I’ve been watching this zombie show for some time — it’s my Sunday night ritual, to switch on AMC while I’m reviewing material for Monday’s lecture (I don’t think any of the themes have leaked over into genetics, though). And there’s a rhythm to the seasons of the show.
Rick and his hardy, zombie-smackin’ survivors struggle in a post-apocalyptic world. They suffer gradual attrition — it’s a feature of the show that some well-loved character will die, horribly — and the group barely makes it. Then they find some little enclave of other survivors who are much better off, who have it together and have built defenses and are eating regularly and doing things like bathing, and aren’t killing zombies non-stop day after day as they wander through a hostile wilderness.
And it always ends up that Rick & Co. end up destroying the enclave and going back to wandering.
Sure, there’s a reason for it. Maybe the happy sheltered village is run by a psychopath, or they’re cannibals. But still, there’s a pattern: Rick’s group is barely able to hang together and feed themselves on their own, but dang, they are battle-hardened killers and are cruising through the landscape like a wrecking ball, smashing every other group of survivors.
I’ve been saying since the beginning that this show is about the bad guys who think they are the good guys.
Now finally, they are embracing their true nature. Once again, they’ve found a nice sheltered community. It doesn’t seem to have any flaws, although the leader is a rather smarmy politician who thinks much of herself. They’re in, and they’re already plotting to take over. They talk about the community members as weak. They’re scheming to get weapons out of the storehouse.
Best of all is Carol. Carol, as those watching the show know, is fiercely protective; she used to be meek and submissive, married to an abusive man, who got his throat conveniently ripped out by a zombie early on, and she’s been growing in fascinating ways. She has been kicked out of the group once before when she took it upon herself to execute a couple of sick members before the disease spread, so she does what it takes…and she was also able to survive solo in the zombie-infested wilderness while exiled. She’s a badass, in other words.
In this last episode, Carol has ingratiated herself into the community by acting motherly and sweet — she bakes cookies. But one night she’s sneaking into the armory and discovers she’s been followed, and this happens:
See? They are the bad guys. The message of the show is that ruthlessness pays and that the hardest survivors are far more dangerous than a mere swarm of zombies.
I see it taking the same trajectory as Breaking Bad, in which the focus is on a central character who is criminally egotistical and evil, for superficially justifiable reasons, and it’s tricking the audience into cheering him while holding up a mirror and showing us some of the nastiness within us.
That makes it interesting. I was starting to get bored with the repetitive cycle of the show, but now…it’s something different.
The bad guys who think they are the good guys?
Moar evil stuff:
Terminators to be released into Scottish highlands.
Conservationists have defended controversial plans to release 300 terminators into the wilds of Scotland. http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/environment/terminators-to-be-released-into-scottish-highlands-2015031096108
The relentless cyborgs are expected to thrive in the barren landscape despite the absence of clothing and motorcycles. They will kill anyone they encounter.
Wildlife expert Stephen Malley said: “We were already going to repopulate the forests with lynxes, and maybe some wolves. So we thought fuck it, let’s throw in some terminators.”
I’m not sure if you’re familiar with the comic, but this idea is more overtly discussed there than it appears to be in the show (I’m not positive, because I stopped watching the show around season 3). Rick is foremost interested in protecting his particular band of survivors, and often does horrible things in the name of protecting them. I’ll be interested to hear if this arc in the show plays out like it did in the comic, wherein the extent to the groups deceptive and controlling tendencies are critiqued by a larger group of survivors.
It’s the complete lack of any “good guys” which finally turned me off of TWD.
When faced with a disaster, people typically bond. They get closer, they share, they feel an intense kinship with those that faced the same struggle. But in TWD-land, there’s none of that. Everyone is self-interested, petty, violent, cruel and often psychotic. There’s never been an attempt to justify this except in so far as we see that everyone acts this way so everyone has to act this way. It’s insulting and it gets a little gross. For all of its flaws, I switched to “Z Nation” for some zombie funtimes and I couldn’t be happier to be done with TWD.
At least with Breaking Bad, we saw the progression, we saw how people can do awful things through good intentions. We saw them reacting to a flawed world but still a plausible/realistic world. It makes all the difference.
They absorbed all the good people from Woodbury into their group after they took down their leaders. That they all died from superflu was, to be fair, not their doing.
What tends to happen is that they meet other survivors under less-than-ideal circumstances (for example, early on they ran into a group while suffering from the after-effects of a zombie apocalypse) and the first encounter doesn’t go brilliantly for one contrived reason or another and someone gets captured. Then there is an escalating cycle of retaliation until the settlement is a smoking ruin and the Group is on the run again. This applies even when the settlement in question is theirs.
I didn’t even know there was a show about zombies. How could this still be a thing?
We watched the first episode. About a year ago. Is it worth suffering through however many seasons they’re up to, to reach this point of prospective redemption?
