Anarchy, state, and zombie dystopia: civilization and its discontents in The Walking Dead.

• Author: Sandefur, Timothy
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Television program review

Now closing its sixth season, AMC's The Walking Dead has received the highest ratings of any cable drama ever, and its writing and acting have been showered with awards. That's impressive, given that the series is also a deadly serious examination of the nature of political society and the virtues necessary to sustain it.

The series begins, appropriately enough, with what Albert Camus called the only genuine philosophical problem: Why not commit suicide immediately? In one early episode, the survivors of the zombie apocalypse are trapped in a lab that's set to self-destruct by a scientist who, unable to pursue his research further, prefers death to a world without hope of cure or rescue. "Wouldn't it be kinder? More compassionate, to just hold your loved ones and wait for the clock to run down?" he asks. The show's central character, Rick Grimes, refuses. "All we want," he says, is "a choice. A chance."

Another character, Andrea, prefers to remain and die, but is forced against her will to escape. For the rest of her life, she resents her rescuer. "I chose to stay," she tells him. "If I decided that I have nothing left to live for, who the hell are you to tell me otherwise? I wanted to die my way, not torn apart by drooling freaks. That was my choice. You took that away from me."

In a later episode, Andrea falls in with a larger community led by a psychotic despot called The Governor. When Rick's followers discover that The Governor plans to attack them, they implore Andrea to assassinate him, but when the moment comes, she holds back and is captured. She dies, as she feared, at the hands of a monster.

Her fate might seem conventional for post-apocalyptic literature: a tragic instance of harsh life after society's collapse. But it is actually just one manifestation of The Walking Dead's most distinctive characteristic: its basic belief that civilization and its virtues are not merely doomed, but fundamentally misguided. Where most post-apocalyptic stories portray civilized virtues in nostalgic terms--to show the value of cooperation, gentleness, progress, and law by imagining their absence--The Walking Dead is skeptical, if not downright cynical, about political society and the good life it makes possible.

From The Governor's tyranny to a hospital controlled by cops who have turned pirate, to Terminus--a society of cannibals whose motto is "You're either the butcher or the cattle"--every community Rick's group of nomads encounters turns out to be corrupt, compromised, or contemptible. The foundations of city life, from religion to agriculture to the pursuit of happiness, are treated as delusions. Andrea's weakness, for instance, is not that she's a coward--she's not--but that she values the pursuit of happiness more than mere survival. "Every one of us has suffered," she tells The Governor's followers at one point. "So what do we do? We dig deep, and we find the strength to carry on. We work together, and we rebuild. Not just the fences, the gates, the community, but ourselves, our hearts, our minds." That idealism proves her fatal flaw.

To the degree that The Walking Dead does respect the city, its ideal is Sparta, not Athens. The creativity, innovation, democracy, and joy that the Greeks saw as proof of Athena's favor are treated here as petty distractions from the bloody trials of "real" life. The series prefers the aristocratic values of warlord societies: violence, hierarchy, cleverness, honor, and physical labor. The characters never create, they rarely sing, and the only books they read are Tom Sawyer and the Bible. Their highest virtue is loyalty. Their worst sin is being slow on the trigger.

The Walking Dead's Nietzschean indictment of bourgeois decadence begins with its scorn for religion. Its subtle jabs at a faith whose God rose from the dead provide a clever indictment of the longing for immortality that often inspires humanity's worst. This is particularly effective in the episode "The Grove," which...