Axes to Grind: Re-Imagining the Horrific in Visual Media and CultureHarmony Wu, editor, Special Issue of Spectator 22:2 (Fall 2002) 69-77

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1979 was a traumatic year in Americanhistory. It was the year that 51 Americanswere taken hostage in Tehran, Iran. It was theyear of the nearly catastrophic accident at theThree Mile Island nuclear plant near Harris-burg, Pennsylvania. And it was the year inwhich the President of the United States an-nounced in a nationally televised address thatthe nation was suffering from a “crisis ofconfidence” that struck at its “very heart,soul, and spirit.”1

Perhaps no film better captured thecountry’s apocalyptic mood than GeorgeRomero’s Dawn of the Dead (1979).2 A belatedsequel to Romero’s legendary midnight movieNight of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn portraysAmerica as a nation in utter chaos—its citiesoverrun with zombies and its countrysideruled by roving motorcycle gangs and armedposses. The story follows four characters at-tempting to protect themselves from thezombie invasion by barricading themselves inan indoor mall, which with its seemingly lim-itless supply and variety of goods promises to

shelter this small group for an indefiniteperiod. Soon, they must fend off both theundead (who, haunted by their habits in theliving world, inevitably show up to wanderthe atrium) and the living, who wish to geta piece of the foursome’s stockpile of re-sources. Despite its lighter tone (the earlierfilm was relentlessly grim; Dawn’s settingoffers several opportunities for comic relief)and garish colors (the earlier film was shotin stark black-and-white), Dawn’s portraitof societal breakdown ultimately trumpedNight’s—where Night ended with the zombiesbeing vanquished, Dawn ended with thehumans being vanquished.3

Successful though it may have been in cap-turing the national mood, Dawn was,however, distinctly less successful in captur-ing the mood of the region in which it wasfilmed, Southwestern Pennsylvania, to whichthe era brought locally specific woes. ForSouthwestern Pennsylvania, 1979 was theyear in which the U.S. Steel Corporation, thenation’s largest steelmaker and 15th largest

SHANNON MADER

Reviving the Dead in Southwestern PAZombie Capitalism, the Non-Classand the Decline of the US Steel Industry

Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968)(photo appears courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

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manufacturer at the time, announced that itwould be closing 16 plants in eight states andlaying off 13,000 workers. Though the movewould end up being dwarfed by the subse-quent downsizing of the entire steel industry,it was seen at the time as “one of the biggestindustry retrenchments in modern history.”4

To the communities affected, the scaling backof U. S. Steel was seen in almost apocalypticterms: “What we are experiencing in citieslike Youngstown and Pittsburgh and Garyis nothing short of economic genocide, a jobextermination program.”5 Yet, despite the factthat it was filmed on location in Pittsburgh,Dawn makes no reference, not even indirectly,to the decline of the steel industry and its dev-astating social and economic effects on thecommunities of the region.6

It is curious that this omission has not beennoticed by ostensibly progressive critics,given that in the more than two decades sinceits original release, Dawn has been canonizedwithin film studies as a progressive—indeedeven radical—critique of consumer capitalismand analysis of the failures of capitalist indus-try seems in line with the Marxian aims ofmuch of the discourse on the film. In Holly-wood from Vietnam to Reagan, Robin Wood hailsthe film “for represent[ing] the most progres-sive potentialities of the horror film,” while inCamera Politica, Michael Ryan and DouglasKellner praise the film as one of “the mostimportant socially critical monster movies ofits era,”7 and even go so far as to describe it asa “Marxist dawn.”8

