The Walking Dead starts again tonight. I love this show, but I don’t have quite the heart for death and zombies like I used to. Sometimes, I fear that our culture is pushing it too far.
For example, last year, a disturbing image came through my social media news streams, a life-sized mannequin for shooting practice. Life-sized targets shaped like white tail deer are not unusual where I live in the Texas Hill Country, but I have never seen one shaped like a scantily clad buxom woman who bleeds when you shoot her.
Thankfully, these zombie shooting targets were generating all of the online outrage (and free publicity) that you would expect. One of my friends posted a link to an email campaign asking Amazon to remove the product (which it did after 63,000 people joined the campaign in just 24 hours). Many commenters were simply dumbfounded, saying things like, “Wow, this is a new level of disgusting.” And “I don’t get it.” And simply “terrible.”
I was horrified too. That’s a shame, I thought. People are sick, I thought.
Does My Imagination Need a Bullet to the Head?
I hate shock and awe marketing tactics. And it is easy to hate a product that encourages men to act out violent misogynist fantasies with real guns. But there was something underneath my outrage that I couldn’t pinpoint. It has stuck with me for over a year.
I kept thinking about The Walking Dead. I’m not blaming the show for the zombie practice target, but the show’s popularity and the practice target result from the same collective imagination our society is cultivating.
Consider zombie video games. When my family visits Kerrville’s Fun Games, the local 1980s-style Twin Galaxies arcade, I try to steer my kids clear of the violent aisle, the one filled with the first person shooter games and the zombie games. These games used to be more controversial. Maybe they still are in some places, but most parents seem to accept the difference between pixels and atoms.
Shooting a buxom pixel zombie for a dollar at the local arcade is something the kids could do at the next birthday party. Shooting a back yard mannequin crosses the line.
I hope we never become numb to bleeding mannequins and misogynist shooting sports, but I wonder if we all shouldn’t be better curators of our imaginations.
I’m not trying to be a fear monger here. Violent video games can be an easy scapegoat when we want to blame others for our own internal poverty.
And this is the strange appeal of a life-sized bleeding mannequin. If they are horrible, if they cause our stomachs to turn, it is only because they give atoms to our darkest pop culture.
Violence Is Not a Focal Practice
The most successful games of all time are not violent games. Tetris is the top mobile game with 100 million paid downloads. The Sims 2 holds the record for PC games with 20 million copies sold. The top game on PlayStation 3 is a racing game. Nintendo systems are dominated by the Mario franchise and Wii Sports.
Twelve million sales of Call of Duty: Black Ops doesn’t seem so dangerous to the culture when you compare it to 123 million copies of Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort.
And these games have almost become a focal practice for some people. Long distance relatives can gather in their favorite game to play together. Families can maintain multiple touches throughout the day with simple turn based games on their phones. Many of these games are highly relational and highly creative, like Minecraft. Some, like sports and dancing games for the Wii are physically active.
Perhaps the worst thing about Wii Sports or Minecraft is our human tendency to entertain ourselves to death. The noise of technology in our lives is hard to ignore. Who can resist so much digital temptation and distraction? Faced with the addictive qualities of some games, we must not become the Gaming Dead. We need constraints on our behavior or we lose our time, even our lives, to toys and games.
Everything is a game, these days. We have gamified our friendships on Facebook. We have gamified our exercise with FitBits. YouVersion has even gamified spiritual disciplines, helping us measure and share our Bible study progress. All of this can be good. Online connectedness is empowering the crowd to help us shape our behaviors for the better. At its best, social games like Facebook encourage people to affirm each other and share the positive stories of good, joyful moments in their everyday lives.
Trying to Escape the Crowd
When the crowd becomes a community, it is a strong force for social good. In the 1960s crowds of non-violent protestors across the Deep South worked to end racial segregation at lunch counters in drugstores and diners. The focus and commitment of these sit-ins drew strength from the church community. Nashville students left one 1960s sit-in without incident and went immediately to a service at the First Baptist Church, moving together from non-violent protest to community worship.
Organizing a crowd into a community takes incredible discipline and leadership, though. Without leadership, every crowd is just a mob, a horde of mindless zombies. It is no wonder that zombies have swept through our cultural imagination in the crowded, noisy world of the digital era.
Like Judas of Jesus Christ Superstar, I am frightened by the crowd.
But entertainment doesn’t have to be empty. I have seen my kids dancing with their cousins to a Disney Wii Game, waving their Wii remotes and their booties to “Squirrels in My Pants.” I have seen them build elaborate world mazes and scavenger hunts in Minecraft, exchanging ipods or joining the same network game to share what they have built.
With all of this creativity at our fingertips, limitless possibilities and directions for our stories, why do we still want stories of violence and decay and exploding heads?
Why, Friday night, did I rewatch the 4th season premiere of The Walking Dead? Why tonight will I watch the 5th season premiere?
Because let’s be clear about one thing. God help me, I love The Walking Dead.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In