(Thing about these serial dramas: the writers have to make you care about the characters enough to want to see what happens to them next. But if they introduce too many twists and turns, and/or if those characters behave like asssholes too much, you get the feeling that they’re just jerking you around. At which point the “willing” part goes out of the suspension of disbelief. Which is why I was just as happy that Flashforward only lasted one season, and we’re about ready to give up on The 100. Even BSG was getting there by the final season. Being Human, OTOH, continues to hold our interest.)
Eamon Knight has hit on the reason I can’t bring myself to watch TV serial dramas at all any more. I used to be a big Buffy fan. I suffered and wept with those characters. I followed the spinoffs. I even read the comic book for a while after the series ended. And then I tried to find another series to follow, but I found that I couldn’t stand to watch the writers shoehorn years worth of personal tragedy into a few weeks of screen time (The L Word, I’m looking at you). I didn’t WANT to see characters I like subjected to conflict and loss, and I didn’t want to watch characters I didn’t like (never have found one I loved to hate). Eventually I gave up and decided I’m not the target audience for any scripted story on TV. Now I read in the evening and watch a few Mythbusters reruns before bed.
The show has been really good this year. They’ve killed off most of the least corrupted characters in ways that show that being decent gets you killed in this world. Then they dump the remaining characters (and the viewers) into an environment where the rules are completely different. Watching it, I felt like Rick feels: these people are weak at best, or engaged in some sort of game that isn’t entirely clear yet. In either case, they aren’t to be trusted and are expendable if they get in the way of keeping the group safe.
It is interesting because the real conflict is going to be within the group, between characters we know and care about. Carol seems completely off the cliff, and how is Daryl going to deal with her if he gets fully on board with the town? Rick should be the good guy, but I see him deciding to take what he wants… and who he wants, considering his animosity towards the husband of the woman he’s attracted to. Will Michonne have to step in and take him down for his own good? Will Carl stay in the house?
No. Carl will NOT stay in the house.
People do typically bond. In the comics (I have not watched the show) the group tends to bond. The group, as a whole, tends to be a (weak) in-group for all the members. People who aren’t members may become members, and members who have been hiding secrets that are discovered or who buck the system may be cast out. It’s a very definite ingroup, centered on Rick, and woe be unto those who he believes have lost faith in him or seek to betray him. The in-group, however, does tend to trust Rick and stand by him. Rick in turn tends to protect his ingroup, though he is a self-absorbed prick who can, will, and does abandon people who aren’t Carl in an instant if it’s a choice between them and Carl.
One thing to consider, though is what defines the ‘good people’. Good people help others. Good people will help those not in their in group. Good people feel empathy, even for strangers. Good people will either help someone in need or regret not helping them. In a zombie apocalypse scenario, good people tend to go in one of a few ways. They will go out of their way to help people they encounter, frequently leading to an infected person getting into their shelter/community. They will help people in need, leaving themselves open to betrayal by a less-good (or more selfish) person/group. They will be controlled by a person (or organization headed by people) who are more ruthless. They could also successfully avoid these outcomes and situations by acting against their insticts to help everyone they see. This could easily lead to them becoming ‘burned out’, and pretending to stop caring. Or they will simply die.
Essentially, the rapid loss of civilization produces a situation where selfish behavior can produce an extreme short-term fitness advantage, and where group-building or supportive behavior is much more dangerous. With zombies in the mix, any short-term disadvantage can become almost immediately fatal. In these cases, the short-term survival of an individual or small group is essentially the inverse of the amount of trust/empathy they have in people outside their group.
The situation we see in TWD, where most good people are living in protected communities run by amoral psycopaths is possibly a likely one, given a collapse situation and zombies making life away from shelter impractical. Rick’s group tends to shed good people (who disagree with Rick’s choices, leading him to see them less as part of his in-group) and tends to destabilize existing power structures.
Meh.
The entire zombie genre is a thinly veiled pro-gun libertarian sociopath power fantasy. The fact that one show is beginning to realize it is as interesting as a yesteryear matzah.
You know those old iterated prisoner’s dilemma simulations, where in the beginning defectors run rampant, followed by strict tit-for-tatters taking over as the defectors self destruct against each other, followed by ever more generous versions of tit-for-tat (and/or win-stay-lose-shift) supplanting the unforgiving ones, until the population is uniformly cooperative, only to be subverted by the rise of defectors once again?
The Zombie Apocalypse fantasy is basically an exploration of that collapse from a cooperative state to an all-defector state, followed by the gradual re-emergence of cooperation, starting with unforgiving tit-for-tat. The “heroes”/survivors are all variations of defectors seguing into strict tit-for-tat.
And strict tit-for-tat is still a jerk….
