In George Romero's satirical film about
consumerism, Dawn of the Dead (1978), an American shopping
mall becomes the site of battles between the zombies who have overrun
the country, four human "survivors" who exterminate the
zombies and appropriate the mall for themselves, and a gang
of marauding bikers which, in the movie's violent climax, seeks
to take over the mall. These battles serve as a useful, if melodramatic
metaphor for recent theoretical disputes over the nature and value
of consumerism, disputes which remain of central importance among
cultural critics of differing political persuasions. 1.
At the risk of crudely dichotomizing, these critics have tended
to affiliate with one of two camps with respect to what might be
called the "consumerism debate."
On one side of this debate, a host of unrepentantly
Marxian critics have described the baleful impact of capitalist
production on those whom it exploits and the depoliticizing effects
of commodity fetishism on consumers. On the other side, postmodern
ethnographers and sociologists have argued that consumerism empowers
capitalist subjects by granting them a limited, but politically
important space in which to live out utopian fantasies of autonomy.
The exchanges between these camps are as frequent as they are ill-tempered:
just when the "issue" of consumerism seems to be dead
and buried, it rises zombie-like from the critical grave. A recent
irascible polemic is James Twitchell's denunciation of the "melancholy
Marxist" view of consumerism, complete with some scandalous
ad hominem attacks on academics
working in cultural studies. Recently, Western arguments about consumerism
have even moved outside the confines of academia and into the realm
of popular culture — witness the recent sparring in the British
press between Germaine Greer and Nigella Lawson (see Lawson). This
paper offers some observations on what might be called the "consumerism
debate" based on a consideration of radical anti-consumerist
elements in Romero's film.
Before discussing this film, I would like to
consider briefly one influential theoretical intervention in what
I am calling the "consumerism debate." In Reading the
Popular, John Fiske argues that while consumer "tactics"
are never radical, they may be "liberating" to a certain
extent. Moreover, he argues, following de Certeau and many others,
that consumers should not be despised as the "cultural dupes"
of capitalist producers; consumers are instead "secondary producers,"
finding value in their consumption and making use of capitalist
products for their own ends. Fiske rightly reminds cultural critics
that people should not be patronized as idiots who compliantly consume
the images and products imposed on them by the dominant ideology;
and he is surely correct that consumers may be temporarily empowered
by the experience of shopping, a point well established by Angela
McRobbie and others. But his well-practiced indignation about "cultural
dupes" requires a caveat, for this injunction risks patronizing
the "ordinary" people whose shopping habits Fiske aims
to redeem. Few critics would dispute that an unacceptably dismissive
view of consumers as "cultural dupes" has been presented
(or at least implied) by radical critics from Adorno to Eagleton.
It is important, however, to remember that many "ordinary"
people actually sympathize with anti-consumerist views and feel
empowered, rather than patronized, by their engagement with oppositional
perspectives. Anti-consumerist —as well as consumerist —
attitudes and activities can be a source of both pleasure and liberation.
As Raymond Williams famously observed, there
is no such thing as "the masses," only ways of imagining
people as masses. Of all of these ways, Romero's
is surely among the most extraordinary. Zombies function in Dawn
of the Dead as a lumpenproletariat of shifting significance,
walking symbols of any oppressed social group. This function is
derived in part from their origins in the literature and cinema
of the twentieth century, in which zombies are synonymous with oppression
and slavery. 2. Romero uses zombies because, as
part of a maligned cinematic underclass, they suit his satirical
purpose. Both Dawn of the Dead and its successor Day
of the Dead (1985) present the human survivors of the zombie
plague as literally and etymologically "living over" the
zombies. In Romero's trilogy, Captain Rhodes — the sadistic
army commander of Day of the Dead — expresses the strongest
contempt for the undead, regarding them as a disposable and despicable
In Dawn of the Dead, the social abjection of
the zombies is established in the film's remarkable second scene.
