The tragedy of the Walmart employee being trampled to death by an excited mob seems to suggest that Dawn of The Dead was not that far off in its depiction of a society unravelling. Like the braindead zombies in the movie, these costumers place product over everything else in their lives, even their fellow man's wellbeing. In the movie, that 'product' is human flesh - in the Walmart example, it's cheap Chinese slave labor goods.
George A. Romero, famous for directing The Night Of The Living Dead on a shoestring budget, saw an opportunity here to infuse the sequel with social commentary on this growing trend. In Dawn Of The Dead, a mutagen infects people and turns them into flesh-eating, braindead savages. Ironically, the central setpiece of the movie is an abandoned mall in Pittsburg, where the characters have to survive an ever-growing onslaught of zombies that are curiously drawn to the mall.
Quite deliberately, the movie equates consumers to ‘zombies’[1]:
Francine Parker: What are they doing? Why do they come here? [the mall]
Stephen: Some kind of instinct. Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.
While it has taken a while for reality to catch up with art, in December 2008 we finally have a real-life precedent that, if not featuring automatons engaging in cannibalism, at least portrays some of the mindlessness that we see in George Romero’s movie.
A Walmart employee was trampled to death during a Black Friday stampede – and nobody bothered to help him.
From the NY Daily News article:
They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me.
“They took me down, too … I didn’t know if I was going to live through it. I literally had to fight people off my back,” Overby said.
It didn’t end there. Consumers fought over who got their paws on the last ‘XBox 360 Guitar Hero’ pack like savages, and they even refused to leave when they were being asked to by the police, yelling out loud: “I’ve been on line since Friday morning!” before continuing on with the shopping spree.
Footnotes
1. [^]In this review dating back to 1979, Jump Cut assesses the themes of the films, Alien and Dawn Of the Dead. In Dead, it sees director George Romero expounding the dehumanising nature of consumerism:
Romero’s attack on consumerist technology thus centers on its ability to denude human beings of anything beyond significant motor response.
Link: – http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC21folder/AlienDawnDead.html (Jump Cut Journal: Alien, Dawn of The Dead – Hi-tech horror [November 21, 1979])