(The zombies themselves are your classic “always-defect”….)
with this discussion I am now positive I have not even been temped to watch any of it.
It is just another pointless serial about unpleasant people doing shockingly bad stuff in just enough graphic detail to not get censored. The whole point is to deliver eye balls. To make a hit show to make lots of money.
they might be interesting and well done if they just told their story in one a season arc and got to their point but they don’t they instead stretch out the story for the maximum episodes grinding out more pointless variations on a theme for in the end just maximum dollars.
they resemble action soap operas and do not stray far from their formula
lots of clever writing ground out week after week .
These hit serial shows have just too cynical a world view for me. Mafia hit men, dope dealers and zombies I could care less but it would have to take a lot of effort.
uncle frogy
Kaintukee Bob: The problem with your analysis is that it is a classic false dichotomy; it allows for no alternative between thoughtless altruism and reflexive sociopathy. There’s a perfectly reasonable option–gradiated trust. A lone survivor arrives at your settlement? You have ’em stick to a quarantine building for a week or two. In exchange for the ration of food that they eat, you may get a decent new member to the group. If they turn out to be infected, you throw ’em a shovel party and go back to business as usual.
And we know this is how humans really do things, because it’s how we did it in the past. Zombies, especially as portrayed in TWD, are actually pretty pathetic as individual threats; swarms are trickier, of course, but the first couple episodes showed they could be outwitted fairly easily. In historical contexts, they’re nothing compared to fast and lethal predators, stampeding herd animals and natural disasters. Humanity thrived in those conditions because of our ability to band together and act cooperatively in the first place.
It’s only in our relatively modern, safe society that sociopathic behavior can be afforded enough to become advantageous. I suspect that, in any sort of zombie-like scenario, where humanity is reduced back to small-group dynamics, the selfish and self-absorbed will be the ones who quickly find themselves without an in-group to rely upon. They’ll be relegated to the role of bandits and highwaymen, and many of them will succumb to the dangers of the wilderness they’ll be forced to call home. The most successful will probably form small warbands, but we’ve dealt with that in our history, too.
Join the Dark Side! We have cookies!
This. I watched it with one eyebrow raised for the first season or 3, and finally gave up in disgust. The motivations are just completely inexplicable. A voice in my brain was more or less continuously screaming itself horse with “people don’t act like that.” Even allowing a lot of leeway for the fact that everyone’s probably dealing with a lot of grief and PTSD and so forth, it just didn’t ring true.
Creating a fantastical horror setting is great, but the people you populate it with need to respond like something approximating real people afterward.
Ditto when the writers decide it’s time for a character to die, so they direct a supposedly seasoned survivor to naively, totally unnecessarily, wander off, alone, in a dark abandoned building or whatever full of zombies, and completely neglect any kind of situational awareness, so they can get bitten on schedule. Total suspension of disbelief killer.
(Not so applicable to TWD, but another related peeve: when supernatural-type movies or shows — i.e., ones where ghosts or vampires or whatever are an actual part of reality — have a caricature of a “skeptic”. Some character whose supposed to be the scientific one, but whose roles is to just stand around blatantly denying the *clear evidence* of all the hinky stuff going on in a universe where hinky stuff is actually part of the rules.)
Agreed with people who like the show less for its lack of good guys. I don’t need good guys v bad guys oversimplifying human nature, but “everyone’s an asshole” is neither believable nor entertaining. I may stay with it a bit longer for the same reason I watch lots of crap – just to see what happens – but after this enclave is toast, I’m done with them.
For me the low was when a character who feels like he’s being enticed by a married woman and is cool with that (questionable, but not the worst thing in the world) is watching the lady walk off with her dude and LITERALLY FONDLES HIS GUN. Fuck that guy all the way off regardless of anything he’s ever done before.
He doesn’t know shit about the situation re: whether she’s into that because he’s abusive or anything and he is, on some level, ready to kill a man to take this lady. No indication she wouldn’t find the scenario anything other than horrifying either.
I stopped watching after I found myself cheering for the zombies.
Alexander @10, aside from the ableist element, mostly agreed with you there. I will say there are people who are into the scenario for another reason – just a feeling of being sick of the overpopulated world, a vague yearning for the removal of all the artifice between humans and their basic needs. When you flip other people’s burgers to pay for your share of an apartment you’ll never own, it makes sense for the economy of a civilization to be structured that way, but it feels detached, meaningless, tedious.
unclefrogy @13
I thought that zombies were after brains.
That’s one of the main reason I don’t bother with horror movies- in order for the monster/serial killer to be a threat, they have to make the rest of the cast act like they’re on stupid pills.
a3kr0n #5
It was never a “show about zombies”. Like with most sci-fi, the setting just provides an environment where the boundaries of human behavior can be explored. P.Z. is right that the main characters are the bad guys. But that is because we are ALL only 3 missed meals away from being bad guys.
