“THE WALKING DEAD” RETURNS

In our “Twilight”-obsessed culture, there’s a lot of pressure to buy into the will-he-bite-or-won’t-he appeal of vampires. But a true monster, as the novelist Colson Whitehead put it in The New Yorker recently, “is a person who has stopped pretending,” and, so in that spirit, I must admit that, aside from a brief, youthful indiscretion with “Buffy,” I’ve remained true to my first love—the zombie tale. In particular, I’ve fallen in love with “The Walking Dead,” the popular AMC series about survivors who spend their days wandering
a Southern Gothic landscape, either killing zombies or hiding from them.
“The Walking Dead” surprised viewers two years ago by offering up a new twist on the old genre. Frank Darabont (“The Shawshank Redemption,” “The Green Mile”) created the series, based upon Robert Kirkman’s graphic novel, and it’s become a female-friendly smash hit. The show, which premières its third season this Sunday, has brought zombies to a whole new audience: people who are fascinated by the undead, yes, but who are also animated by the intricate emotional arcs of the show.
There are two main categories of zombie film: the gritty political allegories directed by genre godfather George A. Romero and others (think of films like “Night of the Living Dead” and “28 Days Later”), and the cheesy, blood-soaked gore-fests made by directors like Sam Raimi, with his “Evil Dead” series. In a 1998 Annals of Hollywood about Raimi, Rebecca Mead remarked on how the latter were celebrated by “a certain kind of cineaste.” Fellini and the Coen Brothers, apparently, can be counted among the admirers of “The Evil Dead” series. (In fact, Mead writes, Joel Coen has quite a high opinion of Raimi. “Sam’s very polite,” he told her, “He has always helped little old ladies across the street. That has always been a part of Sam, along with the evisceration and dismemberment.”)
Darabont’s series doesn’t appear to fall naturally into either category. Instead, it carves out its own trajectory as a kind of postmodern, nouveau zombie narrative. In part, it’s that “The Walking Dead” is a television show, as opposed to a film; the extra hours allow the series to explore the genre’s territory in greater depth and in surprisingly nimble ways. But it’s also that, at its core, it’s not really a zombie show at all. While it does feature the undead, the series actually draws on the iconography and mood of the Western, complete with a reluctant sheriff, a wilderness to be explored, and “savages” to be fought. If the frontier of the old West represented a new world to be tamed, then, in “The Walking Dead,” the world of the zombie apocalypse represents the latest frontier to be conquered. The show doesn’t resemble the old-fashioned Westerns of the John Wayne era so much as the later Clint Eastwood ones (like “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly”), with their haunted, damaged heroes and ambiguous story lines. In a 1958 article about Westerns for The New Yorker, John Lardner explained how the TV Western began reimagining itself, in the late fifties, by emphasizing more complex moral tones:
In one installment of “Wagon Train”…a gambler, a Frenchman, stood in danger of punishment at the hands of the father of a young man whom the gambler had shot and killed in a quarrel. In the end, after a considerable amount of moral rumination, the father forgave the gambler, on the ground that his son had been a heel at heart. The morality here is shockingly gray in tone compared to the sharp black-and-whites that distinguish the honest, primitive Western; in a Western of the old school, a father might conceivably be aware that his son was a heel, but nothing would induce him to pass up a clearly ethical shot at a killer by admitting it.
“The Walking Dead” turns the violent logic of the zombie thriller on its head by introducing the same “shockingly gray” tones. The show tells the story of a former police officer, Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), who wakes from a coma to find that the world has been overrun by zombies, and that his wife and young son—along with a majority of the town’s population—are missing. Eventually, Grimes gathers a group of survivors. Central to the series is an ambiguity about the role of violence in their new world. Time and time again, the survivors find themselves in situations where they are forced to choose between caution and brutality (for example, they must decide whether to massacre a group of zombies they discover locked in a nearby barn).
Throughout the first two seasons, much of the dramatic tension has come from the relationship between Grimes and his partner on the force, Shane Walsh (Jon Bernthal), a trigger-happy gunslinger who wouldn’t feel out of place in Dodge City. Grimes and Walsh have opposite reactions to the carnage the zombie universe elicits from them. Grimes is a methodical and exquisitely restrained protagonist; with each act of violence he commits, he senses his humanity slipping away. Walsh, by contrast, is cocky and aggressive—he’s invigorated, not repulsed, by the brutality around him. As Grimes struggles to lead his motley group of survivors, Walsh consistently challenges his moral compass—urging bloodshed and abandon where Grimes advocates caution. At the end of the second season, the tension between the reticent leader and the hothead gunslinger ultimately came to a head, with a taut version of the classic Western gun duel at dawn.
Watching the series over the past two seasons, I’ve been reminded of Eastwood’s de-mythologizing masterpiece, “Unforgiven,” which is celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year. As Michael Sragow noted, in his 1992 review, the film marked Eastwood’s rejection of the Western’s veneration of the violent gunslinger as a kind of victorious superman. Instead, “he convinces you that the gunslinger is haunted by the men he’s blown to kingdom come.”
In Grimes, “The Walking Dead” gives us a similar gunslinger who is supremely self-conscious of the violence he must commit and wary of the damage it’s inflicting on his soul. By spooling out these themes over dozens of episodes, the series is able to explore them in much greater depth than the old zombie films ever could. It also does something quite daring with a largely forgotten genre, transforming the gunslinger myth of the old West into a new parable for our time.