This past Sunday featured the season premiere of The Walking Dead, a perennial hit television show on AMC. Millions of people tune in when a new episode is on, and AMC rakes in money from advertisers who know many eyes will be on a screen while zombies shuffle around.
Why is this show so popular? That’s a great question to which I don’t have a solid answer. I’ve been a fan of the show from the start, but the way I got hooked is a strange tale.
When I was young, I didn’t like anything with blood and guts. I’d get queasy at the thought of even watching a horror or slasher film. I was “persuaded” to watch one of the Friday the 13th movies as a teenager, and I can still vividly picture some of the more gruesome murders performed by Jason in his hockey mask. Watching that certainly didn’t change my mind about that type of flick.
So I stayed away, for the most part, from that type of movie in the following years. Yet, about a year before TWD appeared for its first season, I happened to be browsing the shelves of graphic novels at the Owatonna Public Library. The Walking Dead comic book collection was on the shelf. On a whim, I pulled it off and read the teaser on the back. Something pulled me toward it, and I read a few pages.
And I haven’t looked back. The comic book series ran nearly 200 issues, and it’s been fantastic storytelling. How would people react in a world where many people have perished and zombies wander around? How do you tell the people with good intentions from those who are only looking out for themselves? There have been many great philosophical debates that have raged in the pages of this comic, and it’s been intriguing to see how characters respond.
When the television show arrived, I had to watch. While watching the first season, I discovered that the gore and blood and death didn’t bother me as it had in my younger years. I’ve often pondered why that would be.
The answer is desensitization. There is so much in our culture that has slowly inured us to these depictions of violence. I wondered where it might have started in my case, and the answer is probably video games. I played Doom and other first-person shooter games while in college. You saw the path ahead of your character and would wipe out the enemy as they appeared. Blood would shoot out of your enemies as you hit them. But this was an animated scene, so it wasn’t quite like Jason or Freddy attacking a victim in a realistic fashion.
I also recall watching movies like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer as an adult. They were very popular, and I wanted to see if they were any good. That probably helped me become desensitized as well. And it doesn’t help that there are just so many more movies like that out there. We’re far from the days when Alfred Hitchcock would inspire terror and suspense by panning away from the violence.
Here’s a funny coincidence. As I was pondering this week’s column, I was also teaching one of my favorite short stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe. In this classic story, the narrator kills the old man he helps take care of and talks casually about dismembering the body and burying it under the floorboards. As I read this with the 7th-graders, I got to thinking about how absolutely shocking writing like that must have been in the 1840s! Yet, while my students let out some yucks and ewws, nobody seemed really taken aback by the description. It was pretty mild compared to what they see in 2019.
When I used to hear people say that video games were wrecking the brains of our youth, I would argue vehemently against that. After all, I played some of those games and never felt like going out and re-enacting those shootings in a live way. But after all these years, I’m starting to wonder. I didn’t start playing those games until I was about 18 or so. But how many kids are being exposed to that material at a much younger, more impressionable age? I’m amazed at how many are talking about shows like TWD at the age of 13 or 14.
Could all that have anything to do with the seeming increase in violence and mass shootings? Are we so desensitized that there are people who think they are playing a game or portraying a scene from a violent show?
That’s likely part of the answer. This nonstop violence that is part of everyday life is making it so people are much less shocked. Try to think back to the last truly shocking scene you saw in a show or read in a book. I’m struggling to come up with that because I’m not surprised by much anymore.
The genie’s out of the bottle, and I don’t think we’ll get it back in. We have to work with our children to make sure they understand the difference between fiction and reality and how to make good choices and think through ideas before acting on them. There are so many ways we can improve the world around us, but the very best place to start is at home.
I will probably keep watching some of these shows, and they are more and more prolific. As I mentioned, I’m amazed at the storytelling of TWD and others like The Boys on Amazon Prime, but I hope I can continue to steer our youth toward quality stories that don’t walk that path until they’re of an age to make adult decisions.
Hopefully, there won’t be a zombie apocalypse before then, or they might miss out on some valuable training.
Word of the Week: This week’s word is contumacy, which means stubborn rebelliousness, as in, “The teenager’s contumacy when told he couldn’t play violent video games caused him to sneak over to his friend’s house to play Call of Duty.” Impress your friends and confuse your enemies!