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Friday
Oct192012

Shoot him in the head! That should weaken him!  

Season 3 of the Walking Dead premiered this Sunday, and I recently caught up on Season 2 (and then re-watched seasons 1 & 2, because how could you not?), and I've been thinking about why killing zombies feels so important.  

I wasn't a zombie guy before the Walking Dead (with the exception of Shaun of the Dead, of course), so I'd never thought much about why zombies are great.  They're people-eating people.  Stupid cannibals.  Things even most fat people can outrun (as evidenced by the general lack of fat zombies).  

Until now, I'd gone with Chuck Klosterman's argument, which he outlines on the other side of this link http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/arts/television/05zombies.html?pagewanted=all , but for those of you not wanting to read an entire article because of the article you're reading, I'll sum it up: killing zombies is the same as our day-to-day tasks.  We feel overwhelmed by emails, tweets, things we must like, and simple but never-ending tasks from all sides.  Killing zombies is the same--destroy the brain, then the next brain, and on and on with the cranial smiting.  You'll never reply to all your emails, the same as you'll never kill all the zombies.  

Which makes sense.  We're combining the tension between feeling in control (knowing how to solve the problem) and being overwhelmed, plus tossing some violence into the mix.  Of course we love it--that's America right there.  

Maybe it's just because of how I've been feeling lately (misanthropic, we'll call it), but I started thinking about how destroying the brain kills the zombie.  Even decapitation doesn't work--if the brain still ticks, the zombie's not dead.  If it's not dead, that mouth will still bite, that brain in there's still hungry.  It still wants to consume.  It's still a threat.  

Do we fear that single-mindedness?  

Nope, saying something only wants to eat isn't a fat joke (for once).  I'm thinking about consuming in a broader sense.  

What about our media?  

Are we afraid of becoming like the masses of people who consume shitty content all of the time, who have terrible taste and just keep consuming more and more of it?  

And it might go even further--zombies represent all of the people we don't want to be.  Not just people who like [Insert shitty thing here]--all of the unthinking people, the masses that move our culture, the people who make awful decisions and have stupid opinions and are just plain dumb heads.  

(This works on either side of any issue, of course, since we believe any situation has only two sides in America)

Which obviously makes this apply to politics, too--a lot of yelling from both sides, mindless yammering about the same shit without anyone meeting in the middle and actually talking things through.  

If we could talk to zombies, we could show them that all this eating of the living is really pointless--there's a limited supply of tasty man flesh left, and if they keep eating us, it's all going to disappear. What's left for them?  They don't even enjoy it that much--a remotely shiny thing will distract them from a meal, so they can't be eating with that much relish.  If we could talk to them, they'd see that their viewpoint hasn't been meticulously considered, that there are shades of grey, that we might achieve some level of mutual benefit if we stopped killing and just talked, mano e dead mano.  

Ultimately, we're afraid of conversion.  We're afraid we'll be infected by their thinking and become one of them.  Some unthinking corpse that doesn't care what it consumes, so long as it moves.  It's a plague driving us to become the lowest common denominator.  

But if we just pop them in the head, no worries.  Keep them at a distance and destroy that brain, and there'll be no problems.  

Or the gore's just fuckin' cool, man.  

Reader Comments (2)

I wonder what this indicates about my consuming fear of zombies...

November 19, 2012 | Unregistered CommenterFelicia

It means that you agree with some part of my theory, which means you're becoming ONE OF US. ONE OF US.

But thanks!

November 24, 2012 | Unregistered CommenterPeter

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