Here, two of the film's central characters, Roger (Scott H. Reiniger)
and Peter (Ken Foree), along with other members of a police SWAT
team, storm a brownstone full of Puerto Ricans who have refused
to exit their properties as ordered by the authorities. Despite
the poverty of these people, one policeman bluntly adumbrates the
film's theme of material insecurity and envy. "Shit man,"
he remarks as he impatiently waits to start shooting at their "nigger
asses," "this is better than I got." However, any
sympathy the audience may have for such reactionary sentiments is
dispelled when the SWAT team enters the zombie-infested building.
The SWAT scene is hardly mentioned in academic
analyses of the movie and has even been dismissed as an unmotivated
procrastination (Shumate). But it could be argued that the scene
provides an interpretative context for the rest of the film. As
well as introducing some hackneyed horror principles (the foul-mouthed
policeman pays for his irascibility with his life), the scene invites
the audience to consider zombiedom as a condition associated with
both racial oppression and social abjection and, therefore, sanctions
socio-political interpretations of the film as a whole.
It is difficult to comprehend the radical import
of Dawn of the Dead without briefly considering the
significance and history of its setting — the shopping mall.
The dawn of the shopping mall age in the 1960s was met with widespread
enthusiasm, and mass hysteria was even reported at several newly-opened
malls (Morris 405). In recent decades, mall hysteria may be less
common, but the shopping mall remains a cultural fascination in
capitalist countries, while in cinema, malls have become a staple
location for smart-ass American teen movies, like Amy Heckerling's
Clueless (1995). It is easy to underestimate, therefore,
the relative novelty, in 1978, of Romero's simple but inspired idea
of setting Dawn of the Dead in a mall.
According to Meaghan Morris, one of the most
exciting and attractive aspects of the shopping mall is the contrast
between its massive structural stability and the constantly shifting
composition of its population (394). In this sense, a mall is like
a theatre or a stage: a space demanding action and transformation.
Romero certainly recognized the dramatic potential of the mall,
which may be regarded as both the epitome of corporate capitalism
and — for the same reason — a potential site of resistance
to the forces that regulate consumerism.
These regulatory forces were long ago examined
by Gibian, who showed how designers try to discipline shoppers'
routes through malls. But the disciplinary forces that construct
malls are perpetually at risk from those who wish to cheat the system.
And the bigger the malls, the more opportunities there are to subvert
the agents of discipline. "The order of the system that builds
and manages the shopping malls," writes John Fiske, "is
consistently at risk of being turned into the disorder of those
who use them, in a way that the small corner deli never was"
(Understanding 43). The mall's subversive allure is clear
in films like Kevin Smith's 1995 comedy Mallrats (1995),
in which two teenage buddies outwit the managers and security staff
of their local mall in order to win back their girlfriends. Such
films attest to the sense in which shopping malls constitute the
"system," whose disciplinary agents must be challenged,
tricked, and overcome: the cinematic mall, it might be said, solicits
not only the consumption of its goods, but also the subversion of
its systems. Before returning to the work done on consumerism and
commodities in cultural studies, I wish first to discuss some of
the elements that make Dawn of the Dead a radical (i.e. oppositional)
In a manner that recalls John Fiske's writings
on the ruses of mallgoers, Romero's survivors make use of various
tactics to wrest control of the mall from the living dead. Having
done so, the survivors create a shopping utopia for themselves,
a place where they can temporarily ignore the threat of the zombies.
In Night of the Living Dead (1968), the first of Romero's
zombie films, the survivors receive no respite from the zombies.
In both Dawn and Day, by contrast, Romero introduces
some brief but significant utopian interludes. In Day of the
Dead, for example, two of the male survivors take sanctuary
in a cosy caravan, where they indulge in verbose and alcohol-fuelled
philosophizing on the value of hedonism; like so many of Romero's
characters, they are content to bury their heads in the sand and
to ignore the chaos all around them. Dawn of the Dead also
contains scenes of release and relaxation; however, these are far
more dramatic than the caravan scene in Day. Once the survivors
in Dawn have exterminated the zombies in the mall and secured
the doors, they indulge in a carnivalesque parody of rampant consumerism.
