about putting Dario’s and mine together as a double bill in Italy .

Scope: The Second Civil War was theatrical in Europe , wasn’t it?

Dante: Yes it was, and it’s almost completely unknown in America . In fact, it came out on DVD about a month ago, and it was like crickets chirped. I mean nobody, it was never covered, it was never reviewed anywhere, it was never even announced, whereas in Europe , it’s one of my best-selling pictures.

Scope: But you had some problems with post-production.

Dante: I did. I had a lot of post-production problems with one particular executive at HBO who—it wasn’t a political thing—wanted to change things, just to change them. Just to pee on it basically. And it was very unpleasant, the whole post-production thing, and I think the last 20 minutes of the movie are probably compromised more than I would like. But I’ve seen it recently and I like it. I think it’s pretty good.

Scope: How long has it been since you’ve made a film this uncompromised?

Dante: I was very lucky in my career. I would say that up until the mid-90s, every movie that came out was pretty much the way I wanted it to be. I was really lucky in that the people I was working for were very supportive and, I mean, there were discussions, the usual give-and-take, but I could stand behind all the movies up until about Small Soldiers. From then I started having problems. But then the business changed. I mean, the people you’re working for changed. You weren’t working for filmmakers anymore, you were working for agents and corporations and their needs changed. And so it can be rough making features now because of so many different forces pulling at you.

Scope: Is that why you decided to go back to television?

Dante: No, not really. You go where the good material is. And frankly, you look around at what’s being made today, it isn’t exactly inspiring, most of it: retreads of old titles and old ideas and trying to bring them up-to-date, throwing more money at them and make them bigger, with bigger explosions. Theatrical movies aren’t as exciting to me as they were when I was going to the movies in the 60s. I was a rabid movie buff and I saw everything. But the business has changed. In the 60s there was an international cinema. Movies from everywhere got released in America , and we knew the names of German actors and German directors and Italian directors and French directors, even B-pictures, because their pictures were all out there. It was a real cross-pollenization. And now everything comes from America . The kind of pictures that are made in Europe that can squeak in are essentially Jane Austen pictures and art pictures. But the percentage of the output of the rest of the world that squeezes into America is very small, because there are no genre pictures anymore. There are no drive-ins, no syndicated TV, there’s no outlet for all that kind of stuff, so it doesn’t get made. Can you imagine how many sword-and-sorcery and Hercules-type movies were made in Italy after Hercules (1958) became a hit? I mean, it was like a zillion of these pictures and they were all sold en masse to television. And they were in the zeitgeist. And now we don’t have that kind of genre stuff. It’s basically all driven from Hollywood to the rest of the world as opposed to the other way around

Homecoming

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