On one side of this debate, a host of unrepentantly Marxian critics have described the baleful impact of capitalist production on those whom it exploits and the depoliticizing effects of commodity fetishism on consumers. On the other side, postmodern ethnographers and sociologists have argued that consumerism empowers capitalist subjects by granting them a limited, but politically important space in which to live out utopian fantasies of autonomy. The exchanges between these camps are as frequent as they are ill-tempered: just when the "issue" of consumerism seems to be dead and buried, it rises zombie-like from the critical grave. A recent irascible polemic is James Twitchell's denunciation of the "melancholy Marxist" view of consumerism, complete with some scandalous ad hominem attacks on academics working in cultural studies. Recently, Western arguments about consumerism have even moved outside the confines of academia and into the realm of popular culture — witness the recent sparring in the British press between Germaine Greer and Nigella Lawson (see Lawson). This paper offers some observations on what might be called the "consumerism debate" based on a consideration of radical anti-consumerist elements in Romero's film.
Before discussing this film, I would like to consider briefly one influential theoretical intervention in what I am calling the "consumerism debate." In Reading the Popular, John Fiske argues that while consumer "tactics" are never radical, they may be "liberating" to a certain extent. Moreover, he argues, following de Certeau and many others, that consumers should not be despised as the "cultural dupes" of capitalist producers; consumers are instead "secondary producers," finding value in their consumption and making use of capitalist products for their own ends. Fiske rightly reminds cultural critics that people should not be patronized as idiots who compliantly consume the images and products imposed on them by the dominant ideology; and he is surely correct that consumers may be temporarily empowered by the experience of shopping, a point well established by Angela McRobbie and others. But his well-practiced indignation about "cultural dupes" requires a caveat, for this injunction risks patronizing the "ordinary" people whose shopping habits Fiske aims to redeem. Few critics would dispute that an unacceptably dismissive view of consumers as "cultural dupes" has been presented (or at least implied) by radical critics from Adorno to Eagleton. It is important, however, to remember that many "ordinary" people actually sympathize with anti-consumerist views and feel empowered, rather than patronized, by their engagement with oppositional perspectives. Anti-consumerist —as well as consumerist — attitudes and activities can be a source of both pleasure and liberation.
As Raymond Williams famously observed, there is no such thing as "the masses," only ways of imagining people as masses. Of all of these ways, Romero's is surely among the most extraordinary. Zombies function in Dawn of the Dead as a lumpenproletariat of shifting significance, walking symbols of any oppressed social group. This function is derived in part from their origins in the literature and cinema of the twentieth century, in which zombies are synonymous with oppression and slavery. 2. Romero uses zombies because, as part of a maligned cinematic underclass, they suit his satirical purpose. Both Dawn of the Dead and its successor Day of the Dead (1985) present the human survivors of the zombie plague as literally and etymologically "living over" the zombies. In Romero's trilogy, Captain Rhodes — the sadistic army commander of Day of the Dead — expresses the strongest contempt for the undead, regarding them as a disposable and despicable underclass.
In Dawn of the Dead, the social abjection of the zombies is established in the film's remarkable second scene. Here, two of the film's central characters, Roger (Scott H. Reiniger) and Peter (Ken Foree), along with other members of a police SWAT team, storm a brownstone full of Puerto Ricans who have refused to exit their properties as ordered by the authorities. Despite the poverty of these people, one policeman bluntly adumbrates the film's theme of material insecurity and envy. "Shit man," he remarks as he impatiently waits to start shooting at their "nigger asses," "this is better than I got." However, any sympathy the audience may have for such reactionary sentiments is dispelled when the SWAT team enters the zombie-infested building.
The SWAT scene is hardly mentioned in academic analyses of the movie and has even been dismissed as an unmotivated procrastination (Shumate). But it could be argued that the scene provides an interpretative context for the rest of the film. As well as introducing some hackneyed horror principles (the foul-mouthed policeman pays for his irascibility with his life), the scene invites the audience to consider zombiedom as a condition associated with both racial oppression and social abjection and, therefore, sanctions socio-political interpretations of the film as a whole.
It is difficult to comprehend the radical import of Dawn of the Dead without briefly considering the significance and history of its setting — the shopping mall. The dawn of the shopping mall age in the 1960s was met with widespread enthusiasm, and mass hysteria was even reported at several newly-opened malls (Morris 405). In recent decades, mall hysteria may be less common, but the shopping mall remains a cultural fascination in capitalist countries, while in cinema, malls have become a staple location for smart-ass American teen movies, like Amy Heckerling's Clueless (1995). It is easy to underestimate, therefore, the relative novelty, in 1978, of Romero's simple but inspired idea of setting Dawn of the Dead in a mall.
According to Meaghan Morris, one of the most exciting and attractive aspects of the shopping mall is the contrast between its massive structural stability and the constantly shifting composition of its population (394). In this sense, a mall is like a theatre or a stage: a space demanding action and transformation. Romero certainly recognized the dramatic potential of the mall, which may be regarded as both the epitome of corporate capitalism and — for the same reason — a potential site of resistance to the forces that regulate consumerism.
These regulatory forces were long ago examined by Gibian, who showed how designers try to discipline shoppers' routes through malls. But the disciplinary forces that construct malls are perpetually at risk from those who wish to cheat the system. And the bigger the malls, the more opportunities there are to subvert the agents of discipline. "The order of the system that builds and manages the shopping malls," writes John Fiske, "is consistently at risk of being turned into the disorder of those who use them, in a way that the small corner deli never was" (Understanding 43). The mall's subversive allure is clear in films like Kevin Smith's 1995 comedy Mallrats (1995), in which two teenage buddies outwit the managers and security staff of their local mall in order to win back their girlfriends. Such films attest to the sense in which shopping malls constitute the "system," whose disciplinary agents must be challenged, tricked, and overcome: the cinematic mall, it might be said, solicits not only the consumption of its goods, but also the subversion of its systems. Before returning to the work done on consumerism and commodities in cultural studies, I wish first to discuss some of the elements that make Dawn of the Dead a radical (i.e. oppositional) anti-consumerist text.
In a manner that recalls John Fiske's writings on the ruses of mallgoers, Romero's survivors make use of various tactics to wrest control of the mall from the living dead. Having done so, the survivors create a shopping utopia for themselves, a place where they can temporarily ignore the threat of the zombies. In Night of the Living Dead (1968), the first of Romero's zombie films, the survivors receive no respite from the zombies. In both Dawn and Day, by contrast, Romero introduces some brief but significant utopian interludes. In Day of the Dead, for example, two of the male survivors take sanctuary in a cosy caravan, where they indulge in verbose and alcohol-fuelled philosophizing on the value of hedonism; like so many of Romero's characters, they are content to bury their heads in the sand and to ignore the chaos all around them. Dawn of the Dead also contains scenes of release and relaxation; however, these are far more dramatic than the caravan scene in Day. Once the survivors in Dawn have exterminated the zombies in the mall and secured the doors, they indulge in a carnivalesque parody of rampant consumerism. Their delight is heightened by their awareness that they have not retreated, like the survivors in Day, to a safe enclave, but have skilfully taken the entire mall from the zombies and driven them out. Thus, even as he lies dying after being bitten by a zombie, Roger is able to crow with delirious pathos: "we whipped them and we got it all." The same sentiment underpins the fury of Stephen (David Emge) when, at the end of the film, a gang of bikers invades the mall. "It's ours," he says coldly as he aims his rifle at the invaders, "we took it."
