The term "nihilism" is often used as a derogatory label intended to impugn the moral credibility of a certain target. In this normative sense, it is meant as nothing more than an exclamation of negative sentiment; a way of expressing distaste for the thing being referred to. Taken seriously as a philosophic concept, however, it acquires a more interesting dimension. Literally, "nihilism" is a "doctrine of nothingness." It is an extreme form of skepticism which holds that any genuine knowledge of the world, whether it be moral, scientific, metaphysical, political or theological, is impossible. It is an epistemological doctrine stemming from the conviction that man is incapable of knowing the world's true nature either because the world has no true nature or because the nature of the world is inaccessible to man's intuitive, intellectual or sensory apparatus.
The nihilist is in an unusual position in relation to the world. Unlike a Cartesian, the nihilist is never able to satisfy himself that the world is as it seems. He has no Archimedean Point on which to stand, and so no way to be certain of what is real or imaginary, or of what is true or false. This skepticism about man's ability to understand the world was described by Nietzsche as the "death of God." (3) Man's loss of faith in God and the eternal truths that He ensures undermines all structures of authority, leaving man in a position where, apart from his will to do so, he has no justification for asserting anything as true or false.(4) This responsibility for one's perspective is potentially crippling, and may lead to feelings of despair and negativity. If nothing can be known for certain, and if there are no objective standards by which to judge truth and falsehood, life could be seen as meaningless and absurd. Further, if life is meaningless and absurd, then there is no justification for choosing life over death.
All nihilists must deal with the issue of if and how life has value. This is the very topic which propelled Albert Camus' writing career, and as he observed, the nihilist is not committed to life denial or suicide. He may, instead, elect to suffer through life in uncertainty, struggling each and every day with feelings of negativity as an option against suicide and death. As another option, he may choose to rebel against this negative propensity and instead of feeling resentment towards his situation, will himself to experience the exhilaration of interpretive freedom. The choice of the nihilist is, then, not necessarily the choice between living or dying, but the choice between adopting a passive or an active stance towards the world. Both Camus and Nietzsche advocate the choice of active over passive nihilism.(5)
Passive nihilism is indicative of a decline in spiritual power. It is characterized by the inability to create, or in the extreme, to react. The passive nihilist is one who, when faced with the world's uncertainty, withdraws and refuses to engage the world. For him, uncertainty is a sufficient condition not to proceed through life, and so paralyzed by fear of the unknown and unknowable, he does nothing. Nietzsche describes this tendency as "...the weary nihilism that no longer attacks...a passive nihilism, a sign of weakness."(6)
Active nihilism, on the other hand, is indicative of a relative increase in spiritual power. The active nihilist sees freedom where the passive nihilist sees absurdity or meaninglessness. He chooses action and creation instead of passivity and withdrawal. For him, the lack of objective standards of truth motivates self created standards and criteria. The active nihilist is not active despite the unknown, but because of it. He possesses a store of creative energy and power which allows him to impose personal meaning on the world while never forgetting that he is the source and progenitor of that meaning. He is heroic in this sense, facing the world with courage and purpose.
The struggle between the impulses of active and passive nihilism is a theme played out repeatedly in George Romero's films.(7) In his "Dead Trilogy," the clearest examples of this theme occur in the ongoing battle between the walking dead and the living survivors and in the evolution from weakness to strength on the part of the central female characters.
A war erupts between zombies and humans in Night of the Living Dead and a process is initiated which, by the end of Day of the Dead, will lead to the extinction of mankind and the triumph of passive nihilism. This zombie invasion is an attack on the metaphysical foundations upon which all societies rest, and it forces the surviving human population into a confrontation with nihilism.
Civilized man takes for granted that order is better than chaos and that due to the natural order of the world, certain things are simply impossible. An assault by flesh eating ghouls, however, calls into question this assumption. It is only in an irrational, absurd world that the dead may rise and overthrow the living. This is, in fact, a complete inversion of what humans take to be the natural order of things.
