Next Sunday, AMC’s The Walking Dead
returns to live television, and its legion of fans can’t wait to veg out and
eat up the season six premier. I have been accused of cultural elitism from
time to time, but no show has gotten its teeth into to me the way The Walking Dead has. It’s so delicious,
and there’s no obvious reason why its hoard of fans are drawn to it. The Walking Dead, while well-made, falls
short of shows like Breaking Bad and Sherlock in terms of quality: Andrew
Lincoln isn’t likely to steal any Oscars from Benedict Cumberbatch. Likewise, TWD—by necessity—falls short of a
franchise like Star Trek in terms of
vision: the characters are cut off from any sense of larger humanity. They
cannot know what has happened to their world nor seek to fix it. Rather than a
grand vision of an optimistic interstellar future a la Trek, TWD is an intimate peephole
unto the end of our race. It’s kinda depressing actually, at least on the
surface of it. So why is it that next Sunday by 8 PM, come hell or high water,
I, along with a massive herd of Americans, am going to throw my phone in the
other room and park my ass on the couch to take in this grim vision of our fleeting
future? Indeed, anyone who doesn’t watch the show must be wondering what all
the fuss is about. What's the big deal? I have wondered myself…
While the dystopian vision of the
end is as old as Science Fiction itself (consider, for example, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, which is in turn
predated by Mary Shelley’s The Last Man),
anyone who’s been paying attention has noticed a proliferation of
post-apocalyptic books, film, and TV since the release of the expanded edition
of Stephen King’s The Stand in 1990. For
some reason in the 90s—which gave us Deep
Impact and Armageddon—we were
really concerned with asteroids and, more importantly, avoiding the onset of
the apocalypse. Since the millennium, we’ve become obsessed with survival after
the end. Prominent examples include 28
Days Later (and its sequel), the completion of The Matrix franchise (begun in 1999), The Day After Tomorrow, Snowpiercer,
the Zac Snyder remake of George Romero’s The
Dawn of the Dead, the rebooting of the Mad
Max franchise, reality television’s Doomsday
Preppers, The CW’s teen targeted The
100, World War Z, Christopher
Nolan’s Interstellar, and Cormac
McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The
Road (and it’s film adaptation)…just to name more than a few.
It seems that our longstanding
interest in end times is broad, pervasive, and on the increase. And is it any
mystery? No matter the ideological perspective of the viewer, the vision of the
end presents itself persuasively to a broad range of American viewers. Those of
us on the left consider the prospects of global climate change with a healthy amount of trepidation. Those
of you on the right see the destabilization of your belief in objective Truth—as
embodied in the legal redefinition of the family and the embrace of multiculturalism—as a harbinger of the
end times. Beyond politics, we all suspect the ability of government to cope
with less politicized threats to our existence such as technological
advancement, pandemic, and scarcity of necessities such as food, water, shelter, and healthcare. Post-apocalyptic
texts then offer a way of confronting such anxieties in the mediated form of
imaginative fiction. As Frederic Jameson claims in his seminal examination of SF, “Progress vs. Utopia,” the
seeming unreality of science fiction provides the opportunity to look at
realities which are far too traumatic for most of us to consider…and certainly
not within the realm of entertainment.
But the negative prospects of
apocalypse only tell half the tale. While the apocalypse is something to be
feared, it is equally—and possibly even more so—an object of desire. The
apocalypse is a fantasy. The Armageddon brings with it wish-fulfillment. In
announcing the end, isn’t the religious fanatic’s primary emotion one of
triumphant glee? And in secular terms, the post-apocalypse allows us to imagine
the end is not the end. It gives us hope where we feel hopeless. Humanity will
endure and narrowly survive pandemic or climate change or the misguided creations
of corporatized science. In fact, we may even—in some fantasy of our Darwinian
or spiritual superiority to others—come out the other side better off.
However, while this survey does
much to explain the appeal of a waxing subgenre more broadly, it does little to
explain the specific appeal of The
Walking Dead.
Certainly, The Walking Dead participates in the critique of capitalism that
has supplied the core of the zombie subgenre since George Romero launched it
with Night of the Living Dead (1968).
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| Martin Shkreli made news recently when he purchased a patent for a drug and jacked up the price 5000%. |
I’m trying to avoid veering off
into a discussion of TWD’s spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead, but it serves to
begin with one of the most ridiculed scene in the too maligned show’s early
run, the scene in which Madison plays the iconic American board game Monopoly
with her children, Alicia and Nick. Those who ridicule the scene miss its
symbolic import. In a textbook case of dramatic irony, we are watching a trio
of characters play a game whose rules no longer apply. Even Alicia’s complaint
that the game is “so evil,” nothing more than “kindergarten capitalism,”
strikes us ironically hollow. In this apocalypse, all the ideological
underpinnings of capitalism, all the ways in which it attributes value, are
rendered meaningless. Far from an objective and absolute arbiter of who
contributes to society and who drags on it (think Mitt Romney’s makers and
takers), capitalism’s entire method of evaluating society is treated like a
Michonne’s samurai sword treats a walker.
The most pervasive representative
of the show’s ideological critique is embodied in its most revered character,
Daryl Dixon. Throughout the show’s fourth season, a number of characters
attempt to guess what Daryl was before the walkers took over. Daryl evades the
truth, but eventually we learn the answer: he was nothing. Unless you consider serving
as your father’s punch toy a social function, Daryl previously fulfilled no
function in society. And as an uneducated backwoods redneck who merely
subsisted on moonshine, methamphetamine, and rodent meat, Daryl retains his
sense of inferiority. However, the weakest of the survivors, Beth Greene, is
able to drive home to him that his terms of self-evaluation are outdated.
