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As a metaphor for evil, the zombie is quite flexible. While all monsters stand in for alterity of some sort, the zombie is the Other who is produced by the hegemonic force of the nation myth, a force that is imagined as a white, male normative subjectivity. The zombie is a monster because the universality and objectivity assumed by the imperial white male gaze results in visuality itself being the product of colonial and patriarchal entitlement. The zombie, a monster that consists of only visual surface, a monster that is uncannily us and yet unknowable, draws attention to the limitations and vulnerability of the gaze. Because the zombie is such a flexible marker, it can represent alterity generally or any particular form of alterity specifically. The limitation of the zombie is that it always represents the difference that allows for a person to be reduced to object status.

The zombie is the human who is not empowered to be the subject of the gaze, who is not allowed to narrate their own stories.117

This is a serious and sweeping accusation. We live in a visual age. Our

subjectivities, our technologies and how we relate to the world around us are defined, in large part, by our immersion in visuality. To declare that visuality itself is a product of white male privilege, as I am, demands that social institutions, technologies and subject positions, all of which have changed radically under the reign of visuality, be called into question. This is precisely why I think the zombie is important. The zombie was invented as a means for hegemonic masculinity to reify itself. It is defined by visuality and often presents a threat in precisely the degree to which it either legitimates white male authority or, conversely, undermines visuality as a regime.

As was discussed in a previous chapter, neither Matheson nor Romero refers to their monsters as "zombies." For Matheson they are vampires and for Romero they are ghouls. Matheson's monster likely owes more to European myths of murderous ghouls than it does to the zombie mythology that fluttered at the periphery of US national consciousness in the wake of our occupation of Haiti. One might argue that Romero's Caribbean roots may have somehow subconsciously implanted the monster, but there's simply no evidence for it. Far more reasonable is to read Romero's ghouls as a

117 _{When stories attempt to be told through the perspective of the zombie, it is either the human becoming}

zombie, such as Ryan Mecum’s poetry collection Zombie Haiku and the film Contracted (2013), or a zombie whose ability to narrate is determined by its difference from the other undead, such as the webseries

Xombie and the novel-turned film Warm Bodies. There is, however, a subgenre of zombies-as-

disenfranchised in which zombies stand in for an identity that is denied full civic life, inviting the audience to identity with their struggle. Film in this genre include Homecoming (2005, veterans), American Zombie (2007, alternative religious communities), Otto; Or Up with Dead People (2008, sexually active gay men),

The Returned (2013, the chronically ill denied healthcare). Romero’s Dead film cycle does not allow the

ghouls subjectivity but it does frequently conflate the struggles of the undead with the living, to suggest a continuum in which the limits of identification are circumstantial rather than inherent.

reimagining of Matheson's vampires. The prime difference being that in Matheson, the vampires retain, to a limited extent, their previous social location. They can't be argued to retain their identities, but they remember their relationship to Neville and use it to attempt to lure him from hiding. From the dead neighbor Ben Cortman with whom Neville retains a rivalry even after Cortman's death, to Neville's own wife who uses his tender feelings for her to infiltrate the house and attempt to kill him, to the "lewd puppets" who Neville assumes are trying to use their previous status as women to seduce him from hiding, all the undead vampires are too weak and lack the cunning to break into the house. They only remain individuated to the degree that they ensnare Neville in the previous social order. In Night none of the characters, with the possible exception of Tom and Judy, are from the local community. Ben, Barbara, and the Coopers are all travelers who get stuck in that farmhouse. If the ghouls that attack them had retained the same degree of social location as the vampires in I Am Legend, we wouldn't know. With the exception of Johnny, who doesn't need to speak to ensnare Barbara in a monstrous filial piety, there are no social bonds to exploit. So instead Romero's film is filled with voiceless monsters whose social location is unknown by the strangers in their midst. For Neville, it was the lingering social order that made him vulnerable. For Ben and company, it is the inherent structural weakness of the home.

