Land of the Dead
A Review by John David Ebert

The image of the walking dead is not a new one, but goes back all the way to the dawn of civilization in ancient Mesopotamia. In the Sumerian poem known as “Nergal and Ereshkigal,” for example, the goddess of the underworld, Ereshkigal, threatens to reverse the natural cycle of life whereby the living are transformed into the dead unless her lover Nergal, who has tried to flee from her embraces, is returned to her by force. “If you do not send that god to me,” she says, “According to the rites of Erkalla and the great earth, I shall raise up the dead, and they will eat the living. I shall make the dead outnumber the living!”
Thus, the fear of the return of the dead is at least as old as civilization, but we may suspect that it is even older, as evidenced by the custom of placing heavy stones on the grave of the dead in order to prevent them from rising again. The fear of the vengeance of the dead even survives into the modern day in the form of our Halloween customs, in which the masked beings that we dress our children up to resemble are an echo of the idea that the ancient dead, the Ancestors, are reborn to us in the form of our children, and unless they are bribed with gifts, will cause us some mischief.

The myth of the zombie, in particular, comes to us from the island world of the Caribbean — the word “cannibal” in fact is etymologically related to “Carib” — where a fusion of Native American traditions with the imported customs of the African Voodoo cult took place. The word “zombie” is based on the Arawak word “zemi,” meaning spirit or god, while the myth of the zombie proper belongs to the traditions of Haitian voodoo. The zombie is simply an image of a person whose physical body has been reanimated after death, but whose soul has been captured by a magician, who can then order it to perform certain tasks.

That the image of the walking dead, furthermore, is meant to be understood metaphorically rather than literally is confirmed for us by Walt Whitman, in whose poem “Song of Myself” modern, materialistic consumers are already compared to the walking dead: “Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking, / To feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally spooning, / Tickets buying, taking, selling, but in to the feast never once going.” The walking dead in George Romero’s four zombie films, then, are allegorical of modern day materialist ‘consumers’ for whom nothing is more important than ‘getting and spending.’ Romero made this very clear in Dawn of the Dead, with his vision of a shopping mall populated by zombies lurching about in a parody of the capitalistic end of history in which the ultimate goal of civilization has turned out to be all along merely the availability of the most goods to the largest number of people. The image of the walking dead eating human flesh, then, is a vision of the utmost debasement of the human mind, with all its higher levels and functions disintegrated, and only the reptilian brain stem, with its desire to eat and reproduce, remaining. In such a vision, only the physical body is thought to be real and so any higher animating forces of soul and spirit are simply denied. The result of living in such a way is exactly the life that Romero has pictured for us in his zombie films, for they are like X-rays taken of American consumer society, revealing it for what it really is: a shallow land of the spiritually dead who place no ideal, ethic or value higher than the dollar bill.

But since this is true of all of Romero’s zombie movies, we must ask what makes Land of the Dead — his best zombie film since Dawn of the Dead — different, as far as its internal messages go, from the others. And to that question we must answer that it is more sensitive to social hierarchy and stratification than either Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead were. For whereas Dawn of the Dead showed us how a society’s external proletariat invade and destroy it from without — pictured by the raiding motorcycle gangs who have migrated from the final frames of Fellini’s Roma to infuse Dawn of the Dead’s climax with its final apocalyptic imagery — Land of the Dead shows us how our society is being torn apart from within by its internal proletariat of disaffected masses.

For this purpose Romero invents a microcosm of a city called Fiddler’s Green, which has devolved almost to the level of a ghost town. There is only one high rise skyscraper powered by electricity, while the rest of the city has regressed to a primordial darkness. Within this skyscraper live the sheltered elite who manage to cling to their wealth under the protection of a man named Kaufman played by Dennis Hopper, who is essentially a CEO. The city itself is contained on an island, like Manhattan, and surrounded on all three sides by water, so it is (supposedly) safe from the zombies who inhabit the hinterlands beyond. The streets of the city itself are populated with the refugees from the ruined civilization that lies smoldering in the world outside. The scenario is loosely familiar from 80s movies like Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome or Escape From New York, with their visions of isolated cities as temporary refuges of negentropy against the disintegrating ruins of a shattered civilization that lies beyond them, where savages dwell. In Escape From New York, the city has become a container for imprisoning these savages, whereas in Land of the Dead it has been erected as a refuge against them.

Predictably, however, the membrane dividing ‘civilization’ from the ‘savages’ becomes more and more permeable as the plot unfolds and the zombies slowly begin to learn how to use weapons and tools just well enough to penetrate its defenses. This film differs from Romero’s other zombie movies in that here the zombies are actually learning how to figure things out and become self-reliant. Most of them, we note, are middle class wage earners like butchers and other shopkeepers, and they are lead – significantly — by a black man wearing a blue collar machinist’s outfit. Here, Romero’s metaphors begin to take on social significance as the gap between the rich and the poor slowly disintegrates and the occupants inside the skyscraper are forced to evacuate and pour out onto the city streets below, where most of them become food for the zombies. Kaufman himself is forced to leave, and he is killed in the parking garage of his building by the leader of the zombies in an image of lower class hatred against white, upper class privilege.

Romero’s X-ray of our society is accurate, for the gap between rich and poor is getting ever wider as the middle classes are melted down through ever heavier taxation, while the rich barricade themselves behind fortresses protected by private armies and pray that no one will ever become anarchic enough to take their wealth away from them. From one angle anyway, the film is an image of the victory of Nietzsche’s slave morality over master morality, of the ressentiment, that is, of the oppressed against those who hold the reins of power. The zombies in this metaphor are the bread and circus masses who are slowly tearing civilization apart brick by brick, while their rage against those whom they perceive as victimizing them builds. Romero’s vision is a an image of precisely what is going on in our society right now, and it is a disturbing one, for he shows us that it is a sick, weak, frail and decaying organism that is internally dismantling itself, like the victim of an autoimmune disorder. It is imploding upon itself into a giant black hole from out of which no light will ever shine forth again.

But this is what the internal proletariat of a disaffected society do, just as the Christians burrowing their way through ancient dying Rome tore the Empire apart from within, brick by brick, until the stage of world history was swept clean for the next great cycle to come. Romero’s film is an image of the creeping cancer that is slowly rotting the supports of our civilization and will eventually, one fine day, cause its utter collapse.