And Say the Zombie Responded?
13
The point, of course, is that as cultural commodities, these icons are
also always already pointing toward horror. This is one of the reasons that
George Romero’s zombie movies are so fascinating. Ever few years, Romero
comes out with another zombie movie that tackles the state of Western culture,
drawing attention to the way in which the line between humans and zombies in
the film—and in reality—is a fine one. This is, arguably, most successfully
accomplished in Romero’s 1978 Dawn o f the Dead in which the four main
characters of the film hole up in a shopping mall after the zombie apocalypse.8
In Dawn o f the Dead it is difficult to tell the difference between the
zombies walking the mall and the regular shoppers. Both move with a dull and
steady determination. Both seem directed toward a goal of consumption that
seems grotesque yet they cannot control it and cannot see how grotesque it
obviously is. The mall thus becomes the eq uivalent of a cemetery for the living,
a place where dead capital goes to keep mall-walking. As Stephen, one of the
main characters of the movie, puts it (after coming back from a post-zombie
apocalypse exuberant shopping trip, seemingly happy that this has all happened
because they now have the mall to themselves): “You should see all the great
stuff we got, Franny. All kinds of stuff. This place is terrific. It really is. It’s
perfect. All kinds of things. We’ve really got it made here, Franny.”
Later, discussing why so many zombies would turn up at the mall and
try, day after day, to break in, three of the main characters in the film listen to
the zombies pounding on the shopping mall’s glass doors:
Francine: They’re still here.
Stephen: They’re after us. They know we're still in
here.
Peter: They’re after the place. They don't know why,
they just remember. Remember that they want to be
in here.
Francine: What the hell are they?
Peter: They're us; that’s all.
The film Sean o f the Dead (Edgar Wright, dir., 2004) is a funny movie,
but in some ways it is also a disappointment in that its main point is merely that
it is difficult to tell the zombies from the regular humans because all of the
people in Sean’s town are already zombified by modem life.9 The problem here
is that this has always been one of the main messages in the Romero films.10
One cannot satirize what is already satire in this manner. It is akin to trying to do
a satire of The Jersey Shore or The Jerry Springer Show. These things are
already satires—and as they continue on in our culture, they become satires of
themselves, even, to a certain extent. Postmodemity’s challenge lies, in part, in
finding a way to engage in post-irony.
Let us say, then, that part of the evil of the zombie is what they—and
by proxy, we—wish to consume. Before we get to the question of consuming