SHANNON MADER Reviving the Dead in Southwestern PA Zombie Capitalism, the Non-Class and 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)
1979 was a traumatic year in American shelter this small group for an indefinite history. It was the year that 51 Americans period. Soon, they must fend off both the were taken hostage in Tehran, Iran. It was the undead (who, haunted by their habits in the year of the nearly catastrophic accident at the living world, inevitably show up to wander Three Mile Island nuclear plant near Harris- the atrium) and the living, who wish to get burg, Pennsylvania. And it was the year in a piece of the foursome’s stockpile of re- which the President of the United States an- sources. Despite its lighter tone (the earlier nounced in a nationally televised address that film was relentlessly grim; Dawn’s setting the nation was suffering from a “crisis of offers several opportunities for comic relief) confidence” that struck at its “very heart, and garish colors (the earlier film was shot soul, and spirit.”1 in stark black-and-white), Dawn’s portrait Perhaps no film better captured the of societal breakdown ultimately trumped country’s apocalyptic mood than George Night’s—where Night ended with the zombies Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1979).2 A belated being vanquished, Dawn ended with the sequel to Romero’s legendary midnight movie humans being vanquished.3 Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn portrays Successful though it may have been in cap- America as a nation in utter chaos—its cities turing the national mood, Dawn was, overrun with zombies and its countryside however, distinctly less successful in captur- ruled by roving motorcycle gangs and armed ing the mood of the region in which it was posses. The story follows four characters at- filmed, Southwestern Pennsylvania, to which tempting to protect themselves from the the era brought locally specific woes. For zombie invasion by barricading themselves in Southwestern Pennsylvania, 1979 was the an indoor mall, which with its seemingly lim- year in which the U.S. Steel Corporation, the itless supply and variety of goods promises to nation’s largest steelmaker and 15th largest
Axes to Grind: Re-Imagining the Horrific in Visual Media and Culture 69 Harmony Wu, editor, Special Issue of Spectator 22:2 (Fall 2002) 69-77 REVIVING THE DEAD IN SOUTHWESTERN PA manufacturer at the time, announced that it questions of ideology altogether) and Steven would be closing 16 plants in eight states and Shaviro’s The Cinematic Body (which features laying off 13,000 workers. Though the move a Deleuzian reading of the film that is genu- would end up being dwarfed by the subse- inely innovative).10 But even Shaviro, novel quent downsizing of the entire steel industry, though his approach may be, uncritically re- it was seen at the time as “one of the biggest produces Wood’s political assessment of the industry retrenchments in modern history.”4 film and its maker, concluding that Romero is To the communities affected, the scaling back a “radical [who is] critical of contemporary of U. S. Steel was seen in almost apocalyptic American culture.”11 terms: “What we are experiencing in cities While acknowledging the film’s intelligence like Youngstown and Pittsburgh and Gary and richness, this essay takes issue with the is nothing short of economic genocide, a job by-now canonic reading of the film as leftist extermination program.”5 Yet, despite the fact critique of consumer capitalism, arguing in- that it was filmed on location in Pittsburgh, stead that the film’s critique of capitalism Dawn makes no reference, not even indirectly, is rendered problematic by, among other to the decline of the steel industry and its dev- things, its relentless focus on consumption to astating social and economic effects on the the utter disregard of production. Ironically, communities of the region.6 this elision of the role played by production It is curious that this omission has not been in a consumer economy reproduces the very noticed by ostensibly progressive critics, logic of shopping malls themselves, effacing as given that in the more than two decades since they do all signs of production. Thus, although its original release, Dawn has been canonized the film may constitute a devastating critique within film studies as a progressive—indeed of consumerism, a critique of consumerism is even radical—critique of consumer capitalism not ipso facto a critique of capitalism. Further- and analysis of the failures of capitalist indus- more, despite their superficially Marxist try seems in line with the Marxian aims of trappings, the readings of Wood and Ryan and much of the discourse on the film. In Holly- Kellner leave out of the equation one crucially wood from Vietnam to Reagan, Robin Wood hails important component of any genuinely Marx- the film “for represent[ing] the most progres- ist analysis: the problematics of social class. sive potentialities of the horror film,” while in Camera Politica, Michael Ryan and Douglas The Logic of Zombie Capitalism: Kellner praise the film as one of “the most Consumption without Production important socially critical monster movies of Wood and Ryan and Kellner succeed in its era,”7 and even go so far as to describe it as spelling out Dawn of the Dead’s critique of con- a “Marxist dawn.”8 sumerism, but the exact nature of its critique Representing as it did the first serious of capitalism goes unexplained. Instead, engagement with the film by a major critic, consumption/consumerism becomes almost Wood’s has proven to be the most influential wholly identified with the system of which reading of the film, setting the terms of the it is merely a part. The result