I find myself daily deluged by supporters of the “America Is Awesome” movement. We are, its rabid supporters froth, the most greatest country on the Earth in every which way, and if you don’t think so you’re a commie socialist and should leave forthwith.
This flies in the face of all empirical evidence, not the least of which is the pap we nightly choose to ingest on TV.
The guys who maintain my building (we live in a co-op in NYC), a great bunch, by the way, despite the fact that they are to a man Yankee fans, were filling me in on what passes for awesome entertainment these days. While I consider Louie the pinnacle of fine art (and not just because I draw a paycheck from the production company), I was told that what I really should be watching is The Walking Dead. I tried to explain that neither zombies nor any other iteration of raving preternatural creatures compels me to tune in. This includes all manner of superheros, even those played by Robert Downey Junior while he’s clean and sober.
Nothing in the manner of childish fantasy gore attracts my interest. Aside from their mandatory requirement to feature thick strands of hanging drool, I find it a sad commentary on the American fetish with the sickeningly banal. Dexter? Eat me. Or rather, please don’t.
But no, seriously, this zombie show is way different. It isn’t about zombies so much. It's more about, you know, like, serious human emotional stuff, when the zombies aren’t hot on the scent of a raw meal. Oh… well then.
After the lecture concluded, I walked outside and was immediately presented with the image of a bus plastered with ads for The Walking Dead. Then another one. The second bus was accompanied by a running commentary from a young couple walking ahead of me. The male was waxing euphoric over what a remarkable series it was. I nearly severed his Achilles tendon to get a clean listen of his review. The female said it was incredible how totally excellent television had gotten in recent years, and to support her argument she had a fine ass.
Perhaps I was missing something. I looked again at the bus, now stopped in traffic. I saw words used to describe the show. Words like “Powerful” and “Provoking” and “Powerfully Provoking.”
The words all had one thing in common: they were cloaked in quotation marks. Here’s another word dressed up the same way: “Bullshit”.
Whose words were these? The words of network flacks, of course. I went home after these visitations and Hulu’d the only show available (zombies rule Internet streaming), the Season 2 premier. It was an hour of gross hokum dressed in grisly production value. Which didn’t stop me from passing the virus along. My wife was the next victim, and from there it was a wave of genetic retribution.
We ended up watching Tivo’d shows at Deb’s sister’s home. I was amazed we all endured the carnage. A fifteen year-old was allowed to attend, and I was there too. My cheap-seat commentary would normally be enough to clear a room.
We’ve since seen everything that has aired to date. It's all nauseating, to say the least. Not to mention incredibly stupid, which cannot be mentioned enough. Incredibly stupid. It would shame me to say I wrote for this show all the way to the bank.
We’ve since seen everything that has aired to date. It's all nauseating, to say the least. Not to mention incredibly stupid, which cannot be mentioned enough. Incredibly stupid. It would shame me to say I wrote for this show all the way to the bank.
The atavistic attraction is inexplicable unless you look up the word "atavistic." I occasionally find myself drawn to closer inspections of road kills, and I'm always sorry for it. There is no respectable reason to watch this show unless you're working on a doctoral list of every way to kill a person from the neck up and wish to check your list off against this benchmark.
What can zombies do? They can do whatever their metrosexual authors desire them to do. If required to be clueless, lethargic lawn ornaments, that is what they will be. If they need legions of bags of protoplasmic ooze to silently materialize out of thin air, loaded to the gills with highly attuned feral senses, they will oblige. They will take just as much time to level a barrier, be it of cinderblock or cellophane, as is required by the featured humans to decide on the worst possible choice of retaliatory action.
And the humans? Their antics are even more noxious to swallow. They manage to incite unfounded empathy in the worst of us even as they act in ways more disturbing than an over-baked Winnebago full of Pennsylvania pigskin coaches.
