The Apocalyptic Strain in Popular Culture
SYNOPSIS
RELATED BOOK
American popular culture is overflowing with doomsday prophecies and end-of-the-world scenarios. According to film and television, vampires, werewolves, and zombies are storming across our landscape, and alien invaders, asteroids, and airborne toxic events threaten us from the skies. We might as well be living in the late Middle Ages. Our films and television shows seem locked into a perpetual and ever-more-frenzied Dance of Death. Whatever happened to the popular culture that used to offer up charming images of the American dream? Where are the happy households—the Andersons, the Nelsons, the Cleavers, the Petries—when we need them? Film and television today are more likely to present images of the American nightmare: our entire civilization reduced to rubble, and the few survivors forced to live a primitive existence in terror of monstrous forces unleashed throughout the land. Has the American nightmare paradoxically become the new American dream? Is there some weird kind of wish-fulfillment at work in all these visions of near-universal death and destruction?
“Has the American nightmare paradoxically become the new American dream?”
There are, of course, as many versions of the American dream as there are Americans, but by the middle of the twentieth century, one common pattern emerged in both reality and in popular culture.[2] This dream was very much embodied in material terms—a family happily ensconced in a spacious house, preferably in the suburbs, with the most up-to-date appliances and two or three cars in the garage. This dream was founded on faith in modern science and technology, which seemed to be continually improving the human and specifically the American condition. The path to achieving this American dream was clearly laid out. One got a good education in order to land a good job, which might or might not be fulfilling in itself but would in any case provide the financial means for buying all the material components that seemed essential to the American dream. As usually envisioned, the job—in order to pay enough—would be in one of the professions, chiefly law or medicine, or in some kind of business, probably a corporate position that would provide financial security. The notion of security was integral to this version of the American dream. One would find a job for life that included solid medical and retirement benefits. This model of happiness was often on view in film and television in the 1950s and 60s, supplying the framework for television situation comedies, for example, or providing the happy endings in many Hollywood movies.
This vision of the American dream was bound up with trust in American institutions. The goal of long-term security rested on faith in financial institutions, such as banks, insurance companies, and the stock market. Medical institutions, such as hospitals, clinics, and the pharmaceutical industry, were supposed to keep extending our life expectancy. Americans also looked up to their educational institutions, from primary schools to universities. After all, they were relying on their schools to prepare them for the careers that would underwrite their financial prosperity. Universities could be counted on to do the kind of scientific research that makes technological progress possible. In short, Americans relied on their institutions to shape them properly in the first place; in many cases they looked forward to being employed by institutions such as corporations and the professions; and they trusted these institutions in turn to work for their benefit, providing, for example, health care and financial security.
Overarching all these institutions was the grandest institution of them all, American government: local, state, and above all the federal government. Especially during the Cold War era, Americans looked up to the Washington establishment because it was protecting them from foreign and domestic enemies. America had been the clear winner in World War II, emerging from the conflict relatively unscarred and assuming an uncontested place as the most productive and powerful nation in the world. America had triumphed over its enemies because of its superior economic and scientific power. It is no accident that the particular conception of the Amercan dream we have been examining crystallized right after World War II. Given the widespread faith in technical expertise in the wake of America’s victory in World War II, Americans generally trusted their government to regulate the economy and produce the prosperity that would make the American dream possible. In the second half of the twentieth century, the American government kept expanding its scope as a welfare state, with the goal of insuring the security of all aspects of its citizens’ lives. Moreover, the federal government steadily increased its role in financially supporting and regulating the various institutions that were woven into the fabric of the American dream, especially educational and medical institutions. In sum, for decades the American dream came boxed in an institutional framework, and most Americans, without thinking much about it, assumed that they could not realize their dreams without these institutions.
But even at the peak of this conception of the American dream in the 1950s, this faith in institutions did not go unchallenged. Dissenting voices charged that Americans were being increasingly “institutionalized,” sacrificing their freedom in their quest for comfort and security. Talk of the “organization man” (the title of a 1956 book by William Whyte) reflected fears that Americans were selling their souls to corporations, giving up their individuality and autonomy to work in bureaucratic organizations.[3] Skeptics also voiced concerns that the standard conception of the American dream might be self-defeating. In the course of trying to provide material benefits to their families, men—and later women—were losing touch with the very spouses and children they claimed to cherish. The notion of the happy, close-knit family was at the core of the American dream, and yet career values often seemed to conflict with family values. Working hard at the office left men—and later women—with little or no time for their children. Everywhere institutions seemed to be coming between people, preventing them from interacting in face-to-face situations. The very institutions that Americans had turned to in order to achieve and secure their dreams seemed to have trapped them in a vast impersonal system that by its nature was inimical to personal fulfillment. These anxieties about the American dream sometimes surfaced in popular culture in the middle of the twentieth century.[4] Movies such as the 1957 The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit portrayed corporate life as empty and stultifying. And the immense popularity of Westerns during this era, in film and especially on television, signaled dissatisfaction with comfortable suburban life. Dramas set in the Wild West provided an imaginative escape from the safe and boring world of modern institutions—an image of a rugged, frontier existence, in which earlier Americans, especially men, were on their own and could act heroically in their struggle with hostile and dangerous environments.
Disenchantment with the mid-twentieth-century formulation of the American dream gradually increased, and became widespread at the turn of the twenty-first century, as people lost their confidence in American institutions. A series of bubbles and meltdowns led people to doubt the fundamental honesty and integrity of financial institutions, above all, their ability to provide long-term economic security. Confidence in the competence and caring nature of the medical establishment began to erode, as witness the alternative medicine movement, the return to traditional home remedies, skepticism about vaccination programs, and the proliferation of medical malpractice suits. Whether these doubts are scientifically justified is irrelevant to the larger cultural issue. The fact is that doctors and the medical profession in general are no longer held in the high esteem they once enjoyed in America. Educational institutions are also being challenged on a wide range of fronts, with critics complaining that they fail to deliver on their promises, and charge exorbitant rates in the process. The home schooling movement offers concrete proof that many Americans have become disillusioned with the educational establishment. As for government institutions, with one “-gate” scandal after another, polling suggests that Americans’ faith in institutions such as Congress and the Presidency is at all-time lows. Looking at the world around them, Americans may be excused for concluding that the financial-medical-educational-government complex that was supposed to help them achieve their dreams has failed them. At this point, it becomes tempting for Americans to wish away their banks, their hospitals, their schools, and their government. Perhaps life might be easier and more fulfilling without all these institutions.
“Popular culture has stepped forward to offer Americans a chance to explore these possibilities imaginatively and to rethink the American dream. ”
Popular culture has stepped forward to offer Americans a chance to explore these possibilities imaginatively and to rethink the American dream. Films and television shows have allowed Americans to imagine what life would be like in the absence of all the institutions they have been told they cannot do without, but which they now suspect may be thwarting their self-fulfillment. We are dealing with a wide variety of fantasies here, mainly in the horror and science-fiction genres, but the pattern is strikingly consistent, cutting across generic distinctions. In the television show Revolution, for example, some mysterious event causes all electrical devices around the world to cease functioning. The result is catastrophic and involves a huge loss of life, as airborne planes crash to earth, for example. All social institutions dissolve and people are forced to rely only on their personal survival skills. Governments around the world collapse, and the United States divides up into a number of smaller political units. This development runs contrary to everything we have been taught to believe about “one nation, indivisible.” Yet it is characteristic of almost all these shows that the federal government is among the first casualties of the apocalyptic event, and—strange as it may at first sound—there is a strong element of wish fulfillment in this event. It is as if these shows are saying: “We’ve lost everything, but at least we’re rid of the federal government. Maybe we can run our own lives now.” The thrust of these end-of-the-world scenarios is precisely for government to grow smaller or to disappear entirely. These shows seem to reflect a sense that government has grown too big, and too remote from the concerns of ordinary citizens and unresponsive to their needs and demands. If Congress and the President are unable to shrink the size of government, perhaps a plague or cosmic catastrophe can do some real budget cutting for a change.
One might even describe these shows as a return to the original spirit of federalism (which was, after all, conceived as an antidote to a powerful central government). The aim seems to be to reduce the size of government radically and thereby to bring it closer to the people. Cut back to regional or local units, government becomes manageable again and ordinary people get to participate in it actively, recovering a say in the decisions that affect their lives. In cases where the apocalyptic event dissolves all government, these shows in effect return people to what political theorists call the state of nature. As if we were reading Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, we get to see how people form a social contract. No longer locked into institutions already in place, the public gets to assess their value and see if it really needs them or might be better off under other arrangements or perhaps no government at all.
