It’s not often you see a 3-foot-6 zombie, particularly one that knocks on your door. But that’s what happened to me Wednesday night, groaning not for brains, but for individually-wrapped Twix bars.
The zombie in question was tastefully done, as far as zombies go—no dangling eyeballs or flapping skin or anything. The whitish pallor of his face and the dark circles around his eyes gave him away. Well, that and the plastic knife sticking out of his chest. His mother smiled and waved from the sidewalk as I tossed a bit of candy into his outstretched pillowcase. He said thank you and skipped off down the driveway. And as I turned away, I thought to myself, Maybe we already are in the midst of a zombie apocalypse.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think we’re all to be forcibly cast in a Day of the Dead remake—only this time, as a documentary. But when it comes to pop culture, zombies have already taken over. They populate books and movies and videogames. And, perhaps most noticeably, they star in one of television’s most popular shows, AMC’s The Walking Dead.
I can’t say I’m a fan of the show. But having reviewed it quite recently, can appreciate what the makers are conceptually trying to do. In a lot of respects, The Walking Dead isn’t so much focused on the dead as it is on the living—and examining the monsters we all can become under the right circumstances.
As such, it was pretty interesting to see the change in tone between seasons two and three. Some of that might be explained by the exit of creator Frank Darabont, but there’s more going on here.
To back up a bit: In seasons one and two, Sheriff Rick Grimes and his motley band of survivors are trying to make their way in a zombie-infested world, keeping as much as their humanity intact as possible. This meant that in between zombie attacks and bothersome undead infections and in-band betrayals, Rick and his crew spent a lot of time talking about the meaning of it all. And that made some sense: There’s nothing like an apocalypse to make you take stock in life, ponder relationships and mull your beliefs as never before. The Walking Dead was a thoughtful show—maybe too thoughtful, some critics would say. I mean, there are certain expectations for a show called The Walking Dead.
In Season Three, though, circumspection is out the window. In the premiere I reviewed, there’s no talking for about the first 10 minutes. Rick and Co. rip through a house, searching for food and dispatching zombies with all the thoughtfulness and angst of a robotic arm putting a door on a Prius. The focus has shifted from how and why and into a more brutal realm: It doesn’t matter. Let’s just make it to tomorrow. Rick is no longer the conflicted, tormented soul that wrestled over the morality of any given decision. He’s living in a brutal world and has become an equally brutal, decisive leader. His son, prepubescent Carl, dispatches walkers like the grizzled vet he is. When a zombie falls, both the dead and the killers are equally emotionless.
From a plotting perspective, it makes perfect sense. We humans are resilient beings, and part of our resiliency is based on our ability to adjust to new realities. And let’s face it: Some of our deeper, more humane ponderings are products of our relatively easy lives. When we have mac and cheese on the table and don’t have to worry about undead attackers knocking down our doors, we have more time and inclination to examine our feelings. When we don’t, life paradoxically becomes much simpler: Food. Water. Shelter. Safety.
And there’s this, too: When much of your everyday existence is, by necessity, predicated on “killing” the undead, you stop thinking about all that slaughter. You become desensitized to it all—forgetting that the mindless zombie before you was someone’s mother or daughter.
That’s why we’re programmed to grow desensitized, I think—to help us better accept whatever reality we’re confronted with.
I didn’t grow up on a farm, but I did go to college in Nebraska. When my farm-raised friends would talk about slaughtering chickens or bouncing cow’s eyeballs against the barn wall, I was appalled. But if I had grown up like they did, I would’ve probably gotten used to the very same stuff. I would’ve had to.
But The Walking Dead gives us another narrative—intentionally or no—in the area of desensitization.
AMC’s hit show has always been brutally gory, filled with more blood and bodyparts than many an R-rated horror flick. And at first, it was shocking. “This may well be the bloodiest show ever seen on television,” Jeff Otto of bloody-disgusting.com wrote when the series debuted. Indeed, many thought that it might be too gross for a broad audience.
But what is over-the-top in Season One is standard operating procedure by Season Three. The level of carnage needs to be bumped a bit.
From what I gather, that Season Three premiere might’ve been about the bloodiest episode in this show’s very bloody run. The blogosphere was rife with discussion of the scene where Rick took a hatchet and mercilessly hacked the leg off one of his followers. “This episode set a new benchmark in pure quantity of carnage,” writes Darren Franich of Entertainment Weekly. “I’m guessing that the show will have to slow down in the next few weeks, if only to conserve our nation’s dwindling reserves of fake blood.”
But really, in the world of basic cable, don’t shows like The Walking Dead have to set new benchmarks pretty frequently? At least to start and end the seasons? After all, the show is supposed to shock us. When the process of desensitization takes hold, we need more blood and violence to achieve that shock. That’s not Plugged In being persnickety. That’s human nature.
Now, I doubt the little zombie who visited me this week is a Walking Dead fan. But it did make me pause … in that I didn’t pause, seeing a 7-year-old with a fake knife sticking out of his chest. Kids don’t need to watch AMC to know what a zombie looks like. They don’t need to be horror fans to differentiate, on site, the difference between Nightmare on Elm Street’s horribly burnt Freddy and Scream’s sinister, dark-robed villain. Thanks to Friday the 13th’s Jason, they know what an old-fashioned hockey mask looks like even if they’ve never seen a modern one. These images are in shop windows and TV commercials and, on Wednesday, walking down the street. And so, to deal with them, kids grow desensitized—just as we all do.
One of the hallmarks of the common zombie is that it feels no pain, its nerve-endings apparently shot in the process of reanimation and decay. They cannot love, cannot hate, cannot draw closer to beauty or retract from danger. They simply, and endlessly, consume.
And sometimes I wonder if there isn’t a little zombie in us all.
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