Thursday, November 29, 2012
Consumerism Week / Film The last word (in movies, anyway) on consumerism
Posted By Ben Sachs on 11.29.12 at 06:52 AM
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Many have tried to claim Dawn as an anticonsumerist parable (as an undergraduate, I was one of them), but the movie's greatest quality may be its open-endedness. The mall is an idiot's paradise, sure, yet it also provides the heroes with everything they need to survive—food, clothes, lodging, weapons. In fact, Dawn often plays as a consumerist fantasy, with the four protagonists enjoying free reign over an entire mall's worth of goods. (It's like an apocalyptic variation on the great Buster Keaton comedy The Navigator.) The fantasy turns unexpectedly poignant when the characters put together a New Year's holiday in the final act: no matter how extravagant their celebration gets, there remain all around them more gifts than they could ever give or use.
In this sequence, Romero quaintly visualizes one of the looming fears of the nuclear age: that we've created a civilization that will outlive us (the model of planned obsolescence central to latter-day consumerism may exist to help us forget this fear). When presented with the alternative of no human activity at all, shopping seems profoundly human—an example of free will in action. The sentiment here marks a complete reversal of the earlier comedic scenes, yet it speaks to Romero's greatness as a satirist that he can get us to identify with both.
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