Analysis of Night of the Living

I want to start out by mentioning that before viewing Romero's Night of the Living Dead I completed the reading of the Wikipedia entry and article by Harper on Night of the Living Dead and those two readings, especially the reading by Harper allowed me to absorb much more from the film than I would have without the literature. The reading allowed me to understand the film within its historical context, for instance I would not have been thinking about the political and social anxieties that people were feeling in the 60s and 70s surrounding the Vietnam War and nuclear warfare. Most likely, I would have also missed the the killing of Ben at the end of the film and how this alluded to the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. These are just some of the things that were very helpful to have a heads up before watching the film so that I was able to get much more from the viewing. 

Clearly knowledge of the historical context of racism and sexism are very important to the films success. It would be easy to miss the way that Barbara precariously positions the knife towards Tom when they are first in the house even though he is protecting her and doing his best to help her. It is also seen in the film that the women are nearly useless. This is something I can say I certainly do not miss seeing in films. The men talk about the women as though they are only a burden and they actually become a burden at times in the movie that women would not generally be in a real life situation (i.e. Judy running out to join Tom in the truck and getting her jacket stuck and leading to the death of the couple, and also Barbaras catatonic state and utter un-helpfulness). The contextualization of these events in the film are critical to understanding what they mean to us as viewers.

The articles were also specifically helpful in relating the film back to the Hall article from the last two weeks of class. I watched Night with the Hall article in mind and I must say it really helped me understand not only the historical context of the film itself but why historical context is an especially important topic to consider when viewing the film. It struck me as very interesting to watch the relations between Ben and Mr. Cooper with the idea that it was nearly unheard of to have a black character as the protagonist of a film in the late 1960s. I enjoyed watching how Ben seemed to "rule" the upstairs and Mr. Cooper couldn't seem to put his trust in Ben, most likely because of the color of his skin. All of the bickering and disagreement between the two men (metaphorically, the two races) eventually leads to the demise not only of the two men but of everyone in the house. At the end of the film when Ben is murdered by the white police officers because they didn't realize he was a human I thought about the flag from the beginning, waving metaphorically in the graveyard and symbolizing the death of America. I tried to use Hall's article to break the flag down, the flag is the sign, the signifier is the flag, the form of the American Flag, its stars and stripes and the cloth of what it is made, and the signified is the concept of the flag, and here it is representing "the meaninglessness and deadliness of patriotism" (Harper p. 5). 

Another way to apply Hall's ideas of representation is to look at the meaning of the zombies. The meaning, or signified, of the zombies can be interpreted many different ways. They can be seen in a biblical sense as those who rise on "the last day", they can be seen as "the younger generation of Americans which, as it seemed to many in the late 1960s, wanted to overthrow traditions and replace them with new social order" (Harper p. 5), or they could also be seen as "the homeless, AIDS sufferers, drug users, or any other marginalized group" (Harper p. 5). There are many different possible meanings for one single thing in the film and that is why Hall's ideas are particularly important for the interpretation of this film. 

"THE TELEVISION SAID THAT'S THE RIGHT THING TO DO"