Wednesday
May232012
Zombies | Ep #25
;)
Zombies!
Show Notes:
14:40 Interlude: The Sprites: "George Romero"
15:55 Brains
16:28 Dawn of the Dead
34:05 Interlude: The Creepshow: "Zombies Ate Her Brain"
35:10 "You do plan on having zombies in your zombie movie, right?"
46:30 Interlude: The Deadlines: "Go-Go to the Graveyard"
47:52 Shaun of the Dead
49:13 The Walking Dead
54:07 Dead Set
58:01 Happy endings = certain doom
3 Comments →
Reader Comments (3)
Drew won't be surprised by this, but I listened to this episode twice, even though I'm probably the only person that has zombie nightmares every time I watch Shaun of the Dead. My psyche clearly doesn't recognize horror-comedy. Which also happens to explain why, for years and years, I was terrified of a movie scene I saw at age 3 that featured a tap-dancing Alien popping out of a guy's stomach. Carried that with me until college. Yup. On another note, I'm afraid I may be counted among Drew's many friends who love The Walking Dead. So, to set the record straight and preserve what little cred I may have, I will say that I am fully — wincingly — aware of its voluminous literary clichés, unlikeable characters, disregard for logic, slow pace and otherwise avoidable faults, and yet for some reason, I choose to watch it anyway. Then again, I also watched every season of LOST.
I also thought your discussion of Land of the Dead was interesting. I recently read Zone One by Colson Whitehead and he has a similar "workplace zombie" concept whereby certain zombies essentially go back to a semblance of their old daily routine. The protagonist happens upon a copy boy staring at a Xerox machine, for example. Before listening to this podcast, I thought that concept was original. Still a good book, though. Filled with obscure SAT words, too.
I have come back to this episode and now that The Walking Dead is in its third season, I would like to put forth an observation about the series. You both posit that the character conflicts in the first season are cliche and contrived, i.e., one guy is a racist, another guy beats his wife, and so on.
While some may see this as lazy, unimaginative writing, I would like to offer an alternative reading. In the first season, we are introduced to a motley band of survivors who are only a few weeks out from "normal" society. The group has established a loose structure based on the roles each person played before the zombie outbreak began. In this world, while there is some nuance, it's clear who is good and who is bad – racist, bad; sheriff, good; wifebeater, bad; little kid, good – just as it was clear before the zombies appeared.
However, as the series wears on and the group encounters adversity in many forms, we are introduced to increasingly troublesome dilemmas that the characters must respond to. And with each episode, we see the mental, physical, and psychological toll of these experiences reflected in the increasingly fragile group dynamic. As with any character study (LOST comes to mind as a similar in many ways), no character remains unchanged from their "before zombies" selves, and their motivations and decisions may begin in a predictable place, but evolve over time to become increasingly removed from the characters' original moral codes.
So, I might argue that the predicability with which the characters are introduced only serves as a baseline by which to measure their progression into the depths of post-zombie social and psychological disorder. As new characters are introduced throughout the series, many of them are morally ambiguous (albeit archetypes of some kind) and serve to stabilize and/or destabilize the existing group.
That said, you can make the argument that some of the characters aren't very interesting to you or are frustrating in various ways, but I still think that, if the writers' intent is what I have described, it works because it starts in such a predictable place.
Also, as a counterpoint to the "there aren't enough zombies" argument, i'll point out that the number of zombies and zombie 'kills' appearing in each episode has increased with each season, which follows logically with the idea that there are more and more zombies as time goes on.
TL;DR The Walking Dead ain't that bad, yo.