The Walking Dead has a problem.
Scratch that. The Walking Dead has a number of problems: a brainless, ferocious, stumbling horde of them. The Walking Dead has problems like a toad has warts, problems stacked one atop another until they resemble rickety blood-soaked jenga towers, constantly threatening to collapse and crush beneath them another character, another potentially promising storyline, whatever hope AMC’s current flagship has of concluding its run as anything more than dishonest misery porn masquerading as smart pulp. The Walking Dead has problems like it has corpses, hundreds ready to rise in the place of whatever dozen are shot, decapitated, or set ablaze.
Last night, the first episode of the show’s seventh season dropped-- with over eight hundred hours of post-apocalyptic slog in the program’s rearview--promising to resolve the cliffhanger that concluded season six nearly seven months ago. In the weeks and months leading up to the premiere, AMC made a concerted effort to flex the impact of the upcoming episode as ostentatiously as possible, a bold strategy considering how poorly received their decision to end the previous season on such a middle finger of a deflection was.
For those who have managed to avoid watching The Walking Dead--based on Robert Kirkman’s comic book series--and have dodged the media blowup that followed the season six finale and the season seven premiere, the show left off with its central gang of survivors, led by pontificating sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), on their knees at the mercy of the show’s new villain, Negan. Played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan with swagger approximating a particularly sadistic high school bully more so than a blood-thirsty warlord, Negan and his trusty barbed-wire-wrapped Louisville Slugger “Lucille” are the heads of a roving gang of thugs named the Saviors, who have made their name in the ruins of the old world through violence and extortion, pressuring other groups and societies for resources with the understanding that to resist is to face the business end of the bat.
Which is precisely what audiences were promised back in April. As Negan marches along the line of newly selected victims, he announces that one of their journeys is about to end, one of them will get the distinct honor of taking Lucille to prom. He “eenie-meenie-miney-moe”s his way from character to character, but just as he selects his victim, the perspective switches to the point-of-view of this unlucky winner. Negan winds up and bludgeons his prey, and the finale cuts out without letting the audience know who we just saw die. What a rip, right?
Well, Kirkman and company made the most of this unresolved murder, teasing for months that, come October, audiences would get the pleasure of seeing just whose brains were gonna be mixed in with the mulch. And so they did--after multiple commercial breaks and several In-Memoriam style montages from the perspective of the thoroughly traumatized Grimes that served to drive home just how unpredictable this reveal was going to be.
Ultimately two characters were killed: the gruff military-bro Abraham (Michael Cudlitz), who had recently left his wife Rosita (Christian Serratos) for fellow survivor Sasha (Sonequa Martin-Green) in the sort of coworker-love-triangle that would make late-period Aaron Sorkin proud; and Glenn (the fantastic Steven Yeun, whose popularity should be the nail in the coffin of any silly arguments against the viability of Asian leading men), who had been killed by Negan in Kirkman’s original comic, and who was the victim of an obnoxiously deceitful fake death earlier in the sixth season. It’s hard to tell who’s enjoying the slaughter more: Negan or the showrunners, who make sure to have their villain wave the bat slick with Abraham’s blood and brain matter in front of Rosita, while explaining that this violence is not in fact pointless. It serves a point. Sure, guys.
The whole time, Negan is framed like some sort of conquering hero, his gleeful taunting of his prey couched in the sort of self-important rhetoric that TWD specializes in: the perpetual need to excuse what is little more than flaccid sadism as some grand statement on the nature of humanity, and the battle for survival, and the collapse of social structures in the wake of calamity. Make no mistake, though. It’s all ass-covering horseshit.
Because time and time again, TWD has proven that it has no idea how to utilize violence as anything more than an exclamation point, a way to prove that the writers of the show are not messing around. “The world is big and mean and scary,” Kirkman and his writers insist. “We just want to show things how they are. Why do you all have to be such prudes?”
But, if TWD thinks this is some sort of justification for how it treats its characters--for how it treats its fans--it is sorely mistaken. Because the complaints and criticisms currently being lobbed at the show by Vulture critic Matt Zoller Seitz, Vox critic Todd Van Der Werff, and others are not calling on Kirkman’s show to suddenly tame itself. The problem with TWD is not that it’s violent. The problem is that it’s pointlessly, artlessly, thanklessly, and thoughtlessly violence, spilling gallons of blood, butchering scores of characters, and demanding that its audience ache for each and every one, without ever taking the time to make a single bit of that violence mean anything at all.
For comparison, let’s turn to HBO’s Game of Thrones, which Seitz addressed in his own piece. There, he made the comparison between last night’s killings and GoT’s infamous “Red Wedding,” in which the show killed two of its ostensible heroes in a nuptial massacre. As Seitz explains, the difference here is that where Game of Thrones spent an entire season building up to this bloody climax, and has spent the three seasons following examining the emotional and political fallout, TWD has never shown much interest in actually examining what its violence means, what ramifications it might have, save for a few scenes of obligatory anguish and a finger-wagging reminder that this is grown-ass television for grown-ass people living in a dark and grown-ass world.
