Land of the Dead
(George A. Romero, Canada/France/US)

By Michael Sicinski

It could take days, maybe weeks, to read Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Hardt and Negri’s Empire, and watch The Battle of Algiers (1965) and Gunner Palace (2004). And of course, it would be time well spent. (Well, maybe not watching Gunner Palace, a documentary so eager to be down with the boys in uniform that it’s never willing to take a stand.) But you could save some time, and probably have more fun, by going to see Land of the Dead instead. The latest from George A. Romero is, predictably, a right-on-time communiqué pertaining to the guerres du jour, those being waged on the poor in Bush’s dis-United States and in the Middle East. Land of the Dead does precisely what any good political film should do—it connects “here” and “elsewhere.” It brings the war home. But part of its acuity is its willingness to plunge headlong into the ambiguities of democracy-at-gunpoint. Land of the Dead is about the need to make clear distinctions and the increasing impossibility of doing so. Just as the exportation of good government today means drawing legalistic Maginot Lines between, say, kicking the Koran and flushing it down the toilet, Romero’s 21st century is, in essence, the dawn of a new dead era, in which “zombie” is less a firm designation than a point along a continuum of rot.

This represents a shift in strategy for Romero. Part of why Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978) were rightly hailed as B-movie masterworks is because they functioned so nicely as allegories. Night was a national reckoning with Vietnam; Dawn was a critique of suburban consumerism. This is the strand that Zach Snyder’s Dawn 2004 remake picks up and runs with in the most obvious terms possible, playing up shopping-mall kitsch in order to goose the under-16 set (who were, naturally, watching the film inside a mall). From early Romero to Snyder, we can observe the decay of the allegorical impulse, its reduction to the kind of one-to-one correspondences that Land of the Dead confounds. Since the zombies in the earlier films were fairly clear stand-ins for a different kind of problem, questions of identity or burgeoning zombie subjectivity were skirted.

Dawn of the Dead is the perfection of this mode. Inside the plot, zombies are things to extinguish, because they will eat you. Meta-textually, they are the self-propelled operation of a single concept, lumbering allegorical tropes. And, perhaps most importantly, they were good for target practice. But Romero executed this B-movie logic with a stripped-down elegance. The premise allowed for meticulous, task-oriented action sequences that played out along the skittering surface of the subtext. It was Bressonianism with entrails, or better yet, Grand Union minimalist choreography as viewed through a rifle scope. All body, all tissue, all in a single space with a single meaning.

Day of the Dead (1985), usually seen as the weak link in the series, comes out the other side, as all bullets eventually do. Shrill and nihilistic, the film stages the complete breakdown of civilization as a claustrophobic shouting match punctuated by the sweet relief of disembowelment. The us/them opposition has become delusional: human beings were zombies, end of story. But in 2005, flipping the script won’t cut it, and Romero clearly understands this. Perhaps this change in perspective was a response to last year’s Shaun of the Dead (2004), which re-invested the zombie scenario with existential heft. Despite being played for comedy, Shaun refutes walking-dead anonymity by forcing its protagonist to watch his loved ones turn. The result is that an individual (living) human has to step up and face his own destiny. Romero expressed admiration for Shaun, and its director and star are awarded with cameos in Land of the Dead. But Romero, social critic that he is, isn’t content to leave the future to charismatic individuality.

Instead, he plunges us into zombie dialectics. Land of the Dead isn’t about private grief: It is about the need to contend with fundamental definitions. Some of this is announced quite explicitly. “Look at them, pretending to be alive,” one soldier marvels. Riley (Simon Baker), the downcast pragmatist and anonymous Everyman, retorts, “Isn’t that what we’re doing?” Throughout the film, boundaries are established and then blurred, deemed impregnable only to be traversed. Some of this is physical, as when Riley’s sharpshooter sidekick Charlie (Robert Joy) is introduced—at first we mistake his blind open eye for the blank gaze of zombiedom. But much of it has to do with subtexts and situations that remain indeterminate and unclear. Some critics have found fault with the film on these grounds, but it’s clearly an ethical position Romero is staking out. The “zombie problem” is about facing the limits of our understanding.

For example, a bread-and-circuses street carnival features direct visual quotations from Abu Ghraib, with chained zombies arranged in humiliating poses while guilelessly cruel Americans get their pictures taken with them. Are the zombies invaders, or the invaded? Soon after, we glimpse a concession booth operated by two women engaged in open-mouthed kissing. A zombie then breaks in, stage right, and begins chowing down on them. This scene has given some leftist viewers pause—have the zombies come to restore some “natural order,” or are they perhaps Qutb-inspired Islamists out to curtail Western decadence? (This would parallel the horrifying moment in The Battle of Algiers when young militants beat the crap out of an Algerian wino.) Or was the dead guy just trying to get a bite to eat?

It is not a flaw that Land of the Dead fails to keep these ideological strands straight, because doing so has become increasingly impossible. And yet, the complete unfathomability of the zombies gives way to a kind of transformation and achievement of a higher state, a Hegelian sublation. We get to know one nameless zombie, later identified in the credits as “Big Daddy” (Eugene Clark), a former gas-station attendant and middle-aged black man, now just “walking dead.” We follow him as he bears witness to the desecration of the dead by the living, prompting him to howl in rage. We watch him learn to handle weapons, and eventually teach other zombies to do the same. Regardless of his or any other zombie’s past, they are now united for one purpose—to eke out survival with as much dignity as their material situation allows. Romero is staging nothing less than the rise of the Multitude, as per Hardt and Negri’s theory of global revolt. Eventually, class antagonisms, racial divides, and national borders will all become moot, as the masses tap into a single-minded agenda for overcoming oppression. Like the zombies, the Multitude looks from the outside like the absolute Other. Comprised of rebels and insurgents across the globe, the Unified Dead simply will not compute in the minds of the living, whose last thought when the revolution comes knocking might well be, “Why am I suddenly so irresistibly delicious?”

In this regard, the combination of intra-American antagonisms with clear echoes of Iraq makes perfect sense. Romero is at pains to show us that on either front, we’re in the midst of the same Total War, a battle to make the world safe for the super-rich at any human cost. Dennis Hopper’s thug/politico/real-estate mogul lords it over a fortified American zone, with roving patrols pillaging for resources and attempting to subdue the locals. The film’s double-movement of confounded ideology is summed up in Hopper’s private tank, dubbed “Dead Reckoning.” Like all army doublespeak, it’s a name designed to read well in the media, a catchy tagline. (“Our machine is the behemoth that the dead must reckon with.”) But in fact, it gives itself away. Fighting the zombies, like the Iraq misadventure, is one wild stab in the dark after another, for an unclear, never-ending purpose.

And this leads to one other supposed fault of Land of the Dead, the lack of a summative, kick-ass battle royale. Romero fails to deliver on the action-movie promise of more guns, more gore, and some definitive social statement that, like the allegories of the preceding films, would tell us where we have to go. I am sympathetic to complaints that the film peters out, but I think this is necessary and intentional. As Riley sadly observes, gazing across the battlefield and locking eyes with his undead opposite number, the gas-station attendant, “They’re just looking for somewhere to be.” There can be no conclusive final battle, only a plangent recognition that the struggle continues, that the dead and the living must somehow share the earth. In other words, when it comes to zombies, there’s no exit strategy, and no timetable for withdrawal. Suitably enough, the conclusion of Land of the Dead brings us full-circle. Gulf War 2005, like Vietnam 1968, leads Romero to propose the most logical solution for those eager to remain human: head for Canada.

Land of the Dead

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