Talking Turkey—About Zombies

Since Thanksgiving week is all about eating, naturally my thoughts turn to zombies.

I mean, they live to eat. Even though they don’t, technically speaking, well, live. And even though it makes no sense that they’re ravenous for human flesh, because why would a corpse have an appetite?

I was thinking about all this last Sunday night when I was watching The Walking Dead on TV. In case you don’t know, this is weekly series that’s broadcast on AMC. Which, extending the theme of counter-intuition, stands for American Movie Classics. The Walking Dead is neither a movie nor a classic. Rather, it’s an episodic television show, based on a series of graphic novels (hifalutin’ comic books) about a small band of survivors of an unexplained (in the show, at least) apocalypse that has killed most of the world’s population, littering the landscape with corpses. Many of whom (but not all, somehow) have reanimated—in the sense that they can move, see, hear and smell, if not breathe, enunciate beyond hisses and moans, or mitigate the stench of their steady decomposition. Furthermore, these “walkers,” when not eating survivors wholesale, lethally infect them with bites that turn them into zombies, too.

None of it frankly makes any sense, even within its own little suspension-of-disbelief universe. Which tends to makes the plots head-scratchingly stupid. Not only that, but the show’s writing, character development and acting are pedestrian at best (pun sort of intended). That’s why I write that, in addition to not being a movie, The Walking Dead isn’t a classic by any stretch. It’s in only its second season, so there’s time for it to become one, I suppose. If, that is, it somehow can fashion its own framework of absurdist logic and hire new writers and actors to implement it.

So, why do I watch this program? It’s stupid, yes, but it’s stupid fun. The makeup, prosthetics, etc, are excellent, and the zombies are genuinely frightening. (An aside: How did “zombie” come to be synonymous with the undead dead, when the term used to be applied to a living person reduced by voodoo to a trance-like state?) The show, thus, is suspenseful, and sometimes delightfully nerve-wracking.

Also, much as watching The Biggest Loser makes me feel good about my ability to exit my house and car without the aid of a crowbar or the fire department, watching The Walking Dead makes living in our real world of environmental, economic, political and civil collapse feel at least slightly more tolerable. I mean, don’t get me wrong—I’m as disgusted as you are that our congressional “supercommittee” promised steely resolve, then crumbled like tinfoil. And yes, it’s hard not to feel that all may be lost when Americans are so desperate for leadership that Newt Gingrich can rise to the top of the GOP presidential field simply because he has ideas—however wrongheaded and disproven and egocentric those ideas might be. Still, just as Tom Waits once famously sang that he’d rather have “a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy,” so, too, would I—speaking of brains—rather not have mine ripped from my cranium and gobbled up by ghouls. As depressing as real life can be, come The Walking Dead’s conclusion at 10 pm Sunday nights, I feel grateful that I’ll soon be sleeping in a comfortable bed, beside a spouse who may punch me to stop snoring but at least is unlikely to cannibalize me.

So, anyway, getting back to eating. Last week’s episode of The Walking Dead included a scene in which a woman standing in a hayloft emptied a sack of live chickens onto a barn floor, where a group of walkers were lurching and hissing and moaning, as the undead dead are wont to do. Please don’t ask why a bunch of zombies were being held captive, rather than having been dispatched by the standard methods—a bullet to the brain or beheading. Again, none of it makes any sense, even within its own crazy context. How is it that something that’s already dead can be killed, anyway? If I told you that these particular zombies are being protected by a flipped-out retired veterinarian who thinks they’re only “sick,” and that they shouldn’t be stigmatized simply because they’re rancid killing machines, would that help sort things out? I didn’t think so.

Moving on. The woman, a daughter of the nutty veterinarian, emptied her sack of chickens and the zombies below—who happened to include the Corpse Formerly Known as Mom—went into a feeding frenzy. Again, why do the dead need to eat at all? If they like chickens so much, shouldn’t survivors tote a supply of Rhode Island Reds at all times to buy themselves getaway time whenever the zombies get close? I read on a Web site somewhere—naturally, there now are more Web sites and chats devoted to The Walking Dead than those dedicated to sustainable agriculture and nuclear disarmament—that the walkers will eat only live animals. Now, why is that?! Is it because the show would be much less horrific if survivors could simply leave a freshly-baked pie on the window sill for a passing zombie to conveniently “steal,” leaving the humans alone? Are walkers ever satiated, anyway? Were they to feast on us at the Thanksgiving table tomorrow, might they later in the day go into a tryptophan coma and doze to the sound of football on TV? While that seems unlikely, it would make about as much sense as anything else in the zombie universe.

I suppose that, in a certain sense, zombies are eating my brain, because I spend a lot of time puzzling over supernatural inconsistencies and illogic that could be better expended on any number of other things. But at least I’m not the only one wasting brainpower in this way. Per my earlier mention of Web sites, there are hundreds, probably thousands, of people who labor over this nonsense at far greater length than do I. I recently picked up a copy of the Washington City Paper to find the syndicated “Straight Dope” column, which is written by Cecil Adams, the self-proclaimed “world’s most intelligent human.” The question posed by a reader was this: “Putting aside the brain-eating and all that, how dangerous is the combined smell of all those ambulatory corpses? I assume they’re giving off methane or ammonia or some other noxious gas. Would the aggregate stench of hundreds of walking dead make your mall sanctuary uninhabitable, even if you managed to keep from being bitten?”

OK, first, why “how dangerous is” the smell, as opposed to “how dangerous would it be”? Does this reader live in a town where creeping malodorousness suggests a looming ambulatory-corpse crisis? Second, while Cecil Adams at least is smart enough to get paid to answer zombie questions, is this really the smartest use of a stratospheric IQ that otherwise might be put to use identifying new energy sources, or perhaps a way to isolate and neutralize the gun-nut gene that daily makes me want to strangle my own country?

Adams’ answer, while circumstantially irrelevant, was based on science and made for fascinating reading. Did you know that “aptly named gasses cadaverine and putrescine are primarily responsible for dead-body smell”? Me, neither! (Actually, I probably did know it, when I read Mary Roach’s Stiff: The Curious Life of Cadavers, but I’d since forgotten.) To make a long response short, Adams concluded, “While the stench of zombies probably won’t kill you”—again, why “won’t” as opposed to “wouldn’t?” does Adams know something?—“it may gross you out of existence. If you’re somewhere that makes you constantly want to throw up, that to me is a good working definition of an uninhabitable environment.”

See, that’s the thing. The world in which we actually live no doubt makes every one of us want to vomit from time to time. One can reasonably argue, too, that—given global warming and its predictably dire consequences—Earth is becoming less habitable with each passing year. For now, though, our immediate environments—climatic and personal—remain (at least for those of us with jobs) within the comfort zone.

Put another way, if we aren’t able to keep our food down tomorrow, it will be because we overstuffed our guts, not because a shuffling army of zombies are harshing our mellow and stinkin’ up the joint.

That being the case, allow me to wish you and yours a very Happy Thanksgiving. And bon appétit.