UNBRIDLED CONSUMERISM

Zombies, Malls, and the Consumerism Debate:
George Romero's Dawn of the Dead

Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900-present), Fall 2002, Volume 1, Issue 2
http://www.americanpopularculture.com/journal/articles/fall_2002/harper.htm

Stephen Harper

University of Glasgow

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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 underclass.

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