is that capitalism critical discourse on Dawn. Indeed, one could ends up being defined not by a specific mode argue that almost everything that has been of production or set of social relations, but by written on the film since then has been written what is a largely cultural and fairly histori- within the framework established by Wood; cally recent phenomenon: consumerism. this certainly applies to Ryan and Kellner, If Wood’s and Kellner and Ryan’s analyses whose reading is essentially an extended foot- nevertheless seem “true” to the film, that is note to Wood.9 The only notable discourses because the film itself never goes beyond on Dawn that are not influenced by Wood and the issue of consumerism. Its use of an indoor with which I am familiar are Gregory Waller’s mall as a metaphor of America indeed The Living and the Undead (which eschews encourages a conflation of consumerism and
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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) capitalism by identifying America with a metaphors not for consumerism per se, but for place where products are consumed but not that which reproduces consumerism: the zom- produced.12 Wood’s and Ryan and Kellner’s bies “represent, on the metaphorical level, the readings do nothing to contest this conflation; whole dead weight of patriarchal consumer in fact, they unwittingly reproduce it. capitalism, from whose habits of behavior and Only a few pages long, Wood’s argument is desire not even Zen-Buddhists and nuns… are deceptively simple, though far less reductive exempt.”14 Thus, rather than being metaphors than Ryan and Kellner’s ostensibly more so- for the consumerist ethos, the zombies are phisticated reading. While Ryan and Kellner metaphors for the process by which consumer assert in no uncertain terms that the zombies capitalism reproduces this ethos. Wood’s dis- “represent programmed compulsive con- tinction here is subtle but crucial: it is the sumption,”13 Wood is more careful. Instead of reproduction of the “habits of behavior and interpreting the zombies as a straightforward desire” of consumerism—not consumerism metaphor for consumerism, Wood simply ob- itself—that the zombies embody. serves that the zombies are “contaminated By interpreting the zombies in this way, and motivated” by the same thing that moti- Wood highlights an aspect of the zombies vates the four protagonists and the motorcycle which Ryan and Kellner do not fully flesh out: gang—consumer greed. The zombies may that the zombies are not simply/only consum- carry this greed “to its logical conclusion by ers, but they are also the producers of consumers. consuming people,” but that does not mean The people the zombies attack and eat become that they are metaphors for consumerism in zombies. This production through consump- Wood’s eyes. Rather, he sees the zombies as tion is a critical issue, as it differentiates the
AXES TO GRIND 71 REVIVING THE DEAD IN SOUTHWESTERN PA zombies from the living; the living simply creates products for the consumer to con- consume, while the zombies produce future sume, but also insidiously creates “a need felt consumers. By equating the zombies with by the consumer.” In Marx’s formulation, consumerism, Ryan and Kellner elide this dis- “Production not only supplies a material for tinction altogether, thereby lumping the living the need, but it also supplies a need for the and the dead into the same general category— material…Production thus not only creates an that is, of consumers. As a result, Ryan and object for the subject, but also a subject for the Kellner fail to see the zombies’ role as agents object.”16 Dawn would thus seem to be echo- of cultural reproduction. ing Marx insofar as it depicts consumerism as In addition to featuring a greater sensitivity something quite explicitly produced. But to the zombies’ place in the production/ there is a difference in Dawn: the consumer is consumption cycle linked to capitalism/ a product, but he or she is not the product of consumerism, Wood’s reading trumps Ryan production. It is consumption—the zombie’s and Kellner’s in its recognition of how the consumption of the living—that produces living fit into the production/consumption the consumer. Thus, in the film’s vision of cycle. For just as Wood’s reading allows us consumer capitalism, the part played by produc- to see that the zombies are producers as well as tion is entirely effaced. consumers, it also enables us to see that the liv- Consequently, Dawn may constitute a ing are not simply/only consumers but also the fiercely intelligent analysis of and attack on very objects of consumption—they are eaten by consumer capitalism, but it is one in which the zombies. An “obvious” point usually over- the role played by production is absent. looked by critics, this blindspot is unfortunate, Consumption is detached from any productive as it is the film’s positioning of the living as sector of the economy; it seems to exist material for consumption that constitutes one independently, to have, as it were, a life of its of Dawn’s great insights into the processes own. Self-generating and self-perpetuating, of consumer culture. Long before we are con- consumption is literally all there is in Dawn. sumers within the consumer culture, we are It is a universe of pure, untrammeled con- “consumed” by the consumer culture; that is, sumption in which we witness the four we are the products of consumerism long be- protagonists’ exhilaration at having the mall’s fore we are the consumers of products. What many consumer products all to themselves (re- makes Dawn such a seemingly radical work call their bagfuls of candy and coffee, their is its insistence on not only articulating this massive