“Something's going to happen . . . but then,
something's always about to happen.”
—Grant Mazzy, Pontypool
Grant Mazzy’s deep, hypnotic voice moves with smooth intonations over the airwaves alluding to the danger that is to come. Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) delivers an opening monologue in Pontypool (2008) that taps into the anxiety and fear born from the digital revolution, a time when people were beginning to feel pressure in their daily lives from the onslaught of information. This new world of information inflammation—commodified and manipulated for the explicit goal of going viral in an instant—created a sense of unease that found representation in a variety of cultural outlets, especially film. The resurgence of zombie-themed films in the early to mid aughts often featured viral outbreaks as a central motif. Movies like 28 Days Later (2002), Dawn of the Dead (2004), and [REC] (2007) portrayed the pervasive influence of media coverage amidst catastrophic events1. Based on the 1995 novel by Tony Burgess, Pontypool Changes Everything2, the film explores the role media plays covering events and spreading information, or sometimes disinformation, in the wake of disaster. However, the film diverges from its predecessors in the origin of its outbreak. In Pontypool, it's not a conventional virus causing the spread of infection; rather, it's the dissemination of language that poses the lethal threat.
In the small, sleepy town of Pontypool, Ontario, words have gone awry and eccentric, radio DJ, Grant Mazzy, is ready for action. “I’ll be banging the drum for you all morning,” Mazzy declares, as he launches into his morning program. Mazzy, who staked his career on inciting listeners through sensationalist and inflammatory language, has taken a job in Pontypool after being fired from his previous job. This new job is, ostensibly, the only one he can get, and it’s immediately clear in the opening moments of his on-air dialog at The Beacon that he hasn’t changed much. Despite the pleas of his program director, Sydney Briar (Lisa Houle), Mazzy goes off script on tangents meant to excite and agitate his listeners. He disregards ethics in favor of the implicit understanding that “going viral” is the key to media success, and it seems he’ll stoop to any low to make that happen. During the initial hour of the broadcast, a slew of disorienting calls begin to roll in, each time contributing to the sense that something isn’t quite right. While Sydney attempts to keep the spread of disinformation at bay, Mazzy plays to the chaos repeating everything he hears without pause. Mazzy could care less about fact-checking or confirming his sources, he’s only interested in being the first to report on that one, big story. His relentless desire to immediately address new updates, however small or unverified, seems to invoke the dawn of information overload that emerged during the tragedy of 9/11. “Required by the deluge of data pouring into newsrooms regarding the deadliest terrorist attack on America soil . . . Shepard Smith, who covered the attack and its aftermath when he worked at Fox News Channel, points to a small but impactful TV innovation: the constant presence of an onscreen news ticker, scrolling through headlines, on cable news channels” (Deggans 2021). Mazzy’s approach embodies the evolution of the media mindset where the focus shifted to relentlessly pursuing and reporting the rapid influx of fresh information in a developing story.
Here Pontypool follows suit with other films of the zombie renaissance, as the speed in which the virus spreads, mimics the technological developments of the instantaneous digital age. As Brendan Riley astutely points out in his 2011 essay, The E-Dead: Zombies in the Digital Age, “the fast zombie phenomenon draws on a number of trends in modern Western society.”3 Fears surrounding the rapid outbreak of SARS and the spread of computer viruses in the twenty-first century seemed to have entered the cannon of the zombie subgenre. From death to rebirth in minutes, Zombies now multiplied instantaneously, imbued with unimaginable speed and stamina enabling them to chase down their victims more easily. These new, accelerated zombies seem to reflect the apprehension that instant access to information can cause ideas to spread like wildfire — for better or for worse. Pontypool takes the concept of language as contagion and weaponizes it, exemplifying how infected words can breathe dangerous ideas into existence.
In Pontypool, the threat to society is invisible. It is only through understanding language that infection can spread. “These new monsters [of the digital age] are hard to pinpoint and isolate,” notes Stephen Asma in On Monsters (Asma, 241). “Such a creature has no corporeal body to fight or dismember; it has no lair to infiltrate, no specific skin color, no national boundary. It is everywhere and nowhere” (Asma, 241). Mazzy drives this point home, that the threat to Pontypool is invisible, when he takes the call from a BBC reporter looking to gain clarity on the developing situation. “Nothing organized, nothing political, certainly not terrorist, or separatist,” Mazzy deliberates, though unsure of himself. But that’s the whole point. Like the early hours of 9/11, no one knew what was happening. All we had was footage of an attack with the vague, embedded notion of terrorism. The details unknown. As Mazzy rattles on speculating about the possible causes of the perceived threat, viewers are reminded of Mazzy’s reference to Norman Mailer in the opening monologue that “in the wake of huge events, after them and before them, physical details . . . spasm for a moment. They sort of unlock, and when they come back into focus they suddenly coincide in a weird way.” He riffs on Mailer’s idea that in order to develop an understanding of the world around us, we must be able to make associations between words and phenomenon. It is precisely in understanding that moments in time become a part of mass consciousness. But when the signified is stripped from the signifier, the foundation of communication dissolves and words are left devoid of meaning.