THE RETURN OF THE MINUTEMEN
In the television show Falling Skies, it is invading aliens who destroy civilization as we know it, and they are quick to eliminate governments around the world. Set in and around Boston, the show revives the tradition of the New England town meeting, as the characters get to deliberate on their own affairs and debate courses of action in the absence of any higher political authority. The characters have been left to their own devices, because, in a decisive blow to civilization, the aliens have destroyed communication circuits and in particular the Internet. The Internet is a perfect example of the kind of technological advance that has usually been featured in the formulation of the American dream. The characters in Falling Skies of course miss the Internet, but they learn to live without it and develop more intimate, and perhaps more satisfactory, modes of communication. The loss of modern technology is characteristic of all these apocalyptic scenarios and reflects Americans’ love-hate relationship with their machines, appliances, and devices. These shows display an ambivalent attitude toward modernity in general, perhaps a genuine disillusionment with it, a sense that all the technological progress upon which we pride ourselves has not made us happier and may, on the contrary, have made us miserable by depersonalizing our relationships and limiting our freedom.
To be sure, the characters in Falling Skies lament the loss of the benefits of modern civilization. Many of them wish that they still had access to the advanced medical technology that used to be available in Boston’s world-class hospitals. Several of the episodes take place in an abandoned school, which points to the loss of modern educational institutions. But the show portrays major compensations for the destruction of modern medical and educational facilities. The featured band of survivors includes a female pediatrician. As she herself admits, she cannot provide the services of a big-city, hospital-based physician, but she makes up for her lack of scientific expertise with her personal concern for the welfare of her patients, who are also her friends. Deprived of urban hospitals, our survivors now have access to a genuine family doctor, who, unlike modern physicians, makes old-fashioned house calls. Similarly, all the children are now home-schooled. Their teachers are their parents, and in the absence of professional educators, the students seem to thrive, actually enjoying their lessons for a change. They are now being taught by people who know them and care about them as individuals. Perhaps there is something dreamlike about this nightmare after all.
The way that the relationships between parents and children have changed in light of the apocalyptic events goes right to the emotional core of Falling Skies. The characters have lost everything that used to make up the American dream—all their material possessions, their social status, their professional careers, and of course their three-bedroom houses. But that means that they can now focus on each other. Careers no longer distract them from their family obligations. For the adults, parenting becomes their full-time job. They used to put their careers ahead of their family life; now they will sacrifice anything for the sake of their children. As a typical Stephen Spielberg production, Falling Skies dwells obsessively on the father-son relationship. The main character is a father who gets to bond with his sons in a way that was not possible when he was pursuing his career as a history professor at Boston University. Now he spends all his time with his sons at his side and gets to watch them grow up under his guidance. This logic takes us to the heart of these end-of-the-world narratives. The characters have lost everything that used to make their lives seem worthwhile, but they discover that those elements of the American dream were at best distractions from, and at worst obstacles to, their true happiness and sense of fulfillment. Liberated from material concerns and impersonal institutions, the characters have the opportunity to search for what makes life truly meaningful, and that turns out to be devotion to friends and especially family. These apocalyptic fantasies seem to reflect the guilt feelings of perpetually overachieving American dreamers, who discover that, in their drive for success, they have betrayed their families.[5] Secretly they wish that the institutions they work so hard in might be dissolved so that they could get back in touch with their families.
With its setting in Massachusetts and its main character a history professor, Falling Skies frequently refers to the American Revolution. The names of Lexington and Concord keep coming up, and our heroes become latter-day Minutemen. Their resistance to the alien invaders is repeatedly compared to the American colonists’ resistance to British tyranny.[6] The Spirit of ’76 thus comes to prevail in Falling Skies. The characters have lost their material possessions and the security that institutions used to give them, but they have regained their independence and self-reliance. In the midst of a nightmarish existence, an older conception of the American dream comes back to life. The characters grow in self-respect because they learn that they can rely on their own resources to deal with the challenges they face. They do not need a whole network of impersonal institutions to preserve their lives and to take care of their welfare—and in particular they do not need the federal government. In the spirit of the American Revolution, they form militias and become citizen-soldiers, defending themselves. As do many of these apocalyptic narratives, Falling Skies features boys who have to grow quickly into men, a process epitomized by their learning to use weapons and thus assuming the adult role of protecting their loved ones. Taking pride in their maturation, these boys reveal what these shows stand for—they champion people who assume responsibility for their lives, rather than passively accepting a role as wards of institutions or the state.
ZOMBIES AND THE CDC
If alien invaders are temporarily unavailable, fortunately American pop culture can supply us with all the zombies we need to re-examine the meaning of our lives. A zombie narrative such as the television show The Walking Dead embodies the same patterns we have just seen operating in an alien invasion narrative such as Falling Skies.[7] In The Walking Dead a zombie plague has quickly spread around the world, annihilating all but a remnant of the human population. In these end-of-the-world scenarios, whatever triggers the apocalypse tends to affect the entire Earth more or less simultaneously. The fear of modernity in all these narratives is specifically a fear of global modernity. What upsets people is the sense that they are losing control of their lives in a world of impersonal and unresponsive institutions, and the fact that all this is happening on a global scale is especially unnerving. If people are disturbed by the remoteness of the authorities that control their lives, then globalization is the ultimate nightmare.
Among their many meanings, zombies have come to symbolize the force of globalization.[8] National borders cannot stop the zombie plague from spreading, and it evidently dissolves all cultural distinctions. The zombies lose their individuality, freedom of will, and everything that makes them human beings. With their herd mentality, they are precisely the kind of mass-men that impersonal institutions seek to produce, and in a curious way they represent the docile subjects that governments secretly—or not so secretly—desire. Zombification is a powerful image of what governments try to do to their citizens—to create a uniform, homogenous population, incapable of acting independently.[9] It is no accident that zombies sometimes are portrayed as the products of scientific experiments and specifically of government projects gone awry (or gone all-too-well).
“Zombification is a powerful image of what governments try to do to their citizens—to create a uniform, homogenous population, incapable of acting independently.”
In The Walking Dead, it is not clear what force produced the zombies, but in any event they set off the typical end-of-the-world scenario. Governments have fallen everywhere and in the power vacuum that results, the characters are plunged back into the state of nature, with a decidedly Hobbesian emphasis on the war of all against all. Chased by relentless if plodding zombies and also by marauding gangs of the remaining humans, the main characters at first think of turning to traditional authorities to protect them. Coming from rural Georgia, they head for Atlanta, assuming that a big city will have the resources to keep them safe. But the city, with its concentration of zombies, proves to be even more dangerous than the countryside. The characters keep thinking of the federal government as their ultimate protector. Pinning their hopes on the military, they talk about going to Fort Benning for security, although they never get there and are warned away from it by other fugitives they encounter.[10]
Season One culminates in a quest to find safety with a well-known federal agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, conveniently located in Atlanta and a seemingly ideal refuge from a plague. But the characters’ relief at reaching their goal proves to be short-lived. Viewing the CDC as their salvation, our band of survivors finds instead that it is a source of destruction. The gleaming modernistic edifice is a deathtrap, run by a sole survivor, Dr. Edward Jenner, who seems borderline sane and fast approaching a pop culture stereotype of the mad scientist. Far from finding a cure for the zombie plague, the CDC may be the source of the infection. We learn in the sixth episode that the CDC weaponized smallpox. It is holding so many deadly germs and viruses that the building is programmed to self-destruct once its generators fail. Reminiscent of HAL in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001, the CDC computer has taken control away from the one scientist remaining in the headquarters. Blindly following its protocols and standard operating procedures, the computerized containment system destroys the most important zombie specimen the CDC possesses and then goes for the whole facility. As portrayed in the series, the CDC represents science at its most inhuman and frightening, an overwhelming force on automatic pilot, indifferent to ordinary people’s feelings and their fate. Our heroes and heroines barely have time to escape before the building blows up, taking the last of the CDC scientists with it.[11] If the CDC functions as a symbol of the federal government in The Walking Dead, then the medical-military-industrial complex proves to be a dangerous and self-destructive force.
As federal agencies go, the CDC is one of the more respected ones. It is, therefore, a measure of the anti-government spirit of The Walking Dead that it portrays the CDC so negatively. Evidently the agency was not about to see its reputation tarnished without putting up a fight. Perhaps in direct response to The Walking Dead, the real CDC created its own zombie narrative in the form of a graphic novel on its official web site.[12] Called Zombie Pandemic, it is generously provided free of charge by the CDC to anyone “looking for an entertaining way to introduce emergency preparedness.”[13] Unsurprisingly, in the CDC’s own narrative, the organization comes across as looking pretty good; it responds quickly and effectively to the zombie plague. Zombie Pandemic thus belongs to a different category of apocalyptic narratives—those with a pro-government bias. In contrast to what we have been examining thus far, some apocalyptic narratives insist on portraying ordinary people as helpless in the face of disaster. They are shown to panic or to freeze or to despair, thus only making matters worse for themselves. Of course this happens with some of the characters even in The Walking Dead, but the keynote of the series is human self-reliance and resilience. By contrast, in some zombie stories, such as the film World War Z, ordinary people are presented as incompetent. They are forced to rely on elites to save them, often a combination of scientific experts and military special forces, sponsored and directed by national governments or even the UN.[14] In this type of narrative, individual human beings, dwarfed and overwhelmed by a global or a cosmic catastrophe, must turn to the government to save them.