Their delight is heightened by their awareness that they have not
retreated, like the survivors in Day, to a safe enclave,
but have skilfully taken the entire mall from the zombies and driven
them out. Thus, even as he lies dying after being bitten by a zombie,
Roger is able to crow with delirious pathos: "we whipped them
and we got it all." The same sentiment underpins the fury of
Stephen (David Emge) when, at the end of the film, a gang of bikers
invades the mall. "It's ours," he says coldly as he aims
his rifle at the invaders, "we took it."
With the corpses of the exterminated zombies
cleared away, the survivors indulge in a fantasy of purchase power.
They "steal" money from the mall bank, cheekily posing
for the security cameras; they take all the clothes and consumer
goods they desire; they play video games; and in a marvellously
frenetic scene, Stephen and Peter "tool up" in the mall's
weapon shop with a vast array of guns. The music during these scenes
is light, airy and released, inviting us to regard this as an ironic
paradise. But however joyous and liberating these "shopping
scenes" may be for the characters, Romero's script emphasizes
the economic exclusivity of consumerism. Perhaps the most poetic
instance occurs in the armoury scene, in which Peter aims an expensive
rifle at a zombie's forehead. "Ain't it a crime," he remarks
wryly to Stephen, "the only person who could ever miss with
this gun would be the sucker with the bread to buy it." Interestingly,
this comment is also a variation on the "cultural dupes"
argument, this time from below, as it were (here it is the affluent
middle classes, rather than the witless proletariat, which is mocked
for its consumer credulity).
The most striking sequence among these scenes
of frenzied consumer abandon is the "supermarket sweep,"
during which the men snatch whatever food and drink they desire.
In one shot, Stephen picks up a loaf only to be trumped by Peter,
who produces an even bigger one. Both men laugh, implicitly recognizing
an analogy of anatomical comparison. To regard this moment as a
crude phallic interlude, however, is to overlook its mythical significance:
comparing their "loaves" Peter and Stephen exploit the
scatological licence traditionally granted to carnival revellers.
Indeed, the film's scenes of carnival license are among its principle
attractions, and they appear to have a particular resonance for
the film's audience. To draw a very long parallel, these scenes
constitute a reworking of the medieval legend of the Land of Cockayne,
an allegory of human sloth and greed in an Edenic land of plenty.
The Land of Cockayne legend was a popular utopian fantasy of a prelapsarian
world in which every luxury is at hand and in which work is not
Romero's satirical depiction of instant and
celebratory gratification is consistent both with classical European
images of luxury and with modernist denunciations of the restlessly
acquisitive postmodern zeitgeist, such as Christopher Lasch's
melancholic Culture of Narcissism (1979). Of the film's characters,
however, only Fran (Gaylen Ross) voices the film's moral insight.
Accusing the men of being hypnotized by the mall, she tells Stephen:
"It's so bright and neatly wrapped you don't see that it's
a prison too." Fran is expressing, albeit rather preachily,
Romero's own perspective: far from endorsing consumerism, she highlights
the tendency of human beings to become cultural dupes. In this sense,
the "fool's paradise" of the mall is a pretext for a classical
humanist condemnation of visceral indulgence.
