Walker: Zombie Ranger

The night before last, Ryan and I discovered that the season premier of The Walking Dead was available on Hulu. Consequently, I spent the rest of the night and early morning in a feverish dream delirium, watching my very own 7-hour original zombie series projected onto the unwitting twin movie screens of my inner eyelids.

You'd think I'd learn my lesson about going near anything zombie-related anywhere near bedtime (genre and quality are of no importance -- I had nightmares after both Shaun of the Dead and the terrible Aughts remake of Day of the Dead "starring" Mena Suvari and Ving Rhames -- but obviously I haven't, because we downloaded and watched episodes 2 and 3 last night, with the same nightmare-riffic result for me. Tossing and turning, awaking every couple of hours and punching down the damp cavern that my head had worn into the pillow, and, the minute my eyes were shut again, returning to an elaborate dream landscape of abandoned, boarded up houses and complex moral quandaries: to kill an infected person in order to preempt inevitable zombification? To put down a zombified loved one or leave them to their gleeful flesh-eating ways? To hunker down or keep moving?

I keep trying to think through why I both love and am utterly eviscerated (graaarrr... zombie pun want braaaiins) by this particular genre, and I keep coming back to the extreme loneliness at the heart of most zombie movies -- the feeling that you, as the audience, are watching what may very well be the last remnant of humanity pathetically trying to hold its own against an encroaching horde of mindless, bloodthirsty brutality. The fact that there's rarely a happy ending to these stories suggests we as a species are all too aware of our limited lifespan and our paltry hope of combating entropy. Perhaps there's some cathartic moment of peace that comes with knowing that we're all going to die anyway, so we might as well be glad that it probably won't be such a horrible death as the one reserved for those poor souls about to wear their intestinal tract as a squishy necktie.

Which is weird, because the two specific dream plots I can remember from the past two nights have started with all the expected gruesome zombie mayhem, but ended in uncharacteristically optimism... after a fashion. The first night's dream cast the zombie apocalypse in the appropriately moody post-Katrina New Orleans (of course), with me hiding in one half of a grimy pink double shotgun house through wave after wave of zombie onslaught. At the end of the dream, with order slowly returning to the city and black-clad national guardsmen silently patrolling the streets, I remember walking down a twilit block somewhere in the Touro vicinity and looking at all the FEMA markings scrawled on the ramshackle houses -- representing not the number of people who were dead in the house, but the number of undead still trapped inside. It was a weird moment because on some level both interpretations of the cryptic markings were active in my mind, and I felt a simultaneous swell of sadness for the (un)dead and a counteracting surge of hope for the rebuilding of society from the ground up, a utopian dream of a social tabula rasa that rarely appears in conventional zombie cinema... unless we're talking about terrible remakes starring Mena Suvari and Ving Rhames (srsly, do. not. watch).

The other dream, the one from last night, took place on the set of my Mississippi high school's production of Anne Frank. Conveniently, my mind had conflated "hiding in an attic" with zombie apocalypse, producing the Nazi/zombie amalgam that Hollywood has clearly been waiting for (Jerry Bruckheimer, call me). Again, the dream ended with a strangely hopeful liberation-cum-rebirth-of-man scene, with paratroopers swooping in like puffy angels and sniping at the undead from the sky. I believe there may even have been a Victory Day parade, though the lack of nail-biting tension in the dream also meant that I was more relaxed and, subsequently, uh, slept through some of it.

I suppose I should be happy that my subconscious finds positive ways of dealing with a topic that it obviously finds so terrifying, but that still doesn't explain to me why that grain of terror gets under my skin so easily to produce these kinds of pearls. Perhaps it's that strain of loneliness after all, reacting with my natural antisocial tendencies and literalizing a deep-seated fear of The Other...

... or maybe, in the immortal words of Arrested Development, I'm just a giant pussy.