The day I get fed up with zombies will be the day I become one, and I know I'm not alone. Sinatra's voice, the electoral college, random squads of flesh-munching post-humans with Heinz 57 facial makeovers—these are the indigenous relics we all know will endure until Alpha Centauri scientists get busy sorting out our idea of fun. We're in hock to Europe for vampires, werewolves, and Frankenstein's monster, but sorry, world: Shaun of the Dead or no Shaun of the Dead, we own this turf. Ravenous dorks in bloodstained Dockers and cheerleader togs are as American as Adam's-apple pie.
Partly because there's no way to make 'em elegant—sooner or later, even the most stylish director has to either show them chowing down or be accused of cheating—the planet's most democratic monsters never used to get much respect. The latest cycle of the zombie meme also got pretty cutesy for a while, from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to Woody Harrelson and the pre-Social Network Jesse Eisenberg bashing in pumpkin-head skulls for laughs in 2009's very funny, far from dumb Zombieland. But then AMC's The Walking Dead came along, and whammo: America's ultimate conspicuous consumers were back in all their foul, decaying glory. The reason zombies can't jump the shark is that they are the shark, baby. Now they've finally gotten the epic TV showcase they deserve.
Based on Robert Kirkman's graphic-novel series, The Walking Dead—whose six-episode debut season is due out on DVD March 8, and hosanna—stars Andrew Lincoln as small-town-Georgia sheriff's deputy Rick Grimes, who awakens from a Rip van Mayberry coma after a shoot-out with a random perp puts him in the hospital. That's when he discovers the world he once knew has turned into a gory-jawed John McCain look-alike contest overnight.
Since he doesn't want "I Ate the Sheriff" to end up getting played at his funeral, he sets out for a failed panacea: Atlanta, which turns out to be overrun with lurching ghoulies. Once he's gotten out of that one and located the rest of the cast, his next try is a CDC complex whose sole remaining factotum ends up making the joint go kablooey in a fit of suicidal despair.
What Rick doesn't know is that his wife, Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies), and former partner, Shane Walsh (Jon Bernthal), got into making each other's bacon sizzle back when they thought he was history. Naturally, along with Rick and Lori's son, they're both part of the ragtag Grimes-led caravan we last saw road-to-nowhere-ing it across a smoke-plumed wasteland in the season finale. And yep—as Huck Finn used to say, we've been here before. Does anything top that primal American fantasy of an improvised community on the move in search of an elusive promised land?
···
If you're still in any doubt that zombies graduated long ago from one-joke creeps to all-purpose metaphors, The Walking Dead will cure you in a jiffy. Vampire snobs can call the basic concept rudimentary all they like. A big plus for Team Living Dead is that, what with the poor personal hygiene and worse social skills, zombies are hard to get romantic about—preventing millions of teenage girls from ruining everything for the rest of us by fantasizing how dreamy it might be to date one. Never stop being thankful that the zombie equivalent of Twilight would be Dinnertime.
And to think we owe it all to what used to be called the best movie ever made in Pittsburgh. It's not like director George A. Romero made everything up from scratch in the original Night of the Living Dead. Revived corpses had already featured in all sorts of creepy tales, from voodoo myths to Russian literary titan Nikolai Gogol's scary 1835 story "Viy." But pretty amazingly, the basics of zombiedom as we know it today—the shambling walk, the appetite for human flesh—were improvised for a single shoestring-budget indie flick in 1968. If we're talking cultural ubiquity as opposed to artistic impact, NotLD has a fair claim to being the most influential movie of all time.
Social satire came front and center with Romero's shopping-mall-set Dawn of the Dead a decade later. It's never been MIA since. What's unique about zombies as horror figures is that—partly because they used to be just like us and still dress the part, and partly because they're so stupid—they're intrinsically funny. While a comic vampire movie is a spoof, a zombie flick without any laughs usually just isn't doing its job.
What makes them a great American joke is that the joke can be on us without quite being about us, or maybe it's the other way around. If vampires are a fantasy of elitism—a riff on decadent old-world aristocracy—then zombies, in their "We the Ex-People" way, are the sickest possible parody of Jefferson-style egalitarianism. They give us permission to add a fun coda to "Pogo" cartoonist Walt Kelly's best-known quip: "We have met the enemy, and he is us. Now hand me a baseball bat."
···
"Permission" is the right word, too. Unlike sci-fi's doomsday scenarios, zombie movies are mainly fantasies of wholesale social breakdown. That's their attraction, not just their scare machinery. Never underestimate the galvanizing effect on any healthy American male of an anarchic U.S.A. in which our lumbering, drooling former co-citizens can be blasted like skeet.
