Abstract
This article analyses the first seasons of two interconnected AMC series, ‘The Walking Dead’ and ‘Fear the Walking Dead’. Our analysis focuses on how these shows frame the emergence of a bio-risk, how the leading characters deal with the experience of bio-risks, and how they develop (or fail at developing) strategies to overcome, or, if this renders impossible, to tame such bio-risk. We have used a Grounded Theory approach to analyse the data, frame our analysis, and create a theoretical understanding of the ways these shows present bio-risks, and of the ways they depict the fictional experience of living a bio-emergency, without any official, institutional plan regarding to how to deal with it.
Keywords
Introduction
This article focuses upon the depiction of a bio-emergency in ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ (FWD) and ‘The Walking Dead’ (TWD), the underlying assumptions within this depiction, and the suggested strategies in order to survive and gain control in a case of emergency. We have focused on these two shows (TWD and FWD) as they have attracted the attention of millions of viewers worldwide, and because they depict the same fictional bio-emergency and catastrophe from different viewpoints, in different moments, and in different places, 1 caused by an unexpected and rapidly spreading disease. 2
Both are AMC shows, and they have partially been consumed by the same audience. However, TWD derives from a comic publication, and FWD explores the same fictional universe without having a pre-written plot.
TWD and FWD focus upon the same epidemic outbreak and explore the same universe of imaginaries from different perspectives. While TWD mainly focuses on life after the epidemic outbreak (leaving the transition from the current to the post-apocalyptic world in the dark), FWD’s first season fully concentrates upon this transition, depicting and reflecting upon the outbreak as a time of ‘passage’ from one world to another. Therefore, it is especially in FWD that we get glimpses of the ways in which the shows’ creators picture governmental strategies to ‘contain’ the infection, to restore normality, and later on, to monopolise the chances of surviving – once the containment of the outbreak has been discarded as a possibility.
Both shows depict a state of emergency and subsequently a state of exception, in which law as people knew it (i.e. backed by the state) is suspended, and the use of force and violence for the sake of the ‘public good’ becomes continuously redefined and renegotiated upon (Cole and McGinnis, 2015; Stiglitz, 1977). Both the shows depict how the provision of ‘public goods’ backed by governmental institutions cannot be guaranteed, thus leaving the survivors trapped in an enduring state of scarcity and struggle for survival.
Of course, not only are public goods questioned in the state of emergency portrayed in the two shows, also the very idea of the public sphere itself is questioned and vanishes, unless one forces oneself to keep it alive, bearing the costs of this moral choice (Calhoun, 1992; Habermas, 1974). These developments suspend society, as we know it. 3 The shows themselves do not develop a clear moral position. They rather provide a multi-layered scenario: despite backing a certain degree of debate and active listening, they also make clear that decisions need to be made, quickly and effectively. Those who do not make the right choices die.
In both the shows, the characters try to face risks, dangers, and fears they were not expecting. They improvise at each step and explore the world on the basis of rudimentary leftovers of rights and wrongs. Their apparently improvised course of action, with all the twists and turns of the stories told, follow notwithstanding clear narrative patterns that we shall explore and analyse in this article. We will show how the imaginaries displayed in both the shows offer us great insight into our society’s present fears and contribute to configuring how our society faces them. 4
Methodology
The analysis of the first seasons of TWD and of FWD has been realised alongside the principles of the Grounded Theory, applying three phases of coding (Strauss and Corbin, 1990). We have viewed each episode of both the shows several times, and have coded each of them, sequence-by-sequence, selecting specific images, words, and sentences in the first phase of coding (open coding), 5 looking for connections and relations in the second phase (axial coding), and selecting overarching codes during the third phase (selective coding; Strauss and Corbin, 1990: 55–143). The resulting overarching codes have been used to structure our discussions below.
