In Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Don’t Die (2019), the director does not resurrect zombies—he exposes the necrotic corpses we had grown accustomed to ignoring. Set in Centerville, a fictional town whose very name feels like a ready-made joke (“Center” of nowhere), the film’s undead do not rise by accident. They are summoned by polar fracking, a drilling operation that throws Earth’s axis out of alignment. The persistent twilight—neither day nor night—illuminates what we prefer not to see: our consumption rituals, repeated like mantras in a world that has forgotten its purpose.
Jarmusch’s zombies devour human flesh, yes, but not out of hunger: it is an empty, mechanical act, as if following a prescripted script. Their true obsession lies in the fragments of identity they carried from their former lives: baseball, coffee, anxiety pills. They are both executioners and victims of the same collapse—ambulatory archives of a modern project that failed to deliver on its promises.
While Sheriff Cliff (Bill Murray) faces the apocalypse with the expression of someone waiting for the check in a bad restaurant, and Ronnie (Adam Driver) remarks between decapitations that he already knows how it will end, Jarmusch offers not a horror story but a death certificate for modern delusions. The undead here are not metaphors; they are diagnoses. They do not represent consumerism—they are consumerism in its purest form, fossilized in decomposing bodies. When a teenage zombie drags a screenless iPhone muttering “Wi-Fi…,” we are not witnessing a joke. It is an epitaph for the promise that technology would liberate us, leaving us instead eternally awaiting a signal that never arrives.
But this text is not about monsters. It is about what happens when the narrative of progress becomes undead, and time, instead of advancing, spins in circles—like the ironic soundtrack “The Dead Don’t Die” (performed by Sturgill Simpson in the film), a dirge for a world born already old.
1. Theoretical Framework: Mark Fisher’s Hauntology
Mark Fisher (1968–2017) developed the concept of hauntology from Jacques Derrida’s original notion in Specters of Marx (1993). For Fisher, however, hauntology became a cultural diagnosis of contemporaneity, characterized by a temporal disorder in which the present is perpetually haunted by “lost futures”—possibilities imagined during modernity that never materialized under neoliberalism and postmodernity. In Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014), Fisher argues: “Hauntology can be seen as a refusal to abandon the desire for the future. What is at stake is not nostalgia for a particular era, but the formal failure of the future.”
This “formal failure of the future” manifests culturally through symptoms like retromania, pathological nostalgia, and aesthetic stagnation. Fisher diagnoses a culture that has lost the ability to genuinely articulate the present or produce anything truly new, preferring instead to endlessly recycle past cultural forms. Under late capitalism, he argues, we no longer experience progressive cultural development—only “upgrades,” incremental changes masking profound repetition.
Hauntology, as Fisher conceived it, is intrinsically tied to “capitalist realism”—the widespread perception that no viable alternatives to capitalism exist, rendering even the imagination of a horizon beyond the current system impossible. For Fisher, depression, anxiety, and other forms of contemporary psychic suffering are political symptoms of this collective inability to conceive alternative futures, psychological manifestations of a time literally “out of joint.”
2. Film Analysis: Connections to Hauntology
a) Zombies as Ghosts of Consumerism
In The Dead Don’t Die, Jarmusch transforms conventional horror-movie zombies into literal manifestations of Fisher’s hauntology. When the dead rise in Centerville, they obsessively return to the objects and activities that defined their former lives. The scene of an undead waitress (played by Sara Driver) mechanically repeating “coffee… coffee…” while clutching an empty pot becomes a disturbing image of the “death-in-life” Fisher described as the existential condition of late capitalism. Consumption is no longer an activity—it becomes a spectral identity persisting beyond biological death.
The sequence where zombies invade a local store, murmuring brand names and products like mantras (“Fashion,” “Chardonnay,” “Xanax”), directly echoes Fisher’s critique of capitalism’s replacement of collective political projects with privatized, commodified desires. The zombies continue to crave even after death because consumerist desire is all that remains when future horizons vanish. As Fisher writes in Capitalist Realism, late capitalism colonizes consciousness and the unconscious itself—Jarmusch’s zombies literalize this colonized psyche, where even death offers no escape from capitalist desire.
