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Popular Culture Review
brains, it makes sense to see this critique of capitalism play itself out in one
other manner as well.
In the fourth—and most ethically and politically complex—of
Romero’s six zombie movies, Land o f the Dead (2005), the tables have been
turned completely and, morally speaking, we end up on the side of the zombies.
Like with all good zombies, the movement is slow. At first, when the film
begins, we are ready to fear the zombies and take joy in their being killed in new
and creative ways—the hallmark of any good zombie movie. But little by little,
it becomes clear in Land o f the Dead that the humans are the evil creatures.
Slowly, we come to identify with the zombies and are forced to confront the
question of who deserves to continue existing in the end.
The movie starts out with a scene that slyly sets up the twist to come.
Some humans have gone out to the zombie-infested suburbs. They crouch in the
foliage near a gas station, spying on the zombies with binoculars. When two
zombies accidentally step on the air hose causing a bell to ring in the gas station,
a zombie attendant comes out as if to provide service to a car. The humans
remark:
First Speaker: They’re trying to be us.
Second Speaker: No. They used to be us. They’re learning
how to be us again.
First: No way....There’s a big difference between us and
them. They’re dead. It’s like they’re pretending to be alive.
Second: Isn’t that what we’re doing? Pretending to be alive?
We, too, are just going through the motions, to be sure. But to admit
this is not fundamentally different than our realization that we are the mallwalkers in the earlier film. What makes Land o f the Dead stand out is that the
particular motions through which we are going are so debased and so lacking of
any moral foundation, it becomes increasingly difficult to root for the human
survivors.
The humans we see watching the zombies through binoculars at the gas
station are not afraid of these zombies. They are not even really hiding from
them. Instead, the humans have purposefully come to where the zombies are in
order to kill them, raid the local stores for food and supplies, and take the spoils
back to a walled-in city inside a protective zone that is zombie-free. Land o f the
Dead thus works on the level of a sort of allegory for empire and colonialism.
The heroes leave their home, pillage the natural resources of the foreign land,
kill the locals (whom they deem sub-human), and return once again with the
booty. Like all colonial rulers, those with the power far away are actually
dependent on maintaining the oppression of their subjects, and this necessarily
involves dehumanizing them. Back in the human city, we thus are not surprised
to find zombies chained up so that humans can pay to have their picture taken