I would like to draw a different comparison. TWD uses violence in the same way that GoT, at its worst, uses sexual assault: as an illustration of generic brutality and darkness, a way to convince audiences that the world in which they’ve been dropped is often an ugly one, as if the executions and torture and disembowelments of episodes past somehow failed to illustrate that. When, in GoT’s fifth season, the character of Sansa was raped on her wedding night by her sadistic fiance Ramsay Bolton to fan uproar, the writers quickly explained that Ramsay was a bad dude, and they just wanted to make sure we all knew that. They just wanted to be certain that we all understood that the character who spent much of his screentime systematically mutilating a prisoner of war, whose house sigil was a man who had been skinned alive was a villain. Thanks for the clarification.
It’s the same with Negan. There is no doubt in the viewer’s mind that this man is not to be trifled with. He’s made it abundantly clear. But still TWD insists on demonstrating this with the deaths of Abraham and Glenn, in addition to a veritable tempest of closeups of their sobbing friends and loved ones, faces slick with sweat and tears, as though Kirkman had been preparing for the introduction of some sort of Smell-O-Vision for human misery. When the camera cuts to the bludgeoned Glenn, whose skull is dented and whose eye has popped out of its socket, mumbling and slurring the name of the woman he loves, it’s not because TWD cares one damn bit about the tragedy of it all. It’s because violence is increasingly becoming shorthand for maturity, and since its premiere in 2010, Kirkman’s show has been fighting tooth and nail to be perceived as the prestige zombie show, Not-Your-Mama’s-Living Dead.
Again, this is not to say that TWD should be bloodless. Violence in art can be intensely powerful, beautiful even. Look at NBC’s Hannibal (also discussed in the Vulture piece), a show that was absolutely fascinated with the ways the body and the soul could be broken, destroyed, and created anew. Hannibal featured everything from vivisection to the creation of a literal totem pole of corpses. However, for showrunner Bryan Fuller, the violence alone wasn’t the point. Here, murder was tragic and funny and romantic and artistic, artisan bloodletting with much more than the impact of human agony in its sights. TWD has yet to attempt any of these things. It’s content to just milk the suffering and call it a day.
Straying from the world of television, one can see a better understanding of carnage in the films of George Romero, the originator of the modern concept of zombies. For Romero, the so-called zombie apocalypse was not simply an excuse for shallow cliches about people maybe being violent sometimes or capable of evil. It was a vehicle for genuinely biting (pardon the word choice) satires: of commercialism, or militarization, or race relations. Romero even treated his undead antagonists with more compassion and nuance than Kirkman and company, the prime example being the trained walker Bub, in Day of the Dead (1985). In TWD the zombies are just target practice, a guilt-free excuse to show all manner of viscera, because who’s gonna say the show doesn’t respect zombies. But whether or not zombies are deserving of compassion, their use in AMC’s most profitable misery porn franchise points to the rotten heart of TWD: that, here, sadism is the easiest and preferred route. The violence here is completely hollow: excess for excesses sake.
And even that might have worked had TWD not become increasingly self-important over the last six years, insisting that underneath all the intestines and tears was something meaningful. As an avowed fan of slasher and splatter films I don’t mind excessive violence. To say there’s an acceptable limit to how much blood can be spilled would make me well beyond a hypocrite, considering how many times I’ve watched Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger descend on unsuspecting teenagers, gleefully cheering what new and depraved ways their films and creators have devised to send these victims to the great beyond. I will talk for hours about the work of makeup artist Tom Savini, about how wonderfully grotesque the work of Lucio Fulci is. But you know what? I have never seen a Friday the 13th or A Nightmare on Elm Street or a Halloween film bisect two fornicating campers, and then force me to spend thirty seconds looking at the horrified, despairing faces of their friends and family, or take a step back from the bodies and explain how the world is a cruel place, and really Jason Voorhees is just a product of a society designed to obscure but not solve the violence of human nature. It just doesn’t happen. Because even in these trashiest of gore showcases, the filmmakers understand how terrible and misguided it would be to pair their wanton employment of violence with some self-serious discussion of what that violence means. They understand they can’t have their cake and eat it, too. They don’t want to make their audience suffer.
The same can’t be said for TWD, which is as much the poster boy of both having cake and eating it as Negan is of the gross dumb bloodlust at the show’s core. Kirkman’s show wants to linger on the viscera, to have its audience absorb every detail of its over-the-top horror-action, to marvel at busted skulls and torn jugulars in the same way that grindhouse fans have for decades. But, then it wants to grab those fans by their hair, and dunk them in a big old whirlpool of emotional carnage. Lest it suddenly just be some fun and gruesome zombie fluff, TWD demands that the audience languish and mourn just long enough for Kirkman and company to assure themselves and their critics that they’re getting at something bigger, without ever considering what the net result of these two urges is.
That net result? The Walking Dead is neither lightweight enough for its violence to be funny or fun, nor smart or compassionate enough to earn the misery in which it continually threatens to drown its characters. Like Negan last night, Kirkman and company spend an hour a week swaggering in front of a captive audience, assuring them that the violence they’ve just witnessed isn’t meaningless. It’s all there to make a point. And just like Negan, they and their show are--pardon me--full of shit. Empty brutality and some half-baked platitudes about human nature do not a compelling study of violence make. They do not justify the sadism on display. They do not make the show’s seeming need to bump off its characters left and right and then make the living suffer until the credits roll any smarter or any more interesting. And although the promos and previews may continually assure us all that no one is safe from the hungry maw of a world gone wrong, it seems that TWD settles on the same victim every single time: its viewers.