Walking Dead is average in bulk, aggressively mediocre at best, and occasionally--very rarely--they'll stumble ass backwards into a sublime moment. The writing is ridiculous, the characters are deplorable, and the plot machinations are paint by numbers zombie stuff. The folks at Walking Dead had a unique chance to challenge the zombie genre's very dead and frequently reanimated tropes. Instead, they've settled for claustrophobic in-fighting and on-the-run "We gotta survive!" cliches. You really like Darryl? You think this show is a view into, "what if this, like, really really happened?" You're for certain it's Shane's baby? Great. I watch too, but let's not kid ourselves; it's a paltry imitation of human drama and a mite peckish when it comes to undead drama.
Anyway, the show is enjoyable, not great, who cares. I'm more invested in the Walking Dead because....why? What's with the whole zombie fixation? Why now? Why not robots or Satanists or aliens or ghosts or time travel or blobs?
Zombie's have manifested, in earnest, three separate eras in the post-pop culture United States; the late 50's through the 60's, the late 70's through the 80's, and 2000ish through now-ish. This is all a bit fluid, and there are some wild zombie films from all of the surrounding years, but these represent the height of zombie viability. Is it just the 20 year cycle of parents sharing with their children? It's got to be part of it, but you can't force something to resonate.
What's our zombie here and now? Take the 60's zombie craze. You had a potent cocktail of civil rights, the spread of communism, and a burgeoning counter culture. From all sides, how provocative is an enemy whom, if they so much as bite, you become one of them? Mindless and infected. The only way to stop them? Destroy the ideological center, the brain.
The 80's were consumer culture something something, "No Nukes," and generations of zombie films excavated as satire. The moaning masses all faking through their already dead existence. Consuming just to consume, probably poisoned by--or soon to be nuked by--the government supposed to protect them.
What is our great crisis? Well terrorism is fucked, and completely sucks. Lingering like a specter, always there, but never there, the constant threat. We have the Internet which has ruined us. Not in a bad way, we just know too much. You should go through your whole life without knowing what cake sitting is, but you know...it's just...it's just all...out there. Discourse in this country is miserable. No matter what side you're on, you're awful. The worst. This is our zombie melange.
One of the most pervasive elements of the current zombie trend is the overarching zombie apocalypse narrative. The concept isn't new, almost all zombie films depict the idea in one way or another. It's the way the zombie apocalypse has been freed from the confines of Romero, and recast as a cultural movement. Two novels written with academic dedication to the subject are both bestsellers currently being adapted into a major motion picture. A Facebook meme bounced around where you cast random people in your friend's list as stock characters in a zombie survival epic. You have one friend who will argue you down over the veracity of their zombie apocalypse survival plan, just ask around. There are bumper stickers, bed spreads, and lawn statuary. We've cultivated an almost gleeful anticipation of the event.
One way to interpret this: we want the world to end. The end of the world has transformed from possibility to certainty to welcome relief. But it couldn't be called fatalistic, because the undercurrent to most zombie apocalypse chatter is survival. Most people believe they are one of the few fit to survive. This equation clearly requires a huge number of undead, so there are going to have to be some people, lots of people, who...you know, are dead-ed. So, just riffing here, we are in eager anticipation of the end of the world, not because it is the end, but because the weak (them) will be culled and I (as in you, or us) will survive. It's going to be fun and easy to blindly club into the rotted remains of humans. You will finally be justified in your assumptions, beliefs, and capabilities alike while the rest of the world languishes, moaning in a horde of destructive ignorance.
But I've been told I project too much.
So, how about this: the zombies are chaos. All the bad and scary thing creeping into our periphery. They are dangerous and insatiable, but their power is in exposing the true threat, one another. We use the zombie apocalypse as a shaky model of our need to come together to survive. Some of us won't make it. There will be furious debates over what's more important, saving humanity, or saving the human race. We kind of maybe don't really care for each other sometimes, but we survive. We stand unified, because our only way to wage war against the gathering storm is to struggle together, regardless of our differences.
We'll have to wait and see as the zombie apocalypse remains pending. Until then, I hope we can band together in our profound dislike of Lori. And seriously, if you're not too busy ruining everything, try and keep an eye on Carl.
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