Please extract 3+ main points from the discussion below and post in Comments by Wed morning (281-07) or Thursday morning (281-06). This is one of the classic analyses of Romero and offers material useful for midterms, with strong focus on social attitudes and social commentary.
Steven Shaviro
Contagious Allegories (from The Cinematic Body)
Postmodern Zombies
GEORGE ROMERO'S "living dead" trilogy—Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead—offers all sorts of pleasures to the willing viewer. These films move effortlessly among sharp visceral shocks, wry satirical humor, and a Grand Guignolesque reveling in showy excesses of gore. They are crass exploitation movies, pop left-wing action cartoons, exercises in cynical nihilism, and sophisticated political allegories of late capitalist America. Their vision of a humanity overrun by flesh-eating zombies is violently apocalyptic; at the same time, they remain disconcertingly close to the habitual surfaces and mundane real- ities of everyday life. Business as usual bizarrely coexists with extremes of tension and hysteria, in a world on the verge of vertiginous destruction. Everything in these movies is at once grotesque and familiar, banal and exaggerated, ordinary and on the edge. Romero's zombies seem almost natural in a society in which the material comforts of the middle class coexist with repressive conformism, mind- numbing media manipulation, and the more blatant violence of poverty, sexism, racism, and militarism. Romero is at once the pornographer, the anthropologist, the allegorist, and the radical critic of contemporary American culture. He gleefully uncovers the hidden structures of our society in the course of charting the progress of its disintegration.
What can it mean for the dead to walk again? The question is discussed endlessly in the three films, but no firm conclusion is ever reached. Some characters search for scientific explanations, others respond with mystical resigna tion. Maybe it is an infection brought back from an outer space probe, or maybe there is no more room in hell. Of course, the whole point is that the sheer exorbi tance of the zombies defies causal explanation, or even simple categorization. The living dead don't have an origin or a referent; they have become unmoored from meaning. They figure a social process that no longer serves rationalized ends, but has taken on a strange and sinister life of its own.
Deleuze and Guattari (1983) aptly remark that "the only mod ern myth is the myth of zombies—mortified schizos, good for work, brought back to reason" (p. 335). The life-in-death of the zombie is a nearly perfect allegory for the inner logic of capitalism, whether this be taken in the sense of the exploitation of living labor by dead labor, the deathlike regimentation of factories and other social spaces, or the artificial, externally driven stimulation of consumers. Capitalist expropriation involves a putting to death, and a subsequent extraction of movement and value—or simulated life—from the bowels of that death. Whereas pre- capitalist societies tend to magnify and heroicize death, to derive grandeur from it, capitalism seeks rather to rationalize and normalize it, to turn it to economic account. Romero's zombies have none of the old precapitalist sublimity, but they also cannot be controlled and put to work. They mark the rebellion of death against its capitalist appropriation. Their emergence—and this is one of the thrills of watching these films—reminds us of the derisory gratuitousness of death, and of Bataille's equation of death with expenditure and waste. Our society endeavors to transform death into value, but the zombies enact a radical refusal and destruc tion of value. They come after, and in response to, the capitalist logic of production and transformation; they
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live off the detritus of industrial society, and are per- haps an expression of its ecological waste.
Indeed, Romero has called to life the first postmodern zombies. (There have been many imitations since, in scores of other films: superficial imitation, or proliferating repetition, is the definitive feature of such undefinable not-quite-beings.) These walking corpses are neither majestic and uncanny nor exactly sad and pitiable. They arise out of a new relation to death, and they provoke a new range of affect. They are blank, terrifying, and ludicrous in equal measure, without any of these aspects mitigating the others.
Romero's zombies could almost be said to be quintessential media images, since they are vacuous, mimetic replications of the human beings they once were. They are dead people who are not content to remain dead, but who have brought their deaths with them back into the realm of the living. They move slowly and affectlessly, as if in a trance, but the danger they represent is real: they kill and consume. They are slower, weaker, and stupider than living humans; their menace lies in numbers, and in the fact that they never give up. Their slow-motion voracity and continual hungry wailing sometimes appears clownish, but at other times emerges as an obsessive leitmotif of suspended and ungratified desire.
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The zombies are impelled by a kind of desire, but they are largely devoid of energy and will. Their restless agitation is merely reactive. They totter clumsily about, in a strange state of stupefied and empty fascination, pas- sively drawn to still-living humans and to locations they once occupied and cher- ished. Only now they arrive to ravage, almost casually, the sites to which their vague memories and attractions lead them. They drift slowly away from identity and meaning, emptying these out in the very process of replicating them. The zombies are in a sense all body: they have brains but not minds. That is to say, they are nonholistic, deorganicized bodies: lumps of flesh that still experience the crav- ings of the flesh, but without the organic articulation and teleological focus that we are prone to attribute to ourselves and to all living things. They are empty shells of life that scandalously continue to function in the absence of any rationale and of any inferiority.
All this is particularly evident when active characters, with whom the audience has identified, are killed and monstrously reborn. In their artificial second life, these characters are both the same and not the same. They are still recognizable beneath their gruesome features, but their corpses shamble along or jerk convulsively, graceless and uncoordinated, drained of the tension of purpo- sive activity. These strange beings, at once alive and dead, grotesquely lit- eral and blatantly artificial, cannot be encompassed by any ordinary logic of representation.
