Random Thoughts: Walking Dead "Nebraska" Edition.

First of all, yay! I hate midseason breaks, and I’m glad that’s over with. SPOILERS for “Nebraska” episode follow, for those who have not watched it yet.

• I hope Lori is dead in that ditch. Because a) Lori is an idiot. And b) Lori is an idiot. And c) Lori is, in addition to being an idiot, whiny. I’m telling you, whiny is not going far in a zombie apocalypse.  First she tells Rick not to go looking for the closest thing they have to an actual doctor. At least a doctor is useful, unlike Lori. Then she goes whining to Daryl about how he’s being selfish by not doing her idiotic bidding, after he just about killed himself trying to find Sophia, and after she sent poor Glenn off with her super-secret shopping list. Self-aware much, Lori? Then she takes off without telling anyone, absconding with one of the vehicles that was in better shape, and tries to read a map by HOLDING IT IN FRONT OF HER FACE WHILE DRIVING. This somewhat impaired her ability to see the ZOMBIE XING sign on her way to Karmasgoingtokickyourassville.    How about this? How about we exchange Lori for introducing the entire rest of the cast from Prison Break? That would be awesome.

• I heart Daryl. He’s at least off making new arrows (especially given how stupid Andrea had him wasting arrows willy-nilly earlier because she’s a passive/aggressive nutcase). He cracked me up with his “Listen here, Olive Oyl…” which might have been the second best line of the show.

• Kid #1 suggesta “Otis Used To Play The Guitar” as an awesome band name.

• Liked how the bar is right next to an honest-to-god horse and buggy shop. Stop in for a sasparilly and some rock candy with the kids! Have your picture taken with an old-timey prospector zombie!

• I can finally look at Andrew Lincoln and not hear him speaking with a British accent. (Unlike most Americans, I first watched him on three series of the BBC show Afterlife.)

• Love how Dale drove Shane absolutely crazy by not saying a single word. I just hope when Shane finally proves to everyone what a cowardly insane douchebag he is in some overly dramatic way, he manages only to take out Andrea and Lori and not anyone who’s actually tolerable.   

• I cannot believe that no one turned to Shane after the Zombie Barn Massacre and uttered the words “Happy now?” Because I so would have. And then I would have done a Snoopy dance.

• While Rick and Herschel’s endless philosophizing was getting on my last nerve, the story arc in the bar from when Michael Raymond-James and Fat Tony walked into until the inevitable dénouement was atiny little masterpiece. For the first time, I believed Rick was a cop. It was amazing to watch the way he and Raymond-James size each other up. And anybody with an ounce of ability to read a scene could see the exact moment when Rick decided who wasn’t walking out of there. Then it was just a matter of picking the moment. One of the best scenes of the season.

• Bonus thought from Talking Dead – Dave Navarro is about as bright as Lori. He not only managed to totally misread every single character, but when asked about his thoughts on Dale said, “Oh, wait, is he the guy with the RV?” Yeah, right, Navarro, you’re on top of things. And you’re a huge fan, even though you can’t bother to learn the character names. Too busy sanding your amazingly smooth face or braiding up the side of your leather pants?

I am still counting down until the moment when Shane/Lori/Andrea are eaten by zombies. Or killed by their own stupidity. The two are not mutually exclusive. Die, Shane/Lori/Andrea, Die!

We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us: Taking the Train to Zombietown

The Walking Dead has been quite a smash on AMC, which make me gleeful because I think horror is vastly underrated as an art form. But that's a topic for another time. The question is why so popular now? I think one of the reasons is the way that art reflects society, and how society embraces art.

When I was a kid one of the first movies I remember scaring the daylights out of me was 1953's Invaders from Mars, in a which a kid discovers that all the adults he's supposed to trust have in actuality been taken over by aliens. Of course no one believes him. In retrospect the movie is kind of cheesy in the special effects department, but it also has a stark truth about it. There is something utterly terrifying about us not being us.

Elementally, we don't like representations of ourselves that are too close. Ventriloquist dummies, the clockwork Stepford Wives, the mannequins in "The After Hours" from the original Twilight Zone, the inhabitants of the Uncanny Valley. Now take that one step further and hollow us out, fill us with something that is fundamentally not us, or even worse than that, just the absence of us.

In 1968, George Romero directed Night of the Living Dead.  It came at a time when the world was flipping upside down. The Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movements, the sexual revolution, women's lib. Conventions were being torn down, and all this coming on the heels of the McCarthyite era when there was a commie around every corner, well, people were a tad unsettled. Who do you trust? Your government, your neighbors, your kids, no one over 30?

Night of the Living Dead is an embodiment of the '60s. I take George Romero's word that he pays no attention to subtext when he's making a film. The great thing about subtext is that it sometimes just inserts itself, either by luck, by the quiet working of  the artist's subconscious, or by some unknown machination of the universe. Whatever the case, Night of the Living Dead works as well on a subconscious level as it does on a superficial scare level.  Little zombie girl hacking up her parents with a trowel? She would have just have become a hippie in the Haight, and isn't that really the same thing?  Good ol' boys with guns shooting the hero, who just happens to be black? At a certain point, it doesn't matter what was intended, the art takes on a life of its own.

Romero, the zombie godfather, followed up with Dawn of the Dead, where we  are just shells that consume for the sake of consuming, and Day of the Dead, where the military/industrial complex seems to be the last institution standing, or shambling, if you want to look at it that way.

Romero spawned an entire zombie culture. Without Romero, you have no Sense and Sensibility with Zombies, you have no World War Z, you have no The Walking Dead. Which takes us back to my original question. What about zombies gets under our skin?

Right now, the world is an uncertain place. I was a tiny kid in the '60s, so I don't remember it all that well, but it seems like a lot of the things we thought were settled are unsettled. I sure as hell feel nervous. We have come to divide, to another point in time where the populace has fallen into a "them versus us" trap.

The zombie is an all-purpose monster. It's a blank canvas you can spatter with the guts of whatever scares you the most. You're a right-winger? Why the zombie can stand in for every brown/gay/liberal/foreign invader who's come to wrench away everything you hold dear. There are hordes of them. And they keep coming. The only way to protect yourself is to hole up with your guns. You a left-winger? The zombie is the unthinking/unbending/unreasoning/unempathetic other, who can't be argued with, who can't be swayed with decency, who only acts out of the basest instincts. It only wants to destroy you. And the worst thing of all, the absolute worst thing, sometimes that unswayable alien other is right there with you, it's your mom or your husband or your kid.

Apocalyptic fiction has been popular since the Bible. It's a test run, just in case. It's a release valve.  It's a way to play out our fears and walk away at the end of the page, at the end of the episode. A zombie apocalypse is the worst we can image, because it means we are our own destruction, we will devour ourselves.

There is one single thing that every being on earth shares. We all die. We all are dust in the end. Whatever your religion, whatever your belief system, no one really knows what makes us us. And when we cease to be here, where we go. We're all supposed to be wonderful unique snowflakes, but what if in the end we're just meat puppets?  The horror of severing our "us" from our bodies has been around since we first walked out of the caves and told tales around the fire. It's there in "The Monkey's Paw," it's there when the father buries Gage in the Pet Semetary, even after he saw what happened to the cat. It's there when Boris Karloff's monster utters, "We belong dead."

The fitful dead are with us always, and they're not going away anytime soon.

(Next Installment: There's No Crying in Zombietown)


Pop culture recommendation: any iteration of Ray Bradbury's "Mars is Heaven." If you can find the original radio play, it might actually kill you.