The Walking Dead (AMC)

A couple months ago I had been saying that I was done following any new television shows. The last new show I tried to watch was Kings a couple years ago on ABC, and LOST had really left me feeling empty. I had picked up Mad Men for a while, but I hadn't seen any of the last season, which was a year and half ago.

But then last Sunday night I'm sitting in front of the television counting down the minutes on the screen until the season finale of The Walking Dead on AMC. I'd been discussing it on Facebook with a friend who watches it, and had been following the subreddit dedicated to the show like a groupie. So what happened?

It was purely a whim, I suppose. About a month ago, AMC announced a marathon of The Walking Dead, starting with the first episode of Season One. Having nothing better to do that weekend, I sat down and watched the whole run of the marathon in two segments over two days. Fortunately there wasn't that much to catch up on, since there had only been one and half seasons so far, and the AMC seasons are only thirteen episodes long.

But a zombie show? That was the surprising part to me. I really had no interest in seeing any more zombie stuff. During my run of seeing all the movies that came out, I truly got sick of zombies. They seem to have taken over our culture, and are everywhere.

Last Halloween it really hit me how far we've come. In mid-October I went downtown one evening and encountered the modern day phenomenon of "the zombie crawl," which is, I learned, an open-air spontaneous Halloween parade/walkabout where everyone is dressed as a zombie of some kind.

It caught me off guard and was quite horrifying. There were zombies of all kinds, including an Alice in Wonderland zombie with her throat cut walking with a Mad Hatter zombie also with his throat cut. There were political figure zombies. There were monster zombies. There were adult zombies. There were little children zombies. There were every people zombies. By far the most common type of zombie were the women dressed in wedding gowns, usually blood splattered.

"What the hell has happened to our country?" I thought, staggering away to drive home. Later I spoke to my friends Agnes and Thor about this. They were equally disturbed when I described the parade.

"Why would I want to volunteer to be an extra in Satan's Army of the Damned?" I said. That got a laugh out of them.

"All Halloween costumes have to be zombie costumes now," said Agnes. "My niece wanted to a cheerleader for Christmas," she explained. Then she said her sister suggested a "zombie cheerleader" costume.

"Why does everything have to be undead now?" Agnes complained.

Why indeed. Using the premise that Halloween costumes reflect the "shadow" nature of personalities and cultural sensibilities, then idea that we all must be walking dead figures now has an obvious cultural message, one that dovetails with nearly every observation I've made about America lately.

We are a Zombie Nation, we seem to be saying. And by zombie, we mean naturally the canonical zombie as introduced by George Romero in Night of the Living Dead in 1968. All zombies follow that pattern of cannibalistic, rotting corpse types who can kill people with their bite and turn them into zombies of the same kind.

So we are all braindead cannibals now, corpse-like representations of the human beings we once were? Yup, that sounds like America in 2012.

That being said, I've really enjoyed The Walking Dead more than I thought, perhaps because it acknowledges how far deep into the baroque phase of zombie culture we are. In many ways, it does not try to be original. It uses all sorts of zombie tropes and shorthand of recent zombie culture, including things borrowed from not only the Romero movies, but quite obviously from the British movie 28 Days Later and even from LOST, which was not about zombies, but had similar themes as a science fiction work. This makes it very accessible in a way, and allows it to skip to themes behind simple zombiedoom.

In fact the zombies often fade into the background of the post-apocalyptic world of the show. This indicates how normalized zombie culture is. We all know what it is by now, and we are all living it, to some degree, in shadow form.

Instead, as I wrote about in a friends Facebook post:

I agree about the writing, Betty. It has dawned on me that the show isn't really about zombies, or a post-apocalypse society. From my view, a lot of the show seems an exploration of male-female roles and relationships outside of the evolved canons of contemporary post-feminist society. What does it really mean to be a man or a woman? The apocalypse scenario largely forces contemporary men and women into "traditional" roles and contemplates how they cope with that. In a sense, it truly is the same show as Mad Men, which has much of the same underlying theme, but uses the lens of the pre-feminist past instead of an apocalyptic future.

Yes, the show is really about manhood and womanhood. The main discussions on the Internet are about the characters living up to, or not living up, various demands on them as men and women in a very traditional sense.

That's why the show is refreshing. This is especially true concerning the male characters, and many of the Internet discussions are about whether the male characters are sufficiently "men" considering the demands being made on them (LOST had this as well, to a high degree).  These are discussions that one is simply not allowed to have about most male characters on television these days, who buy and large are depicted as irrelevant man-boys who are mostly obsessed with boobs and beer. Or they act manly but they work as enforcers for the Police State in some form. Even then there power is challenged and equalled by strong female characers and thus it is no longer considered to be "masculine" in nature.

The post-apocalypse scenario of The Walking Dead cuts right to the chase: men need to be men. They need to be strong and decisive. They need to protect the women and children. There is no arguing about this. The women can be strong too, but for them it is an option.  If they want, they can choose to be feminine. For the men, it is not an option. It is mandatory. There is no dicussion. It is simply known and assumed by all the characers.

It's very caveman level in some ways. I think this is why the show is so popular.

In any case, I'm hooked. But shucks, now that I'm caught up, I have to wait six months or more for the next season, like all the rest of the poor suckers for follow the show.

In the meantime, there's a new season of Mad Men coming up. Hmmm....