“In the wake of huge events, after them and before them, physical details . . . spasm for a moment. They sort of unlock, and when they come back into focus they suddenly coincide in a weird way.”
—Grant Mazzy, Pontypool
Ideas have always had the power to take hold of the masses. We see this in various zeitgeists throughout history from Hitler’s concept of the master race to the Black Lives Matter movement that emerged in 2020. Ideas have the power to breathe life into our lungs and yank us from our slumber. Though we know, “that fitfully sleeping monsters live in our intimate language, ready to awaken in virulently infectious forms,” we use language haphazardly, throwing around words with little care or resolve (Kirsch 256). In our language exists the possibility of an outbreak, “of particular ideologies that underwrite the survival and dominion of the state, but also — and this is what sets Pontypool apart as a language-focused sub-genre — of potentially any spoken word in which understanding becomes a felt thing, near enough to touch or bite” (Kirsch 256). It’s important to note that Pontypool specifically indicts the English language as the origin of the virus. When Mazzy and Sydney discover this, they resort to speaking in broken French to avoid infection. It’s not lost on the viewer that the filmmaker is making a statement about the colonialism and interventionist history of America. It is America’s “particular ideologies” that have infiltrated Canadian society causing a violent outbreak of infected words, and it is only through awareness and dissociation that those on the verge of infection can escape (Kirsch 256).
As a mass of zombies encroach on the studio in the last act of the film, Mazzy and Sydney scramble to find a way to avoid falling victim to an infected word loop. Though Sydney and Mazzy try communicating in broken French, it’s not enough to stave off contamination of the English language, leaving Sydney stuck with an infected word on her tongue. “Kill. Kill. Kill,” she repeats over and over, unable to shake the word from her mouth. “How do you not understand a word?” asks Mazzy. “How do you take a word and make it strange?” In Mazzy’s desperation to free Sydney from the word loop, he resorts to a form of ad-lib, brainstorming — a form of dissociative, word salad meant to abstract language to the point of incomprehension. “Kill isn’t kill!” Mazzy cries. “Kill is blue. Kill is wonderful. Kill is loving. Kill is baby. Kill is Manet's Garden. Kill is a beautiful morning. Kill is everything you ever wanted. Kill is kiss.” In a fit of poetic exclamation, he purposely subverts the meaning between violence and love by contrasting the words “kill” and “kiss,” which ultimately prevents Sydney from succumbing to infection.
Released from the chokehold of language, the two revel in a moment of freedom before they are shocked back to reality by the sound of a military loudspeaker imploring them to stop broadcasting. But Mazzy, in one last act of defiance, flips the metaphorical bird to the military-industrial complex and powers that be as he continues airing his feed. In the final moments of the film, viewers can overhear a soldier counting down from ten, indicating that they plan to waste the area, while Mazzy, microphone in hand, shouts his terminal message to world, “Today's news, folks . . . today's late-breaking, developing, just-across-my-desk news story is this: It's not the end of the world, folks! It's just the end of the day.” In his last transmission, Mazzy signals a fear mongering message to his listeners that despite what you hear, the world is not consumed by doom and gloom. Life will go on, and, above all else, you shouldn’t believe everything you hear on the news.
References
Asma, S. T. (2012). Torturers, Terrorists, and Zombies. In On monsters: An unnatural history of our worst fears. essay, Oxford University Press.
Deggans, E. (2021, September 10). From TV news tickers to homeland: The ways TV was affected by 9/11. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2021/09/10/1035896519/from-tv-news-tickers-to-homeland-the-ways-tv-was-affected-by-9-11
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, summer 2018, pp. 252+. Gale Literature Resource Center, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A551340722/LitRC?u= depaul&sid=googleScholar&xid=2d54804c. Accessed 10 Dec. 2023.
Pontypool. Directed by Bruce McDonald, performances by Stephen McHattie and Lisa Houle, Maple Pictures, 2008.
Poole, W. S. (2018). Alien Invasion. Monsters in America: Our historical obsession with the hideous and the haunting (pp. 115–134). Baylor University Press.
Riley, B. (2011). The E-Dead: Zombies in the Digital Age. In Generation zombie: Essays on the living dead in modern culture (pp. 194–205). essay, McFarland.
Notes
The zombie renaissance of the 2000s also included films like Resident Evil (2002), Planet Terror (2007), and I Am Legend (2007), however these films highlighted the dangers of corporate greed, biochemical warfare, and the pursuit of science untethered by ethics rather than the threat of mass media.
The second novel in the Pontypool Trilogy. Originally, the novel was adapted to stage for a 2009 CBC radio play, and then, in turn, the radio script was adapted for the screen.
Unlike the slow, bumbling zombies in Romero’s trilogy: The Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978), and Day of the Dead (1985), zombies in the twenty-first century move viciously fast. Zombies have long served as a vehicle for exploring the contemporary fears of society, and the nascent, frenetic zombies that arose from a post-9/11 world highlight the fears of rapid, uncontrollable technological advancements of the digital age.