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In their compulsive, wavering, deorganicized movements, the zombiesare allegorical and mimetic figures. They are allegorical in the sense that allegory always implies the loss or death of its object. An allegory is not a representation, but an overt materialization of the unbridgeable distance that representation seeks to cover over and efface. (I am defining allegory here in terms that derive ulti- mately from Walter Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1985b; for a discussion of the importance of allegory, so conceived, to postmodernism, see especially Owens 1984; Olalquiaga 1992).
The "living dead" emerge out of the deathly distance of allegory; their fictive presence allows Romero to anatomize and criticize American society, not by portraying it naturalistically, but by evacuating and eviscerating it. Allegory is then not just a mode of depiction, but an active means of subversive transformation. The zombies do not (in the familiar manner of 1950s horror film monsters) stand for a threat to social order from without. Rather, they res- onate with, and refigure, the very processes that produce and enforce social order. That is to say, they do not mirror or represent social forces; they are directly ani- mated and possessed, even in their allegorical distance from beyond the grave, by such forces. Thus they are also mimetic figures, in Benjamin's (1985a, 160-63) sense of magical participation, perception become tactile, and nonsensuous (non- representational) similarities (I am indebted to Michael Taussig for calling this essay to my attention).
The movement from allegory to mimesis is a passage from passive reanimation to active, raging contagion. This progression is the source of the zombies' strange appeal. Forever unequal to themselves, they are figures of affective blockage and intellectual undecidability. They can be regarded both as monstrous symptoms of a violent, manipulative, exploitative society and as poten- tial remedies for its ills—all this by virtue of their apocalyptically destructive, yet oddly innocuous, counterviolence. They frighten us with their categorical rapac- ity, yet allure us by offering the base, insidious pleasures of ambiguity, complicity,and magical revenge. Romero's films knowingly exploit the ambiguity of their position: they locate themselves both inside and outside the institutions and ideologies—of commercial film production and of American society generally—from which they have evidently arisen.
Survival or Sacrifice?
But what of horror's traditional themes of struggle and survival, of rescuing the possibilities of life and community from an encounter with monstrosity and death? The "living dead" trilogy plays with these themes in a manner that defies conventional expectations. (Indeed, it is this aspect of the films that has been most thoroughly discussed by sympathetic commentators. See especially Wood 1986, 114-21; Newman 1988, 1-5, 199-201, 208-10.) All three films have women or blacks as their chief protagonists, the only characters with whom the audience pos- itively identifies as they struggle to remain alive and to resist and escape the zom- bies. The black man in Night is the sole character in the film who is both sympa- thetic and capable of reasoned action. The woman protagonist in Dawn rejects the subordinate role in which the three men, wrapped up in their male bonding fan- tasies, initially place her; she becomes more and more active and involved as the film progresses. The woman scientist in Day is established right from the start as the strongest, most dedicated, and most perspicacious of the besieged humans. In both Dawn and Day, the women end up establishing tactical alliances with black men who are not blindly self-centered in the manner of their white counterparts. All these characters are thoughtful, resourceful, and tenacious; they are not always right, but they continually debate possible courses of action, and learn from their mistakes. They seem to be groping toward a shared, democratic kind of decision making.
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In contrast, white American males come off badly in all three films. The father in Night considers it his inherent right to be in control, although he clearly lacks any sense of how to proceed; his behavior is an irritating combina- tion of hysteria and spite. The two white men among the group in Dawn both die as a result of their adolescent need to indulge in macho games or to play the hero. The military commanding officer in Day is the most obnoxious of all: he is so sex- ist, authoritarian, cold-blooded, vicious, and contemptuous of others that the audi- ence celebrates when the zombies finally disembowel and devour him. These white males' fear of the zombies seems indistinguishable from the dread and hatred they display toward women. The self-congratulatory attitudes that they continually project are shown to be ineffective at best, and radically counterproductive at worst, in dealing with the actual perils that the zombies represent. The macho, paternalistic traits of typical Hollywood action heroes are repeatedly exposed as stupid and dysfunctional. Romero dismantles dominant behavior patterns; he gives a subversive, left-wing twist to the usually reactionary ideology and genre of sur- vivalism. To the extent that the films maintain traditional forms of narrative iden- tification, they divert these forms by providing them with a new, politically more progressive content.
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The first film in the series, Night of the Living Dead, is the one most susceptible to conventional psychoanalytic interpretation, for it is focused on the nuclear family. It begins with a neurotic brother and sister quarreling as they pay a visit to their father's grave, and moves on to the triangle of blustering father, cringing mother, and (implicitly) abused child hiding from the zombies in a farm- house basement. Familial relations are shown throughout to be suffused with an anxious negativity, a menacing aura of tension and repressed violence. In this con- text, the zombies seem a logical outgrowth of, or response to, patriarchal norms. They are the disavowed residues of the ego-producing mechanisms of internaliza- tion and identification. They figure the infinite emptiness of desire, insofar as it is shaped by, and made conterminous with, Oedipal repression. The film's high point of shock comes, appropriately, when the little girl, turned into a zombie, cannibalistically consumes her parents.