With the corpses of the exterminated zombies cleared away, the survivors indulge in a fantasy of purchase power. They "steal" money from the mall bank, cheekily posing for the security cameras; they take all the clothes and consumer goods they desire; they play video games; and in a marvellously frenetic scene, Stephen and Peter "tool up" in the mall's weapon shop with a vast array of guns. The music during these scenes is light, airy and released, inviting us to regard this as an ironic paradise. But however joyous and liberating these "shopping scenes" may be for the characters, Romero's script emphasizes the economic exclusivity of consumerism. Perhaps the most poetic instance occurs in the armoury scene, in which Peter aims an expensive rifle at a zombie's forehead. "Ain't it a crime," he remarks wryly to Stephen, "the only person who could ever miss with this gun would be the sucker with the bread to buy it." Interestingly, this comment is also a variation on the "cultural dupes" argument, this time from below, as it were (here it is the affluent middle classes, rather than the witless proletariat, which is mocked for its consumer credulity).
The most striking sequence among these scenes of frenzied consumer abandon is the "supermarket sweep," during which the men snatch whatever food and drink they desire. In one shot, Stephen picks up a loaf only to be trumped by Peter, who produces an even bigger one. Both men laugh, implicitly recognizing an analogy of anatomical comparison. To regard this moment as a crude phallic interlude, however, is to overlook its mythical significance: comparing their "loaves" Peter and Stephen exploit the scatological licence traditionally granted to carnival revellers. Indeed, the film's scenes of carnival license are among its principle attractions, and they appear to have a particular resonance for the film's audience. To draw a very long parallel, these scenes constitute a reworking of the medieval legend of the Land of Cockayne, an allegory of human sloth and greed in an Edenic land of plenty. The Land of Cockayne legend was a popular utopian fantasy of a prelapsarian world in which every luxury is at hand and in which work is not required.3.
Romero's satirical depiction of instant and celebratory gratification is consistent both with classical European images of luxury and with modernist denunciations of the restlessly acquisitive postmodern zeitgeist, such as Christopher Lasch's melancholic Culture of Narcissism (1979). Of the film's characters, however, only Fran (Gaylen Ross) voices the film's moral insight. Accusing the men of being hypnotized by the mall, she tells Stephen: "It's so bright and neatly wrapped you don't see that it's a prison too." Fran is expressing, albeit rather preachily, Romero's own perspective: far from endorsing consumerism, she highlights the tendency of human beings to become cultural dupes. In this sense, the "fool's paradise" of the mall is a pretext for a classical humanist condemnation of visceral indulgence.
Romero's film also mobilizes classical images of female false consciousness which, while undoubtedly radical, are problematic from the perspective of postmodern feminism. In his article about Romero and feminism, Barry Keith Grant has less to say about Fran than any other Romero heroines, but she is in many ways the most complex and intriguing female figure. The Barbra (Judith O'Dea) of Night of the Living Dead is quickly reduced to helpless catatonia; on the other hand, Sarah (Lori Cardille), in Day, is a consistently stronger character than Fran, as is Barbara (Patricia Tallman) in the brilliant feminist remake of Night. Grant does, however, note that Fran is presented as a professional. Although this point is not discussed further, there are grounds to support this assertion. Fran helps the men to defend the mall; she also takes responsibility for herself and others, asking Stephen (presciently, as it turns out) to teach her how to fly the chopper lest anything should befall him. These qualities identify her as a spiky feminist heroine. "I'd have made you all coffee and breakfast," she tells the men ironically when they first arrive at the mall, "but I don't have my pots and pans."
Later in the film, however, Fran's feminist resolution is worn down. Bewitched by the hypnotic magic of the mall, she increasingly falls into stereotypically feminine patterns of behavior. In a particularly striking scene, Fran pampers and perfumes herself in front of a mirror, in the classic tradition of nineteenth-century fiction or twentieth-century film. Various techniques are used in this mirror scene to signal that Fran now identifies with her own glamorous reflection. As she applies her lipstick, she adopts the vacant gaze of the stereotypical female consumer who sees in the department store dummy an image of her objectified, commodified self. Fran becomes a human zombie, no more alive than the conspicuous mannequin heads on which the camera mockingly alights in a series of objective shots. As she makes herself up, she absent-mindedly toys with a pistol, indicating her implication in the film's system of commodity fetishism. In short, despite her own earlier warnings to the men, Fran becomes a cultural dummy.
Although it is fleeting, Fran's narcissism attests to the zombifying power of commodity fetishism on even the liveliest characters. In this sense, Dawn of the Dead may be seen as a modernist critique of the alienating effects of the consumption-led, post-Fordist society which, according to many commentators, developed throughout the 1970s (for a sceptical survey of views on post-Fordism see Callinicos, 132-144). In no sense does Romero regard Fran's absorption in fashion and image as liberating. On the contrary, Fran's increasingly lifeless behavior contrasts starkly with her spirited feminist attitude earlier in the film. It comes as no surprise when, in the very next scene, we see Fran in a domestic role, preparing a meal for Peter and Stephen in what appears to be an incongruous yet perfect recreation of a bourgeois living room. Despite her earlier feminist quip, Fran finds her way to the pots and pans after all. Consumerism alone, Romero implies, will not liberate women from their traditional subordinate roles.
Romero is not merely interested, however, in decrying commodity fetishism as spiritually deadening or politically inert; on the contrary, he stubbornly returns to the theme of exploitation. Towards the film's end, we are reminded of the exploitation that enables consumerism when one of the invading bikers (Tom Savini) calls the black survivor, Peter, "chocolate man." This racial insult is casual, but within the context of a film about consumerism, it is very resonant, as it identifies Peter with one of consumer society's most throwaway goods (it is no accident that, while Peter's priorities on arrival at the mall are to obtain "the stuff we need: television and a radio," the more frivolous Roger opts for two rather less vital commodities: watches and chocolate). More importantly, the "chocolate man" insult sharpens the film's focus on the economic origins, as well as the social effects of consumerism, since the production of chocolate depends on the exploitation of black labor. (In this connection, it is interesting to note that Peter is the only character in the film whose own production is foregrounded by Romero. While the backgrounds of the white characters are never mentioned, we learn that Peter has a Trinidadian grandfather and two brothers, who conform to the black stereotypes of professional basketball player and prisoner).
In both Dawn of the Dead and its sequel, a single phrase governs the film's concern with identification and difference: "they're us." This phrase — which oscillates suggestively between oxym oron and tautology — functions as a kind of shorthand for the troubled relations between human beings and zombies. The paradox posed by the zombies' human/inhuman condition is expressed in Roger's terrified, half-human face when he "returns" from the dead. It is also present when, having secured and "cleaned up" the mall, the survivors stand staring down at the zombies outside as they vainly claw at the glass doors. In this brilliantly conceived scene, it is Peter who makes the chillingly simple observation "they're us." Fran gives a slight shiver and pulls up the collar of her expensive fur coat (an apparently unnecessary garment under the air-conditioned circumstances), indicating that while guns constitute an effective defense from the enemy, consumer goods provide the psychological protection against any pricks of conscience. The scene dramatizes, perhaps better than any other scene in contemporary cinema, the senses in which consumers become guiltily aware not only of their own pleasures, but of the social costs of consumerism. Clearly, Romero's take on consumer society constitutes a humanist, radical, and one might say Adornian critique of racism, sexism and exploitation. As Tania Modleski writes, in many horror movies "the attack on contemporary life strikingly recapitulates the very terms adopted by many culture critics" ("The Terror" 288) and Romero himself has even been described as a "radical critic of American culture" (Shaviro 82).
