The Philosophy of Horror

Zombies of the World, Unite: Class Struggle and Alienation in Land of the Dead

Zombies of the World, Unite John Lutz Mike: It’s like they’re pretending to be alive. Riley: Isn’t that what we’re doing, pretending to be alive? —Land of the Dead In a 2005 review of George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead, Roger Ebert notes the class structure of the society of surviving humans residing in Pittsburgh, pointing out the contrast between the luxurious (and apparently completely idle) lifestyle of the residents of Fiddler’s Green, a luxury skyscraper at the center of the city, and the dehumanized condition of the poorer inhabitants surrounding it. Ebert goes on to note how the functioning of money is never explained in this economy, “where possessions are acquired by looting and retained by force.”1 This provocative description is not pursued any further in the review, but it provides a point of departure for examining the film’s satiric treatment of American capitalism and, by extension, a global economic order predicated upon class exploitation. Indeed, the economic system depicted in Land of the Dead has a remarkable parallel with Marx’s representation of capitalist society. According to Marx, capitalism is defined by an unremitting conflict between classes with antagonistic and irreconcilable interests. In the Marxian view, class struggle represents a central feature of human history. This is a struggle in which, from one economic system to its successor, oppressor and oppressed have “stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”2 One of the fundamental characteristics of Marx’s description pertains to the some121 Class Struggle and Alienation in Land of the Dead 122 John Lutz times “hidden” nature of class conflict. This insight suggests that members of classes with antagonistic interests may not always recognize themselves as representatives of a particular class, nor recognize the precise nature of their true interests. In the United States, a country where discussions of class rarely find their way directly into public discourse, representations of class conflict sometimes appear in unlikely places. Romero’s film is one such place: an ostensible representation of what is known as a survival narrative, that is to say, “a story in which a group of characters undergoes a crisis that tests their individual and collective capacity to survive,”3 that actually represents a complex, sustained allegorical treatment of class conflict in America and exploitation on a global scale. At the same time, the film represents an interesting variation on the genre of survival horror and, in particular, the zombie film, which, like its prototype The Birds, usually involves a relatively small group trapped in a house or mall. In Land of the Dead, this principle is applied on a grand scale. The besieged house is transformed into an entire city allegorically representing America and its relationship to the underdeveloped , exploited nations on the periphery of empire. Furthermore, like Romero’s earlier films in this genre, Land of the Dead seems preoccupied with making comparisons between the cannibalistic zombies and uninfected humans. The opening scene depicts members of a zombie brass band playing their instruments pathetically. A teenaged couple, the unlaced sneakers of the male very much like the style currently fashionable, parades past. And, when the gas station bell rings, the African American attendant, Big Daddy, who will later lead the zombie “revolution” against the businessman Kaufman, emerges to answer the bell and picks up the gas handle in imitation of his former life. The choice of an African American for this role contributes to the film’s allegorical exploration of class and privilege on two levels. Even as it evokes the zombie figure’s origin in the history of African slavery in the Caribbean, it comments upon the relationship between race and class in the United States by pointing to the disproportionate number of African Americans in impoverished conditions and the role of violence in enforcing these conditions. Indeed, in a discussion of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead cycle, Noël Carroll points out that these films are “explicitly anti-racist as well as critical of the consumerism and viciousness of American society.”4 Similarly, in a discussion of the original Night of the Living Dead, Tony Williams suggests that the film represents “a devastating critique upon the deformations of human personality operating within a ruthless capitalist society.”5 Land...