Saturday night I attended a screening of 1979’s Dawn of the Dead. (Apologies to a friend who didn’t make the screening. Had I known you would have trouble finding the theater I would have changed my mind on the logistics.) This is only the second time I have seen

Peter(L) & Roger

this film in a proper movie theater environment and it still works and moves at a good brisk pace without losing theme or character. What happened last night though is that I started think about the relationship between Roger and Peter. Spoilers will follow.

Brief recap: Fran and her boyfriend Stephen, television news people, have stolen the station helicopter in order to flee the zombie apocalypse. They have invited their friend Roger, a swat team officer to flee along with them. After a harrowing incident in a large public housing building, Roger has invited Peter to also join them. It is clear that Roger and Peter only met for the first time during that night’s action and Peter is a total unknown to either Fran or Stephen. They fly in the helicopter for more than day and end up in a mall that has been overrun by the dead. Here it becomes a story of the survival and dynamics of the band of four characters.

Stories like this one are not new and many of the issues raised have been tackled in other setting, most often with a nuclear attack providing the collapse of society and the isolation of the characters. It has also been common to have the dynamic been that there is one couple and another man or two without a romantic or sexual partner. When this happens a very common complication is the frustrated sexual desire created by the only woman in the area being bonded to another man.

This never happens in Dawn on the Dead (1979.) Stephen and Fran have issue with their relationship but no hint of desire or attraction is ever apparent in either Roger or Peter. Rather Roger and Peter express a powerful bond for each other. They hatch plots together, trust each other implicitly in times of great danger, and when Roger is bitten, sealing his fate to die and rise as an undead, it provokes the strongest emotional expression from Peter. Nothing else in the story’s events comes breaking Peter’s locked-down facade of control like Roger decline, death, and re-animation. Even after Roger passes from the plot, Peter displays no interest in Fran, instead retreating away to giver her and Stephen room romance as he spends the time at Roger’s grave. At the climax of the film, after battling a marauding outlaw gang, and Stephen’s death, when Peter and Fran escape together, there is no sexual or romantic undertone. The chemistry simply isn’t there.

Perhaps the close bond Peter and Roger shared is the brotherly bond of fellow soldier, men who face terrible times together and who must trust each if they are to survive. However, they have no history together in the field. They have only just met, and there’s the case of no interest in Fran. Apparently Stephen, a character with a markedly fragile ego, had no issues or concerns in inviting another man to flee with he and his girl. Is that perhaps because he knows Roger well enough to know Roger does not care for women and thus he presents no threat? Could it be that Roger’s impulsive offer to Peter a man he had just met was prompted by fully functioning gay-dar?

In the text there is no conclusive proof of this hypothesis but neither can the film falsify it. It is a question that each viewer will have to answer for themselves.