We opted for the Grounded Theory, despite its similarities to qualitative content analysis, because of some important differences and advantages. The Grounded Theory has not yet been widely used for the type of material which we have coded. Visual and audio-visual material has been less often discussed in the literature on Grounded Theory than textual material (including transcriptions of audio or audio-visual materials such as interviews or focus groups) (Cho and Lee, 2014; Hsieh and Shannon, 2005; Pope et al., 2000). However, its specificities might be of special importance when facing the analysis of a cultural product delivering a narrative that cannot be analysed in an insolate way, but which makes much more sense when analysed in relation to its context. We might see here its most important difference from content analysis, which stays analytically within the narration of the film and cannot easily go beyond such limits. In contrast, the Grounded Theory approach allows the researcher the space to entangle these analyses and subsequent results with theoretical accounts from more classical forms of film analysis. In this way, the Grounded Theory allows to include, for example, a perspective and sensitivity close to semiotic analysis (Mulvey, 1989; Rose, 2016: 106ff). This is important because, within an episode or a movie, most things that are communicated are not communicated in an explicit and direct manner (denotation), but hinted at, implied. Thus the viewer ‘knows’ what is meant even if it is not being said or even shown (connotation; Fiske, 2011: 80 ff., compare also with Fiske, 2004; Manghani et al., 2006). For instance, in TWD, the catastrophe that society has undergone, and the indiscriminate death and pain inflicted upon the population are hinted at by capturing broken, dirty, abandoned toys, often lying on the floor. These toys, which under normal circumstances, would not have been abandoned by their legitimate owners (children), point at something terrible that has happened to them. In this way, viewers ‘know’ that children have died (and those who protected them) without needing to show or explicitly depict how this happened (Barthes, 1972: 109ff; Barthes and Duisit, 1975: 267).
In order to present our findings and discussion, and making them intelligible for all the readers who are not familiar with these shows, we shall first concentrate on the pilot episodes of both the series, as they set the frames from which the rest of the stories are told, and will unfold. Then we shall extend the discussion to the rest of the shows’ first seasons. We shall not provide the readers with an initial depiction of the shows, as the article would then become too descriptive and too long. But we shall combine brief depictions (findings) with our related analyses (discussion).
At the end of the presentation and discussion of our findings, we shall turn to our theoretical sources and our theorisation of the results, and thus close the analytical circle, revisiting our discussion and findings in relation to our theoretical approach and framework.
Findings and discussion of the pilot episodes
The ways in which FWD and TWD approach the zombie outbreak are very different, despite being part of the same constellation of imaginaries. In FWD, the main character (Nick, a young, intelligent heroin addict) witnesses the very beginning of the outbreak, and has an intuitive insight regarding what is going on before most people do. In contrast, in TWD, the main character (Rick Grimes, a sheriff deputy from the outskirts of Atlanta) wakes up from a coma when the zombie outbreak has already killed many people, converted Atlanta into a walking dead graveyard, and all structures of law, authority, and order known to him have already been destroyed.
Hence, in TWD, the audience wakes up with Rick Grimes, and tries to figure out at the same time as he does what has been going on while he was not conscious. In contrast, FWD 6 complements and completes the puzzle of events presented in TWD, helping the audience to figure out how the outbreak began. From FWD, we know that it started with a strange and very strong flu that could not be cured, and left no survivors (something which was learnt by the authorities after the observation of a certain amount of cases – and this fatal destiny of the infected will become relevant in the way they are dealt with), a flu whose casualties ‘come back’ as zombified beings, with no self-reflexive will, but with an unstoppable hunger for living flesh.
Despite the different perspectives upon the outbreak adopted by both the shows, they share striking similitudes and parallels. These similarities are not in the foreground, but we consider them to be of great importance for the construction of the mythical imaginary of the bio-risks and bio-emergencies that both the shows create and develop. This is why we shall be focusing upon these parallels now, regarding the pilot episodes of both the shows.
Vulnerability, oneiric sceneries, and blond girls: negotiating danger and the suspension of the taken-for-granted world
Both the series begin with a dream-like brief capture of a post-apocalyptic reality, a reality after the outbreak that is so surreal that it could be a fragment of a nightmare, and shows the beginning of the new world that TWD and FWD introduce to the audience. The viewers are caught within these first images, without having been provided with clues to decipher them.
These images appear before the opening credits mark the beginning of the story and, are hence, strategically and symbolically separated from the rest of the pilot episodes. They introduce the audience to the main male characters (Rick and Nick), with whom we are immediately invited to identify. Both share certain characteristics. They are shown as disoriented and extremely vulnerable, physically and psychologically weak, although for different reasons: Nick is a drug addict, Rick has just woken up from a long coma.
