The Dead Don’t Die: Genre, Parody, and the Failure of the American Zombie as an Agent of Social Change

ABSTRACT

Jim Jarmusch’s 2019 zombie flick The Dead Don’t Die uses comedy to both critique the zombie genre and confront the many horrors of twenty-first century life. Zombies are symbols for human anxieties, whether those are anxieties about “otherness,” anxieties about nuclear annihilation, anxieties about mindless overconsumption, or anxieties about environmental catastrophe. The Dead Don’t Die explores all of these anxieties, focusing on the fear of environmental catastrophe. The zombies in The Dead Don’t Die rise from their graves because polar fracking has caused the earth’s axis to shift, reanimating the dead. In its critique of the zombie genre, the film asks whether the zombie film’s history of political and social commentary is still (or ever has been) effective in creating social change. Ultimately, The Dead Don’t Die is concerned with the failure of the zombie to produce lasting change and what that means for a world still plagued by greater horrors than the undead.

KEYWORDS:

• climate change
• film
• parody
• zombie

Notes

1 IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes score as of March 2023.

2 Defined as “a more subdued approach that manages comic deflation with an eventual reaffirmation of the subject under attack” (Gehring, 32).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lauren Crockett-Girard

Lauren Crockett-Girard is a fifth-year PhD student at Boston College. Her area of focus is twentieth-century American literature, with a special interest in apocalyptic literature/film and zombie theory. She is particularly interested in exploring the ways in which the zombie appears in American political discourse.