Before comparing Romero's modernist critique of capitalism with some cultural studies writings on the subject, I wish briefly to discuss the reception of the film. The typical audience response to the film is, to say the least, enthusiastic. Modleski notes that in the years after its release, Dawn became "a midnight favorite at shopping malls all over the United States" and surmises that the movie-going consumers were "revelling in the demise of the very culture they appear most enthusiastically to support" ("The Terror" 290). Perhaps this explains why the film was one of the biggest grossing horror movies at the box office. Whatever the case, the film's transformation of the mall's rational, quotidian environment into a Dionysian orgy of violent indulgence has a deep attraction for its American consumers. The power of this aspect of the film derives from its relevance to the everyday activities of its viewers. As Virginia Nightingale reminds us: "audience is distinctively inflected by the nature and cultural significance of the interaction between audience activities and textual character" (105). This interaction seems to be particularly dynamic in the case of Dawn of the Dead: one North American fan related to me how, after viewing late-night showings of the film in a shopping center, he and other members of the audience used to roam through the deserted mall, imagining scenes from the film.
The audience reaction to this film suggests that people can have an ambiguous relationship with consumer culture. Indeed, the experience of viewing Dawn has even prompted some to question their consuming habits for the first time. Another fan of the film relates how he overheard a woman commenting to her friend in a New York City mall: "Oh, my god! Look! It's just like Dawn of the Dead! All of these shoppers look like zombies walking about the place!" "She seemed shocked", commented the fan. "It was as if a light had just been turned on, illuminating an aspect of her life never considered" (cited in England). From this piece of "fan" evidence, it is clear that the film has prompted at least one shopper to reconsider her relationship to consumerism. Clearly, the experience of shopping which "ordinary" people supposedly find liberating can also contain a degree of uneasiness. Certainly, it appears that the "happy shoppers" thesis is overgeneralized, as it fails to account for the contradictions which consumers find in their own habits. Cultural theorists need to recognize that radical views about consumerism are not restricted to a coterie of superannuated Marxian critics, but are inscribed within the quotidian experiences of consumers.
I would like to conclude by returning to the dispute about consumerism between the radical and the postmodernist camps of cultural studies outlined at the beginning of this paper. One often-advanced complaint is that critics in the Frankfurt School tradition tend to treat the consuming public as "witless and uncritical." This is an important and, in many cases, justified point (the conception of consumers as feckless dupes is plainly wrongheaded), but it would also appear to be something of a straw man. Most radical critics do not argue that people are simply cultural dummies, but that consumerism is both morally perilous to those who can afford to buy into it and economically exclusive to those who cannot. These two points — which even the film's audience seems perfectly capable of grasping — are made consistently in Dawn of the Dead.
It is among the easier tasks of cultural criticism to berate the Marxist fathers of cultural studies for their benighted refusal to concede any liberating potential to consumer practices. In her article "Things to Do with Shopping Centres," Meaghan Morris lightly mocks radical critics' portentous denunciations of commodity fetishism. She selects the following passage from Terry Eagleton for particular scorn:
The commodity disports itself with all comers without its halo slipping, promises permanent possession to everyone in the market without abandoning its secretive isolation. Serializing its consumers, it nevertheless makes intimate ad hominem address to each. (qtd. in Morris 27)
Eagleton's remarks about the dangerous seductiveness of commodities, which are heavily indebted to the apocalyptic rhetoric of the Frankfurt school as well as to a dangerously normative narrative of fallen humanity, are clearly consistent with what A. C. Grayling has called the "sociological orthodoxy" which views consumerism as oppression of the consumer. For Morris, however, such a view is unduly pessimistic and anti-feminist. For her, Eagleton presents an overgeneralized account of the allure of the commodity:
What is the sound of an intimate ad hominem address from a raincoat at Big W? Where is the secretive isolation of the thongs in a pile at Super-K? The commodities in a discount house boast no halo, no aura. (Morris 408)
In contrast, Morris aims "to make it more difficult for 'radical' culture critics to fall back quite so comfortably on the classic image of European bourgeois luxury to articulate theories of … economic exchange" (408). For Morris, the radical critique of consumerism is itself a Eurocentric luxury, patronizingly aloof from the quotidian concerns of consumers, and women shoppers in particular.
Morris's postmodernist writings on consumerism are clearly at odds with the essentially modernist critique of capitalism and consumerism mounted by Romero (what could be more "classic" or more benightedly "European" than the legend of the Land of Cockayne, on which Dawn's satirical sting depends). This poses some difficult questions for the cultural critic. Which critique of consumerism is the more satisfactory—Morris's or Romero's? And to what extent can filmmakers supplement the sociological and cultural conclusions of academic criticism about consumerism?
As implied in my comments above, one of the many strengths of Morris's article is its emphasis on the diversity of shopping malls. It is not sufficient, she argues, to generalize about shopping centers: one must examine their specificities and the diversity of those who visit malls. One must also acknowledge, she argues, the importance of each mall's precise geographical location in the life of the individual shopper. The importance of place in the experience of shopping is explicitly acknowledged in Dawn of the Dead when Peter explains to Stephen that the zombies are continuing to clamour outside the mall because they feel a residual connection with the place: "It's not us they're after, it's the place. They remember that they want to be here." Romero even differentiates his zombies in this film to a certain extent by clothing type and occupation. Nevertheless, despite the film's postmodern awareness of individual differences, it might still be argued that Dawn bases its politics on hackneyed or stereotypical images of decadence and luxuriance from a dead European tradition. In Romero's defence, it might be said that the dramatic exigencies of cinematic narrative rarely permit sociological completeness; Romero's film, one might say, selects only the worst elements of consumerism for critique and should not be taken as a generalizing statement. But far more importantly (in my view), Romero's critique contains an important element that Morris's analysis does not: namely, a concern with exploitation (of women, of black labour and, by metaphorical extrapolation, of the "masses" symbolized by the zombie throng). Put simply, Romero's critique of consumerism, "Eurocentric" as it may be, contains an ethical concern with exclusion that is absent not only from Morris's work, but also from the writings of the growing number of journalists who have pitched into the consumerism debate in recent years, in Britain as well as America (see Lawson, Twitchell, and Brooks). These commentators illustrate all too well Marx's argument in the first volume of Capital that, under capitalist conditions, the productive origins of commodities are easily forgotten. Marx's insight is still relevant to the field of cultural studies as a whole. Judith Williamson long ago expressed concern about the undue concentration of several strands of cultural studies on the consumptionist perspective—a point elaborated most forcefully and eloquently by Jim McGuigan and Angela McRobbie. Dawn of the Dead contains a symbolic corrective to this critical tendency to focus on "consuming passions" at the expense of critical considerations of production.
