Death, Undeath, and the Pursuit of Material Happiness

In the late 1960’s George A. Romero released the first of his series of dead-coming-to-life social criticism films “Night of the Living Dead”. This iconic film jump-started and remains emblematic of the still-existing genre of zombie movies. A few years later Romero released his landmark “Dawn of the Dead” which remains one of the entertaining indictments of consumerism ever caught on film. The premise of the movie is that zombie attacks have suddenly overwhelmed the major cities of the United States. A small group of survivors evacuates via helicopter, and while flying over an unknown suburb sight the edifice that will be their fortress against the living dead: a shopping mall.

Although the mall contains a number of undead, their choice at least initially proves to be astute: they have a limitless amount of supplies to survive on if only if only they can clear the building of existing zombies and then barricade the rest of the witless undead hordes outside. After many gruesome encounters they finally secure a safe existence within their castle of consumerism. They then go about the slow business of surviving and waiting for the world to sort itself out. However, they do much more than survive. They live the good life. Life in the mall offers them not only the food and safety they need to live, but sleek furniture, fine drink, and fashionable clothes. They have lost contact with the outside world, which is presumably falling to pieces around them, but they don’t even care. They take the self-absorbed goods-based lifestyle to its extreme: caring about luxuries and status symbols while there is nobody to demonstrate their status to and while the fate of the human race lies in a most precarious state.

For one character, though, these comforts ring hollow. With the bulk of human existence stripped to its most basic states, life and death (and the horrifying prospect of undeath, without a functioning society, the language of symbols and possession become next to meaningless. Yet to others, these goods offer them solace in a world that otherwise doesn’t make sense any more. Ultimately however, their obsession with the material becomes their undoing. At the end of the film, a human biker gang invades the mall in search of supplies, allowing zombies to penetrate into the protagonists’ consumer paradise. The bikers begin a bout of wanton looting. Had the protagonists allowed this to continue, it would most likely have been a simple matter to rid the mall of remaining zombies and resecure their perimeter. But this isn’t good enough, as they rush to defend their things, not from the zombies but from the people taking away their commodities. Chaos ensues, people die, and the mall is lost to the shuffling hordes.

The movie is pretty clear in showing how consumerist attitudes affect the lives of the people living within the mall, but what does it say about how consumerism affects or lives? I would agree with Romero that it makes us selfish, indifferent to the greater world around us, and exclusivist. The ultimate zombie movie cliché is that “the zombies represent society, man!”. This film is no exception. Except, when I see these zombies I see not a generalized mindless social organism, but the downtrodden, the poor and the hungry (hungry for brains?). Consumerism ultimately makes us think what matters is what we have, and drives us to protect our wealth as if we were protecting our selves, at the expense of all those others who see into world of prosperity and just want to have a little of it for themselves.