Representing as it did the first seriousengagement with the film by a major critic,Wood’s has proven to be the most influentialreading of the film, setting the terms of thecritical discourse on Dawn. Indeed, one couldargue that almost everything that has beenwritten on the film since then has been writtenwithin the framework established by Wood;this certainly applies to Ryan and Kellner,whose reading is essentially an extended foot-note to Wood.9 The only notable discourseson Dawn that are not influenced by Wood andwith which I am familiar are Gregory Waller’sThe Living and the Undead (which eschews

questions of ideology altogether) and StevenShaviro’s The Cinematic Body (which featuresa Deleuzian reading of the film that is genu-inely innovative).10 But even Shaviro, novelthough his approach may be, uncritically re-produces Wood’s political assessment of thefilm and its maker, concluding that Romero isa “radical [who is] critical of contemporaryAmerican culture.”11

While acknowledging the film’s intelligenceand richness, this essay takes issue with theby-now canonic reading of the film as leftistcritique of consumer capitalism, arguing in-stead that the film’s critique of capitalismis rendered problematic by, among otherthings, its relentless focus on consumption tothe utter disregard of production. Ironically,this elision of the role played by productionin a consumer economy reproduces the verylogic of shopping malls themselves, effacing asthey do all signs of production. Thus, althoughthe film may constitute a devastating critiqueof consumerism, a critique of consumerism isnot ipso facto a critique of capitalism. Further-more, despite their superficially Marxisttrappings, the readings of Wood and Ryan andKellner leave out of the equation one cruciallyimportant component of any genuinely Marx-ist analysis: the problematics of social class.

The Logic of Zombie Capitalism:Consumption without ProductionWood and Ryan and Kellner succeed inspelling out Dawn of the Dead’s critique of con-sumerism, but the exact nature of its critiqueof capitalism goes unexplained. Instead,consumption/consumerism becomes almostwholly identified with the system of whichit is merely a part. The result is that capitalismends up being defined not by a specific modeof production or set of social relations, but bywhat is a largely cultural and fairly histori-cally recent phenomenon: consumerism.If Wood’s and Kellner and Ryan’s analysesnevertheless seem “true” to the film, that isbecause the film itself never goes beyondthe issue of consumerism. Its use of an indoormall as a metaphor of America indeedencourages a conflation of consumerism and

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capitalism by identifying America with aplace where products are consumed but notproduced.12 Wood’s and Ryan and Kellner’sreadings do nothing to contest this conflation;in fact, they unwittingly reproduce it.

Only a few pages long, Wood’s argument isdeceptively simple, though far less reductivethan Ryan and Kellner’s ostensibly more so-phisticated reading. While Ryan and Kellnerassert in no uncertain terms that the zombies“represent programmed compulsive con-sumption,”13 Wood is more careful. Instead ofinterpreting the zombies as a straightforwardmetaphor for consumerism, Wood simply ob-serves that the zombies are “contaminatedand motivated” by the same thing that moti-vates the four protagonists and the motorcyclegang—consumer greed. The zombies maycarry this greed “to its logical conclusion byconsuming people,” but that does not meanthat they are metaphors for consumerism inWood’s eyes. Rather, he sees the zombies as

metaphors not for consumerism per se, but forthat which reproduces consumerism: the zom-bies “represent, on the metaphorical level, thewhole dead weight of patriarchal consumercapitalism, from whose habits of behavior anddesire not even Zen-Buddhists and nuns… areexempt.”14 Thus, rather than being metaphorsfor the consumerist ethos, the zombies aremetaphors for the process by which consumercapitalism reproduces this ethos. Wood’s dis-tinction here is subtle but crucial: it is thereproduction of the “habits of behavior anddesire” of consumerism—not consumerismitself—that the zombies embody.

By interpreting the zombies in this way,Wood highlights an aspect of the zombieswhich Ryan and Kellner do not fully flesh out:that the zombies are not simply/only consum-ers, but they are also the producers of consumers.The people the zombies attack and eat becomezombies. This production through consump-tion is a critical issue, as it differentiates the

Zombie capitalism in George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1979)—a system of pure consumption, with no production(photo appears courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

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zombies from the living; the living simplyconsume, while the zombies produce futureconsumers. By equating the zombies withconsumerism, Ryan and Kellner elide this dis-tinction altogether, thereby lumping the livingand the dead into the same general category—that is, of consumers. As a result, Ryan andKellner fail to see the zombies’ role as agentsof cultural reproduction.

