The zombie film has long been thought by some as a necrotic fetish of America’s horror-loving cinematic subculture. Images of arms reaching out of freshly-made graves and terrified teenagers running from brain-hungry flesh-eating deceased neighbors generally come to mind when thinking about zombie movies. The more gruesome, the better the film is in the zombie world and nothing is sacred. You can expect to find humans torn limb from limb and innocent people having their guts ripped out in most zombie films. However horrifying and terrible these images are to actually picture, framing the images within a zombie film gives the gore some credibility. Films about reanimated flesh are still considered to be a part of American subculture. Movies such as Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Army of Darkness (1982) have developed large cult followings and continue to enthrall audiences viewing them for the first time (“List of Zombie Films”). Zombie flicks have made such an impact on modern culture that literary critics have also picked up on the social implications occurring within the twisted symbolism of dead flesh eating living flesh.
To begin the discussion, one must first understand what exactly a zombie is. As defined by Max Brooks in his Zombie Survival Guide,
“ZOM-BIE: (Zom׳be) n. also ZOM-BIES pl. 1. An animated corpse that feeds on living human flesh. 2. A Voodoo spell that raises the dead. 3. A Voodoo snake god. 4. One who moves or acts in a daze ‘like a zombie.’ [A word of West African origin]”
Brooks goes on to tell readers that “Zombism is irreversible with no treatment” (Brooks 1,4). Throughout cinematic history, zombie films have run the gammot from grotesque and frivolous to taking on a very socio-economic-political agenda. When George A. Romero began his zombie odyssey in 1968 with Night of the Living Dead he had the goal of raising social awareness by raising the dead. By the time the eighties came around, zombie films were at their height of gore and frivolity with films like the Evil Dead trilogy and Dead Alive (“List of Zombie Films”). Currently in the late nineties and early two thousands zombie films have moved away from absurd plots and mindless dialogue and have reclaimed their position of the socially conscientious and critical film and have been put in a place of great cultural importance. In 2006 director Andrew Currie embarked on a new zombie film tradition with Fido. Zombie films have classically been considered social critiques on modern culture and Fido is no different. However, Fido inverts the zombie tradition of equalization and in an effort to satirize modern economic crises and consumerism, becomes a class-structured film contradicting the previous concepts of equalization, where no matter what status humans had in life, the undead occupy an office of servitude. Fido flips zombie/human roles where traditionally humans were the victims and zombies are the predators and creates a binary class system where the once-living are the shackled slaves of affluent suburban America.
Through Fido, movie-goers enjoy the comical enslavement of flesh-eating zombies, but upon deeper reflection of the film, audiences will notice a very real critique on modern capitalism and the social structure of the United States. Fido sets itself apart from other zombie films centered on apocalyptic destruction with its life-after-nuclear-war. It is an obvious parody of 1950s American suburbia with its quaint families in their quaint neighborhoods with their quaint neighbors. In the film, zombies become the new fashionable accessory—no family is complete without one much like a domestic pet. The only place in the film that controls the “zombiness” of the zombies is the ever-present conglomerate Zombcon. Without Zombcon in the film there would be nothing to stop the undead from taking every living creature with them into the flesh-eating abyss. Director Andrew Currie palimpsests on the groundbreaking cultural awakening originally started by George A. Romero with his Night of the Living Dead by adding onto what had previously been addressed in zombie films such as social inequalities. Romero struck a more poignant cultural chord with his critique on capitalism in Dawn of the Dead (1978), “Romero’s zombie’d mall stands as a symbol of the cheap, materialistic values that so often take precedence over the traditional romantic, moral, and spiritual ideals in the twentieth century” (Loudermilk 84). From Romero’s zombies at the mall to Currie’s zombie corporation, capitalism has been an ever-present element in zombie films. Even the term “zombie” has come to represent a stereotyped mindlessness in a modern “mall culture.”
Zombie films like Romero’s and Currie’s (among dozens of others) have taken their place as one of the greatest cultural and social allegories. The allegory of necrotic flesh that refuses to die (invariably one of the grossest images that come to mind) doing anything and everything in its power to destroy the living is not such a far stretch when comparing this fiction to real problems that won’t go away. Romero’s problem that wouldn’t go away in Night of the Living Dead was fear of “the other” (“the other” being open to interpretation by the audience). In his second film, Dawn of the Dead, the problem was the “pure motorized instinct [that] is what brings the living dead to Dawn’s mall,” essentially the mechanization and conformity of American culture (Loudermilk 85). In Currie’s Fido, the problem that won’t go away is the corporate tyranny being perpetuated by Zombcon. Fido’s Zombcon packages and sells their products in a manner leaving every citizen to believe that they are not complete without the commodities being sold. One question that still looms in many critical movie viewers’ minds is why use zombies as signifiers instead of tackling problems head-on in a film? Simply put, movies about actual head-on problems are viewed as one-dimensional and uninteresting to general audiences, specifically to younger demographics. Trying to get teenagers to go see a movie called “Capitalism is Ruining Our Lives, so we Should Fix it” is a much more difficult task than getting viewers to see a movie called “Dawn of the Dead.” In a way, zombie films are bringing socio-economic political awareness to the masses neatly concealed by rotting flesh and brain-hungry walking corpses. Some critics believe the gore is an unnecessary part of the larger message, but “cannibal consumerism” wouldn’t have the same meaning without actual cannibals. Without the blood and guts framing the cultural critique, the message would not be as urgent or disturbing. The audience should be just as disturbed by mindless conformity, control, and dehumanization propagated by advertising in the media as much as they should be disturbed by reanimated corpses walking the earth eating their way to domination.
