Shuttling ourselves from the city to the suburbs, we enter an enclave that encases the convenience of urban life and the peace of the country. Lured by the promise of the idyllic, we hope to find in this nexus a defense against the decay of the city, while still retaining its advances. Although the suburbs were built to barricade us from the corruption of the city and suppress the horrors of the past, the evils of the urban and the rural both seethe and stir under our well-manicured lawns and behind white fenced yards.
Dawn of the Dead (1978) begins with the city crumbling and collapsing; urban centers are no stalwarts for security and society. As the sequel to the genre trailblazer Night of the Living Dead (1968), the movie intensifies the conflict by having the zombie outbreak stretch into a global threat. While Fran Parker (Gaylen Ross) and Stephen Andrews (David Emgee) work for a Philadelphia television studio and witness firsthand the inability of civilization to control or cope with the crisis, Peter Washington (Ken Foree) and Roger DeMarco (Scott Reiniger) raid the housing projects and gun down blacks and Latinos for violating martial law and not delivering their dead to the National Guard, which demonstrates that even as social order decays, there is still a racial and economic hierarchy imposed by those grappling to retain power. When our two parties converge and locate a helicopter to escape the city, they will then seek sanctuary in the country. However, the rural environs prove uninhabitable for our urbanites and their guns cannot abate the encroaching hordes. Fleeing from the unknown of the country, our protagonists retreat to the mall, which is the intersection of the urban and the suburban.
Hunkering down in a site of commerce, the four characters are ensnared by the entertainment offered by the shopping mall. Looting the stores, Peter, Roger, and Stephen risk their own lives wheeling a garden cart of the luxuries of consumer society through droves of flesh-eating fiends. Devaluing life is not restricted to their own though as the men’s craving almost costs Fran her life and the life of her unborn child. They even consider aborting the baby at one point; after all, if life does not contribute to the capitalistic stream, what good is it? When Steve reunites with her, he stifles her sobs and dismisses her real fears of death with, “We’re okay. We got a lot of stuff. This place is perfect.”
Furnishing their living quarters with the amenities of the American Dream, the three men stockpile goods and cash in a time when such possessions would seem devoid of worth. The urge to accumulate any and all products during an economic catastrophe proves that the appeal of capitalism emerges from an understanding that the value of merchandise consists not in their utility or their exchangeability but in the illusion created that material wealth satiates our primal yearning to extend ourselves beyond our own bodies. Thus, the problem with capitalism isn’t simply the alienation of labor, the manufacturing of discontent, and the normalization of greed. Desire is at the heart of the problem, but is not the problem itself. We are desiring creatures and were made to be so. We desire because we lack, and we will never not lack. But capitalism defers the impossibility of desire’s fulfillment and the surplus that is impossible for products to satisfy. The commodification of goods assures us that we will not die, but the undead horde descending upon the mall very viscerally shows how empty those promises really were. Hunger, we see, does not end with death. The ravenousness persists beyond biological life, showing that life under such conditions already is death.
Unchecked appetite instills territorialism as Peter, Stephen, and Roger descend into consumeristic madness and attempt to seal the mall from the roving zombies by moving trucks to bar the entrances. In their efforts, Roger gets bitten, dies from his wounds, and returns as one of the undead. Life is devalued for the pursuit of goods and merchandise. While Peter is referring to the zombies when saying that they are drawn to the place, he could have just as easily been speaking of the survivors. Exchanging life and others for space and stuff, Peter and Stephen make their last stand defending their Eden of the mall by engaging in a shootout with a roving biker gang. Even before Stephen dies, he is among the waking and walking damned; rather than do what is rational and run, he entrenches himself with Peter for what he ultimately worships is the temple of that place of commerce. Fran is the only one who continues to enact humanity by evacuating to the helicopter not only for her own preservation but the preservation of her offspring. Reneging on his suicidal plan, Peter forfeits his material empire he had erected to the illusion of his immortality and chooses the reality of a life that involves self-denial and sacrifice, though the length of such a commitment is as uncertain as the length of life itself.
While transient in its ability to satisfy, the desire to collect and consume is as difficult to kill as the zombies in George A. Romero’s movie. Exposing capitalism for its animalistic nature, Dawn of the Dead might lull us into the false notion that only the most extreme hedonists would pursue such an end as the ultimate goal. Dispatching with that misconception, Tobe Hooper’s Poltergeist (1982) shows us what happens when that hunger is baptized through the gospel of American conservatism and the dictates of the Protestant work ethic.
