When they are attacked by a biker gang, the group reacts in a classically individualistic mode. Stephen says “it’s ours, we took it,” referring to the the mall and all its resources. Instead of working together, the two different groups fight each other and both end in a bad situation. The biker gang is destroyed by the zombies, and Stephen also becomes a zombie. Because the two competing groups do not display communitarian tendencies, Fran and Peter are finally forced to flee the temporary consumerist paradise of the mall.
Communitarian Impulse
In Day of the Dead, the zombie threat has evolved to a near complete takeover of the world, and we see a group of scientists and soldiers holed up in a bunker in an effort to survive. Sarah, one scientist, hopes to solve the problem by curing the zombie virus, while Dr. Logan, another scientist, tries to figure out how to train the zombies not to kill living people (or not just any living people; it is suggested that there may be profitable military applications for domesticated zombies).
We feel more sympathy for the zombies in Day than in any of Romero’s previous films. For one thing, they are rounded up and subjected to scientific experiments that are very uncomfortable to watch. The more individualistic characters do not feel sympathy for the zombie plight, while the communitarian hero, Sarah, does. The soldiers are only able to feel sympathy when it is one of their own who is being experimented on. Again, the individualistic instinct only allows you to connect with those like you—a fatal flaw. All of the soldiers are eventually eaten by zombies, while Sarah, and two other communitarian characters, John and McDermott, survive to leave the bunker. The zombies, meanwhile, are beginning to show startling new abilities. As Dr. Logan says, “it’s the beginning of civil behavior”—the zombies begin to demonstrate the capacity to develop their own social contract. We root for “Bub” the zombie to destroy Captain Rhodes, leader of the soldiers, at the end because Rhodes has demonstrated such nasty individualistic tendencies.
Land of the Dead, the most recent film in the series, explores another aspect of the problems with the Hobbesian social contract. The movie begins with the quote “if these people ever learn to think, to reason in any way, the outcome will be disastrous.” This could be a Rousseauian statement made by someone watching humans coming out of a state of nature. Jean-Jacques Rousseau argues in On the Origin of Inequality (1754) that as soon as humans reasoned and formed societies, vanity and civilization were born and brought man to a corrupt state. In Land, the corrupt state is the result of a social contract born out of individualism.
In Land, we see that the zombies have clearly taken over, but pockets of people have formed city-fortresses, and some semblance of order has been restored. Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), the leader of one of these cities, organizes a social contract that puts him at the top of a very strict hierarchy—exactly as Hobbes would predict would happen with a contract born of fear—and becomes the Leviathan. Only wealthy white people can live in “Fiddler’s Green,” where they are fed very well and live in beautiful apartments. They are isolated from the zombie threat, and also from the unkempt poor who are housed in the slums surrounding Fiddler’s Green. Kaufman and his minions provide vices such as prostitution and extreme (if unsophisticated) gladiatorial games for the poor to keep them distracted. For example, we are introduced to Slack, a communitarian hero, when she is thrown into a cage with hungry zombies. Surrounding the cage are poor people cheering the zombies on in a manner reminiscent of the Roman arenas where Christians were fed to the lions. When the poor begin to organize, Kaufman either has them imprisoned or killed. The Tambourine Man, who has been leading protests in the streets, is very quickly rounded up and put in prison (Slack is thrown in the zombie cage because she worked with the Tambourine Man).
Kaufman has also enlisted people to serve in a makeshift military to defend the city and its surrounding environs from the zombies. In his military we find Cholo, a Hispanic individualist, who risks and ultimately loses the life of one of his men to bring back liquor to Kaufman to secure a place in Fiddler’s Green. This loss of life is the result of an individualistic instinct and gains Cholo nothing (Kaufman refuses him, implicitly because he is Hispanic).
The communitarian Riley also serves in Kaufman’s military. Unlike his colleague, Riley works to make the world a better place for people immediately around him. He strives to bring back goods to the poor people, and saves as many people as possible while putting his own life at risk. The people he saves (Slack, for example) eventually become his community. Riley is rewarded for these choices in this movie when he is able to leave the corrupt city successfully. Note that his community is not formed out of fear but from a mutual bond to make the world a better place. We are led to think that this community might actually be better when Riley tells the Tambourine Man, who gains control of the city after the zombies topple its leadership, that leading the city the way he wants will result in more of the same corruption suffered under Kaufman’s regime. The message is that a contract based on the survivalist motive of fear cannot sustain itself and will eventually collapse under the weight of its own individualist contradictions.
The other communitarian leader in the movie, interestingly enough, is a zombie. We are introduced to Big Daddy during a raid on a town controlled by zombies, when he displays sympathy for other zombies who are distracted by fireworks and mowed down by Kaufman’s military. This also evokes Rousseau’s social contract, as developed in On the Social Contract (1762), based on something he calls the general will. Rousseau argues that people do not form communities because we are afraid, but that we connect to each other because of a common bond—that is, a communitarian contract. Big Daddy and the zombies demonstrate this type of social contract when they stop focusing on the fireworks and eating human flesh, and focus on working together to bring down the Leviathan. Watching the zombies organize is like watching an emergence from a state of nature into a social contract. Like Riley, they form a mutual bond to survive, and their contract is similarly based on community rather than individual needs. By the end of the movie, as a result, the Undead form a more sympathetic community than the living inhabitants of the city. They take out Fiddler’s Green, and we root for them as they do so. We are thus left with two communitarian heroes: Riley and Big Daddy, who base their contract not on fear but on communitarian ties.