Zombie Marxism
From the beginning of zombie time, the zombie has been the definitive “other” whether that other is at the root of lower class Haitian culture, or the projected image of racial or gender “others” or the embodiment of mindless ever-consuming drones, zombies have come to represent the fear of the cultural moment. The concept of the zombie goes beyond just popular films, “zombies are ghostly forebears who have arisen in periods of social disruption, periods characterized by sharp shifts in control over the fabrication and circulation of value, periods that also serve to illuminate the here and now” (Comaroff 783). This point is most evident in Night of the Living Dead released during a period of radical change that culminated with the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War in 1968. The concept of the encroaching others (in this case, the living dead) was a comment on both the real and fabricated fears of personal invasion during that cultural moment. In the case of Fido, the “shift in control” today is the failing economy and the ever-growing relentless consumption that characterizes the United States in the eyes of the rest of the world. The concept of cannibal consumption defined through zombie films is best described by the concept that “some build fortunes with the lifeblood of others” (Comaroff 787). No where is this more evident than the literal lifeblood that is capitalized on by Fido’s Zombcon and its supporters. Zombcon capitalizes on death and directly parodies the dog-eat-dog corporate ethic standards. Essentially, Fido asks where the exploitation stops.
Exploiting zombies is one thing, but what Fido asks of the audience is to critically examine what labor has come to mean in the twenty-first century. Karl Marx probably never thought his theories of economics and labor would be applied to zombies. However, the zombie has long been considered the lowest of the low in any situation and the actual enslavement in the film forces audiences to directly confront the similarities between the working class, the positions they occupy, and the concept of the zombie. In the film, the zombie workers have been stripped of all of their value they had in life and are imbued with the stigma that labor equals production without variation. Because monetary compensation has been completely removed from the equation in Fido, the zombie’s work is only worth how much labor it completes—“Labor power, therefore, is a commodity, neither more nor less than [for example,] sugar” (Marx 659). This is the purest form of labor seen throughout human history—slavery. “Zombie-making [is] the brutal reduction of others…to instruments of production; to insensible beings” is the nightmare vision behind Fido’s playful exterior (Comaroff 787). Not that the film seeks specifically to raise awareness of labor exploitation, but rather raises questions about to what extent cannibal consumption will drive humans to an oblique, zombie-like existence. The frightening situation in all of the discussion of zombies is that real people with real families working “blue collar” jobs have to deal with the fact that “the depreciation of the worker is taken into account in the same way as the depreciation of the machine” (Marx 662). Production and consumption has become so frantic and in such high demand that humans and machines are considered comparable in the corporate world and the logic is that if anyone can be replaced by a machine why continue any advancement in life? Why not just become a zombie? Not in the literal undead sense, but why put any effort into something that is just going to reduce you to something worth less than a machine could do? These problems become the fear of the dehumanizing power of capitalism. Beneath the gruesome, sometimes funny, sometimes scary exterior, loss of human identity is a real fear at the core of the zombie film.
The idea of the loss of one’s own identity in a capitalistic situation is best described by Karl Marx’s essay “Wage Labor and Capital.” Not only does Marx postulate his theories of the cold, uncaring machine that is capitalism, but he also unknowingly describes the concept of zombie labor in Fido to the last detail. The most frightening part of Marx’s uncanny description of zombie laborers is Marx’s description human laborers which draw the parallel Fido seeks to point out. Because zombie films have not previously been a commentary on labor, Currie’s film sets itself apart from other zombie film discussions with its Marxist undertones. The reduction of humans to zombies is already a poignant image in itself, but to further reduce zombies to commodities is the true loss of identity. Marx discusses the role of the laborer: “He is himself a commodity, but the labor power is not his commodity” (Marx 661). No matter what zombies (once humans) produce with their labor, they do not actually get to tangibly possess it once they have completed production. If both the laborer and the product he produces are commodities, what or who is to give one more value over the other? The allegory of the zombie laborer helps to illustrate Marx’s theories of labor because it is easier to digest fictitious beings in distress rather than actual beings in distress, “labor power is, therefore, a commodity which its possessor, the worker, sells to capital. Why does he sell it? In order to live” (Marx 660). This point is particularly comical when applied to Fido because literally, the zombies are rehabilitated with Zombcon’s zombie collars and if they do not follow orders they are shocked or disposed of. In this case, the zombies are reduced even further because they aren’t actually selling their labor to receive any kind of compensation. Their reward is not being destroyed. Although this outlook seems bleak, Fido humanizes (or at lease re-humanizes) the zombies in the end and we all love happy endings.