In addition to featuring a greater sensitivityto the zombies’ place in the production/consumption cycle linked to capitalism/consumerism, Wood’s reading trumps Ryanand Kellner’s in its recognition of how theliving fit into the production/consumptioncycle. For just as Wood’s reading allows usto see that the zombies are producers as well asconsumers, it also enables us to see that the liv-ing are not simply/only consumers but also thevery objects of consumption—they are eaten bythe zombies. An “obvious” point usually over-looked by critics, this blindspot is unfortunate,as it is the film’s positioning of the living asmaterial for consumption that constitutes oneof Dawn’s great insights into the processesof consumer culture. Long before we are con-sumers within the consumer culture, we are“consumed” by the consumer culture; that is,we are the products of consumerism long be-fore we are the consumers of products. Whatmakes Dawn such a seemingly radical workis its insistence on not only articulating thisinsight but on literalizing it. The process bywhich consumers are produced is depicted as aprocess of literal consumption—the livingbecome consumers by literally being con-sumed by dead consumers.

Neither Ryan and Kellner nor Wood seizeon the film’s literalization of the process bywhich consumers are produced, which is star-tling since, after all, if anything is Marxianabout the film, it is this. Marx’s claim in theGrundrisse that “production is consumption,consumption is production” has its perfectanalogue in the productive consumption ofthe zombies.15 Indeed, Dawn at times seems tooperate as a deliberate demonstration ofMarx’s thesis that production “creates theconsumer” through a system which not only

creates products for the consumer to con-sume, but also insidiously creates “a need feltby the consumer.” In Marx’s formulation,“Production not only supplies a material forthe need, but it also supplies a need for thematerial…Production thus not only creates anobject for the subject, but also a subject for theobject.”16 Dawn would thus seem to be echo-ing Marx insofar as it depicts consumerism assomething quite explicitly produced. Butthere is a difference in Dawn: the consumer isa product, but he or she is not the product ofproduction. It is consumption—the zombie’sconsumption of the living—that producesthe consumer. Thus, in the film’s vision ofconsumer capitalism, the part played by produc-tion is entirely effaced.

Consequently, Dawn may constitute afiercely intelligent analysis of and attack onconsumer capitalism, but it is one in whichthe role played by production is absent.Consumption is detached from any productivesector of the economy; it seems to existindependently, to have, as it were, a life of itsown. Self-generating and self-perpetuating,consumption is literally all there is in Dawn.It is a universe of pure, untrammeled con-sumption in which we witness the fourprotagonists’ exhilaration at having the mall’smany consumer products all to themselves (re-call their bagfuls of candy and coffee, theirmassive loaves of bread, their trips to thearcade, their dinner at the Brown Derby17), butnever once is reference made to the labor thatwent into the production of these consumerproducts. It is precisely for this reason thatDawn’s use of the metaphor of America asshopping mall is so problematic as a presumed“critique of capitalism;” the role played by pro-duction—by labor—in the creation of consumergoods is effectively obliterated.

Scenes from a De-Historicized Mall inMonroeville, PAThe conflation of the “mall” (as the apotheosisof consumer culture) with America (as theemblem of capitalism) glosses over socio-his-torical specificities of each, summarized in thesimple fact that the shopping mall is not as old

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as America. Rather, the mall is a relativelyrecent phenomenon, one that arose undera very specific set of historical and socioeco-nomic conditions.18 This elision of the specifichistory of the mall is more problematic still inostensibly Marxian analyses such as Wood’sand Ryan and Kellner’s, given that the mall inDawn is the Monroeville Mall, located inMonroeville, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pitts-burgh, a city that was once synonymous withthe steel industry. Despite the Pittsburghsetting, however, the steel industry is con-spicuous in its absence from Dawn.

