Untitled - Centre for Comparative Literature - University of Toronto

family. As the ultimate consumer good, Jacobs writes: “The most serious and widespread
increase was for the need for an automobile. Public transportation declined or was
altogether absent, especially in the suburbs. […]” (Dark Age 34). Similarly, a 1957 fi lm, In
the Suburbs, presents an ideal of life for young adults with “similar interests and goals,”
with families; a social and economic monoculture. These young families are, according
to the narrator, entering the “purchasing stage” of their lives: a new home, a new car, and
babies on the way all mean that these young couples are on a “wild, non-stop ride” in a
“happy, go-spending, world.” The shopping centre is the social nexus of this suburban
life, created in the image, and to fulfi l the needs, of suburbanite shoppers, determined
consumers with homes and lifestyles in constant need of expansion, who buy in quantity,
and take home their purchases in their cars, who “live by the automobile,” a veritable
incarnation of the American Dream. 3
Twenty-one years later, in 1978, George A. Romero fi lmed his cult-classic zombie
movie, Dawn of the Dead, at the Monroeville Mall, in Monroeville, Pennsylvania, a suburb
of Pittsburgh. The action of the movie takes place as the four main characters—Special
Forces commandos Peter and Roger, Stephen, a pilot, and Francine, a TV producer—
escaping a poorly explained zombie outbreak in Philadelphia, take refuge in a suburban
shopping mall. The mall supplies them with everything they could conceivably need:
clothes, food, a skating rink, a barber shop, fi re arms, and a car. They are in a consumer
heaven.
They are not alone in the mall, however: it is full of aimlessly wandering zombies,
there despite the fact that there are no humans left for them to eat; more and more of them
keep congregating there, walking into the glass doors that they cannot open. When the
protagonists fi rst arrive at the mall, landing on the roof in the helicopter, they peer down
through a skylight to see the zombies milling about:
FRAN: […] What are they doing? Why do they come here?
STEVE: […] Some kind of instinct. Memory…of what they used to do.
This was an important place in their lives. (Romero, shot 167)
The living dead fi nd their way to an isolated shopping centre solely by their memories—
they have only two instincts: to eat humans and shop. But the human characters’ instincts
are not all that different: not to get eaten by zombies, and shop. At one point Fran accuses
72 transverse