Originally published this at PopMatters 10 years ago, but the link appears to be slightly broken:
1968 is Undead: The Grim Legacy of Night of the Living Dead
Pictured Above: early right-wing militia
"It's like
they're pretending to be alive"- Mike
Isn't that what we're doing?"- Riley
-Land of the
Dead (2005)
To what do we owe the dead?
This is a question that lingers through the background of
all of George A. Romero's zombie films from his pivotal genre-defining
debut Night of The Living Dead to 2007's
new media manifesto Diary of the Dead. It's one we pose when we revisit events
on their round-numbered anniversaries. 1968,
the year of Night of the Living Dead's debut, turns 40 this year and it's worth
noting that it has stuck with us long after December 31, 1968.
In a way, 1968 never really stopped happening. It never really went away. It just transmogrified, like a zombie, a specter,
a ghoul, haunting and informing the future.
The revolutionary ideals of that time and the reactionary backlash
against them are undead in today's culture, try as we might to bury the past. Despite the sheath of disambiguation that
confounding, deifying, or otherwise revisionist historicity has covered upon
the era, its soul and its memory persist, even as we aim our redneck shotguns for
its brain. It's like we owe 1968
something.
To what do we owe Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert
Kennedy, both assassinated in 1968 (in the case of King, mere hours after
Romero wrapped up post-production)? The
spirits of both icons are embodied in the Junior Senator from Illinois, who
seems to possess King's capacity to inspire hope and Kennedy's youth and
vitality, though Obama’s specific policy initiatives have adapted themselves to
the political mainstream and disavowed King's pacifism.
To what do we owe the P.O.W.? In this election cycle, he's represented by a
decorated veteran who stayed in captivity for over five years, withstanding
injury and disease, though as a politician he has frequently been known to sell
veterans down the river and create tons of new dead soldiers. He even voted
against a bill that would have restricted the intelligence community's use of
torture methods.
The grim legacies of civil rights, war, and internment
extend beyond the inspirational narratives of the presidential candidates
though. They cross over to the dead and
dying bodies of Katrina, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay. It is that dark patrimony which inscribes
itself in our culture the deepest, despite all evidence of our institutional
progress. It is perhaps to those dead,
the faceless anonymous masses, that we owe the most.
Romero's career trajectory is a straight arrow towards
overtly political allegory, but Night of the Living Dead is very much a shell
of a storyline, what Umberto Eco refers to as an "Open Work" or Opera Aperta. The film tackles the complexity of a changing
world with a distilled narrative, archetypal characters, and a broad,
indefinable threat. This openness allows
for a multiplicity of interpretations.
Unlike Romero's later films, Night of the Living Dead was
written with no specific polemic argument in mind. But it did shoulder with it the albatross of rising
violence from the Vietnam
and Civil Rights eras. Its imagery is
evocative without being directly allusive, from the space probe carrying
dangerous levels of radiation back to earth to the Molotov cocktails Harry
throws out the window at the zombies. Even
the film's much publicized racial subtext is grafted onto the celluloid by
years of critical equivocation. Leading
man Ben was originally imagined to be a white trucker, but unknown black actor
Duane Jones, who gives an electrifying and nuanced performance, wowed Romero in
the audition process.
Thus, Night of the Living Dead, much like 1968 itself, is as
much about public perception and cultural reception as the actual events that transpired. It's a film subsequent generations will be
able to readily revisit, still finding its subversive content harrowing,
insightful, and prophetic.
Set in rural Western Pennsylvania,
the film is the story of a group of stragglers banded together in a house where
they attempt to protect themselves from a heretofore unnamed menace (the word
"zombie" is never actually uttered in the film) that has begun to
claim the lives of their friends and loved ones. As a monster movie, it's oddly absent many of
the normal conventions of the horror film, even by today's standards. Its enemies are lethargic and witless, barely
even a threat. They quiver at the sight
of fire and are defenseless against hillbillies with shotguns. In fact, it's exactly the inconsequentiality
of the zombies in Night of the Living Dead that defines the film as a true
watermark in cinematic history.