In this respect, Dawn manages to be pro-phetic as well as obfuscatory. It is propheticbecause the steel industry would in fact beabsent from Southwestern Pennsylvania in afew short years. Indeed, it is almost as ifDawn foresaw the “death” of SouthwesternPennsylvania, as if the dead that congregate inthe mall in Dawn were a harbinger of the“dead” who would soon be populating themalls of Southwestern Pennsylvania.19 Dis-possessed of their lives, the dead of Dawn stillcome to the mall to which they had been soaccustomed to going to in life; dispossessed oftheir livelihoods, the “dead” of SouthwesternPennsylvania had nowhere else to go.

The economic and industrial decimation ofSouthwestern Pennsylvania in the 1970s andearly 1980s was by no means unique, nor wasthe fate of the American steel industry anexception. The deindustrialization of Americawas part and parcel of the shift from manufac-turing to services that was the defining featureof America’s emerging post-industrialeconomy.20 The shopping mall occupies acomplicated place in this transition from anindustrial to a post-industrial economy, for al-though it would seem the very epitome of apost-industrial economy—the jobs it creates,after all, are low-paying, short-term servicesector jobs—it was within the context of athriving postwar industrial economy that theindoor shopping mall first appeared.21

If the indoor shopping mall has managedto outlive the postwar industrial boom fromwhich it was born, this in no way belies the itsorigins. Indeed, the case of MonroevilleMall—a mall whose fortunes declined withthe decline of the steel industry—is a paradig-matic illustration of the interconnectionbetween malls and manufacturing. With thedecline of the manufacturing industries in thelate 1970s and early 1980s, malls that gener-ally catered to lower middle-class andworking-class clientele folded, faded, and/or

Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968)(photo appears courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)

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underwent major overhauls. In Pittsburgh,for instance, not only did the fortunesof Monroeville Mall decline (the ice rinkimmortalized in Dawn was shut down inthe early 1980s) but the Allegheny CenterMall on Pittsburgh’s North Side whichserved a distinctly working-class clientele,practically ceased operations altogether.22

Meanwhile, the more upscale and self-consciously middle-class Ross Park Mall, andlocated in the affluent North Hills, openedin 1986 and quickly emerged as one ofPittsburgh’s most popular malls. The institu-tion of the shopping mall may have thussurvived, but not without significantly recon-stituting its consumer base.

This painful socio-economic shift, playedout in the arena of the mall, is not evident inthe text of Dawn of the Dead. The severed linkin Dawn between production and consump-tion pictures consumerism as continuingunabated and unaltered (most of the zombiesare working class adults, not affluent teenag-ers) in spite of the absence of heavyindustry—or, for that matter, in spite of theabsence of any kind of industry. There is liter-ally no productive sector of the economyextant in Dawn, and still consumption per-sists. What is so apocalyptic about Romero’sfilm is thus not that it envisions the end ofconsumerism but that it cannot envision anend to consumerism. As the end credits(which depict the mall again overrun by zom-bies) make clear, the dead will keep coming tothe mall and continue consuming eventhough the social relations that made consum-erism possible perished with the collapseof organized society.23

Children of the (Zombie) Revolution:New Social Order or Non-Class?In Wood’s reading of Dawn, he downplays thefilm’s bleak vision of consumerism continuingunaltered and unabated; instead, he finds thefilm’s ending strangely optimistic. UsingNight of the Living Dead as a point of contrast,he points to the restoration of order at the endof the earlier film, suggesting that Dawn’s

ending is more hopeful precisely becauseorder is not restored:

The functions of the sheriff’s posse in Nightand the motorcycle gang in Dawn are in someways very similar. They constitute a threat bothto the zombies and to the besieged (even if inNight inadvertently, by mistaking the hero for azombie); more important, both dramatize, albeitin significantly different ways, the possibility ofthe development of Fascism out of breakdownand chaos. The difference is obvious: thepurpose of the posse is to destroy the zombiesand to restore the threatened social order; thepurpose of the gang is simply to exploit andprofit from that order’s disintegration. Theposse ends triumphant, the gang is wiped out.The premise of Dawn in fact is that the socialorder (regarded as in all of Romero’s films asobsolete and discredited) can’t be restored; itsrestoration at the end of Night simply clinchesthe earlier film’s total negativity.24