Both the characters explore in these opening scenes a somehow familiar but at the same time most unwelcoming and uncanny environment (a gas station full of overturned cars and dead bodies for Rick, and an abandoned church for Nick). They encounter death (with clear signs of violence), and a girl, who they first see from behind, and who awakens in both male characters a sort of will to ‘protect’. Thus, both characters start their journey with the will to ‘rescue’ an ‘innocent’ girl in the midst of all the destruction. Nick realises immediately that something bad has happened to his girlfriend, who is eating the face of a corpse, and turns around to eat him. He runs away in panic. Rick realises the little girl he has been addressing is actually a zombie and, after a moment of horror, shoots her in the head (Rick knows already how to kill zombies, Nick does not – yet).
Despite their (momentary) situation of weakness and vulnerability, and the encounter with a figure whom many would expect weaker (but is an imminent threat), Rick and Nick manage to escape. Their construction as ‘survivors’ has thus begun.
These opening scenes show us how the world of values and judgements has been turned upside down, and how the horror can reside in what we (audience and characters) are culturally trained to see as most beautiful, weak, and delicate (blond, White, little/young girls, a teddy bear). If we need protection from what used to depend on our protection, who or what can be trusted? In a situation of a bio-emergency, danger can come from everywhere, from anyone. Nobody can be blindly trusted (Luhmann, 2017).
Interplay between everyday life and exceptionality: transitioning towards a state of emergency and exception
In both the shows, the audience is taken back to a safe place after the opening credits: to a quotidian landscape the viewers can easily relate to. In TWD the audience goes back in time to meet Rick and his work partner sitting in their police car while having lunch. The outbreak has not started yet. In FWD, the audience is taken to Nick’s home where his family (mother Madison, step-father Travis, and sister Alicia) share a normal morning – not aware of what is simultaneously happening to Nick. Both the scenes end with a disruption of this quotidian atmosphere: in the one case Rick gets shot and is taken to hospital, in the other Madison receives a call from the hospital telling her that Nick has had an accident. Although the audience knows that everyday life has been broken, the characters still have no clear signs of the imminent crisis that already is a reality and which they will soon encounter.
Like in a possible real emergency, the interplay between everyday life and exceptionality passes through different stages. There is no immediate shift from quotidian routines to a state of bio-emergency. It is a steady, yet gradual, process that lasts for the whole of each pilot episode, and which is represented by images saturated with signs that could raise concerns if observed carefully, but which mostly remain in a silent background – for the audience as well as for the characters. For instance, in TWD, after Rick has been ‘rescued’ by a survivor (Morgan) and his son, he rides a horse (he has found abandoned in a farm) to Atlanta. The image certainly breaks with quotidian imaginaries of everyday life: a sheriff deputy riding a horse on an empty motorway. However, and beyond the catchy image, a careful look at the other side of the road would have shown the audience and Rick Grimes clear signs of an imminent danger in Atlanta: there are hundreds of burned and abandoned cars on the motorway that were trying to leave Atlanta and did not make it. The audience cannot know at this point what happened there, and Rick does not seem to pay attention. A little attention might have prevented Rick from entering Atlanta unprepared. In FWD, we are confronted with the growing number of empty chairs in high-school classrooms, and ambulance and police sirens getting louder and more frequent, eventually joined by helicopter sounds. All these hint at something unknown and certainly unusual going on. However, the main characters do not pay attention until it is already almost too late.
In FWD, we witness how the zombie outbreak started as a ‘flu’, as an assumed risk, which at the beginning does not alarm anyone. It is this invisible implicitness that increases the risk Furthermore, in their wish to keep the emergency in secret – probably in order to avoid massive panic – authorities do not warn the population of any symptoms that should worry them, do not inform them regarding how to react in front of the infected, and do not tell them what kind of danger they are facing. This secrecy slows down authorities’ actions and the populations’ reaction, making any chance of containment even less possible. Instead, it ignites protests and demonstrations as people start witnessing, filming, and sharing online what looks like innocent, ill citizens being shot by policemen without any apparent reason. Just a few scenes later, cities and motorways collapse with desperate families trying to escape when escaping is no longer possible – also due to a lack of coordination and effective evacuation plans.
