Month: March 2019

Is “The Walking Dead” Catholic?

Dare I say AMC’s The Walking Dead carries some distinctly Catholic undertones? (Or is it overtones? I’m never sure which I really mean).

I think I’ve always felt this in my bones. I came to the show about three years in, caught up with a summer binge in time for Season 4 , and have watched faithfully ever since. Every now and then, I’ll tune in to some of the Internet’s reactions to the show, and I’m often surprised to find seething hordes of angry fans and critics closing in on the show writers like Rick in the tank.

Angry fans besiege the AMC writer’s room

Those fans and critics were alternately angry at cruel character deaths and bored for long stretches that I found rich in a number of ways: surprising interpersonal cooperation and conflict, compelling explorations of human nature, the tensions between doom and grace, fresh interpretations of mythic archetypes, and through all of it, a persistent resonance with Catholic concerns.

At its most basic, the apocalypse of TWD is a Catholic nightmare about the resurrection of the body and life after death–like Lucifer’s mockery of Christ’s promise. This nightmare continuously tests the remnants of human civilization like Job writ large. To what extent will they–can they–remain true to the things they know to be good amidst the horrors this world will visit upon them?

Then, of course, there are the symbolic echoes of the Judeo-Christian story: Rick Grimes, one-time lawman, leading his people on an Exodus like Moses, the Law giver; Rick, the foster father, raising a child not his own for the promise of hope in a world of death; the repeated gathering of lost sheep; not to mention the more overt winks and nods in names like Judith, Ezekiel, Gabriel, Abraham, Simon, Aaron, the (ironically named) Saviors and their Sanctuary, and, yes… Jesus. (Apparently, your odds of surviving the apocalypse are higher if you have a biblical name; bonus points for Old Testament).

I’m hardly the first to notice this, and in fact, it wasn’t until the most recent half-season (Season 9) that I was able to articulate my Catholic appreciation of the show when others’ faith in the series had been crushed by Negan’s barbed-wired bat. It was the fight for community at Hilltop, in the Kingdom, at Alexandria, that felt so profound in a show that, on the surface, might just have been about killing zombies. Here is a show of diverse, believable, imperfect people, haunted (literally) by their mortality, finding their strength in community and love in their neighbors, daring to show mercy to enemies, yearning to welcome the strangers they fear.

What’s not Catholic about that?

Fahrenheit 2019

In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the antagonist, Beatty, delivers a memorable villain-monologue to the novel’s protagonist, Guy Montag. Montag has begun to have doubts about what they do as firemen–i.e. burn books, which are illegal in Bradbury’s dystopian future. Beatty attempts to set him straight with brief cultural history.

The entire speech, which goes on for several pages, is a tour de force that’s well worth reading in its entirety. (Go on, you know you have an old copy from high school somewhere on your shelves. It’s pages 51-59 in my 2013 Simon & Schuster edition). But here’s one excerpt from Beatty’s speech that knocks my socks off:

Speed up the film, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought!

Captain Beatty

Fahrenheit was published in 1953.

1953!

You’d be hard pressed to find a better description of the media culture of 2019.

I’m not one to get caught up in how well (or not) science-fiction predicts the future. That’s not the point. But if Bradbury is prophetic here, it’s not because he’s predicted anything; it’s because he has as sharp an insight into human nature as any writer of the Twentieth (or Twenty-First) Century. Like any good prophet, his words cut deep with painful truths that the culture doesn’t want to hear about itself.

By my count, this passage is 473 characters long, or about four Tweets. The novel itself is relatively short, clocking in under 50,000 words (shorter than Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone). I hope it’s not too long for people to keep reading it.

Our screens certainly don’t want us to. Guy Montag’s screen-addicted wife, Mildred, has her screens on the parlor walls; we have them on our walls, on our laps, in our pockets, under our pillows. It might turn out that paper doesn’t burn at 451-degrees Fahrenheit. Maybe it just combusts into nothingness at the temperature of a warm lithium-ion battery.