Hard to say which is worse: a nightmare so real you wake up in a sweat? Or waking up drenched in sweat from a nightmare that seems so real because it wasn’t? Since the answer always depends on the dreamed reality, Alma Ortega would certainly be glad if her feverish fantasy had only played out in her own head: the shots, the screams, the fear – the land of freedom trapped in the dungeon of torn harmony.
Almost 19 months after the storming of the Capitol, HBO Max has filmed a DC comic with Warner that already anticipated at the end of George W. Bush’s second presidency what seemed conceivable at Joe Biden’s inauguration. The liberal coastal fringes in the civil war with the reactionary Bible Belt, modern vs. medieval, Democrats vs. Republicans, a culture war that raged long before Donald Trump’s January 6, 2021 coup attempt.
In “DMZ” what used to be science fiction moves menacingly close to our present and raises the question of how true earlier dystopias are in the age of permanent world crisis. The screenplays by Roberto Patino suggest: extremely truthful.
After a bloody battle along the old slavery frontier, both camps face each other at a “demilitarized zone” in New York City, where clans and gangs rule – the “Spanish Harlem Kings” of the neck-tattooed Parco Delgado (Benjamin Bratt), for example, or the Amazon Army by Wilson Lin (Hoon Lee), lord of Manhattan’s Chinatown. Both casual, both unscrupulous, both charismatically archaic: It is hardly by chance that the series ghetto is reminiscent of “The Walking Dead”, the most popular of all end-time fictions.
The law of the strongest also applies there. There, too, man is man’s wolf. There, too, social criticism is paired with emotional action. However, anyone who believes that “DMZ” is commenting on the current situation in a similar near future, as contemporary SciFi material is called, will be disappointed.
Patino only uses Brian Wood’s comic story as a quarry where he dug up Alma. Only a minor character in the original, she is smuggled into the restricted area to look for her son.
The adaptation thus replaces journalistic ethos with an emotional one. Instead of commenting on the right-wing populist bombardment of Western values, there is a family reunion in the house that is in danger of collapsing. Instead of sociocultural messages there is violence, emotion and gangstarap. The fact that Alma finds Christian aka Skel (Freddy Miyares) with the help of a sweet orphan and had private relationships with every main character in the ghetto makes Patino’s storytelling even more constructed than the juicy happy ending. Too bad actually.
Because the post-apocalyptic animation technique of the directors Ernest Dickerson and Ava DuVernay offers excellent cyberpunk art, with which scene shifting à la “Blade Runner” is now photorealistically digitized. Only: Without meta-levels, a leopard remains in the devastated metropolis of self-referential frippery.
This compromise offer to all social camps is all the more annoying as the creative people are busy trying to replace the power-hungry patriarchy with a benevolent matriarchy. The women in the DMZ are not only more empathetic, but stronger and apparently essential even in nightmares: always attractively dressed.