The power of the story lies precisely in this half-quotidian/half-emergency narration, for it awakens parallels between the show’s depiction of day-to-day life and our own (as viewers). As viewers, we (the audience) ‘become aware’ that an epidemic outbreak (like the one depicted by both the shows) could happen any time, and that the initial signs can be weak, ambiguous, and blurry. Understanding them might depend on risk sensibility and awareness, on an informed perspective, and on a prepared reaction. Being aware of the risk, looking at the same scenes a second time, the viewer perceives all signs in a different and much clearer form and is able to draw meaning from them. As the audience, we learn implicitly that risk awareness shapes the perception of quotidian life, and that risk awareness brings advantages in the case of emergencies.
Rites of passage: hospitals as thresholds to a durable state of emergency
The outbreak starts as a disease, therefore, there is no better place to be than at a hospital in order to symbolically stage and witness the passage from an old (the one we share with the fictional characters) to a new reality (a world we – the audience – do not have a direct experience of). Being at the hospital at this point is like going through a rite of passage, inhabiting a liminal space in which the transformation from everyday life to exceptionality can and will take place (Turner, 1979).
If we pay attention to the details, we can see hints of the ways in which the outbreak has been/ is being dealt with and which show how everyday life vanishes in favour of a state of exception and emergency.
When Rick wakes up from his coma, he is in an abandoned hospital. No one is alive there but him. And yet, by the looks of his room, and especially of the dried flowers next to him, we know that a few weeks have gone by since anybody entered the room. We also know that the hospital staff must have left in a rush, as Rick is still connected to his oxygen supply and intravenous medication when he wakes up, although they cannot function properly after so many days. Rick’s room looks ‘normal’, besides two things: the dried flowers and a stopped clock. They point at the suspension of normal time, life time; death has taken over.
Outside his room the evidence of the catastrophe is less metaphorical: dead, rotten, half-eaten bodies lie everywhere, and there is a marked place where the ‘dead’ (the zombies) are kept and locked with a warning sign on the door. There are also remains of a military intervention in the surroundings of the hospital, and many more corpses outside of the building.
In Nick’s case, we witness the death of Nick’s room neighbour and the way in which doctors and nurses react: they are nervous, afraid, and hectic to take the body away from that floor. When Nick disappears from the hospital, and Madison and Travis come looking for him, the nurse, who had been so nice and calm before, seems extremely nervous and agitated, and simply does not care about Nick, as if she had much more urgent and relevant matters to attend to. However, the risk that is already there, remains at the level of non-verbal signs, hints, implicit and invisible. Quite in contrast to TWD, in FWD the outside world still seems to be fine, while in the hospital they know about the occurring changes.
First seasons: findings and discussions
In our analysis of these first scenes of TWD and FWD, we have highlighted three transitions, three thresholds, which we would now like to systematise and subsequently use for discussion of the rest of the analysed seasons:
The blurred identification markers of vulnerability (transitioning from strength to vulnerability, from a taken-for-granted world to a continuous state of emergency and alert);
The threshold of exceptional times: transitioning from everyday life to exceptionality;
The threshold of exceptional places/the hospital: which is symbolically linked to transitioning between health and sickness, life and death, safety and risk, and insiders and outsiders.
These thresholds (and the transitions they mark) play an important role in both the shows during the whole of the examined seasons. Once the path through the thresholds has been initiated, life as known before the outbreak finds a closure and a new reality begins for the characters. The markers of vulnerability open a new world of potential risks and dangers, altering the characters’ relationships with their loved ones. The markers of time, which bring a closure to everyday life and unveil a time of exceptionality, intermesh with a new relationship to space, in which the uses of and risks attached to particular places also change. The markers of belonging, of sickness, and health get overwritten, leading us to new logics of inclusion and exclusion as well as to proto-forms of community building.
Let us focus upon the openings and closures allowed by these three thresholds:
Vulnerability and danger/surviving in a new world
In both the shows, the characters have to undergo a quick process of learning what the new dangers and risks are. They have to learn whom to trust, and how to protect themselves and their loved ones from danger. This is the first and most imminent source of vulnerability; that is, the characters’ complete ignorance of the new situation and its patterns.