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But at the same time, the film's casual ironies undercut this allegory of the return of the repressed. The protagonists not only experience the zombie menace firsthand, they also watch it on TV. Disaster is consumed as a cheesy spectacle, complete with incompetent reporting, useless information bulletins, and inane attempts at commentary. The grotesque, carnivalesque slapstick of these sequences mocks survivalist oppositions. Even as dread pulses to a climax, as plans of action and escape fail, and as characters we expect to survive are eliminated, we are denied the opportunity of imposing redemptive or compensatory meanings. There is no mythology of doomed, heroic resistance, no exalted sense of pure, apocalyptic negativity. The zombies' lack of charisma seems to drain all the surrounding circumstances of their nobility.
And for its part, the family is subsumed within a larger network of social control, one as noteworthy for its stupidity as for its exploitativeness. Romero turns the constraints of his low budget—crudeness of presentation, minimal acting, and tacky special effects—into a powerful means of expression: he foregrounds and hyperbolizes these aspects of his production in order to depsychologize the drama and emphasize the artificiality and gruesome arbitrariness of spectacle. Such a strategy doesn't "alienate" us from the film so much as it insidiously displaces our attention. Our anxieties are focused upon events rather than characters, upon the violent fragmentation of cinematic process (with a deliberate clumsiness that mimes the shuffling movement of the zombies themselves) rather than the supposed integrity of any single protagonist's subjec- tivity. The zombies come to exemplify not a hidden structure of individual anxiety and guilt, but an unabashedly overt social process in which the disintegration of all communal bonds goes hand-in-hand with the callous manipulation of individual response. It is entirely to the point that Night ends on a note of utter cynicism: the zombies are apparently defeated, but the one human survivor with whom we have identified throughout the film—a black man—is mistaken for a zombie and shot by an (implicitly racist) sheriffs posse.
I love that Shaviro categorizes Romero as a pornographer in just the first paragraph. Most people don't think of horror films as anything close to pornography, though those close to the genre will tell you that "gore porn" is a rather widely used term to describe the goriness or disgustingness of a particular movie. To closely associate the two is rather disturbing in itself, though it's been a part of mainstream horror culture for years.
ReplyDeleteAnother interesting point that Shaviro makes is that, in Romero's films, George doesn't paint the zombies as black and white as many other directors have. In some other movies, it is glaringly obvious that the living dead are bad and supposed to be an allegory for actual living humans who aren't actually living their lives as they should. In others, we are meant to feel sorry for the zombies that shamble around from scene to scene. As Shaviro puts it, Romero's zombies straddle the line between good and bad or right and wrong.
His commentary on race relations in Romero's films is striking as well. The fact that most of Romero's protagonists are white or a person of color speaks to how forward thinking and subversive Romero was for his time. And not only were they main characters, but they acted with a peace of mind and resolve that the other white male characters did not. For the time in which Romero was making his first zombie films, those watching were probably extremely interested.
In Shaviro’s analysis of Romero and his films, I found it interesting that he mentioned that although a plague of zombies is apocalyptic, the situation of a zombie plague seems to co-exist with the regular habits, routines, and mundane realities of everyday life. The zombies in Romero’s films cause tension and horror for the characters involved, but they also don’t get rid of the social issues of society such as poverty, sexism, and racism. Rather than shake-up or eliminate, maybe the zombie plague(s) actually bring such issues to the forefront of the public’s consciousness? Shaviro’s analysis definitely demonstrates that the coexisting of something of apocalyptic nature alongside already preexisting social issues is interesting, to say the least.
ReplyDeleteI also thought that another one of Shaviro’s points that I found interesting was that white American males are portrayed negatively in all three of the mentioned Romero films. Giving men such character traits as: believing themselves to have an inherent right to be in control, a toxic combination of hysteria and spite, and an adolescent need to indulge in macho games and/or to play the hero role, Romero commentates that these traits (along with sexism and condescension) are a few that show male Hollywood characters (and maybe, by extension, men in reality as well) as stupid and dysfunctional, especially since all the males mentioned do die in their respective films.
Finally, I thought it was interesting that Shaviro mentioned that Romero’s zombie movies are pretty open to psychoanalytical interpretation (especially Night of the Living Dead). Because it’s focused on a family that’s not totally calm and perfect, the loudness of the father, the hysterics of the mother, and the possible abuse of the child serves to commentate that emotionally draining situations can often bring out repressed and pre-existing violence and tension, among other things.
Shaviro’s analysis of Romero’s films showed certain amount of ambivalence in which the zombie figure represents mix feelings of desire and repulsion. In a sense zombies represent the end of the capitalist era and social structure, but at the same time they represent something grotesque and threatening our safety and stability.
ReplyDeleteShaviro also analyses the social criticism on Romero’s films in which we identify ourselves with the minorities and we cheer when the authoritarian “tyrant” dies. We can observe the social critique when he makes the female characters the strong ones while making the white male counterparts who are portrayed as self-centered macho/paternalist features (88,7: 88,9). Also, he critiques how the female characters decide to make alliances with the black males because of their resourceful and tenacious behavior, and their ability to learn from their mistakes.