Another reason for exercising caution in this regard is that oppositional views about consumerism may be far more widespread among both artists and audiences today than postmodern theory has hitherto been prepared to admit. If cultural studies is serious about identifying the politically progressive aspects of consumerism (and I agree that it ought to be), it must acknowledge that radical views about consumerism circulate not only among academic Marxists but also among radical artists.4. Cultural studies should also recognize that the oppositional views of consumerism contained in films can and do affect at least some "ordinary" people outside Europe, like the woman in the New York shopping mall. Although further audience research needs to be done, some moviegoers, it appears, are fascinated by the oppositional perspectives on consumerism that Romero's powerful images afford; this might explain why the film was one of the biggest ever grossing horror movies at the American box office. While I share Tania Modleski's concern that ethnographic studies of subcultural audiences might foster a dangerous "collusion between mass culture critics and consumer society," it would certainly be interesting to discover the extent to which other films that are critical of consumer culture—such as David Byrne's True Stories—inform audiences' opinions about consumerism (Modleski, Studies xii).
Eagleton's comments about commodity fetishism might be, as Morris says, "comfortable"; but they are no more comfortable than many of the more uncritical celebrations of consumerism. In any case, it is beyond the scope of this short paper to draw conclusions about the extent to which consumerism ought to be celebrated for its liberating possibilities or lamented for its baleful effects. This is a question that has been successfully addressed by sociology and cultural studies; but it is one that is seldom considered by film (or indeed literary) critics. The study of anti-consumerist texts and their audiences might contribute to a richer understanding of people's relation to consumerism than sociology alone can provide.
Introduction
There has been an veritable outbreak of zombie films in the last few years, from Hollywood blockbusters Resident Evil (Anderson, 2002) and Resident Evil 2: Apocalypse (Witt, 2004), to British films such as 28 Days Later (Boyle, 2002) and the zombie spoof Shaun of the Dead (Wright, 2004). The release in 2004 of Zack Snyder's remake of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) attests to the continuing influence and appeal of classic "zombie cinema." While the cinematic concern with the undead predates Romero's films, all of the recent films mentioned above have some connection to Romero (Romero was originally scheduled to write the screenplay for Resident Evil, for example, while the recent British films allude frequently to Romero's work). The following essay is an attempt to account for the continuing attraction of Romero's first zombie film, Night of the Living Dead (1968), nearly forty years after its release.
Shot in black-and-white over seven months on a shoestring budget, Night of the Living Dead defined the modern horror movie and influenced a number of international horror directors, especially those working within the horror genre. The film's plot of is simple: Barbra and her brother Johnny are attacked when visiting a graveyard to honour the grave of their father. Johnny is attacked and killed by a zombie. Fleeing her attacker, Barbra meets Ben, who is also on the run from the recently reawakened dead. They begin to set up a nearby farmhouse as a fortress and soon discover they are not alone in the house. Two couples have been hiding out in the basement of the house: a young couple, Tom and Judy, and Harry and Helen Cooper, an older married couple with a young daughter who has already been bitten by one of the zombies. When Ben and Harry start arguing over where the safest place in the house is, tensions are created that lead to the downfall of the group. The film ends when Ben is shot by marshals who apparently mistake him for a zombie.
Night of the Living Dead was George Romero's first feature film and its title has become almost inseparable from its director's name. This in itself is problematic in that it allows the film's author to overshadow and even determine the film's interpretation. Night of the Living Dead certainly encourages auteurist interpretation: Romero both wrote and directed the film and is therefore, like the cinema "greats" Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, or John Ford, an auteur par excellence. But since the film so clearly and insistently engages with its contemporary social and political milieu, we must also try to understand it in its historical context. First of all, the disturbing power of Night of the Living Dead has deep historical and cultural roots that can be uncovered through comparisons with much earlier, European texts. Like Franz Kafka's (1992) classic story of 1914, "Metamorphosis" (which concerns a travelling salesman who is mysteriously transformed into a gigantic insect), Night of the Living Dead dramatizes the bewildering and uncanny transformation of human beings into non-human forms. Indeed, like all metamorphosis narratives, the film carries uncomfortable messages about identity — about what it means to be a human being and about the terror of alienation. The film's power to unsettle its audience also derives from its focus on the taboo subject of cannibalism (which it depicts far more graphically than previous zombie films). In the eighteenth century, the English ironist Jonathan Swift (1996) wrote A Modest Proposal, a darkly satirical attack on the privations suffered by the Irish people at the hands of the English in which the author ironically proposed that infants be killed and eaten in order to solve the problem of poverty in Ireland. Night of the Living Dead also uses cannibalism as a metaphor for exploitative power relations. Thus, while it deals with a quite different set of social problems, Romero's film can also be seen a sinister satire that exploits an outrageous premise in the interests of social and political critique. My specific concern here, however, is with how the film reflects and negotiates the political and social anxieties of the late 1960s.
I shall discuss Night of the Living Dead in relation to the formal categories of genre, structure, and theme, with particular reference to the film's engagement with the politics of race, gender, and violence. While these time-honoured categories are hardly exhaustive of the film's meaning, I hope that exploring them will take us some way towards understanding the film's central concerns and its wider cinematic importance and influence. Some of my wider claims about Romero's ideological vision are unoriginal — the exposition of Romero as a social critic, for example, has been magnificently achieved by Robin Wood (2003), amongst others. Moreover, close readings of the film already exist, most notably the analysis of the film's "textual and structural" aspects first published in the early 1970s by R. H. W. Dillard (1987) Nonetheless, my discussion (I might almost say disinterment and dissection) of the film offers some original contributions to the film's generic, stylistic, and structural analysis and explores some of the reasons for its continuing popularity at a time of renewed cultural and cinematic fascination with zombies.
Reality Bites: Truth, Genre, and Zombies
Genre, of course, often determines how a text is received by its audience. Given its titular identification as a horror film, we know from the start that Night of the Living Dead will present a world in chaos; there is no sense in which the zombie plague is anything other than a catastrophe. In other ways, however, Night of the Living Dead complicates many taken-for-granted critical assumptions about genre. Wells (2001: 7-8) suggests that while science fiction primarily concerns the external, and "macrocosmic," horror concerns the internal and the "microcosmic." In other words, the horror genre is concerned with fundamental fears: the primal fear of the unknown and of that which may end life at any moment. Certainly, Night of the Living Dead is most immediately concerned with such "inner" fears. Yet the film is also, as we shall see later, replete with references to its contemporary social milieu, severely problematizing the rigid distinction between science fiction and horror suggested above. The "realism" of Night of the Living Dead seems to confound other critical distinctions. In his famous book The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Concept (1975), Tzvetan Todorov distinguished between two types of verisimilitude: cultural verisimilitude and generic verisimilitude. The first type refers to texts that aim to be "true to life," like police drama; the second refers to texts in which the narrative details are true to the conventions of the genre. Horror texts tend, of course, to fall into the latter category. Night of the Living Dead obviously has a generic verisimilitude — while it observes the conventions of the horror genre, it does not, in a literal sense, correspond to any known reality. Yet the film calls into question Todorov's distinction, since it seems entirely feasible that a world in which zombies did exist would be like the one presented, giving the film — fantastic as it is — a sense of being "true to life." The plausibility of the zombie outbreak is reinforced by several textual qualities. For example, television news in 1968 appeared in black and white, which would have given Night of the Living Dead a documentary-like feel to the film's original audiences, at least. This sense of verité is also emphasised in the series of gory still photographs that accompany the film's closing credits and which recall the photojournalism of the Vietnam war. In other words, the film's gritty, "realistic" mode of address confers upon the film a "cultural verisimilitude': the audience is asked to believe that the horrific events depicted could be happening now.