It is during this period of transformation that the characters lose their grip on reality to which they have to learn to readapt. Or, to say it with the terms of Bourdieu (2013: 83), they have to pass a period of hysteresis before their habitus can adapt to the new circumstances of a transformed life of emergency.
The two main characters of both the shows have a certain advantage with respect to this transformation, as they have had some preparation in expecting the unexpected. This has something to do with their lives before the outbreak: as a drug addict and as a sheriff deputy.
One of the first and most painful learning processes is how to say goodbye to loved ones who turn into zombies, and thus cross for good the third threshold we have identified: from health to sickness, from being a part of an ‘us’ to being an imminent threat. The pain of the loss has to be overcome much quicker. Both the shows emphasise how pain, grief, anxiety, fear, and sadness, related to the loss or the potential loss of loved ones, increase the characters’ vulnerability and exposure to danger. Grief can slow you down, make you weaker. Nostalgia or remorse are enemies of the new survivor, who can love and grieve, but has to learn to work ‘efficiently’ with these feelings. Ritualisation of goodbyes is crucial, in order to let go and move, on. Being too emotional, too afraid or too attached to the past are clear signs of weakness which are unforgivable in this ‘new order of the world’. However to love and to value a lost life is also important as it is this valuation of love that keeps characters human.
For instance, Daniel Salazar 7 considers Madison, the mother of Nick, as too weak when he witnesses her incapability of killing her zombified neighbour and long-time friend. He will be proven wrong. Another character of FWD (Victor Strand) points out to Nick how the rules of the ‘old’ world have changed, and how those who had been rich and powerful are becoming the main course of the buffet. However, Salazar, Madison, Strand, or Nick himself are capable of surviving despite momentary situations of vulnerability, due to their capacity of keeping a cool head in moments where others fall prey to panic and desperation, and due to their human values that allow them to integrate into a group.
The same pattern can be found in TWD: despite his initial vulnerability, Rick manages to survive his waking up from coma in the apocalypse because, despite having more than enough reasons to panic, he keeps a cool head, is capable of reacting and learning in an extraordinarily rapid manner, and does not lose all values in the process. He is prepared (Collier, 2008). In contrast, others (like Amy, a young female character) die because they are not alert enough, quick enough, and much too afraid, to survive.
Transitional times/everyday life and exceptionality
Both the series make clear efforts to differentiate a ‘now’ (exceptional) and a ‘before’ (everyday life – shared with the audience). In TWD, the transition between an old order of ‘normality’ and the new world is marked by brief conversations in which the characters come to realise that the rules of the old world do not apply after the outbreak. For instance, when Rick and his new group are trapped in a department store, Andrea (a member of Rick’s first Atlanta community – and Amy’s sister) wonders whether ‘taking’ a necklace for her sister, in front of a sheriff deputy, is considered stealing. Rick expresses his insecurity about whether the old rules apply any longer. A few episodes later, these questions do not appear any more, and a couple of seasons later the characters seem to have forgotten those questions about right and wrong. They have adapted to the ‘structural lag between opportunities and the dispositions’ (Bourdieu, 2013: 83).
After the initial shock, a quick naturalisation of the new situation becomes part of the recipe for staying alive, together with the implicit (sometimes made explicit) knowledge that staying strong is not just an attitude but a necessity (Schütz, 1964). The use of guns and all sorts of weaponry in order to protect oneself and others, first only from zombies but later on also from other people, is another essential part of adaptation.
In both the shows, we also realise how the expectations regarding who should be trusted in a state of exception rapidly shift away from governmental institutions responsible for safety to the people. In fact, under the conditions of the quickly spreading zombifying disease, the military and the police cannot guarantee protection and safety. In TWD we know little, since the audience wakes up with Rick to a world that has completely changed, and in which the military has already disappeared as a corps. However, in brief flashbacks we see how Rick’s partner, Shane, rescues Rick’s wife and child and, while they are on the road trying to escape, they witness from the distance how the city of Atlanta is being bombed with napalm. This happens just after the authorities stop broadcasting information about a refugee centre in Atlanta that was supposed to be a safe haven for all the people in the outskirts of the city. When all control is lost, the military bombs the city without any previous warning in order to eliminate as many walkers as possible – which they probably do, but killing many living people too. Also the CDC (centre for disease control and prevention), which guided Rick and his group’s hope during the first season of TWD, turns to be a place in which the ‘normal/expected’ cannot be found anymore. Instead of finding answers and eventually a cure, by the time they reach the CDC the supposedly last bastion of normality is in a state of exceptionality while the group has started to turn exceptionality into normality. The tables have turned. If the answer to other epidemics might have been disciplination and enclosure (Foucault, 1995: 512ff.), the answer to a postmodern epidemic is a return to the empowerment of individuals and small communities, to self-management (Bauman, 2000: 29ff) and to traditional practices of survival and community building.