Shaviro also points out the incompletion horror within Romero’s films in which the dead are not really dead. He says “The zombies are in a sense all body: they have brains but not minds.” So we observe that the function of the brain is incomplete; the brain has turned down to the most primitive desires (eat and move) but what makes us human (which is the emotions, and thinking) is turned off making the zombie to become incomplete.
Finally, Shaviro points out that the conventional categories of living and dead are disturbed leaving us on a grey area.
Reading over this piece by Shaviro about Romero’s zombie trilogy opened my eyes to a lot of different themes that he was trying to convey. The idea of the zombies representing an overall piece of American society, instead of using zombies to represent a single group of people, was an interesting way to comment on the social climate of modern America. The idea that middle class people in America are somewhat zombie like, pacified by the luxuries that surround them while important and troubling things occur in the worlds really well expressed. As the essay has put it “He gleefully uncovers the hidden structures of our society in the course of charting the progress of its disintegration.
ReplyDeleteThe idea that the night/dawn/day of the dead zombies represent multiple, contradicting things at once shows the complexity of the social commentary on Romero’s part. During a zombie apocalypse as described by Romero, it shows a harsh reality of trying to normalize death into every day life. In a capitalist society, you are expected to work and contribute to society until the day you die. As the author says “They cannot be controlled and put to work. They mark the rebellion of death against its capitalist appropriation” to be a zombie and wander the earth mindlessly without a purpose shows a complete diminishing of the way or society works. The idea that people have to be” useful” is something very prevalent in society, so to have human like shells walking around aimlessly, and seemingly until the decompose, combats the idea that in order to live correctly, you must contribute to things.
Shaviro also touches on Romero’s social commentaries based off of how he portrays his characters. In big name holly wood it is rare to find someone other then a white male as the hero, but in each movie the white males are portrayed in a horrible light. I feel that this is a comment on the over all privilege that white males seem to forget that they have in terms of average level of respect and lack of discrimination they receive. I feel that while the characters describes are as he puts it “ cartoon like” and exaggerated it rings a truth that not many people accept. That discrimination is still alive and very well but as he power structure shifts to a more diverse cast of characters, the ones in power tend to respond very angrily, and most times those strong emotions cloud the brain and people end up making stupid decisions based on their own individual flaws. To think that you are invincible makes you the most vulnerable person in the room.
Steven Shaviro discusses many major points that are represented in George Romero’s “Living Dead” trilogy. Shaviro believes that Romero created the first postmodern zombie. Shaviro states that these zombies did not stand for a threatened social order, as previous views of the zombie had. These zombies have many new and different characteristics in Romero’s films.
ReplyDeleteShaviro also points out that Romero shows no origin for his zombie. It is a question throughout the films but it is never revealed. I think this is a very important point because in many zombie films the origin of the zombie is presented at some point within the story.
The idea of family, specifically the nuclear family, is also emphasized in the films. In the time period this movie was made, the nuclear family was falling apart and wasn’t a popular idea. I think that this point was emphasized because of changing social ideas of the time. The movie begins with the siblings going to visit their father’s grave and another family was showed later.
I like how in part of the essay Shiviro relates Romero’s zombies to a rebellion against a capitalist society. He reflects on the idea of capitalism as an exploitation of the working class and how it is driven by consumerism. As a capitalist society we want to rationalize death, all coming back to how much money can be made (If you think about it the cost of a funeral, it is ridiculous). Johnny is very rational about visiting his dead relatives grave, being more concerned with the cost and time of traveling to the gravesite than paying his respects, and he is quickly turned into a zombie in the film. Shiviro also points out that Romero’s zombies can’t be controlled or put to work. This is in direct contrast to the well-behaved zombies in “White Zombie”, a movie promoting the American colonization of Haiti and the abuse of its residents by a capitalist society. The uncontrollable nature of the zombies in “Night of the Living Dead” can thus be seen as a rebellion against capitalist ideals and as a symbol of the waste created by an industrial society.
ReplyDeleteI also found Shiviro’s analysis of Romero opting for a female and a black male to play the lead characters interesting, as well as the way the characters were portrayed. Shiviro points out that Romero provides audiences with a progressive alternative to the typical Hollywood action hero. The macho white males (Johnny and two guys from the cellar) who are usually portrayed as hero figures were portrayed as foolish, controlling, and end up ultimately as zombie food. The females were fairly useless for survival in “Night of the Living Dead” and naturally all ended up dead as well. I can only hope that Romero’s portrayal of these women was an exaggeration to mock societies treatment of them as fragile. Most importantly we have our black male lead and sole survivor: cool-headed, brave, and competent. He is the only character you really root for, which is progressive for the time this movie was released.
Another interesting aspect of Shiviro’s essay was the analysis of the nuclear family. Personally, I was most intrigued by the scene in the movie where the daughter becomes a zombie and kills her parents. It is implied that the daughter is abused, thus her killing here parents can be seen from a psychological perspective as a fulfillment of her repressed desire to do away with her abusers. In fact, all the family relationships in the movie are portrayed in a negative light, possibly to criticize society’s patriarchal norms.
