Zombies just keep coming, and you can't stop them. Since 28 Days Later came out in 2002, they have lumbered inexorably forth, an endless trend. Just a year ago, with the release of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I thought the trend had reached its peak, and yet The Walking Dead television series has garnered ratings, buzz, and praise that outshine my own beloved Mad Men and saved AMC again, instantly erasing Rubicon from the collective memory.
Why so popular? In today's New York Times, Chuck Klosterman shares his ideas. To summarize, Klosteman thinks zombies currently represent the rise of modern internet culture. Viewers identify with the protagonists as they run amid a sea of mindless, anonymous corpses because that's how we feel on the internet everyday.
It's a credible theory. Monsters are constant projections for all sorts of cultural anxieties, but zombies are unique because they can represent, well, almost anything. I agree more with my friend Chan who says zombies are the ultimate, faceless, "other". They drain a human of all their empathetic attributes, thereby giving the heroes (us) a free pass to exercise our most violent, hostile impulses without discretion or remorse.
Still the popularity of The Walking Dead baffles me. I assume that most people, like myself, watch TV for escapism, comfort, and a few chuckles. The Walking Dead pilot episode held me in rapt fascination. Familiar zombie tropes were played out in the most intense terms imaginable. As a character struggles with the idea of sniping his zombie wife in the forehead, he breaks down in tears, his tired face filling the screen. We've seen this scenario many times before, but never in such visceral terms. Towards the end, Sheriff Rick Grimes finds himself trapped under an abandoned tank while the entire zombified population of Atlanta crawls towards him. It was one of the most harrowing scenarios I've ever witnessed on television, beautifully filmed, edited, and acted. I felt like someone had skewered me to the couch with a washing machine.
The Walking Dead comic was conceived to show a different side of the zombie apocalypse story, to dramatize the day-to-day survival and the toll it would take to live through such a thing. Predictably, it is a fairly bleak comic, but in black and white panels it's at a harmless remove. On television, and especially in the hands of Frank Darabont, it's almost unbearable. I predicted at first that the show would fail. It has since been renewed. But we'll see if viewers will hang for another season of constant dread and despair. Until then, the cultural zombie menace shows no signs of stopping.