Though plausible enough on its own terms,Wood’s argument does not account forDawn’s clear positioning of zombies as theproducers of consumers, which means thattheir triumph signifies not the defeat of con-sumer capitalism, but its triumph. Becausethe zombies are self-reproducing, consumer-ism will continue even though the social orderthat produced it has completely collapsed.So, while the social order is indeed dead, thedrives and desires that the consumer societyengendered live on.

Yet in spite of the film’s projection of anundead future wherein consumerist impulsesbeat on eternally, Wood is incontestably rightwhen he says that the ending of Dawn is still“curiously exhilarating:”

Hitherto, the modern horror film has invariablymoved toward either the restoration of thetraditional order or the expression of despair(in Night, both). Dawn is perhaps the first horrorfilm to suggest—albeit very tentatively—thepossibility of moving beyond apocalypse.It brings its two surviving protagonists to thepoint where the work of creating the normsof a new social order, a new structure ofrelationships, can begin—a context in whichthe presence of a third survivor, Fran’s unbornchild, points the way to potential change.25

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Still, this ending, although undeniablyexhilarating, is decidedly downbeat.26 Thetwo survivors, Fran and Peter, do escape, buttheir escape is an escape from, not an escapeto—they literally have nowhere to go. As theystand on the roof of the mall, preparing toleave in the helicopter that brought them therein the first place, Fran and Peter realize theyhave no destination and very little helicopterfuel. With no alternative, they lift off anywayinto an empty horizon; literally nothing—except the rising sun—beckons them.27 Fur-thermore, their escape is a purely personalone. It may prefigure a “new structure ofrelationships,” as Wood suggests, but it doesnot portend a new economic structure. Afterall, consumer capitalism continues to live on,even if only in the bodies of walking corpses.

In this respect, Fran and Peter do not heralda new order so much as crystallize and enactthe desires of a new class—specifically,the non-class André Gorz describes in Farewellto the Working Class. Though largely forgotten,and to some extent genuinely outmoded,Gorz’s work is a strikingly original rethinkingof Marxism that never received the attentionit deserved. My purpose in invoking it hereis not to rescue it from historical oblivionbut rather to use it as a Marxist-tinted lensthrough which to view Dawn. The compatibilityof a Marxian-inflected analysis of Dawn withGorz’s thinking comes, in part, out of the twoworks’ near simultaneous emergence:Farewell was published in France just oneyear after Dawn’s American release, a histori-cal coincidence that suggests that the twoworks are expressions of the same Zeitgeist.Both are haunted by the failure of the radicalmovements of the 1960s, and each attempts tocome to terms with a capitalist order thatturned out to be far more resilient than theLeft had anticipated.

In particular, Farewell to the Working Classhelps explain why the absence of any produc-tive sector of the economy in Dawn is perfectlylogical and why the film’s open ending is in-deed “exhilarating.” Gorz’s central claim isthat the proletariat of industrial society hasbeen replaced in post-industrial society by

what he calls “the non-class of neo-proletar-ians.” This non-class is composed of thosewho fill “the area of probationary, contracted,casual, temporary and part-time employ-ment.”28 Gorz calls this group a non-class, notbecause it does not constitute a genuine socio-economic category, but rather because it doesnot imagine itself as a class; its members areusually overqualified for the jobs they find,and consequently they “see ‘their’ work as atedious necessity in which it is impossibleto be fully involved.”29 Gorz elaborates:“Whether they work in a bank, the civil ser-vice, a cleaning agency or a factory, [they] arebasically non-workers temporarily doingsomething that means nothing to them.”30 Asa result, members of the non-class neitheridentify with their work nor their fellowworkers. And because of the anonymous andseemingly inconsequential nature of their la-bor (be it telemarketing, stacking shelves,adjunct teaching, folding clothes, enteringdata…), they do not see themselves as playingan integral part in the productive process, andconsequently, do not see their work as asource of potential agency. Indeed, theirwork is, if anything, disempowering: theyexperience merely their impotence, irrel-evance, and expendability.