In the seasons 12th
episode, “Still,” Beth has decided, much to Daryl’s annoyance, it’s time for
her to have her first drink. In her defense, Beth suspects that she’s not
likely to enjoy long term survival, and Daryl gets on board, locating a
backwoods shack with an attached moonshine distillery. When Beth asks him how
he knew to find such a place, Daryl explains that he grew up in an eerily
similar household. It is in this
discussion that Daryl reveals his pre-apocalyptic identity and persistent lack
of self-esteem. It is at this point that Beth predicts, “You’re going to be the
last man standing. You are. ...You’re going to miss me so bad when I’m gone, Daryl
Dixon.” Despite the fact that his previous society valued him as little more
than excrement, Daryl is now the definitive survivor. Rather than the group’s
least important member, Daryl is arguably it’s most important. His skill and familiarity with weaponry place him
as among the most adept in dealing with threats from both walkers and other
groups. In a world without grocery stores and restaurants, he is essential to
the group as a skilled hunter and tracker. How can you place value on the man
that brings home the possum…er, bacon? In a world where no authority demands
adherence to the social contract, he is trustworthy. Among all of our
survivors, he is the only one that we can imagine surviving all on his own. He
is so skilled, that as a member of the group he certainly gives more than he
receives in terms of protection. When Beth informs him that he is likely to be
the last human alive, we know she’s right. Fittingly, at the episode’s
conclusion they burn the shack—and with it, his outmoded self-evaluation—to the
ground. So, in taking the least valuable and transforming him into the most
value, The Walking Dead demonstrates
the radical arbitrariness of ideology—capitalism most obviously, but all
ideology really, for we could perform a similar analysis of how the show
confronts issues of, say, religion or race. So, every viewer—especially those thinking
that their slice of the American pie is even smaller and less appetizing than a
squirrel carcass—confronts the possibility that such valuation is arbitrary,
that they could be among the most revered in another version of civilization.
And it must be noted that this
radical arbitrariness of ideology extends to leftism and liberal humanism as
well. How relevant are the terms of debate over such issues gun rights? How
carefully are we asked to consider the efficacy and justice of torture? And
while Rick Grimes and his followers repeatedly try to reestablish faith in such
ideals as democracy or charity or the inherent value of human life, such ideals
are repeatedly undermined by apocalyptic realities. So while the radical
contingency of ideology does pull the rug out from under conservatives’
stubborn insistent on timeless Truths, leftists and liberal viewers must also
readily accept a demand to adapt their methods of interpreting their world.
Now, it might be tempting to
respond that TWD’s survivors live in a
horrific world, a chaotic nightmare that demands we listen to threats
identified by people of other ideological stripes. There may be some truth to that
sentiment. It is possible that show is saying that we have a choice: a chaotic
and horrific end to human civilization or a validation of ideologies we believe
to be ridiculous: somehow bible-thumping gun nuts and eco-terrorists must find
common ground. It’s possible I guess…but I’m attracted to the notion that The Walking Dead is not a nightmare at
all, but a fantasy. We in fact envy the survivors and their freedom from our
chains. While Rick and the group must endure real anxieties inherent in the
daily fight for survival, they are compensated with everything that our version
of late consumer capitalism denies us. And what is that? The key lies in Beth’s
prediction, not that Daryl will be the last man standing, but that when he is
he will miss her…
As Frederic Jameson has explained,
the banishment of anxiety in modernity has come at the price of all of the rest
of our emotions as well. While we do not deal with primal threats, all of the
rest of our relationships—those to our family, our friends, our romantic
partners, our work—have become mediated by material goods and the consumption
by which they are acquired. Our children know we love them, not because we
protect and provide for them, but because we buy them toys that lose their appeal
once they’ve been removed from the packaging. In our sexual lives, romance has
become an inconvenience and sexual partners are disposable; we’ve gone from dating
to online dating to swiping right and hooking up. Why become invested when we
can always shop for another person online? We’ve banished all difficulties from
dating, but at the price of companionship. Even our sense of self is purchased
and donned in mass produced clothing that rides around in socially coded
automobiles. We’ve eradicated boredom, but we eat in front of televisions and
ignore the people with whom we share the meal. We all stumble about, staring
into our phones, believing all the same tired conventional truths, looking for
something to buy that will make us happy. Consume. Consume. Consume. Together,
but all alone. Maybe the bloodlust we have for the weekly zombie massacre TWD enacts is the embodiment of our own self-loathing, because the sad truth is, we are zombies. We are the walking dead.
Not so with Daryl, Beth, and Rick. Not so with any of
the survivors of The Walking Dead. When
they get bored, they think about their lives, they interrogate its meaning, they read, they play music, and they talk and get
to know one and other. But it’s always more than that. Because their survival depends upon their humanity and the
strength of their relationships. It’s a truism on the show that no one can
survive on his or her own. And even if Daryl Dixon could possibly survive on
his own, his participation in the group only further reveals the value of
relationships. Without the others, we suspect he’d feel his life to be pretty
meaningless. By the show’s third season, the members of the group refer to the
others as family. Far from hyperbole, family seems an insufficient term…for the
most precious commodity in the world of The
Walking Dead is another person that can be relied upon to help you in a
fight, to share food with you, to watch your back, to tell you the truth. And
so we envy the characters of The Walking Dead because we feel the loss of such
ways of relating to one and other. At best, such relationships are something we
can watch played out on the television each Sunday evening this fall.
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