“[If] every affect belonging to an emotional impulse, whatever its kind, is transformed, if it is repressed, into anxiety, then among instances of frightening things there must be one class in which the frightening element can be shown to be something repressed which recurs. This class of frightening things would then constitute the uncanny.” –Sigmund Frued, The Uncanny

I recently read Matt Zoller Seitz’s critical review of The Walking Dead season seven opener and I have to say that I thought it was a good piece. He makes some great points about our culture’s obsession with “empty violence” and eroticized brutality. I do admit that this particular episode was perhaps one of the most graphic, violent ones I’ve ever seen on television. Regarding what the show is about Seitz writes:

“The longer this series goes on, the more obvious it becomes that the violence is the point, and everything else is an intellectual fig leaf. The show is not really about the slow process of desensitization to violence that occurs after disasters, during wars and so on; it’s (inadvertently, I think) about our own desensitization as audience members in a country that is, despite pockets of deprivation and violence, basically a soft place day to day, compared to the hellholes we see on the news and read about online. You get to come into your job Monday morning and talk about that awesome kill last night, or that sad but awesome kill of some character you liked.”

I think Seitz is sniffing up the right tree here but he’s not quite there. I would want point out that, unlike many of the other shows that Seitz brings up in comparison to TWD which depict heavy violence, at root, The Walking Dead is a show that has zombies in it. This is an important considersation because, in my mind, this puts the show under the genre of “monster story.” Zombies are interesting because they are “undead” creatures, and as anthropologist David Gilmore has observed (gesturing to Freud), zombies are the sort of monsters that really do embody our fear of death. One obvious problem with our society is that, like sex or pornography for example, talk of death is illicit. In Western Euro-American culture, anyway, death has been removed from our homes and lives and hidden behind sterile hospital curtains. I’ve read claims that suggest massive and systemic death repression might be implicated in the attraction to horror stories, in general, and zombie stories specifically. So Seitz is on to something when he points out that perhaps because of our lack of everyday societal violence it comes out in our art/stories, but I’d say that It’s not our obsession with violence coming out, necessarily (this is a little too Hobbseian for me), so much as it is the unconscious fear of death.

Freud’s theory of mourning is also applicable here and helps explain zombies pretty well, in my opinion, especially in The Walking Dead; it is a show about death and the externalization of the confusing, contradictory, ambivalent process of mourning. When a loved one turns into a zombie, that’s some messed up shit. How does one deal with that in a healthy way (especially when us American’s don’t really deal with death in a healthy way to begin with?!?)? Is the living person able to put the dead person to rest, or do they remain tied to them forever, refusing to let them die? This happens all the time in the show. Freud’s theory of the uncanny (mentioned in the quote above) is also applicable to zombies: zombies are incomprehensible, yet incomprehensibly familiar. They’re like us but different in a weird sort of way. In other words, often times when people have to deal with complicated or unacceptable emotions, we project them onto exterior things or people. This is sort of where monsters come from. “I’m not evil, that zombie/werewolf/vampire is!” The thing that’s really scary or unnerving or uncanny about monsters, and zombies in particular, is that they represent our repressed, unacceptable feelings that are supposed to stay hidden. We Americans don’t want to see, experience or deal with death at all, let alone see it shuffling up the street toward us.

Tags:deathdeath repressionFreudmourningpsychologythe walking deaduncannyzombies