One of the main points made by Shaviro is that Romero's Dead trilogy breaks from the tradition of previous, pre-capitalist zombie films, in that the zombies can be viewed as a victimized entity by standard social orders. In pre-capitalist zombie films, the zombie figure represented a threat to one specific social order; in Romero’s films, the threat is of assimilation to the victimized masses. In particular, the films portray traditional Western Caucasian patriarchy as a threat, given that the main characters of each film are either African-American or women. These characters are more sympathetic and identifiable, while white male figures are portrayed with considerably less positivity.
ReplyDeleteAnother point that Shaviro makes is the identification of the reincarnated zombies with a violent Oedipal complex. This, he argues, is portrayed most prominently in the white male father’s incompetence in his role, both in family and in the survival group. Other authoritative white figures, such as the military man in “Day of the Dead”, are portrayed in such a negative way that the zombies become somewhat heroic when they dismember him. A warning against authority figures in a patriarchal society comes across strongly in Romero’s films.
Further warnings are perpetrated by Romero, the least of which is not the stark warning against capitalism in America. Survivors grouped around radio and television sets being fed incompetent information is enough to prove this point; the zombies in Romero are perhaps most famously associated with suburbanites in America, particularly in Dawn of the Dead, which takes place in a mall.
Steven Shaviro discusses many different things in this writing. There were a few main points that I took out of this reading. First, Shaviro talks about the gore of the zombie and how grotesque zombies are portrayed. This ties into one of the main points, that horror films, not just zombie films, always encompass contradictory ideas. He says, “Everything in these movies is at once grotesque and familiar, banal and exaggerated, ordinary and on the edge.” I thought this was a very important idea because this is what keeps us interested. It peaks the audiences interests when something is abnormal even for a horror movie. The next thing that I thought was very interesting was the idea of the zombie being a symbol of capitalism and our society as a whole. Even today there is much discussion about how we are zombies already and we are still living. We go to our mundane jobs, day-in and day-out and are attached to our electronics and barely have the same amount of human contact that we used to and we act, in many ways, as the zombies do in these movies. Finally, I thought it was important to examine how the idea of the nuclear family was something that was disintegrating, and is represented through these films.
ReplyDeleteOne of the possibilities that Shaviro poses for Romaro’s zombies is that they represent one or perhaps all of a number of different aspects of capitalism. One that seems to make the most sense is that the zombies represent consumers overwhelmed with desire for certain products or goals, and blindly shamble toward them, happy to gobble it all up without paying heed to consequence, i.e. the survivors with guns in the house.
ReplyDeleteThe film also has an anti-racist feel to it. The main characters are a white woman and an African American man. The white men in the film seem to be irrational and driven by a sort of hysteria and a need for control. This could stand for a commentary on what was the underlying racist mentality of Americans at the time.
The film also, as Shaviro points out, says a lot about the family, especially the nuclear family. He mentions that the family found in the cellar of the house are all high strung, filled with repressed violence he says. If this is the case, he then states that the zombies are the response to the norms of overbearing parental guidelines. This then reinforces an Oedipus complex outlook especially as he says, when the young girl is transformed into a zombie and eats her parents.
One point that Shaviro was trying to make was how Romero was using the dead to act as middle class people living in an American society instead of using these zombies as brain hungry creatures. It seems that Shaviro saw these zombies as middle class because of the brainless life these creatures lived following strict social code. When there is something in life that is attractable then everyone gathers around trying to get to it.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, Shaviro also points out that Romero was trying to give a "against racism" feel the way one of the main characters was Black. The white male in the film was power hungry and irrational going against whatever the African American was saying which leaded to a negative consequence for both parties.
Shaviro also points out that Romero seemed to think that stress, drama, and violence can tear families apart literally! In the beginning of the film the kids were visiting their fathers grave while they were bickering and arguing. Romero portrayed this perfectly the way Johnny was taken from Barbra leaving her with barely any family left. As for the other family in the farm house cellar,both parents were very hostile and child abuse looked to be apparent . As a result of the parents violent behavior their family broke apart quickly beginning with the daughter eating her father also one of her abusers.
From this reading, I gathered that Romero's zombies are the quintessential idea of zombie. Whenever someone talks about zombies, Romero's are the ones of which people think. In the fifth paragraph, Romero's zombies are described as being "dumber, weaker, and stupider (sic)" than humans which is right on in terms of how Hollywood portrays zombies.
ReplyDeleteThe second point that I found interesting is that Shaviro says that all horror movies contradict each other. They are all "ordinary and on the edge" because they take normal things that we are all comfortable with and ruin them by adding elements that keep the audience attentive as well as frightened.
One final idea that I gathered from this reading is when Shaviro writes about zombies having a desire for flesh but no longer possess energy and will to do anything. As we can see in countless zombie films, they just stumble and wander about aimlessly. Shaviro suggests that zombies somewhat possess vague memories from their lives and tend to stay around those places and things. This makes sense to me, I've never seen a zombie on a cross country road trip. They all tend to stay in the area that they reanimated.