This point can be further illustrated with reference to another of Todorov's ideas about genre. Todorov distinguished between three modes of horror: the "uncanny," the "marvellous" and the "fantastic." In the uncanny text, the apparently supernatural is finally explained rationally. In the fantastic text, we hesitate between natural and supernatural explanations of events (as in Henry James famous story The Turn of the Screw). In the marvellous text, the bizarre events of the story can only be explained by reference to another level of reality. From the first appearance of a zombie in the opening graveyard scene, Night of the Living Dead seems to conform to the "marvellous" category. Nonetheless, it is worth emphasizing that Romero makes us believe that this is happening now — so the film cannot be seen simply as a "marvellous" text like Alice in Wonderland. On the contrary, it asks us to believe that there are rational explanations for the zombie's existence: we are told, however implausibly, that the zombie phenomenon has been caused by radiation from outer space. Insofar as the film posits a rational explanation for the zombie menace, the film is "uncanny." Thus, rather than presenting a fantastical "alternative" reality, Night of the Living Dead insists on the shocking immediacy of this one.
A Beginning, a Middle, and a Bloody End:
Narrative Structure and the "Unities"
Narrative Structure and the "Unities"
The film's sense of urgency and immediacy is also a function of its narrative structure. Night of the Living Dead can be seen to be complexly structured around a number of classic horror film binary oppositions (such as nature and culture, urban and rural). The essential plot of the film, however, is very simple. Night of the Living Dead has a beginning (the graveyard scene), a middle (the defence of the farmhouse) and an end (the tragic shooting of Ben). In this sense, the film — like many Hollywood films — broadly follows a classical Aristotelian three-act structure. One of the most striking aspects of the film's structure, however, is its conformity to a central concern of much Renaissance tragedy: namely, that drama should observe the three "unities" of time, place and action. Night of the Living Dead takes place in real time (there are no forward jumps or flashbacks), bringing us an hour and a half of a group of people defending themselves from murderous zombies. This temporal continuity is quite unusual in contemporary film. Most narrative films contain cuts and take place over a few days in various locations. Night of the Living Dead, however, adheres to all three of the so-called "unities" of classical theatre, which are based (very) loosely on Aristotle's Poetics: the unities of time, place and action. According to the rather rigid strictures of seventeenth-century dramatists like Corneille, tragic drama should not exceed 24 hours, it should not contain multiple plots and it should be set in only one location. According to this model, therefore, drama should be confined to a single action occurring in a single place and unfolding over no longer than a single day. It seems improbable that Romero was consciously trying to follow this formula himself (and undoubtedly, Romero's decision to delimit his narrative in this way was partly determined by his limited budget). Yet Romero's adherence to these unities is fortuitous, ensuring that its pace does not slacken (indeed, "unrelenting" is a word often employed by the film's critics). In short, the film's uncomplicated narrative structure produces a concentrated, taut drama, uncompromised by digressions or subplots. Like other films that observe (or nearly observe) the unities — Joel Schumacher's Phone Booth (2002) is a case in point — the pace is unflagging and the atmosphere intense. It is also instructive to consider the structure of the film in relation to the conventions of classic Hollywood narratives. As Todorov implies, narratives tend to begin with a state of equilibrium that is disrupted, and then return to a state of "equilibrium" at the end. In many 1980s horror films, for instance, the initially harmonious family unit is disrupted and eventually reunited at the end of the film. As the case of 1980s horror cinema suggests, this simple narrative structure has often been used to reinforce conservative ideologies by transforming disharmony into order (for a basic introduction to some of the issues involved here, see Strinati, 2000: 34-39). However, this narrative structure does not necessarily lead to ideological conservatism; as Robin Wood points out, classical narrative moves towards the restoration of an order, but that nature of this order is open to question and revision:
If classical narrative moves toward the restoration of an order, must this be the patriarchal status quo? Is this tendency not due to the constraints imposed by our culture rather than to constraints inherent within the narrative itself? Does the possibility not exist of narrative moving toward the establishment of a different order, or, quite simply, toward irreparable and irreversible breakdown (which would leave the reader/viewer the options of despair or the task of imagining alternatives)? (Wood, 2003: 220)
Wood's comments are highly relevant to the conclusion of Night of the Living Dead. On a purely formal level, the "equilibrium" model describes the structure of the film; Romero, however, gives this narrative structure a twist, undermining the apparent "return to order" at the end of the film. On a superficial level, narrative equilibrium is restored in the final scene by the state troopers who, in keeping with their usual diegetic function in thriller and horror film, reinstate order and authority. Yet the audience knows that this apparent "order" has been achieved at the cost of Ben's life and has involved a heinous violation of social justice. In this sense, Night of the Living Dead anticipates the pessimistic horror cinema of the 1970s, in which legitimate authority is seen to be impotent in the face of evil (Crane, 2002: 169). Yet, while despair is one possible response to such endings, the shocking bathos of Night of the Living Dead challenges the audience to imagine more positive alternative endings.
Apocalypse Then: Romero's Catastrophic Vision in Context
Night of the Living Dead is a film about apocalypse. American films are very often apocalypse or disaster movies, and there are many theories about why this is so. The cultural critic Slavoj Zizek (2002a) points out that Americans have a deep psychological attachment to images of catastrophe. This constant anxiety about catastrophe shows just how concerned America is about radical social change and indicates, he argues, just how concerned America is to preserve the status quo. While many mainstream American films concern some kind of catastrophe, however, Night of the Living Dead does not offer the happy narrative closure expected of the Hollywood disaster movie. Instead, Romero's presents a tragedy in which the hero dies, rather than saves the world. Romero's tragic vision is quite unusual in an American culture which, according to the critic Terry Eagleton (2003), has been rendered "anti-tragic" by the forces of relativism and voluntarism. This tragic vision has a political colouring in Night of the Living Dead. Indeed, Romero's film can be seen as the artistic counterpart of Raymond Williams' argument, in his Modern Tragedy (1966), that tragedy consists not simply in the deaths of great leaders, but in the heroic and pointless destruction of "ordinary" people in their struggles for democracy. Whereas Slavoj Zizek's theories about catastrophe grow out of his analysis of American responses to the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, Night of the Living Dead must be understood in relation to the impact of Vietnam on American consciousness in the 1960s. Experiences of Vietnam constitute a common subtext of American cinema from the 1960s onwards. Near the beginning of Night of the Living Dead, in a shot of Johnny and Barbra's car entering the graveyard, we see a fluttering American flag in the foreground. The symbolism of the flag becomes clear as the film progresses: America is a dying country as a result of the zombie menace, and the flag represents the meaninglessness and deadliness of patriotism. In the post-war period, Leftist critics often pointed out the almost religious hold of patriotism in the Western world and the dangerous fervour with which patriotic ideology was upheld. Writing in the 1950s, the psychoanalyst and humanist cultural critic Erich Fromm, for example, pointed out that attacking the flag of one's country would be an unspeakable act of sacrilege; even extreme racist and militarist views, he continued, would not be regarded with such great hostility as anti-patriotic ones (Fromm, 1963: 59). The savagery of the anti-Communist McCarthy hearings of the mid-1950s certainly vindicated Fromm's observation. However, by the late 1960s such patriotic hegemony had been significantly contested and undermined. Romero's film emerged at a time of strong public disapproval of the American military involvement in Vietnam, during which criticisms of patriotism — while deeply offensive to the American establishment — were becoming commonplace.
