No personal protective equipment, no training for the current situation, and no Clorox wipes as far as the eye can see, though you’ve never needed one more. The threat of death lurks around every corner, and your job, nominally developing your students’ minds, now requires jeopardizing your body. It may sound like Betsy DeVos’s plan for the 2020 school year in the US. In fact, it definitely is. But it is also the plot of Abe Forsythe’s 2019 Australian film Little Monsters, a zom-com in which kindergarten teacher Miss (Audrey) Caroline (Lupita Nyong’o) must safely extricate her class from a petting zoo plagued by zombie hordes stumbling over from a nearby American military base.
As US educators watching the film in 2020 (why, God, why????), we find it difficult to overlook how often our supposed “life of the mind” demands making an ultimate sacrifice of our bodies. In that regard, COVID-19 simply replays the tired old arguments around gun violence in American schools. Whether we’re told to arm ourselves with guns or antibacterial gel, our teaching is interrupted constantly by threats we’re not trained or paid to handle. What Little Monsters suggests is that this is modern-day education.
Check out the trailer for Little Monsters:
Dressed in a full-skirted yellow sundress as if for a Sunday picnic, and armed only with her ukulele, Miss Caroline hardly resembles the typical survivor of a zombie apocalypse. And she can’t, because she’s a teacher. Continually convincing the students that the flesh-eating monsters are actors in a “shooty game,” Miss Caroline constructs an illusory world where all is safe and fun. When Teddy McGiggles (Josh Gad), one of the spoiled man-babies she happens to be trapped with, threatens to bring it all crashing down, she repurposes a broken souvenir into a shiv, threatening to gut him if he reveals the truth. “[M]y only responsibility is for these children’s safety,” she tells him. “If they are put in danger,” whether from a cursing man-baby or from zombies, “my job is to remove that danger,” and “I’m not going to let these children be traumatized.” The parallel between McGiggles and the zombie hordes illustrates Miss Caroline’s layered responsibilities: she must protect the children’s physical bodies, as well as their young minds, from any trauma or fear that lurks outside the door–all while ostensibly teaching them about music and the food groups. Even though Miss Caroline herself has “no idea what we’re all dealing with here,” there is no room for her own fears because the children need “to feel like the adults are in control.”
No easy feat for Miss Caroline, saddled not only with McGiggles, but also with Dave (Alexander England), irresponsible uncle to five-year-old Felix (Diesel La Torraca), whose long list of food allergies makes him the butt of his classmates’ ridicule before the field trip. Volunteering to chaperone only to impress Miss Caroline, Dave harms more than he helps. He frightens the children with his bleak heavy metal ballad, drops f-bombs like lullabies, and triggers Felix’s anaphylactic reaction by feeding him chips. In the end, of course, Dave eventually steps up, running into the zombie hordes to secure transportation for the children’s escape. In fact, most critics focus primarily on Dave’s journey from man-baby to stand-up guy, essentially complaining that Little Monsters is little more than “Knocked Up and Zombies.”
But despite Dave’s new-found responsibility and Miss Caroline’s best efforts to protect the children from the dangerous world outside the souvenir shop, ultimately the children must contribute to their own survival. While Miss Caroline attempts to prevent the class from seeing Dave’s dangerous battle with the zombie hordes, Felix catches sight of Dave’s predicament, sneaks out of the souvenir shop, and runs into the fray, wielding his toy lightsaber. Rescuing a symbolically-loaded lost lamb along the way, Felix secures the transportation and saves Dave’s life in the process.
Children can teach us something about constructing the world we want, Forsythe suggests. While Miss Caroline verbalizes this construction, Felix embodies it.
Forsythe’s primary question in Little Monsters is “How do you do it? Be a superhero?” He shows us a world that demands gluten-sensitive 5-year-olds, wanna-be rock stars, and kindergarten teachers all “step up” and become heroes. They simply do what they have to do, and they don’t have a choice. Why? Because G.I. Joe is the villain, not the hero, and American exceptionalism is a lie. Forsythe hammers this point home, giving us two failed versions of the exceptionalism that America markets to the world: the celebrity and the military. If McGiggles–the ignorant, koala-obsessed, literal mother-f$cking TV host–is easily extinguished by the zombie hordes, the military complex presents a much longer-lasting global threat. Creators of the zombie-virus terrorizing the people and animals of Australia, the American soldiers continually demonstrate a casual disregard for the country they occupy. On the base, a soldier comments, “This country’s insane. Do you realize how many animals they have here that could kill you?” The irony, of course, is that the Americans are the real danger to the natural world of Australia and the people and animals that inhabit it.