The CDC’s Zombie Pandemic follows this kind of script. The story is told largely from the perspective of an ordinary couple named Todd and Julie, who listen to the news of a zombie plague unfold in public service announcements from the CDC. The government orders people to remain passive in the face of disaster. Todd and Julie dutifully obey the CDC’s instructions: “Stay in your home. Do not go outside.” Their reliance on government action to save them promises to be rewarded, because the CDC makes remarkably swift progress in dealing with the zombie plague. Only a few days later, one of its doctors proclaims: “Yes, the health department sent it in Monday and we’ve managed to map the virus’ DNA. It appears to be a highly mutated form of the flu. They’ve labeled it Z5N1.” Working around the clock, the CDC soon comes up with the needed countermeasure for the zombie outbreak. As one doctor announces: “We’re using the same type of vaccine that we use for the seasonal flu.” Despite the spotty effectiveness record of flu vaccines, apparently this news is meant to reassure the public. One week later, the CDC is ready to distribute the vaccine, as an official from the “Strategic National Stockpile” reports.
Todd and Julie continue to follow the directives they receive from the CDC’s broadcasts, and accordingly they head for what is called a “safe zone” at a nearby elementary school. County Health Department officials carefully monitor their entrance into the safe zone, where they are assured that the vaccine is on its way. Unfortunately, just as it seems that Todd and Julie will be saved, a horde of zombies converges on the school building. Faced with being overrun by zombies, the military guards balk at using their weapons: “We can’t just shoot them. These are our fellow citizens!” Apparently a government agency like the CDC draws the line at portraying the U.S. military being used to mow down Americans, however zombified. The CDC could proudly annotate its web site: “No zombies were harmed in the making of this graphic novel.” Unopposed, the zombies smash their way into the gym where the people thought they were safe and “mass panic ensues as everyone realizes there’s no place to run.”
Just when things are beginning to look truly grim, Todd wakes up and discovers that all this was just a nightmare, brought on by his having recently watched a horror movie. But the experience has not been in vain. As the story ends, Todd tells Julie: “I’ve been thinking. . . . We should really make an emergency kit in case something happened. What if we were stuck in the house or had to evacuate? We need to have a plan!” With its use of the “it was all a bad dream” cliché, Zombie Pandemic is not going to win any awards at a comic book convention. But it does get across the pro-government message the CDC wishes to promote. Faced with any major disaster, ordinary citizens need to rely on government authorities and institutions to save them, and in particular they must docilely follow official orders. Government scientists will quickly come up with the solution to any catastrophic problem and make sure that it is quickly made available to all citizens. Central planning, especially by government experts, and centralized models of control are the proper response to any crisis. We seem to have traveled back in time to the 1950s, when the faith of Americans in their government was unbounded.
By contrast, in The Walking Dead, the characters learn to be skeptical about any orders they receive from people in authority, and they refuse to accept their fate passively. Their first impulse is to fend for themselves and to practice the venerable art of self-defense. As for central planning, Season One reveals that “the government’s plan to herd everyone into the cities was a failure. All it did was provide food for the undead, turning everyone within the city into these creatures.”[15] The government’s first impulse is always to centralize things, to bring everyone under its control and come up with a single master plan to solve the problem. At first glance, this would seem to be the only way to handle a large-scale disaster. As in Zombie Pandemic, a government institution, in this case the CDC, gathers together all the data on the zombie outbreak and scientifically analyzes it in order to come up with the right vaccine. Then the population will be brought together to be inoculated. Only a response centralized at all levels and at all stages seems capable of dealing with the crisis as a whole, and indeed the goal is to find a single, comprehensive solution to the total problem. This certainly sounds like the right idea, but this approach rests on a number of questionable assumptions—that a cure for the plague can be found and found quickly, that production and distribution delays will not prevent the vaccine from being properly administered on time, that the general population will follow the CDC’s instructions to the letter and present themselves in an orderly fashion for inoculation, and so on. If any of these assumptions proves to be incorrect, the centralized government approach could make matters much worse and run the risk of exposing the whole population much faster to the zombie virus, as indeed happens in the story The Walking Dead tells. Even the CDC’s own graphic novel culminates in disaster when the zombies break into the inoculation center. In a strangely candid moment, the CDC admits that even the best of government plans may misfire when put to the test in the real world, with all its unpredictable and uncontrollable elements.[16] The government’s “all-or-nothing,” “one-size-fits-all” approach becomes a matter of “putting all your eggs in one basket.”[17] If the strategy fails, then all is lost and we are left with a complete disaster.
The Walking Dead suggests that dispersing people rather than concentrating them is the better way to respond to the zombie plague. When scattered into small groups, people are able to pursue a variety of survival strategies and find out which ones work, rather than pinning all their hopes on a single plan dictated by the government, which may fail catastrophically. To use a technical term, nomadic existence is antifragile—it makes people more resilient and capable of adapting better to changing conditions.[18] The decentralized response to the zombie plague at first glance might seem not to be a genuine response at all. This approach does not attempt to deal with the problem as a whole or to seek a total solution for it. But if there were a coherent theory behind what amounts to an improvised and instinctive response to the crisis, it might run something like this: “We do not know what caused this plague or what might cure it. All we can do is to survive as long as we can. Maybe the plague will run its course, or maybe a cure will be found some day. The main thing is to stay alive so that some remnant of humanity will be available to repopulate the Earth if it becomes feasible. We must each pursue our own survival strategies, alone or in small groups. The greater the variety of strategies we pursue, the more it is likely that at least some of us will survive. But if we adopt a single, uniform strategy, we risk losing everything.” This is the logic that underlies the decision our heroes and heroines in The Walking Dead make to take to their RVs, SUVs, motorbikes, and Dale’s camper and hit the road.[19] Over the seasons, The Walking Dead has developed a rhythm of episodes of nomadism alternating with episodes of attempted settlement.[20] The show thus follows a pattern familiar in human history. Whenever the characters settle down, they turn to farming to secure for themselves a reliable food supply, but as soon as they have any success, they become prey to roaming bands of predators. These “barbarians” (think of the Saviors) seize their produce and demand more, and they may also try to take over their settlement or destroy it. It says something about The Walking Dead that the attempts at settlement always fail and the characters are thrown back upon a nomadic existence to save their lives.[21]
FARMS, PRISONS, AND GATED COMMUNITIES
In Season Two of The Walking Dead, the characters find a refuge, but it is in an isolated farmhouse, presided over by a sort of Biblical patriarch. The answer seems to be to get as far away as possible from the modern world and all its complex interrelations and institutions. Cut off from interaction with the larger world and retreating into the narrow realm of the nuclear family, the survivors find a momentary peace and even a degree of safety. Given the primitive conditions under which they live, it is almost as if they have journeyed back in time, to the simpler and happier age of nineteenth-century America, when living on a self-contained farm was the typical way of life and an early incarnation of the American dream. As in Falling Skies, medicine becomes a marker of where The Walking Dead stands on the issue of modernity. The characters of course miss modern medicine and often have to go scavenging in cities for stores of drugs and other medical supplies. But when a boy in the group named Carl is shot, they look to the patriarch, Hershel, to save him. To their shock, Hershel turns out to be a veterinarian, not a board-certified surgeon. But as in Falling Skies, the fact that the old man genuinely cares about his patient and is willing to sit up with him all night by his bedside trumps his lack of medical expertise. Once again home medicine beats the big city hospital. In fact, we see in flashbacks that when the main hero, Sheriff’s Deputy Rick Grimes, wakes up from a coma, he finds himself in a hospital at its most hideous, portrayed as a prison-like containment facility for zombies, being slaughtered by military forces. In The Walking Dead, public health institutions seem to be devoted to imprisoning and annihilating their patients, not curing them. Far from being safe refuges, hospitals appear to be among the most dangerous places to be in The Walking Dead.[22]
Zombies eventually overrun the pastoral retreat at the end of Season Two of The Walking Dead, and in Season Three the band of survivors (much reduced) finds a new refuge—this time in a prison. An institution originally designed to keep criminals in turns into the best way to keep the zombies out. Season Three deals with various efforts to move beyond the nuclear family and restore order to society, but they are not portrayed in positive terms. At the end of Season Two, Grimes ominously proclaims: “This isn’t a democracy anymore” and the specter of autocracy haunts Season Three.[23] A prison is obviously not an attractive model of social order; it suggests that the overriding concern for security requires locking down everything and allowing no scope for freedom. Later in Season Three, we encounter an alternate model of order, the town of Woodbury, presided over by a character named simply the Governor, the epitome of a smooth-talking Southern politician. At first Woodbury seems nice enough, indeed the very model of small-town America. With its Southern atmosphere—barbecues on holidays—Woodbury comes across as a re-creation of Andy Griffith’s Mayberry. In the third episode of Season Three, the Governor says with some pride: “People here have homes, medical care, kids go to school. . . . And people here have jobs. It’s a sense of purpose. We have community.” It sounds as if government institutions have been reconstituted to good effect, and people are recapturing the old American dream. But we soon discover that Woodbury is a gated community in the bad sense of the term, basically just a prison with a Main Street, U.S.A. facade. The armed guards posted to keep the zombies out are also tasked with keeping Woodbury’s citizens in, thus maintaining their subjugation to the Governor’s arbitrary commands. Once again the price of security is freedom, and the more we learn about the Governor, the more he appears to be a tyrant and a crazed one at that. His obsession with imposing his plans on everybody leads him to kill almost all the people in the town when they fail to carry out his orders to attack Grimes and his associates in the prison. It is the planned community of Woodbury that turns out to be the real prison in Season Three of The Walking Dead—and another death trap. The character of the Governor reflects the skepticism about governments in The Walking Dead—in the name of protecting their citizens, they have a nasty habit of annihilating them.