@21: in order for the monster/serial killer to be a threat, they have to make the rest of the cast act like they’re on stupid pills.
Exactly why I hated The Hollow Man. You could tell exactly who was going to get snuffed next, and jebus how hard is it implement and follow a buddy system? If 10 year olds at summer camp can manage it…..
@AlexanderZ #10
This is an unfairly general statement. It’s no doubt true for a lot of zombie fiction (and apocalyptic/dystopian fiction) but it doesn’t apply neatly to the genre as a whole. For example, Romero’s zombie movies have themes touching on racism, consumerism, capitalism, and militarization. The pro-gun libertarians are often the crazy villains of these films, posing more of a danger to the protagonists than the zombies do.
What ableist element?
That said, much of the appeal of the recent zombie craze seems to be A) the macho fantasy of being one of the strong, resourceful people who’d make it, not like the sheep and B) the right-wing paranoia/fantasy of being surrounded by Others who, while they may look more or less human, are recognizably Different, mindless, hostile, incapable of being reasoned with, bent on one’s destruction, needing desperately to be shot.
Abraham Van Helsing #22
No, we’re not! Read freemage #14 and the other commenters – humanity was at that stage and passed it fairly successfully. Yes, a huge number of our current problems can be traced to the infancy of humanity, but no matter how bad our xenophobia (and other hatreds) is, we have never reached a point where we were incapable of forming basic enclaves of mutual interest. That’s our default mode. That’s how we, as social animals, evolved to be.
The fact that so many protagonists of zombie films can’t grasp that shows that they are deficient human beings. They are not the norm and they have nothing to teach us, other than that their writers are very unpleasant people.
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Great American Satan #19
True, but history shows that these kind of emotions are also destructive. I have nothing against escapism, but why is it always has to be dark escapism?
This is why I miss good SciFi. Despite everything, shows like Star Trek at least tried to present a positive message and provided both entertainment and hope, while the current “dark”-themed programs just fill me with disgust.
Chris Walker #24
Azkyroth #26 has already replied to this. I just want to add that Romero’s films and popular works like World War Z (the novel) is still very problematic and exhibits many of the tropes of genre. Which is understandable, since they try to subvert the genre in some way they have to be deeply saturated with it, but this only underlines my problems with the genre as a whole.
I think that WWZ shows it best – while in many ways it’s a book about the rebuilding of humanity and its governments, the basis for the book – the reason why a zombie emergence could become a World War – is due to a caricature-like government incompetence that in no way reflects anything in the real world. When arguably the best and most thought-out work in genre needs to rely on libertarian fantasies to make itself work I feel justified in dismissing the entire genre altogether.
AlexanderZ @27
I agree with you completely. Perhaps I over-generalized. It’s just that those social bonds can be severely strained under conditions of existential threat, which is the most interesting feature of TWD. Same with Sons of Anarchy.
It’s called ‘The Walking Dead’ for a reason.
Beyond the obvious.
@26 Azkyroth
@27 AlexanderZ
I think we are mostly in agreement on this issue. I also feel that the recent zombie craze has taken more of a libertarian bent, and it’s one of the reasons (along with plain old over saturation) that I’ve largely lost interest in the genre. I just wanted to point out a couple of works that I felt go against those tropes. Though, as AlexanderZ rightly points out, even they aren’t without their problems. Some of my favorites are spoofs like “Sean of the Dead” and “Fido,” because they don’t take themselves so seriously and openly critique a lot of the genre conventions.
I would disagree that World War Z is the best or most thought out work of the genre, but that’s a matter of taste. It is undoubtedly one of the most popular, which shows what a lot of people are looking to the genre for. I found it to be pretty shallow and overly jingoistic. I did enjoy “The Girl with All the Gifts” a great deal, though it suffers somewhat from another libertarian trope of zombie fiction: The suspicion and fear of science, particularly medical science.
Ack, that should be “Shaun of the Dead.” My apologies to Simon Pegg.
They made the point pretty well in the comic back at the prison. Rick, injured, stumbles out from where they’re arguing after having killed one of their evil-hangers-ons and gives this big speech about what’s happened to them, and there’s a big splash page where he yells “~WE~ are the walking dead!”
At which point I stopped reading, because, well, that’s the point, right? We’ve reached a satisfying climax and the message is received, and everything else is just spinning wheels? It had a title drop and everything.
Chris Walker @24 The pro-gun libertarians are often the crazy villains of these films, posing more of a danger to the protagonists than the zombies do.
And Superheroes tend to fight selfish people who disregard the rule of law and do what they want while wearing crazy costumes based on their own motivations. The message of both is evil people are EVIL. And a benevolent person can do whatever is necessary and still be the good guy, even if the specific actions are fundamentally identical.