loaves of bread, their trips to the insight but on literalizing it. The process by arcade, their dinner at the Brown Derby17), but which consumers are produced is depicted as a never once is reference made to the labor that process of literal consumption—the living went into the production of these consumer become consumers by literally being con- products. It is precisely for this reason that sumed by dead consumers. Dawn’s use of the metaphor of America as Neither Ryan and Kellner nor Wood seize shopping mall is so problematic as a presumed on the film’s literalization of the process by “critique of capitalism;” the role played by pro- which consumers are produced, which is star- duction—by labor—in the creation of consumer tling since, after all, if anything is Marxian goods is effectively obliterated. about the film, it is this. Marx’s claim in the Grundrisse that “production is consumption, Scenes from a De-Historicized Mall in consumption is production” has its perfect Monroeville, PA analogue in the productive consumption of The conflation of the “mall” (as the apotheosis the zombies.15 Indeed, Dawn at times seems to of consumer culture) with America (as the operate as a deliberate demonstration of emblem of capitalism) glosses over socio-his- Marx’s thesis that production “creates the torical specificities of each, summarized in the consumer” through a system which not only simple fact that the shopping mall is not as old
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Night of the Living Dead (George Romero, 1968) (photo appears courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences) as America. Rather, the mall is a relatively The economic and industrial decimation of recent phenomenon, one that arose under Southwestern Pennsylvania in the 1970s and a very specific set of historical and socioeco- early 1980s was by no means unique, nor was nomic conditions.18 This elision of the specific the fate of the American steel industry an history of the mall is more problematic still in exception. The deindustrialization of America ostensibly Marxian analyses such as Wood’s was part and parcel of the shift from manufac- and Ryan and Kellner’s, given that the mall in turing to services that was the defining feature Dawn is the Monroeville Mall, located in of America’s emerging post-industrial Monroeville, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pitts- economy.20 The shopping mall occupies a burgh, a city that was once synonymous with complicated place in this transition from an the steel industry. Despite the Pittsburgh industrial to a post-industrial economy, for al- setting, however, the steel industry is con- though it would seem the very epitome of a spicuous in its absence from Dawn. post-industrial economy—the jobs it creates, In this respect, Dawn manages to be pro- after all, are low-paying, short-term service phetic as well as obfuscatory. It is prophetic sector jobs—it was within the context of a because the steel industry would in fact be thriving postwar industrial economy that the absent from Southwestern Pennsylvania in a indoor shopping mall first appeared.21 few short years. Indeed, it is almost as if If the indoor shopping mall has managed Dawn foresaw the “death” of Southwestern to outlive the postwar industrial boom from Pennsylvania, as if the dead that congregate in which it was born, this in no way belies the its the mall in Dawn were a harbinger of the origins. Indeed, the case of Monroeville “dead” who would soon be populating the Mall—a mall whose fortunes declined with malls of Southwestern Pennsylvania.19 Dis- the decline of the steel industry—is a paradig- possessed of their lives, the dead of Dawn still matic illustration of the interconnection come to the mall to which they had been so between malls and manufacturing. With the accustomed to going to in life; dispossessed of decline of the manufacturing industries in the their livelihoods, the “dead” of Southwestern late 1970s and early 1980s, malls that gener- Pennsylvania had nowhere else to go. ally catered to lower middle-class and working-class clientele folded, faded, and/or
AXES TO GRIND 73 REVIVING THE DEAD IN SOUTHWESTERN PA underwent major overhauls. In Pittsburgh, ending is more hopeful precisely because for instance, not only did the fortunes order is not restored: of Monroeville Mall decline (the ice rink The functions of the sheriff’s posse in Night immortalized in Dawn was shut down in and the motorcycle gang in Dawn are in some the early 1980s) but the Allegheny Center ways very similar. They constitute a threat both Mall on Pittsburgh’s North Side which to the zombies and to the besieged (even if in served a distinctly working-class clientele, Night inadvertently, by mistaking the hero for a practically ceased operations altogether.22 zombie); more important, both dramatize, albeit Meanwhile, the more upscale and self- in significantly different ways, the possibility of consciously middle-class Ross Park Mall, and the development of Fascism out of breakdown and chaos. The difference is obvious: the located in the affluent North Hills, opened purpose of the posse is to destroy the zombies in 1986 and quickly emerged as one of and to restore the threatened social order; the Pittsburgh’s most popular malls. The institu- purpose of the gang is simply to exploit and tion of the shopping mall may have thus profit from that order’s disintegration. The survived, but not without significantly recon- posse ends triumphant, the gang is wiped out. stituting its consumer base. The premise of Dawn in fact is that the social This painful socio-economic shift, played order (regarded as in all of Romero’s films as out in the arena of the mall, is not evident in obsolete