“Challenging the conventional wisdom that government central planning is the only way to deal with a crisis the show suggests that, in the face of disaster, even on a massive scale, individual initiative and self-reliance offer the best chance of survival.”
All attempts to turn to institutions to solve problems in The Walking Dead seem to fail. The show suggests that its characters must ultimately rely on themselves and their own resources. Challenging the conventional wisdom that government central planning is the only way to deal with a crisis, the show suggests that, in the face of disaster, even on a massive scale, individual initiative and self-reliance offer the best chance of survival. Our heroes and heroines figure out how best to protect themselves, often improvising solutions, and they become urban explorers, foraging for what they need in abandoned buildings. Their local knowledge stands them in good stead. A young pizza delivery boy named Glenn, who had no status whatsoever in the pre-apocalypse world, becomes the man of the hour. His knowledge of the streets of Atlanta makes him a hero when he skillfully navigates urban environments during re-supply missions. In various flashbacks, we learn that, prior to the zombie plague, many of the characters seemed inadequate and unable to take care of themselves. They had all sorts of problems in their relationships. The husbands and wives were generally unhappy in their marriages, with soap opera consequences.[24] Again as in Falling Skies, a disaster in material terms proves to have some good results in emotional terms. Under the pressure of the zombie threat, family bonds grow tighter and people learn who their real friends are. On one level, the zombies represent the absence of true humanity, a mass of beings who are brain dead. They go through the mere motions of living, but their existence is completely meaningless. By contrast, life has become meaningful for the surviving human beings.
As shown in several episodes, the characters have had to make conscious choices to go on living, and thereby they recover a strong sense of purpose in their struggle for survival. Andrew Lincoln, the actor who plays Rick Grimes, commented on his upcoming struggle in Season Eight with his archenemy Negan: “Crazy as it sounds, war means hope. Everyone may end up dead, but there’s something wonderful and empowering about taking matters into our own hands.”[25] With a revitalized sense of purpose, the characters rediscover their sense of community and band together in small units to fight for their survival. As often happens with natural disasters, the zombie apocalypse proves to be the catalyst for ordinary people to become heroes. As Executive Producer David Alpert said of the role of catastrophe: “Sometimes it brings out the best in people. When people sort of rally together and support each other and come to each other’s aid.”[26] Again and again, The Walking Dead pays tribute to the ability of Americans to work together to deal with the challenges facing them. In his Democracy in America, the great French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville argued that what distinguishes Americans from their Old World forbears is their ability to form associations among themselves that can solve problems in the absence of government intervention. The way the characters in The Walking Dead keep forming and reforming alliances against the zombies and their human enemies makes the show deeply Tocquevillian in spirit.[27]
CLINGING TO THEIR GUNS
Given the survivalist ethic in all of these end-of-the-world shows, they are probably not popular with gun control advocates. One of the most striking motifs they have in common—evident in Revolution, Falling Skies, The Walking Dead, and many other such shows—is the loving care with which they depict an astonishing array of weaponry. The Walking Dead features an Amazon warrior named Michonne, who is adept with a samurai sword, as well as a southern redneck named Daryl Dixon, who specializes in a cross-bow. The dwindling supply of ammunition puts a premium on weapons that do not require bullets.[28] That is not to say, however, that The Walking Dead has no place for modern firearms and indeed the very latest in automatic weapons.[29] Both the heroes and the villains in the series—difficult to tell apart in this respect—are as well-armed as the typical municipal SWAT team in contemporary America. The heavy armament in these series goes hand-in-hand with the militia spirit they embody. In the absence of municipal or state police, as well as the U.S. military, the characters have to protect themselves and need weapons to do so. They band together to secure and patrol their own territories, and whatever order they achieve must be self-imposed.
To some of the characters, clinging to their memories of pre-apocalyptic peaceful times, guns are an unfortunate and last resort. But it is more characteristic of these shows to celebrate the role of guns in the survivors’ lives. Being able to use a weapon is the chief marker of status in The Walking Dead. At first the need to go armed restores the men to positions of unchallenged leadership, overcoming feminist tendencies in the pre-apocalyptic world (suggested in several flashbacks). In a throwback in human evolution, the men again become the hunter-gatherers, while the women return to household chores.[30] But the gun is actually a great equalizer, and is particularly effective in overcoming women’s usual disadvantage in physical strength vis-à-vis men. A character named Andrea starts off as a stereotypically weak, dependent woman, but once she learns to shoot—more specifically to kill zombies—she is completely transformed into a powerful figure, who can take command in difficult situations, even over aggressive males (the same process takes place with several women in the series, including Carol and Maggie). Andrea is emblematic of the overall tendency of The Walking Dead to show ordinary people moving from situations of dependence (relying on other people and institutions to save them) to genuine independence (relying only on themselves and each other).
This tendency applies even to children in The Walking Dead (as it also does in Falling Skies). The young boy Carl wants nothing more than to learn how to shoot a gun, and, although his mother and father are at first hesitant, they allow a family friend to initiate the young boy into the company of trained marksmen. Carl graduates from shooting zombies to taking out fellow human beings, and, in one of the more shocking developments in a series that thrives on shock value, the youngster eventually reaches an elite plateau of cold-bloodedness when he shoots his own mother, rather than let her turn into a zombie. Carl is the ultimate example of how the characters in The Walking Dead must toughen up or fall by the wayside.
HOME ON THE FIRING RANGE
Carl’s father is Rick Grimes and earlier in the series he gives the boy his lawman’s hat. In the February 17, 2013 episode of The Talking Dead, a fan discussion show that follows the weekly broadcasts of The Walking Dead on AMC, actor-director Kevin Smith cleverly referred to Carl as “Wyatt Twerp.” Smith’s evocation of a classic Western hero is right on the mark. Beneath all the horror-story gore in The Walking Dead beats the heart of a good old-fashioned Western.[31] The show transposes the Wild West to a contemporary setting, reviving the spirit of rugged individualism that Westerns promoted as an antidote to the overly comfortable version of the American dream in the middle of the twentieth century. By stripping away all the institutions that constitute modern civilization, The Walking Dead gives us what the Western used to provide in American pop culture—an image of frontier existence, of living on the edge, of seeing what it is like to manage without a settled government, of facing the challenge of protecting oneself and one’s family on one’s own, of learning the meaning of independence and self-reliance.
The zombies play the stereotypical role traditionally assigned to Indians in Westerns—the barbarian hordes lurking on the borders of the civilized community and threatening to annihilate it. Just like the Indians in many Westerns, the zombies are nameless and virtually faceless, they never speak, and they may be killed indiscriminately. The odyssey of the characters in The Walking Dead through the shattered landscape of Georgia and beyond resembles the wagon trains of Westerns, navigating through one danger after another, fighting or negotiating with rival groups, troubled by dwindling supplies, searching in vain for refuge in military outposts that turn out to have been overrun and abandoned, slowed down by stragglers and delayed by searches for lost comrades, torn by disputes over their destination and other challenges to their leaders, dealing with childbirth or other medical emergencies on the fly—the list of parallels goes on and on. As for the vicious assortment of robbers, rapists, and murderers who repeatedly assail our heroes and heroines in The Walking Dead, they correspond to the bad guys who populate Westerns. People have been lamenting the closing of the frontier throughout American history. Zombie tales and other apocalyptic scenarios turn out to be a way of imaginatively reopening the frontier in twenty-first century popular culture.[32]
In the end, then, all these apocalyptic shows are re-creations of that most basic of American genres, the Western. The “Westernization” of end-of-the-world narratives is made clear by their use of the central symbol of the genre: the horse. In an iconic moment—arguably the money shot of the whole series—Sheriff’s Deputy Rick Grimes rides into plague-ravaged Atlanta alone on a horse.[33] More generally, horses become a frequent mode of transportation in The Walking Dead, as well as in other apocalyptic series, such as Revolution. As professional survivalists have pointed out, this makes no sense. In a post-apocalyptic world, in the absence of readily available and gassed-up automobiles, the logical mode of transportation becomes the bicycle. Horses represent a net loss in a post-apocalyptic economy with its severely reduced food supplies. Horses have to be fed, thus diverting resources from human consumption, and they could become food themselves for their hungry owners (this is something that the otherwise dumb zombies quickly realize—unlike humans, they eat horses, rather than trying to ride them). There is no economic logic to the continued use of horses in the world of The Walking Dead, but of course it has a powerful symbolic value as a sign that the characters have returned to a pre-modern and frontier existence, which is to say a Western one. A character in Falling Skies says of the post-apocalyptic environment: “It’s the Wild West out there.” The 2011 film Cowboys and Aliens explicitly unites the Western and the alien invasion narrative. Once we realize that contemporary end-of-the-world scenarios share with Westerns the goal of imaginatively returning their characters to the state of nature, we can see how the American nightmare can turn into the American dream when rampaging aliens or zombies descend upon a quiet American suburb. The dream of material prosperity and security is shattered, but a different ideal comes back to life—the all-American ideal of rugged individualism--the spirit of freedom, independence, and self-reliance.[34]
THE REHABILITATION OF THE REDNECK
The “Western” character of these end-of-the-world narratives is reflected in the fact that the apocalypse generally returns people to a rural setting, or at least uproots them from the urban setting in which they grew up. The popularity of the Western in mid-twentieth-century popular culture was a reaction to the increasing urbanization of America during this period. In the nineteenth century, the family farm had been at the center of the American dream, and twentieth-century Westerns drew their power from nostalgia, from an urge to go back vicariously to an earlier and simpler time, when American life was based on frontier values. In the twentieth century, much of popular culture, including gangster movies and crime dramas, embodied rural suspicions about the new urban way of life. When the Western exhausted itself as a genre—if for no other reason than overproduction—popular culture turned to variants of it—the zombie narrative, for example, as we have seen in the case of The Walking Dead. The series champions rural values over urban values. It suggests that life is healthier, safer, and just better all-around when people are living dispersed, and human existence is at its worst when people are crammed together in big cities.[35] The main characters are constantly tempted to aggregate into larger groupings, but every community they are drawn to turns out to be a hellish trap. In Season Four they seek salvation at a place called “Terminus,” but when they finally arrive there, they discover that they have been lured by the promise of safety into a community of cannibals, and they are on the menu. Later the main characters encounter a group who call themselves the Saviors, led by a deranged tyrant named Negan. In their efforts to restore normalcy, the Saviors have re-instituted industrialization, putting enslaved people to work in a factory. In The Walking Dead, every step away from isolated rural life to congregated urban life is presented as a disaster. Evil appears to dwell in the city and good flourishes only in the country.
