It’s a Vibe: Jim Jarmusch’s Zombie Apocalypse in The Dead Don’t Die

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In its opening moments, Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die sets the stage for the classic zombie movie—a graveyard, a quiet, empty forest, ominous music, a cop car pulling up to investigate suspicious activity. But out of that car comes Bill Murray and Adam Driver, there to check out a report made against local Centerville hermit Tom Waits. What follows is the genre brought to the most mundane level, a relaxed hangout with familiar faces shot through with understated, laconic humor that undercuts the “end of days” atmosphere that zombies portend. At the same time, it’s a use of the zombie formula to comment on the climate crisis and advocate for a worldview that’s more in tune with what’s happening around us. In other words, it’s a groovily philosophical horror flick that deploys a cast of favorites and subtle Midwestern humor to depict a zombie apocalypse in ways both comforting and stark.

Plot-wise, it’s a fairly by-the-numbers zombie story, in which the undead arise as a result of some sort of manmade horror and wreak havoc on society, in this case the tiny town of Centerville. On the case is the three-person crew of the police department, Chief Cliff Robertson (Murray), Ronnie Peterson (Driver), and Mindy Morrison (Chloë Sevigny). But we spend as much time getting to know the other residents in the town, from Hermit Bob (Waits) living in the forest on the outskirts of town, to Farmer Miller (Steve Buscemi), Hank (Danny Glover), Fern (Eszter Balint) and Lily (Rosal Colon) in the diner, to RZA as a delivery worker and Tilda Swinton as the newly-arrived funeral parlor owner.

The tone is what hits you first, the dead air that hangs around just about every sentence uttered by the characters. There’s a quietness that feels out of place, not eerie quiet but funny quiet, as though someone forgot to tell the cast they were in a horror movie. It’s deliberately slow, taking its sweet time to get to the guts and gore as Fern and Lily gossip in the diner, Ronnie and Mindy talk about caffeine jitters, and kids in the town’s juvenile detention center watch the news. It’s less world-building, with the purpose and expansive quality that term implies, and more just spending time with these people, sitting in on their conversations for a full hour before shit really hits the fan. It can be hilariously boring, as we ride along on endless drives with Ronnie and Cliff, talking about daylight savings time and Hermit Bob’s teenage years. The frequent soundtrack to those rides is similarly chill; the film’s theme song, “The Dead Don’t Die” by Sturgill Simpson, is a warm country throwback even with its spooky lyrics. Ronnie’s watch stops in one of the sequences— “Something weird’s goin’ on,” Cliff observes. “This isn’t gonna end well, Cliff,” Ronnie replies, totally relaxed. Even when “this isn’t gonna end well” becomes less an inkling than a certainty, the lack of panic persists, as the characters calmly figure out their plans and decapitate zombies with about the urgency of deciding on a lunch order.

This bizarre airlessness, totally out of sync with a typical zombie movie, is funnily off-kilter on its own; to it Jarmusch adds similarly stilted humor, mostly derived from the actors delivering their lines like they’re reading them for the first time. From total understatement (Cliff, as he and Ronnie sit in a car surrounded by zombies: “You wanna get out and check?” Ronnie: “I think I’d rather not.”) to dumb running jokes (it’s repeatedly asked if the zombie attacks are the work of “a wild animal…or several wild animals?”) the lines are consistently, goofily awkward, a never-ending series of deadpan observations. You’re never bowled over by how funny it is; it’s humor at a gentle simmer, subtle and easygoing.

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More specifically, it’s a sort of folksy dialogue that when read essentially without affect is slyly funny. There’s a distinctly Midwestern feel, the kind of “oh gosh” expressions reminiscent of Fargo, like the way Ronnie says “Excuse me” before decapitating a zombie. The town slogan, as seen on its welcome sign, is “A Real Nice Place,” and sets the tone for the small town environment. Centerville feels a bit stuck in time, consisting mostly of a diner, a motel, a hardware store, and so on. Nothing is a franchise or has an overly designed storefront. The diner is cozy and familiar, as the camera lingers on all the things that make it so: the red vinyl booths, the orange and brown color-coded coffee pots, the ancient radio. There’s no slick, loud flat screen TV, no cell phones. The comic book store-slash-gas station is similar, the kind of packed-to-the-gills assemblage of figurines and slim Marvel and DC volumes that is becoming fewer and farther between. And the characters all talk to each other, know each other, are fairly decent to one another. Danny Glover’s Hank as the hardware store owner is nothing but nice to Steve Buscemi’s right-wing Farmer Miller, who wears a red “Keep American White Again” hat (another familiar sight but depressingly so). For the audience, it’s a small town populated with our favorite people, with a slow pace to life that accommodates a lot of hanging around and shooting the shit.