Coming in a close second is the turn-on of material goods suddenly free for the taking, something The Walking Dead poeticized when Grimes the lawman—gently saying, "I don't think those rules apply anymore"—let a fellow refugee (Laurie Holden) swipe a mermaid necklace from a department store. With Hummers, weaponry, and whole supermarkets up for grabs, the pilfering scenes in a zombie movie are capitalism porn that outdoes any shopping-spree montage in a chick flick. And since we also kind of hate all the pointless crapola consumer culture nags us to buy, Zombieland was at its shrewdest when the heroes trashed an inoffensive tourist-trap souvenir shop as gleefully as if its trinket-crammed notion of charm had been oppressing them for years.
At the same time, downright touchingly, zombie movies have also become the garage-sale repository for fables about our hardy national spirit. The irresistibility of World War Z, Max Brooks's best-selling "oral history" of a future zombie war, was all in his resurrection of the kind of heroic America—with everybody in the new Greatest Generation selflessly doing his or her part for victory—that these days seems more chimerical than ever.
At its most involving, The Walking Dead pulls together these resonances and undertones more consciously than any zombie saga before it. It's not just that Grimes, who pointedly still wears his old-timey sheriff's hat, rode into town on horseback in the premiere, or that his cuckolding second banana probably isn't named Shane by accident. As the caravan's Wise Old Coot, Jeffrey DeMunn is patently the postmillennial version of Walter Brennan manning the chuck wagon on Red River's cattle drive—and with a brainy Asian-American dude (Steven Yeun) and a stalwart African-American one (IronE Singleton), among others, aboard for the ride, the series has one foot planted in the melting pot and the other in The Road Warrior.
Thanks to the Georgia setting, a whole other set of associations is in play as well. Civil War buffs who got a jolt from a character recalling "when Atlanta fell" no doubt also recognized the likely source of Rick Grimes's stunned walk past body-bagged corpses as he left the hospital: Scarlett's trek among the railroad-station casualties in Gone with the Wind, hands down the most moving crowd shot of all time. All that was missing was the Stars and Bars mournfully flapping away as the camera pulled back and the orchestra broke into "Dixie."
Before you get all p.c. about the implications of equating modern-day America with ye olde Confederacy, remember that context makes a difference. Because a pang of involuntary identification isn't quite the same thing as an endorsement, what registers isn't "They were wrong"; what registers—and haunts us—is "They lost." We also know that all those dead relatives and neighbors aren't coming back, at least once a head shot has disposed of their posthumous incarnation. Even if it ends up having a happy or "happy" ending, The Walking Dead, like the best of Romero, allegorizes an inconvenient truth that most of our chipper culture hasn't given up on sugarcoating: The world that was can never be restored.
Partly because there's no way to make 'em elegant—sooner or later, even the most stylish director has to either show them chowing down or be accused of cheating—the planet's most democratic monsters never used to get much respect. The latest cycle of the zombie meme also got pretty cutesy for a while, from Pride and Prejudice and Zombies to Woody Harrelson and the pre-Social Network Jesse Eisenberg bashing in pumpkin-head skulls for laughs in 2009's very funny, far from dumb Zombieland. But then AMC's The Walking Dead came along, and whammo: America's ultimate conspicuous consumers were back in all their foul, decaying glory. The reason zombies can't jump the shark is that they are the shark, baby. Now they've finally gotten the epic TV showcase they deserve.
Since he doesn't want "I Ate the Sheriff" to end up getting played at his funeral, he sets out for a failed panacea: Atlanta, which turns out to be overrun with lurching ghoulies. Once he's gotten out of that one and located the rest of the cast, his next try is a CDC complex whose sole remaining factotum ends up making the joint go kablooey in a fit of suicidal despair.
What Rick doesn't know is that his wife, Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies), and former partner, Shane Walsh (Jon Bernthal), got into making each other's bacon sizzle back when they thought he was history. Naturally, along with Rick and Lori's son, they're both part of the ragtag Grimes-led caravan we last saw road-to-nowhere-ing it across a smoke-plumed wasteland in the season finale. And yep—as Huck Finn used to say, we've been here before. Does anything top that primal American fantasy of an improvised community on the move in search of an elusive promised land?
···
If you're still in any doubt that zombies graduated long ago from one-joke creeps to all-purpose metaphors, The Walking Dead will cure you in a jiffy. Vampire snobs can call the basic concept rudimentary all they like. A big plus for Team Living Dead is that, what with the poor personal hygiene and worse social skills, zombies are hard to get romantic about—preventing millions of teenage girls from ruining everything for the rest of us by fantasizing how dreamy it might be to date one. Never stop being thankful that the zombie equivalent of Twilight would be Dinnertime.