It is no accident, then, that one of the most popular characters in The Walking Dead is the redneck Daryl—he of the crossbow and the motorbike. The Walking Dead is the anti-Deliverance. For decades the rural South has been the butt of Hollywood jokes or the site of its most gruesome horror stories. It was not always that way. For roughly the first half of the twentieth century, Hollywood had catered to Middle America, and in particular had romanticized the rural South (think: Gone With the Wind or Disney’s Song of the South). Movies and then television shows celebrated the small-town and its middle-class virtues, while often picturing cities as riddled with crime and corruption. A TV show like Mayberry RFD presented Southerners as the best neighbors in the world. The sitcom Beverly Hillbillies dealt with hicks from the South moving to the heart of the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, and they were portrayed as moral innocents at the mercy of city slickers, although the country people, with their folk wisdom, tended to outwit the urban sophisticates who tried to take advantage of them.
This positive view of the rural South in popular culture began to change, in some cases as early as the 1940s and 50s, as a result of many developments, chief among them the Civil Rights movement. The South began to be viewed as the most backward and unenlightened region of the United States, the home of ignorance, racial prejudice, religious bigotry, and superstition. In popular culture, the lynch mob became a potent image of the South.[36] If Southerners were not taken seriously as the greatest threat to the civil rights of minorities and generally presented as living in the Dark Ages, they were ridiculed as country bumpkins, incapable of dealing with the complexities of modern life. Even as ethnic stereotypes in humor were being proscribed as politically incorrect, redneck jokes began to flourish, as witness Jeff Foxworthy and his “You Might Be a Redneck If” routines. Deliverance was only the most powerful exemplar of Hollywood’s dark vision of the rural South. Four men from Atlanta leave the safety of the city and civilization, and enter the world of dueling banjos, only to find that they have undertaken a nightmarish journey into the heart of darkness, Georgia-style. By contrast, in The Walking Dead, the heart of darkness is in Atlanta, and the shining light is Hershel’s farm in the remote Georgia countryside.
The Walking Dead is thus part of a reaction to an earlier reaction against the South, and might be viewed as an attempt to restore balance to the portrayal of the rural South—and rural America in general—in popular culture. To be sure, Daryl’s brother Merle looks as if he had just stepped out of Deliverance. He is Daryl’s evil twin—violent, cruel, vicious, and bigoted. But Merle is generally the odd-man-out among the cast of The Walking Dead, and even he earns some sympathy eventually and redeems himself at the time of his death. The show participates in a general rehabilitation of the redneck in American popular culture. This development has been evident in perhaps the oddest corner of popular culture, Reality TV. In this category, one show after another has centered on a rural subculture: Duck Dynasty, Mountain Men, Swamp People, Ax Men, Ice Road Truckers, Gold Rush, and my favorite in terms of title, Gods, Guns, and Automobiles (the redneck’s holy trinity).[37] These programs dramatize ways of life quite foreign to the urban sophisticates who generally create movies and TV shows. They celebrate such politically incorrect virtues as manliness, marksmanship, and the ability to fix a car engine with one’s bare hands.
These shows may well have been developed by urban sophisticates to make fun of the rural subcultures (“Look how ridiculous these rubes are!”), but their surprising success with audiences and their endless proliferation indicates something quite different. Americans evidently like what they see on these shows, responding favorably to contemporary versions of the old frontier virtues traditionally chronicled in Westerns. Reality TV offers viewers a dramatic alternative to the comfortable but boring lives they lead in middle-class America. Pent up in their office cubicles, leading a 9-to-5 existence, people enjoy watching Americans in remote and exotic places like the Louisiana bayou or the Bering Strait. These intrepid characters confront nature in all its wildness, battling the elements, as well as alligators or grizzly bears. When your biggest challenge is combatting a computer virus, watching someone dealing with something a little more elemental provides a vicarious thrill. These shows generally portray the very opposite of urban sophisticates—people down on their luck, often trying to eke out a bare living, armed only with traditional family values and religious beliefs (and perhaps a couple of guns). The heroes and heroines are often rugged individualists, proving that they can be self-reliant and live off the grid, doing without the sophisticated technologies that have come to seem necessary in the modern world. The technology that does appear in these shows seems positively archaic by contemporary standards: chain saws, drill bits, fishing nets, backhoes, and tractor trailers. This is technology that requires more brawn than brains to operate it. One reason we secretly admire the characters on these shows is that they can make real machines work and most of us could not. In any kind of apocalyptic scenario, most human beings would be at a loss to keep all the machines on which their lives ultimately depend in working order. On both Reality TV shows and programs like The Walking Dead, urban sophisticates see their world turned upside down—the working-class types they normally disdain becomes objects of awe for their competence in the material world.[38] There is something almost archaeological about these programs, as if they were offering fleeting glimpses of corners of the old America that are fast vanishing in the wake of modernity. In the terms of a popular book, these reality shows are all forms of Hillbilly Elegy.[39] So is The Walking Dead.
RED STATES VERSUS BLUE STATES
This group of reality shows, together with all the apocalyptic narratives, embody important political trends in contemporary America as well. They reflect the great political divide that has opened up in America, encapsulated in such terms as “Red States versus Blue States” or “Flyover America versus Coastal America.” From their command posts in New York and Los Angeles, urban elites have been in charge of the entertainment industry for many decades. A show such as The Walking Dead represents a pushback against the entertainment establishment, even if it had to be produced by elements within that establishment.[40] Television needs to appeal to a mass audience, and evidently there is still a market in Middle America for a show that celebrates Middle American values, especially independence rather than dependence on government. We have seen that people began to lose faith in the American dream when they came to lose faith in the elites who were supposed to guide them to the fulfillment of that dream. The Walking Dead is deeply suspicious of elites, of anyone who claims the right to rule over the mass of ordinary people, whether it be scientists at the CDC or would-be autocratic politicians such as the Governor or Negan.
In Season Five, The Walking Dead found an effective way to dramatize the conflict between the elites and the masses in contemporary America. Having escaped Terminus, and still looking to the federal government to solve their problems, our heroes and heroines set their sights on Washington, D.C., in the belief that surely their wise rulers must by now have found a cure for the zombie plague.[41] Just as they get a glimpse of the Washington Monument and the Capitol Building, the band is sidetracked into another possible safe haven--Alexandria, Virginia. They are invited into a literally gated community in this D.C. suburb, and they join it in the hope of being protected from the zombie-infected countryside around them. Re-named the Alexandria Safe-Zone, this suburban town is the perfect Blue State community—it has gun control, a gay couple, solar power, and no capital punishment. When the zombie apocalypse broke out, the army directed a group of federal government insiders to safety in this suburban redoubt. Alexandria offers a powerful image of the isolation of the D.C. elite, the way these government functionaries are insulated from the problems affecting the heartland of the country. They live in a world of privilege, far beyond the means of the average citizen—homes in this planned community were advertised as “starting in the low $800,000s.” Shielded from the threats the average American faces, the Washington elite is able to continue to live their lives the way they did before the apocalypse. While ordinary Americans are out battling zombies just to stay alive, these members of the elite still hold cocktail parties, where they serve white wine and exchange gourmet recipes. When one of our heroines goes out to hunt wild boar, one of the Alexandrians asks her if she can have a leg from which to make prosciutto.
