Modern Issues Represented in "Fido"

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Is the movie Fido just another zombie movie, or does it have underlying messages about modern day culture? It’s the 50s and a few decades ago, the earth drifted into some “space dust” which reanimated corpses into zombies. The living populace fought the “zombie wars” (the equivalent of our WWII) for survival until an enterprising company called Zomcom discovered a method of “eradicating” the zombies and a method of domesticating them. Now every family has a zombie to be their slave. The movie has characters that represent different groups of oppressed people in the modern world, Fido and the other zombies represent racism, Mr. Robertson represents heterosexism, and Mrs. Robertson along with other females show sexism. Perhaps most obvious among the movie’s social parallels are the significant racial undertones. Bernice Murphy argues that the Fido makes “pertinent points about the containment culture of both the ‘50s and our own era.” In a community of all-white, upper-class suburbanites exploiting a population of gray-skinned zombie laborers, it isn’t a far leap to suggest that the zombies represent a racial minority. The divide between these two groups shows both 1950s segregation and the treatment of the “cheap migrant labor” which is relied upon to support modern-day suburbia. This latter comparison can be extended further; the zombies’ inability to speak could be seen as mirroring the language barrier obstructing many recent immigrants from achieving the legendary American Dream (Murphy). More than anything, what ties the zombies’ treatment to that of a racial minority is the overwhelming sense of being the other; fences, physical restraints, and social taboos are firmly in place to prevent the gray-skinned second-class citizens from mixing with the white humans. However, beyond this point, racial parallels become more ambiguous. Murphy mentions “containment

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