FWD explores in detail the fall of ‘civilisation’, state authorities, and the legitimate monopoly of violence. The situation is at first (1) silenced, perhaps with the hope of solving it without people actually noticing, (2) handled with extreme precaution, still hoping to contain a situation that worsens exponentially and (3) abandoned as impossible, and the rule of the jungle takes over everything. Those who have more power (now translated into physical force, access to safe places, food, and weaponry) try to monopolise it, excluding everybody else from access to potential safety.
In both the cases we see how trust is moved from authorities to communities and from experts to survivors. In this context, there is a confrontation between the ‘old’ views and the necessity to stick together and fight together in order to survive; in the context of which old divisions like racism (Glenn, Michone) and classism (Daryl) are overcome thanks to the projection of a new other.
Transitional spaces/new borders and roles, inclusion and exclusion
In both the shows, we learn that in this ‘new world’ cities have become the most dangerous places. 8 In TWD, this becomes obvious already at the end of the first episode and especially during the second episode. Rick Grimes discovers the new reality of Atlanta after he follows the rumour that cities may be safe havens with refugee camps and protection, and rides to Atlanta. What he finds is quite the opposite. Atlanta is full of zombies, hungry and ready to eat anyone who smells alive. Thus, although it may very well have been the governmental intention to gather people in the cities in order to protect and provide for them, cities and emergency facilities fell rapidly to the growing chaos caused by the dead. As a consequence, survivors gather in the outskirts of the cities, as Rick’s group does. They camp and try to gather food and supplies in order to stay alive and live day-by-day, without bigger plans than survival.
In FWD, we are shown the whole process of decay of the world as we knew it in a present future tense. We see Los Angeles, slowly and invisibly at the beginning, and then increasingly rapidly and visibly, becoming prey of chaos and despair. The process of decadence is depicted in a detailed manner throughout the first season: from the first leaked video of a zombie to the abandonment of the refugee camp to its own fortunes by the military at the end of civilisation.
Ironically, institutions and places that we would consider places of exceptionality, like hospitals, prisons, military camps and even closed slums, suddenly turn to become the safest areas.
In the context of the reorganisation of space, gender inequalities are also thematised. While there is a clear demand to leave racism behind and fight the dead together, there is not even an attempt to do so with sexism and gender inequalities. In fact, TWD’s first season points at a clear sexist social structure (in a much more straightforward and clear way than FWD). In the camp led by Shane and Rick on the outskirts of Atlanta, the division of labour is clear and little contested (there are a few ironic conversations among the women wondering what made them go back to traditional female roles that had been overcome before the outbreak). Thus, women who had had a career before the outbreak are reduced to washing dishes and clothes, and cooking, while men take over the tasks of protection and scavenging for supplies.
However, the division of labour and the growing sexism can be – and will be (mildly) – contested in the following seasons of TWD and FWD. New boundaries and classification of people are not irreversible, and they are not presented as such. Only the division between the living and the dead is unchangeable, as the survivors learn to recognise throughout the first (and in TWD also the second) season of the shows. The ‘walkers’ are beyond life. They are not sick people who can be healed. Their bodies, and minds, are in a state of decay that cannot be reversed. There is no cure. In the realm between life and death which the walkers inhabit, there is no hate, no revenge, no wish to harm, there is no will or reflection, just blind hunger. Among the walkers, there are no differences between ages, classes, sexes, either. Cultures and identities, and ideologies and beliefs do not matter any longer.