The zombies in these films are a kind of revolutionary force of predators without a revolutionary program. Their only concern is to satisfy an instinctual drive for predation; a drive which, as is pointed out in Day of the Dead, serves no actual biological purpose. They appear and attack without explanation or reason, violating taken for granted principles of sufficient cause and rationality. Because of this, they are especially threatening to the surviving human beings. Enemies such as Nazis or Communists are comprehensible in terms of their historical backgrounds, economic interests, religious, political or philosophic beliefs. But these zombies are a new breed of enemy in that they do not operate according to the same underlying motivations human beings share in common. They are a nihilistic enemy which, as lifeless, spiritless automatons, exemplify the epitome of passive nihilism. They wander the landscape exhibiting only the bare minimum of power that is required for locomotion and the consumption of living flesh. They must steal life from the strong because they possess such a depressed store of innate energy. They are, literally, the walking dead.
The eruption of the zombie threat forces the protagonists in these films to confront the world in all of its absurdity. As the threat worsens, there is a progressive realization that the interpretive tools available to the survivors are inadequate to deal with this situation. Science and religion prove equally impotent in performing their traditional roles of providing frameworks by which to impart purpose and meaning to events in the world. Life is reduced to a violent struggle for survival and even the hope of a serene after-life is destroyed. As this invasion worsens and the outlook for mankind becomes bleaker and bleaker throughout the course of the trilogy, it becomes apparent that the struggle for survival is hopeless as well, and that regardless of whether one adopts an active or a passive stance towards this threat, survival is impossible. The initial reaction of the humans is to turn to the tools of science in search of an explanation and solution to the problem at hand. In Night of the Living Dead, it is hinted at that the cause of the zombie phenomenon has something to do with a space probe that has returned from Venus, but this explanation is presented as hypothetical and very peripheral to the plot. The main role that scientists and authorities play in this first film is to warn citizens against the irrational attachments that they may feel towards loved ones who have become zombies. They warn that these irrational feelings of sympathy are dangerous and will only lead to an exacerbation of the problem. In Dawn of the Dead, one of the characters from the first film returns as a TV psychiatrist who, in frustration at the panic all around him, repeats over and over, "We must remain rational..." in an eerie chant that echoes throughout the compound of some survivors who have taken refuge in a shopping mall. In juxtaposition to this appeal to science, one of the main characters invokes a voodoo warning: "When theres no more room in Hell, the dead will walk the Earth." This religious explanation is simply another example of the same tendency which provokes scientific explanations. It is a natural human response to look for causes and solutions to seemingly baffling problems. To live is to have a perspective and to interpret and evaluate the world. In the attempt to impose meaning and order on the world, all humans are engaged in activity. Even the weakest and most passive character out of all of the films, Barbara, asks repeatedly throughout Night of the Living Dead, "What's happening?" Not until Day of the Dead is it realized that all traditional methods of explanation are useless. It is then, as passive nihilism triumphs, that the overthrowal of mankind is almost complete. Only then do humans realize that, "...the cause doesnt matter because its beyond the realm of human understanding anyway."(8)
The contrast between active and passive nihilism is further dramatized in the character development of the main protagonists throughout the trilogy. There is a satisfying symmetry over the course of the films in the development of the female characters and the development of the male characters. In the first installment of the series, the conflict between activity and passivity is introduced through the characters of Barbara and her brother Johnny. On a routine trip to the country where they once a year place flowers on the grave of their grandmother, the two characters bicker about the tradition of honoring the dead. Johnny is cynical and bitter about the whole process, complaining that it is an empty gesture to convention serving no real purpose. Barbara, on the other hand, is committed to paying homage and showing respect for the dead. Johnnny's actively rebellious attitude towards convention is contrasted to Barbara's relatively passive attitude towards duty and routine. She becomes very upset when Johnny's irreverence reaches its peak and he begins to tease her as though she were a child again. "Barbara! Theyre coming to get you!" he says, impolitely pointing at a figure walking through the graveyard. It is embarrassment over her brother's behavior that initiates the first action in Night of the Living Dead. Barbara feels compelled to approach the lumbering figure pointed to by Johnny in order to apologize for her brother's behavior. It turns out that the figure is a zombie, and it attacks. Johnny intervenes and is killed in the fight that ensues. Barbara's respect for the dead and her observance of the traditional rules of politeness betray her, and she withdraws into a state of confused passivity which lasts until her death later on in the film. Throughout the film, she remains crippled by her inability to come to grips with the situation.