Alexandria is presided over by a woman named Deanna Monroe, who is very different from the autocratic types who rule elsewhere, such as the Governor or Negan. At least she is a democratically elected official, a Congressperson, she explains, from the 15th District in Ohio. Although it is never specified, she seems to be an Obama Democrat. When she interviews our band of survivors, she films the proceedings, reassuring them “We’re about transparency here” and thus echoing President Obama’s promise to run the most transparent administration in history.[42] Like Obama’s one-time Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, Deanna is not one to let a crisis go to waste. She sees the zombie apocalypse as an opportunity to initiate her plans for the future. She describes Alexandria as environmentally friendly: “This is the start of sustainability.” The town is now operating on a solar grid and it has instituted ecobase sewage filtration. When Rick remarks on the fact that Deanna has given jobs to everyone in his group, she shows her true colors by laughing and saying: “It looks like the Communists won after all.” Alexandria is very progressive. Looking beyond the zombie apocalypse, Deanna has a vision of the future. She is sure that “there’s going to be a government here one day” and she adds: “I see a vibrant community here” with “industry, commerce, civilization.” Undoubtedly, she intends to regulate all three.
Naturally Deanna has instituted a strict gun control policy within the borders of Alexandria. As repeatedly happens with our heroes and heroines, the first thing they have to do when they enter this new community is to turn over their guns, the very weapons that have so often saved their lives in the world of the zombie apocalypse. Deanna reassures them: “They’re still your guns,” and adds: “We store them for safety,” but how can Rick and the crew be sure of that? Soon even the warrior Michonne is hanging up her trusty samurai sword on the wall above her fireplace as an ornament. Our band of survivors is nervous about giving up their weapons, and they worry that their new comfortable surroundings will make them grow soft. The intrepid Carol, one of the toughest of the survivors, expresses her fear: “If we get comfortable here, let our guard down, this place is gonna make us weak.” But despite these reservations, our survivors are seduced by the material benefits of modern civilization. As Rick Grimes says: “Electricity, showers, haircuts: I never thought I’d see those again.” He recalls the days when he and his wife used to drive through upscale neighborhoods like Alexandria and dream that one day they might live in such opulence. Enchanted again by the American dream of suburban life, our heroes and heroines are willing to trade their independence and self-reliance—represented by their guns—for tract houses with all the latest appliances in a gated community. They have been living in the Wild West and now they are settling down in a community where the children name a horse “Buttons.”
The Alexandria sequence portrays what amounts to the culture clash between Red State and Blue State America. Having lived through a Hobbesian war of all against all in the outside world, our survivors have a hard time adjusting to a peaceful life within the D.C. Beltway. Alexandria is a marvelous image for what has been called the Beltway Bubble, the cocoon within which the Washington elite lives in isolation from the troubles with which most ordinary Americans have to deal. The actress who plays Deanna, (Tovah Feldshuh), captures perfectly the smugness, self-righteousness, and “holier-than-thou” attitude of elitist politicians in D.C. Despite her liberal convictions, she is quick to shut down any opinions that dissent from her orthodoxy: “That sort of thinking doesn’t belong in here.” Our survivors have a hard time coping with their new conditions. Suffering from varying degrees of PTSD, they look bewildered when they have to make small talk at a standard Beltway cocktail party. It is as if they have wandered into a completely different world and in a way they have. They keep wondering which of the two worlds is the real one. Indeed, the Alexandria sequence suggests that Americans are now living in two different worlds, one for the elites, one for the masses.
The show sets up the greatest culture clash of all when redneck Daryl teams up with a gay couple named Aaron and Eric. Their encounter is presented evenhandedly and subtly. Gay couples are of course in theory accepted in liberal Alexandria, but Aaron tells Daryl: “Eric and I—we’re still looked at as outsiders.” Daryl may never have met an openly gay couple before, but he does not react the way a stereotypical redneck would. Instead, Aaron’s confession creates a bond between Daryl and his new neighbors. As a redneck, he is equally an outsider in the world of urban sophistication. He might as well be from an alien planet. When Daryl says: “I ride bikes,” Aaron replies: “I take it you don’t mean 10-speeds.” Here is the culture clash in miniature: Daryl would be a fan of Motocross; Aaron and Eric would follow the Tour de France. Finally, Aaron invites Daryl to dinner. In the most awkward and yet poignant moment in the sequence, Aaron and Eric look on with amused condescension as Daryl slurps up the spaghetti and wipes his mouth on his sleeve. This is a complex moment. We share the mild contempt these urban sophisticates cannot help feeling for the uncouth Daryl, who for once shows up, even to us viewers, as a stereotypically crude redneck. But we must remember that it is tough men like Daryl who survive in this apocalyptic world, and it is tough men like Daryl who are needed to protect the civilized but helpless citizens of Alexandria.[43] Indeed, moments later, Aaron asks Daryl to assemble a motorbike from parts he has been collecting. Shades of reality TV—the urban sophisticate has no idea how the parts fit together and must rely on a redneck greasemonkey to do the job for him.
The Alexandrians may be politically progressive, but they are unable to protect themselves. Safe behind their walls, they have not had to come to terms with what the zombie apocalypse really means, and they are too quick to look beyond a dangerous situation that shows no signs of ending soon. They just do not know how cruel the outside world has become and what challenges they now face. As the gruff soldier, Sgt. Abraham Ford, tells the townspeople: “There’s a vast ocean of shit that you people don’t know shit about.” Even young Carl sees what is lacking in the Alexandrians and worries about joining the community; he tells his father: “They’re weak—and I don’t want us to get weak too.” Rick sees the advantages of settling in Alexandria, and is willing to make compromises to do so, but he has no illusions about the situation. He tells his followers: “If [the Alexandrians] can’t make it, then we’ll just take this place.” And in the Hobbesian world of The Walking Dead, that is just what happens. Rick gets into a vicious fight with the town doctor, Peter Anderson, because the doctor has been abusing his wife (with whom Rick has grown friendly). Deanna and the Alexandrians take the doctor’s side, partly because they need his services and partly because Rick is just too belligerent for them. Deanna’s husband, Reg, expresses the typical prejudice of city dwellers against the rural population—they are throwbacks to a violent past. Reacting to Rick, Reg rejects nomadism in the name of civilization: “The cavemen—they were all nomads and they all died; then we evolved into this and we lived. Civilization starts when we stop running—when we live together.” The Alexandrians in effect put Rick on trial and are on the verge of exiling him, when the doctor goes berserk, and in an attempt to get at Rick, kills Deanna’s husband instead.
Fortunately, Rick has violated the town’s gun control regulations and is armed and ready to deal with the murderous doctor. Abandoning her liberal principles, Deanna says simply: “Rick, do it,” and he executes Anderson on the spot. In the terms of the series, this is a cathartic moment. The D.C. elites have proven unable to keep the peace in their own community, and they must yield authority to the sheriff’s deputy from the back woods of Georgia. In the end, in The Walking Dead the spirit of the Wild West triumphs over the spirit of Beltway liberalism. The federal government elite cannot save the common citizen; the common citizen is needed to save the federal government elite. That may be the ultimate fantasy in the zombie apocalypse narrative, a fantasy of the empowerment of the ordinary citizen in a world long dominated—and poorly run—by a government elite. If you are wondering why a macabre series like The Walking Dead has become so popular, consider this possibility: the show managed to capture and express the frustration of the American people in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Wherever they look, the American people think they are seeing their world going to hell in a hand basket, and when they turn to their leaders for aid and comfort—their cultural, scientific, and above all their political leaders—they are met with deaf ears. The elites seem content to remain in their comfortable bubbles, enjoying their privileged lifestyle and congratulating themselves on their cultural superiority, while ordinary Americans have to deal with the genuine problems of the everyday world. The Walking Dead evidently strikes a responsive chord in its audience when it celebrates the resilience and self-reliance of ordinary Americans, who are not turning to anyone else to solve their problems, but instead taking their destiny into their own hands.
The way that American popular culture has increasingly turned to nightmarish end-of-the-world scenarios seems at first truly odd, especially the persistent fantasy of the disappearance of the federal government. One might have thought that the Civil War had settled the issue of secession once and for all in the United States. It is, then, very strange that the dissolution of the nation-state into smaller units has become a common nightmare/dream scenario in American popular culture. Several years before secession emerged as a serious issue in states like California, it surfaced in popular culture. In Revolution, for example, post-apocalyptic America is divided into rival republics, and the series culminates in the ultimate battle between the Red States and the Blue States, as the Republic of Texas manages to defeat the Republic of California. Another variant of this motif was provided by the short-lived TV series Last Resort, in which an American navy submarine in effect secedes from the United States when it disobeys suspicious orders from Washington.[44] With its full complement of nuclear weapons, the sub possesses one of the chief components of national sovereignty these days and indeed uses its armament to maintain its independence in the face of all the forces arrayed against it (finally succumbing only to the ultimate power in the television universe—network cancellation). Perhaps it now takes the likes of rogue nuclear subs, inhuman aliens, and implacable zombies to shake us out of our complacency and suggest that we may have been sacrificing fundamental American values in our quest for material goods and security. In our rush to achieve these goals, we may have surrendered our freedom to the shackles of a web of institutions, the prison-house of the administered world. The Walking Dead, Falling Skies, and other apocalyptic narratives may be warning us against a graver danger than mere zombies and alien invaders.
