Dawn of the Dead: The Fantasy of Having It All to Yourself

by Thomas L. Vaultonburg

I've probably watched George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead a hundred times. It's one of my favorite movies, and at this point I don't really watch it to find things wrong with it. I know its peculiarities, its rhythms, its characters, and most of its dialogue. It's an old friend.

Tonight I'm watching it by candlelight, on a day when a series of technological breakdowns has reminded people how fragile the systems supporting modern civilization might be. Airports, computers, communications, transportation. We construct an elaborate world of interdependent systems and then act surprised when something stops working.

It's an appropriate evening to watch the end of civilization.

And for the first time in perhaps a hundred viewings, I'm thinking about Dawn of the Dead less as a horror movie than as a fantasy.

The film's criticism of consumerism is so familiar that it hardly needs explaining. The dead return to the shopping mall because some residual instinct draws them there. They wander the corridors, ride the escalators, and congregate around the stores, performing the rituals of consumption without any understanding of what they're doing. The satire is broad, funny, and effective. The zombies are us, stripped of whatever intellectual and spiritual qualities we imagine distinguish us from creatures governed entirely by appetite and habit.

But there's another fantasy operating beneath this criticism, and Romero doesn't seem especially interested in mocking it.

What if you could have the entire shopping mall to yourself?

Not just visit it. Own it. Every restaurant, every department store, every piece of clothing, every television, every bottle of liquor. No prices, no lines, no opening or closing hours, no bosses, no bills, and nobody telling you that you can't have something.

For a considerable portion of Dawn of the Dead, this is precisely what the surviving characters experience. And Romero seems to enjoy it every bit as much as they do.

The scenes of the survivors exploring their new kingdom are among the most pleasurable in the movie. They eat, drink, play games, try on clothes, and furnish their private living quarters. The music is playful. The atmosphere is frequently closer to comedy than horror. For a little while, the end of civilization looks like the greatest shopping spree in human history.

And the remarkable thing is that nobody has to buy anything.

This is where the film's two ideas become particularly interesting. Romero is clearly satirizing consumerism, but his characters have escaped the economic machinery that makes consumerism possible. They no longer need jobs, salaries, credit cards, or bank accounts. They possess the products of an entire civilization without having to participate in the system that produced them.

It's consumer capitalism without capitalism.

And it's a wonderful fantasy.

Eventually, of course, the survivors become restless and unhappy. Their luxurious refuge begins to resemble a prison. But I'm not convinced that Romero is suggesting material abundance itself has made them miserable. They're living through the extinction of humanity. Their friends and families are dead. They have no idea whether the world outside their walls will ever be safe again. It would be remarkable if they weren't miserable.

The mall, meanwhile, has provided them with comfort, security, amusement, and a temporary escape from the catastrophe outside. It has done practically everything they could reasonably ask of it.

Then the bikers arrive, and the fantasy comes apart. Not because the survivors have discovered the moral emptiness of material possessions, but because somebody else wants what they have.

I don't offer any of this as criticism of Romero. Quite the opposite. I think Dawn of the Dead is a masterpiece, and one of the reasons I can watch it for the hundredth time is that it contains pleasures and contradictions that aren't exhausted by its obvious message.

Romero makes fun of people who spend their lives wandering shopping malls, but he also understands the delicious appeal of having one entirely to yourself. He doesn't seem particularly embarrassed by that appeal, either. He invites us to share it.

Maybe that's why the film has always felt strangely comforting to me. Beneath the violence, the disintegration of society, and the walking dead, there's a little boy's dream of being locked inside the world's biggest toy store after everyone else has gone home.

Tonight, with candles burning and the machinery of modern civilization looking a little less dependable than it did yesterday, I find myself appreciating that dream all over again.

Not the end of the world, necessarily.

Just having the place to myself.

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