Throughout almost every frame of the film, the eighties is venerated as the cultural ideal, and the Reagan era is nothing if not the height of American exceptionalism and the belief in the American Dream. Steve Freeling (Craig T. Nelson) is the father of the ideal American family. His wife, Diane Freeling (JoBeth Williams) is an amiable housewife that makes breakfast every morning. His oldest daughter, Dana (Dominique Dunne) is the quintessential teenager enjoying the freedoms of privilege belonging to white adolescence. His eight year old son, Robbie (Oliver Robins) is a vehicle for commercialism as he must have more Star Wars toys than any child in America. Finally, there is Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) who epitomizes innocence and purity, which prompts our pity all the more when she is snatched by the eponymous poltergeist. The patriarch builds this home, both literally and metaphorically, as he is a real estate agent for Cuesta Verde, meaning “green hill,” and his lullaby each evening is the playing of the National Anthem from the quotidian tube, the household hymn that engenders in them even while they sleep the lie that all of this is rightfully theirs and is indicative of the good life — one that is equally parceled to all peoples, as equally as the simpatico buildings scattered throughout phase one through five of the subdivision. As Steve tells a prospective buyer when he says, “You know, we have a saying around here. The grass grows greener on every side”, it is easy to enjoy power, privilege, and possessions guilt-free if you delude yourself into thinking it is evenly distributed.
However, the carefully curated developments of Cuesta Verde conceal the injustice of the erasure of those who had once called that land home. In a pivotal scene, Steve is shocked to learn that Cuesta Verde is built atop burial grounds. His boss, Teague (James Karen), emulates Satan by taking Steve to the top of the world of the movie and having him look down, claiming that plot could become his. When Teague lauds the view, Steve astutely mentions that it depends on whether you are in a house at the bottom or a house at the top. Thus, the green hill of residential houses is both a hiding of an ugly past and a position to look down on the less fortunate. By the end of the film, Steve learns an even darker truth though; those who were buried weren’t relocated as his manager claimed: only the headstones were moved. The American Dream has one foot in the grave and conceals its embeddedness from consciousness through denial, demolition, and misdirection.
Beneath the surface of what could be just another haunted house story is a critique of the pompousness of capitalism and its plausibility structures, Poltergeist confronts the viewer with powers that exist beyond the limits of our mass produced lifeworld and confronts her with the truth that in spite of our pretensions, we are not the masters of this planet.
Unpeeling the false belief in the Anthropocene, Tangina Barrons (Zelda Rubinstein) arrives at the Freelings as a spiritual medium to advocate for a more contested and pluralistic universe. Her rhetoric probably arrests many viewers when they watch this. But in spite of her grandiosity and apparent displays of power in the face of the dark forces that have abducted Carol Anne, she actually accomplishes nothing. She pronounces the house “clear” after Carol Anne is rescued by a snatch-and-run through a tear in the fabric of our spacetime, but it isn’t. The Beast she warns against is still there and more insistent than ever on capturing Carol Anne.
Tangina may not be a fraud, but the esteem in which she is held by the parapsychology “experts” in the film is misplaced. Carol Anne’s brother, Robbie, devises the method that is successfully used to retrieve Carol Anne and after Tangina leaves having pronounced, “Mission accomplished,” it’s Steve and Diane who save their family at the (necessary) cost of their home.
The way that the house shrinks into nothingness shows the insubstantiality of the dream that built it. When the pressures of the real clamped against the Freeling home, the nothingness at the heart of this life proved insufficient to resist the compression, which nicely concedes to the lies of Tangina’s howlers. “There is no death,” she claims, “there is only a transition to a different sphere of consciousness.” What a nice sentiment to assuage the guilty conscience of the contractors that desecrated the resting place of the dead. The United States didn’t liquidate the native Other: they transitioned them to another sphere of consciousness. Thank God! That could have been really awful if a program of genocide, cultural assimilation, and the seizure of land took place. We would have something to answer for! Pious New Age nonsense like this cannot atone for the very real wrongs perpetrated upon these people.
The way that the dead practically leap out of the ground in the film’s ending paints a very different picture, and I’m grateful to Trevor for pointing this out to me (Ian). It really speaks to me because Native American devastation is a place I might not call home but my mom, my aunts and uncles, cousins, and grandparents do. The bobbing corpses in the excavated pool and protruding corpses in caskets are all the more potent since they are from real skeletons, making the audience feel the indictment of the movie. Whether conspirators in the injustice of the American Dream or casualties, we are all complicit because we are all corrupted by it.
Breeding scarcity, competition, and consumerism, the American Dream culminates in fragmentation. Squelching our desires or sanitizing them as evidence of a good work ethic is a suppression that eventually causes us to spiral because the dream eventually fails us. In Session 9 (2001), Brad Anderson showcases the unraveling of a man confined to the claustrophobic narrative of capitalism by setting his story in an abandoned asylum.
