Writing this post later than I would have liked, I can do no better than to quote Inigo Montoya himself: “Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.” Over the last few weeks, I have finished up a thesis chapter on ITC’s The Prisoner and its representations of labour and economic exchange, written and presented a paper on Granada Television’s The Owl Service, gone on several research trips for same, and attended an AHRC project update meeting as well as the University of Leicester’s ‘Politics of Television Space’ symposium. It is a good thing my diet ordinarily consists solely of coffee and biscuits, otherwise it could have come as quite a shock to my system.
I could therefore legitimately blog about any of these events (and I do hope to post my Owl Service paper and Prezi presentation on this blog within the next few weeks), but what I want to talk about is The Walking Dead. The Walking Dead is a little out of my research remit, coming as it does a good sixteen years after the end point of the doctoral project I’m currently engaged upon. However with its recent premiere on British terrestrial television on Channel Five as part of their stable of high-ratings, international dramas that attempt to negotiate tensions of ‘quality’, audience appeal, and economics, The Walking Dead does raise questions about the spaces and strategies of television fantasy and horror as texts, and as aspects of broadcasting schemas of quality and niche programming. Part of my methodology must necessarily consist of interrogating the idea of television history itself, and while my research focuses on a certain period, it would be poor judgement not to take into account ongoing trajectories and shifts in television fantasy up to the current day. Plus, I really like zombies.
Leaving aside the issue of Channel Five and what I suspect is their ongoing construction of a corporate and broadcasting identity by tailgating the productions and values of U.S premium cable channels, one of the key questions of zombie narratives is raised by Christopher Lockett in his article, ‘Zombie Gentrification’, for Flow TV (http://flowtv.org/2011/01/zombie-gentrification/): “if we proceed from the truism that filmic monsters express certain fears and anxieties in the cultural imaginary, what are the walking dead of The Walking Dead telling us?”
Zombies are, essentially, flesh-eating floating signifiers. Where other icons of horror exist in a specific relation to the human race: vampires as a reification of the individualistic, werewolves as pack animals, zombies are the entire weight of history against the present, the cumulative dead in opposition to an inevitably small and fractious band of survivors who can only live in the present. The balance of threat in a zombie narrative is consequently always with the (un)dead. In addition, there’s no allure to a zombie: they don’t function within human society; they do not suggest unfettered sexuality or a connection to nature; they do not assume Byronic poses and they emphatically do not sparkle. Zombies are, sadly, just not sexy. This disjunct with human values and attributes, however, means that human anxieties can be more effectively mapped onto them as abstract and abject. Zombies have been metaphors for the racial prejudice of 1960s American society (Romero’s Night of the Living Dead), the dangers of consumer capitalism (Romero again with Dawn of the Dead), even as subtextual projections of misogyny and anti-feminism. Yes, Doghouse, I am looking at you.
Traditionally zombie narratives have been cinematic and it’s only recently that zombies, and horror more generally, have started to move into television, as with Channel 4’s Dead Set and AMC’s The Walking Dead. However Matt Hills locates this shifting of the horror genre into television as a ‘strategy for the branding and “making-cinematic” of television drama’ in his examination of Torchwood for Cinephile (http://cinephile.ca/files/Cinephile%206.2%20Low.pdf), and adds ‘the genre’s rapprochement with TV is relationally structured against a view of “ordinary” television as not evoking horror’s conventions.’
Horror television then is still working within a strained discourse of film versus television: the spaces and subject matter of film allied with the accessibility and audience allegiance which television prompts. Serials have always been popular with audience and accountants within television drama, and the hybrid form of ‘quality’ television currently in the ascendant is invested with the benefits of both television and film. Consequently, the conventions of the zombie film narrative have now shifted to television under the auspices of ‘adult drama’ or ‘original programming’. These conventions rely upon a tacit understanding of the television/film hybrid’s ability to depict more graphic and grotesque scenes of violence and the abject (and increasingly speedy zombies), and seriality is congruent with the escalating nature of horror, particularly pitting zombie masses against a small band of survivors. The horror of the abject is thus always close ‘but acting more as backdrop to the human drama unfolding in the foreground.’ In this way, the focus is on the human survivors and the drama inherent in their relationships. Zombies as a homogenous mass, devoid of anything but hunger, do not inspire drama amongst themselves; they are, as Lockett suggests, ‘ciphers’, ‘representing a host of fears of anxieties from creeping conformity, mindless consumption, infection and disease, or the spectre of groupthink and dystopian mass culture’ as with Romero’s mall-zombies in Dawn of the Dead or the religious/biological origins of REC’s zombie outbreak.
However while the aesthetics and production values of the The Walking Dead and arguably the earlier Dead Set are cinematic, the camera perspective is split between the survivors and the zombies and this construction directly implicates the television audience. The viewers are themselves complicit in the spread of horror television, and television as a medium of disputed value, through its continued consumption. Where violence and the abject infect the television text from the film form, they indicate a possible epidemiology for its transmission. The viewers are themselves complicit in the representation of a mindless consumer; we, the audience, are the zombies. Rick Grimes said so all along.
As previously mentioned, one of the markers of the tension between film and television that is brought to television drama is a willingness to construct graphic violence and horror through the abject, and this strategy not only identifies the shifting of boundaries between film and television and the notions of quality, aesthetic and scope which mediate them, it also says quite a lot about the television audience. We want visceral and horrifying violence to be part of this text. We want the horror to escalate, because we understand that horror texts and serials rely upon escalation and we want to consume that horror. It is both as necessary and empty as the flesh that zombies eat: a projection of the disgust and anger the viewer may feel at themselves as consumer, perhaps?
