Undead in the West by Cynthia J. Miller & A. Bowdoin Van Riper

Author:Cynthia J. Miller & A. Bowdoin Van Riper [Miller, Cynthia J. & Riper, A. Bowdoin Van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2012-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Flesh-eating zombie Big Daddy, a former garage owner, emerges as the leader of the undead, and perhaps of a nascent zombie society, in Land of the Dead.

The film contrasts the learning process taking place among the zombies with the accelerating disintegration of the society of the living. While the living continue to pursue their individual goals and are at war not only with zombies but also with each other, the zombies are learning to be a group. When they attack the city, they even manage to set aside their instinctual self-serving need to feed on humans in order to execute the invasion and bring down the tower—the ultimate symbol of civilization. Individualism—when it devolves into egoism—breaks down civilization, but communitarianism can produce civilization.

In the end of the film, after avenging their mistreatment, the zombies travel back into the wilderness. Romero leaves their fate ambiguous, but Simon Clark sees this ending to open a possibility for a new zombie society different than that created by the living: one that celebrates instinctual freedom. Clark bases his claim on the zombies’ instinctual characteristics and on the Freudian explanation model of the psyche. In the Freudian model, individuals would like to act on their instincts, but social norms have forced them to suppress these desires. Thus, Clark argues, social structures have distanced human beings from nature, but the zombies—having returned to the wilderness—would have a direct relationship with the wild and could create a society that combined personal liberty with communality.29

Clark’s idea of an emerging zombie society recalls the frontier myth, wherein wilderness, freedom, and liberty are productive forces for civilization. However, whereas Clark connects the creation of civilization to a continued relationship with instincts, I argue that Land of the Dead promotes a combination of individualism and communitarianism. The zombies who learn to work together, despite their own solitary goals, create the progressive civilization of the traditional Western, whereas the survivors who learn to mistrust each other and rely only on themselves face the degeneration of their civilization.

Examples of Individualism: A Hero and an Outlaw

In Westerns, as John Cawelti argues, the responsibility of importing the positive values of the wilderness into the community was given to the heroic individuals who crossed the boundaries of civilization, entered the wilderness, and there learned to defeat savagery.30 In Land of the Dead, it is suppliers who enter the realm of wilderness and have the opportunity to learn from encounters with savages and their own dark sides. The two main supplier characters, Cholo (John Leguizamo) and Riley (Simon Baker), react differently to this encounter. They have different attitudes to individualism, and they come to represent the Western archetypes of the outlaw and the cowboy.

Cholo is an outlaw who refuses to work as a mediator between wilderness and civilization. Rather than trying to understand the wilderness, he violently attacks the zombies and kills them in order to attain a feeling of supremacy. He sees himself as having no connection to the wilderness and belonging only to civilization. By

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