Toiling in jobs devoid of meaning and im-portance, the non-class of neo-proletarians isthe exact antithesis of the working class asconceived by Marx. Instead of seeing their la-bor as a source of potential power, thenon-class sees their work as the very source oftheir powerlessness. And far from hoping toseize control of the means of production, thenon-class wants nothing more than to escapefrom the productive process entirely:

While the industrial proletariat derived anobjective power from the transformation ofmatter, so that it perceived itself as a materialforce underpinning the whole course of society,the neo-proletariat can be defined as a non-force,without objective social importance, excludedfrom society. Since it plays no part in theproduction of society, it envisages society’sdevelopment as something external, akin toa spectacle or show. It sees no point in takingover the machine-like structure which, as it sees

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it, defines contemporary society, nor of placinganything whatsoever under its control. Whatmatters instead is to appropriate areas ofautonomy outside of, and in opposition to, thelogic of society, so as to allow the unobstructedrealization of individual development alongsideand over that machine-like structure.31

What the non-class seeks is thus not the abo-lition of the old order—Marx’s revolution—butsimply a little pocket of autonomy outside ofand alongside the order, in which they canachieve a sense of self-identity and individual-ity.32 As a result, the dream of escaping fromthe social order takes precedence over the de-sire to change that order, requiring as thatwould collective action and some degree ofclass-consciousness. Indeed, the dream impliesthe continued existence of that order, for itis only by virtue of the continued existence ofthe old order that one is able to carve out aniche of autonomy alongside it (a point unwit-tingly illustrated in Romero’s subsequent film,

Knightriders [1981], which makes explicit theescapist logic underpinning Dawn).

What is so depressing about the ending ofDawn is thus what is so exhilarating about it.The zombies triumph, consumerism lives on,but the two human survivors escape. Wherethey are escaping to is irrelevant; what makesthe ending so exhilarating is that it is anescape from: the fantasy of a niche of au-tonomy outside of and alongside the oldnetwork of social relations would be spoiledif the prospect of a new network of social rela-tions were raised.

The ending of Dawn is thus not so apoca-lyptic after all. For it envisions a world inwhich the future of consumerism is assuredand in which the escape from consumerismis not only possible within the contextof consumerism but only possible withinthe context of consumerism. In so doing,it enables us to have our cake of anti-consum-erism and consume it, too.

Shannon Mader received his doctorate in Critical Studies from the University of Southern California and,until recently, taught at Loyola Marymount University, where he specialized in postwar American cinemaand the horror genre. His dissertation, “That Pudgy Colossus of Movie Melodramas:” The Films of AlfredHitchcock, the Melodramatic Tradition, and the Postwar Discourse on Irony, explores the influence of the NewCriticism’s discourse on irony on the auteur critics’ canonization of Hitchcock’s films. He is currently pur-suing a J.D. at the UCLA School of Law while writing a textbook on law and popular culture (to bepublished by Peter Lang) with Michael Asimow (UCLA School of Law) and Norman Rosenberg(Macalester College).

NOTES1 Edward Walsh, “Carter Finds ‘Crisis of Confidence,’” Washington Post (16 July 1979) A1. Other major events that

year included: the federal bailout of Chrysler, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the fall of the American-backedSomoza regime in Nicaragua, and the inflation rate topping 11 percent.

2 Also released that year were such self-consciously apocalyptic works as Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola),The China Syndrome (James Bridges), Meteor (Ronald Neame), Mad Max (George Miller), and Quintet (RobertAltman).

