The other films in the cycle are made with higher budgets and have a much slicker look to them, but they are even more powerfully disruptive. The second film, Dawn of the Dead, deals with consumerism rather than familial tensions. The zombies are irresistibly attracted to a suburban shopping mall, because they dimly remember that "this was an important place in their lives." Indeed, they seem most fully human when they are wandering the aisles and esca- lators of the mall like dazed but ecstatic shoppers. But the same can be said for the film's living characters. The four protagonists hole up in the mall and try to re- create a sense of "home" there. Much of the film is taken up by what is in effect their delirious shopping spree: after turning on the background music and letting the fountains run, they race through the corridors, ransacking goods that remain sitting in perfect order on store shelves. Once they have eliminated the zombies from the mall, they play games of makeup, acting out the roles of elegance and wealth (and the attendant stereotypes of gender, class, and race) that they dreamed of, but weren't able actually to afford, in their previous middle-class lives. This consumers' Utopia comes to an end only when the mall is invaded by a vicious motorcycle gang: a bunch of toughs motivated by a kind of class resentment, a desire to "share the wealth" by grabbing as much of it as possible for themselves. They enter by force and then pillage and destroy, enacting yet another mode of commodity consumption run wild. One befuddled gang member can't quite decide whether to run off with an expensive TV set or smash it to bits in frustration over the fact that no programs are being broadcast anymore. The still alive and the already dead are alike animated by a mimetic urge that causes them to resemble Dawn's third category of humanoid
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figures: department store mannequins. The zombies are overtly presented as simu- lacral doubles (equivalents rather than opposites) of living humans; their destruc- tive consumption of flesh—gleefully displayed to the audience by means of lurid special effects—immediately parallels the consumption of useless commodities by the American middle class. Commodity fetishism is a mode of desire that is not grounded in repression; rather, it is directly incited, multiplied, and affirmed by artificial means. As Meaghan Morris remarks, "A Deleuzian account of productive desire ... is more apt for analyzing the forms of modern greed ... than the lack- based model assumed by psychoanalytic theories" (in Bergstrom & Doane 1989, 244). Want is a function of excess and extravagance, and not of deficiency: the more I consume, the more I demand to consume. "I shop, therefore I am" (Barbara Kruger). The appearance of the living dead in the shopping mall thus can no longer be interpreted as a return of the repressed. The zombies are not an exception to, but a positive expression of, consumerist desire. They emerge not from the dark, disavowed underside of suburban life, but from its tacky, glittering surfaces. They embody and mimetically reproduce those very aspects of contem- porary American life that are openly celebrated by the media. The one crucial dif- ference is that the living dead—in contrast to the actually alive—are ultimately not susceptible to advertising suggestions. Their random wandering might seem to belie, but actually serves, a frightening singleness of purpose: their unquenchable craving to consume living flesh. They cannot be controlled, for they are already animated far too directly and unconditionally by the very forces that modern advertising seeks to appropriate, channel, and exploit for its own ends. The infi- nite, insatiable hunger of the living dead is the complement of their openness to sympathetic participation, their compulsive, unregulated mimetic drive, and their limitless capacity for reiterated shock. The zombies mark the dead end or zero degree of capitalism's logic of endless consumption and ever-expanding accumula- tion, precisely because they embody this logic so literally and to such excess. In the third and most complex film of the series, Day of the Dead, Romero goes still further. A shot near the beginning shows dollar bills being blown about randomly in the wind: a sign that even commodity fetishism has col- lapsed as an animating structure of desire. The locale shifts to an isolated under- ground bunker, where research scientists endeavor to study the zombies under the protection of a platoon of soldiers. All human activity is now as vacant and mean- ingless as is the zombies' endless shuffling about; the soldiers' abusive, macho pos- turings and empty assertions of authority clash with the scientists' futile, mis- guided efforts to discover the cause of the zombie plague, and to devise remedies for it. All that remains of postmodern society is the military-scientific complex, its chief mechanism for producing power and knowledge. But the technological infrastructure is now reduced to its most basic expression, locked into a subter- ranean compound of sterile cubicles, winding corridors, and featureless caverns. Everything in this hellish, underground realm of the living is embattled, restricted, claustrophobically closed off. This microcosm of our culture's dominant rational- ity tears itself apart as we watch: it teeters on the brink of implosion, destroying itself from within even as it is literally under siege from without. The bunker is like an emotional pressure cooker: fear, fatigue, and anxiety all mount relentlessly, for they cannot find any means of relief or discharge. As the film progresses, ten- sions grow between the soldiers and the scientists, between the men and the one woman, and ultimately among the irreconcilable imperatives of power, compre- hension, survival, and escape. The entire film is a maze of false turns, blocked exits, and dead ends, with the zombies themselves providing the only prospect of an outlet.
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Day of the Dead is primarily concerned with the politics of insides and outsides: the social production of boundaries, limits, and compartmen- talizations, and their subsequent affirmative disruption. The zombies, on the out- side, paradoxically manifest a "vitality" that is lacking within the bunker. Their inarticulate moans and cries, heard in the background throughout the film, give voice to a force of desire that is at once nourished and denied, solicited and repulsed, by the military-scientific machine. Inside the bunker, in a sequence that works as a hilarious send-up of both behaviorist disciplinary procedures and 1950s "mad scientist" movies, a researcher tries to "tame" one of the zombies. The dead, he explains, can be "tricked" into obedience, just as we were tricked as children. He eventually turns his pet zombie, Bub, into a pretty good parody of a soldier, miming actions such as reading, shaving, and answering the telephone, and actu- ally capable of saluting and of firing a gun. This success suggests that discipline and training, whether in child rearing or in the military, is itself only a restrictive appropriation of the zombies' mimetic energy. Meanwhile, the zombies mill about outside in increasing numbers, waiting with menacing passivity for an opportunity to break in. From both inside and outside, mimetic resemblances proliferate and threaten to overturn the hierarchy of living and dead. The more rigidly boundaries are drawn between reason and desire, order and anarchy, purpose and randomness, the more irrelevant these distinctions seem, and the more they are prone to violent explosion. The climax occurs when one of the soldiers—badly wounded (literally dismembered, metaphorically castrated), and motivated by an ambiguous combination of heroic desperation and vicious masculine resentment—opens the gates and lets the zombies into the bunker, offering his own body as a first sac- rifice to their voracity. The controlling boundary is ruptured, and the outside ecstatically consumes the inside. Allegory entirely gives way before a wave of con- tagious expenditure and destruction. The zombies take their revenge, but, as Kim Newman (1988) notes, "American society is cast in the role usually given to an individually hatable character" (p. 209). If the zombies are a repressed by-product of dominant American culture in Night, and that culture's simulacral double in Dawn, then in Day they finally emerge—ironically enough—as its animating source, its revolutionary avenger, and its sole hope of renewal. They are the long- accumulated stock of energy and desire upon which our militarized and techno- cratic culture vampiristically feeds, which it compulsively manipulates and exploits, but cannot forever hope to control.
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