God forgive me, but dude on the left looks sort of like Neil Young… sorry.

Something occurred to me this morning whilst trying to ignore stomach cramps and fever. Watching season after season of The Walking Dead on my own, outside the context of new episodes and seasons being released to fans, has probably colored my reaction to it. Watching the ordeals of the characters on the show has been an ordeal in its own right. The difference between me and its regular audience though is that it’s not been a shared ordeal. Fans and regular viewers got to share in the whole experience and get a sense of connectedness with each other. That just doesn’t happen when the viewer is sitting at home alone grinding through episode after episode. It’s just another spectacle with nobody to share it with.

For years now I’ve watched fans of various shows light up when conversation falls on their favorite shared thing. It’s like a low-key tribal connection and my hunch is that these connections had more to do with hanging on to shows that went too long than the shows themselves. I’ve just missed the fucking point and probably missed out on a lot because of my stubborn distancing.

It also occurs to me that in the absence of real shared ordeals, at least until the advent of COVID-19, people hung on to The Walking Dead to get some vicarious thrill. Maybe it’s genetic memory. As pain is often the touchstone of all growth, shared hardship is the touchstone of connectivity and ultimately, meaning. What is life and death anyway?

Anyway…

I still don’t get the popularity of Seinfeld, but that’s another story.

Still to be discussed, the ongoing popularity with the zombie genre… A friend said last night that she thinks it’s about the fear of dying and the dead. She said she doesn’t understand that fear. I’m not sure I share her beliefs here though. The popularity, it seems to me, is based on a few things and some of them more intangible and unarticulated. There are obvious angles, like the ongoing theme of survival and how far we’ll go to survive before we become less than human ourselves. That runs through most of the genre and that seems to have more to do with fear of what might be hiding in each of us.

I think the popularity also speaks to our unspoken fears of the instability of our own society and the precepts that supposedly make us civilized. Certainly we already do some very uncivilized things to protect the notion that we stand above all other creatures, and above any number of other people. I just get to thinking that not even so deep down we know that we’re all full of shit and that we’re not so civilized at all. We exist with strong desire to believe that truth and morality are absolute but the fearful truth that everything is conditional.

Yup, I think the zombie thing is our knowledge that we are full of shit. Science fiction and horror writers have always been the first willing to dissect and examine what it means to be “human.” As far as the viewers go, most of them probably aren’t fully conscious of why they keep getting drawn in. It’s like a fascination with a mirror.

Sidenote – consider the running zombie theme of eating brains. It’s not the first part of the body that an animal goes for when it kills. That would be the bowels. The brain thing feels like an exclamation point on a statement about the destruction and decay of rational thought.

Okay, time to go figure out why I’m cramping and sweating.