The difference between Rick’s Group and The Governor isn’t one of truly contrasting ideologies, it’s that the Governor is self indulgent and hypocritical.
The really weird thing is that you often see really, really liberal people and really, really conservative people enjoying these media, and it’s clearly for different reasons.
I happened across the comics early in their run and have read them ever since, always frustrated and annoyed at how stupid people are in them (yet, perhaps because they’re flawed in human ways, hooked on wanting to know their fates).
The TV series might seem to have the theme they’re really bad guys but in the comics, though I don’t think it’s the writers intention, nearly everything disastrous occurs because Rick Grimes is monumentally stupid.
Because his pride is more important to him than peoples lives Grimes starts conflicts without thinking, planning or even cursory scouting of situations and yet continually is deferred to by others.
Spoiler alert!! Comics Spoiler alert!!
The best example of this is the fate of Glenn. The most sane and competent person dies pointlessly solely because Rick Grimes pride refuses to concede authority to another for a moment when he refuses, in a clearly disadvantaged position, to even pretend to acquiescence to a warlord/protector racketeering mobster.
Well, the conceit of these types of movies is that the population has just gone through a severe bottleneck event. After such an event, the old “default”, the old “the way we evolved to be” may not necessarily apply any more. A minority trait pre-bottleneck, may, either through adaptive advantage, or sheer chance, no longer be minority, and in fact constitute the majority trait among the survivors.
In the zombie movie genre’s case, that majority “capable of forming basic enclaves of mutual interest” before the apocalypse isn’t the default anymore. That majority are all now zombies, because the zombie infection got into those “enclaves of mutual interest” early on, well before the actual action of the zombie fiction itself.
That is the foundational premise of most zombie fiction. You have to accept that from the get-go as part of your willing suspension of disbelief, and if you can’t then the genre simply isn’t for you.
It’s like being unable to enjoy Homer because you can’t accept the premise that any man could be so stupid as to pick Aphrodite’s bribe over Hera’s or Athena’s.
I don’t think I could watch this – not for a while, anyway. I recently read The Road, when I was depressed and the weather was bleak. Never do this! I think it may have broken me, and now I want to keep away from post-apocalyptice fiction for a bit and think happy thoughts.
Speaking of stories where the main characters are assholes, has anyone ever tried to get through the Left Behind books. I’ve made it two books in so far, and there aren’t a lot of characters to cheer for. (I can’t really comment on the OP because I’ve never watched the show.)
The problem is, this is also the core of people’s attempts to argue back from zombie fiction to our understanding of real life.
“Not available in your country” videos are the worst.
Having read a lot of post-apoc fiction, I had often wondered why everyone immediately became complete assholes and ran out into the woods ( bugging out), right afterwards. Or why some people insist that everyone must immediately do so.
This is a great discussion, btw.
I speculated on my blog about what I’d do during a zombie apocalypse. I’m pretty sure I’d not be doing any of the stuff that happens in any of the books I’ve read. Re: bugging out to the wilderness. Yeah.. That’s not gonna happen.
There’s also speculation about things like women still shaving their armpits during the apocalypse, feminine hygiene in general, people who need special medications, people with mental illness or disabilities, or who have only lost their glasses, all running around in the woods, waving crossbows and swords around.
Moggie: I’m surprised you’re still alive. I read that book when I was in relatively good spirits and it nearly broke me. Its worth reading but, dear Jeebus, it was depressing.
@36
I saw the movie a while back and did not know it was from a novel
the movie was kind of dark and washed out, bleak to say the least! I do not think I could read the book not even in late spring before the heat of summer.
uncle frogy
Try a free web proxy. It may not always work, but this one worked for me:
https://proxy-us.hide.me/go.php?u=9uu3OfV2Ekt392GtqoaBeargo1ft98XaJDxYt4aTRVUNhYSQPY%2FB&b=5&f=norefer
And support a strong Anti-Bugfuckery law in your country.
Sociopath=bad. While it isn’t great to have empathy deficit problems, it isn’t good to use them as insults for people with horrible morals. I’ve done this a lot myself, it’s de rigeur around here, I don’t expect everyone to be on the same page about this at the moment.
That’s why I said “it makes sense for the economy of a civilization” even though it doesn’t feel good – because it helps reduce individual labor, feed the maximum number of people, blah etc. But it’s an understandable bit of escapism that I would argue is not motivated by belief in cruelty=power ubermenschen scenarios.
I think you can even go dark without humanity having to be as nasty as all that. Looking at Alien, the corporation is shit, but individuals caring about the survival of people – whether or not they even like each other personally – is a big deal. That’s more realistic.
If Ayn Rand wrote zombie fiction…?
Forty page soliloquies about brains?
