After seeing Dawn of the Dead(1978), images of zombies biting flesh of the living kept flashing across my mind. The film's horrifying, disgusting, gruesome, brutal, violent, appalling but still it's brilliantly droll and funny(I laughed a few times at the zombies' stupidity and Ha! The water ketchup throughout the film... after all, it's a production from 70s!).
It's a mysteriously plague that sweeps across the nation, causing thousands of dead to rise and roam the land. Driven by an insatiable hunger, they compete tearing the flesh of the living. It's disgusting! (Think of sitting there for 2 hours watching zombies tearing human flesh from their limbs... I'm one of the few people who could stay through the whole film). But despite all these, what makes me can't shake it off is the sickness of a consumer society. In the film, the zombies are destroyed wholesale in all sorts of terrible ways, but that doesn't affect us so much after awhile. They aren't being killed, after all: They're already dead. They're even a little comic, lurching about a shopping center and trying to plod up the down escalator. The director Romero teases us with these passages of humor.
But oh god how many sicknesses and maladies in this world must I see before something can be done about it? I'm sick of it! Having worked on my paper about the commodification and globalization of hip hop culture, my only conclusion is that many of us are just stupid. In this age people are better in manipulating new technologies to create new possibilities and thus have connection to the outside world. But as soon as they have all the information out there, they are at the same time absorbed within it. TRAPPED I say! They read stuff and take everything without filtration, without questions.
My generation is probably the first to have a wider view about the world. But it's not necessarily a more critical view.
Pathetic!
Dawn of the Dead(1978) :
When there is no more room from the hell, the dead will walk the earth."
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