Fiddler's Green in Land of the Dead

reddie

I brought this up very briefly in another thread, but I was thinking (pointlessly) about the population of the fortified city in Land of the Dead. Considering the resources they had at their disposal, what sort of population would they need? How the heck did Kaufman and his cronies manage to keep the "have-nots" down for so long? Simple fear of the zombies and/or jack-booted thugs?

Secondly, I know it's pretty typical of Romero films to feature an indepent-minded protagonist with a disgust for the System, but what the heck did Reilly and his pals expect to find up "north"? Is Canada somehow free of both humans and zombies?
 

Psychomeltdown

I think the population has to be a couple of thousand strong. I'm guessing about 10,000 as an nice round number. Mainly because you need a lot of "have-nots" to keep the "haves" afloat.

Considering they're a society basically living off the scraps of the Old World they wouldn't really need much in the way of manufacturing. Basically all they'd need is technicians to keep the stuff lying around working and a few engineers to come up with what's needed.

There's no farming, there's no mining, etc. Just a bunch of people cooped up in a city doing... nothing. It's a wonder they haven't rose up in rebellion yet. Maybe that's why they're all into the gambling and the other vices, as they were called. It kept them occupied while the "Haves" enjoyed what they had.

But there's always a need for Scavengers and soldiers. Probably to act as both protection and police. along with service people for the "haves", repair people. your basic infrastructure caretakers, etc.


As for going Up North, God only knows. My guess is since its supposedly underpopulated in OTL, there's gonna be less in the way of zombies up there. But why live in a freezing hellhole? The guy is insane.

Plus wouldn't the Fiddler Green people have wiped out the zombies in there area for at least a couple score miles? I mean if they've been there for over a decade, just by random shooting should have wiped out a good portion of the zombies around them.
 

Diamond

Banned
I agree that wiping out the 'local' zombies would be a priority. The problem is that they... migrate. You can spend months wiping out the ones in your county or whatever, and more will still come. They always do. Just think about the population of Pennsylvania - probably around 14 or 15 million. If only ten percent of that is zombies, that's still 1.5 million stenches. And I think it'd be a safe guess to bet that much more than 10% of the population was zombified. And that's just Pennsylvania...

I was under the impression that the whole fortified city-state was a kind of stop-gap measure set up by Kaufman and others until everything 'got better'. Unfortunately it's not going to, and they really have no idea what do next. And they don't care - as long as they've got their steak and booze, why should they?

Psycho hit it right on the head as far as keeping the populace under control with the gambling, etc. I read a brief interview with Romero last month that confirmed that thought.

And as far as why the populace didn't revolt, well, don't knock the security people feel with a (relatively) safe roof over their head. As much as it sucked in the city, it'd be a thousand times worse outside. Inertia and fear kept them in their places.
 

reddie

Diamond said:
I agree that wiping out the 'local' zombies would be a priority. The problem is that they... migrate. You can spend months wiping out the ones in your county or whatever, and more will still come. They always do. Just think about the population of Pennsylvania - probably around 14 or 15 million. If only ten percent of that is zombies, that's still 1.5 million stenches. And I think it'd be a safe guess to bet that much more than 10% of the population was zombified. And that's just Pennsylvania...
Click to expand...

I was under the impression that the stenches remained around their former homes, acting out parodies of their previous lives. Of course, I suppose they probably migrate in search of human prey, using whatever method zombies use to track down humans (the film implied it was smell).

It's hard to believe that the entire earth fell to the zombie plague. The way Romero had it set up in previous films, the US pretty much went under because of poor decision-making and general panic, but I'm figuring there are survivors in other places besides Fiddler's Green. It'd be pretty easy to retain a human population on a Pacific island, for instance. For overpopulated regions like Nigeria, India or Japan, much less so.

Of course, mass death and depopulation brings me to another topic: nuclear melt-downs. Would these happen as civilization broke down in China and Russia, or even the US?

And another thought: there is bound to be high attention to the sick and the elderly even in a place like "undertown." I'm under the impression that the death always rise, bitten or not; that makes it unlikely that life is ever going to be particularly "cheap" even in that urban hellhole.
 

reddie

Oh yeah: just how strong are the frickin' zombies? They'd have to have strength somewhere above the grizzly bear level to pull your head off with one hand. Other than pulling people apart, they don't display any superhuman strength. I guess that's probably a good thing; "super-zombies" would turn LOTD into camp real quick...
 

wkwillis

reddie said:
I was under the impression that the stenches remained around their former homes, acting out parodies of their previous lives. Of course, I suppose they probably migrate in search of human prey, using whatever method zombies use to track down humans (the film implied it was smell).

It's hard to believe that the entire earth fell to the zombie plague. The way Romero had it set up in previous films, the US pretty much went under because of poor decision-making and general panic, but I'm figuring there are survivors in other places besides Fiddler's Green. It'd be pretty easy to retain a human population on a Pacific island, for instance. For overpopulated regions like Nigeria, India or Japan, much less so.

Of course, mass death and depopulation brings me to another topic: nuclear melt-downs. Would these happen as civilization broke down in China and Russia, or even the US?

And another thought: there is bound to be high attention to the sick and the elderly even in a place like "undertown." I'm under the impression that the death always rise, bitten or not; that makes it unlikely that life is ever going to be particularly "cheap" even in that urban hellhole.
Click to expand...
Nuclear reactors will be scrammed by their operators pretty quickly, and their automatic cooling systems will easily handle the isotope decay heat for the first week or so of high intensity by convection, and then conduction will take care of what's left in PWRs, but the RBMKs of Russia have Wigner problems with their graphite.
Wigner energy storage in graphite will build up as the isotopes decay and irradiate the graphite. Then the graphite will be subject to suddenly glowing red hot and releasing all the stored Wigner energy at once. That's why they are still scared of another Chernobyl meltdown. Just because it's been twenty years since it operated doesn't mean it can't cook off again.
 

Psychomeltdown

Othniel said:
Fresh meat tastes better?
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Yes, othniel knows all about that. One more reason to raze utah from the earth. :p


the dumb thing is the Fiddlers Green people didn't at least fence off the river parts of their city. Christ, how stupid it that?
 

Othniel

Psychomeltdown said:
Yes, othniel knows all about that. One more reason to raze utah from the earth. :p


the dumb thing is the Fiddlers Green people didn't at least fence off the river parts of their city. Christ, how stupid it that?
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Donner Party....migrating to California, and only one of their members survived by going canniblistic when they ran out of food.
 

Tyr

Is land of the dead out in yankland?
If so-lucky biggers...

We don't know what the virus is caused by so the effects are hard to guage. A major factor is if people die normally in the city do they become zombies?
If not then I'm sure they could just get a few diggers from construction sites and dig a huge series of pits around a area they have cleared of zombies, set up a few fences and live happily. Or even move to a island and clear out the zombie population there.
 

NapoleonXIV

Banned
I've never understood the attraction of these. As plausibly 'real' SF they are good allegories, but as allegories they are so unsubtle as to make a first time wannabe author blush in their adolescent heavy handedness. Is well-done Grand Guignol alone really that attractive?
 
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