The Walking Extinct

Warning: There will be spoilers. And zombies. But mostly spoilers.

The Walking Dead marketing materials advertise a pretty cool zombie show, and the Walking Dead comic book is a pretty cool zombie comic book. But the first six episodes of The Walking Dead, didn’t constitute a pretty cool zombie show. Partly, the show wasn’t cool enough (the finale would have been terrible even if the show were called The Walking Room That Arbitrarily Kills You With Napalm After You Argue About It For Twenty Minutes). More importantly, it wasn’t zombie enough.

The marketing material for The Walking Dead looks like this:

And the early Walking Dead comic book looks like this (although the artist is replaced shortly after the part of the story portrayed so far in the TV show, which is just a few issues):

While The Walking Dead the TV show looks more like this:

Or this:

After I while, I got to thinking that the show is really a lot less like this:

And a lot more like this:

The pants are no longer pleated and the monsters look less like lizards, but The Walking Dead the TV show seemed to be modeled much less on zombie/survival culture and much more on adventure/monster/survival culture – specifically safari-ish stories like Jurassic Park.

This is a weightier, more complex issue than just the art direction, costumes, photography and set design (which are of course not clearly defined or conclusive across genres) — it speaks to the heart of what zombie stories are about and why they captivate the way they do. More on this, and on why shambling corpses and carnivorous lizards aren’t always that different, after the jump —

Tell it to the Giant Snakes

Okay, so, thought experiment time. Let’s say we wanted to put the following scene  in The Walking Dead. What parts of it would we have to change?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-H6q7F1jnR0

As you can probably tell because you are a connoisseur of fine film, this scene is from Anaconda 3: The Offspring, a made-for-TV monster movie starring David Hasselhoff (subtitled in German, ‘natch, because Germans love David Hasselhoff). And the answer to the question is – everything except the shots of the giant snake would fit right in an episode of The Walking Dead. This is unfortunate, because the cast of Anaconda 3 looks ridiculous:

Good thing there’s nobody on The Walking Dead who looks as silly and patently cliche as David Hasselhoff.

Actually, no, it turns out that there is a guy on The Walking Dead who looks and acts quite a bit like David Hasselhoff (though the ‘Hoff has gone back and forth on chest shaving).

The pictures illustrates the underlying point: this is a generic scene about surviving in a place where you think you ought to be safe, but you aren’t, because you are relatively isolated and there is a monster. There is nothing in the scene that specifically dictates the monster has to be a snake. You could take the monster out and replace it with any number of other monsters, and the story would function the same way.

Think of the times the people in The Walking Dead come upon or fight zombies. Usually it’s a supply raid, a rescue party, or a defense of the home base.

The relationship between the camp and the city of Atlanta are even similar to the situation in Jurassic Park – you have a place that’s perceived to be safe, but is only sort of safe, and people have to go to some sort-of-faraway place that would normally be easy to get to, but is dangerous because there are monsters. The challenge is to get there, do what you need to do, and get back whilst not being taken down, and before the monsters overwhelm home base.

This isn’t the apocalypse, it’s capture the flag.

Pocket Monsters

Certain kinds of monsters tend to be interchangeable. Wild animals, fantasy monsters, various beasts, creeps, robots — there are a lot of monsters that don’t impose a specific form on the stories in which they appear. Godzilla can fight a giant version of pretty much anything (and pretty much did). Ninjas can fight pirates and it doesn’t matter. You can collect more than 151 Pokemon and use any of them you want in most fights, whether they are ducks or dragons or boxing things or whatever.

But zombies generally don’t work this way. Zombies come with specific sorts of stories, because they relay a form that tends to influence the way stories function. The Walking Dead chooses to ignore this and frame a zombie fight as a monster fight, missing out on the chance to get more closely involved with the broader artistic project and tropes of zombie stories.

Take this scene from Episode 3 (by the way, it’s worth noting that, in rewatching episode 3 looking for examples, there are many surprisingly long stretches of The Walking Dead that are totally devoid of any relation to the zombie apocalypse, either directly or thematically. “Thank you for washing my clothes” was a big one.).

RICK: “I’ve been thinking about the man we left behind.”

LORI: “You’re not serious.”

SHANE: “Water’s here, y’all. Just a reminder to boil before use.”

LORI: “Are you asking me or telling me?”

RICK: “Asking”

LORI: “Well, I think it’s crazy. I think it’s just the stupidest way to break your son’s–”

(SCREAMS!!!)

CARL: Mom!

(Various yelling as people run into the woods.)

LORI: “Noting bit you? Nothing scratched you?”

(Gang of men with guns and cudgels come upon a zombie eating a deer. The zombie is slow and methodical, savoring the deer flesh. When it feels threatened, it gets up, yells at everybody, and rushes at Rick. Rick hits it in the face with a stick. The men beat the crap out of it until Dale chops its head off.)

DALE: “This is the first one we’ve had up here. They never come this far up the mountain.”

JIM: “Well, they’re running out of food in the city, that’s what.”

(Everybody hears noises. SHANE gets tense, raises his gun, looks out into the woods. DARYL appears.)

SHANE: “Eh, Jesus.”

DARYL: “Son of a bitch! That’s my deer! Look at it, all gnawed on by this filthy, disease-bearing, motherless, toxic bastard!”

