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I have a favorite scene in Madmen.
There's no way I'm alone with this choice. The scene is all over YouTube. It manages to bring tears to the eyes of pretty much anyone who watches it.
It's the carousel scene.
Mr. Draper has to make a pitch to the good people at Kodak that will allow them to sell their "wheel", as they call it, that spins around on the top of the slide projector and allows you to show one slide after another. They're stuck because they see this wheel as an exciting new technology, and they are, after all, in the era of excitement over new technologies. We're putting people into space when they invent that Kodak "wheel," we're making new medicines and new machines and we're on top of the economic world based on our innovation and our American optimism. So - how to market a wheel? How to market about the oldest technology that exists? How to market something as a technological breakthrough when it also represents something that we mastered thousands of years ago? We've been using wheels for millennia. How do we make them fresh?
And Don Draper, the deeply flawed romantic that he is, the man who inspires intense ambivalence and paradoxical admiration, tells the people at Kodak that even more powerful than the concept of "new" is the concept of nostalgia. He gives them this pitch (click on the link!).
And dammit, I challenge you not to cry when you watch this scene. But don't stop there. Ask yourself this: why, exactly, do you cry when you watch this scene? What, exactly, is it that makes us tear up at the circularity, the wheel, what Draper calls the "Carousel of Nostalgia"?
For the purposes of this post, there's another important question as well:
What in the world does this have to with the television show The Walking Dead that happens to be coming back on the air this Sunday?
In the spirit of John Donne, a man who made a living out of bringing together seemingly disconnected notions (what he called the metaphysical conceit), I'm going to try to tie my love of zombies in general and my affection for The Walking Dead in particular to the moment that Don Draper makes us cry with his carousel pitch. They're related, and the connections are more unsettling, I'd guess, than we'd like to acknowledge.
Here's my premise:
The Walking Dead is really about nostalgia.
It is about returning to what is old and seemingly true in a world that is otherwise turned abruptly into chaos. Yes, it's silly. Zombies do not exist, and we humans in the real world can off ourselves with plenty of other methods besides allowing a zombie plague to take hold.
But the conceit of the zombie Armageddon makes possible a stark cultural reckoning with our gut feelings about what matters and about what has therefore garnered valued permanence in our psyches. More importantly, it makes us ask ourselves what we'll do as we choose to keep these values alive. It is in fact not all that different from our current political discourse.
When Mitt Romney says he's hunted varmints, what he's appealing to, really, when you watch that clip, is the memory he hopes to invoke and I think genuinely experiences, of hunting those varmints when he was 15, in simpler times, when he "was young and easy under the apple boughs" (as Dylan Thomas would say). I'm not taking a political stand here; I'm simply stressing the strength of nostalgia to provide comfort as well as pain in times of uncertainty. We remember what we remember not just for the facts but also for the feelings that go along with the facts, and the ability to balance feeling with fact is what keeps us out of trouble.
The converse, however, is also true. The inability to balance feelings with facts allows all hell to break loose. That's literally what happens a lot of the time in The Walking Dead.
Look at episode 4, when the two daughters are fishing together. They're remembering their dad. They're remembering the way he threw all the fish back with one daughter and kept the fish with the other. They're remembering a time of unique normalcy.
Here's the most interesting part of that otherwise clichéd interaction. In fact, here's what keeps me coming back time and again to ponder the zombie trope. If the whole world is over-run with meaningless, if literally everything is different and arguably a whole lot worse than it has ever been, than we don't have to look too hard to find things with which we can recall normalcy. And yet, rather than remembering something simple, like walking to school or buying a cheeseburger, these women recall the fundamentally different ways that their father treated them. And they remember it while they're fishing. They remember their fishing experiences with their dad while they are themselves fishing. In other words, they are on Don Draper's Carousel.
And, like that last scene in that Madmen clip, the screen onto which they're projecting their own memories goes abruptly blank. Yes, they're out on a lake in a boat and they're fishing, but there is nothing - NOTHING - that is similar in their current predicament to their fishing trips with their dad. That's why nostalgia translates, literally, to a kind of sadness over a false homecoming. Homer wrote about this for Odysseus. You cannot really come home again, ever. You pang for something that can never again be, so you are forced to choose which rules, which values, which fundamentals of civilized existence are worth preserving, perhaps even necessary to preserve, in this new and grotesque landscape.
Should Rick have shot the little girl now that she's a walker? In the old world, no way. In the old world he should have brought her to the hospital and gotten her care, allowed her to live with some kind of human dignity. But Dr. Jenner tells us at the end of season 1 that he can't even be sure the Walkers are alive. If something that looks human isn't alive, then it can't really be afforded the same values as a living human, can it?
Go back three slides on Draper's carousel. In that world, that girl is taken to the hospital. Go forward three slides in the carousel of The Walking Dead.
You can't.
That carousel doesn't exist yet. It is being invented in the real time of the show. Old rules don't apply, and that by itself is damn unsettling. In fact, we know from neurobiology that when presented with evidence that our old world views are patently false, we refuse to engage our prefrontal cortex, the very part of the brain we need most to make sense of the new. Drew Westin did some brilliant experiments about this with regard to how we choose political candidates. We tend not to use the very parts of our brains that invented democracy in the first place.
In The Walking Dead we're riveted, because we are presented with one "what if" scenario after another, and it is literally trying to our intensely socialized brains. We lack rules in the landscape of the Walkers. And lacking rules creates nostalgia for a time when those rules existed. We want to turn back Draper's carousel to a time when there were no Walkers, but this just isn't an option for Rick and Shane and everyone else.
And here's the most unsettling aspect The Walking Dead. Sometimes the old rules work, and sometimes they don't. They lack predictability. You literally don't know when the rules will save us or fail us until it is often too late.
Is there a fundamental commonality to life? John Donne went so far as to compare his love for others as the love of a flea's thirst for blood. It is a natural thing, he seemed to say, for life to love life. But that rule, a variation of the Golden Rule I guess, doesn't always work in The Walking Dead.
What would I do?
That's the question I keep asking with each episode. That's the question I'll be asking this Sunday. And I won't know the answer. But in the asking, I'll learn about myself. Could I have pulled the same trigger that Rick does in that last scene? I don't know, man. I just don't know.
Steven Schlozman is the author of the novel, The Zombie Autopsies, and a contributor to the collectiomn of essays The Triumph of the Walking Dead