Labor throughout human history has always been reminiscent of the zombie labor in this discussion. And throughout time some group of people has always been exploited whether by physical enslavement or reduction to commodities, but what makes the subject of zombie labor so disquieting is the reason for the discussion—cannibal consumption—the mindless buying of products without caring about the human cost or monetary cost. “There is no such thing as capitalism sans production” and what consumers want, consumers get (Comaroff 782). “The devaluation of labor power has been a traditional response to falling profits and periodic crises of commodity production” and the integration of this concept into Currie’s film is a reflection of the modern economic crisis currently felt by the United States (Comaroff 784). Fido’s reduction of humans to zombie slaves is a call for social action from the director’s chair. The insatiable need for goods whether they are necessary or frivolous has sent tremors through the process of production from the CEOs of companies to the laborer to the consumer. John and Jean Comaroff discuss the concept of zombie labor in the twenty-first century in their essay “Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millenial Capitalism:”
There is widespread evidence of an uneasy fusion of enfranchisement and exclusion, hope and hopelessness; of a radically widening chasm between rich and poor; of the effort to realize modern utopias by decidedly post-modern means (785).
Those “modern utopias” are the corporate drive for domination—to be the best at production, development, design, and sales at the cost of the “radically widening chasm between rich and poor” (Comaroff 785). Exploitation is nothing new to the world of capitalism, but that chasm is evident in Fido where the zombies that have already lost all of their identity are at the beck and call of their owners who are all seemingly upstanding, productive, worthy individuals. Currie introduces cannibal consumption to audiences and provides an introduction to real problems through the signification of flesh-eating brain-loving zombies.
Conclusions
Although zombie films have long been dismissed as frivolous horror flicks enjoyed by subcultures with no real cultural value, upon closer inspection, zombie films really are about what is happening in society and should be given more credibility. Fido falls into the category of the socially critical film, but takes the traditional criticism a step further in order to satirize the modern economic crises and rampant consumerism evident in today’s society. In Fido the undead are not free to roam the earth and terrorize the living as they are in every movie from 28 Days Later to Planet Terror, but rather occupy positions of servitude to those who still possess pulses. Where zombie films were once about fear of the other and the unknown, Fido presents the fear of ourselves in this modern moment. Fido forces us to look critically upon issues of class and the huge influence advertising has on our lives and challenges us to do something about it. In order to not become cannibal consumers or zombies, Andrew Currie’s direction points us in the direction of compassion for the underdog in the film (that is Fido) and, in turn, compassion for the real life underdog caught in the cold, uncaring machine that is capitalism. The only real remedy for such callous tactics to get humans to consume at any cost, is to bring back compassion (if not only acknowledgement) for the human element within every business deal and every advertisement.
Fido comes at the perfect moment when American citizens have finally had it with automated phone calls and being replaced by machinery and are finally in the market for a little humanity. Companies who appeal to the fact that they care about the people they represent are the companies that are regaining trust in consumers. Where the underground movement before was to “stick it to the man” with anarchy and disdain for corporate America, the underground movement rapidly gaining popularity now is the support of local businesses and the boycotting of larger ones in an attempt to even the playing field of economic competition. Products that are “fair trade” have become more popular than products with the same quality outsourced to a foreign country, made cheaply by people who can’t afford food or shelter, and bought in American stores for cheaper than domestic-made products. Although the economy is suffering, people will pay more for products made ethically than cheap products made unethically, and although Marx would love to see his utopian dream of fair labor realized, not even in death can you escape capitalism.
Works Cited
28 Days Later. Dir. Danny Boyle. Twentieth Century Fox, 2003.
Brooks, Max. The Zombie Survival Guide. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2003.
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Comaroff, Jean; Comaroff, John. Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millenial Capitalism. The South African Quarterly. 2002.
Dawn of the Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. Twentieth Century Fox, 1978.
Fido. Dir. Andrew Currie. Lionsgate, 2006.
Land of the Dead. Dir. George A. Romero. Universal Studios, 2005.
“List of Zombie Films.” 11 May 2009. Wikipedia.com. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_zombie_films> 12 May 2009.
Loudermilk, A. Eating ‘Dawn’ in the Dark. Sage, 2003.
Marx, Karl. Wage Labor and Capital from Literary Theory: an Anthology. Blackwell Publishing Ltd.: MA, 1998.
Planet Terror. Dir. Robert Rodriguez. Dimension Films, 2007.
Wilson, Tracy V. “How Zombies Work.” 28 October 2005. HowStuffWorks.com < HYPERLINK "http://science.howstuffworks.com/zombie.htm" http://science.howstuffworks.com/zombie.htm> 08 April 2009.
Other topics tackled by Brooks include the source of zombie creation, the process a human being goes through to become a zombie, what you should do incase of a zombie attack, what zombies want, and why zombies can’t have sex.
Wilson, Tracy. “How Zombies Work.” 28 October 2005. HowStuffWorks.com. HYPERLINK "http://science.howstuffworks.com/zombie.htm 08 April 2009" http://science.howstuffworks.com/zombie.htm 08 April 2009.
Explains how and why zombies are still widely believed in Haiti and why they are feared so much.
See Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws for more discussion on racial and gender issues in modern horror films.
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