Dawn of the Dead_Response 5

Romero’s Dawn of the Dead displayed an eerie sense of humor during a time that was so near the end. I suppose most humans try to find the humor in such dire times. There is no rational reason for needing to laugh while the world is crumbling around you, but it is done everyday. People hide their sadness with smiles and jokes while they are collapsing inside. I think Romero knew and felt this irony and chose to portray it in several scenes in this film.

            Throughout the entire movie, there are one-liners that make the audience giggle. These are often found in the dialogue between the Peter and Roger when they share witty banter about plans they were making to avoid or kill the zombies. The scene that stood out specifically to me was the scene in which Peter, Roger and Stephen band together to move the semi-trucks to the entrances of the mall in order to block any “intruders.” During this scene, Peter and Roger use the radios in their trucks to make jokes about how they ended up in the same S.W.A.T. team. I believe Peter makes fun of Roger’s size and the jokes about this continue. During this extremely crucial moment of having to avoid zombies attacking Roger as he gets out of the first truck to climb into Peter’s, the only thing the two are thinking about is jokes. It could be interpreted that this scene is used to show how ridiculously absurd it is that these four people are attempting to make a shopping mall their home during the apocalypse.

            Another rather hilarious scene is after the bikers “break into” the mall and start using the zombies as the punch line of all of their jokes. During our discussion in class, someone mentioned that the biker gang went from bikers to Mexicans to clowns because of the sombreros and throwing pies in the zombies’ faces. That’s any extremely good way to interpret this scene because it seems that the biker gang was only used in this movie as a comedic relief piece. Throwing pies in zombies’ faces wasn’t enough however, Romero decided to kill the biker wearing a poncho and a sombrero at a blood pressure check station. This scene makes this particular biker’s death hilarious because the zombies rip of his arm while it’s still in the blood pressure cuff. I believe that Romero did this to reduce the horror of the feeding the zombies were about to partake in.

            This film, gruesome as it was, was also hilarious because of the dialogue exchanged between the characters and the way Romero chose to portray and kill certain characters. Aside from this movie being filmed in 1978 with terrible acting and make up, Dawn of the Dead created a story line that shocked the audience because of the amount of humor that went along with this zombie apocalypse. Then again, human nature is to laugh at the things that make us upset or uncomfortable in life and Romero did an excellent job at portraying that.