1. “Capitalist expropriation involves a putting to death, and a subsequent extraction of movement and value—or simulated life—from the bowels of that death. Whereas pre- capitalist societies tend to magnify and heroicize death, to derive grandeur from it, capitalism seeks rather to rationalize and normalize it, to turn it to economic account. Romero's zombies have none of the old precapitalist sublimity, but they also cannot be controlled and put to work. They mark the rebellion of death against its capitalist appropriation.”
ReplyDeletea. I found this description highly fascinating. It describes our present day capitalist mentality through a zombie film perfectly.
2. “Our society endeavors to transform death into value, but the zombies enact a radical refusal and destruction of value. They come after, and in response to, the capitalist logic of production and transformation; they live off the detritus of industrial society, and are per- haps an expression of its ecological waste.”
a. This is a really good point used, I think to review the horror in zombies. We generally cringe at anything that is a destruction of value.
3. “The zombies do not (in the familiar manner of 1950s horror film monsters) stand for a threat to social order from without. Rather, they resonate with, and refigure, the very processes that produce and enforce social order.”
a. I think it is interesting that Steven says the zombies are part of the social order, not there to change it. This makes the film even more frightening.
4. “The movement from allegory to mimesis is a passage from passive reanimation to active, raging contagion. This progression is the source of the zombies' strange appeal. Forever unequal to themselves, they are figures of affective blockage and intellectual undecidability.”
a. I like this quote because it displays more of an “in your face theme.”
5. “All three films have women or blacks as their chief protagonists, the only characters with whom the audience positively identifies as they struggle to remain alive and to resist and escape the zombies.”
a. This quote sheds light on the struggles women and blacks have had with race and gender issues. It also shows the real tyranny of the white man in the past and to some extent, today.
6. “The macho, paternalistic traits of typical Hollywood action heroes are repeatedly exposed as stupid and dysfunctional.”
a. I totally agree with the author that these things are stupid and dysfunctional. The movie does a great service by depicting these things as such.
Shaviro makes the point that Romero uses zombies as a vehicle for many different concepts across his three classic zombie movies. Most emphasized is Romero’s choice for his heroes to be minorities(Women or African Americans) and in contrast featuring a white male either as an opposing survivor, or in hoards of zombies. This choice of character goes against what had been seen in zombie films prior. Rather than glorifying the white Anglo-patriarchy it rebels showing them as a threat and sympathizing with people of color and females.
ReplyDeleteBuilding on this social concept Romero’s film seem to carry a heavy message against Capitalism. There are clear statements again the status quo and materialism, this is shown for example in Dawn of the Dead when the film takes place in a shopping mall.
Shavario goes on to explain that Romero’s films also appeal to the audiences more ‘primal’ mind. He describes it as pornographic in its appeal. The zombies are characterized without though or feeling, but still having desires, specifically a desire for flesh and violence. This description of zombies fits very well with the Freudian concept of ‘id’
i found it interesting that Shaviro called Romero a pornographer. Most of the time at least in our society we think of pornography as sex. In this sense its more of like a desire aspect. Zombies are impelled by a kind of desire. A desire of flesh and will do anything to get it. Some will even eat animals and their own kind to satisfy their desire.
ReplyDeleteRomero has created the first postmodern zombie which are known as walking corpses. i found it funny that they say they are not majestic they are more like blank, terrifying, and ludicrous. Shaviro states that they drift slowly away from identity and meaning and become more in a sense all body with brains but no mind.
the idea of family plays a role in the night of the living dead. Romero plays around with the brother sister aspect as well as the mother father and daughter. This term nuclear family has many meaning in Romero's films. The notion that family doesn't really work out in the film, the brother becomes a zombie and comes after his sister and she dies. Also, the family in the basement with the injured daughter who comes back to life and eats her parents in the end.
The description of Romero’s zombie in comparison to the other zombie films that came before his is drastically different. The Zombies before hand had some type of pull that made you feel bad for them and were controllable. Romero brings Zombies to a new level, making them uncontrollable, not relatable and scary.
ReplyDeleteHe is able to add his social view on society with his zombies as well. He makes the zombies attack dysfunctional families. As if to say families are being torn apart and that the viewer needs to know this.
Romero’s zombies aren’t forced to rise from the dead nor are puppets by the controller. He is able to make them appear human but still is able to make them undead. Romero makes his zombies still appear human by making them cling onto the lives that they use to have but are unable to live like they once did.
I think it is interesting how he describes “postmodern zombies.” The zombies in White Zombie were more of slaves where these postmoderns zombies are something to be feared. The zombies are not controlled by anyone so it makes it more exciting for the viewer because they are less predictable. They are slow moving dead people who are hunting living people. These are the first cannibal zombies.
ReplyDeleteI find it interesting that he points out the the “white male” character is seen poorly in the trilogy. Usually that is the hero. However, in this case the protagonists are black males and women.
He also points out that there is not hope for the human characters that you are following through the story. It is more about the events that happen scene by scene rather than seeing the protagonist make it through to a zombie free utopia.
In Steven Shaviro's discussion of postmodern zombies, he analyzes George Romero's "living dead" trilogy, which include "Night of the Living Dead", "Dawn of the Dead", and "Day of the Dead".