There is then more talk of deer tracking, trying to save the deer and eat venison, and a reference to On Golden Pond. The decapitated zombie head lurches, and DARYL shoots it in the eye with an arrow.

DARYL: “C’mon people! It’s gotta be the brain. Don’t you know nothin’?”

The zombies act, and are treated, like animals. They have basic intelligence and awareness and clearly want things (mostly to eat). They are dangerous, but people can generally best them if they get the upper hand and have the right weapons. The really dangerous circumstance is to meet them alone. But the people have a settlement that is more or less free of them, except for occasional attacks, and in that space, as long as they take care of their basic needs, they’re pretty much okay.

Dead Man Walking

It’s worth noting for the sake of fandom that this isn’t how the subject is treated in the comic books. The full events of the show go by in just a few issues of the comic books. People die a lot more frequently. The despair of it all is a lot more crushing. People’s arrogance against the persistence of the zombies is a lot more apparent and fragile. All the characters much more quickly become unhinged by the insanity of their situation. The zombies have an effect on people characteristic of zombies – the world has fallen apart, and the mockery the zombies make of humanity calls into question the humanity of the characters themselves.

Because zombies have the bodies of humans, in most zombie stories, they draw a comparison between themselves and the survivors. In every zombie story that embraces this tradition, from Dawn of the Dead with its shopping mall and anticonsumerist message to Shaun of the Dead and its thirtysomething electronics store clerk who shuffles every day through his commute dead to the world, such that he doesn’t recognize when the zombie apocalypse has happened, the surviving characters are compared to zombies, and the zombies are compared to human beings in some way.

In most zombie movies, the “walking dead” are, in some way, us. The people of the earth, especially of its cities and privileged developed areas are the zombies – we are the mindless hordes who destroy the earth and feed on each other. We are the ones who shamble about blindly following our appetites, without the vibrancy and immediacy of meaningful life. We are the doomed ones. The zombie apocalypse has already happened.

This is what zombie stories are about and how zombies function uniquely as monsters.

Now of course, this isn’t exhaustive. We can get into an endless debate of semantics and exceptions. But the general form of it comes through. And there are certainly scenes in The Walking Dead that are zombie-specific (like the man holed up in the house who can’t shoot his zombie wife). But they are pretty few and far between, compared to the scenes about surviving without the comforts of modern civilization or fighting generic monsters.

Another One for the Fire

Now, take this scene, from the 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead (special bonus for Babylon 5 fans!). How much of this scene would work if you replaced the zombies with giant snakes?

The answer? Pretty much none of it. The human form of the zombies is essential for the comparisons here, which say a lot about savage human nature, about race and racial violence in America, and about the primitive roots of contemporary execution of physical violence. This is classic Romero style – these kinds of comparisons are not the only way to make a zombie movie, but they’re one of the best and most influential.

How about this scene, from 2007’s 28 Weeks Later (I’m picking somewhat lesser-known properties because the clips are slower to get taken down from YouTube, even though we are using them for educational purposes, after a fashion). What parts of this scene work if the monsters are bears, or giant snakes, or mutant bats?

None of them. This scene is about family and trust. The girl sees the boyfriend as part of the family, but her family sees him as an outsider. The boyfriend’s leaving constitutes an act of betrayal they won’t forgive. You get the sense that, even if he weren’t a zombie, he’d be treated much the same by all parties.

Then, the young boy comes in as a counterpoint. His family is trying to kill him. He’s searching for outsiders to help him. But the family’s fear of trusting outsiders turns out to be justified when the kid brings zombies in tow toward the house.

None of this works if the monsters are bears, because it’s not about the survivors living through the movie. It’s about their relationships to each other and the world they live in.

That’s another unique point about zombie stories – more than any other kind of monster story except for very similar alien body snatcher stories, zombie stories are totally fine ending with a TPK – a Total Party Kill, or Wipe, where the good guys lose and everybody dies.

This is not the case with, say, movies about genetically engineered dinosaurs. In those movies, we usually need to see somebody survive and the dinosaurs, because the point is the threat to our own lives. In zombie movies, survival isn’t the goal. The goal is remaining an individual, finding oneself or preserving the relationships that matter in an alienating world, and the fact that this is hard and sometimes doesn’t work is part of the point.

That’s a big part of what makes zombie stories so scary. Zombie stories are heavy with futility. As one of my dearest friends always says, “Think about it. You can’t kill them; they’re already dead.” The individual zombies usually aren’t hard to kill, but in a large group, they are unstoppable. You think there is going to be help, and there probably isn’t. You think the government can do something, but it probably can’t. You think your own group of survivors will hold together, but it probably won’t. The worst acts in zombie stories are usually committed by surviving human beings against each other.

That’s why The Walking Dead the comic book is so bleak. It follows these characters over the long haul, keeping up a tone of futility for much of the journey. And it’s why the marketing material for the show is so bleak – because this is the gray, dusty world, fallen and given over to the zombies.

But the show isn’t like this at all. Even with the various attempted rapes and acts of intrahuman violence, there is still plenty of hope for the protagonists to end up okay, and that idea is woven into the very fabric of the show, from its acting to production design to dialogue. And this is kind of disappointing, because it makes the show so much more common and less interesting than it could have been. But it leaves open the possibility that things may change quite a bit in the future…