and discredited) can’t be restored; its the text of Dawn of the Dead. The severed link restoration at the end of Night simply clinches 24 in Dawn between production and consump- the earlier film’s total negativity. tion pictures consumerism as continuing Though plausible enough on its own terms, unabated and unaltered (most of the zombies Wood’s argument does not account for are working class adults, not affluent teenag- Dawn’s clear positioning of zombies as the ers) in spite of the absence of heavy producers of consumers, which means that industry—or, for that matter, in spite of the their triumph signifies not the defeat of con- absence of any kind of industry. There is liter- sumer capitalism, but its triumph. Because ally no productive sector of the economy the zombies are self-reproducing, consumer- extant in Dawn, and still consumption per- ism will continue even though the social order sists. What is so apocalyptic about Romero’s that produced it has completely collapsed. film is thus not that it envisions the end of So, while the social order is indeed dead, the consumerism but that it cannot envision an drives and desires that the consumer society end to consumerism. As the end credits engendered live on. (which depict the mall again overrun by zom- Yet in spite of the film’s projection of an bies) make clear, the dead will keep coming to undead future wherein consumerist impulses the mall and continue consuming even beat on eternally, Wood is incontestably right though the social relations that made consum- when he says that the ending of Dawn is still erism possible perished with the collapse “curiously exhilarating:” 23 of organized society. Hitherto, the modern horror film has invariably Children of the (Zombie) Revolution: moved toward either the restoration of the traditional order or the expression of despair New Social Order or Non-Class? (in Night, both). Dawn is perhaps the first horror In Wood’s reading of Dawn, he downplays the film to suggest—albeit very tentatively—the film’s bleak vision of consumerism continuing possibility of moving beyond apocalypse. unaltered and unabated; instead, he finds the It brings its two surviving protagonists to the film’s ending strangely optimistic. Using point where the work of creating the norms Night of the Living Dead as a point of contrast, of a new social order, a new structure of relationships, can begin—a context in which he points to the restoration of order at the end the presence of a third survivor, Fran’s unborn of the earlier film, suggesting that Dawn’s child, points the way to potential change.25
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Still, this ending, although undeniably what he calls “the non-class of neo-proletar- exhilarating, is decidedly downbeat.26 The ians.” This non-class is composed of those two survivors, Fran and Peter, do escape, but who fill “the area of probationary, contracted, their escape is an escape from, not an escape casual, temporary and part-time employ- to—they literally have nowhere to go. As they ment.”28 Gorz calls this group a non-class, not stand on the roof of the mall, preparing to because it does not constitute a genuine socio- leave in the helicopter that brought them there economic category, but rather because it does in the first place, Fran and Peter realize they not imagine itself as a class; its members are have no destination and very little helicopter usually overqualified for the jobs they find, fuel. With no alternative, they lift off anyway and consequently they “see ‘their’ work as a into an empty horizon; literally nothing— tedious necessity in which it is impossible except the rising sun—beckons them.27 Fur- to be fully involved.”29 Gorz elaborates: thermore, their escape is a purely personal “Whether they work in a bank, the civil ser- one. It may prefigure a “new structure of vice, a cleaning agency or a factory, [they] are relationships,” as Wood suggests, but it does basically non-workers temporarily doing not portend a new economic structure. After something that means nothing to them.”30 As all, consumer capitalism continues to live on, a result, members of the non-class neither even if only in the bodies of walking corpses. identify with their work nor their fellow In this respect, Fran and Peter do not herald workers. And because of the anonymous and a new order so much as crystallize and enact seemingly inconsequential nature of their la- the desires of a new class—specifically, bor (be it telemarketing, stacking shelves, the non-class André Gorz describes in Farewell adjunct teaching, folding clothes, entering to the Working Class. Though largely forgotten, data…), they do not see themselves as playing and to some extent genuinely outmoded, an integral part in the productive process, and Gorz’s work is a strikingly original rethinking consequently, do not see their work as a of Marxism that never received the attention source of potential agency. Indeed, their it deserved. My purpose in invoking it here work is, if anything, disempowering: they is not to rescue it from historical oblivion experience merely their impotence, irrel- but rather to use it as a Marxist-tinted lens evance, and expendability. through which to view Dawn. The compatibility Toiling in jobs devoid of meaning and im- of a Marxian-inflected analysis of Dawn with portance, the non-class of neo-proletarians is Gorz’s thinking comes, in part, out of the two the exact antithesis of the working class as works’ near simultaneous emergence: conceived by Marx. Instead of seeing their la- Farewell was published in France just one bor as a source of potential power, the year after Dawn’s American release, a histori- non-class sees their work as the very source of