There has been much discussion regarding the metaphor of the zombie and its meaning in relation to our current society: Marxist and post-colonial narratives have quickly come to claim the zombie as an exemplary example of representing the ‘Other’: the poor, the deprived, or the Black (Canavan, 2010: 431–453; Shaviro, 2002: 281–90). However, the power of the zombie as a metaphor resides in the fact that it can be identified with everyone. Everyone can be a zombie or can turn into a zombie in the future, there is no marker that protects from a possible future as a zombie. This is the real power of the metaphor, it allows identification with the threat. This is why TWD producers keep on claiming that no one is safe in the series. 9
In the first seasons of both the shows, we witness the characters’ learning process and how they come to terms with the porosity of the threshold separating ‘us’ from ‘them’: you can always and quickly move from ‘us’ to ‘them’, but once with ‘them’, there is no coming back. This becomes a powerful motive for killing zombies without remorse as they are not recoverable. How porous the threshold between us and them actually is becomes very clear in TWD when Morgan and his son find Rick, and first attack and tie him, in order to check whether he has been bitten (which would mean he is already on the way to ‘the other side’). When they discover he has been gunshot but not beaten, they untie him and offer him food, something that does not happen so easily in the following seasons, when communities start to consolidate and as a consequence there are other kinds of others, which are not separated by their difference in terms of material conditions but by their values. While the zombie is the ‘abject other’, the undifferentiated and certainly threatening other, ‘the unknown and potentially aggressive other’ is a survivor without values (a Hobbesian ‘other’ in a way). While the first other must be separated through expulsion, the second might become integrated thanks to processes of education, discipline, and punishment (Foucault, 1995: 512ff; Morton and Bygrave, 2008: 1–4).
Biopolitics and zombies
The herds of walkers that terrify the survivors in TWD and FWD’s first seasons do not wish to cause harm, to destroy the survivors’ worlds and lives, or to end a society, which had been their own. They merely seek to satiate their hunger. Their hunger is the engine and end of their actions. They do not reflect upon the pain they are inflicting or the consequences of their ‘actions’.
The zombies penetrate all social roles, unmaking them from the inside. In a certain form, the zombie is the homo sacer, forcibly reduced to bare life (artificially almost equated to Zoe), excluded from society (Agamben, 1998: 86). The zombie is certainly one that can be killed by anyone but cannot be sacrificed. The process of conversion of the zombified human being to a homo sacer is gradual. We know that in both the shows, survivors start relatively soon to kill zombies without thinking of them or feeling anything for them. However, in the second episode of TWD, when Rick and some members of his group-to-be try to escape a department store surrounded by walkers, and they ‘execute’ one walker in order to use his guts and blood as a protection from all the other walkers, they read aloud the information contained in his ID, check for further information his wallet, and they honour the fact that he was an organ donor. They ritualise the death of that walker as a sacrifice that has saved them, emphasising that before he became a walker he had been a normal guy, with hopes, dreams, plans and commitments, and the picture of a pretty girl in his wallet. This scene is the marker of a transition: from considering walkers as somehow people who can be sacrificed, to viewing them as homines sacri, dispossessed of their humanity, and notwithstanding, marking the limits of humanity and the boundaries of society.
Zombified humans are, in TWD and in FWD, the unwilling destroyers of civilisation. Zombies only care for satisfying their most immediate need: hunger for raw, living flesh. They lack rationality, morality, and self-reflexive intentions. They follow their desire and eat whenever eating is possible. Their herds lack structure and hierarchy, there are no classes among zombies. Gender markers are only there as shadows of an unrecoverable past, until their clothes erode and their hair is wasted.
However, the line between homines sacri, normal people of a society, and the sovereign is thin (Agamben, 1998: 85–90). As we see in the bombings of Atlanta (TWD) and the situation in the safe area in Los Angeles where Madison and Travis live (FWD), all people – zombies or not – are turned into homines sacri by state authorities if the protection of the population in general is at stake. The clearest example can be found in the confession of a military man to Daniel Salazar in FWD: the military has shut thousands of people in Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena because there were dead among them, and they did not have the time to figure out who was ‘really’ alive and who was a zombie. Therefore, they locked everybody in the arena, and, of course, after a while: they had all turned into zombies. In the eyes of the sovereign (in this situation the military), everybody became homines sacri if order is to be preserved. And the same occurs in TWD in relation to the bombing of the city of Atlanta.
Later on in both the shows, we witness how the survivors increasingly become sovereigns in relation to the walkers surrounding them – and some survivors also do so in relation to other communities (which they view as bare life). However, the difference between homines sacri and humans is no longer drawn in the name of order but of survival of the group.