[1] These words appear on the back cover of the graphic novel on which the TV series is based—The Walking Dead: Compendium One (Berkeley, CA: Image Comics, 2015).
[2] For discussions of this period, see Lawrence R. Samuel, The American Dream: A Cultural History (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2012), 42-71 and Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (NY: Oxford University Press, 2003), 133-57.
[3] On the importance of Whyte’s book, see Cullen, American Dream, 153. As Cullen notes, David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd was also important for the way it criticized conformism in America.
[4] See Samuel, American Dream, 61 for the way “the dark side of the American dream” began to surface in popular culture as early as the 1950s.
[5] Among such busy overachievers are the people who work in the entertainment industry itself. These apocalyptic fantasies, in which professionals are in effect re-united with their families, may reflect the guilt feelings of a Hollywood community in which the broken family is the norm rather than the exception.
[6] Revolution rests on the same parallel. Co-executive producer Jon Favreau says in an interview: “We call the show Revolution because it harkens back to a time when we were colonists under an oppressive monarchy. It’s about a new kind of revolutionary war, where the people must rise up and build a nation all over again” (TV Guide, September 17-23, 2012: 33).
[7] Robert Kirkman (the creator of the graphic novel series) has revealed that he originally conceived of the story as an alien invasion narrative: “The whole story was hinging upon a later reveal that it was aliens that caused the zombies and that this was part of a massive alien takeover” (quoted in Paul Ruditis, The Walking Dead Chronicles: The Official Companion Book [New York: Abrams, 2011], 16). For the record, I have read a good deal of the graphic novel series, but my analysis in this chapter is based almost entirely on the TV series. The show’s creators have deliberately chosen not to follow the exact plot line of the graphic novels, in order to maintain suspense and keep their options open.
[8] On zombies and globalization, see Daniel W. Drenzer, Theory of International Politics and Zombies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), especially 15.
[9] In American popular culture, zombies originally functioned as a symbol of slavery. Zombie films were typically set in the American South or the Caribbean, and the zombies were generally black; often some kind of plantation owner commanded them. A good example is Val Lewton’s 1943 I Walked with a Zombie. In films like this, the chief feature of zombies is their subjugation to the will of a master. This background lends plausibility to the idea that, in contemporary pop culture, zombies may symbolize slavery to modern institutions. George Romero’s pioneering zombie films have been interpreted as portraying the slavery of the American people to their consumerist fantasies. In his second zombie film, Dawn of the Dead (1978), the zombies are irresistibly drawn to a suburban shopping mall. See Camilla Fojas, Zombies, Migrants, and Queers: Race and Crisis Capitalism in Pop Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017), 68. Fojas develops an interpretation of the significance of zombies in American popular culture, including in The Walking Dead, that offers an alternative to the view developed in this chapter.
[10] See ibid., 68-69.
[11] On the use of the CDC in The Walking Dead, see Ruditis, Walking Dead Chronicles, 173-74. On the look of the CDC interiors in the show, Production Designer Alex Hajdu had this to say: “When I read the script it felt very Cold War to me, in a Kubrick kind of way. . . . Of course the image of the war room in Dr. Strangelove came to mind. I felt nothing better illustrated the futility of a powerful government institution faced with an unresolvable dilemma than that symbolic reference” (Chronicles, 174). Anyone who still thinks that American television shows are produced by people who have no idea what they are doing should ponder Hadju’s comments. He is clearly thinking in political terms, and he is drawing upon cinematic tradition in the process. And he is only the Production Designer! Yet even he is consciously making a “symbolic film reference.” As I have often argued, the people who create the best of American television are a good deal more sophisticated than most academics think.
[12] See www.cdc.gov/phpr/zombies . For further commentary on the CDC web site, see a series of three articles I wrote: 1)”Zombie Apocalypse in a ‘DC’ Comic,” http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/09/paul-cantor/zombie-apocalypse/ 2)”The Walking Dead and a Refuge From the Modern State,” http:/www.lewrockwell.com/2013/09/paul-cantor/the-walking-dead-2/ 3)”The Economics of Apocalypse: A Tale of Two CDC’s,” http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/10/paul-cantor/the-economics-of-apocalypse/
[13] In Maureen Dowd’s column on the movie World War Z, “A Zombie Scare With a Zombie Chaser” (New York Times, June 22, 2013), she quotes Dr. Ali S. Khan, director of the CDC Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response, saying with regard to Zombie Pandemic: “You may laugh now, but when it happens you’ll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you’ll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency.”
[14] World War Z is a libel on the competence of the human species. The film consists of one scene of mass panic after another. Women in particular are repeatedly shown to be utterly incapable of dealing with a crisis (unless they are in the Israeli army). The film’s central symbol for humanity is a pair of frightened little girls who cannot be left alone for a minute without tears and screams coming on (the film takes the notion of “helicopter parents” literally). In World War Z, the military is shown to be the only source of order among human beings. The UN’s navy is at the center of coordinating humanity’s response to the zombie outbreak, which tells us something about the film, because the UN does not have a navy. Evidently the creators of the film have never met an authoritarian regime they do not like. North Korea comes in for special praise from a rogue CIA agent for their approach to the zombie plague: “They pulled the teeth of all 23 million in less than 24 hours—the greatest feat of social engineering in history. Brilliant—no teeth, no bite, no great spread.” Social engineering by governments, the more totalitarian the better, is the film’s answer to all human problems. Rather than the CDC, it is the WHO that miraculously comes up with a countermeasure against the zombies in World War Z. On the film, see Fojas, Zombies, Migrants, and Queers, 73-77; John Podhoretz, “Zombies in the Mineshaft,” The Weekly Standard, July 8/July 15, 2013: 47; and Ryan McMaken, “Horror Film as Neocon Fantasy,” http:lewrockwell.com/mcmaken/mcmaken158.html.
[15] Ruditis, Walking Dead Chronicles,11. The way the government herds people in cities into various forms of holding facilities or concentration camps is actually portrayed in Season One of the spinoff from The Walking Dead, Fear the Walking Dead.
[16] This discussion of fictional zombie plagues may seem purely academic, but such imaginary disasters do have genuine parallels in the real world. For example, critics of the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina have dwelled on the way the government’s insistence on concentrating people in centers such as the New Orleans Superdome made matters worse, while spontaneous and improvised solutions offered by ordinary citizens and local volunteer organizations succeeded in saving lives and improving conditions. On this subject, see my book The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012), 423-24, note 33 as well as Neille Ilel, “A Healthy Dose of Anarchy,” Reason 38, no. 7 (December 2006): 48-56 and Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York: Penguin, 2010), 231-304. As these studies show, the government approach to disaster relies on a top-down model of order, a generalized and therefore abstract view of the problem that often turns out to be blind to local needs and concerns. As we will see, The Walking Dead portrays individual people dealing with their immediate, personal problems in concrete circumstances with which they are intimately familiar—a bottom-up response that may well be better adapted to survival in a catastrophic situation.
[17] Executive Producer Gale Anne Hurd comments on the danger that looms “whenever you put all your eggs in one basket—especially when it’s the fate of humanity” (TV Guide, Dec. 8-21, 2014: 18).
[18] See Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder (New York: Random House, 2012).
[19] Mobility has always been a vital component of the American dream. Consider the importance in Breaking Bad of the RV in which Walt and Jesse initially cook their meth. Albert Brooks’s film Lost in America offers a hilarious send-up of the mobile home version of the American dream.
[20] The same pattern develops in what amounts to the first “zombie” novel, Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), one of the earliest “walking dead” narratives (in fact it is an account of the great London plague of 1665). Defoe contrasts the government’s plan to fix the population of London in place through quarantines monitored by an elaborate system of panoptical surveillance, with the hastily improvised schemes of ordinary citizens to evade the municipal lockdown by fleeing the city and dispersing into the countryside. It is not clear which approach Defoe endorses; he shows the advantages and disadvantages of both. In particular, he repeatedly praises municipal officials in London for their draconian efforts to contain the plague by turning the city effectively into a gigantic prison, while at the same time pointing out how often this policy backfired; as in The Walking Dead concentrating the population in the city only spread the plague faster and made matters worse. At other points in the book, Defoe shows that escaping the city to the countryside was the most effective survival strategy, even at the risk of spreading the plague further.
