The Walking Dead, AMC’s runaw—er, shambling hit, drew a record 16.1 million viewers for its fourth season premiere a couple of weeks ago. Its ratings didn’t dip much for the second episode, and I’m sure our updated review of the show—which posted yesterday—will be, as always, one of our best-read television reviews of the season. Even Plugged Inreaders like to know what’s up with those gory zombies, it seems.
But not everyone loves AMC’s walkers. About a week ago, Dr. Manny Alvarez published a piece on how our culture’s fascination with zombies really is an apocalypse.
Hate me all you want, or call me paranoid and misinformed, but there is one common theme that is pervasive in American pop culture today: violence. Even more specifically, zombie violence. The idea of a zombie-infested world inspires fantasies of monsters possessed by an uncontrollable rage to kill, and viewers get a thrill imagining what it would be like to participate in this new world order.
Alvarez takes issue with not just AMC’s zombies, but the proliferation of zombie video games out there and even the zombie runs—actual races where participants must not only run a few miles, but do it while pursued by packs of gored-up volunteers.
Says Alvarez:
When you’re dead, you’re dead. Our brains should be less focused on imaginary zombie hordes and more focused on harnessing the tools that we need in order to enhance our lives, whether it be music, education, science or the classics. Entertainment should help us soothe our brains so that we can ease our minds of some of the stress from our daily lives.
I get the criticism. Our fascination with zombies is a little … disturbing. And The Walking Dead, as popular as it may be, is also the grossest, bloodiest show on the tube—gore we can all do without.
But since the shamblers are here to stay for a while—and there’s very little we can do about that—maybe there’s another way we can think about them. Can Christians turn the whole zombie phenom into telling a different kind of story? Into a reminder of sorts?
The Bible, like our culture, has a certain preoccupation with life, death and what constitutes both. But it defines life differently than the culture does. The Bible tells us that, when we live in sin, we’re not really living. We’re shuffling around, doing the stuff that we always do … but real life escapes us. We are, in a way, zombies—abominations, if you will, of what God would like us to be.
To find life, Paul tells us, we have to die to this zombified life we’re living. “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” he writes in Romans 6:3-4. “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”
God has always loved paradox, and so we find another one particularly resonant in our culture today: In The Walking Dead, living people die and become zombies. In the Bible, zombies die to their sin and become living people.
Loose translation, of course.
Now, none of this makes watching The Walking Dead a spiritual experience. You probably won’t get closer to God by gunning down zombies while playing The Last of Us. But should you find yourself in a zombie run one day, dodging growling pursuants as you head toward the finish line, give this a little thought:
I was just like they were once.
Recent Comments