After causing the zombie outbreak through their experimentation on humans, the soldiers proceed to clean up their mess in the only way they know how: spectacular violence. The lives of Australian civilians are of little to no consequence. “All of the infected are congregated here. I would advise we drop the bomb on the Pleasant Valley Souvenir Store,” an advisor tells the army general. It rapidly becomes clear that this is not the first time they’ve done so: there is a precedent in place, a protocol to be followed. “Why are we here?” a soldier asks, bored. “Zombies again,” replies his sergeant, equally casually. “Fast ones or slow ones?” “Slow. We need to contain the infection, so shoot anything that moves.” “Thank god they’re slow.”
The soldiers are so inoculated to violence and addicted to protocol that they are prepared to gun down a kindergarten class as a matter of course. As Miss Caroline, Dave, and the children appear down the road, the squadron stands at the ready, guns cocked. “They could be infected,” one soldier points out. “They’re going to be obliterated,” another answers. But when the soldiers realize that some of the survivors are “tiny children,” the general reconsiders. “Goddammit,” he mutters, “I can’t shoot kids … again.” Even though another soldier reminds him that allowing survivors to escape is “against protocol,” he commands the squadron to “let them through” before proceeding to gun down the zombie hordes and obliterate the site under a bomb cloud resembling the nuclear mushrooms of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
As we watch the children standing under this cloud, gazing at the bloodshed, we can’t help but wish the soldiers had considered the alternative universe the children constructed. “You’ve just got to sing them a song,” Dave yells as the tractor chugs past them. Dave isn’t wrong. On the way out, Miss Caroline and the children sing “If You’re Happy and You Know it” as call and response, and the zombies join in, the melody flowing from Caroline, to the children, to the zombies, and back again. As two teachers and eleven 5-year-olds, the “Little Monsters” band of survivors is incapable of relying upon the violent zombies vs. survivors paradigm typical of the genre. Because they cannot fight their way out, they must find a new form of communication. Miss Caroline and the children teach the zombies a new way to be in a world that thinks it knows all it needs to know about zombies.
Miss Caroline saves the day, but not because she wields a pitchfork or shoots a gun. Instead, she relies upon her training and values as an educator–a “professional kindergarten teacher,” one “so good at something that [she is] paid to do it.” She may slay zombies, but she does it incidentally.
Incidentally, she shouldn’t have to.
Like US teachers working during both a global pandemic and a national epidemic of gun violence, Miss Caroline must wage war on a mortal threat created by the very leaders whose job it is to establish a safe environment for the education of children. Miss Caroline rarely gets down to the business of education at the zoo at all, because she is too busy distracting her students from physical danger and serving as a shield against their potential emotional traumas. Forsythe has called the film not only a love letter to his son, but also to his son’s kindergarten teacher, for this very reason. Teachers, he asserts, are superheroes because they perform any and all aspects of physical and emotional labor we might need them to do, presumably in addition to the intellectual labor in their actual job description. The film inadvertently suggests the costs of this worldview, however. The horror in this horror movie lies in the fact that so long as educators are expected to serve as security guards and pandemic babysitters, society will continue to avoid the legal and social reconstruction we need in order to actually make the better world the film imagines.
Teachers teach. If you want them to battle zombies, give them a raise. Or better yet, give ‘em a raise anyway.
Little Monsters is streaming on Hulu and also available on Blu-ray:
Katherine J. Anderson is an assistant professor of English at Western Washington University. She is finishing a book manuscript entitled Twisted Words: Torture and Liberalism in Imperial Britain, and she has also written for Public Books and The Critical Flame. You can reach her at Western or on Twitter.
Shannon Zellars-Strohl works as a lecturer at University of Maryland, teaching courses in literature, film, and writing. Holding graduate degrees in Victorian Literature and Philosophy of Religion, her research focuses on intersections of religion, science, and the gothic in 19th-century British literature and contemporary horror films. You can reach her at UMD or on Twitter.
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