The Return of Dawn of the Dead

I wanted to make a few more remarks about Dawn of the Dead, but first wanted to acknowledge what Tim Hulsey and Josh Levin have already said about the film(s) (and give a nod to the latter for providing a link to the former). I especially like how both argue why zombies are slow in Romero's films but fast in the current generation of zombie flicks (not only the Dawn remake, but 28 Days Later; in particular, Hulsey has smart things to say about the Nietzschean implications of Romeo's zombies, who are emblematic of mob tyranny. As I've indicated earlier, Romero's films were scary but pleasurable for the young me. I get the satirical, anti-consumerist message of Dawn, but must admit I enjoyed the fantasy of what it would be like to have a mall to myself, and also derive pleasure today remembering the consumer context of my first experience of the films (on T.V. and seeing them run at movie theatres). But another part of the pleasure I derive from Romero's films (and I should note that I'm omitting Day of the Dead from consideration here, but it never held my interest like the others) is that they're both fantasies (or nightmares) of underclass (particularly black) power, which a welfare kid like myself must have intuited at some level. Read as actors in a civil defense film, the zombies of Night of the Living Dead possess the same social energy of the people rioting in Watts: of course they're being hunted down by a redneck sheriff, of course the news footage contained within the film recalls civil rights media coverage from earlier in the decade (down to the barking dogs), and of course the more-eloquent-than-Sidney-Poitier Ben has to get killed at the end of the film: one zombie is just like any other. Part of what makes Dawn of the Dead fun for me is that it reverses the dystopian ending of its predecessor by giving us a black male hero (Peter) who survives. Indeed, Peter's first act in the movie is killing a redneck cop who's been killing the zombies and non-zombies currently residing in an urban housing development (they're interchangeable at the beginning of the film): the Watts rioters of Night have become the urban poor of Dawn, and Bull Conner has been replaced by a SWAT team. I haven't developed a complete thesis on this aspect of the film, and how it integrates with its second phase. To my thinking, the original Dawn of the Dead has two main acts - the tenement section, and the mall section. There are probably one or two exceptions to the following generalization, but there aren't any black zombies at the mall, and there aren't any white zombies in the tenement. Everyone always talks about the mall section of the film, but what do these two sections have in common? Are the mall zombies and the tenement zombies dangerous in the same way? Is the mall a fantasy of escape from the tenement, but one that isn't really an escape? I can't answer that question definitively (I'll give it more thought), but, reaching back to who I was when I first saw the film, it's fair to say that the mall was a fantasy of escape for this young moviegoer, which contributed both to my initial pleasure in the film, and my sense of nostalgia about it.