The figure of the Wi-Fi-obsessed teenage zombie (Luka Sabbat), muttering “Wi-Fi…” while clutching a useless smartphone, amplifies this critique. Devices meant to connect us become spectral fixations, anchoring us in loops of passive consumption.
b) Environmental Collapse and the Cancelled Future
The zombie invasion in The Dead Don’t Die is explicitly triggered by ecological crisis: polar fracking—excessive resource extraction at the poles—throws the planet off its axis, “waking the dead.” This absurd premise allegorizes what Fisher called “the return of the repressed”: the ecological consequences of capitalism, long denied, resurface as uncontrollable monstrous forces.
The pseudoscientific explanation offered by town nerd Bobby Wiggins (Caleb Landry Jones)—“They say it’s ’cause of polar fracking… Something ’bout the poles… Earth’s off its axis”—mirrors Fisher’s description of hauntological time as fundamentally “out of joint,” where past, present, and future no longer align.
Sheriff Cliff’s resigned refrain (“This isn’t going to end well”) and Ronnie’s cynical acceptance (“Where would we go? There’s nowhere to go”) epitomize Fisher’s analysis of capitalist realism’s response to ecological collapse: a passive acknowledgment of catastrophe, devoid of political agency. The perpetual sunlight—ironically symbolizing enlightenment—becomes a signifier of distorted temporality, dissolving boundaries between day and night. Fisher’s hauntology thrives in such temporal dissolution, visualized here through Jarmusch’s crepuscular cinematography.
c) Cultural Stagnation and Meta-Cinema
The Dead Don’t Die reveals its hauntological consciousness through meta-cinematic gestures. When Officer Peterson (Adam Driver) breaks the fourth wall—“Jim gave me the script”—the film exposes itself as a product of cultural recycling. This self-reflexivity mirrors Fisher’s observation that postmodern culture is exhaustively aware of its own repetition.
The exchange between Cliff and Ronnie—
Cliff: “How do you know this will end badly?”
Ronnie: “Jim gave me the script.”
Cliff: “He didn’t give me any script.”
—articulates hauntology’s core condition: some characters are painfully aware of their entrapment in repetition (Ronnie), while others remain oblivious (Cliff). Fisher identified this asymmetry as emblematic of life under capitalist realism—simultaneously conscious of cultural stagnation and powerless to escape it.
The zombie genre itself becomes a signifier of cultural stagnation. By referencing decades of zombie-film conventions (decapitation “rules”), Jarmusch critiques a culture that “lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present,” as Fisher wrote, preferring instead to catalog and recycle its own past.
d) Setting and Pathological Nostalgia
Centerville, with its retro diner, abandoned stores, and ironically named “Centerville Nerd Shop,” embodies pathological nostalgia—spaces that cite past eras while being fundamentally contemporary. Farmer Miller (Steve Buscemi), wearing a “Keep America White Again” cap, embodies reactionary nostalgia for a mythic racially pure past. Fisher noted that in the absence of progressive futures, nostalgia often turns regressive—a truth Miller’s character grotesquely enacts.
3. Conclusion
Analyzing The Dead Don’t Die through Fisher’s hauntology reveals how contemporary cinema can expand theoretical cultural critique. Jarmusch literalizes the “ghosts” Fisher identified—pathological nostalgia, consumerist desire, ecological trauma—transforming zombies into ambulant signifiers of late capitalism’s distorted temporality.
The warning shared by Fisher and Jarmusch is clear: without collectively imagined futures, we remain perpetually haunted by ghosts of desires that were never truly ours and catastrophes we always knew would come. The final question this analysis poses is whether art—even as incisive as The Dead Don’t Die—can resist “lost futures” or is doomed to merely document their disappearance. The answer may lie in the audience’s ability to recognize late capitalism’s zombies on screen—and the zombified desires still animating our own lives.