Night’s critique of authority is made possible by the inclusion of multiple degrees

of survivor community. There is the community of people within the farmhouse, who rely on one another’s labor to support and defend them. There is also the larger local community represented by the militia. On this level, survival is dependent on organized violence similar to what we’ve seen at work in previous chapters as “wild work.” This

wild work requires the tools of violence and a hierarchical structure in order to distribute those resources and coordinate that violence. As R.H.W. Dillard has argued, the film derives its power from this capacity to render the violence of wild work ordinary.

The film is. . . the story of everyday people in an ordinary landscape, played by everyday people who are, for the most part, from that ordinary locale. The way in which Night of the Living Dead transforms that familiar and ordinary world into a landscape of unrelenting horror reveals the film’s moral nature and the deep and terrible fear at its heart. (20) For Dillard, the dead cease to be terrifying the moment that Ben kills one. The fear of death is then replaced by a fear of the violence that sustains US white-supremacist empire, a violence only precariously contained and directed toward the Other. Dillard argues that the fear of Night is that wild work can so easily be turned to target the citizen, should they be declared Other by those who execute the wild work, who themselves are above reproach. If any character in this film represents the position of unquestioned authority that Van Helsing established, it is Sheriff McClelland. On the top level, we have the explicit national community, which consists of politicians, military leaders, and scientists. That level is incoherent and inaccessible, comprehensible only through the efforts of the local newscasters who function as its agents.

The farmhouse community is entirely alienated from these other two levels of survival, just as the subject positions within the farmhouse are alienated from the ideological supremacy of the nation and from the localized institutions by which the nation sustains itself. White Zombie’s (1932) Neil was a representative of the national norm and served as a pedagogy of hegemonic masculinity in the service of empire. King

of the Zombies’ (1941) Jeff functioned to recruit subordinated masculinities in to the

national project. Neville was not a patriot but instead showed how the national myth can appropriate individualist masculinities, creating the impression that the nation is merely a projection of the hegemonic ideal and that the two share the same interests. In Night, however, we have a community of survivors and none of them can be conflated with the subjectivity to which that the national myth interpolates us. Instead, this community represents the real people who make-up the nation, those whose difference is erased in the myth of national unity that privileges the model subjectivity of the gaze. Night presents us with an alternate model of the nation, one based on consent-based coalition building amongst those with shared interests. The Utopian potential of this focus is undercut by the continual reassertion through media that the survival of the national myth takes priority over the survival of the farmhouse community. The ending of the film, however, privileges the survival of those who control violence. Sheriff McClelland may or may not be fighting to preserve the nation. He may, like Neville, conflate the national myth with his own ego. Either way, he is clearly the fittest masculinity in the film in no small part because of his role within the national myth as both idealized subject and pragmatic enforcer.

Race is a technology that functions, like gender, to divide humans into groups that can then more easily have labor, resources, and loyalty divide amongst them. In a racially segregated economy, one can simply look at a person's skin color to determine the

appropriate labor, behavior, and community for that person. To be clear, race itself is an invention that allows the logic of the gaze to be substituted for more time and energy consuming ways of knowing about others, self, and the ever-so-important barriers

between. The divisions within human society lacked justification and race became a metonymic substitute that foreclosed inquiry by making oppression a mere fact of the gaze rather than rational distribution of tasks. In return, the ideology of race served to further construct the subjects generated by the logic of looking.

Ben and Barbara reject US national myths of normative race and gender. She demonstrates that the sacred space of the home/nation is not safe when women are stripped of agency. He, despite being excluded from the home/nation, proves to be its best defender. Normative scripts of race and gender in the US have long pitted white women and black men against one another in order to legitimate a white supremacist heteropatriarchy. As presented in The Birth of the Nation (1914), the foundational argument of white supremacy groups like the KKK is that white men's first duty is to protect the white woman from the black man. Women are taught to seek protection from their white patriarchs and black men are taught to fetishize white women as forbidden fruit. This system relies on compulsory heterosexuality and the dual constructions of passive white women's sexuality and black male sexuality as uncontrollably aggressive.

Night plays with these constructions, presenting both Barbara and Ben with the

stereotypical scripts but then using the presence of zombies to force each character out of their respective script. The breaking point for each character is a significant shift in the trajectory of the film.