The strongest, most active character in NOTLD is Ben. He appears at the farmhouse to which Barbara flees and secures the building against the approaching zombies. Ben is an organizer and a fighter. His strength seems well directed towards survival, but he must struggle with the character of Harry Cooper as well as with the zombies. Harry Cooper and his family have barricaded themselves in the basement of the farmhouse and Harry is intent upon staying there. He retreats instinctively to the basement, and is willing to give the rest of the world to the zombies. Ben, on the other hand, is unwilling to retreat. He reasons that in order to keep their options open, it is best to defend the house and formulate a plan for escape. This clash between the strategies of Mr. Cooper and Ben culminates in the death of Mr. Cooper at Ben's hand. Although throughout the film Ben is the strongest, most reasonable and admirable character, he is doomed to die just like everyone else. Regardless of their activity or passivity, all humans must eventually submit to death. The thing separating admirable and noble individuals from the rest, however, is their active stance towards the world. Ben epitomizes the heroic, active strain of nihilism found in those who choose to engage the world in battle for the sake of affirming and expressing their own life force. Even though the war is already lost, the active nihilist refuses to roll over and die.
In Dawn of the Dead, the female lead, Fran, at first appears to be doomed to the same sort of passivity exhibited by Barbara in the first film. Fran's helicopter pilot boyfriend, Steven, rescues her from the television studio where she works, and then picks up Peter and Roger, two SWAT team deserters. The group eventually lands at and secures a suburban shopping mall, setting up house at a place that George Romero calls a "temple to consumerism."(9) Fran, as the only female character, is expected to perform the duties of housewife and maid. She is excluded from all decision making and is not allowed to participate in the exploration of the shopping mall. When she becomes pregnant, her passive role seems sealed. But unlike Barbara in NOTLD, Fran is not committed to tradition and convention. She demands to be given a gun, to be taught how to fly the helicopter, and to be given a voice in the decision making process. Fran's character develops from passivity towards activity and she is, in the end, responsible for the rescue of the only other surviving character in the film. Whereas at the beginning she is one of three passengers in a helicopter, at the end she is the pilot, flying the craft into the sunset and oblivion.
Dawn of the Dead dramatizes a transition between the worlds represented in Night of the Living Dead and Day of the Dead. In NOTLD, even though the zombie threat exposes the nihilistic charachter of the world, the structures of social convention temporarily survive. Certainly, humans have been given a disturbing peek at the "abyss," but they are still able to reassert the conventional order. In Dawn of the Dead, the zombies have come to dominate the living by virtue of their superior numbers (and not, it should be noted, because of superior knowledge, or moral correctness). Society has crumbled, and it becomes apparent that individual activity or passivity will be what determines the quality and character of human life. Fran's development from a passive to an active nihilist is in response to her awakening to this fact. She must take responsibility upon herself to impart meaning to life. Her pregnancy may be just the thing that gives her an orientation towards the future, providing her with the strength to take survival, and life, seriously.
