Night of the Living dead

Let me preface this entry by saying that this movie was phenomenal. I know this is not meant to be a review but I would be remiss if I didn’t address that point. Moving on to the analysis I would like to focus on representation through language and discourse. Foucault defines discourse as more than just the “linguistic concept” he goes further to state that discourse “is about the production of knowledge through language. … All practices have a discursive aspect”. This really resonated with me while I was watching the film because clearly the movies have a strong discursive element that helps to define characters. I was specifically stricken with the representation of women in the film. Noticeable from the first few scenes, women were depicted as weak and merely secondary. Just as the first attack begins Barbra runs away after the “ghoul” takes down her brother, she then makes her way to the house where she slowly falls into hysteria. It was up to the man to try and save her. As we meet the other characters in the house it becomes evident that this is not an isolated theme. Each of the women in the movie was in some manner fragile or delicate in need of protection and direction from the male characters.

Interestingly this goes along with a similar theme that I discussed in my blog about the exorcist. Last week I wrote how representation is controlled by the historical time. In that sense I wrote about how the idea of horror movies have changed and what was scary once does not necessarily hold the same resonance today. In this case a similar argument could be made about the role of women in film. Although we still see the “damsel in distress” in modern cinema, the flat female complacent characters that were represented in Night of the Living Dead are no longer the prevalent portrayals. The discourse that defined women as scared and helpless in the late 60’s have changed. This has the effect of making the lack of woman character development somewhat antiquated.