ReplyDeleteOne of the points that Shaviro makes in his analysis, is that Romero has introduced the first postmodern zombies that we are familiar with today. He begins to explain the characteristics of said zombie-figures, such as moving slowly and aimlessly, being blank and terrifying, and ultimately killers of live humans. These creatures also seem to be compelled by an unstoppable desire to quench their hunger, and are devoid of energy and will.
Another point that Shaviro makes that I found to be interesting is when he notes that Romero anatomizes and criticizes American society. The zombies in this case, resonate and emit the very processes that create and enforce social order; they do not represent any kind of social force.
Finally, one other point that Shaviro makes is the idea of having women and African-Americans as the film's chief protagonists, and portraying the white American males badly. In "Night of the Living Dead", the black man is sympathetic and capable of reasoned action, the woman lead in "Dawn of the Dead" lets go of her subordinate ways and becomes more active throughout the film, and the woman scientist in "Day of the Dead" is extremely strong and dedicated. The white males in the film come across as sexist, authoritative, irritating, lacking any sense of progression, and coldblooded. It's interesting to note that Romero breaks down and reconfigures these dominate behavior patterns in society by giving a revolutionary, liberal twist to the more conventional forms of the narrative.
It was hard for me to understand what Shaviro's comments were on Romero's "Night of Living Dead". Shaviro notes that Romero's "Night of Living Dead" was a commentary on the effect of media, sexism, racism, and militarism. A few ideas that are expressed in Romero's story is an evident struggle for power, zombies in relation to capitalism, and zombies and allegory.
ReplyDeleteOne of the interesting things Steven Shaviro talks about in his article about George Romero’s trilogy was that he describes Romero as being a “pornographer”. This is interesting in the sense that Shaviro is claiming Romero is an exploiter and that he enjoys showing society the un-norm in a manner in which is highly unacceptable to some. I also found it interesting that Shaviro describes Romero’s zombies as “ecological waste”. Since the world is becoming quickly overpopulated, we are running out of space for people and filling up with too much garbage. It is interesting that Romero could possibly be creating these zombies as a way to under-populate the world, to start over perhaps. I also thought it was interesting how Shaviro says that Night of the Living Dead is an example of the “nuclear family”, and how the zombie epidemic helps the family to work through their problems. I think that Romero clearly had some intention of bringing together a group of people during a zombie outbreak. Also, the figure of the black male clearly has more of a head of his shoulders than the white characters. He is the only calm collected person of the bunch. Romero was probably trying to point out racial tensions during a period in America where racial discourse was perhaps considered taboo (the 1960's).
ReplyDeleteSteven Shaviro main points on Romeros Zombies
ReplyDeleteBy: Morgan Buckingham
Steven Shaviro discusses Romeros "post-modern." Some main points that he addresses explain how the zombie phenom has resonated with so many people over the years. For example, Shaviro writes " Their emergence—and this is one of the thrills of watching these films—reminds us of the derisory gratuitousness of death, and of Bataille's equation of death with expenditure and waste. Our society endeavors to transform death into value," (Shaviro, paragraph 3). People love watching Zombie films because they are an exaggeration of the livings misappropriations and fears.
A second point he makes is in paragraph nine, he writes, "Rather, they resonate with, and re-figure, the very processes that produce and enforce social order. That is to say, they do not mirror or represent social forces; they are directly animated and possessed." Shaviro expands the notion that Romeros Zombies are have similarities and reflections of the processes of social order in the living world.
The final major point that I found interesting in Shaviro's piece was Romeros projection of woman and blacks. He writes, " the women end up establishing tactical alliances with black men who are not blindly self-centered in the manner of their white counterparts. All these characters are thoughtful, resourceful, and tenacious; they are not always right, but they continually debate possible courses of action, and learn from their mistakes. They seem to be groping toward a shared, democratic kind of decision making. In contrast, white American males come off badly in all three films." This was interesting because in most horror films American white males are projected as the hero but it Romeros films, it is the character that are mostly projected as the oppressed to be resourceful and intelligent. Shaviro's piece had many interesting points that revealed Romeros take on the post-modern Zombie to show dominance and a reflection of social order.
Shaviro discusses George Romero’s films as critiques on American society. He sees them as “left-wing action cartoons” and seesthe vision of the film close to the “mundane realities of everyday life”. He compares reanimation of zombies and the concept of zombies to modern day capitalism- exploiting the dead for labors or conditions of factories (“deathlike”, “regimented”). He seemingly compliments Romero for creating a new living dead, one that is now endlessly imitated. They are more terrifying and emotion-provoking than those before. Shaviro also comments on the massification of Romero’s zombies (“their menace lies in numbers”) and continuously makes note of the categorical disturbance (“mimetic replications of the human beings they once were”). By creating the films in such a fictive manner, Romero is able to critique and criticize American society, without the modern viewer acknowledging his commentary, or acknowledging and able to laugh along through Romero’s wit and satire. Shaviro made an interesting point when he stated in the films the main protagonist and the most relatable in each film is an African-American or woman. In the films, these characters remain or become the strongest and most capable of reason. At the same time, the films show white American males as self-centered, and in a negative light. They believe they have an inherent right to control and be in charge and are sexist, impulsive, and completely counter-productive for the survival of the groups.
