Shop Till You Drop... Dead!
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The notion of the "consumer zombie" has become an element of common culture, particularly during the intense sales period that starts with Black Friday in the USA. An unfortunate concept that has taken root over the past few years in the UK, where previously sales madness didn't traditionally start until Boxing Day (December 26th). We've all seen the news stories on TV of frenetic shoppers massed outside department stores and shopping malls, baying for bargains. Drooling at the thought of grabbing up a cut-price consumer product, some much so that they will trample over each other to get to the front. TV viewers sit open-mouthed in disbelief as normally rational people turn into hordes of rabid consumer zombies.
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These "zombies" are not exactly the slow moving classic zombies of George A. Romero's Dawn Of The Dead (1978). They aren't exactly roaming aimlessly through malls, arms extended, blank emotionless expressions on their faces. Attracted to the mall as some kind of remnant of their passed existence draws them there. These are a 21st century zombies, foaming at the mouth with rage in their eyes, like those in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002). Zombies consumed by a virus, who want nothing but to consume the flesh of non-consumers, turning them into consumers like them. So they too become consumed by the virus, and the unstoppable urge to consume. Symbolising a seemingly unstoppable cycle of self-referential consumption, like the ancient symbol of the Ouroboros (the tail-eating serpent). Constantly re-creating itself, a primordial force that has existed from the beginning so powerful that it can never be extinguished. An awakening of the instinctive libidinal Kundalini serpent, coiling its way up our spine to our Sahasrara Chakra. Free from illusion, are we simply reduced to mindless consuming zombies? Is this our true state?
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Is the recent rise in the popularity of zombies, a reflection on how we see ourselves? Have they always reflected back to us an unconscious nod to a hidden part of our psyche? The earliest zombie movies like White Zombie (1932) and I Walked With A Zombie (1943) showed zombies not as the cannibalistic creatures of later movie representations, but as slaves under a spell. The terror that these zombies represented wasn't that of being killed by them, but of becoming trapped as one of them. Enslaved through the trickery of an all controlling master, these zombies where a reflection on Western colonialism. Both the fear of the other, and our desire to have control over them. The horror being in our fear of losing control to the malevolent other, yet knowing that the true malevolence has always been ourselves.
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Night of the Living Dead (1968), was the first movie to feature the flesh-eating zombie we have become so accustomed to seeing. The movie is an allegory about the attitudes in the south of the USA to Civil Rights movement, and a critique on the media representation of the violence of the Vietnam War. By the time Romero came to make Dawn Of The Dead in 1978 the allegorical nature of his work had shifted to represent for the first time the "consumer zombie". Zombies, unconsciously by pure habitual instinct descending on the shopping mall. Still harking back to the enslaved representation of zombies from earlier movies, now they are stripped of any ability to hide their true nature as slaves to capitalism. A shuffling representation of both an oppressed social group and until Romero an ignored and forgotten class of cinematic monster.
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Black Friday shoppers from 2012?
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Dawn Of The Dead zombies from 1978?
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Then there's the double-whammy irony of the "survivors" making the shopping mall their place of refuge. That they battle with the zombies to control the consumer space for themselves, and later in the movie against the bikers who too want the shopping mall for themselves. There is only the shopping mall, it represents the whole of civil and uncivilised society existing simultaneously in one place. That there is only a thin piece of glass between us and them, the civilised and uncivilised, the zombies and us. That in fact those empty staring eyes, and their hands futilely pawing at the glass pane of the department store doors is a mirror. A mirror that like the magic mirror in Snow White can only reflect back to us the reality of our true nature. That no matter how much we protest that we are better than that, that we aren't one of those kind of people, we all are to some greater or lesser extent consumer zombies.
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Monroeville: Mall Of The Dead - The biggest character in the cult zombie horror Dawn Of The Dead, the shopping mall, located just 10 miles east of Pittsburgh, PA.
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Vintage Fairs: Just Over-Priced Jumble Sales - The vintage vultures are circling, picking off the last remnants of flesh from our consumer culture bones.
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