Walk The Dead

The Walking Dead, otherwise known as AMC’s latest story that matters, is a zombiepocalypse masterpiece. Based on a graphic novel of the same name, series developer Frank Darabont, has distilled a raw energy from the original pages that burns on the small screen like the only light left on in the dark.

The premise is literal: there are dead people walking the streets.  An indirect comma ominous explanation suggests a virus has ravaged through the American south.  Second, third, fourth generation zombies or “walkers” seem to arise from bitten victims who survive, though I’m still waiting on the medical rationale behind the initial wave of zombie forebears.  Therefore, the bedrock of The Walking Dead is obviously survival, carrying on after the apocalypse.  It’s life or death in the best way possible (unlike “Lost” and its spiraling purgatory).

Calculated single-camera shots remain a consistent feature of the series, though the aesthetic effect of immediacy and isolation is perhaps best utilized in the pilot.  Darabont, who also directed the episode, pays homage to the original panel format by still-setting the camera in frame as the actors move through.  This stillness and a lack of soundtrack (with the exception of heavy breathing and guttural noises) do much to impart a sense of warped negative space, which in turn disconnects the viewer from a completely normal experience of say, seeing a suburban street.  The end of days has indeed come to pass.  It feels palpable and uncomfortable.

At the center of the character ensemble is Georgia’s King County, deputy sheriff: Mr. Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln).  Grimes has the features of comic book messiahs, square-jawed, inexplicable sense of responsibility, black and white worldview, but Darabont’s Grimes also has a kind of weakness.  The TV Grimes is afraid of something unnamed, he’s staunch yet unrooted, and his strength stems from broken resolve.

An especially powerful moment from the pilot involves a man whose wife has become a walker.  At the onset of infection, she asks her husband to kill her, but he can’t.  He won’t even leave her behind.  He stays in the same town where she “died.”  Eventually, he holes up on the top floor of a boarded house and points a rifle out the window.  The man begins to shoot roaming walkers to draw his undead wife to the sound of the gun.  She appears and staggers toward the house.  The man steels himself, puts his wife in the crosshairs, and he still can’t do it.  He just stares at her in torture.  He can’t conceive of his wife as anything else.  He has to humanize her.  Sold.

This level of character presence exists throughout The Walking Dead, and the layered emotional tiers impart a sense of identity.  The show actually pursues realism in this regard because the essential question is not how to survive, but how to be human.  You follow the day-to-day of this post-apocalyptic world and the walkers seem genuinely terrifying, you think to yourself how nice it is that the undead don’t eat your skin in jerky strips, and then suddenly a realization dawns on you that this zombie show might actually go deeper.  The Walking Dead delivers a visceral portrayal of what remains to define people when they’re stripped bare.  Throw in high-octane intensity and claw-at-your-body-in-complete-desperation-psychological turmoil—it’s a monster mash.

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