Survival of the Dead |
  • USA / Canada • 2009 • 90m •    • Directed by: George A. Romero. • Starring: Alan Van Sprang, Joshua Peace, Hardee T. Lineham, Dru Viergever, Eric Woolfe, Shawn Roberts, Scott Wentworth, Amy Lalonde, Michelle Morgan, Joshua Close, Mitch Risman, Kenneth Welsh, Julian Richings. • Music by: Robert Carli.      On an island off the coast of North America, local residents simultaneously fight a zombie epidemic while hoping for a cure to return their un-dead relatives back to their human state.
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But the rebellions of the 60s went nowhere. Radicals morphed into yuppies and once the decade's social upheavals had passed, consumerism turned out to be the real winner. It is therefore appropriate that Romero's second zombie movie, "Dawn of the Dead", took place almost entirely in a shopping mall. Here men live a fantasy of commodity abundance and unhinged consumption, whilst the zombies - always the "good guys" in Romero's films, out to usurp the current generation - draw inexorably closer, the mall reminding them of their happiest pre-death moments. In this world there is no satisfaction, only lack, the zombie's lust for flesh mocking the consumer's unquenchable desires.
Romero's next zombie flick was "Day of the Dead". Here, 60s radicalism and 70s consumerism are shunted aside in favour for an assault on Reaganism, military authoritarianism and scientific claims to supreme authority. Relentlessly fatalistic, the film's zombies now embodied a kind of sympathetic, undeveloped and ego-less desire (they do not know why they "want"), which contrasts with the libidinal drives of mankind and the twisted viciousness of Romero's human characters (they deny their true motivations and mask the roots of their desires), all of whom hypocritically stand for social order.
"Land of the Dead" followed, Romero painting 90s America as a paranoid bastion of humanity and freedom, the West standing tall against the "foreign horde". Here, the ruling class live lives of wealth and elegance in exclusive and gated high-rises whilst the masses outside do their bidding and scrape by on low incomes, distracting themselves from their worries with sex, drugs, gambling and violence. The leader of this late-capitalist America, a George Bush styled madman out to make the rich richer and who "refuses to negotiate with terrorists", subsists by sending into zombie territory teams of warriors who steal zombie loot (he achieves this by distracting the zombies with fireworks- a kind of metaphor for media spectacle, war and social brainwashing). The zombies themselves are, once again, the good guys, often linked with the rebelling humans who wish to rise up against their overlords. When the zombies break into the city - led by a black zombie of course - it's symbolic of the proletariat finally rising against their masters and demanding restitution and justice; a 1960s pipe dream.
Next came "Diary of the Dead", a hyper-remediated films which posits the 21st century as information orgy, Romero taking into account the decade's staggering communication and technological changes. Here the zombies extend out of the violent media-scape, mankind shifting from a "society of the spectacle" to being a society of participatory and interactive media; what Deleuze called the "society of control." And so man now lives as the dead, existing only to outsource himself to the global brain.
In contrast, "Survival of the Dead" is about the impossibility to forge an "off the grid" existence outside of "Diary's" techno-sphere. Here, the zombies represent modernity. They are manifestations of the modern info world, in which the merging of Neoliberalism with the techno-sphere have resulted in the eradication of all forms of sociality, association, meaningfulness, and hope.
Faced with this dead-endedness, in which Neoliberalism's "market principle" slowly breaks down all social relationships, all principles of association etc, the film's survivors flee from the modern world in the hope of starting a new life on an island. Here they attempt to resurrect an archaic social order – literally chaining women to the kitchen, riding horses etc – all as a means of resisting the zombie horde. But our survivors are not only men tied to the past, but busily attempting to re-train zombies to "eat what is right". In other words, they are not only trying to survive and ostracise themselves from modernity, but to reverse it.
But of course they are doomed to fail, Romero emphasising the way the survivor's ultra-conservative utopia is itself the result of a lack of imagination. This is what is known as "capitalist realism" or what Fukuyama called "The End Of History", the impossibility to even conceive a future. Faced with the inability to imagine, the survivors thus resort to countless end-of-days fantasies in which the world destroys itself and a primitive utopia, in which individualism and self reliance can actually flourish, is naively reinstated. But what Romero does is satirise and dissect these fantasies. He makes it clear that his survivors seek only to resurrect a simulation, a fantasy culled from movie images. As a result, the Simulacral Utopia eventually crumbles, as ageing patriarchs wage war, cling to old codes, traditions and outmoded customs. Meanwhile, off the island, the cyber apocalypse rumbles on.
Romero's point: current alternatives to zombie modernism are themselves not real. The fantasy of survivalism is a sham which masks a monomaniacal, paranoid, tyrannical, misogynistic and bigoted world. The survivors, the resistance (who significantly can't have children), are themselves already zombies because their own form of life is itself a dead archaism, both zombies and zomboid survivors forever crying out with desires for destructionconsumption that will never be satisfied.
The film ends with the survivors turning into zombies and fighting one another, whilst mankind's last outcasts - a lesbian, computer nerd and warrior (ie no babies) - flee the island. The last shot recalls Oswald Spengler's "The Decline Of The West", which put forth a cyclical theory of the rise and decline of civilisations and which showed how populaces constantly strive for the unattainable. For both Spengler and Romero, Western Man is a tragic figure. Spengler himself predicted the inevitable ballooning of insider-dominated financialization as one of the key stages in a culture's end time.
Review by tieman64 from the Internet Movie Database.
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