Amphiox #35
That’s not the premise of the zombie genre. One of the most important aspects of the genre is that anyone and everyone can become a strong survivor. These works go out of their way to portray the most diverse survivor group imaginable. If we, on the other hand, follow your point the survivors must all come from a very specific type of people, and we know who those people are: Some studies have shown that sociopaths (sorry Great American Satan, I’m a psychiatrist, but these aren’t real people – they’re just characters and their written behavior is almost point-to-point sociopathic) tend to be greatly overrepresented in certain fields (mostly economy and politics). Most of us know enough violent and anti-social (a.k.a typical zombie-genre protagonists) people in our real life to know what views they’re likely to hold and how they generally act and talk.
But the protagonists are never like that! On the contrary, they’re given professions, backstories, ideologies and customs of the every-person. For many survivors their ability to survive comes as a transformative revelation that changes them and their worldview completely, even when it comes to fairly mature people. The only options that remain are either that the writers have no idea about human psychology and think that people can instantly change into whatever (the likeliest option since most writers, as most people in any profession, aren’t very informed) or that the all survivors are lying about their histories until they can reveal their true colors. The latter is in agreement with your view, but gives the writers (all zombie-genre writers!) an extraordinary amount of credit.
Either way your position is inconsistent with how the characters are portrayed. They are rarely glib enough to be masterful deceivers nor are their former lives show people who are ill-suited to civilized living. And that’s intentional – they’re supposed to be identifiable to a wide an audience as possible, provided that audience doesn’t think too much about it.
It’s more like being unable to enjoy a modern Iliad version where the apple reads “to the best twerker” and the goddesses show their moves while Paris (played by Nicolas Cage) provides a funky beat.
If the zombie-genre works were set in the Mirror Universe or some sort of fantasy setting with goblins instead of people, I’d have less of a problem with it. But these works try to be as realistic as possible, so I cannot suspend my disbelief too much.
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Chris Walker #31
Totally agree. Zombie comedies are great fun.
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Great American Satan #44
Exactly! I put “dark” in quotation marks precisely because a truly dark work is much more realistic, and Alien was realistic as hell (I particularly liked the uneasy conversations and the general annoyance with each other that exists in any office job).
Like I said above, the characters are written in such a nasty way that their behavior can only be called sociopathic or cartoonish. Since the writers didn’t intend to make a cartoon, I’ll go with sociopaths. As for “Sociopath=bad”: a violent sociopath can never be a good person (non-violent ones are a different story, but they usually don’t even know they’re sociopaths) by definition so I can’t agree with your critique.
Jeff Lewis @37: The only one I know of to have read that piece of Christian snuff porn is Fred Clark of the slacktivist blog. Who has spent the last 12 years in a week-by-week, page-by-awful-page critique of the series, which he calls The World’s Worst Books (the dimensions of “worst” including at least the literary and moral). He’s up to IIRC somewhere in Book 3. And he’s frequently very funny.
You can either search his blog at Patheos, or buy the Kindle compilation of the first 200 pages from Amazon.
Not necessarily!
The premise underpinning these narratives is that the capacity for sociopathic behavior lies dormant in many more people than just those who are obviously (or even not so obviously) sociopathic right now. That there is behavioral plasticity in human beings, and that “sociopath” is one life strategy that comes out in response to certain environments. So SOME for people, sociopathic behavior comes out in the environments surrounding the fields of economy and politics, and for SOME other people, our regular modern society is the environment that brings out sociopathic behavior, but there are other people who would not in any way shape or form exhibit sociopathic behavior in the environment of regular modern life – they would be normal, and test as normal, in the environment of regular modern day life, but are capable of switching to sociopathic behavior in the environment of a Zombie Apocalypse.
These are the people who end up being the survivors in the fictional scenario, and they are already the dominant personality type at the beginning of the narrative in most cases, because in most cases the zombie apocalypse has already happened. All the people who are not capable of becoming sociopathic, or who become sociopathic in OTHER environments that are not that of a zombie apocalypse are all dead or zombified already. This includes all the Wall Street and Political sociopaths too.
I have no idea if this is or is not a realistic representation of the reality of human nature. But that is the assumed premise (the premise ALSO includes the supposition that sociopathic behavior actually is advantageous in the environment of a zombie apocalypse and that too is certainly not something that anyone can provide evidence for) you have to suspend your disbelief for even before beginning the fiction.
The fact is that, in the universe of a zombie apocalypse (and it IS an alternative universe, like all fictional universes are), most of the survivors are facultative sociopaths, and sociopathy is selectively advantaged. It is as foundational to those universes as magic is to Harry Potter’s.
In real life a zombie apocalypse would never get off the ground. If it isn’t quarantined successfully at patient zero, the zombies would freeze solid the first winter and get eaten by wolves, and the idea that a modern military, even if it ever came to that, could get run over by a zombie horde (a mass of unarmed civilians with no capacity for use of weapons and shuffling at slower than regular walking pace) is laughable.
