| THE WALKING DEAD AS CONSERVATIVE CULTURAL CRITIQUE |
| 1 | CHARLES NUCKOLLS Brigham Young University THE WALKING DEAD AS CONSERVATIVE CULTURAL CRITIQUE K illing zombies can be understood as a form of ritual sacrifice with two purposes: To reinforce the solidarity of the survivor community, and second, to perform the sacrifice of a victim who by virtue of innocence relieves the community of its internally divisive tensions. The first function, in American zombie fiction, is routine enough to considered cliche. |
| 2 | The unity of the group is manifest foremost in its collective defense against a common enemy. The second is no less significant, but only takes place occasionally and in special conditions. One finds clues to the meaning of both in consideration of this question: Why is it necessary to kill zombies with what seems to be excessive violence (e.g., hacking, slicing, gouging)? The focus is the American television series, The Walking Dead, and argues that Christian sacrifice and the restoration of traditional marriage are important themes. |
| 3 | In effect, the series functions as conservative cultural critique. This is contrary to the popular assumption that the world of the zombie apocalypse is synonymous with the collapse of traditional social structures and systems of meaning. Here the opposite conclusion is considered. The ritual of sacrifice serves to re-affirm traditional institutions and to reconstruct the post-apocalyptic world on the basis of a conception of marriage restored to its вtraditionalв form. |
| 4 | The Walking Dead is thus a form of cultural revanchism masquerading as a fantasy of destruction. Extreme Violence and the Sacrifice of Innocents A clue to this trajectory is found in the nature of violence. In the television series, zombies are not merely dispatched, coolly and efficiently, but killed with a violence that goes beyond what standard zombie physiology would seem to require. They are hacked and stabbed, not once but repeatedly, and sometimes in highly ritualized settings (e.g., torch-illuminated arenas) whose purpose is to excite and titillate an audience. |
| 5 | Could the reason be anger, or even the desire for bloodthirsty revenge? Revenge killings function in many societies as a mechanism for maintaining social solidarity. For revenge to be present as a motivating factor it is necessary, but not sufficient, for the perpetrator of the vengeful act to feel that he or she has been wronged somehow by the victim. This is personal vengeance of the sort Francis Bacon described as вwild justice.в What might be termed вvicarious vengeance,в on the other hand, is directed at the person or people who stand in for the person or group that is believed to have wronged oneвs own community. |
| 6 | If it is vengeance of this kind that is on display in The Walking Dead, could that explain the extra measure of violence that killing zombies often requires? In the anthropological literature, killing in order to restore balance between structurally opposed social groups (or subgroups) is a common phenomenon. Barthвs study of the Swat Valley Pathans in Pakistan is a case in point (Barth Nuckolls: The Walking Dead as Conservative Cultural Critique 103 1966; see also Lindholm 1982). |
| 7 | Reciprocal violence between groups can go on for years as members in turn kill and are killed by their counterparts. Then there are the Waorani (formerly known as the вAucaв) of Amazonian Ecuador, whose internecine violence --- mostly between Waorani subgroups -- threatened until recently to decimate the tribe (Robarchek & Robarchek 2002). The process is vicarious because the killer and his victim usually stand in for the groups or sub- groups of which they are members. |
| 8 | Violence is experienced by the victims on behalf of (and therefore vicariously) the groups they represent. The origins of the animosity may be long forgotten. What counts now is the violence itself, and the social calculation of being temporarily one up in the cycle of reciprocal killing. There is a similarity to violence against zombies. Here, too, personal vengeance is notably absent; rarely, in fact, does the zombie-killer know the zombie, and when he does this makes for a certain pathos, as in the first episode of The Walking Dead. |
| 9 | In the seriesв first episode, when a man tries (but fails) to shoot his zombie-wife, she eventually ends up biting and killing their son, and the husband eventually goes insane. Presumably this is intended to suggest the moral dilemma in killing someone who is known and loved, and (more importantly) to foreshadow the child sacrifice that later serves as means for reconstructing social solidarity on the basis of reproductively fertile marriage. |
| 10 | But for the most part вwalkersв (the term used in the series for zombies) are not known to the people who stab them, run over them, or decapitate them. In this respect they resemble the victims of vicarious violence in tribal societies. But victims of violence in this sense must stand in for a group if the violence against them is vicarious in the sense described above. Do zombies qualify? In one sense, of course, the answer must be negative: Zombies do not simply stand in for groups of other zombies. |
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