The show’s first Jump-the-Shark moment (were I a shark I would need a bigger ocean) comes way too soon in Season 1, when a despicable hillbilly (every human in this show is reprehensible enough to deserve a sickening on-camera death, particularly the hillbilly sheriff, who insists on wearing his Dudley Do-Wrong costume no matter how entrail-caked it becomes) who really deserves to die, so he’s left to do so by his compatriots, he handcuffed to a thin rod on the rooftop of an Atlanta building (in this world there is only Atlanta and the woods), with nothing to comfort him but his military training memories and a conveniently placed hacksaw.
Given the choice of hacking through the rod (piece of cake), or perhaps the handcuffs (harder, but doable, a cop friend tells me), he chooses a third option: the removal of his own hand, thus providing a more compelling visual for us to return to after the station break.
The hand is all our remorseful rescue team discovers, after having risked their dubiously calculated lives to save the rat-bastard. Which means he’ll show up again down the road, like a bad penny, or Newt Gingrich. Count on it.
nailed it (right through the brain stem)
ReplyDeleteThe Walking Dead's primary failure, though, let's face it is substance. The Zombie, like any genre, is merely a framework, a premise to work inside of. And I do think something can be said for working within a genre. Given a set of guidelines, a certain universe within which one can operate, writers can subvert expectation, flip it on its head, or like Romero's original creatures, create social satire with its drooling gut dragging mall goers. Early on, the main character, the cop, meets a black father and son. Interesting. Black is not a neutral color. Not there anyways.And having been an Atlanta resident and given the familiarity I have with the still if not nominally but socially segregated southeast, Perhaps some impending commentary? The young black boy's mother had succumbed to the zombie disease and occasionally the father and son would look out into the street and see her wandering around aimlessly. It reminded me of an article I had read about the explosion of crack in poor black neighborhoods in the 1980s and havoc that wreaked. How interesting it would have been if this zombifying contagion had fallen along class lines? If Katrina taught us anything it was that the greatest victims of a natural disaster are the poor. Perhaps if the writers of the WIRE could be brought in to resituate these sadly two dimensional folks in the realm of the real world we could start seeing some speficity instead of archetypes. Anyways, my real question to you is, how do you get LOUIE to look so creamy and even? I love the way it looks. Great show too.
ReplyDeleteNora, while I grant your premise, I’d add the caveat that not all genres are created equal. And I think it’s fair to ask of the producers, in the midst of their mayhem did they intend to create thought-provoking social commentary, or simply gross out viewers (a time-honored story-telling imperative) in the service of their advertisers? By the look and sound of things (grisly “production value” interspersed with the vacuous musings of country bumpkin caricatures) I’d say the latter.
ReplyDeleteI’d place this show within the more general category of apocalyptic fiction, where one takes the simplistic notion of everything going to the shitter on a grand scale (meteors, aliens, tsunamis et al) and expounds upon the CGI’d outcome in typical Hollywood fashion. This ostensibly serves as a vehicle for the observance of human behavior in horrific situations. Typically though, the storyline devolves into men behaving badly for casual entertainment, till boy gets girl.
I may be biased, but this rarely leads to any thoughtful introspection. In fact, I would argue the opposite, for what we have here is a metaphor for human warfare. And the strategy humans have used to foment, finance and fight wars since time immemorial has been to first dehumanize the “other side”. There’s no easier way to rally troops to atrocitiy than to zombify the bad guys.
As soon as we convince ourselves the other side is essentially waiting to be dead, we can mindlessly complete the process and any question of man’s inhumanity to man is vaporized along with the gray matter. The fetishistic worship of weaponry as the only viable solution to conflict circumvents any need for understanding and negotiation. This is how one efficiently dispenses with such creatures as Chinks, Krauts and camel jockeys.
You bring up “The Wire”. Precisely. No need to introduce extra-terrestrials to create one of the finest dramas of our age. And no need to imagine (I shudder to do so, in fact) what that show would have become if entrusted to the hackneyed hands of the staff of “The Walking Dead”.
It isn’t as if these showmen haven’t attempted to create drama here. It’s just that they’re so ham-fisted at it, and then create such garishly simple-minded resolutions to the questions they raise. Shame on them. And by extension, shame on me.