Importance of Community Connection
One theme that plays out in all of Romero’s movies is the “us versus them” attitude that develops when the original social contract falls apart. The introduction of the zombie threat causes all people to become completely individually driven. Thus the live people begin to see themselves in compartmentalized groups as well. Night demonstrates this when Cooper refuses to help anyone that is not his family. In Dawn a SWAT team officer calls the poor people living in the projects “spics” and “niggers.” Throughout Day the all-white soldiers refer to the other characters in racist language, and their conversation is overlaid with a distrust and suspicion of science and intellectuals; in addition, they constantly subject Sarah to sexual harrassment. In Land the wealthy white people who live in Fiddler’s Green have pushed the poor minorities out into the city’s outskirts.
In all these movies, the implosion of the governing authority brought on by the zombie threat causes people to revert to a “protect your own” mentality. This is the basest individualistic tendency, and it is not a sympathetic position in any of Romero’s films. Each, except arguably Night, demonstrates the fatal flaw of not working together as the individualistic heroes die and the communitarian heroes survive (and even in Night there is the vague suggestion that Ben’s abandonment of his communitarian ideals somehow precipitates—if only because it precedes—his death at the hands of the living mob).
Though Tocqueville argues that we need to join groups to begin our deliberative democracy, to fuel communitarian tendencies, we cannot simply join groups where everyone looks like us. Indeed, Romero’s films dramatize our need to connect across a diverse range
of people in order to survive. Throughout, those groups that exhibit isolationist, racist, and other exclusionary tendencies—the rednecks in Night, the biker gang in Dawn, the soldiers in Day, and the white wealthy people in Land—fare poorly.
Another marker of individualistic chauvinism is the inappropriate laughter, elation, and general sense of superiority that attends the living’s treatment of the Undead: in Night, vigilante hicks treat the mass shooting of zombies like a hoedown; in Dawn, the bikers make a macabre game of killing zombies when they invade the mall (to the perverse accompaniment of pie-throwing and circus music); and in Land, the urban poor set up humiliating “have your photo taken with a zombie” amusement stands.
These individualistic travesties do not present a pretty picture of human nature, and for Romero, the arrogance they represent is the path to destruction. Conversely, his communitarian heroes are notable for their compassion and empathy. They are leaders who understand that cooperation and not fear of others is the only way to survive. Ben in Night says we need to work together and help each other, not hide in the basement while someone is screaming upstairs. Peter stays with Roger until the very end and is the one who shoots him (reluctantly) when he comes back as a zombie in Dawn. Sarah in Day asks “Why can’t we just work together?” when faced with the soldiers’ threat of death. Riley in Land leaves Big Daddy and his fellow zombies alone, saying, “They’re just looking for a place to go, just like us.” Throughout these movies, the message is that the communitarian tendency is the preferable position.
No Way Out
And yet this pro-communitarian message might appear to be complicated in a number of ways. In Night of the Living Dead, Romero kills off all the characters, on both the individualistic and the communitarian side, intimating that the question has long since lost relevance in our thinking. Romero himself has commented in interviews that what is most scary is one’s neighbors. Thus the fact that zombies are the people we know makes them even scarier.
Is it Ben’s communitarianism or his individualism that enables him to survive the longest? And which, if either, is most relevant to his ultimate destruction? The suggestion in Night is that these two driving concepts in American political thought have wiped each other out, leading to a bureaucratization of our lives. This bureaucratization, symbolized by the police that kill Ben at the end of the film, has numbed our sense of individualism and made it impossible to connect in any real way. Ben’s “success” is casually ended by an overwhelming apparatus, and presumably his heroic story is lost forever.
Although Night seems to offer an ambiguous understanding as to what is actually the better tendency, individualism or communitarianism, the rest of the movies in the series make a clear case for commitment to a communitarian-based social contract. Indeed, the zombies in Land provide the perfect example of a community working and making decisions together in an effort to save their world. For Tocqueville, this is exactly what a democracy needs: a system which allows all members of the community to be accountable for what happens to each other.
The Romero Dead films ultimately depict the communitarian social contract as preferable to one based on pure individualism. If there are still some irresolvable contradictions—if it is not clear whether Land, for example, should be interpreted as a nightmare vision of the inevitability of Hobbesian totalitarianism, as a Rousseauian rejection of civilization outright, or as a hopeful Tocquevillian gesture toward democratic equality—it still appears clear that even if Romero no longer believes in the viability of communitarianism as a “way out” for humanity, he nevertheless believes it was once the right choice to make.