Romero's film also mobilizes classical images
of female false consciousness which, while undoubtedly radical,
are problematic from the perspective of postmodern feminism. In
his article about Romero and feminism, Barry Keith Grant has less
to say about Fran than any other Romero heroines, but she is in
many ways the most complex and intriguing female figure. The Barbra
(Judith O'Dea) of Night of the Living Dead is quickly reduced
to helpless catatonia; on the other hand, Sarah (Lori Cardille),
in Day, is a consistently stronger character than Fran,
as is Barbara (Patricia Tallman) in the brilliant feminist remake
of Night. Grant does, however, note that Fran is presented
as a professional. Although this point is not discussed further,
there are grounds to support this assertion. Fran helps the men
to defend the mall; she also takes responsibility for herself and
others, asking Stephen (presciently, as it turns out) to teach her
how to fly the chopper lest anything should befall him. These qualities
identify her as a spiky feminist heroine. "I'd have made you
all coffee and breakfast," she tells the men ironically when
they first arrive at the mall, "but I don't have my pots and
Later in the film, however, Fran's feminist
resolution is worn down. Bewitched by the hypnotic magic of the
mall, she increasingly falls into stereotypically feminine patterns
of behavior. In a particularly striking scene, Fran pampers and
perfumes herself in front of a mirror, in the classic tradition
of nineteenth-century fiction or twentieth-century film. Various
techniques are used in this mirror scene to signal that Fran now
identifies with her own glamorous reflection. As she applies her
lipstick, she adopts the vacant gaze of the stereotypical female
consumer who sees in the department store dummy an image of her
objectified, commodified self. Fran becomes a human zombie, no more
alive than the conspicuous mannequin heads on which the camera mockingly
alights in a series of objective shots. As she makes herself up,
she absent-mindedly toys with a pistol, indicating her implication
in the film's system of commodity fetishism. In short, despite her
own earlier warnings to the men, Fran becomes a cultural dummy.
Although it is fleeting, Fran's narcissism
attests to the zombifying power of commodity fetishism on even the
liveliest characters. In this sense, Dawn of the Dead may
be seen as a modernist critique of the alienating effects of the
consumption-led, post-Fordist society which, according to many commentators,
developed throughout the 1970s (for a sceptical survey of views
on post-Fordism see Callinicos, 132-144). In no sense does Romero
regard Fran's absorption in fashion and image as liberating. On
the contrary, Fran's increasingly lifeless behavior contrasts starkly
with her spirited feminist attitude earlier in the film. It comes
as no surprise when, in the very next scene, we see Fran in a domestic
role, preparing a meal for Peter and Stephen in what appears to
be an incongruous yet perfect recreation of a bourgeois living room.
Despite her earlier feminist quip, Fran finds her way to the pots
and pans after all. Consumerism alone, Romero implies, will not
liberate women from their traditional subordinate roles.
Romero is not merely interested, however, in
decrying commodity fetishism as spiritually deadening or politically
inert; on the contrary, he stubbornly returns to the theme of exploitation.
Towards the film's end, we are reminded of the exploitation that
enables consumerism when one of the invading bikers (Tom Savini)
calls the black survivor, Peter, "chocolate man." This
racial insult is casual, but within the context of a film about
consumerism, it is very resonant, as it identifies Peter with one
of consumer society's most throwaway goods (it is no accident that,
while Peter's priorities on arrival at the mall are to obtain "the
stuff we need: television and a radio," the more frivolous
Roger opts for two rather less vital commodities: watches and chocolate).
More importantly, the "chocolate man" insult sharpens
the film's focus on the economic origins, as well as the social
effects of consumerism, since the production of chocolate depends
on the exploitation of black labor. (In this connection, it is interesting
to note that Peter is the only character in the film whose own production
is foregrounded by Romero. While the backgrounds of the white characters
are never mentioned, we learn that Peter has a Trinidadian grandfather
and two brothers, who conform to the black stereotypes of professional
basketball player and prisoner).
In both Dawn of the Dead and its sequel,
a single phrase governs the film's concern with identification and
difference: "they're us." This phrase — which oscillates
suggestively between oxym oron and tautology — functions as
a kind of shorthand for the troubled relations between human beings
and zombies. The paradox posed by the zombies' human/inhuman condition
is expressed in Roger's terrified, half-human face when he "returns"
from the dead. It is also present when, having secured and "cleaned
up" the mall, the survivors stand staring down at the zombies
outside as they vainly claw at the glass doors. In this brilliantly
conceived scene, it is Peter who makes the chillingly simple observation
"they're us." Fran gives a slight shiver and pulls up
the collar of her expensive fur coat (an apparently unnecessary
garment under the air-conditioned circumstances), indicating that
while guns constitute an effective defense from the enemy, consumer
goods provide the psychological protection against any pricks of
conscience. The scene dramatizes, perhaps better than any other
scene in contemporary cinema, the senses in which consumers become
guiltily aware not only of their own pleasures, but of the social
costs of consumerism. Clearly, Romero's take on consumer society
constitutes a humanist, radical, and one might say Adornian critique
of racism, sexism and exploitation. As Tania Modleski writes, in
many horror movies "the attack on contemporary life strikingly
recapitulates the very terms adopted by many culture critics"
("The Terror" 288) and Romero himself has even been described
as a "radical critic of American culture" (Shaviro 82).