Closely related to concerns about the consequences of militarism (and about Vietnam in particular) are fears about the potential for Western society to be devastated by nuclear holocaust. The wretched condition of Romero's zombies resounds with popular fantasies about the aftermath of a nuclear attack on America — a widespread anxiety underpinning American post-war cinema (other films attesting to this fear include Franklin J. Schaffner's Planet of the Apes, which was also released in 1968). The film may also represent another type of apocalypse: that of religious doomsday. Many fundamentalist Christians in America and elsewhere believe that the dead shall be raised to life on "the last day':
Lo! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable
. . . (King James Version, 1 Corinthians 15:51-52)
. . . (King James Version, 1 Corinthians 15:51-52)
Romero's zombies, according to this interpretation, might be seen as the resurrected on Judgement Day: indeed, like their biblical counterparts, they are mute.
Clearly, it is possible to read many versions of apocalypse into the film. Perhaps the zombies represent, in Freudian terms, the "return of the repressed" — those sublimated aspects of ourselves that we hide from public view. Perhaps they are to be equated with the Russians — often conceived by Americans at the time as a barbaric throng, intent on destroying (devouring) the American way of life. Perhaps the zombies represent the younger generation of Americans which, as it seemed to many in the late 1960s, wanted to overthrow traditions and replace them with a new social order. Or perhaps, from a more recent perspective, the zombies could be seen to represent the homeless, AIDS sufferers, drug users, or any other marginalized group (Tom Savini's 1990 remake of the film makes the drug-user metaphor explicit). Clearly, some of these interpretations may have been intended by Romero, while others were not: but all of them are valid. It is true that the film does offer a kind of B-movie scientific explanation of what is happening: radiation from outer space. However, Romero does not posit this "explanation" as the only correct interpretation of the apocalypse; instead, he prefers to let the audience determine the meaning of his metaphor. Horror films are, to borrow a term from the Italian theorist Umberto Eco, "open works," texts that allow a high degree of interpretative ambiguity. Eco argues that such texts are the most appropriate type of text in our own time, because they reflect the sense of disorder and discontinuity that are such marked features of the modern world (Eco, 1989). In every era, the Night of the Living Dead audience will attach its own meanings to the zombies. Romero is more interested in allowing his metaphor to work subtly yet powerfully at the heart of his film. Romero's primary interest is not in providing a detailed explanation of the disaster that has befallen America, so much as in analysing the human response to it. Communication, Alienation, and Isolation
Night of the Living Dead constitutes a dramatic appeal for communication and cooperation in the face of paranoia and violence. Romero's interest in communication resembles that of the British dramatist Harold Pinter. Like Pinter, Romero explores interpersonal communication through dialogue, focusing on the ways in which our preconceptions of others make us suspicious and even hostile towards them, and the lies we tell to ourselves and to others. As with Pinter, the dialogue demands scrupulous attention. Careful listeners will have noticed that when Barbra first speaks to Ben, she is not entirely honest about her relationship with Johnny: she tells him that she was "with Johnny," implying that Johnny is her partner. This suggests Barbra's uncertainty regarding the intentions of her interlocutor, perhaps because he is a man, perhaps because he is black? Barbra also misleadingly talks about her brother is if he were still alive, even although the audience knows that he is dead. Barbra's denial of her brother's death can be understood as an unconscious psychological survival strategy. The character of Harry Cooper, however, tells lies deliberately in order to cover his cowardice. Early in the film he tells Barbra and Ben that when he was in the basement, he hadn't heard the others enter the house; later, however, he lets slip that he had, in fact, heard the commotion above.
The film also raises questions about the role of the media and the role of mass communication. The media is omnipresent. Early in the film, there is a lengthy scene in which Ben and Barbra don't speak, but listen to the radio — a fairly fruitless activity adumbrating Romero's concern in his later films with the banality of media culture (Blake, 2002: 157-61). Later on, a television is discovered upstairs in the house and is fought over by Ben and Harry Cooper. There is irony here: Ben and Harry fight over the only means of communication with the outside world, but are unable to communicate with each other. Through such ironies, the film incessantly poses the question: who is the enemy? At first it seems obvious that it is the zombies; later, however, as the paranoid human beings fight among themselves, the distinction between human beings and zombies becomes blurred. The point is reinforced by Zizek: "The division friend/enemy is never just a recognition of factual difference. The enemy is by definition always (up to a point) invisible: it cannot be directly recognized because it looks like one of us." (Zizek, 2002b: 5). In the final scene of the film, the difficulty of enemy recognition is horrifically exemplified when Ben is shot dead after he is misrecognised (seemingly) as a zombie (a scene which to an American audience in the 1960s must surely have resonated with the murder of the black rights leader Martin Luther King). Romero himself has emphasised that his zombie films, in particular, dramatize failures of human co-operation. Cooper's initial intention is to board up his family in the basement and thus isolate them. In historical terms, this impulse is understandable. During the cold war, the instinct to hide in the basement was the response of many people to the threat of a nuclear attack (the Cooper family are the "nuclear" family in every sense). But Cooper's actions also symbolize the human tendency towards solipsism and isolationism. There are echoes of this selfish impulse in contemporary American separatist militia and other isolationist groups, who often believe that they can escape what they perceive as the madness of the world around them by sequestering themselves in the forests or mountains. Even in the "mainstream" of Western societies, we find similar attitudes that are bound up with an individualistic, bourgeois mode of existence — isolated from the local community and living alongside others without ever communicating with them. Romero's message is therefore implicitly a call for co-operation: if we allow the world fall apart around us, Romero implies, the destruction will sooner or later destroy our own lives.
Again, this message needs to be located in a historical context. In post-war America, and in the West in general, many middle class people were starting to live more prosperous, but more isolated lives; however, the apparent ease and security of such lives carried dangers of alienation: a safe home quickly becomes prison-like. In the 1960s and 1970s progressive criticism of the bourgeois conception of the family reached its height. As the anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote at the end of her life:
Nobody has ever before asked the nuclear family to live all by itself in a box the way we do. With no relatives, no support, we've put it in an impossible situation. (Margaret Mead, New Realities, June 1978)
In the film, the collapse of the bourgeois domestic family is symbolised when Karen Cooper becomes a zombie and kills her parents. Thus the ending of Night of the Living Dead contrasts quite markedly with the more conservative endings of many horror films, where the restoration of family values is seen as the answer to social problems.
"Beat 'em or burn 'em": Race and Power
To those unfamiliar the zombie movie genre, it might seem hard to see how a film like Night of the Living Dead could be regarded as a political film. However, the film is one of the most important cultural records of its era. Romero himself has explicitly commented that the film is a document of contemporary social changes. We don't have to take the director's word for this, since the film's political themes are hardly hidden from the audience. But why should a film about zombies be considered as a film about race? One reason lies in Romero's selection of zombies as the film's monsters of choice. Why zombies, as opposed to vampires or dragons or giant beetles? It is important to remember the zombie's origin in the voodoo tradition in Haiti (indeed, the phenomenon is taken so seriously in Haiti that the country's Penal Code considers making someone into a zombie as a form of murder). According to the belief, Haitian zombies lack freewill and perhaps souls. They become zombified by a "bokor" (sorcerer) through spell or potion, and are afterwards used as slaves. It is this connection with slavery that allows us to equate zombies with people of colour. This is not an entirely new conception. Two years before Romero's film, for example, the link between zombies and slaves had been used in John Gilling's British zombie film for the Hammer Studios, The Plague of the Zombies (1966). Set in a Cornwall, an evil squire uses black magic to turn his villagers into zombies and exploit their labour in his dangerously unsafe tin mine. Thus the zombie is a metaphor for, in Gilling's film, the exploited working class, and in Romero's film for the oppressed racial minorities of America.
