When viewing George A. Romero’s 1978 zombie masterpiece, Dawn of the Dead, the usage of the zombie as symbol for larger social forces is apparent on even a surface viewing of the film. Following Steven Shaviro’s account of the undead in that film as representations of amok consumer capitalism during the age of the image, I suggest that the zombies in the film can also be seen as representing the amok forces of the urban itself, as represented in the rhetoric of the mid-century, American suburban migration. Through a discussion of the faceless, mindless and all-consuming violence of the urban core, as felt by those who moved out to the suburban sprawl, I offer the zombie as the figure for the urban dweller. That isn’t to suggest a one-to-one correlation between zombies and inner-city minorities, rather I suggest that the forces of violence often associated with urban life (and attributed to urban minorities) by the suburban populace are embodied and concretized as the undead horde in Romero’s film (which is, after all, about perpetual escape into the suburban landscape, away from the urban core).
Having established the zombie as a figure for the forces of urban violence, I suggest that zombies can also be used as a metaphor for the average city-dweller (slack-jawed, lost amidst the play of information and image that constitutes the postmodern urban landscape). Here, I critique Deleuze & Guattari’s assertion that the zombie is the only metaphor available to the citizen of late-capitalism. According to Bernard Tschumi, the tangled architectural chaos of the deregulated, contemporary city (especially Tokyo and New York) represents a space that is continually shocking city-dwellers with the conglomeration of styles and the radical disjunction between form and function (churches are night clubs, night clubs are churches, etc.). Tschumi asserts that heightening this sense of shock and creating indeterminate structures are the new trajectory for architecture following the failed utopian impulses of the modern and the aesthetic chemistry of the postmodern. Further, I suggest that this urban shock is fundamental in suggesting that everyone (and not just the politically and socially turned-on flaneur of Situationist discourse) is constantly being revivified by the shock of the urban architectural chaos.