Amphiox – Agreed that Romero zombies are no contest & even the original NotLD came down on that side by the end. The latent scumbag premise, as you describe it, is not used in every zombie apocalypse scenario. There are too many of them now to make absolute assertions. But it does feature in many of the most popular ones, and it really doesn’t appeal to a lot of us, as successful as it is.
Alexander Z – Think I’ll bow out now. Agree to disagree and all that. Carry on.
If “The Walking Dead” can be seen as an economic horror story, plenty of the naysayers can be seen as sociopathic wealthy folks who cannot and will not empathize with the less advantaged. A lot of the complaints sound like “why would you forsake propriety, things aren’t that bad”, but coming from people who have never really suffered.
Alexandria is a town that has enjoyed everything, and has given up nothing. Sounds like a bunch of privileged folks around here, TBH.
Agree 100% with Joe. It’s easy to say you would never steal bread when you’ve never gone hungry.
And people have less peripheral vision and situational awareness than guards in a stealth game. Cloverfield probably wins that one- it’s got a monster the size of the Chrysler Building that manages to sneak up on the main characters multiple times.
If “having ethics” is a “privilege” thing then why does privilege even matter?
A somewhat tangential point, but if one looks carefully and in detail at the overall political and policy aims of secular humanism and liberalism, it all basically boils down to creating a social environment wherein ethical behavior is advantageous relative to unethical behavior, and thus would be naturally promoted.
Amphiox #49
That’s the crux of the matter for me. I want fiction to show how real people deal with fictional situations, not how surreal people deal with near-fictional situations.
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Improbable Joe #51 and dysomniak #52
What on earth are you going on about?
I quit on the show when the zombies stopped mattering to the story as anything but cattle prods for the plot. When the writers — not having a full show’s worth of ideas in some episode — needed a shock to wake up the viewers, a zombie would jump out from behind a tree. It was just regular enough to make a great drinking game.
The entire zombie genre is a thinly veiled pro-gun libertarian sociopath power fantasy. The fact that one show is beginning to realize it is as interesting as a yesteryear matzah.
I totally agree. Zombies were just plain boring* long before they got overdone; and horror movies in general are nothing but violence-porn pretending to be “hard-hitting incisive explorations of our true nature” or some such phony self-righteous horseshit.
Vampires and werewolves at least can be funny or sexy, which is why “True Blood” was always more fun to watch than any of the big-budget zombie shit.
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*Especially the zombies who keep on lifelessly churning out more of the same old zombie movies and TV shows.
And here’s another reason I find zombie stories ridiculous: a zombie is a dead person, kinda-sorta-reanimated — so how does a dead body become MORE powerful than it was when it was alive and fully functioning? Seriously, the total lack of thought or imagination that goes into these shows is almost…zombie-like. NO BRAINS OF MY OWN…MUST EAT YOURS…CAN’T GET SMARTER NO MATTER HOW MANY BRAINS I EAT…CAN’T THINK OF ANYTHYING ELSE TO EAT…MUST HAVE BRAINS…
Nobody is a “good guy,” but if you can’t empathize with the characters in this show, I’m more creeped out by you than I am creeped out by them.
And, if you feel like they’re being cruel and saving themselves at the expense of their own group, remember that you’re literally doing the same thing every day. Every day you ignore human suffering and tragedy. You eat while others starve. You live while others die. Why are you so ready to give yourself a pass? Just because the victims of your cruelty and callousness are father away?
The show is a mirror for civilization. If you think you’re better than these characters, it’s only because you’re lying to yourself.
When societies collapse out group (out of tribe) altruism mostly collapses with it. For most of human history out of tribe altruism was the exception rather than the rule. Even today in places where states fail out of tribe altruism becomes MUCH more rare, particularly when resources are thin. Even in fully functioning states humans prey on humans at rates higher than any of us are comfortable with and the predators win. The most wealthy and successful people in the US by and large didn’t get that way via altruism. There are some notable exceptions, but most of them became altruistic after their success. I think the humans as villains in post apocalyptic scenarios is more realistic than people here are willing to credit and more realistic than I wish it were.
I’m not a fan of the zombie genre, but my favorite post-apoc book, far and away, is “The Postman” (the book, not the forgettable movie, obs).
It isn’t just that it’s optimistic, it’s that it’s explicitly about the rebuilding of society and what society actually means. It’s the concepts of society (civilization, science, and community), even more than the actual things themselves, that are necessary for our survival. I mean, in each of the three sections of the novel, Brin explores how it’s more important for people to believe that a thing exists, than whether the thing itself actually exists or not, because it’s the belief in a idea’s meaningfulness that actually creates it.
There are already a lot of insightful comments about the show that I hope I am not repeating too much, but this:
has a couple of problems. Before I start- content warning. Spoilers, discussion of rape.