The film's immediate social context further suggests its racial significance. Night of the Living Dead is set at a time of racial upheaval and protest in America. Black people had been given faith in the possibility of the betterment of their conditions. With the death of Martin Luther King, however, many people lost this faith and abandoned the idea of peaceful resistance. White and black militant groups like the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam, and the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nation sprang up (mentioning these groups together does not, incidentally, imply a moral equivalence between them). To many people, it seemed as though there might be a race war in America. Conservative, reactionary discussions of this possibility often focused — as they sometimes do today — on the possibility that "we" might soon be outnumbered by "them." The line in Night of the Living Dead "we don't know how many of them there are" highlights this racist concern with numbers and the fear of being outnumbered or "swamped." This fear was not restricted to America; 1968 was also the year of British Conservative MP Enoch Powell's notorious "Rivers of Blood" speech, which predicted bloody racial conflict in the United Kingdom Powell was duly sacked for his comments by the party leader Edward Heath.
Of course, Night of the Living Dead is not the only film of its time to deal with issues of race. In Guess Who's Coming To Dinner? (1967) Sidney Poitier played a black man engaged to a white woman; the film details the reactions of each partner's family to the interracial marriage. In that film, however, racial issues were dealt with in a quite explicit way — they were the focus of the film. In Night of the Living Dead, on the other hand, racial tensions are not explicitly mentioned, making them, paradoxically, all the more evident. By casting a black man as a hero, Romero, the independent filmmaker, implicitly rejected the values of Hollywood, which at that time typically eschewed black heroes. In recent years, we have become accustomed to visible minorities playing the "virtuous" characters in films (in fact, some critics now believe that this has in itself become another form of racist misrepresentation: after all, if visible minorities are always the "good guys," doesn't this imply a lack of confidence in portraying them as fully-rounded human beings?). In 1968, however, the novelty of a black hero was striking.
While racial issues are not explicitly foregrounded in the film, the dialogue makes continual reference to the ways in which racial minorities have been treated in the past in America: Chief, if I were surrounded by say six or eight of these things, would I stand a chance?
Well, if you had a gun, shoot 'em in the head. If you didn't, get a torch and burn 'em, they go up pretty easy. Beat 'em or burn 'em.
The redneck hostility of this language here is reflected in later films about racial hatred in America, such as Alan Parker's 1988 film Mississippi Burning. Finally, the way in which the zombies are hung from trees in the final scenes of the film inevitably invokes the racist lynchings of America's past.
Men, Women, and Tablecloths: Gender Stereotypes
The film also contains a deeply committed exploration of gender roles. Throughout the film, only the men seem to be effective in combating the zombies. While Ben and the other men are active, Barbra is catatonic. Once inside the house and safely in the care of the film's black hero, Ben, Barbra is quickly reduced to helpless catatonia. She sits on the living room sofa for almost the entire duration of the film, until she is finally moved to action at the sight of Helen Cooper being attacked by zombies. In fact, Barbra is both infantilised (while Ben boards up the house, she toys with a musical box, suggesting that she is "regressing," in the Freudian sense) and identified with household items, such as the linen tablecloth and the embroidered arm of the sofa which she obsessively strokes. In other words, while the men act, the women — Barbra in particular — draw comfort from domestic goods. There is also an imbalance in the types of role adopted by each sex. Helen and Judy undertake the "women's work" of caring for the injured Karen Cooper, while the men set about the more pressing business of boarding up the house against the undead. Although Helen Cooper is relatively active (and resistant to the orders of her bullying husband Harry) and although Barbra eventually attempts to rescue Helen in a belated gesture of sisterhood, the women in the film generally constitute a kind of backdrop, their feelings and actions largely dependent on the more capable males.
The passivity of the women in Night is problematic for some feminist critics. Gregory A. Waller, for example, notes that Barbra's character "would seem to support certain sexist assumptions about female passivity, irrationality, and emotional vulnerability" (1986: 283). This stereotype of the catatonic blonde was common in the cinema of the 1960s. It can be seen, for example, in Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1964), which is widely described as a study of feminine repression and insanity. In Repulsion, Carol (Catherine Deneuve) is accosted by various more-or-less lecherous or downright vicious men, eventually suffering from frightening hallucinations and becoming a murderer. However horrifying her acts may be, it is difficult to hold her responsible for her actions (she is clearly extremely mentally disturbed); on the contrary, the film forces us to consider the impact on women of patriarchal oppression. There is a risk here of using patriarchal oppression to explain away all problematic representations of women; yet when that context is clear in the filmic text, it can excuse representations of women that might in other contexts seem sexist. Indeed, just as Carol's violence is at least partially understandable as a response to her oppression (and not simply her repression), we can excuse the extreme passivity of the women in Night of the Living Dead on the grounds that they are not only intimidated by the men (or, at least, by some of the men), but also conditioned to act as passive domestic drudges.
Moreover, if we consider Barbra's attitude towards Ben, there is a sense in which Romero's presentation of women is progressive. In many films about race, women are presented as completely non-racist; indeed, their non-complicity with racist sentiments accords all too neatly with stereotypes of feminine perfection. However, Barbra's clear mistrust of Ben — she positions the knife on the fridge ambiguously, so that the audience is unsure whether she wishes to use it against the zombies or against Ben — suggests that, for all her docile domesticity, she has been affected by the racism of the world outside (Lightning, 2000). Barbra, after all, is not perfect.
Violence: from the "Gratuitous" to the Metaphorical
British film director Nicholas Roeg once quipped that "there are three lovely critical expressions ... pretentious, gratuitous and profound, none of which I truly understand." Roeg's remark indicates that film critics often reach for such expressions as summary (yet unexplained) insults. Indeed, while few critics are concerned, it appears, about the filmic representation of gratuitous love or gratuitous friendship, many critics express anxiety about so-called "gratuitous" violence. Night of the Living Dead is a violent film, although by contemporary Hollywood standards, the number of violent acts is actually rather low. This violence is problematic — not because violence is always or inherently problematic, but because its representation has become problematic in Western society for a number of cultural reasons. Some elements of British audiences, for example, have adopted a critical attitude towards film violence by the campaigns of Mary Whitehouse's Viewer's and Listener's Association and other right wing pressure groups. Their arguments often assume (rather questionably) that fiction should depict only those things which we wish to see in real life and (equally questionably) that the fictional representation of violent acts leads to violent behaviour. These arguments have a long history, however. In the Renaissance, for example, violence violated the rules of "decorum" (i.e. violence was "unseemly"). Violent incidents in plays, for example, were merely reported rather than enacted on stage. Until fairly recently, violence was not often depicted in art. Even early horror films, such as Nosferatu (1919), did not depict violent acts to the same extent as Night of the Living Dead. In relation to film, in particular, regulation and censorship of movies through the Hays Production Code made film violence rare until the 1960s.