[21] A helpful framework for thinking about The Walking Dead is provided by the brilliant work of political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott. Challenging the generally unexamined assumption that living in states is the norm for human existence, Scott has shown in a series of remarkable books that humanity has typically alternated between nomadism and settlement, between barbarism and civilization, just as the characters in The Walking Dead do. Human beings are attracted to large settlements by the security they provide and their abundance of food. But these settlements are governed autocratically, and eventually, if not immediately, they oppress their subjects, burdening them with ruinous taxes, backbreaking work requirements, and regimented lifestyles, thereby denying them the freedom and independence of nomadic existence. When the burden of the state’s demands—such as slaving away on useless projects like building pyramids—becomes too great, the oppressed people just pick up and leave, heading back for the hills or slipping back into the jungle whence they originally came. Historians are traditionally mystified by the sudden collapse of pyramid-building civilizations. Scott makes us wonder how they ever survived as long as they did when they made such brutal and insane demands upon their citizens. As Scott documents, for most of human history—before the comparatively recent emergence of the modern nation-state with its sophisticated means of bureaucratic surveillance and control—the situation that so-called civilized people stigmatize as “barbarism” was a genuine and perennially attractive alternative for human beings. The narrative rhythm of settlement and flight in The Walking Dead reflects Scott’s understanding of the human condition. In analyzing strategies for evading and escaping oppressive state control, Scott comes up with the concept of “shatter zones”—interstices between state spaces that occupy the permeable boundary line between civilization and barbarism. Scott’s concept of “shatter zones” is an apt way of characterizing the territory The Walking Dead explores. Among Scott’s books, see especially The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchistic History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009) and Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). Without intending to, these books read like a commentary on the world of The Walking Dead.
[22] In Season Five, Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta becomes another potential death trap for our heroes and heroines.
[23] In the fifteenth episode of Season Three, Grimes repudiates his repudiation of democracy and claims to be re-establishing majority rule in the band of survivors. All quotations from television shows in this chapter have been transcribed from the DVD versions.
[24] Robert Kirkman has actually said of the entire TV series: “The Walking Dead is a soap opera” and “I’m really just doing a soap opera about survival” (Ruditis, Walking Dead Chronicles, 10, 23).
[25] TV Guide, Oct. 16-29, 2017: 20. See Michael J. Totten, “The Walking Dead in an Age of Anxiety: Why we’re obsessed with zombies,” City Journal, Autumn 2015, 3: “The last people on earth can reinvent themselves into something better, or more powerful. Glenn, a pizza-delivery driver before the zombie plague, becomes, postapocalypse, a vital strategist and skillful navigator of deadly terrain. Philip Blake was an office drone in the old, normal world; in the dark new world, he’s the Governor, the feared and charismatic ruler of Woodbury, a walled-off town of survivors. Carol was a cringing victim of domestic violence before the end of civilization; after, she chops her zombified husband’s body into pieces with an ax and transforms herself into a hardened, capable survivor.”
[26] Ruditis, Walking Dead Chronicles, 24.
[27] See Jack Cashill, “Alexis de Tocqueville and the Walking Dead,” American Thinker, December 26, 2013.
[28] Revolution adds an interesting twist—its characters are forced to resort to swords and bows-and-arrows because the reconstituted government forces have outlawed firearms among the general populace. Revolution presents gun control in a sinister light, as does another series, Under the Dome. Given the Hollywood community’s seemingly universal support for gun control, it is surprising how many of the television shows it produces offer arguments against gun control.
[29] The CDC’s Zombie Pandemic contains instructions for putting together supplies for an emergency. It recommends “game and activities for children,” as well as a “manual can opener.” It says nothing about weapons. The characters in The Walking Dead do not make this mistake. Being more realistic, they load up on guns and ammunition whenever they have the opportunity.
[30] This development provokes some negative comments from the women in the third episode of Season One. One says: “I’m beginning to question the division of labor here.” This situation triggers nostalgia among the women for the work-saving devices in pre-apocalypse civilization: “Scrubbin’ on a washboard ain’t half as good as my old Maytag back home.” Another woman says: “I miss my coffee maker.” Modernity has some advocates in The Walking Dead, especially among the women. On women in the series, see Fojas, Zombies, Migrants, and Queers, 77.
[31] It occurred to me that the way Carl is torn in Season One between his real father (a good guy) and a substitute father (a bad guy) is reminiscent of the situation of the young boy in the classic Western Shane. Then it occurred to me that the substitute father in The Walking Dead is named Shane. The creators of the show were way ahead of me on this point.
[32] The creators of The Walking Dead are well aware of its connections to Westerns. Production Designer Alex Hajdu said of one of the Atlanta scenes: “It was like a Sergio Leone spaghetti Western, like Once Upon a Time in the West. You expected to see the silhouettes of bandits on the roof. The courtyard became like the street of an old western town where the showdown takes place” (Ruditis, Walking Dead Chronicles, 162). Director of Photography David Boyd compared the way The Walking Dead is shot to John Ford’s method in The Searchers (Ibid., 165).
[33] The symbolic value of this moment was not lost on the show’s Executive Producer, Gale Anne Hurd, who commented: “There is almost a western sensibility to it; that lone sheriff riding into town, riding into hostile territory” (Ruditis, Walking Dead Chronicles, 190).
[34] In a brief chapter, I have been able to discuss only a few examples of the patterns I am identifying in contemporary popular culture. In Invisible Hand in Popular Culture, I discuss Falling Skies at greater length (341-44) in a chapter devoted to alien invasion narratives, which includes analyses of The X-Files, Invasion, The Event, V, Fringe, and several other examples of the genre. I discuss the convergence of science fiction and the Western at a number of points in the book (see, for example, 87-90 and 342-44) and also the way that apocalyptic disasters propel characters back into the state of nature (see, for example, 144-45, and 423-424n33). I devote a chapter to showing how state-of-nature thinking can be applied to understanding Westerns in the case of Deadwood (97-127).
[35] On the way zombie narratives reflect anxieties about the increasingly urbanized nature of the modern world, see Totten, “Age of Anxiety,” 5
[36] On this development, see the chapter on “The Original Frontier” in Cantor, Invisible Hand, esp. 91-94, where I discuss the negative portrait of the South encrypted in the TV Western Have Gun--Will Travel.
[37] I am aware that Alaska, the site of several of these series, is not in the South; the point of all these shows, however, is that they offer alternatives to the conventional urban settings that now dominate American television. God, Guns, and Automobiles deals with a car dealership in the rural town of Butler, in Bates County, Missouri. The title of this show is probably a reference to a famous speech made by President Obama, which he gave in San Francisco on April 11, 2008, in which he said of people in small towns in the Midwest: “They cling to their guns, or religion” (for further discussion of this speech, see Cantor, Invisible Hand, 154, 392n42). For an excellent discussion of this group of Reality TV shows, see Victor Davis Hanson, “Good Ol’ Boy, Inc.” on National Review Online, December 31, 2013 (http://www.nationalreview.com/article/367231/good-ol-boy-inc-victor-davis-hanson; consulted 1/5/2014).
[38] Totten, “Age of Anxiety,” 5: “A mechanic fixes my car. I couldn’t raise enough food to sustain me, solve a serious engine problem, or get water to my house, except by bucket from a stream or river. Nor can I set broken bones, put out large house fires, or build a refrigerator to keep my produce from rotting. . . . Ironically, people who lived 200 years ago were better prepared to survive in a postapocalyptic environment, and, on some level, we all know it.”
[39] See J. D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis (New York: HarperCollins, 2016).
[40] The Walking Dead was not picked up as a series by any of the major networks, either broadcast or cable. Instead the series was developed by AMC, at the time known only for scheduling old movies (Ruditis, Walking Dead Chronicles, 46, 51). AMC became a major player precisely by developing shows that no other network at the time would touch, including Breaking Bad.
[41] Their trek to Washington is originally inspired by a character named Eugene, who claims to be a government scientist with a cure for the zombie plague—he just needs to get to D.C. to implement it. It is characteristic of the series that the man claiming to be a scientific expert turns out to be a complete fraud.
[42] To re-enforce this point, later (in Season Five, episode 16), Deanna says that she “would like to share something in the spirit of transparency.”
[43] Totten describes Daryl as “precisely the sort of man you’d want to cover your back” (4). The Alexandria sequence is an excellent example of how The Walking Dead TV series is much more complex and sophisticated than the graphic novel on which it is based. Almost all the telling details we have analyzed in this sequence—the transparency, the ecobase sewage filtration, the gourmet recipes, the white wine, the 10-speed bike—are not present in the graphic novel. There Alexandria is presided over by a male leader, Douglas Monroe, and although he is identified as the Democratic representative of the 2nd District of Ohio, he has none of the characteristics that make Deanna such a perfect emblem in the TV series of the D.C. elite. The only details about Alexandria the TV series takes from the graphic novel are the facts that it runs on a solar power grid, it practices gun control, and it contains a gay couple named Aaron and Eric. The entire theme of culture clash so richly developed in the TV series is absent from the graphic novel. The Alexandria sequence appears in Chapters Twelve and Thirteen in The Walking Dead: Compendium Two (Berkeley, CA: Image Comics, 2012). The corresponding moments in the TV series are roughly Season Five, episodes 11 through 16.
[44] For a brief but insightful article that brings together Revolution, Falling Skies, The Walking Dead, and Last Resort along the lines I have been discussing, see Alessandra Stanley, “A Future With Swords, Not iPhones,” New York Times, September 16, 2012. Stanley concludes: “Fighting back is a theme that has special resonance these days.”
Related Work
