The End of the World As Pop Culture Knows It, Part 1: The Real - And Troubling - Reason I Do Not Like The Walking Dead

 

One of the things I find so maddening about not only my profession but so many people who’d you think would know better is when they look at a trend in Hollywood and use to argue that it is the reason certain people in our society are the way are.

This is crap. Hollywood has never led society. Hollywood doesn’t even lead Hollywood most of the time. What everybody always forgets – including the people in Hollywood – is that’s it is a business and that like every business, it’s follows the market. It follows a trend and milks the golden goose until there are no eggs left – and then waits a few more years and raids the gooses corpse in case everyone’s forgotten.

I can make this argument on just about any major issue of society you want but for the purposes of this series I’m going to focus on a trend that has become increasingly popular over the last decade: the end of the world. One of the narratives that so many critics and celebrities tie to rise of so many populists including Donald Trump has been the rise of popularity in the past decade of film and television franchises dealing with the end of the world and its aftermath.

This would not hold up under close scrutiny or indeed any scrutiny at all.  The idea of the world ending has been a mainstay of television and the movies since the Cold War began when our entire society was very certain that it was a matter of time that these scenarios were going to play out in real life. I hate to diminish the understandable concern so many people who are younger than me might think, but nothing fundamentally has in changed in our society since then save the nature of the end. In the 1950s until the 1990s, it was nuclear annihilation. As this century began it involved terrorism and occasionally climate change. These days it’s taken on the nature of plague – which to be clear was a trend even then. We’ve always had metaphors – alien invasion, zombie apocalypse, the rapture – but it’s always the same. As I wrote in a piece on Millennium, our society always seems to be waiting for the end to come, and when it doesn’t we just push the date back a little further.

So in that sense, series that deal with the end of the world these days are not a sign that Americans have been looking for a man like Donald Trump. That said, there is a trend in so many of these series in recent years that is troubling and I think it may be that reason that I finally realized why I have never been able to either get into or watch The Walking Dead, arguably the most successful franchise on television in the last twenty years.

To be clear I’ve had many other more personal reasons to avoid it. For one thing, it took one of my favorite prestige cable networks AMC – which was the creator of Mad Men and Breaking Bad and essentially turned into what amounts to almost entirely all Walking Dead network.  I’ve lost count of how many spinoffs there have been and now that Better Call Saul is gone, I’m not sure I’ll have a reason to ever look at it again. (Unless they renew Lucky Hank.)

There’s also the fact that the zombie is the least interesting of all the supernatural creatures. Vampires have charm; werewolves and ghosts have tragedy at their center, and witches have their own levels. Has their ever been any zombie film or TV show where the zombies are interesting at all other than their looming menace and the ways to kill them? A zombie on its own is basically dull; it’s only in numbers that their scary and even then, that’s not interesting really. A single vampire or werewolf is terrifying and has a sense of menace no zombie or group ever has.

It's not even that I never read the comic book, that would never have been a reason on its own to stop me from looking at any TV or film. Frankly I tend not to read the source material before I see a movie or TV show in order not to prejudice me about it.

No the reason I’ve never been able to truly enjoy The Walking Dead is a bigger implication. And to explain why I’ll let someone else talk for me.

When he was writing his non-fiction treatise on horror Danse Macabre, Stephen King did not talk much about the genre he was even then in 1979 making his own. However, he did briefly discuss the rational behind The Stand and he admitted something that may be at the core of why so many people like doing more than just idea of a metaphor. He was tired of how society operated at its core and a part of him relished the idea of being able to tear it all down. He even admits as much directly in the final sense: “Yes friends and neighbors, in The Stand I got to destroy the whole human race, and it was fun!” (His italics not mine.)

I think at some level that is the motivation at the core of so much of the apocalyptic fiction that existed before and after the time of King. It is the discontent of every aspect of our society and the idea that the best thing for humanity might very well be for there to be no more humanity. This is never something you like to hear people say out loud, particularly when it comes from the voice of anyone with power or who promises violence.  But I’m not going to pretend that every part of our society is not in some way a shitshow and that the idea that it might be simpler if it were all gone isn’t a comforting one. It’s also utterly ludicrous – I don’t think any millennial could survive five minutes without their cell phone, much less live off the land. But I do get why watching it play out on screen might give a person a vicarious thrill and that’s why so many of these genres are popular. So I understand in theory why millions would be drawn to it. It’s the execution (pun not intended) that bothers me.