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First, they are the bad guys in the context of Alexedria. Sort of. So far they haven’t actually done anything bad, with the exception of Carol. She is become the boogeywoman. She is probably who we should fear most. Rick is edging uncomfortably close to Governor territory, but he hasn’t actually done much of anything either. Weird, yes. Creepy, yes. But harmful, not so much. The rest of the group? Also not so much. And Rick told them this on day one. The Alexendrians know this. Asron explains exactly why he thinks so. Repeatedly. The only one pretending is Carol, and I don’t think Deanna is going to buy her ridiculous put-on for a second.
Also, the good guy/bad guy line is… big and and grey and blurry. There are essentially good people who do bad things. There are essentially bad people who do good things. But our protagonist group is clearly not just “bad guys”. In Alexendria, Daryl refused a stolen gun from Carol. Michonne hung up her katana. Maggie clearly wants in the democracy dreamland. Sasha is just freaking the fuck out, but she’s been mostly cooperative if a bit rude. She’ll probably come around. Abraham loves beer and they have beer. He didn’t threaten any children to get more. I have no idea where the hell Eugene was for that episode, but I’m pretty sure he’d be in, they have a hair stylist and video games. They all have cooperated, even death-or-cookies Carol. Daryl is practically blossoming.
Problem 2: sociopathic jerk faces also die. It isn’t just nice people that can’t make it. There is a trail of sociopaths, rapists, slavers and cannibals from Atlanta to Alexandria. (To be fair, the cannibals have an interesting back story. They were the good people, before the guy Glen let out of the rail car turned the place into a rape camp. So too probably was Dawn, before she became a slaver. )
Various characters repeatedly say things like “in this world, people become what they are.” So I’ve got my hopes on Daryl. He is not the bad guy he thought he was. The group sees that, especially Carol, and now Aaron too. I don’t think they’re wrong. Dammit they better not be >< This is the world that pretty much made Daryl a good guy.
Remember Buttons the horse? They are mostly feral, like the horse. Not bad. And what happened to Buttons?
And last but not least- FYI spoiler from the comics that may or may not be in tv show….
***
Alexandria ends up ok. So far. There are problems. They rebuild.
*** END CONTENT AND SPOILER WARNING***
So to sum it all up, chaotic evil is not the only path to success in this world and it often gets you dead because, as Glen says, “We only get there together.” I guess that technically applies to anyone, since even uber-villians can cooperate, but we haven’t seen a lot of those people make it in this world.
Sorry, there were really big gaps between the last spoiler warning and the spoiler in my preview. Damn you html!
This is basically me, too. The only TV I watch anymore is Doctor Who, Last Week Tonight, and non-fiction science shows and stuff. I didn’t like Breaking Bad, or The Walking Dead, or Game of Thrones, and Supernatural ended with season 5 as far as I’m concerned… I really didn’t and don’t like any of it. I’m pretty off with TV at this point. I can’t stand it anymore. I find it to be largely boring and terrible, even though I really do try, because my dad watches a lot of it. I’m tempted to give Constantine a try because I liked the comics, I’m probably the only person on the planet who liked the movie, and I enjoyed the two episodes I’ve seen. But my hopes aren’t even high for that. 12 Monkeys seemed interested, but turned out to be boring. I don’t even watch the Daily Show anymore, and I watched that religiously for years!
And please don’t get me started on The 100. That penultimate episode made me want to burn things. And I’ve found Helix to be almost as infuriating.
I stopped watching True Blood precisely because it stopped being the one thing it had going for it, which was funny. The scene was the one where Bill snapped the neck of what’s her face. During sex.
I turned it off right there and never went back. And from what I hear didn’t miss much, but I intend to give it another chance some day… during the zombie apocalypse when I am out of ammo and trapped in a solar powered house with exactly one dvd.
I figured that out in season two, the story of a nice farmer dealing with a bunch of assholes who take advantage of his offer of help and proceed to kill his best friend, dump zombie guts down his well, free a barn full of zombies for no particular reason, yell and shoot guns until they attract more zombies, and finally burn his farm down.
I assume the rest of the world has recovered from the zombie plague by now, and the only reason the Deep South is still a post-apocalyptic wasteland is because of these shitkickers running around smashing every attempt to rebuild society.
Oh you troll! Hershel was a madman who was keeping zombies as pets and feeding them chickens. Chickens with broken legs! And they um, cleared that well out.
Heh, well, one of them was his daughter and he was hoping there was something they could do about it, right? Or praying for a miracle or whatever. It’s hard to remember details now…. But Hershel was a “madman”? Surely, you jest. And yes, that’s totally different from what the Governor did … because it’s different.
Still, your #63 is very good. That’s also generally the way the writers/actors/etc. think about it, if you catch any of the Talking Dead episodes afterward.