Brad Pitt’s character Gerry observes process of turning of the young male into a zombie – underlining the crucial moment of before and after: in 12 seconds after his ‘normal’ life, he is a monster with blurred eyes, hungry gaze and scattered hair, violently banging his head on the glass of his own car, where his family is. This pattern was repeated quite a few times within the movie: during the lab scene, where the scientist in Wales was contaminated, and during the roof scene, when young boy’s father was the first among the raged zombies following Gerry’s family and his own son, making the difference and the line between ‘them’ and ‘us’ as long as a snap of your fingers or zombie’s jaws at that point. They infect the living, regardless any …show more content…
Various scholars agree that zombies ‘can be read as tracking a wide range of cultural, political, and economic anxieties of American society’ and ‘zombie cinema represents a stylized reaction to cultural consciousness and particularly to social and political injustices’. Todd K. Platts* University of Missouri Department of Sociology Locating Zombies in the Sociology of Popular Culture Sociology Compass (2013): 7, 547– 560, 10.1111/soc4.12053
And it is hard to disagree, despite the suggestion that zombie is a “uniquely North American construction” and “the only canonical movie monster to originate in the New World”.
Bishop, K. (2008). ‘The sub-subaltern monster: Imperialist hegemony and the cinematic voodoo zombie.’ The Journal of American Culture, 31 (2) :141 – 152; Bishop, K. (2010a). American Zombie Gothic, McFarland, Jefferson. Bishop, K. W. , (2010b). ‘The idle proletariat: Dawn of the dead, consumer ideology, and the loss of productive labor.’ The Journal of Popular Culture, 43(3) …show more content…
Zombies are “the sign of an over-leisurely society lacking in broader spiritual or communal purpose, left to the impulses of its unchecked power and its desires for consumption”. Neill Scott
Simply put, people crave a lot of things, for example, happiness. Thus they crave things that will make them happy – according to their own perception of what ‘happiness’ is, their acknowledgment of themselves within their own scale of happiness and often acquiring things that they are told they need in order to achieve this precious happiness (forced up by the family, friends, and finally marketing). As well as zombies crave flesh. And more flesh, until someone kills them – like we want things one after another, until we die. We crave happiness through the terminate things, looking for things to replace them, and then craving new things, like “the new slave, the capitalist worker, but also the consumer, trapped within the ideological construct that assures the survival of the system,”13 Lauro and