And to think we owe it all to what used to be called the best movie ever made in Pittsburgh. It's not like director George A. Romero made everything up from scratch in the original Night of the Living Dead. Revived corpses had already featured in all sorts of creepy tales, from voodoo myths to Russian literary titan Nikolai Gogol's scary 1835 story "Viy." But pretty amazingly, the basics of zombiedom as we know it today—the shambling walk, the appetite for human flesh—were improvised for a single shoestring-budget indie flick in 1968. If we're talking cultural ubiquity as opposed to artistic impact, NotLD has a fair claim to being the most influential movie of all time.
Social satire came front and center with Romero's shopping-mall-set Dawn of the Dead a decade later. It's never been MIA since. What's unique about zombies as horror figures is that—partly because they used to be just like us and still dress the part, and partly because they're so stupid—they're intrinsically funny. While a comic vampire movie is a spoof, a zombie flick without any laughs usually just isn't doing its job.
What makes them a great American joke is that the joke can be on us without quite being about us, or maybe it's the other way around. If vampires are a fantasy of elitism—a riff on decadent old-world aristocracy—then zombies, in their "We the Ex-People" way, are the sickest possible parody of Jefferson-style egalitarianism. They give us permission to add a fun coda to "Pogo" cartoonist Walt Kelly's best-known quip: "We have met the enemy, and he is us. Now hand me a baseball bat."
···
"Permission" is the right word, too. Unlike sci-fi's doomsday scenarios, zombie movies are mainly fantasies of wholesale social breakdown. That's their attraction, not just their scare machinery. Never underestimate the galvanizing effect on any healthy American male of an anarchic U.S.A. in which our lumbering, drooling former co-citizens can be blasted like skeet.
Coming in a close second is the turn-on of material goods suddenly free for the taking, something The Walking Dead poeticized when Grimes the lawman—gently saying, "I don't think those rules apply anymore"—let a fellow refugee (Laurie Holden) swipe a mermaid necklace from a department store. With Hummers, weaponry, and whole supermarkets up for grabs, the pilfering scenes in a zombie movie are capitalism porn that outdoes any shopping-spree montage in a chick flick. And since we also kind of hate all the pointless crapola consumer culture nags us to buy, Zombieland was at its shrewdest when the heroes trashed an inoffensive tourist-trap souvenir shop as gleefully as if its trinket-crammed notion of charm had been oppressing them for years.
At the same time, downright touchingly, zombie movies have also become the garage-sale repository for fables about our hardy national spirit. The irresistibility of World War Z, Max Brooks's best-selling "oral history" of a future zombie war, was all in his resurrection of the kind of heroic America—with everybody in the new Greatest Generation selflessly doing his or her part for victory—that these days seems more chimerical than ever.
At its most involving, The Walking Dead pulls together these resonances and undertones more consciously than any zombie saga before it. It's not just that Grimes, who pointedly still wears his old-timey sheriff's hat, rode into town on horseback in the premiere, or that his cuckolding second banana probably isn't named Shane by accident. As the caravan's Wise Old Coot, Jeffrey DeMunn is patently the postmillennial version of Walter Brennan manning the chuck wagon on Red River's cattle drive—and with a brainy Asian-American dude (Steven Yeun) and a stalwart African-American one (IronE Singleton), among others, aboard for the ride, the series has one foot planted in the melting pot and the other in The Road Warrior.
Thanks to the Georgia setting, a whole other set of associations is in play as well. Civil War buffs who got a jolt from a character recalling "when Atlanta fell" no doubt also recognized the likely source of Rick Grimes's stunned walk past body-bagged corpses as he left the hospital: Scarlett's trek among the railroad-station casualties in Gone with the Wind, hands down the most moving crowd shot of all time. All that was missing was the Stars and Bars mournfully flapping away as the camera pulled back and the orchestra broke into "Dixie."
Before you get all p.c. about the implications of equating modern-day America with ye olde Confederacy, remember that context makes a difference. Because a pang of involuntary identification isn't quite the same thing as an endorsement, what registers isn't "They were wrong"; what registers—and haunts us—is "They lost." We also know that all those dead relatives and neighbors aren't coming back, at least once a head shot has disposed of their posthumous incarnation. Even if it ends up having a happy or "happy" ending, The Walking Dead, like the best of Romero, allegorizes an inconvenient truth that most of our chipper culture hasn't given up on sugarcoating: The world that was can never be restored.
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