American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture by Kyle William Bishop

Author:Kyle William Bishop [Bishop, Kyle William]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: McFarland Publishing
Published: 2010-01-26T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

THE DEAD WALK THE EARTH

The Triumph of the Zombie Social

Metaphor in Dawn of the Dead

My granddad was a priest in Trinidad. He used to tell us, “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.” — Peter, Dawn of the Dead

Roughly half an hour into the bloody rampage of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, the four human protagonists who have been fleeing the chaos of Philadelphia by helicopter come across an abandoned shopping mall. A hand-held camera, shooting from inside the cockpit of the helicopter, replicates the point of view of the beleaguered humans and reveals a decidedly eerie and uncanny landscape. Parallel yellow lines establish a vast asphalt parking lot, populated by only a few cars and a scattering of slow-moving zombies. The unease of the audience is further heightened by Romero’s canted and oblique camera angles, a montage of shots that take the towering lampposts, the chain link fences, and the friendly welcome signs out of expected context. Furthermore, when filmed from above, the large structure of the mall appears strangely isolated from the rest of civilization, surrounded by the buffer of the parking lot and clearly void of human life. Yet because they need a place to stop, eat, and rest, the four protagonists tentatively land their helicopter on the roof of the imposing structure. Once they feel secure in their lofty position, the four cautiously investigate the condition of the building, assessing its level of safety and the potential spoils there for the taking. Looking down through the skylights, a perspective once again replicated as a subjective point-of-view shot, they see a modern-day shopping palace, complete with fully stocked stores and ample electrical power, and the few zombies roaming the concourses seem to be of little threat. Fran (Gaylen Ross), the only woman in the group, looks on the ghouls and asks, “What are they doing? Why do they come here?” Her boyfriend Stephen (David Emge), impassive behind his “tough guy” sunglasses, answers, “Some kind of instinct ... memory ... of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.”

Most scholarship concerning Dawn of the Dead rightly focuses on the film’s rather overt criticism of contemporary consumer culture. By setting the bulk of the action in a shopping mall, Romero consciously draws the audience’s attention towards the inherent relationship between zombies and consumerism. In Romero’s allegory, the insatiable need to purchase, own, and consume has become so deeply ingrained in twentieth-century Americans that their reanimated corpses are relentlessly driven by the same instincts and needs. The metaphor is simple: Americans in the 1970s are the true zombies, slaves to the master of consumerism, mindlessly migrating to stores and shopping malls for the almost instinctual consumption of goods. In fact, by reducing the zombies to such a heavily symbolic role, the monsters become little more than supporting characters; of greater critical interest are both the shopping structure itself and the four surviving humans who come to isolate themselves on the mall’s upper levels.

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