AMC’s Zombie series “The Walking Dead,” which concluded its first season last night, received (mostly) kudos from (mostly) liberal critics. And some of this praise is deserved: The acting is first rate, and the show looks gorgeous – the directing, cinematography, and make-up are feature-film calibre, no question.
But the series also has some serious flaws, which critics seem loathe to mention. The writing is uneven. Some of the characters are disappointingly cliche and two-dimensional (the smart Asian kid, the redneck who beats his wife, etc). And some story points are way too obvious set-ups for way too obvious payoffs – when a character makes a big deal about it being her birthday at the beginning of the episode, you may rest assured she’s going to be Zombie chum at the end of that episode.
But perhaps most unforgivable is that for a zombie show, “The Walking Dead” features a surprising dearth of zombies. Except for the first few action-packed episodes, most of the series seems to consist of people talking about what they’re going to do if the zombies find them.
So why such gushing praise from the critics? Liberals love zombies, because they terrorize in the aggregate and lack individual will, volition and character, and so lend themselves easily to being used as a metaphor for any sort of large scale environmental, economic, or military catastrophe. This allows the film-maker to engage in “social commentary” (lucky us), which liberal artists love to make more than art and liberal critics love to praise more than critique. George Romero pioneered this approach with “Night of the Living Dead,” which used zombies to cast a light on race relations, and “Dawn of the Dead,” which satirized America’s mall-culture commercialism, among others.
And indeed, in “The Walking Dead,” the zombies could easily be substituted for a hurricane, nuclear war, etc., anything to throw a small group of people together in a desperate survival situation so the audience can watch them backstab each other, and the film-maker can make the point:
“It’s not the dead you have to worry about. It’s the living.”
I get it. Very clever. But I already know that. I don’t need a zombie show to tell me about man’s inhumanity to man. But I do need a zombie show to show me zombies’ inhumanity to man.
Is that too much to ask?
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