Are We the Walking Dead? Zombie Apocalypse as Liberatory Art

Abstract

Marcuse argued that subversive visions of a better reality can emerge from “low” as well as “high” culture, from within as well as outside the repressive apparatus. This article leverages Marcuse’s aesthetic theory to consider whether the enormously popular AMC cable series, The Walking Dead, might be considered emancipatory art. Set in a post-neoliberal America suffering through a zombie apocalypse, the dark, existential themes and urgent political ambivalences of this series reflect collective yearnings, tensions, and fissures in the current social reality worth attending to. I argue that The Walking Dead does have emancipatory potential, in that it addresses “depth dimension” concerns that occupied Marcuse; reflects disillusionment with core aspects of American neoliberalism; and reaches for less repressive, more life-affirming, alternative political visions. Time will tell if the show will sustain such visions or surrender to the status quo.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers, whose thoughtful feedback on this essay was most helpful, and also to Lisa Disch and the panelists on “The Culture of Neoliberalism and Post-modernism” panel at the Association for Political Theory conference, 2015. Thanks also to students in my course “Political Theory, Climate Change, and the Zombie Apocalypse,” for their always-invaluable insights on zombies in the current political moment.

Notes

¹ David Peisner, “Robert Kirkman: I Can Do 1,000 Issues of ‘The Walking Dead’,” Rolling Stone, October 8, 2013.

² The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, English Version, 1978), p. 72.

³ Herbert Marcuse, “Art in the one-dimensional Society,” in Peter Marcuse (ed), Herbert Marcuse: Art and Liberation (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007), p. 115. Marcuse cites versus from a “pretty bad poet indeed,” Arthur O’Shaughnessy, to illustrate the persistence and protest of art.

⁴ Herbert Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, English Version, 1978), p. 37.

⁵ Ibid., 11.

⁶ Michael Schneider, “These Are the 100 Most-Watched TV Shows of the 2015–16 Season: Winners and Losers.” IndieWire, May 31, 2016, available online at: http://bit.ly/1TPSKpd (accessed July 28, 2016); The Walking Dead (TV Series), Section 5.2, Ratings, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walking_Dead_(TV_series)#Ratings

⁷ Herbert Marcuse, “Art and Revolution,” in Peter Marcuse (ed), Herbert Marcuse: Art and Liberation, p. 170.

⁸ Todd Platts, “Locating Zombies in the Sociology of Popular Culture.” Sociology Compass 7 (2013), pp. 547–560.

⁹ See Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz, “Infection, Media, and Capitalism: From Early Modern Plagues to Postmodern Zombies,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10:2 (2010), pp.126–147; Henry Giroux, Zombie Politics and Culture in the Age of Casino Capitalism (New York, NY: Peter Lang Academic Publishers, 2010); Denise N. Cook, “The Cultural Life of the Living Dead,” Contexts 12:24 (2013), pp. 54–56; and Dan Drezner, “Night of the Living Wonks: Toward an International Relations Theory of Zombies,” Foreign Policy, June 11, 2010, and Glen Whitman and James Dow (eds.), Economics of the Undead: Zombies, Vampires, and the Dismal Science (New York, NY: Rowman & Littlfield, 2014).

¹⁰ Christopher M. Moreman and Cory James Rushton (eds.), Race, Oppression and the Zombie: Essays on Cross-Cultural Appropriations of the Caribbean Tradition (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2011), p. 2.

¹¹ Karen McCarthy-Brown, “Afro-Caribbean Spirituality: A Haitian Case Study,” Second Opinion, II (1989), pp. 36–67.

¹² Ibid., 38.

¹³ Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988).

¹⁴ Moreman and Rushton (eds.), Race, Oppression and the Zombie, p. 4.

¹⁵ Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism,” boundary 2 35:1 (2008), pp. 85–108.

¹⁶ Gerry Canavan, “‘We Are the Walking Dead’: Race, Time, and Survival in Zombie Narrative,” Extrapolation 51:3 (Fall 2010), pp. 431–453.

¹⁷ See Charles Reitz, Art, Alienation and the Humanities: A Critical Engagement with Herbert Marcuse (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000).

¹⁸ Ibid., 122–124.

¹⁹ Ibid., 123.

²⁰ Eros and Civilization; Reitz, Art, Alienation, and the Humanities, p. 19.

²¹ Matthew Walker, “When There’s No More Room in Hell, the Dead Will Shop the Earth: Romero and Aristotle on Zombies, Happiness, and Consumption,” in William S. Larkin and Hamish Thompson (eds), Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy: New Life for the Undead (Chicago, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, 2010).

²² George A. Romero, Dawn of the Dead, Laurel Group, Inc., 1978.

²³ Edgar Wright, Shaun of the Dead, StudioCanal, 2004.

²⁴ “Under the law of the aesthetic form, the given reality is necessarily sublimated: the immediate content is stylized, the “data” are reshaped and reordered in accordance with the demands of the art form, which requires that even the representation of death and destruction invoke the need for hope—a need rooted in the new consciousness embodied in the work of art.” Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, pp. 6–7.