The progress towards the domination of the world by zombie forces is complete in Day of the Dead, but it is in this film that the individual assertion of power and strength by the female lead reaches its peak. Sarah is a doctor doing research into the zombie threat at a military installation. Civilization has crumbled, and it is probable that the individuals at this installation are the last surviving humans on earth. Sarah finds herself trying to act as a mediator between three conflicting groups; the doctors who are naively still trying to find a rational explanation for the zombie phenomenon, the soldiers who simply want to fight the zombies, and the technicians who want to fly away from the installation to find an island where they may live and die in peace. Sarah's character continues her development where Fran left off in the previous film. She becomes the strongest and most active character in the film, a reverse image of Barbara from NOTLD. Her boyfriend, on the other hand, becomes the weakest, most dependent character who, as it turns out, sacrifices himself passively to the zombies. Sarah's active orientation is exhibited in her attempts to mediate between the three warring groups. Whereas in the previous films the female leads played little or no part in plan making and the organization of the group, in Day of the Dead Sarah is the sole organizer and plan maker. The doctors are isolated characters, out of touch with the severity of their situation, the soldiers are panicky, hysterical characters unable to trust each other and the technicians simply want to retreat and not take part. In Sarah, we find all of the attributes exhibited by Ben in NOTLD. She is a plan maker, an organizer and a leader. Like Ben, she is also doomed to die, despite her strength. But in her rebellion against the world, and in her struggle to survive, she exhibits the nobility that is expected of any hero. Day of the Dead ends with Sarah and two other survivors on a deserted island where they will presumably spend the remainder of their lives.
George Romero's "Dead Trilogy" dramatizes the process by which passive nihilism triumphs over active nihilism. The initial zombie invasion forces human survivors to face a topsy turvy world in which the dead walk and pursue the living. The zombies, as lifeless creatures passively led by instinct, represent the forces of passive nihilism, while humans, in their attempt to fight, survive and explain this phenomenon, represent the forces of active nihilism.
Humans have different responses when confronted with the "abyss," and the battle between active and passive nihilism is played out in the interactions of the main characters in these films. There is a progressive strengthening of the female and a weakening of the male characters throughout the series. In Night of the Living Dead, the weakest character is a woman and the strongest is a man. In Dawn of the Dead there is a development of the female lead from weakness to strength, while in Day of the Dead the strongest character is a woman and the weakest is a man.
George Romero's "Dead films" are a warning against passivity. Human beings often sacrifice their creative power for the comforts of tradition and conventionality. When traditional ways of living and thinking are undermined or called into question by anomalous circumstances, people sometimes respond by ignoring the new developments and withdrawing passively from reality. Like zombies, they lifelessly walk the earth without passion, intellect or curiosity. Romero's films try to persuade us that an active engagement with the world, even in the face of hopeless circumstances, produces a higher quality of life worth the sacrifice of comfort. Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead are nihilistic films. They advocate an active form of nihilism which promotes strength and courage while depicting the apocalyptic consequences of the triumph of passive nihilism.
(1) - Night of the Living Dead, in Variety, 9/16/68.
(2) - Midnight Movies, by Stuart Samuels. Collier Books, 1983. pg. 52.
(3) - The Gay Science, by Friedrich Nietzsche. Vintage Books, 1974. pg. 167.
(4) - Michael Allen Gillespie on the other hand contends that historically, the nihilistic impulse stems not from the death of God, but from "...a new concept of divine omnipotence and a corresponding concept of human power in the late Middle Ages." According to Gillespie, modern nihilistic thinkers were highly influenced by William of Ockham's conception of an omnipotent God who is free from the constraints of reason. See: Nihilism Before Nietzsche, by Michael Allen Gillespie. The University of Chicago Press, 1995.
(5) - For Nietzsche's views on active and passive nihilism see especially: Genealogy of Morals, pgs. 479 - 480 and pgs. 531 - 532, In Basic Writings of Nietzsche. Modern Library, 1968; The Gay Science, pgs. 285 - 290. Vintage Books, 1974; Will To Power. Random House, 1967. For Camus' views on nihilism see especially: The Rebel. Vintage Books, 1956; The Myth of Sisyphus, in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Vintage Books, 1955.
(6) - Will To Power, by Friedrich Nietzsche. Random House, 1967. pg. 17.
(7) - For instance, in The Crazies (where a virus epidemic causes homicidal behavior which must be countered by survivors), and Monkey Shines (where a wheelchair bound man must at first rely upon, and then battle, a helper monkey).
(8) - George Romero, personal correspondence.
(9) - See: George Romero: Cinema's Dark Dreamer Steps Into The Light, in Questar, number 4, August 1979. pg.18.