What does it mean to be human (A social Commentary)
When professor Due was talking about the main characters in Night of The lIving dead it really struck my interest, Especially when it comes down to the role of femininity, or more interesting, the role of dark femininity. The power of having men, or in this case Ben, bend at your will and do things for you due to your helplessness as a woman. You can see this by how differently she was treated in comparison to other women because she acted like a child, but due to that, her life was easier. And so with feminist movements and this reinvention of the common housewife, is it really to the benefit of women? I always reconsider the roles that men and women have, especially during the civil rights movement in which this film was shot. I argue that women can do anything and everything a man can do, it's proven multiple times, but at the same time isn’t it nice to be pampered and tended to? Modern-day women complain all the time that this era of men is too feminine and ‘sassy’. But what if men becoming like that is simply due to our own misconstruction of gender which leads us to this imbalance in gender roles? We can blame men for not opening doors and being the breadwinners of the household when we push these narratives of being self-sufficient and hyper-masculine. But I do agree there needs to be a balance, living in an era (especially during the civil rights movement) where men and husbands have the right to control their wives, rape, and beat them is never ok, I fully support that part. Especially with the surprising image of Ben punching her to the point of unconsciousness. So sorry for the off-topic rant, the treatment from the character Ben made me dive into how she got away with acting like a child. But in further conversations, the Girl with all the Gifts was INSANE! The muzzle, the face covered in blood?! Her being an experiment?! IS so scary and terrifying, to treat a human being as less than the real horror, not that it’s fictional, but that it's real life. But part of me seeks retribution in the way that she plays a white character, but the fact her actor is biracial really does play into the history of African Americans in this century, especially by being used as studies and research experiments, knowing, and unknowingly. The Tuskegee study is one of many, many examples.