ReplyDeleteIn Shaviro’s analysis of Romero’s “Living Dead” trilogy, one of the main points that I extracted from the excerpt was in regards to Romero’s zombies seeming almost natural in society. Shaviro implies that the coexistence of the materialistic middle class comforts with the blatant violence of poverty, sexism, racism, and militarism in Romero’s films, consequently makes him a radical critic of contemporary American culture. The juxtaposition that is evident in Romero’s works between good and evil and normal and obscure subtly exemplifies the apparent disintegration of modern American society. The fact that zombies could even be considered normal in society highlights Romero’s condemnation of what America has become and he passively attacks American people for conforming to structure and expectations.
ReplyDeleteAnother one of the main points that I thought relevant from Shaviro’s analysis of Romero’s films was the relationship between the life-in-death of zombies to a nearly perfect allegory for the inner logic of capitalism. Shaviro argues that Romero’s zombies mark the rebellion of death against capitalist appropriation. Zombies cannot be put to work, enslaved, controlled or even reasoned with, which are all characteristics of a capitalist society. The zombies represent a destruction of the value that society attempts to label death with. Shaviro implies that the zombies offer a confronting, yet realistic display of the negatives associated with modern western society.
The final point of analysis that I was able to extract from Shaviro’s article was in regards to the negative connotations that white American males receive in all three of Romero’s films. The three films all have either black or female characters as their chief protagonists. The viewers are encouraged to identify and sympathize with such characters as they struggle to survive and remain alive in hostile zombie environments. On the contrary, the white male characters are all displayed as sexist, racist, vicious, ignorant and obnoxious. The development of such characters positions the audience to naturally dislike these men. Romero challenges the typical white, macho and tenacious Hollywood action heroes, repeatedly exposing them stupid and dysfunctional.
By: Jesse Soto
ReplyDeleteSteven Shaviro offers an insightful breakdown of Romero's post-modern "living dead". Three central points that I can see in this discussion follow horror engineering, the allegorical zombie, and Romero's social critique. Though not the only point of this discussion, I feel that they address the truly artful expression Romero utilized in what initially can be viewed as a gory horror film.
In terms of horror engineering, I enjoyed Shaviro's in depth relation of the physical grotesqueness of zombies to the type of fear or anxiety called forth from the viewer. As the zombies aimlessly stroll about in the post-apocalyptic setting, they are only drawn to the pursuit of live human flesh. The zombies are viewed as mere shells of the former human and in that the viewer can relate to the fear of becoming this cannibalistic enemy of humanity. A deeper fear of the zombie comes from how unnatural their hunger is. Their need to feed seems more of a compulsion for destruction of the human species versus the natural hunger of a living thing.
Shaviro next highlights the allegorical nature of the post-modern zombie as a distinct change in Romero films from that of films like White Zombies in the 1950s. Shaviro identifies the Romero zombie as a tool to criticize American society, but also what that means for the philosophical idea of the zombie. The post-modern zombie has evolved from being a threatening entity to social order from the outside, to being a force acting within the social order. They restructure the basic elements of social order creating ambiguity and duress from infection of the general public. It was interesting to read Shaviros analysis of zombies even being ambiguous in the sense of friend or foe. We can see them as both a deadly horrifying plague and a cleansing of our ills in society.
Lastly, Shaviro analyzes the messages behind Romero's "living dead" trilogy. There is so much happening in this realm that it is hard to write it all out. In many instances the zombies serve as a horrific interpretation of the viewer being a "zombie" in society. Aimlessly going from place to place, we try to quell our insatiable greed and lust for consumer goods. Romero even disbands the typical macho hero stereotype for a more left-wing interpretation where the heroes are unlikely candidates (black men/white women) that use plans and reasoning to survive. The macho stereotypes in the trilogies are dismembered before us, showing a distaste for the run and gun tactics usually employed by other heroes. Romero even critiques the nuclear family image by having death and destruction break it down. Eventually, the daughter from Night rises up as a zombie and promptly devours her parents signaling an end to the family structure in its entirety.
Shaviro does an excellent analysis of Romero’s movies. Near the very beginning he says, “What can it mean for the dead to walk again? The question is discussed endlessly in the three films, but no firm conclusion is ever reached.” I think part of what makes these movies scary is the unknown. Many methods of explanation (from science to something spiritual) are explored in the movies but none are able to bring a resolve.
ReplyDeleteIn Night of The Living Dead, the nuclear family is emphasized. The parents are overbearing and the zombies are a natural response to this family structure. The cycle of rebellion against this norm is complete when the young girl finally turns into a zombie and consumes her parents.
Shaviro talks of the social commentary on capitalism. Zombies are victims of capitalism, which is driven by consumerism. In a capitalist society, people contribute to society depending on how productive they are. Getting caught in a mindless rut where people drone on daily trying to get the next dollar or newest object. Zombies are the perfect embodiment of this idea, mindlessly droning along trying to get what they want.