The Fresh Air of 'The Walking Dead'
Classical Greek themes include a cautionary tale of anocracy
I’ve been watching AMC’s “The Walking Dead” for a couple of months now and, aside from a sneaking suspicion that “post-apocalyptic zombies” is how billionaires, Musk, Bezos and Zuckerberg view us, I find the show surprisingly restful.
Although the world is inhabited by highly contagious flesh eating zombies (and, among the living, more than a few murderous survivalist psychopaths), for once we are watching a human society that isn’t pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at an alarming rate.
In fact, the breakdown of global civilization by a killer disease that turns almost everyone into “walking dead,” means that though society as we know it is irreparably damaged and must start over, the ecosphere is rebounding. The show only hints at it, but the cumulative effect of ending commercial human monoculture and consumption, as well as the sudden roving masses of indiscriminate carnivores means that there is a unique and bizarre opportunity for the flora of “The Walking Dead” world to flourish.
But it’s the human interactions — which the show concentrates on — that are really fascinating. As the mode of living changes from survival scavenging to culture and cultivation, people’s choices change. The survivor society recapitulates the development — and the ethical dilemmas — of basic human civilization, as the groups grow from individuals to extended families to communities, and finally to city states.
As it reaches a stage of de facto city states, “The Walking Dead” parallels the era of classical Greek civilization and the show’s script engages with the same basic human questions as Sophocles, Aeschylus and Euripides. Who are our tribe, who our family? How do people earn entry? What happens when some needy person comes knocking at the gates of our embattled and impoverished city? What happens when an army conquers us? How do we learn and change from the brutal events of survival? How, to boil it down, do we treat the stranger and build for the future?
There’s a devil’s bargain at the heart of civil society, but at what point must it be struck? How and when do we use our power and strength to enshrine right and justice at the heart of society? And when do we move past lex talionis and revenge — an eye for an eye, a life for a life — as a tool of justice?
Watching the show while 20th century democratic institutions strain at the seams, is also restful. Deceit is face-to-face, unmediated by internet platforms. Murder is only available at the scale of hand weapons. Ammunition is limited. While in the real world we are buffeted at massive scale by evil media liars like Alex Jones, amoral billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg, and hate-mongering politicians like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Viktor Orban, Jair Bolsonaro and genocidal Xi Jinping, the evil leaders of classical Greece and Walking Dead America can only wipe out what they can see.
Tolstoy may have written that humans only need enough land to bury themselves, but his characters weren’t battling the undead to reestablish human civilization. The show visits and revisits the relationship of might and right. The writing and directing of the show often dips from excellent to lame, but what remains consistent is the will to compare and contrast the behaviour of the walking living and the walking dead, as well as the choices of the different leaders of the living groups. Couched in the rhetoric of toxic masculinity, characters weigh the need for protection and communal strength against the ideals of community freedom.
As charismatic narcissists lead our actual, ailing world into anocracy — a form of governance that mixes democratic with autocratic features — “The Walking Dead” shows the doomed allure of the caudillo. “People are a resource,” as we are reminded
by one of the most compelling and most toxic of these “strongmen” (whose symbol of power is a barbed-wire covered baseball bat named for his dead wife). But what people are not, for even the most empathetic of these autocrats, is agents of their own destiny.
The show’s writers have magically transformed the pressing geopolitical issue of our time — massive population growth — into a constant source of narrative urgency. Killing everyone off solves the challenge of how to create a system that keeps everyone alive without constantly making it harder for that system. And having that massive population always trying to eat the flesh of the survivors is a way of keeping survivors — and audiences— on their toes.
This murderous narrative strategy transforms a version one of the three pressing issues of 2022 into a solution for another. A pandemic kills enough people off that the climate change crisis is essentially averted and the show can concentrate on belonging and governance.
I’m only up to the 8th season so I don’t know how, or if, the great experiment of human life on Earth ends. But I hope that when the characters on the show are able to choose a way to power their life, they choose one that doesn’t also poison their world.
Thanks! What’s Next?
Thanks to everyone who supported the climate in honor of my NYC Triathlon event. We raised somewhere more than $1,800 and, surely, convinced Joe Manchin to get on the right side of history. My next newsletter will be about fairness, and will appear in your inbox somewhere around U.S. Labor Day.