The film opened with harrowing montages of frightening zombies matched with an eerie, suspenseful score. Humans are few and far between because the zombies have taken over and started a new life where they learn to play music, get gas from the local attendant zombie Big Daddy (Eugene Clark), and feel threatened by humans trying to destroy their way of life. Rolling through the streets in the Dead Reckoning (a destructive tank that zombies can’t breach), the humans slaughtered every zombie in sight. Big Daddy, the zombies’ leader and main character, screamed in agony afterwards and led a revolt to end the tyranny against their kind. They discover the source of the tyranny, Kaufman (the perfect role for Dennis Hopper), and attack him at the tallest tower in the middle of the city, leaving all others in peace once they killed Kaufman and ended the tyrannical rule. Those in the Dead Reckoning let the zombies be as well, and they fled to Canada. These actions were unsuspected, but their beliefs had changed in recognizing the true enemy.
Several stereotypes were depicted on Land of the Dead. There was the ruthless, powerful American in a suit (Hopper), his fellow Americans (soldiers aboard the Dead Reckoning) who hated him as much as the enemy, and the zombies. The zombies and soldiers were portrayed favorably, whereas Kaufman was the most evil person/being in the film. At first, Romero used the cultural stigma of what a zombie is to force the viewer into siding with the humans initially. As the Dead Reckoning plowed through the residential streets killing thousands of zombies who were too slow to defend themselves, one soldier declared, “I thought we’d have more of a fight. This is a massacre!” As Big Daddy screamed in agony, surveying the destruction of his people, the audience is stunned to realize that the zombies – a cultural icon of a bad guy, an enemy – were fought unfairly enough to consider that they had been persecuted. This, in tandem with the politics of our nation at war back then, commented on the possibility of the enemy being slaughtered, no matter how evil we may have perceived them. To spell it out, Romero used the zombies as a metaphor for this concept our nation has of terrorists: evil, ungodly, flesh-eating heathens. America has treated terrorists and all associated with them in the same manner.
In the history of zombies, they have been portrayed as godless heathens praying on the fibers of civilization, a connotation one often associates with the word terrorist. Certainly, this had been true for all zombies in the past, and Kaufman would argue that a zombie is a terrorist (like our government, in one line he said, “We do not negotiate with terrorists!”), but the zombies in this film are fighting for survival against our civilization. Since both parties sensed impending danger and felt threatened, war ensued. This motivated Kaufman to be prejudiced against zombies, though he doesn’t hide his hatred or prejudice, calling Cholo (John Leguizamo), after Cholo became a zombie, a “Fryeing spic bastard.”
Kaufman had every qualification for an authoritarian personality, developed by Theodor Adorno and his colleagues, which led to his prejudice:
[They] (1950) proposed that the authoritarian personality was composed of nine characteristic patterns of thought, five of which are related to prejudice: conventionalism: rigid adherence to conventional, middle-class values; authoritarian submission: submissive uncritical attitude toward idealized moral authorities; authoritarian aggression: tendency to be on the lookout for, and to condemn, reject, and punish people who violate conventional values; stereotypy: the…disposition to think in rigid categories; projectivity: the disposition to believe that wild and dangerous things go on in the world; the projection outwards of unconscious emotional impulses. (as cited in Whitley and Kite, 2006, p. 211)
One character, Charlie (Robert Joy), had a facial deformation that made him resemble a zombie, but he was an innocent human. Charlie represented the innocent people associated with terrorists because of their ethnic appearance. In the context of Land of the Dead, he was introduced by having a gun pointed at him because he wandered onto the screen slowly, like a zombie. He was also labeled and dismissed as "retarded" by others. This character rounded out the metaphorical representation of everyone involved in the war on terror. Eventually, as an audience member, we accepted him as anyone else, but the first few times he was on screen during battle, it was difficult to think he was not a zombie, which Romero did intentionally to comment on racial profiling.
Though Charlie sided with humans, others remained skeptical of him, much like whites were skeptical of blacks in the army in WWII and much like skeptics of having gays in the military. As Star, Williams Jr. and Stouffer noted in their article “Intergroup Tension, Prejudice: Negro Infantry Platoons in White Companies,” in a time of war, whites were able to accept blacks and put prejudice and profiling aside for a common cause, much like humans learned to do with Charlie. Charlie was judged nonetheless like gays in todays military. He wasn’t murdered, but others were often startled by his presence and ready to attack him due to his disfigured face.
Social progressives like George A. Romero need to find more outlets to spread their ideas to the public, though zombie films are an excellent way to reach the public eye by gratifying us with the ultra-violence we crave. Most laugh when I say that such and such zombie film made startling, well-conceived social commentary on the intricacies of American culture and life, but exposure to a concept like questioning your enemies could be invaluable to someone just seeking entertainment.
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In other words, #SLOE. These playoffs are great! Go GMs! The basketball being played by the GMs is really great basketball. Players are shooting and making shots, but sometimes other players block the shots! For example, in one game, the Suns got 8 blocks whereas the Pistons got 9 blocks. These teams are not big blockers though, at least not in this game, but it proves that players block shots, too.
So now it's league related and based on precedent I should get full points for a 1500+ word count.
References
Allport (1954). The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, MA: Perseus.
Barnett, S. (Producer), Romero, G. A. (Director). (2005) Land of the Dead [Motion Picture]. United States: Universal Pictures.
Stouffer, S. A., Star, S. A., & Williams Jr., R. M (1949). Intergroup Tension, Prejudice: Negro Infantry Platoons in White Companies. In The American Soldier: Studies in Social Psychology in World War II (pp. 596-601). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Whitley Jr., B. E. and Kite, M. E. (2006). The Psychology of Prejudice and Discrimination. Australia: Thomson Wadsworth.
