Evacuating Television’s ‘Lifeboat Ethics’ Engine
Almost everyone I know loves The Walking Dead.
I myself religiously watched every episode of the first 5.5 season of The Walking Dead. I found it a well-written, often tense and scary, well-acted television show.
I really enjoyed watching the show until all of a sudden I noticed that maybe I was enjoying the watching experience for all of the wrong reasons and that my enjoyment was starting to cause problems for me in other areas like depression and psychic numbing.
Why?
Loving A Show For All The Wrong Reasons
The protagonists on The Walking Dead are a group of (mostly) randomly connected human beings fighting to stay alive in a world populated by zombies and other, often even more brutal, groupings of human beings.
Staying alive on The Walking Dead is about the struggle to maintain, in a constantly threatening dystopian society, the kind of ‘ALIVE” that the philosopher Giorgio Agamben has referred to as “Bare Life” or life as exists prior to aspirational politics (life reduced to its most animal form).
If there is a unifying factor among the ‘protagonist’ group it is that they all want to continue to assert (together) the right to remain independent and breathing.
Every other dream or aspiration, beyond small moments of accidental joy, has been reduced to only animalistic survival, independent association, and eating and sleeping.
The group endlessly bounces from visiting one Donner party situation to another Donner party situation in a seemingly never-ending television experiment in lifeboat ethics.
Ultimately, as the situation became bleaker and bleaker, I found myself often rooting for terrible ethical behaviors forced only because the alternative was even more terrible ethical behaviors.
As I found myself cheering, by default, for a team making darker and darker choices, I found myself feeling spiritually dirtier and dirtier after each episode. I got to the point where I felt totally invested in rooting for what became a team of remorseless brutal killers only a tiny bit less dehumanized and cruel than the people they were fighting against.
Three things became clear to me:
1. The least ethically complicit characters on the show were the mindless zombies
2. The “Walking Dead” in the title was most likely the human survivors and not the zombies (and that the worst monsters were almost always the human ones). It is really hard to blame zombies for doing zombie things (they aren’t doing it out of spite or meanness, they are just doing what zombies do).
3. Enjoying the show was progressively making me a worse person. The show was, in a sense, so good at presenting brutality, that it seemed to have a transitive property implicating and influencing me ethically through my connection to the characters.
One thing that should be clear here, I am not saying the show is bad. I am saying that the show is so effective at manufacturing ugliness that it has turned vice into virtue and despair into an expectation.
My Mom used to say that she avoided violent television because she didn’t want to entertain herself with terrible events and practice and I used to consider her perspective extreme and maybe even naïve.
5.5 seasons of TWD may have finally converted me to her point of view.
Repetitive and Numbing Misery
Over time, I found that the repetitive nature of the core plot mechanism was reducing my overall enjoyment of the series and also depressing me.
The core plot engine of TWD is:
The team is forced by circumstance or hope to move to a new community and the new community turns out to be even worse.
In order for this core engine to work, the brutality of each new situation has to be heightened every single time.
Not only have I become tired of the repetitive nature of the core engine, but I find myself disgusted by my enjoyment of each new level of brutality and literally afraid that by participating, I was myself becoming dehumanized in the process.
There are literally things I was cheering that five minutes before I saw them I would have said that I had no desire to see.
And this last point is pretty important because it suggests that part of what the show produces is a progressive psychic numbing and an addiction to increasingly spectacular sorrow, brutality, and torture porn.
Some might suspect that I am calling for censorship of brutality porn, nothing could be further from the truth, my point is only to suggest that I made a personal choice to no longer participate in The Walking Dead’s perpetual escalation of sorrow, brutality, and torture porn.
Because TWD does what it does so well, I was feeling really emotionally disturbing aftershocks from my normal viewings of this show. Obviously, not everyone probably experiences this level of reactions to what happens on the show.
- ‘Breaking Bad’ was often a terribly brutal show but the point of the show wasn’t to inspire future Walter White’s.
- ‘The Wire’ could be incredibly depressing and brutal, but the goal of the show wasn’t to celebrate the inevitability of bureaucratic indifference and structural racism and violence.
- ‘The Shield’ was often a truly brutal show (about how good police can go bad), but the end of the show made clear that the point wasn’t intended as a celebration of excessive law and order.
Anyway, that is why I stopped watching The Walking Dead. I don’t require shows or movies to hide brutality or to hide complex ethical choices, but I do require them to ultimately try to write the world a better place.
What does The Walking Dead stand for?
Josh is a 100% reader-funded blogger and freelance writer. Please consider following him on Twitter, throwing a tip into his hat on Patreon, or adding his blog OnPirateSatellite to your feeds. Support writing on platforms like Medium that don’t have pop-ups or bloatware!