cal coincidence that suggests that the two their powerlessness. And far from hoping to works are expressions of the same Zeitgeist. seize control of the means of production, the Both are haunted by the failure of the radical non-class wants nothing more than to escape movements of the 1960s, and each attempts to from the productive process entirely: come to terms with a capitalist order that While the industrial proletariat derived an turned out to be far more resilient than the objective power from the transformation of Left had anticipated. matter, so that it perceived itself as a material In particular, Farewell to the Working Class force underpinning the whole course of society, helps explain why the absence of any produc- the neo-proletariat can be defined as a non-force, tive sector of the economy in Dawn is perfectly without objective social importance, excluded logical and why the film’s open ending is in- from society. Since it plays no part in the deed “exhilarating.” Gorz’s central claim is production of society, it envisages society’s development as something external, akin to that the proletariat of industrial society has a spectacle or show. It sees no point in taking been replaced in post-industrial society by over the machine-like structure which, as it sees
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it, defines contemporary society, nor of placing Knightriders [1981], which makes explicit the anything whatsoever under its control. What escapist logic underpinning Dawn). matters instead is to appropriate areas of What is so depressing about the ending of autonomy outside of, and in opposition to, the Dawn is thus what is so exhilarating about it. logic of society, so as to allow the unobstructed The zombies triumph, consumerism lives on, realization of individual development alongside 31 but the two human survivors escape. Where and over that machine-like structure. they are escaping to is irrelevant; what makes What the non-class seeks is thus not the abo- the ending so exhilarating is that it is an lition of the old order—Marx’s revolution—but escape from: the fantasy of a niche of au- simply a little pocket of autonomy outside of tonomy outside of and alongside the old and alongside the order, in which they can network of social relations would be spoiled achieve a sense of self-identity and individual- if the prospect of a new network of social rela- ity.32 As a result, the dream of escaping from tions were raised. the social order takes precedence over the de- The ending of Dawn is thus not so apoca- sire to change that order, requiring as that lyptic after all. For it envisions a world in would collective action and some degree of which the future of consumerism is assured class-consciousness. Indeed, the dream implies and in which the escape from consumerism the continued existence of that order, for it is not only possible within the context is only by virtue of the continued existence of of consumerism but only possible within the old order that one is able to carve out a the context of consumerism. In so doing, niche of autonomy alongside it (a point unwit- it enables us to have our cake of anti-consum- tingly illustrated in Romero’s subsequent film, erism and consume it, too. s
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 cinema and the horror genre. His dissertation, “That Pudgy Colossus of Movie Melodramas:” The Films of Alfred Hitchcock, the Melodramatic Tradition, and the Postwar Discourse on Irony, explores the influence of the New Criticism’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 be published by Peter Lang) with Michael Asimow (UCLA School of Law) and Norman Rosenberg (Macalester College).
NOTES 1 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-backed Somoza 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 (Robert Altman). 3 As Robin Wood has observed, however, Dawn’s ending is actually more upbeat in tone than Night’s, which I discuss 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 Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988) 179. 8 Ryan and Kellner, 181.
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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 the ideological implications of horror texts that is the dominant topic of discussion in critical circles, not, say, the formal 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 Minnesota Press, 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 the limitless 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 the banks of the Mahoning River like the bleaching bones of some recently extinct dinosaur. Twelve soaring stacks that 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 George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1979) is in actuality a description, written in 1979, of the abandoned steel mills of Youngstown, Ohio. 20 For a thorough discussion and analysis of this phenomenon, see Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison, The Deindustrialization of America: Plant Closings, Community Abandonment, and the Dismantling of Basic Industry (New York: 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,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (20 April 1994) B4. 23 The film is somewhat evasive when it comes to just how bad general social conditions are. However, the television commentator’s suggestion that the zombies be used as food gives some indication of how dire the economic conditions 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 eventually detach itself from the market economy altogether and form a network of social relations outside of it. History, thus far at least, has not borne out this hope.
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