The subject of AMC’s horror drama, The Walking Dead, came up in comments a week or so ago. It’s one of the few series I go out of my way to watch and I haven’t commented on it so here goes. This post will be filled with spoilers. If you want to be surprised, have no interest in television, or are not interested in flesh-eating zombies, walk on by.
The Walking Dead is a combination horror drama, soap opera, and allegorical/philosophical narrative. In the modern day drama the world has been overrun by flesh-eating zombies, the condition begun by a mysterious and possibly manmade plague and now spread by transmission from the bite of the zombies, the few pitiful remnants of humanity struggling for survival against the zombies, the elements, and each other. In some ways it’s an update of the old 1950s western Wagon Train with flesh-eating zombies in place of hostile Indians or bands of outlaws. It’s just finishing its third season on AMC and it will be back for at least one more.
In The Walking Dead the zombies are the McGuffin. A “McGuffin” is the pretext for a drama. The term comes from joke. Here’s a version of the joke:
First man (pointing to an oddly shaped object): What’s that?
Second man: It’s a McGuffin.
First man: What’s a McGuffin?
Second man: It’s used for hunting the lions that inhabit the Scottish Highlands.
First man: There are no lions in the Scottish Highlands.
Second man: Then that’s no McGuffin.
Alfred Hitchcock used the term. In The 39 Steps, Saboteur, and The Man Who Knew Too Much the spy story is the McGuffin. In The Walking Dead it’s the zombies.
That’s the objection even outrage that hardcore zombie purists have about the show: the zombies aren’t front and center. Mostly they’re just lurking around the periphery, shambling across fields, or stirring from piles of decaying bodies.
The series is tense, frightening, and gruesome. It’s just on my limit of tolerance. I found the very first episode in which the main character, Sheriff’s Deputy Rick Grimes, revives from a coma in a hospital empty except for the dead bodies and the zombies, about as intense as any television I’ve ever watched. His town is overrun by them. The world is overrun by them. His family has disappeared. Everything he knew and everyone he knew is gone.
The soap opera component is completely forgettable—uninteresting to me. For me what elevates TWD above other horror dramas is that the producers and writers rather clearly see it as an opportunity to discuss larger issues.
What do you do when the world you knew just disappears? And is replaced by something much grimmer and more threatening than anything you’ve ever expected? Are the old values relevant? Do you just do whatever it takes to survive?
The most recent theme along these lines has been developing for a while and really emerged in the most recent episode. What do you do when your kid, under the influence of all of the changes that have occurred, the danger that he’s experienced, and the violence that’s been a part of daily life develops a fascination with cruelty, danger, and death? Is he becoming a sociopath? Is he the New Adam? Is there a difference? What do you do? What should you do? Will attempting to cultivate the old values and damp down the new ones that are emerging just make it harder for him to survive?
The third season has raised any number of new issues and has handled them in intelligent and frequently surprising ways. I’ll give it one more season. We’ll see.
I was surprised that you watched this given the number of times you’ve expressed a disinclination to watch graphic violent material. Its moderate by zombie standards, but the infrequency of the sound and splatter of cranal matter has its own power. And the soap opera elements make the victims more than just “red shirts.”
My siblings have read the graphic novel(s?), and say its better, but I think they watch the show as well. I’ve picked-up a sense that a lot of complaints from the zombie crowd are at the differences in plot and charachterization between the two.
The last few episodes have provided a strong-payoff on big questions after dragging for a while. I was sad to see Dale die. Not that I like his charachter necessarily; he’s somewhat of a moral scold, who manipulates others and is a bit too willing to criticize others for the dirty work he benefits from, which, of course, makes him an interesting charachter.
My only criticism of the recent shows was they were accomplished by a number of sudden changes in charachter. Rick (to the dark side), Andrea (to the good side), Carl (to cruelty), Daryl (to not caring), Herschel (to weakness) and perhaps Beth if we knew more about her.
Yeah, it’s right on the border for me.
I thought that killing Dale off was a bit gratuitous. I can think of several possible explanations:
I had one more wisecrack to make but I failed to work it into the post so I’ll just put it here.
Be warned: this program has more gruesome makeup jobs than any program on TV with the possible exception of The Bachelor.
I love this show.
Some people complain that there aren’t enough zombies in it, but I like that the focus is mainly on the characters and you don’t have something jumping out at you every other minute… it makes the scares more meaningful when they happen.
I especially loved the part where they went through all that trouble to pull that horrible bloated thing out of the well, only to have it split in half with most of its guts spilling back down into the water. LOL
BTW/ All of the writers on the show are supposed to have read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, about living in a concentration camp. I’ve not read it, but I wonder if Rick’s (IMO) sudden willingness to kill an innocent man is not a dynamic arising from growing fear of the people he is trapped with. The humans are becoming the more frightening threats in the show, the zombies, as you say, just shake things up.
It’s a good book. Well worth reading. It’s relatively short—a couple of hundred pages. It was in when I was in college.
I think they killed Dale off because he was the most vocal advocate for the old way of doing things… so now that Dale isn’t there to try to restrain the others anymore, we get to see how the group does without the voice of reason. Will anyone else will ever manage to fill that role before the group tears itself apart?
I watched a season and a half of the show and then gave up. I may go back and watch the rest at some point. What turned me off were the soap opera elements which went overboard in the second season and how the characters were so frequently stupid in how they reacted to their environment. Hey, there’s a bunch of broken down cars blocking the road! Let’s all get out, split up and wander around! Hey, there are thousands of abandoned vehicles around – let’s keep driving the POS RV that keeps breaking down. Hey, let’s let the children wander around unsupervised!
Then there are the cliche’s and stereotypical characters. A black guy named T-Dog. A redneck racist, etc.
Sounds like the third season may be better though
Andy, we are still on the second season. The first season was only six episodes (probably to test the market) and the second season was essentially split into two, with a mid season climax and break. So there probably aren’t that many episodes you’ve missed.
PD Shaw,
My mistake. I think I watched about 3 episodes of the second season. I just looked and episode 11 just aired so I’m about 8 behind.
No, it was Dave that mistakenly wrote 3 episodes; I just try not to be pedantic about things other than Lincoln and movie ticket unless someone might get hurt.
BTW, this is one of those things that will either be epic or really, really bad.
Darryl’s a good subversion of the stereotype, though. He’s a bit of a hick, but he’s also a fundamentally decent person who grew up under the thumb of jerks like his older brother.
Andy, I missed a partial screening of the Lincoln Vampire Hunter movie a few weeks; the Lincoln people were apparently happy. The civil war battle scenes and Lincoln fighting on top of a burning train were apparently well done. They appear to be going for Lincoln as a serious figure instead of a comic one. I was (and remain) somewhat worried with Tim Burton’s name attached as producer; he’s increasingly unable to avoid self-amused shticks and probably has no one left around him to reign him in.
For sake of joinder, I should add for those who didn’t know, my Lincoln avatar is adopted from the comic book/tv pilot, The Amazing Screw-On Head, in which President Lincoln deploys his top agent to defeat the plans of Emporer Zombie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Screw-On_Head
Hehe. I posted that link mainly because of your avatar, which I didn’t know the history of.