Rather than focusing on the pure visceral terror of its
villainous corpses, the film turns its cameras on the supposed protagonists for
whom a dynamic power struggle begins to emerge.
After Ben rescues Barbara, who has just witnessed her brother's death at
her father's grave site, they discover the house of Harry Cooper, whom we find hiding
in the basement with his wife and his infected daughter. The Coopers ignore the disturbance that Ben
and Barbara make in their attempt to secure the site as Harry adopts an
isolationist view point.
"We luck into a safe place and you're telling us that
we gotta risk our lives just because someone might need help, huh?" Harry asks
Ben, who is incensed by Harry's lack of basic human altruism.
"Something like that," Ben replies acerbically.
Harry and Ben spar with one another immediately and start
struggling for territory. Harry claims
the downstairs, where there's only one door to defend. Ben prefers the upstairs, where he can scour
for supplies and plan an exit strategy if need be. Their quarrel is more about control than
survival. "If you stay up here, you
take orders from me", Ben shouts to Harry at one point.
Tom and Judy, a young couple who have been hiding with Harry
and Helen Cooper in the basement, side with Ben and take refuge upstairs. Tom helps Ben board up the house to keep the
zombies out, but in doing so, it soon becomes clear that they're also fencing themselves
in. Trapped in a space with no exit, it
doesn't take long for them to discover that hell is indeed other people.
The breakdown in communication is a running theme throughout
all of Romero's work. In Night of the
Living Dead, Ben and Harry won't let the very real task of escape and survival
interfere with their constructed social hierarchies. Barbara, after an initially courageous
escape, is rendered catatonic by both the trauma of seeing her brother killed
and, not unimportantly, her powerlessness to stop it. In the face of a patriarchal power structure
that renders her and the other females in the house ineffectual, Barbara panics
and slowly loses her mind. Despondent and petrified, she voices a desire to be
let outside so she can save her brother.
In the process, she smacks Ben, who retaliates and strikes her back, his
fists rendering her practically mute for the rest of the film.
Ben's aggression and its intimation of domestic violence,
makes him a complexly rendered and three-dimensional protagonist, perhaps moreso
than most films today, which tend to unrealistically deify African-American
heroes as “magical negros” or the unassailable “black best friend”. He is a decisive and well-spoken leader,
poised and responsive to the changing demands of his situation, possessed with
a sense of chivalry, but unable to control his aggression, which later leads
him to first assault and then shoot an increasingly belligerent Harry Cooper.
At the time of the film's release, images of black
nationalists like the Nation of Islam militants responsible for Malcolm X's
assassination and those in the burgeoning Black Panther Party/black separatist
movement were horrifying whites like Harry and Helen, who sought safe haven,
stability, and isolation from the racial tensions of America's cities in the
suburbs. Though desegregation and other
civil rights laws slowly trickled traces of tolerance into mainstream society,
the fear of black militancy still permeates throughout society today. In 21st century America, unconscious
prejudices are legislated or policed into the popular imagination via crack
downs on gang violence, draconian penalties for drug abuse, and capital
punishment enforcement. In electoral
politics, the fiery rhetoric of Barack Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright, the
confoundingly misinterpreted "terrorist fist jab", and a manufactured
news story on a missing lapel pin have painted the current Democratic presidential
candidate as anti-American and hostile in some above-ground circles, while
Sarah Palin's separatist husband and open advocacy of armed insurrection go
largely unscrutinized. One need only
imagine how pictures of Barack Obama with a gun would go over to see the divide
between Black and White gun ownership.