The super starry cast featured here is about the farthest thing from small town life, but that these characters are played by Murray and Waits and Swinton and RZA et al. is the main draw of the film, and it constantly references that fact. There are myriad little things thrown in to the script seemingly solely as treats for the audience, commenting on their already-established relationships to the actors: Adam Driver owning a miniscule smartcar or having a Star Wars keychain, RZA working for “Wu-PS” delivery, Rosie Perez as newscaster “Posie Juarez.” Further is the way the characters’ personalities seem to comment on the actors’ personas, like Tom Waits as the all-seeing intuitive oracle Hermit Bob, stumbling around the forest prophesying the end of the world, or Tilda Swinton as an unearthly Scotswoman, or Selena Gomez’s small part as a cute, friendly out-of-towner, with tiny cartoon stars twinkling around her head as she introduces herself.

This weakened distance between the characters and actors is extended into direct fourth wall breaking. The constant use of Simpson’s “The Dead Don’t Die” prompts characters to comment on its ubiquity; when Cliff comments that it sounds familiar early on in the film, Ronnie replies, “Well, ‘cause it’s the theme song.” At another point Ronnie pops in the CD of the single: “Sturgill Simpson. Great song.” Cliff chucks it out of the window in disgust. This breakdown of the line between movie and outside world, between participant and audience member, increases as the film goes on, disregarding the pretense of commitment to a plot and characters in favor of watching beloved actors talk and kill zombies. This reaches its apex when Cliff asks how Ronnie has remained so calm throughout this whole thing (a question on the audience’s mind as well), and he answers that, well, he read the script. “The whole script?” Cliff (but more so Murray) asks. “Yeah, Jim gave me the whole script.” Cliff/Murray, in disbelief: “He only gave me our scenes, he never gave me the full script. After all I’ve done for that guy…What a dick.” The trappings of this being a movie are discarded, and we come full circle to the beginning of our experience with the film, with the fanfare over its trailer being released, the promise of a long list of names in a zombie flick by Jim Jarmusch.

And just as we like to see Bill Murray-as-Cliff Robertson comfort Chloë Sevigny-as-Mindy Morrison in the face of a zombie apocalypse, so too do we feel that comfort extended to us watching. The film’s intended parallel to its in-universe crisis is climate change, as the advent of the undead is a direct consequence of big business’s “polar fracking” setting the earth off its axis. Hermit Bob is the first to notice that something is wrong, as he observes changes in the behavior of ants fleeing their anthills. Next come the animals, as livestock leave Farmer Miller’s property and pets leave homes. Then three of the kids in the Centerville juvenile detention center, watching news reports about polar fracking and knowing intuitively that there’ll be severe consequences for it, evincing a belief in “out of the mouths of babes”-type foresight. It’s this kind of natural world-attuned, groovy and down-to-earth vibe that the film cultivates throughout, a complement to the low-key character of the plot itself, that’s encapsulated by RZA’s words of wisdom to Caleb Landry Jones’ comic book nerd: “The world is perfect. Appreciate the details.”

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The need to listen to the earth, heeded only by the few on the margins, is emphasized through contrast by the needs of the zombies. When Sara Driver and Iggy Pop emerge from the cemetery as the film’s first two zombies, they’re in search of brains, naturally, and get their fill at the diner, attacking Fern and Lily. But they’re quickly distracted— their eyes light up once they spot the pots of coffee on the warmer. They abscond with the pots and set off looking for more as they slump through town. The rest of the zombies follow this pattern, as they break into stores to procure all manner of modern comforts: Snapple, Snickers, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Xanax, Ambien. It’s a not-so-subtle equivalence to the living’s obsession with the same things, the things that bring them farther from a sense of the natural and what Hermit Bob, quoting Melville, calls the “nameless miseries of the numberless mortals.” It’s a prevailing sense of dread that’s paradoxically shot through with warmth; as doom approaches and becomes all-encompassing, the solution nevertheless is a fundamentally wholesome, literally earthy, one - focusing on the protection of the natural world.

That unexpected fuzziness that Jarmusch imbues his world with makes it comforting a year later too, for totally different reasons. Even though the film ends starkly, abruptly, with Cliff and Ronnie feasted upon by a horde of zombies, it’s the film’s personality, that chill, wry, wise vibe, that makes it a perfect hangout for our current end times. The competence amongst the mayhem, quiet and unassuming as Cliff and Ronnie efficiently dispatch zombies toward the end, is reassuring, as is the reluctance to whitewash the situation and make everything seem alright. When Mindy, realizing how dire the situation is, asks, “Guys, shouldn’t we be telling each other this will all go away, like a bad dream?”, Ronnie replies, “Gee Mindy, I’m not sure I can say that.” But more than wish-fulfillment fantasies of handling a crisis, The Dead Don’t Die is a movie of kindness, small town familiarity, subtle deadpan humor, and attentiveness to the world around us. It’s an hour and a half of chilling out with actors we feel like we know, whether we’ve seen them for decades or just a few years, and the plot a perfunctory reason to get them to all share the same space, bringing us a little oasis of the familiar in the middle of the frightening.