The Walking Dead slyly constructs this association of viewer with zombie through camera movement and framing. Rick as our hero, and potential snack, is repeatedly framed through windows and apertures, as below, and in the earlier moments of this section, the camera tracks him from inside the house, even though everyone inside is clearly and graphically dead.
The camera not only shows the subjective perspective of the survivors but also adopts the perspective of the abject, the potential zombie. The idea of reciprocal and reflexive viewing is made diegetic through the text’s use of ocular perspective. In the AMC promo, Rick emerges from his coma after a subjective shot of Shane’s concerned face is rapidly intercut with a zombie leaning over his hospital bed, and this shot/reverse shot of subjectivity and ‘abjectivity’ plays out in the episodes as well. After his meeting with Morgan, Rick stares out of the peephole at a zombie and she peers back; subsequently, Morgan will stare at his undead wife down a riflescope and she will focus unerringly back upon him through the same aperture. The perspective moves from shot/zoom from Morgan’s POV to reverse shot/zoom from the zombies’ perspective, swiftly shifting between equal and opposite perspectives as subjective to abjective, and locating Morgan as a faceless, anonymous threat in the same way that the zombies are an anonymous threat.
Once again, the perspective of the survivor is reversed and maneuvered to make the camera cognate with the zombies’ perspective.
Rick’s approach to Atlanta also shows elements of this use of camera movement and location, juxtaposing space and suggested safety through angle of view, using height and long shots (as in the pictures below) with representations of subjectivity/abjectivity: close-range, low-angle and moving within the shot. These shots are often partially obscured to intensify the sense that the camera is the agent of surveillance as menace.
Brooker’s Dead Set (Channel 4, 2008) is located in a closed television studio as an analogue for reality television series such as Big Brother, and the mindless, endless consumption which Brooker suggests informs them; as such, the concept of watching and distance is key, as are the spaces in which reality and alterity are suggested and/or fabricated. One way mirrors and cameras, stages and studios all work as interfaces between the living and the dead, reality and television, consumption and survival.
Brooker’s Dead Set (Channel 4, 2008) is located in a closed television studio as an analogue for reality television series such as Big Brother, and the mindless, endless consumption which Brooker suggests informs them; as such, the concept of watching and distance is key, as are the spaces in which reality and alterity are suggested and/or fabricated. One way mirrors and cameras, stages and studios all work as interfaces between the living and the dead, reality and television, consumption and survival.
The Walking Dead suggests the idea of surveillance in a similar way, but in examining the opening episode, ‘Days Gone Bye’, the camera becomes the abject. The flashback sequence relies on strong frontality and conventional action shots of speeding cars and gunfire. It sets up the notion of a mimetic ‘reality’, based upon how relationships, space and landscape are policed and depicted; present threats are monitored and the weight of moral judgement comes down to sheriff’s deputies and criminals. Although, as a sly metatextual point, one of the sheriff’s deputies points out how cool it would be if their gunfight got them onto ‘one of them video shows’. Clearly we already have an idea of opposition and violence set up, as well as the contrapuntal camerawork, moving between space as landscape and angle of view, and action as close-up. Equally there is a strong emphasis upon the idea of mechanical movement through this landscape, an idea that will later be complicated by the ever-present threat of the walkers and the problems of transport in a post-apocalyptic landscape. However the pre-credits sequence stalls movement and morality by locating Rick’s shooting of a child zombie in a depleted petrol station, and this sequence identifies the presence of the zombie child through low-angle filming via lacunae in the mise en scene, Rick lowering himself to peer underneath a car as she shuffles past on the other side in bunny slippers.
Long shots on freeway and in the city suggest objectivity, but tracking shots around and through obstructions not only anticipate the horror but suggest that the camera is the horror, surveillance always lurking for the hero, a potential consumer around every corner; however if the camera is a consumer, so too is the audience. We watch Rick from behind objects. The viewer is both diegetically and literally the abject, the cast-out, the consumer, hence the long tracking shots and emphasis upon the Grand Guignol of repeated headshots and evisceration. Bicycle Girl (seen below) is after all one of the defining images of the graphic novel, and the first active zombie that Rick sees. Our shock and horror is Rick’s shock and horror, but the fact that we are shown the missing lips, the long bones of the legs stripped of flesh, the ‘body in pieces’, also locates us as willing and expectant consumers of such representations of horror and violence. The audience expects escalation of horror and consumes it avidly. The camera constructs us both as viewer of horror and degradation, and as that horror and degradation implicit in the willing viewer.
Quatermass and the Pit ostensibly encouraged racial equality and tolerance in the wake of that text’s discovery that ‘We are the Martians’; perhaps the only reconciliation to be sought in the wake of The Walking Dead’s suggestion that we are the zombies is of our own hunger for the provocative, the abject, and the televisual.
(In closing, I would like to bring this to your attention: this is the greatest piece of advertising placement ever. THE GREATEST. The only thing that comes close is another Co-op Funeralcare in my hometown which has a huge neon clock hanging in their window, counting down your remaining days upon this earth.)
Quatermass and the Pit ostensibly encouraged racial equality and tolerance in the wake of that text’s discovery that ‘We are the Martians’; perhaps the only reconciliation to be sought in the wake of The Walking Dead’s suggestion that we are the zombies is of our own hunger for the provocative, the abject, and the televisual.
(In closing, I would like to bring this to your attention: this is the greatest piece of advertising placement ever. THE GREATEST. The only thing that comes close is another Co-op Funeralcare in my hometown which has a huge neon clock hanging in their window, counting down your remaining days upon this earth.)
