[Assignment]
The Walker Within: How Zombies Define Humanity
Since it first hit comic store shelves in 2003, The Walking Dead has captivated readers, gaining even more prominence when it was made into a television series by the same name in October, 2010 by AMC. The allure of zombies as a trope is strong; they offer an antagonist that is truly unrelenting and impossible to reason with, while their ability to carry on despite massive and traumatic injury allows for high levels of blood, guts, and gore, appealing to the horror fans that are the zombie genre’s main audience. Even from its first appearance, though, the zombie was about more than dragging entrails and hunger for brains. As Robert Kirkman says in his introduction to the first book of The Walking Dead, “Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in societyand our society’s station in the world. They show us gore and violence and all that cool stuff toobut there’s always an undercurrent of social commentary and thoughtfulness” (v). The zombies in The Walking Dead represent the monster within all of us, asserting that even normal, everyday human beings can become terrifying creatures far more easily than they would like to believe, and defining true humanity through resistance to that transformation.
The zombie is a relatively recent addition to the horror writer’s arsenal. Similarly undead entities, like ghosts and vampires, have existed in human folklore for centuries. The modern vampire was spawned in the eighteenth century; ghosts have been a part of folklore since well before the Roman Empire (Alderman). The zombie as it is known to modern culture only came about in 1968 when George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was released in theaters (Macek). Though the term is derived from Haitian folklore and the concept of the reanimated corpse dates back much further, “Prior to this splash, ‘Zombie Films’ usually featured human beings enslaved by Voodoo and controlled by some kind of mad scientist with a diabolical B-movie plan” (Macek). The modern idea of the zombie film—generally post-apocalyptic, with the zombies taking on the role of mindless predators—did not exist before Romero. It was with the Romero films that zombies acquired their allegorical flavor. The modern zombie is associated with the collapse of civilization and the return to pure survival. Zombies are “the interchangeable anonymous people we encounter on our daily commute, those whose humanity we cannot acknowledgeAnd they won’t just kill us, they’ll turn us into one of them. They confront us with how close we all are to the edge of acceptability” (Alderman). More frightening than the single zombie is the fact that they come in hordes, masses of mindless, shambling corpses that can be used to symbolize the danger of the mob mentality or as a cultural commentary, condemning those who follow without questioning.
The Walking Dead put a new spin on the zombie trope, shifting the emphasis from the monsters to the characters, and it is from that shift that the theme becomes clear. The first volume follows Rick Grimes, a police officer from a small town who wakes up from a coma to discover that the world has ended. The first other human Rick encounters is a young boy, Duane, whose first action when he sees Rick is to hit him over the head with a shovel (Kirkman 13). Even though it’s still relatively early on in the apocalypse, Duane has already become accustomed to using violence to defend himself in a way that would have been unacceptable before society collapsed. That Duane is a child—an innocent, and someone you wouldn’t normally associate with violent behavior—serves to highlight how far society has fallen. Duane is not mindless by the zombies, but the presence of the zombies has forced those that are still human to operate in survival mode and take on some of the traits of the things they’re fighting. Still, Duane only injures Rick, refraining from delivering the killing blow once he realizes Rick hasn’t turned; humans are thereby defined as those who can kill but can also choose not to when morality or reason necessitate another choice.
This sentiment is echoed in the scene that ends the volume. By this point, Rick has found his wife (Lori) and son (Carl) at a survivor camp outside Atlanta. They were helped to safety by Shane, Rick’s friend from the police force, who is in love with Lori and slept with her during the trip to Atlanta. When Rick comes back, Shane sees his chances to make a life with Lori disappearing. Shane pulls a gun on Rick, on the reasoning that if he kills Rick he can resume his relationship with Lori. Carl, though, follows Shane and Rick, using his own gun to shoot and kill Shane before he can fire. The juxtaposition of Shane and Carl in this scene perfectly showcase how Kirkman uses zombies to define humanity. After he shoots Shane, Carl tells his father, “It’s not the same as killing the dead ones, Daddy,” to which Rick responds, “It never should be, son. It never should be” (Kirkman 134-135). While both Shane and Carl were human by the definition above, retaining the ability to choose whether or not to kill, it is Carl’s distinction between killing the “dead ones” and the living that shows he’s also retained his humanity. Shane’s willingness to kill out of desire rather than survival makes him just as dangerous to Rick as the zombies. It is the ability to make judgements of right and wrong that makes a person truly human.
The question of whether humanity is derived from society or from the individual becomes most pressing in times of political and cultural upheaval. In her essay “The Meaning of Zombies,” Naomi Alderman points out that “While vampires tend to be more popular in times of economic prosperityzombies, the shuffling mass dressed in rags, tend to come to the fore in more austere times.” Presented with the threat of a societal collapse, people begin to wonder how they would survive in a landscape where it is every man for himself. The question becomes how individual people would define themselves without the context of societal groups—not as an American or as a Christian, but simply as a single Homo sapiens—and to what extent concepts like logic, justice, and empathy, qualities often pegged as inextricably human, would maintain their hold without laws to enforce them. Most people would like to believe they’d be Rick or Carl, able to both survive in an apocalyptic world and stay true to an ingrained code of ethics. The Walking Dead examines the idea that there are multiple ways to lose one’s humanity. Even those that don’t lose their identity and reason by turning into a zombie are at danger of becoming like Shane—able to make choices but lacking the internal moral compass to identify which choices are the right ones.
There are multiple instances in human history where a zombie-like mob mentality has led to death and destruction. The Holocaust in Germany is the most visceral example, with nearly every German citizen turning a blind eye to the genocide of the Jewish people, never directly killing but complicit in their silence. Modern consumerist culture could be cited as a more recent example, the hordes of shoppers mindlessly rushing to superstores to buy cheap things without stopping to think about just why the prices can be so low, or lining up to get their hands on the newest iPhone without considering the conditions of the workers that made them. The zombie is a human body that has lost everything it had that made it a person. Its presence in fiction allows humanity to be defined by contrasting it with everything it’s not. By shifting the attention from the zombies themselves to the human characters that survive, Robert Kirkman in The Walking Dead takes a closer look at what defines humanity by showing its ongoing struggle against the monster that’s within us all.
Works Cited
Alderman, Naomi. “The Meaning of Zombies.” Granta 117. 14 November 2011. Web. 10 July 2016.
Kirkman, Robert. The Walking Dead Volume 1: Days Gone By. Berkeley, CA: Image Comics, 2004. Print.
Macek, J.C. “The Zombification Family Tree: Legacy of the Living Dead.” Pop Matters. 14 June 2012. Web. 10 July 2016.
B. Quote from intro—“there’s always an undercurrent of social commentary”
C. Thesis: The zombies in The Walking Dead represent the monster within all of us, assterting that even normal, everyday human beings can become terrifying creatures far more easily than they would like to believe, and defining true humanity through resistance to that transformation.
II. Zombie history
A. Basis in Voodoo/Haitian culture
B. George Romero’s modern zombie
C. Use as cultural metaphor
III. Use of zombies in The Walking Dead
A. Zombie-like qualities brought out in surviving humans
B. Shane’s attack on Rick—“a human without humanity”
C. Carl quote, “It’s not the same”
IV. Further discussion of humanity in zombie lore
A. Timing with social upheaval
1. Represents collective fears about civilization collapse
B. Targeting which qualities define humanity through contrast with zombies
V. Conclusion
A. Zombie-like people through history
B. Re-state/answer thesis