When Romero presents us with a horror film in which the conflict occurs within the house even more so than without, he is participating in a larger conversation of how the nation is already unstable and multi-voiced. Even within the house, there is conflict and oppression. When Romero and his fellow film producers decided to cast a black actor

to play Ben, they knew they were transgressing the dominant racial paradigm.

Throughout the film Ben performs race in a way that Hollywood has not been prepared for. While Sidney Pointier and Harry Belafonte had been pushing the envelope of black men’s roles in film for two decades, their roles were often diluted through one of two strategies: either their characters were displaced to African or Caribbean locales, thus rendering their rebellions abstract and outside the national community or, more so for Pointier than for Belafonte, their characters were primarily solicitous to their white companions.118 _{The one exception to this rule is a film that Belafonte, a lifelong civil}

rights and later black power activist funded and helped to produce. Odds Against

Tomorrow (1959) came out nearly a decade prior to Night and chronicles black and white

thieves who, on the run after a bank robbery, turn on one another and both die in an explosion that leaves their bodies indistinguishable. Night was produced the same year that Pointier’s character in the film In the Heat of the Night (1967) slapped a white superior and proclaimed a new era of black masculinity in Hollywood. However, Night was released three years before the genre of Blaxploitation action films was established with the release of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971). While Ben misses the mark of being the first black man presented as justified in striking a white man, he is still among the first black main characters to make use of violence for purposes that are endorsed by the narrative. He predates the careers of such pioneering actors as Fred Williamson, Carl Weathers and Bernie Casey. What’s more, Ben doesn’t merely strike a

118 _{In Black Hollywood: The Black Performer in Motion Pictures, Gary Null notes that Pointier’s roles as}

the accommodating consummate professional marked as significant improvement from the roles for black actors in the 1940s. Previous decades had only imagined black characters in poverty and it was largely Pointier who led the movement to create fully relatable human characters rather than simply black stereotypes enacted (158).

white man. He, like Belafonte’s Johnny Ingram, shoots one and, unlike Johnny, outlives his antagonist. Unlike the Blaxploitation films to come out over the next decade, Night was not targeted to a black audience. Audiences are encouraged to cheer on Ben’s violence not because of racial solidarity, but because it is the best chance for survival for the rapidly depleting survivor community. Having a black actor play the role of the character who best defends and longest survives was a radical act in 1968.

Whether Ben is a working class white trucker or a middle-class black man, both models of subordinated masculinity are in a position to question visuality as a logic of domination and as a means of survival. In the terms of Gregory Waller, the Van Helsing style Renaissance man leads through visuality, his authority legitimated by his wide knowledge base. This breadth of knowledge participates in the regime of visuality because it functions as a mental map that can comprehend both science and the

supernatural. Like any other map, Van Helsing’s knowledge base functions by reducing an over-abundance of information to a spatial relation that can miraculously be

understood from an external, objective position. Van Helsing originally represented hegemonic masculinity, and in the various remakes of Last Man on Earth, Neville is always some form of critique of the Van Helsing model. Both were manifestations of the ideal citizen, the white masculinity in whose interest the nation functions and on whose privilege the nation is assumed to depend. What Night adds to the equation is recognition that subordinate masculinities have their own capacities for survival. At its best, Night disproves that the nation is contingent on the privileging of hegemonic masculinity and the erasure of alterity within the national community. Night argues that other subject positions are part of the survivor community and to ignore or disempower them weakens

the community as a whole. But Night is clearly not a utopian vision. Instead, the film cannot imagine a community beyond the normative authority of the national myth. The representatives of hegemonic masculinity in this film cannot imagine the agency of other subject positions and therefore cannot value the labor of subordinated groups. Ultimately, hegemonic masculinity in Night fails to see the difference between fellow citizens and foes.

To determine what ways that Night innovates the genre, we must trace the

precedents set in Matheson's novel. What Romero's film retains generally are the monster and the setting, although the updates of the cast of characters will certainly require more attention. Ben cannot be read as reimagining of Matheson’s protagonist and narrator Neville. I believe Johnny is a far better successor to that legacy. Ben is an escape from the narrow range of masculinities considered in previous zombie narratives. Like all other successful critiques of the hegemonic order, he is appropriated back into that order. But for his dialectic moment, he reveals the blind spots of the order against which he fought.