The Walking Dead in an age of anxiety

Like all good science fiction and horror, The Walking Dead is completely believable once you accept the premise—the existence of corpses that walk and bite. But though the zombies are integral to The Walking Dead’s plot, they’re not what the show is really about. They’re just a way to blow up the world. As creator Robert Kirkman tells Matt Mogk, author of Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Zombies, The Walking Dead is “about us. It’s about how we respond to crisis.” Director George Romero, who kicked off the zombie genre with his 1968 horror classic Night of the Living Dead, said much the same about his film. “Zombies could be anything,” he told The Big Issue magazine. “They could be a hurricane or a tornado. It’s not about the zombies. The important thing to me is the way people react to this horrible situation, misbehave, make mistakes, and screw themselves up.”

Kirkman’s dystopia swarms not only with the walking dead but also with bands of desperate—and sometimes predatory—survivors, competing with one another for dwindling supplies or food, ammunition, and defensible shelter. Everyone left alive learns that distrust is essential. Yet, even forced to spend their lives in survival mode, the characters of The Walking Dead still yearn for meaning. There’s a wish-fulfillment aspect to the story, which anyone who has ever fantasized, even idly, about living through an apocalyptic event will recognize. The last people on earth can reinvent themselves into something better, or more powerful. Glenn, a pizza-delivery driver before the zombie plague, becomes, postapocalypse, a vital strategist and skillful navigator of deadly terrain. Philip Blake was an office drone in the old, normal world; in the dark new world, he’s the Governor, the feared and charismatic ruler of Woodbury, a walled-off town of survivors. Carol was a cringing victim of domestic violence before the end of civilization; after, she chops her zombified husband’s body into pieces with an ax and transforms herself into a hardened, capable survivor.

Society begins to reinvent itself, making The Walking Dead a study in primitive politics. Different models of government emerge—Rick’s tough but basically consensual and fair leadership, the Governor’s brutal authoritarianism, and a mysterious new system, which appears to involve ritualized cannibalism, at the end of season four. All these systems are more or less based on the chieftain model that humans lived under during their prehistory. Nobody builds bridges, founds nonprofits, or splits the atom in The Walking Dead. No one mentions the United States Constitution.