²⁵ Herbert Marcuse, “Art in one-dimensional Society” in Peter Marcuse, Herbert Marcuse: Art and Liberation (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007), p. 119.

²⁶ Marcuse, “Art and Revolution,” p. 171.

²⁷ Ibid., 171.

²⁸ Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, p. 11.

²⁹ Ibid., 117.

³⁰ Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, p. 9, italics original.

³¹ Marcuse, Art in One-Dimensional Society, p. 114.

³² Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, p. 45.

³³ Marcuse, “Art in the one-dimensional Society,” p. 120.

³⁴ Ibid., 10.

³⁵ Marcuse, Art in the one-dimensional Society, p. 114.

³⁶ Ibid., 115.

³⁷ Herbert Marcuse, “Art and Revolution” (1972) in Peter Marcuse, Herbert Marcuse: Art and Liberation (New York, NY: Routledge, 2007), pp. 170–1.

³⁸ Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, pp. 18–19. See also p. 8: “A work of art is authentic or true not by virtue of its content (that is, the ‘correct’ representation of social conditions), nor its ‘pure’ form, but by the content having become form.”

³⁹ Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, p. 22.

⁴⁰ Marcuse, “Art in the one-dimensional Society,” p. 115.

⁴¹ Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, p. 15–18.

⁴² Marcuse, “Art in the one-dimensional Society,” p. 119.

⁴³ Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, pp. 2–3; 8; 17–19.

⁴⁴ Marcuse, “Art and Revolution,” p. 169.

⁴⁵ Ibid.

⁴⁶ At this writing, the comic is on its one hundred fiftieth issue, released in January 2016. Available online at: http://walkingdead.wikia.com/wiki/Storyline_(By_Issue).

⁴⁷ Though beyond the scope of the present inquiry, it might be fruitful to investigate the differences between the comic series and the television show over time, to determine how the political implications might vary.

⁴⁸ David Peisner, “Robert Kirkman: I Can Do 1,000 Issues of “The Walking Dead,” Rolling Stone, October 8, 2013. Available online at: http://rol.st/1PgeEuu.

⁴⁹ Andrew Wallenstein, “How ‘The Walking Dead’ Breaks Every Rule We Know About TV Hits,” Variety, February 10, 2014. Available online at: http://bit.ly/1gnRFxS.

⁵⁰ Sara Bibel, “‘The Walking Dead’ Season 5 Finale is Highest Rated Finale in Series History, Garnering 15.8 Million Viewers,” TV by the Numbers, March 30, 2015. Retrieved June 4, 2015; Wikipedia, Walking Dead Ratings. Available online at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walking_Dead_(TV_series)#Ratings (accessed October, 2015).

⁵¹ Adam Kirsch and Mohsin Hamid, “Are the New ‘Golden Age’ TV Shows the New Novels?” New York Times, Sunday Book Review, February 25, 2004. Available online at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/books/review/are-the-new-golden-age-tv-shows-the-new-novels.html?_r=0.

⁵² Danielle LaPorte and Linda Sievertson, Interview with Robert McKee, Beautiful Writers Podcast, March 19, 2016, at time stamp 28:19–29:35.

⁵³ There were six 45- to 60-min episodes the first season, thirteen the second, and sixteen episodes from Seasons 3–6.

⁵⁴ Marcuse, Eros and Civilization (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 1.

⁵⁵ Daniel Solomon, “Tabula Zombie: Locke’s Political Society and the Post-Apocalyptic Scene,” Time Lords (Philosophy Blog), September 30, 2012.

⁵⁶ Marcuse, “Art in the one-dimensional Society,” p. 119.

⁵⁷ Ibid.

⁵⁸ George Monbiot, “Neoliberalism—The Ideology at the Root of All of Our Problems,” The Guardian, April 15, 2016. Available online at: http://bit.ly/1WsKPhU.

⁵⁹ Lorraine Berry, “Still a White Patriarchy,” Salon, April 2013. In February 2014, Executive Producer Tom Luse visited a class of mine to answer students’ questions about The Walking Dead. He explained that TWD writers often pay attention to published and online critiques of racial, gender, and class dynamics in the show, and that they have sometimes made adjustments when they determined those viable. An example given was the killing off, early on, of black characters, which the show eventually corrected.

⁶⁰ Episode 613.

⁶¹ Season 1, Episode 4.

⁶² Wisecrack has produced a useful short video elaboration of this, which notes intentional references to Roman history, including Cincinnatus, in TWD. See “The Philosophy of the Walking Dead” (Part 3), 2016. Available online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt-paZAUKeQ.

⁶³ Episode 512, “Remember.”

⁶⁴ Episode 512.

⁶⁵ Episode 612.

⁶⁶ The term “theology” is used by TWD producers in the Episode 604 commentary.

⁶⁷ Episode 615, “East.”

⁶⁸ Ibid.

⁶⁹ Marcuse, The Aesthetic Dimension, p. 6.

⁷⁰ Ibid., xii and 69.