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Popular Culture Review
flesh. Nothing else will satiate them—and, indeed, not even human flesh will
really satiate them, because they act as though no matter how much flesh they
are able to eat, they are always starving. We can read this in two ways. We
might simply think of this as yet another instance of zombies being an
incarnation of our own mad desire for consumption. Like the zombies
mindlessly shopping in the mall—mindlessly consuming—perhaps this hunger
is another cultural marker for our own excesses, our own desires to go on
consuming and consuming with no end in sight. Yet we can also see something
tragic in this compulsion. The zombies do not seem to have a choice about their
desire to eat humans. And actually eating humans doesn’t stop the desire. Like
the gluttons in the third circle of Dante’s version of hell, those who are punished
are unaware of each other’s presence, forced to live in a mass of flesh that is
lubricated with mud caused from the continual rain that falls. The life of sensual
pleasure and appetite has reduced the sinners to a world in which they cannot
recognize anything other than their own desires. Narcissism and gluttony are
thus related. And in this way there is a tragedy at work in such insatiable desire
both in Hell and in a Hell-on-Earth. Dante also tells us that Cerberus, the three
headed dog, is the guard of the third circle of hell, and in a nod to this, the
Resident Evil films and videogames always include zombie dogs, also named
Cerberus. In the 2010 film in this series, in fact, one of the zombie dogs opens
his mouth and it expands into multiple mouths with multiple rows of teeth.11 All
the better to eat and keep eating.
Given the relationship between zombies and gluttony, it is thus not
surprising to see zombies’ unending appetite as a theme that occurs repeatedly in
zombie films. In the French zombie film, The Horde, the relationship between
tragedy and desire is spoken out loud. As zombies press against the glass doors
of an apartment complex, moaning and wailing to get in (in an apparent homage
to Romero’s mall-based Dawn o f the Dead), one character watches and listens to
the moans, remarking: “It’s like some sort of cry for help.” “No,” another
character argues. “They’re starving to death.”12 Of course, like all zombies, they
are already dead. So the starvation at work is one that is not really related to
survival in any way. As is the case with the living, desire is thus always pointing
at something other than its own satiation. Desire is its own end.
Zombies, even when they are cut in half and have no stomach, want to
eat. This is, in fact, a major point of Romero’s third zombie movie, Day o f the
Dead (1985). Here, most of the film takes place underground in a secret Army
facility where a small group of soldiers and scientists live. The soldiers round up
zombies and keep them in a pen, turning them over when requested, to the team
of scientists who are studying them. The scientists are divided, however, as to
whether or not they should be concentrating on curing the zombie virus or
simply finding a way of domesticating the zombies and learning to live with
them. Dr. Logan, who argues for domestication, treats the zombies as animals,
vivisecting them in his lab. “See, it wants me,” explains the doctor. “It wants