Intended for those we stigmatize as Other, the psychiatric hospital represents an encasement of people who do not conform to our standards of normalcy. Inside these bland buildings, image bearers pace as hollowed out by our drugs and experiments as the buildings that store them. For Gordon Fleming (Peter Mullan), he is fracturing from the stress of new fatherhood and, as result, commits to a job of removing asbestos from Danvers State Hospital in a week. To meet the deadline, his friends, Phil (David Caruso), Mike (Steve Gevedon), and Hank (Josh Lucas) agree to assist, knowing that there is a significant bonus for such expeditious work. Adding to the group’s numbers, Gordon’s nephew, Jeff (Brendan Sexton III) comes under the tutelage of the more seasoned workers.
Although each character is an individual with his own distinct personality, the four of them act as a single entity. Particularly considering the title takes its name from nine-audio taped therapy sessions with Mary Hobbes, a former patient who suffered from dissociative identity disorder, there is a clear reading of the movie as each character as metaphor for the splintering that occurs in Gordon. The lives of each one is enmeshed. Hank jilted Phil because he stole his girlfriend and yet despite Hank’s penchant for self-destruction, Gordon cannot extricate himself from that relationship. Mike, a law school dropout, both informs the group and protects it by being knowledgeable of the asylum’s history and investigating the patient tapes he discovers. As Gordon’s nephew, Jeff seems to represent his optimism and innocence. After all, the nephew is a grown man who has nyctophobia (fear of the dark). The dark is not just literal; it suggests the uncertainty of a future, especially a future constructed out of dreams of making the big score from manual labor.
Wealth from our own manual labor seems noble until the bodies financing our pleasures are revealed. Mark explains how the hospital came to be vacant by recalling the government defunding in the 1980s when patients were discharged and dumped into the street, rendering them homeless. However, there was another incentive to deinstitutionalization that came in the form of litigation over a patient that had claimed a repressed memory in which her parents had abused her. When the memory was demonstrated false, her parents brought a suit against the hospital. Dismantling many places of psychiatric care because of financial liability suggests both the holiness of the dollar and the ability of false memories to define our lives.
Residuals of past violence incubate in the walls of Danvers though. Fumigating the corridors and rooms, our characters are picking the scabs and sores of the collective wounded. Hank tells Jeff to not breathe in the asbestos as it will cause psychological deterioration, but the actual madness comes not from a physical agent but from the awareness of the fact that our nation was meant to be a hospital for others and instead was a torture chamber for what the movie calls the “weak and the wounded.”
Containing structural similarities to The Shining (1980), Session 9 interrogates the house haunted by the ghost of a national narrative that was written with the blood of the oppressed, the hurting, and the marginalized. The story of our own goodness and the ability to save ourselves through our own work that the American Dream peddles is a dream cracking into a nightmare, as seen by the torn United States poster in the background while Hank lectures Jeff about the importance of having an exit plan. The crumbling of Danvers and the plan to repurpose the building indicates the failure of rehabilitation. But rehabilitation is not a failure because of its intent but its execution. Littered throughout the eerie, atmospheric hospital are lobotomy picks, signals of a seemingly more brutal and uncivilized time. Lobotomy picks are the ultimate symbol of suppression as they convey the erasure of desire to the point of automaticity. Enhancing our unease is the fact that while we might expect these scenes to occur at night, the horror of our film is almost exclusively during daylight hours, indicating how evil skulks even in places that seem bright.
Suppression is a short-lived solution. We all eventually cave to cravings. After discovering some expensive antiques in the basement of the building, Hank returns at night to steal them and abscond but is foiled. Hank’s disappearance strains the allegiances in the group further and, when Jeff spots him in the basement one day, it splits the group literally and figuratively. Questioning Gordon’s leadership to Mike after learning that the protagonist struck his wife after an accident, Phil plots a coup to restore order. Not long after, the big reveal of the movie (which I will refrain from spoiling) emphasizes how our self narratives and national narratives are tenuous at best and that interred within them is the scary truth that we are all capable of heinous acts. Suppression shifts the awareness from this reality for the moment, but the corpses will exit their tombs whether as zombies of desire, poltergeists of vengeance, or lobotomized patients.
Nowhere is safe: the suburbs shield us from others we would delude ourselves into thinking are different in order to sanction our actions against them and sanctify ourselves as being morally superior. Suppression does not shelter us from the haunted habitats of our surroundings as it is constructed by the brick and cement of lies. Bodies are buried everywhere and death — of our personal goodness, of our national identity, of ourselves eventually — is inescapable. Only when we stop running from place to place and face the inevitable with eyes wide open will we have life.
