Note: This is a spoiler for "Night of the Living Dead" (which came before "Dawn").
"Night" was an unconventional horror film for many reasons, but among them, the hero of movie was black, and the year was 1968. While he survives the zombies up to the last minute of the film, he dies because a civil patrol posse of good old boys mistakes him for a zombie and shoots him in the head. The film ends with newsreel-type images of the hero being dragged out of the house, to a pile of bodies and then set afire -- a disturbing image in a time of civil rights turmoil.
I think that's relevant background to why the introduction to the SWAT team in "Dawn" was set in the projects, with a racist unit leader controlling a bloody charge into a building where families wouldn't give up their undead. I squirmed when Wally called the people the n-word and called their building "a fancy hotel -- they've got it better than I do."
5 comments:
I think the protagonist being black was one of the most interesting ways the film departs from what one would expect.
The racist unit leader was indeed squirm-inducing. He was quite a terrible person.
I thought the racist unit leader was just a racist unit leader. I'm sure most people squirmed then, too. And I'm sure people recognized him as a type: the macho white male racist (sexist and homophobic too, no doubt) who denounced minorities for feeling "entitled" to have the same rights he did. This was the Archie Bunker era when guys like that resented the hell out of things like affirmative action and busing because they thought it was wrong that something should be "given" to people just because of their race or sex, not realizing that people like him had been given things for millennia precisely because they were white and male. This was just a couple years before Reagan-era conservatives started the myth that "welfare queens" (their coinage) were living large — wearing diamnonds and driving Caddies in the ghetto. Everyone would recognize that racist unit leader.
It brings up an interesting issue, also, how people 30 years from now will see shows like "South Park" and "Sopranos" and many others, where the racism is deliberate to make fun of racism. Will people decades from now understand it the way we did, especially if they have no cultural aid (secondary sources, etc.) to explain it to them?
Interesting point about "South Park," kc.
I didn't think Wally was supposed to represent anything mainstream in that point. Other characters like Roger obviously didn't buy into it.
I didn't say he was mainstream. I said he was a type that most people would recognize and squirm about.
Oh! I didn't mean it that way. I thought my original post was unclear.
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