George Romero's high-tech Golem

George A. Romero's The Golem

In 1995, George Romero wrote The Golem, a screenplay that radically re-imagined the golem myth - a myth that would continue to be important to his thinking about science, technology, and society: the monster that turns on those who create it. Many of the themes would, for example, re-appear in the Resident Evil scripts he'd write in the next two years. (Romero's final completed work would be a collaboration with artist and longtime friend George Nama called "The Liberator," for which Romero contributed an acidic short story about a modern-day golem.) He set the story in contemporary America, where a secret military/intelligence organization discovers that an elderly Jewish man is protected by a golem. They kill him and begin work to create their own unstoppable clay killing force. With the immense resources and teams of brilliant scientists at their disposal, they succeed very quickly! However, although they deduce the proper procedures for creating a golem, they have failed to reckon with the moral or mystical elements of the creature. Summoning a golem requires the summoner to be morally upstanding and for their cause to be just: you cannot use a golem for personal gain, for vengeance, for cruelty, or, for power. The military, of course, does not intend to restrain themselve. This golem is conjured to be an enforcer, as a weapon of war, which proves to be deadly for everyone involved in the conjuring. The military’s compulsion to weaponize the sacred dooms them all, as the creature instantly turns on its creators. They turn an endless barrage of high tech weaponry on it to no avail. Bullets, bombs, fire, and ice all break down the golem’s body but fail to destroy it, the creature reconstituting itself over and over again. 

The creature is summoned through cutting-edge digital computing. Sarah, a military scientist explains:

There are twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet. Each of these also represents a number, ranging from one to four hundred. Each of these numbers is said to  contain a message in what we call ‘gematria.’ […] Kabbalists believe that these letters, arranged in pairs, in every possible permutation, are the … ‘Gates of Light’ … […] the whole of God’s knowledge passed down to us in the Torah. […] The secrets of the universe. The secrets of creation itself. The numerical infrastructure of the cosmos… are contained… theoretically… in this alphabet.

They have computed the number of possible sequences at 236,789,665,204,633,600,000, and, using their “HP LASER JET PRINTER” they will print every one of them out to place inside the chest of a clay sculpture. The proper sequence will necessarily be contained within them, allowing the military to wield “the secrets of creation itself” without ever determining which sequence invokes that magic power, gained by the sheer volume of their digital firepower.

Or, at least, that’s half the equation. That sequence of letters “gives it its power. It’s [sic] potential. The shem gives it its life.” The military needs to invoke “the secret Name… of God” in order to activate their unstoppable soldier, which they do through an amulet. The creature is fundamentally a mixture of cutting edge digital technology and pre-technological superstition, of computers and clay. And it could only be realized on screen with CGI. Romero’s version of the Golem is a kind of amorphous blob: it begins as a large clay statue in the shape of a man, but constantly evolves and re-forms, capable of taking on the form and nature of anything it comes in contact with, slinking through shadows and merging with columns, weapons, even living things:

We realize that Chino is in distress. He gags. Chokes. Striker turns and sees him TREMBLING. With great effort, he pushes with his hands. His head comes away from the column TRAILING A THICK ELASTIC STRAND OF MATTER. […] Chino’s body is YANKED against the column, as though on a giant rubber band. He his FLAT, his arms and legs splayed out. He seems to GET LARGER… INFLATING… not radically… rather like a balloon getting its first breath of air before the rubber stretches.

In the next moment, THE GOLEM APPEARS… walking OUT OF THE COLUMN… walking OUT OF CHINO… walking THROUGH CHINO.

Training an arsenal at it does little, as any kind of physical attack simply breaks it down to component parts that then recombine in another form – which is, not coincidentally, the nature of its own attacks. It is not simply that the Golem clobbers its victims with its superior size and strength, but that it kills by attacking at the molecular level. It is, in other words, fundamentally digital, an accumulation of modular information with the capacity to reduce everything around it to its own modular building blocks.

It operates with the cold, inhuman logic of a machine, but still adheres to an older, sacred morality:

The Golem will kill mercilessly, but it will not kill in anger or revenge. It kills only to protect its tribe or to… or to punish its maker if… if that maker does… evil… in the eyes of God.

And, of course, creating a Golem to be an aggressive military weapon is inherently sinful. Each member of the organization who helped create the Golem instantly becomes its target. The action unfolds in combat against the creature, and, in the end, after all conventional weapons have failed, the handful of survivors seemingly defeat it through magical/sacred means: writing the name of God backwards, in Ugarit rather than Hebrew.

However, this being a Romero script, the resolution is not without ambiguity or ambivalence. The only way to definitively defeat a Golem is for the conjurors – all of the conjurors – to die. Carving the proper Ugarit characters into the surface of the Golem seemingly defeats it but the survivors realize that it isn’t dead and it isn’t gone, just “turned off.” But they know that one character had been spared by it after throwing herself in front of it in an attempt to distract the Golem and save others. She had earned survival through selflessness and sacrifice. In the moral logic of the script, bringing a Golem to life can only end in one of two ways: the death of the creators, or a life of upstanding moral purity. One of the characters is an innocent, a “fool” with a likely learning disability who, we discover, had himself conjured a Golem – “Big Abe” – when he was younger. Because of Thomas’ (not unproblematic!) moral “innocence” means that he is not in danger. Big Abe, in fact, continues to serve as his protector. The film ends with one of the survivors, a native American named Benjamine Tall Tree (a name repurposed from Jacaranda Joe) asking Thomas to be his teacher.

The Golem, like the T-Virus of Resident Evil, cannot be put back into the box once it has been freed. In Resident Evil, as in most of Romero’s zombie scripts, the outbreak can be controlled if humanity can simply work together for the common good, if greed and shortsighted personal gain and petty interpersonal grievances can be overcome. In The Golem, that is policed directly by an enforcer of God’s own moral code. The survivors have to live with the uncertainty of never knowing whether or not a transgression might prompt their revived executioner to strike. It is the Platonic ideal of a Romero scenario: survival is possible, but only if you are selfless. What marks The Golem’s resolution as unusually optimistic for Romero is that the script seems to entertain survival as a very real possibility.

 

- Adam Charles Hart