The only person in the house to advocate for cooperation is
Tom, though even he does so in a way that is divisive. "We'd be a lot better off if all three
of us were working together," Tom says of Harry, Ben, and himself, failing
to even consider the women. Film
historians have alternated between readings of Night of the Living Dead as
either a feminist or antifeminist text. Certainly, the women are not complicit
in the bumbling corruption of the male leadership, but they are not allowed a
chance to be either. Their passivity and
hysterics could be read as a kind of "problem with no name", subjugated
upon them by the intimate oppression of the men, who offer them no role in
their own life narrative. Even so, this
is still a rather narrow portrayal of womanhood that, sadly, is not completely
alien from standards in Hollywood today.
In terms of the political landscape, one needs only look at the rhetoric
that tailed the Hilary Clinton primary run and, to a lesser extent Palin's V.P.
bid, to see how mainstreamed misogyny still is in American culture.
Only Helen Cooper is allowed a small degree of independence
and it seems to have only come after years of suffering in domestic misery. "We may not enjoy living together, but
dying together is not going to solve anything", Helen says to Harry at one
point.
Though she directs this comment specifically towards her
husband, Helen's words could easily be transferred to both the struggles in the
house and those beyond it. The 1960s,
with its rapid social change and equally rapid schisms, created a vastly
splintered vox populi. At the political
level, the quagmire of Vietnam appeared to have no exit strategy nor vision of
what victory might look like, which is also true of the Cold War in general. Communication broke down amongst rulers,
Generals, the young and old, the working class and leisure class, the black
power and women's lib movements, the antiwar pacifists and the New Left
Trotskyites, the veterans who continued to support the war (like John McCain)
and those who came to oppose it (like John Kerry), the energized activists and the
hippy drop-outs, and so on. The mass
movement of young idealism even came to define itself as countercultural, or against
society.
Much of the legislative movement since 1968 has been an
attempt to close those divisions, either by pushing the radical movements of
the sixties to the fringes or by compromising and undermining many of the
hard-fought victories of that era.
However, if anything, the world is more multivalent and stratified than
ever. Yet, the political sphere has been
atomized into an easily quantifiable series of demographics, constituencies,
and axises. There's the indeterminably
vague "War on Terror", an inculcation of Samuel Huntingdon's
wrongheaded Orientalist “Clash of Civilizations”, which has promulgated such
polarizing dogma as the infamous "with us or against us"
Bushism. And then there's the mass
bureaucratic bungling of the September 11th tragedies and the
Hurricane Katrina disaster, which speaks to a national security state emboldened
by endless outpourings of capital yet so disabled by its own crisscrossing
inadequacies and addictions to perfunctory procedure that it is practically
unable to function. In this instance,
Romero's ongoing thematic topoi of the communication gap seems most piquant. The radio and television broadcasts of Night
of the Living Dead, and perhaps even more poignantly so in later films like The
Crazies and Diary of the Dead, depicts a government unable to protect, alert,
and prepare its citizenry for a national crisis. In fact, Diary of the Dead, in which the
government and the media conspire to willfully manipulate news footage to
manufacture new truths, uses real Katrina broadcasts as part of its found
footage.
Yet despite the political fragmentation, the world itself is
also more globalized and interconnected than ever before, with industry and the
internet playing equal roles in the expansion.
The protest movement now encompasses hundreds of pet causes. Antiwar
protestors have united en masse in larger numbers than they ever did in the
1960's. Ironically, it's the relative
pacifism, solidarity, and unity of these demonstrators that has perhaps denied
them the headline-grabbing press of a more confrontational 1960's leftist resistance
movement. Despite the relative
invisibility of activists on the national stage, the privileged and powerful
still maintain the same callous disregard for their critics and are all too
willing to suppress their rights to free speech and free assembly in order to
relocate these grievances into the margins of discourse. Dissent’s scarcity inside the daily
operations of the state make it seem extreme and anomalous, though it's
actually far less so than it was 40 years prior as there’s perhaps more to
protest now than there ever has been before.
