THIEVES AND BAD GUYS: Thoughts on George A. Romero’s ‘Dawn of the Dead’

Speak of zombies and for most people the scenario conjured to mind is one with a world in ruins, scattered band of survivors battling mindless hordes of the undead intent on consuming all flesh. The filmmaker most responsible for that apocalyptic vision is George A Romero and his movie ‘Dawn of The Dead.’ Other filmmakers, Jorge Grau with ‘Let Sleeping Corpses’ Lie (aka ‘The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue’) and Lucio Fulci with Zombi 2 (originally titled Zombi, but renamed with the release of Dawn of the Dead in it Italy as Zombi.) hinted at a coming disaster as part of the finale of their zombie movies, but it was Romero and ‘Dawn of the Dead’ that first gave us a world lost to a tide of the dead. While the zombie genre encompasses everything from the horrifying to the silly, it is this movie, released unrated in the Unites States because of explicit violence, that is the towering work of art with much more to say that, shoot them in the head. Be warned, hereafter there be spoilers.

Synopsis:

Conceived and produced as a sequel the Romero’s Night of The Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead is a dark cynical film that is as relevant today as its release in 1979. The story opens on a disintegrating world. Fran, a local television news producer vainly attempts to manage the chaos of a television station that falling into chaos while publishing outdated rescue stations lists. Meanwhile SWAT team members Roger and Peter, are engaged in a pitched battle to evict people illegally staying in the private homes in defiance of martial law. As the humans bicker, fight, and kill each other, the dead continue to rise; an implacable storm surge of relentless hunger. Fran’s lover and televising station helicopter pilot Steven executes his plan for their survival and, together with the deserting SWAT team officers, they steal the station helicopter fleeing for parts unknown. After looting fuel from isolated and private airfields, they stumbles across an abandoned shopping mall. Finding civil defense survival supplies in an upper level shelter, they decide to stay, making the mall their own. They secure the mall, eliminating the zombies within, while, due to his own recklessness, losing Peter. The three remaining characters settle into a life of comfort and ease with their stolen goods until an army of motorcycle toughs arrive, and besiege the mall. In a climatic battle with motorcycle outlaws, our heroic looters, and countless zombies, the mall falls again to the dead while SWAT team officer Peter and News producer Fran, flee as the sole survivors, low of fuel and lost in a world where the dead are rapidly replacing the living.

One of the most intriguing aspects to 1979’s Dawn of the Dead, is how the story is utterly lacking in redeemable characters. Our protagonists are all characters who have abandoned their duties to civilization in pursuit of their own survival and in the end, possession of the remnants of a world that no longer exists. Fran exhibits some moral compass at the start of the film, objecting to broadcasting a list of overrun rescue shelters to an unsuspecting public, but by the end of the film she shares complicity with the others in their looting and rejection of any great moral duty than to ones own needs. No one else shows the smallest guilt for their actions, abandoning the civilian population to be murdered at the hands of the undead. While they are searching for fuel and discussing the needs to avoid areas still under authority it is the ex-SWAT officer Peter who reminds them that they are now “Thieves and Bad Guys.”

The shopping mall is the central focus of the film, the locus that attracts the undead and moral degenerates alike. The dead return to the mall as a place that mattered, as something that was important in life and remains important even in death. The zombies wander the gleaming hallways, like eternal window shoppers, forever entranced by the glittering fools’ gold of consumerism. The principal characters, after succeeding in taking possession of the mall from the dead, become as lifeless as the zombies that they displaced, as their days becoming an endless procession of pointless routine. Not even the promise of new life in the form of a pregnant Fran can stir the characters into any semblance of life. They may not eat the flesh of the living, but internally Peter, Roger, Fran, and Steve are as dead as the zombies they hunt and fear. They abandoned their duties to survive, as Steve implored of Fran when he told her of his plan, ‘someone must survive,’ but the seduction of the mall and its endless frivolities, robs them of not only motivation but also of identity, transforming them into nothing more than possessors. The seduction is so complete that when they are faced with a battle that they cannot win, they stay and fight rather than flee and abandon their looted fortress. Steve’s imperative that ‘someone must survive’ becoming an irrational compulsion to die attempting to retain what he has stolen. Peter and Fran survive, fleeing in the helicopter, but their escape, though accompanied by bombastic music, is a flat, emotionless process, all mechanics and no soul.

As I stated at the start of my essay 1979’s Dawn of The Dead, is the foundational film for what we know now as the zombie apocalypse, and yet the point of the film, its ruthless depiction of a living death in a life of hollow consumerism is barely references by the filmmakers that have followed the path blazed by Romero. 2004’s remake that launched Zack Synder’s career as a director, has a group of survivors, barricade in a shopping mall against a sea of the dead, but shares nothing else in common with the film it purports to recreate. The remake is a thrilling, exciting, and scary thrill ride, I still shiver thinking of the image of a woman seen indistinctly thought the frosted glass of a mass transit bus being attacked by zombies, but the movie is ultimately as soulless as Peter and Fran fleeing their own abandoned mall. I own both films as part of my expanding library, but it is Romero’s vision that I return to again and again.