See when Stephen King scrubbed the human race, he decided that was the start of something not the end. Indeed the quintessential adaptation of it for ABC actually used that as its tag: ‘The end of the world is just the beginning. King has gone back to the end of the world many times in his short fiction and longer novels – he actually visited the idea of a zombie apocalypse in Cell nearly thirty years later. But the recent I think The Stand is not only his best word on the subject – and the gold standard for so much of it that followed – was that King not only spent a lot of time on what society would look like after the end of the world, but refused to provide any easy answers as to what it would look like. (I’ll actually look at that in a later entry in this series.)

By contrast, not only after the original series ended but well into spinoff number three (or four, I’ve lost count) we don’t seem to be any closer in The Waling Dead universe to a new society or even anything resembling it. I admit most of this is based off summations that I get online or from publications over the years, but I don’t expect I’m far off. From what I understand, almost every season of any series deals with some kind of threat, either from zombies or some apparently safe refuge that a group of survivors must deal with, episode by episode or at the end of the season. Whatever respites the characters ever get is almost always off-screen and by the end of any episode they’re facing some force of attack, from without, within or both.

Leaving aside that decades after the fact no one seems to have come close to constructing something resembling a solution to the zombie threat (it’s been decades you think at some point the zombies would waste away somewhere) this reduces what should be a complicated issue to a fundamental question of always being in a state of waiting for the next attack to happen.  As a result The Walking Dead may be the worst example of television of torture porn. I’ve seen variations of in Shonda Rhimes’ work and the Game of Thrones universe, but Walking Dead is its own version of hell. It argues that not only should the viewer not bother to get attached to any regular for very long but that the characters themselves shouldn’t bother because at some point they will probably have to kill them, and often that’s the best case scenario. (I almost wonder if it would make more sense just for the regulars who are bitten to spend longer as zombies because it might be more interesting.)

That’s the thing that I find by far the most frightening about not only The Walking Dead franchise but its popularity.  I think millions of people watch it years after it stopped being interesting but because the idea of is appealing. You don’t have to live in a world with modern conveniences or any societal interests. You don’t even have to bother to make emotional connections beyond the occasional sexual encounter.  You don’t have to worry about stability or really plan for anything.  All you have to do is have a gun to blast creatures that were once human beings and sometimes even if they were people you loved. And it’s not like so many of these character truly seemed burdened by emotional trauma over all of these deaths over the years. Maybe there’s a larger statement to be made about how exhausting it gets to see your friends die and be able to nothing to stop it, but considering how much more interest people seem to have in the zombies than most of the character after a while, it really does make you wonder why people keep watching the show.

Is that why so many of us want a zombie apocalypse? Nothing about The Walking Dead seems like it’s a fun world to live in or one anyone in our society could survive it.  Certainly this isn’t a franchise that has to have a lot of laughs over fifteen years. I know that shows like Game of Thrones and Breaking Bad can be grim, but I honestly think the only time the actors in Walking Dead had any fun was in a Robot Chicken parody when they made fun about how insane everything they were doing was.   I keep wondering if people enjoy this series and I have no good answer.

On a separate subject, however, I think I can comment. Over the past decade it has been a subject of great frustration by fans and cast members that The Walking Dead has been ignored by the Emmys. Most people argue that had to do with the fact the Emmys doesn’t know what to do with sci-fi and fantasy and while that might have been true when the series premiered, it certainly isn’t now. This past year alone, sci-fi and fantasy recognized peak proliferation in the drama category in the Emmys with Andor, House of The Dragon, Yellowjackets and The Last of Us all receiving Best Drama nominations. The latter’s nominations are particularly telling because that series is based on a video game that deals with a zombie apocalypse in all but name.

Perhaps that is the key difference between them. The Last Of Us is fundamentally about characters and about human connection even in the midst of the end of the world. Few would look at an episode like ‘A Long, Long Time’ and could see it appearing at any point in The Walking Dead.  The Last of Us is a series about finding humanity even after the end. The Walking Dead can’t even find humanity among the humanity that’s left.