PART V
Leaving a Good-Looking Corpse
18
The Fear of Fear Itself: The Philosophy of Halloween
NOËL CARROLL
Halloween: The Festival of the Wandering Undead
Halloween is the night of the living dead. In all likelihood, the festival originated in Ireland where it was celebrated on November 1st, Samhain, which was, for the ancient Celts, the first day of winter, the season of death.
According to legend, on Samhain, the souls of all those who had died in the previous year gather from hither and yon to enter the otherworld. The living would put out food, drink, and other offerings to placate the traveling souls of the dead, perhaps to expiate any wrongs that they had done to them. Bonfires were lit and recently harvested food was fed to the flames as a sacrifice.
This should sound somewhat familiar to you. For it is very probable that the practice of going from door to door dressed as skeletons, vampires, zombies, ghosts, mummies, ghouls, Frankenstein’s monster, and other assorted living dead in the expectation of receiving candy, money, and the like is a re-enactment of the itinerary of the wandering Undead on Samhain.
Catholic missionaries penetrated Ireland in the fifth century, entering into competition with the indigenous Druidic religion of the Celts. But rather than attempting to stamp out Samhain entirely, they appropriated it. In accordance with a strategy developed by Pope Gregory the Great, Catholic missionaries melded their myths with the local ones. In this way, pagan fertility imagery, like painted eggs and rabbits, was dragooned into the iconography of Easter, and pre-Christian symbols, like the Germanic Tannenbaum, were re-identified as trees of special significance to Jesus. In Ireland, Samhain became All Saints Day—the day in which all those saints without feast days of their own were honored—and the day after that—November 2nd—became All Soul’s Day, a day, like Samhain, dedicated to all of the souls of the departed. Though now in Catholic vestments, these days were still marked as belonging to death and winter as clearly as Easter is associated with spring and rebirth.
Halloween, of course, is the day before All Saints Day. Saints, needless to say, are hallowed. So, “Halloween,” in other words, is “All Hallows Eve,” or more archaically, “All Hallows’ Even,” which was shortened to “Halloween.”
The Catholic missionaries also re-described the gods of the Druids as demons, devils, fairies, goblins, and monsters, and their priests and devotees as witches and wizards. Their kingdom was identified as the underworld. So, on Samhain, that enchanted moment on the seam between two seasons, the gates of hell are opened not only to receive the wandering dead but also, in the process, to loose onto the world the denizens of the domain of death, including devils, demons of every monstrous shape, and witches, not to mention the prisoners of the underworld—ghosts and other Undead in every manner of degeneration from the horrifically mutilated, fraying, and decaying to bone-dry skeletons. This is, of course, a cast of characters whom you already know, even if you never heard of Samhain. In their trail, evil and chaos reigns.
This superstitious belief then was given embodiment by mummers and maskers who, dressed like the minions of hell, go from door to door exacting tribute. For whenever the Undead appear, they typically want something from the living. When the Irish emigrated to America, they brought this custom with them, and they came in such large numbers that it became a national theme. As I recall the Halloweens of my youth, it is easy to re-imagine them as visions of hellish chaos—with piles of autumn leaves burning in the twilight, and clusters of witches and skeletons and ghosts scurrying madly in every direction, driven by too much sugar.
The predominant imagery of Halloween revolves around death. The most traditional costumes allude to the wandering dead—ghosts, ghouls, skeletons, and so forth. The devil, of course, is the lord of the dead and witches are his missionaries. Since they are often members in good standing in the league of the living dead, many movie monsters are naturals—or, perhaps more aptly, supernaturals—for Halloween masking, including the Mummy, Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, zombies, and so on. Likewise, any demon from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, especially perhaps from the episode devoted to Halloween, is ripe for masquing.
In fact all manner of monsters can inspire Halloween mumming—even those who hail from outer space—since they would fit into the Christian redefinition of th
e Halloween universe as demons, soldiers of Satan’s armies of hell. Of course, not every costume on Halloween is monstrous. But what is nevertheless very striking is that so many of the most frequently recurring ones are connected to the realm of the Undead in one way or another. Over three-fourths of the Halloween outfits and masks at my local costume shop were of monsters, most of them of the Undead variety.
Halloween decorations also invoke death imagery. The Jack O’Lantern refers to an Undead trickster—a blacksmith named Jack—who, having been exiled from both heaven and hell—wanders the world, some say with his head in his hand. Dummies—sometimes scarecrows, perhaps to ward off carrion feeders—are often set up or hung from porches, and they are joined by effigies of witches, ghosts, corpses, and, more recently, movie monsters. Mock spider webs, replete with rubber arachnids, imitate the interiors of crypts, while various vegetables, like cobs of corn, are hung on doorways. Often these vegetables are already in a state of deterioration, reminding onlookers that they were mowed down in the recent harvest. Leaves, already in the colors of autumn decay, are everywhere, whether intentionally or not. And, of course, there are cut-outs of Halloween figures like witches and ghosts plastered on windows, blackboards, and the like.
Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy Page 24