The news media in Night of the Living Dead feeds the
protagonists contradictory information, in part galvanizing their estrangement
from one another. Yet, while the news media has always been an
unreliable source of information, recent years have seen it grown even more
insidious in its masking of realities. Diary of the Dead takes on
the blackout of media in the bloody 21st century. It reacts to the disappearance of corporeal
violence from the video game news coverage of the Iraq War. The blood of Iraq, the bodies, the corpses, are
only accessible to those who would seek it out in the new media world. Even those more sanguinary images that did
make their way to the major news networks, like the torture candids from Abu
Ghraib, were tempered for primetime audiences with weak stomachs.
Night of the Living Dead was made with the videographic and
photojournalistic iconography of the carnage in South Vietnam fresh in its
memory. Its groundbreaking gore found root in the footage returning home of
dead young soldiers, razed villages, and shattered communities. In 1968, the famous photograph by Eddie Adams
of General Nguyen Ngoc Loan Executing a
Viet Cong Prisoner in Saigon sent shockwaves throughout the globe. The roves of dead bodies lining the
countryside in Night of the Living Dead bellow a silent scream of inquiry, perhaps
like Loan's defenseless victim- "To what do we owe the dead"?
The tenets of revenge fantasies, like those carried out in
the wake of the Gulf of Tonkin or September 11th, seem to dictate
that all we owe the wrongfully killed is still more dead bodies. Justice, by its Western cultural definition,
demands that aggressors pay for their sins in pounds of flesh. Yet, by this logic, the innocent civilians
caught in the crossfire of these vengeance strikes (over 1,000,000 civilian
casualties are logged by most counts in Vietnam and conservatively 100,000 civilian
dead are estimated in Iraq) should return upon their attackers the same degree
of vigilance. It’s a recursive strategy
that ensures an ever-growing cavalcade of corpses. As King's role model Mahatma Gandhi said,
"An eye for an eye makes the world blind". Or, maybe just zombifies us.
Romero's gore though is always subservient to the plot, not
vice versa. He's often conversely
lambasted for not delivering enough entrails and praised for offering up the
most enthralling and inventive executions. But the balance of the violence in
Romero's scripts is always deliberately tipped.
As bloody and disgusting as the Dead films are, Romero consistently
embeds his tragic villains with a sense of pathos (in later films he even
sympathizes with them). The excitement
of seeing the zombies get killed in a Romero picture is always countered with a
repulsion towards those who delight in their deaths. It recalls Guy Debord, whose writing inspired
the May 1968 student and worker uprising in Paris.
Debord, a lifelong revolutionary, once said "Victory will be for
those who know how to create disorder without loving it". Those who gleefully murder their zombie
enemies without reservation offer no solutions to the "epidemic of mass
murder" (as the radio announcer refers to it). They are simply symptomatic of it, as Ben's
grisly fate cruelly illustrates at the end of Night of the Living Dead.
The paradox of Romero's zombies is that they are archetypal
forces who embody a wealth of contradictions.
They can represent new ideas and sweeping changes acting en masse to
overthrow an established order, or their lifeless bodies can be stand-ins for
cultural conformity. The zombie as a
figure functions equally well as an other, a figure of dread whose changes
threaten to alter everyday living, and a faceless drone, like one of Theodor
Adorno's "prepared corpses", whose inability to negotiate his or her
station spells doom for humanity at large. What exactly the zombies are can never be
precisely pinned down because, as the mantra of Romero's later films goes,
"They're us".
To what do we owe ourselves?
To what do we owe our future corpses?
Will we go on living like we're already dead, like the past is inevitable,
like we're doomed to repeat ourselves, doomed to recapitulate the terms of our
decease? "I am trying to scare
you," Diary of the Dead's film student Debra narrates as footage of war,
disease, panic, and terror screen behind her voice in George A. Romero's most
recent film. "Maybe you'll wake
up. Maybe you won't make the same
mistakes we did". 40 years and
counting…
