The Problem of "Us"

Is anyone else excited about The Walking Dead tonight?

I, for one, cannot wait. The pilot episode did not disappoint, and while the second episode brought up many questions, at least for me, as to whether or not the series could maintain its original promise, last week's episode "Tell It To the Frogs" dispelled any doubts I may have had. Quite honestly, I thought it was brilliant.

One of the reasons I love horror in general is how the genre lends itself to the epic struggle of good versus evil. For example, vampires are usually bad. We know very clearly who the bad guys are and who the good guys are. Zombies tend to fit this pattern. After all, everyone knows the object of the zombie movie is to kill the zombies, no questions asked. It is this paradigm that allows for such entertainment that a movie like Zombieland (2009) can produce. We love to watch our hero bash in some zombie brains.

The Walking Dead follows this model well. One of the characters even comments that it is "us versus the dead." The problem, though, in Darabont's world is not the dead--it is the "us." Flannery O'Connor in her short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find" writes, using the voice of the Misfit, "She would have been a good woman [...] if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life," drawing upon the idea that in the face of death our humanity really shows through. The knowledge of our own mortality highlights the goodness in us, the true evil in us, and all those messy gray areas in between.

In The Walking Dead, as in life, the true horror is what we as humans are capable of doing to one another.

The third episode opens (and I promise if you're worried about spoilers, this is the only detail I give away) with Merle Dixon on the roof alone, handcuffed to a pipe after a recent scuffle. The image is a truly horrific one as we watch a man face his imminent death. Interestingly, similar to what the Misfit observes in the O'Connor story, Merle reaches out to Jesus, begging for help in between frantic and often angry outcries. The terror of the man's situation intensifies as the audience wrestles with the fact that another man put him in this situation, leaving him there to die. The chain and lock on the door only exemplify this problem: is it an act of kindness to keep the zombies out (a gruesome, painful, but quick death), or is it worse to let him slowly die of thirst and exposure? The characters themselves, like the audience, are not sure how to answer this question.

Maybe this is what I like about the show so far. It resists moralizing and preaching. The characters are not sure how to answer these tough questions. They struggle with defining morality just as we do. The past three episodes have already tackled difficult issues like race and gender, and the series has done so successfully thus far. Interestingly, religion has not been directly addressed, but it has been alluded to. The survivors have pondered over the ethics of their actions (looting the department store in Atlanta, for instance). In another subtle example, the van in the background of the survivor's campsite is a church van (Holy Cross Lutheran Church). Darabont has created a South that is, to borrow another of Flannery O'Connor's terms, "Christ-haunted." I have a feeling that this will be something the survivors will have to address at some point in the series. Are ideas like religion and faith still applicable in this post-apocalyptic world? What does it mean for ideas like heaven and hell if the dead are roaming the earth looking for their next meal? If ethics and morality are still important, then who determines right and wrong? And what happens when two people's ideas of right conflict?

I don't know how these questions will be answered, but I know I can't wait to tune in and see.