Before comparing Romero's modernist critique
of capitalism with some cultural studies writings on the subject,
I wish briefly to discuss the reception of the film. The typical
audience response to the film is, to say the least, enthusiastic.
Modleski notes that in the years after its release, Dawn
became "a midnight favorite at shopping malls all over the
United States" and surmises that the movie-going consumers
were "revelling in the demise of the very culture they appear
most enthusiastically to support" ("The Terror" 290).
Perhaps this explains why the film was one of the biggest grossing
horror movies at the box office. Whatever the case, the film's transformation
of the mall's rational, quotidian environment into a Dionysian orgy
of violent indulgence has a deep attraction for its American consumers.
The power of this aspect of the film derives from its relevance
to the everyday activities of its viewers. As Virginia Nightingale
reminds us: "audience is distinctively inflected by the nature
and cultural significance of the interaction between audience activities
and textual character" (105). This interaction seems to be
particularly dynamic in the case of Dawn of the Dead: one
North American fan related to me how, after viewing late-night showings
of the film in a shopping center, he and other members of the audience
used to roam through the deserted mall, imagining scenes from the
The audience reaction to this film suggests
that people can have an ambiguous relationship with consumer culture.
Indeed, the experience of viewing Dawn has even prompted
some to question their consuming habits for the first time. Another
fan of the film relates how he overheard a woman commenting to her
friend in a New York City mall: "Oh, my god! Look! It's just
like Dawn of the Dead! All of these shoppers look like zombies
walking about the place!" "She seemed shocked", commented
the fan. "It was as if a light had just been turned on, illuminating
an aspect of her life never considered" (cited in England).
From this piece of "fan" evidence, it is clear that the
film has prompted at least one shopper to reconsider her relationship
to consumerism. Clearly, the experience of shopping which "ordinary"
people supposedly find liberating can also contain a degree of uneasiness.
Certainly, it appears that the "happy shoppers" thesis
is overgeneralized, as it fails to account for the contradictions
which consumers find in their own habits. Cultural theorists need
to recognize that radical views about consumerism are not restricted
to a coterie of superannuated Marxian critics, but are inscribed
within the quotidian experiences of consumers.
I would like to conclude by returning to the
dispute about consumerism between the radical and the postmodernist
camps of cultural studies outlined at the beginning of this paper.
One often-advanced complaint is that critics in the Frankfurt School
tradition tend to treat the consuming public as "witless and
uncritical." This is an important and, in many cases, justified
point (the conception of consumers as feckless dupes is plainly
wrongheaded), but it would also appear to be something of a straw
man. Most radical critics do not argue that people are simply cultural
dummies, but that consumerism is both morally perilous to those
who can afford to buy into it and economically exclusive to those
who cannot. These two points — which even the film's audience
seems perfectly capable of grasping — are made consistently
in Dawn of the Dead.
It is among the easier tasks of cultural criticism
to berate the Marxist fathers of cultural studies for their benighted
refusal to concede any liberating potential to consumer practices.
