I’m a squeamish watcher. If it’s a cop show and someone gets shot in the leg, my hand instinctively grasps my own leg. If it’s a horror movie, I involuntarily repeat-shout “Don’t open the closet! Don’t open the closet!” One time, watching the first X-Files movie, I started to wonder who in the theater was talking so loudly before I realized that coming from my own mouth was this high-volume mantra, “Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, no!”
So, I’m not a likely viewer of The Walking Dead. [Spoilers ahead.] I don’t care about zombies, just like I didn’t really care about vampires when I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Angel (in my book, still the only worthwhile ones among the many vampire-themed shows and movies). I’m not especially interested in knowing the “rules” of how zombies are made and how they can get you and what attracts or repels them. For me, zombies are just a vehicle for delivering story in a heightened and focused way.
Here’s the kind of thing I mean: In season two of The Walking Dead I realized with a start that until that very moment I’d never wondered or even considered what anyone (besides Rick, the obvious sheriff) did before the world started to unravel. During a scene on the sanctuary-for-a-while of the farm, Andrea and Dale are talking. Dale says to her “But you were a lawyer.” Andrea, practically and matter-of-factly says “I’m nothing now.” In that moment – a season and a half into watching the show – I realized I’d never once considered anyone’s previous jobs. When’s the last time you spent time with anyone for more than ten minutes without obtaining this information? What do you do? is almost always one of the first things we learn about someone. I’d spent a season and a half with these characters and never even wondered about past lives because, in the world of this story, all that’s important now is what kind of person you are and how you can be part of the group in order to survive.
I routinely look away when zombies are eating or when something particularly gruesome is happening – I don’t need to see (or hear) that in order to get the point. But I can’t look away from the show as story because it’s telling some of the most soulful, character-driven stories out there… Who are you when everything and every one you knew and loved is gone? How is community created and sustained? What do we retain and preserve from our previous lives and culture when the rules have completely changed? Where’s the line between caution and hospitality? In what ways does violence change who we are and in what ways does it show us who we are? What does leadership look like? How do we make ethical choices when all the parameters for ethical behavior have changed? How to we (re)define good or bad?
One of the most beautiful, pregnant-with-meaning, but spare scenes in the series to date was during last week’s episode. Rick and Tyreese are standing outside a white wooden church in daylight. They’re both holding shovels, standing in front of holes they’re making, with bloodied sheets covering a pile of dead bodies next to them. The bodies are those of several people they’ve killed the night before in a kill-or-be-killed battle. The dead had previously held them captive and were intending to butcher and eat them – that was their answer to survival in this bleak time. But Rick and company – though they knew they had to kill the cannibals in order to live and so that others might live – do not leave them uncovered and unburied where they’ve fallen. Because of Rick and company’s answer to violence, ethics, and survival, they are taking the time to bury the people who acted like animals and who had treated them that way.
The scene would have been enough just for that. Enough just to see Rick and Tyreese completing the sweaty, hard work of burying people behind the church, working side by side to keep the smallest semblance of order and dignity and ethical behavior in a crazed and panicked world.
It would have been enough. But they say just three lines of dialogue.
Rick says to Tyreese, “I never asked how it was for you, making your way to Terminus [the place the cannibals lured them].” Tyreese, who had to kill a child along the way, says, “It killed me.”
They keep shoveling in silence. We are watching them in a wide shot, edge of the church in one corner, pile of bodies covered with a bloody sheet next to the holes, green woods behind them, birds singing incongruously. Not breaking the rhythm of shoveling, Rick says, “No, it didn’t.”
No, it didn’t. Those who are dead feed on others. Those who are dead don’t bother to properly bury the dead.
This is why I watch, sometimes holding my hand up to block the parts I can’t watch. I watch because when everything else civilizing has been ripped away, what you do with the dead and who you become in the places you thought were dead tells the story I need to hear.
[Bonus: For those who weren’t geeky enough to pause this week’s episode and copy down the Bible passages listed on the wooden board in the church, I’ve got you covered. They deal with life in and after death, God bringing life to lifeless places, suffering, and resurrection. I imagine the priest putting those up on the board after everything started going down, long after there were parishioners left to read them, in an effort to make sense of the terrifying new reality in terms of God’s promises. Here they are: Romans 6:4, Ezekiel 37:7, Matthew 27: 52, Revelation 9:6, and Luke 24:5.]
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photo credit: “Zombie Apocalypse” © 2005, Stephen Dann, CC BY-SA 2.0