However, such rules about the representation of violence were made to be broken: even in the Renaissance, dramatists like Shakespeare sometimes violated the "rules" of decorum by depicting violence in their plays (in King Lear, for example, Cornwall blinds Gloucester onstage). In relation to film, the decline of the Hollywood studio system in the late 1950s led to the abandonment of the Production Code, allowing films to be released with a minimum of censorship. But is there any justification for dramatic depictions of violence? If we are concerned with the representation of power relations in society, then the answer is surely yes. In his book Understanding Popular Culture, John Fiske writes:
It is not violence per se that characterises popular culture, but only that violence whose structure makes it into a metaphor for the distribution of power in society. (Fiske, 1989: 137)
According to Fiske, then, violence is a metaphor for inequitable (and presumably unjust) power relations in society. It is important, however, to understand this point in historical context. Violence became more commonly depicted in films and on television in the late 1960s, during a socially turbulent period when social hierarchies were being challenged. To many people, the violence of the later 1960s and 1970s seemed arbitrary. In 1966 a twenty-five-year old part-time graduate student in architectural engineering positioned himself in an observation tower on the Austin campus of the University of Texas, shooting forty-four people, and killing fourteen of them. In their book Images of Madness, the critics Fleming and Manvell write: It was but one of a number of multiple murders that came at a time when mass violence appeared to be erupting throughout America and was coming to be accepted as commonplace. It was this arbitrary and violent quality in murder that became the subject of two box-office successes of the period, Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and In Cold Blood (1968) (Fleming and Manvell, 1985: 103)
Indeed, from the late 1960s, police series became more fast-paced and violent, while so-called "spaghetti Westerns" challenged the conventional bloodlessness of conventional Westerns by showing the gory reality of violence. Spaghetti Westerns also challenged the enduring Western myth that the strong and the virtuous will prevail; instead they showed that even the good get hurt — a message reinforced in Night of the Living Dead. Yet these representations of violence cannot simply be seen as "arbitrary" or "gratuitous." As Alan Clarke writes about the violent police dramas of the 1970s: "much of the violence was completely gratuitous unless it was seen as the necessary background to the war against crime which the police were fighting. This more explicit portrayal had gained a symbolic value" (Clarke, 1986: 220).
In light of the above comments by Fiske and Clarke, the violence in Romero's film can be viewed as metaphorical — it stands for the interracial violence of 1960s America and for the horrors of the Vietnam war that were so shockingly revealed on American television screens in the late 1960s. In a certain sense, then, the violence of the film may be seen as "realistic'; that is, it reflects and comments upon the violence of the period in which the film was made. Violence is a theme Romero has worked with in all of his zombie films in order to highlight current social injustices. Indeed there is in the film a sense of documentary-like verisimilitude, especially in the grainy photographic images of the zombie cull at the end of the film, which recall contemporary photographs of the carnage in Vietnam.
What is interesting is the way in which our attitudes towards violence change throughout the film. After a while we become inured to the shock of seeing the zombies being killed. As the film progresses, the zombies become an undifferentiated mass — as enemies so easily become. As the violence increases, we begin to lose our sense that the zombies are in any way human and tend to become (to use a cliché) "desensitised" to the violence we see (recalling Joseph Stalin's chilling observation that "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic'). However, Romero never allows us to feel fully comfortable with this — and the ending of the film offers the stark admonition that in our zeal to eradicate our enemies, we risk destroying ourselves.
Conclusion: Night of the Living Dead — An Undead Classic?
Presenting, as I have done, Romero as a social critic, incurs a risk of underestimating his wry wit. While the tone of the film is sombre (there is more humour in the film's sequel Dawn of the Dead), there are also many strongly humorous elements. Often there is a kind of cartoonish quality, for example, about some of the characters. Frustrated by his own incompetence, Cooper does exactly what Moe from the Three Stooges would have done: he complains and lashes out angrily at those around him, blaming them for his own inability to function. In a sense, therefore, Cooper is a stereotypical buffoon, infuriatingly impervious to criticism in a way that leavens his (to borrow a phrase from Theodore Adorno) "authoritarian" personality. There are also elements of black humour in the names of the characters. Mr Cooper, significantly, wants to "coup" his family up in the basement; Ben's name, meaning "good" in Latin, is consistent with his role as the moral touchstone of the film. Despite this humour, however, Night of the Living Dead, as I shall argue more strongly below, remains a deeply serious film in terms of its social import. To some extent, the continuing power of Romero's film can be seen in terms of its subsequent cinematic influence. Night of the Living Dead draws on Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), especially in its film craft: the use of shadow and camera angles. But it in turn has influenced many other films, most notably the opening sequence of Salva's Jeeper's Creepers (2001), which draws on both Night of the Living Dead (particularly in the scene in which a brother and a sister argue in a car on a winding, deserted road) and the film adaptation of Stephen King's Children of the Corn (1978) (in which a couple listen to fundamentalist radio stations as they drive through the rural environment). The boarding up of the farmhouse has precursors in Western films, such as John Huston's The Unforgiven (1960), from which the settlers fight off the marauding Indians (intriguingly, The Unforgiven's hero is also called Ben) and is often been repeated, as in M. Night Shayamalan's Signs (2002). The image of zombies climbing in through windows to devour human flesh, meanwhile, has become a pop culture icon, referenced in such disparate places as John Carpenter's seminal film Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), or the more recent British films such as 28 Days Later (2002). To invoke some even more populist contexts, the names of popular music bands, the video for Michael Jackson's "Thriller," the best-selling Playstation game series "Resident Evil" and the television comedy series Father Ted have all drawn on Romero's iconography. After forty years, the diffuse and all-pervasive influence of Night of the Living Dead is makes it difficult precisely to assess its overall cultural impact.
Indeed, as so often in intertextual borrowing of this kind, the original atmosphere and satirical spirit of the film has proved less enduring than the dominant image of the lumbering zombie made famous by Romero. It might be argued that the while many films contain iconographical references to Night of the Living Dead, the oppositional and ironic power of Romero's original vision is seldom achieved. One brief example may help to illustrate this point. The ending of Night of the Living Dead is reprised in Eli Roth's film Cabin Fever (2002), a film about a group of teenagers assailed by a hideous virus, one of whom — Jeff, played by Joey Kern — escapes by isolating himself from his friends, earning the contempt of his fellows (and of the audience). When this surviving member emerges from the shack shouting "I made it!," he is shot by the police, who mistake him as a virus-carrier. The brutal irony of this final scene clearly invites comparison with the ending of Night of the Living Dead; yet the audience's contempt for Jeff's isolationism ensures that we feel a certain satisfaction, rather than outrage, at the young man's death. Moreover, unlike Romero's ending, this ending restores and legitimises the authority of the police.
Turning to the films mentioned at the start of this essay, it can be seen that while several of the recent zombie films that make reference to Night of the Living Dead may have interesting qualities, their ideological implications differ markedly from those of Romero's film. The Resident Evil films (Anderson, 2002; Witt, 2004) are marred by their treatment of women as sexual spectacles, while the comic parody of Shaun of the Dead (2004) seems hollow, as there is never a sense of menace or of any human value being at stake. Perhaps 28 Days Later (2002) and Snyder's remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004) are the most intriguing of these films, although their gender politics are suspect (Harper, 2005). There are, of course, dangers in designating Night of the Living Dead, or any film, as a "great" or "seminal" film, whose lofty social conscience recent zombie cinema has basely traduced. Nevertheless, none of the recent spawn of zombie films offers the ambiguity, artistry, and radical import of Romero's film. Night of the Living Dead (and, indeed, its worthy sequels) reminds us of something that the recent outbreak of zombie films may have caused us to forget: the oppositional potential of popular culture. In this sense, the film is an undead classic that can still tell us something about who we are — and warn us about what we might turn into.