In her article "Things to Do with Shopping Centres," Meaghan
Morris lightly mocks radical critics' portentous denunciations of
commodity fetishism. She selects the following passage from Terry
Eagleton for particular scorn:
The commodity disports itself with all comers without its halo
slipping, promises permanent possession to everyone in the market
without abandoning its secretive isolation. Serializing its
consumers, it nevertheless makes intimate ad hominem address
to each. (qtd. in Morris 27)
Eagleton's remarks about the dangerous seductiveness of commodities,
which are heavily indebted to the apocalyptic rhetoric of the Frankfurt
school as well as to a dangerously normative narrative of fallen
humanity, are clearly consistent with what A. C. Grayling has called
the "sociological orthodoxy" which views consumerism as
oppression of the consumer. For Morris, however, such a view is
unduly pessimistic and anti-feminist. For her, Eagleton presents
an overgeneralized account of the allure of the commodity:
What is the sound of an intimate ad hominem address from a raincoat
at Big W? Where is the secretive isolation of the thongs in
a pile at Super-K? The commodities in a discount house boast
no halo, no aura. (Morris 408)
In contrast, Morris aims "to make it more
difficult for 'radical' culture critics to fall back quite so comfortably
on the classic image of European bourgeois luxury to articulate
economic exchange" (408). For Morris, the
radical critique of consumerism is itself a Eurocentric luxury,
patronizingly aloof from the quotidian concerns of consumers, and
women shoppers in particular.
Morris's postmodernist writings on consumerism
are clearly at odds with the essentially modernist critique of capitalism
and consumerism mounted by Romero (what could be more "classic"
or more benightedly "European" than the legend of the
Land of Cockayne, on which Dawn's satirical sting depends). This
poses some difficult questions for the cultural critic. Which critique
of consumerism is the more satisfactory—Morris's or Romero's? And
to what extent can filmmakers supplement the sociological and cultural
conclusions of academic criticism about consumerism?
As implied in my comments above, one of the
many strengths of Morris's article is its emphasis on the diversity
of shopping malls. It is not sufficient, she argues, to generalize
about shopping centers: one must examine their specificities and
the diversity of those who visit malls. One must also acknowledge,
she argues, the importance of each mall's precise geographical location
in the life of the individual shopper. The importance of place in
the experience of shopping is explicitly acknowledged in Dawn
of the Dead when Peter explains to Stephen that the zombies
are continuing to clamour outside the mall because they feel a residual
connection with the place: "It's not us they're after, it's
the place. They remember that they want to be here." Romero
even differentiates his zombies in this film to a certain extent
by clothing type and occupation. Nevertheless, despite the film's
postmodern awareness of individual differences, it might still be
argued that Dawn bases its politics on hackneyed or stereotypical
images of decadence and luxuriance from a dead European tradition.
In Romero's defence, it might be said that the dramatic exigencies
of cinematic narrative rarely permit sociological completeness;
Romero's film, one might say, selects only the worst elements of
consumerism for critique and should not be taken as a generalizing
statement. But far more importantly (in my view), Romero's critique
contains an important element that Morris's analysis does not: namely,
a concern with exploitation (of women, of black labour and, by metaphorical
extrapolation, of the "masses" symbolized by the zombie
throng). Put simply, Romero's critique of consumerism, "Eurocentric"
as it may be, contains an ethical concern with exclusion that is
absent not only from Morris's work, but also from the writings of
the growing number of journalists who have pitched into the consumerism
debate in recent years, in Britain as well as America (see Lawson,
Twitchell, and Brooks). These commentators illustrate all too well
Marx's argument in the first volume of Capital that, under
capitalist conditions, the productive origins of commodities are
easily forgotten. Marx's insight is still relevant to the field
of cultural studies as a whole. Judith Williamson long ago expressed
concern about the undue concentration of several strands of cultural
studies on the consumptionist perspective—a point elaborated most
forcefully and eloquently by Jim McGuigan and Angela McRobbie. Dawn
of the Dead contains a symbolic corrective to this critical
tendency to focus on "consuming passions" at the expense
of critical considerations of production.
Another reason for exercising caution in this
regard is that oppositional views about consumerism may be far more
widespread among both artists and audiences today than postmodern
theory has hitherto been prepared to admit. If
cultural studies is serious about identifying the politically progressive
aspects of consumerism (and I agree that it ought to be), it must
acknowledge that radical views about consumerism circulate not only
among academic Marxists but also among radical artists.4.
