Danny Boyle and Alex Garland's 28 Days Later isn't a story where the threat is a lone killer in a mask, nor is it about townsfolk who are normal by day but are raising their pitchforks to slay monsters by night. In stories like 28 Days Later (and even films like Sinners), the main characters are good, ordinary people and it's the rest of the world that's fucked up. It's not just about surviving every day in a dystopian landscape, but learning how to deal with it.
28 Days Later is not explicitly nor deliberately a trans story, but queerness has never needed its stories to be textual in much the same way that straight audiences have been able to ignore it when it is staring them in the face. So many of our most beloved monsters are queer-coded, like Freddy Krueger, Leatherface, and the Universal Monsters. The list is extensive, and I have love for all of them, but I have never connected with feeling like a monstrous queer in the same way I have connected with being a survivor.
When Cillian Murphy's Jim wakes up in a hospital, he's unaware that his world has completely changed. His frame is waifish and delicate, not dissimilar to David Bowie's Thin White Duke era when he was being kept alive on a diet of bell peppers, milk, and cocaine. Jim's drug of choice here is Pepsi. Before the outbreak, maybe Jim's gaunt figure could have been seen as androgynous or shocking, like many of the '70s glam rock singers I idolized in my teens. But in Boyle and Garland's apocalypse? It's just circumstantial. There is nothing freakish about him because he's not the monster here.
Wandering the empty streets, the first sign of life he finds is in a church, a place whose sole purpose is salvation. Upon entering, the priest immediately tries to kill him. He is rescued by survivors, including Selena, and eventually finds others, Frank and Hannah. They learn of a sanctuary connected to a military blockade, and it seems like the group has finally found a refuge. But, like the church, this is also a lie.
It's a veritable Breakfast Club of convenient definitions who are up against the world — the teen girl, the strong Black woman, the working-class single father, and the Irishman lost within the British Empire. Each member of this family of survivors is someone that the ruling-class hated, even before it went to shit, but what I recognized when I first watched this movie was myself, and I hardly fit within these archetypes.
The soldiers attempt to kill Jim because he is not willing to go along with the unit's plan of raping Selena and Hannah. After all, the promise of procreation turns women into a form of currency at the end of the world. In retaliation, Jim elects to free the chained Private Mailer, a Black soldier who had been infected weeks earlier. He uses the ensuing chaos to kill the remaining soldiers, rescue Selena and Hannah, and is almost mistaken for being infected himself. But 28 Days Later isn't about him becoming a monster. This is just survival.
I once took part in a documentary and was asked when I first saw myself in a horror film. Jim was my answer. The hostility he endures, this specific hostility, was and continues to be exactly what I persist in existing as a transgender woman in America. 28 Days Later presents a dangerous world that I am already acutely aware that I should fear. Despite the core of 28 Days Later being an oppressively British film [complimentary], the transcendence of its themes is just as reflective of the pro-military machismo of the Bush administration, the promise of religious damnation for queerness by right-wing America, and the unmistakable, violent homophobia of the world at large.
Despite claims that transness is a very “new” thing, I came out as transgender some 16 years ago, and I have had to reckon with a world that looks like the one Jim is trying to survive every day since. Paying rent, healthcare, the warmth of human connection, and even basic human decency have been such a struggle that it is hard to have the time or energy to actually enjoy the act of living.
Company should be more than just safety in numbers; a meal should mean more than just sustenance. All I want to do is enjoy drinks over dinner with those in my life without having to worry about what the next day will be. These characters want you to remember that there should always be beauty and hope in the darkest times, but it is only getting darker, and I'm so tired of being angry.
Christopher Eccleston, as Major Henry West, says that nothing has changed since the start of the infection because it is just “people killing people,” and as uncomfortable as it is to accept, he's right. The difference is that as a military officer, he signed up for that reality. If it came down to it, what would I do to survive? If someone, in a fit of rage, decided that it was going to be them or me, could I do it?
Fortunately, I haven't been forced to find out, but I know deep within my soul that I would absolutely drive both of my thumbs into someone's eyes if I needed to. I have emotionally prepared myself to live, which means preparing to fight to the death. I didn't ask for this burden, but neither did Jim. Neither did Selena or Hannah, or any of the other survivors in this franchise.
A lot of wannabe, loser patriots with stockpiles of assault rifles like to talk a big game about how they are prepping for “when the time comes,” but they aren't scared. They are blood-hungry and just want to maintain the views of a dying world through munitions. It's not about just trying to live because they aren't the ones getting assaulted and gunned down in the street. It's people who look like Selena, Hannah, Mailer, or me. And instead of other survivors banding together to make it out alive, they're leaving us to fend for ourselves.
Just because you aren't personally ripping us limb from limb doesn't spare you from being a fucking monster.
Rage is a scary thing. It will destroy everything beautiful in this world if you let it. We're here, nearly 28 years later, and things have only gotten worse. There used to be isolated incidents of men invoking the “trans panic defense” that would say they were able to claim temporary fits of insanity and rage if they discovered someone was trans and subsequently attacked or even murdered them. Now, the American military state is reciting religious doctrine, stripping away rights, and actively harming trans people because they relish the cruelty.
The end is extremely fucking nigh, and no one is coming to save us. Not the military, not the government, and certainly not God. I have known too many trans people who have been jumped, assaulted, and killed, and no amount of my own self-preservation could ever have saved them. We need to protect each other because the way things are going, we are all future survivors, and just surviving should not be as good as it gets.
Stay Safe.
Happy Pride.
