Zombies in the Zeitgeist
I’d link to the Walking Dead’s Hulu page, but it doesn’t have one.
If you listen to only one collection of 6 songs while reading this post, make it these
There’s a newish TV show called “The Walking Dead”. It’s set just after zombies have done their work of killing damned near all of us. We’ve been watching movies about Zombies for decades. And shooting them in video games for years. So it was just a matter of time before there was a TV show set in the zombie Apocalypse.
Zombie games let you shoot people-looking entities without feeling guilt about murdering people.* Zombie movies put characters into extreme circumstances and demand they try and survive when the rest of the human species cannot. A zombie TV show has the potential to be… a very different sort of beast.
Over the last 10-15 years, TV has become a long-form narrative. This opens up new space in the zombie story milieu. The show opens and the zombie war is over. The zombies have won, and society is destroyed. This point is rather blatantly reinforced when the show has a uniformed cop tell a woman that looting laws no longer apply– so she should go ahead and take that necklace for her sister.
In politics, and in political science, we have the understanding that laws must not be made which contradict human nature. Laws, rather, must be made which guide and push humans into desired behavior. Naturally, we in the political sphere try very hard to figure out what the fuck “human nature” might be.
The problem is that human societies already have laws that are pushing humans to behave into some way or another. It is incredibly easy for observation bias to destroy our ability to think critically about what humanity is at base. Political philosophers therefore try to imagine humans in a “state of nature”, or under a “veil of ignorance”** to figure out sorts of societies are ideal for us.
Yes, this would be easier if we had non humans to contrast ourselves against.
Enter, once more, the Walking Dead. Humanity is now in a state of nature. There is no law. No society ordering us about and giving structure to our decision making process. The rough beast has come ’round and mere anarchy is loosed upon the world***.
Even if the show weren’t explicitly about that (And the comicbook is, at least according to the author. Also of note: This is explicitly the story of Rick Grimes), it would be impossible to tell this story without also giving some insight into someone’s idea of human behavior.
There is a telling vignette early in the series where the racist redneck (Merl Dixon) refuses to work with a black man (T-Dog. No seriously. That’s the name he’s given in IMDB) because… because the white dude is too stupid to live, really. After beating the hell out of T-dog, Merl the racist cartoon holds an “election” to get himself declared king of the ruins. That’s when the hero, Rick Grimes, punches Merl and handcuffs Merl to some pipes.
On a symbolic level, the lesson seems to be that democracy is rule by violent thugs, and only people in uniform can be trusted. After the characters return to the main camp, we learn that Rick’s wife, as well as the cop he used to partner with, are in the group that Rick randomly bumbled into.
A major difference between an apocalypse story and an actual “state of nature” is that the machinery is still there. Water is still easy to get– it just needs someone who knows how to turn the crank. Food is fairly easy to get– all the Twinkies in the world are sitting in stores. Weapons? Every police station- and military base- and about half the private homes in the country- have a ton of them. Electricity? There is no reason to believe that Hydroelectric dams would have shut off. There are only 2 limited assets in a zombified world: human capital and time.
Naturally this is what the characters choose to waste. They try and fix a crappy old van rather than just take a new, working one. The fearless leader chooses to risk a shootout over a bag full of guns– rather than simply walk into a sporting goods store and take new ones. One of the women has a college degree (the only degree we’re told about any of the survivors having). She’s pushed into laundry detail rather than being allowed to use her brain.
These people are too stupid to live. Many of them die.
The major question we’re left with, then, is whether this is a vision that the producers have for all of humanity– or merely this group of survivors? Watching a group of dysfunctional humans try and overcome their own neuroses to create a flourishing society would be interesting. Consider it high-stakes psychotherapy. It would be nice to know that elsewhere, outside the vision of our protagonists, there are other people. They would be basically sane, relatively healthy people engaged in the small dramas of carving out a place for human beings amidst an incredibly hostile environment. That story would be less interesting, perhaps, but I think also truer to who we are as a species.
I guess I’ll do the HDTV equivalent of “tuning in” next season for the answer to that question.
*Yes, gamers really do care about the fact that they’re slaughtering people. We’re no more likely to be bloody psychopaths than the average human.
**Which might help explain the subhead of this blog. But not explain the typo.
***And yes, there are probably some Indignant Desert Birds chattering that the beast is too nasty.
No related posts.
I do like this series, and I suppose it’s for all the same reasons you sketch here. Yes, these characters make some classic rookie mistakes after an apocalypse, but it seems early on they are convinced that there are still pockets of civilization left, and it’s only a matter of time they find where the safe haven is. I just started reading the comic book, and while it’s very similar in many ways, it has some interesting detours that the TV show doesn’t explore.
You might want to have a look at this: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/12/20/the-zombie-theology-behind-the-walking-dead/
Also, re-watch the episode “Vatos” on The Walking Dead It has some of the compassionate elements that you were craving. I’m not sure if all the characters in that episode were sane, but they had created a fortress against the hostile world.
You’re 100% right about Vatos. It’s actually something I wanted to mention, but couldn’t really work in. You’re right about those kids– they seemed a bit more high-strung than maybe is optimal, but their reactions and how they seemed to be surviving showed that they were basically doing the right sorts of things. Which made the fact that _Rick_ was lecturing _Felipe_ even more grating than it should have been.
I’ll trade you link for link: http://drezner.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/12/05/your_generic_zombie_article_template