Cultural studies should also recognize that the oppositional views
of consumerism contained in films can and do affect at least some
"ordinary" people outside Europe, like the woman in the
New York shopping mall. Although further audience research needs
to be done, some moviegoers, it appears, are fascinated by the oppositional
perspectives on consumerism that Romero's powerful images afford;
this might explain why the film was one of the biggest ever grossing
horror movies at the American box office. While I share Tania Modleski's
concern that ethnographic studies of subcultural audiences might
foster a dangerous "collusion between mass culture critics
and consumer society," it would certainly be interesting to
discover the extent to which other films that are critical of consumer
culture—such as David Byrne's True Stories—inform audiences' opinions
about consumerism (Modleski, Studies xii).
Eagleton's comments about commodity fetishism
might be, as Morris says, "comfortable"; but they are
no more comfortable than many of the more uncritical celebrations
of consumerism. In any case, it is beyond the scope of this short
paper to draw conclusions about the extent to which consumerism
ought to be celebrated for its liberating possibilities or lamented
for its baleful effects. This is a question that has been successfully
addressed by sociology and cultural studies; but it is one that
is seldom considered by film (or indeed literary) critics. The study
of anti-consumerist texts and their audiences might contribute to
a richer understanding of people's relation to consumerism than
sociology alone can provide.
1. When I refer to consumerism in this article, I
mean primarily of the system of values surrounding public, rather
than private or domestic, consumption.
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2. In the absurd 1991 made-for-cable movie Cast a Deadly Spell,
for example, zombies are imported from Haiti by housing developers
to assist with home-construction projects; they arrive in crates
like so many white goods and carry a guarantee for six-months, after
which they collapse and disintegrate (Marcus 25).
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3. In Western visual culture, the most eminent representation
of the legend is Pieter Brueghel the Elder's oil painting of 1567,
which depicts three bloated men asleep after indulging in a feast.
In this land, all desires can be instantly gratified, obviating
the postlapsarian requirement for human toil. Around Brueghel's
sleeping men, a pig walks with a knife attached to it, while a duck
presents its head on a silver platter, patiently waiting to be killed;
such details make the painting a grotesque but comic satire upon
gluttony. The Time Out Film Guide's description of Dawn
as a "Bosch-like vision of a society consumed by its own appetites"
also contributes (Time Out Film Guide).
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4. In a recent magazine article Chuck Palahniuk, author
of the anti-consumerist film Fight Club, complains in true
Adornian style that "shopping has replaced adventure"
and has become a "substitute for a real
life" (Hicklin 7).
Brooks, Libby. "Buy, buy, baby." The Guardian.
9 July 2001.
Callinicos, Alex. Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique.
Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989.
Cast a Deadly Spell. Dir. Martin Campbell. Perf. Fred Ward and Juliane
Moore. HBO and Pacific Western, 1991.
Clueless . Dir. Amy Heckerling. Perf. Alicia Silverstone and Paul
Rudd. Paramount, 1995.
Dawn of the Dead. Dir. George Romero. Perf. David Emge and Ken Foree.
Day of the Dead. Dir. George Romero. Perf. Lori Cardille and Tony
Alexander. Dead Films Inc. and Laurel, 1985.
de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley:
U of California P, 1984.
Eagleton, Terry. Walter Benjamin, or Towards a Revolutionary
Criticism. London: Verso, 1981.
England, Norman C. The Zombie Farm. http://www2.gol.com/users/
Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. Perf. Edward Norton and
Brad Pitt. Art Linson, Fox, Regency, and Taurus, 1999.
Fiske, John. Reading the Popular. London and New York: Routledge,
———-. Understanding Popular Culture. London and New
York: Routledge, 1989.
Gibian, P. "The Art of Being Off Center: Shopping Center Spaces
and Spectacles." Tabloid 5 (1981): 44-64.
Grant, Barry Keith. "Taking Back The (Night of the Living
Dead: George Romero, Feminism and the Horror Film." Wide
Angle 14.1 (1990): 64-76.
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