The ritualised sacrifice of the walker whose blood and viscera are used by Rick and his group to pass as zombies is not repeated in the shows, and walkers are only killed, but never again sacrificed.
There are some interesting grey zones in the relation between survivors and walkers, beyond the initial doubts regarding whether they should be considered homines sacri or sick people. When survivors face the zombified version of a person they had loved, they find it difficult to see only a homini sacri. Killing a beloved undead does attain the dimension of a ‘sacrifice’, but it is an emotional act of bringing the body of the beloved person to rest, letting it finally find its peace and getting rid of the disease.
Conclusion
This article has aimed to show how the rise of a bio-emergency has been framed in two different, but related, shows: TWD and FWD. Both the shows depict three transition processes that are typical for projections of future emergencies. These transitions include changed markers of vulnerability, of belonging, and a gradual transition of quotidian and exceptional places and times into their opposites, which imply a complete decay of society as we know it, and a new foundation of society and social bonds, which necessarily have to be built on new premises.
The three thresholds this article discussed frame the transition from the world as we know it to a world after the outbreak, and, of course, they mark the path that the main characters of both the shows undergo during that transformation, from habitus over hysteresis back to an updated habitus. However, they also mark the frame for why and how human beings die during the outbreak.
The first threshold, the threshold of vulnerability, is a threshold that takes many lives because it turns relationships of protection into relationships of risk and leads emotions like love and care to their opposite and against those who feel them. People tend to mourn those they love and make them be there for them. It is this danger of uncritical misjudgement of the known and the loved that is one of the biggest risks in the case of an emergency. The tendency to try to help loved ones after they have turned is depicted in FWD, for instance, when Madison goes back to her high school to look for medicine for Nick, and finds the headmaster in a zombified state. Her first tendency to help him bears the greatest danger, whose fatal outcome is only avoided by leaving the expected behind and adapting to the new, represented by Madison killing her former friend.
Furthermore, and in relation to the second threshold, there are errors which many people commit, leading to their death. First, they do not realise that what they took for granted, what they thought was evident, did not work anymore in the world after the outbreak. If one fails to see the transition from quotidian life to a state of exception, and continues behaving according to the ‘old rules’, those that have been habitualised and integrated (and are therefore difficult to suspend), death is the most certain result. The safest places might be those that were places of emergency before. The safest people are those who used to live at society’s margins or have experience in dealing with exceptionality.
Finally, in relation to the third threshold (inclusion/exclusion), and closely connected to the second threshold of exceptionality and to those taken-for-granted old patterns, we encounter a further fatal mistake. If people continue viewing themselves as citizens of a democratic state within the rule of law, and do not realise that in a state of emergency, the ‘sovereign’, has been turned upside down (and is changing), they will not understand that they are no longer citizens but survivors, who have to create and build community and trust on their own. This leaves them unprepared for what is about to come.
FWD and TWD are shows that deal with social closures and openings, with transitions from everyday life to exceptionality, from a relatively safe world to a state of exception, similar in many ways to a Hobbesian state of nature, in which survivors fight each other for increasing their chances of staying alive (they do not always fight, but there is no way of telling in advance whether they will) and in which bare life (the zombies) seems to win over bios.
A future emergency might change the future of society. We have identified preparedness as the key element that allows survival against all odds in a time in which exceptional time becomes quotidian and quotidian time exceptional. The world after the apocalypse is a world in which chances are redistributed, and a few people who had little chances of success in life (like Nick from FWD, or Merle or Daryl from TWD) are given a second chance as co-leaders of the new communities. Only prepared survivors can avoid becoming the new, abject ‘other’, the zombies, who are full members of society until they ‘turn’, and start to mark the boundaries of the social.
FWD and TWD project a new form of society after a future epidemic. In a certain way it shows but it also prepares the viewers for a risky future. It presents tactics and strategies that survivors need to develop in order to remain sane, social, and, above all, alive. And finally both the series make us aware that there is a latent zombie inside each of us just waiting for its moment to take over, and overcome all boundaries of sociability in search for fresh flesh.
Footnotes
Funding
This article is part of a research funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity CSO2013-48232-P.