i was afraid i'd eat your brains: a meditation on The Walking Dead

They’re here, they’re dead. And they’re everywhere you want to escape. They’re zombies, and they’re on your television, and in your movies, your X-Box, your indie rock lyrics and your classic literature.

Zombies now occupy a privileged pop culture position that rivals the place of perhaps the most protean of mythological creatures, vampires. However, in the past couple of decades, it seems like we’ve hit the saturation point of vampires. A trend long in the making, vampires have gained traction since Anne Rice’s Interview—and in the process, they’ve lost their bite. Much of the vampire’s cultural trajectory has been built on making the vampire a good middle-class citizen. Gone is Dracula’s effete and perverse aristocratic lineage. Banished are Nosferatu’s lamprey mouth, bat ears and rodential hands. Squashed are Lamia’s unrepentantly deviant desires. Well, mostly. If you’re talking True Blood, vampires still got sex game, but not so much if you’re watching Buffy or Twilight.

In the past fifteen years, vampires have been made safe for public consumption. They’re good; they’ve become a “care-bear with fangs,” as Buffy’s Cordelia Chase sneers about Angel. They have souls. They have remorse. They hunt only animals. They drink artificial blood made by Japanese companies and heated in a microwave oven. They want the right to vote. What pop culture has done to vampires is, by and large, remove the danger and the perversity, and in the process, castrate them. Divested of their castles and their capes, vampires have slowly been folded into mall culture. They may wear vaguely vintage-inspired duds, but given their preoccupation with diets, morality and home remodeling, vampires have become just like us. That is, except for when they’re very, very bad, and then they need to be punished, naughty vampires. Punished, and possibly replaced.

The proliferation of zombies in every possible medium argues that zombies are the new vampire.  The king is undead, long live the king of the undead.

Perhaps the best, most explosive example of the cultural prominence of the zombie is the hit AMC series The Walking Dead, the entertainingly evil spawn of writer-producer Frank Darabont. Based on a best-selling graphic novel of the same name, The Walking Dead is AMC’s most popular television series ever—in fact, as the New York Times Brian Stelter notes, it has gained viewership over its short six-episode run. Which makes a kind of sense, because strange sorghum hillbilly accent aside, it’s astoundingly good.

The Walking Dead works on somewhat of the same premise as the film 28 Days Later. The protagonist, in The Walking Dead it’s police officer Rick Grimes, wakes from a coma to find everyone around him is a dead man—or woman, or child—walking. Grimes is a good guy adrift in a post-apocalyptic nightmare of staggering necrotic ex-humans. (Forgive me, but the sight of hordes of people with so much shredded flesh careening like so many ambulatory carnitas really does bring the Monty Python skit to mind: “This human is dead. This is an ex-human!”) Grimes is, as much as the desolate, hungry world around him, the walking dead.

What is truly remarkable about The Walking Dead is less the story line, the script, the production values or the acting—series like Mad Men and Breaking Bad have proven how good AMC is at picking talent and producing quality television—it’s the raw visuals of gory bodies. If you are a fan of cinematic decapitation, exploding skulls, misting blood and exacting evisceration (and I am), this show is a thirteen-course delight. I can’t remember a television series that has reveled in innards as much as The Walking Dead. One scene centers on a long, drawn-out, almost loving evisceration of a zombie whose entrails get festooned like garlands over Rick and his fellow survivor, Glenn. Good times.

I can only assume that such gory play is allowed because the zombies are no longer human. The light is literally out of their eyes—the sudden cataract-like filming of the eye is one somatic signifier of zombiehood. Living humans can’t be treated this cavalierly. Their innards are not playthings. But zombies’ are, and that strange, diaphanous distinction is what separates the Walking Dead from the walking dead, and it’s what allows us to enjoy the blood without guilt.

Except at the same time, it’s not. The humans in The Walking Dead are not all created equal. Some are more compassionate than others, and, indeed, it’s this mark of compassion that designates Grimes as the Very Good Guy. He looks at a zombie woman staggering toward him, hands outstretched, mouth open, and apologizes to it softly. “I’m sorry this happened to you,” he says, and then he shoots her in the head. Other survivors are less magnanimous. Daryl Dixon, half of a cracker brother duo, distinguishes himself as bad through his callous treatment of the zombies (alternately called “walkers” and “geeks”). It’s less man’s inhumanity man that makes the man bad; it’s man’s inhumanity to the ex-man.

And, really, what of the zombies themselves? The great mark of the zombie, other than its flayed flesh, dead eyes and flesh eating is its lack of individuality. The zombie is not a person, not merely because it’s, well, dead, but because it no longer has difference. The zombies in The Walking Dead have the same zombieness of zombies everywhere, and of all time. They walk, crawl, or chomp until they can walk, crawl or chomp no more. They hunger for tasty flesh, preferably human, preferably live, preferably yours.

Zombies are, theoretically, the ultimate consumer. The Walking Dead returns repeatedly to a department store in Atlanta; it serves as a major plot point and, of course, a visual metaphor. As the zombies clatter their decaying palms against the glass doors of the store, they look like a very focused and amoral scrum of Black Friday shoppers. Their mad rush at the humans locked inside looks like nothing as much as the running of the brides at the Filene’s Basement bridal sale. If only zombies carried credit cards, they’d resuscitate any flailing economy. But, sadly, they don’t. They consume, but they don’t buy.

The world of The Walking Dead is very small. It’s bands of people with tenuous bonds to one another, bonds that strain at the seams with every human impulse, emotion and foible. If what makes the zombie a zombie is its unutterable uniformity, then what makes the human a human is his or her keening difference. And, of course, it’s those differences that imperil the living. Racism, xenophobia, brutality: what the zombies can’t eat could kill the living.

And therein lies the drama and really answers what is so compelling about The Walking Dead. Unlike Shaun of the Dead, a brilliant movie, this television series will not answer affirmatively “Why can’t we all get along?” We can’t. We won’t. We’re human.

Bless our tasty, tasty brains.

(Also, bless Brian Stelter's tasty brains in specific. This piece owes a great big debt to a conversation we had while waiting for our dinner when we were out with other friends. He had salmon. I ate, yeah, carnitas.)

Comments

[Pete]

CG,
Fun read. I have never figured out why all zombies shuffle.
Pete

[chelsea g. summers]

Thanks, Pete.

I had to puzzle it out for myself. Hence, the piece. I think zombies shuffle because of the cards they've been dealt.

kissyskiss,
chelsea g.

[Lucky]

Actually, the main body of Zombies is separated into two very distinct halves. There are those whom are limited to the shuffle and groan that is often attributed to Zombies as a whole, and there are those whom are afflicted by a more realistic Zombifying disease, seen as a mutation of rabies, whom are capable of blood curdling screams in place of the once usual grunts and possessed of the ability to not only run, but flat out sprint long past the point that a normal human being's body would have given out on them. These zombies are even capable of climbing with near-human dexterity.

In my personal opinion, the later are, by far, the more terrifying.

As for the reason the former version of Zombies all shuffle, it is because their brains suffer a great deal of damage when they "die" and, for the most part, shut down. Zombies are driven to hunt and eat but, in the case of the shuffling Zombies, the part of the brain that controls fine motor skills has been left to rot, while the primal urge to devour has been kicked into overdrive.

Forgive the ramble, I hope my obsession with the living dead has paid off. For any further information, I'd recommend Max Brooks' "The Zombie Survival Guide." for any preparations you haven't yet made for the Zombie apocalypse:D

Lucky