3 As Robin Wood has observed, however, Dawn’s ending is actually more upbeat in tone than Night’s, which Idiscuss below.

4 Fred Swoboda, “Big Cutback at U.S. Steel Will Mean 13,000 Layoffs,” Washington Post (28 November 1979) A1.5 Jerry Knight, “Youngstown,” Washington Post (2 December 1979) K1. The quote is attributed to an Episcopal priest

from Youngstown.6 Although it was filmed prior to the cutback announcement by U.S. Steel, the plight of the steel industry had been

apparent for some time. See, for instance, Bill Richards, “From the Mine to the Factory, Steel is Having Troubles,”Washington Post (25 September 1977) A1.

7 Robin Wood, Hollywood From Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986) 121; Michael Ryanand Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington andIndianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988) 179.

8 Ryan and Kellner, 181.

s

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9 One might add that Wood has not only framed the terms of the debate but the very nature of the debate: it is theideological implications of horror texts that is the dominant topic of discussion in critical circles, not, say, theformal properties of horror texts.

10 Gregory A. Waller, The Living and the Undead: From Stoker’s Dracula to Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (Urbana:University of Illinois Press, 1985) and Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1993).

11 Shaviro, 83.12 Indeed, the film goes beyond malls in reality in this regard, for while real-world malls are staffed by thousands of

service sector employees, the mall in Dawn is literally workerless. It is perhaps this fact—more than just thelimitless supply of goods—that makes the world of endless consumption depicted in the film so utopian.

13 Ibid., 182.14 Wood, 118.15 Karl Marx, Grundrisse, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books, 1973) 93.16 Ibid., 92.17 A dinner we do not see cooked, it is worth pointing out.18 The Guinness Book of World Records identifies the Roland Park Shopping Center (1896) as the world’s first shopping

center, but it was not until 1956 that the first indoor shopping mall, the Southdale Shopping Center near Minne-apolis, Minnesota, appeared.

19 Consider, for instance, the following quote: “For more than a mile, the rusted metal buildings sprawl along thebanks of the Mahoning River like the bleaching bones of some recently extinct dinosaur. Twelve soaring stacksthat once belched acrid smoke now provide rest stops for pigeons. Vast railroad yards lie barren except for rain-soaked piles of unused coal” (Nick Kotz, “Youngstown’s Tragedies: A Legacy for Other Cities,” Washington Post 17[June 1979] B1). What sounds like a description of the deserted and dilapidated structures depicted in GeorgeRomero’s Dawn of the Dead (1979) is in actuality a description, written in 1979, of the abandoned steel mills ofYoungstown, Ohio.

20 For a thorough discussion and analysis of this phenomenon, see Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, TheDeindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (NewYork: Basic Books, 1982).

21 As noted above, the first indoor shopping mall appeared in 1956.22 As of 1994, less than a dozen stores remained in the mall and half of the 12 restaurants in the food court were

empty. See Tom Barnes, “Principal in Allegheny Center Mall Blames City in Party for Garage Woes,” PittsburghPost-Gazette (20 April 1994) B4.

23 The film is somewhat evasive when it comes to just how bad general social conditions are. However, the televisioncommentator’s suggestion that the zombies be used as food gives some indication of how dire the economicconditions must be.

24 Wood, 117-18.25 Ibid., 121.26 Wood seems to be ambivalent here as well: note that he does not say that a new order will begin; rather, he simply

says that the film “points the way to potential change.”27 The rising sun could be read as some sort of hopeful portent. However, it could just as plausibly be read as the

“dawn” referred to by the title, in which case it heralds the zombies’ reign.28 André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-Industrial Socialism, trans. Michael Sonenscher (London:

Pluto Press, 1982) 69.29 Ibid., 7.30 Ibid., 70-71.31 Ibid., 73.32 Gorz sees this aspiration as potentially radical. While acknowledging that the non-class will never be revolution-

ary in the sense that the proletariat was for Marx, Gorz nevertheless believes that the non-class may eventuallydetach itself from the market economy altogether and form a network of social relations outside of it. History, thusfar at least, has not borne out this hope.