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The Walking Dead
Reviewed by John David Ebert
Cinema Discourse
December 5, 2012
As I have pointed out elsewhere, television is now the great new
medium that is taking over the role once occupied by cinema, especially
the role of miniaturizing ancient and long forgotten cosmologies. And
so, from now on, I will be including reviews of television shows on this
site, along with contemporary films. Frank Darabont’s television show, The Walking Dead, based on a series of graphic novels, is one of the best of these new shows and I want to say a few words about it here.The Walking Dead is a sort of experimental laboratory for
probing utopian societies, and the evolution of the show thus far —
currently in its third season — has progressed through a series of such
miniaturized societies. In this respect, the show is continuing where
the great utopian / dystopian narratives of classical literature, from
Plato’s Republic to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (and then onward into such celluloid narratives as The Truman Show and Dark City) left off. Film has currently traded the exploration of multiple utopias for precisely one
utopia, that namely, of comic book Gotham, and has left the exploration
of other utopic / dystopic possibilities for television.The show’s first season explored, and then rejected, the modern
megalopolis as ideal society, finding it a corrupt world of the walking
dead, an old, very old metaphor for the spiritually asleep and ignorant
human being locked into the mode of forgetfulness of Being. The first
season polarized the corrupt and decadent metropolis against the
exospheric nomadic society, privileging the latter social formation as a
stateless mode of wandering and exile in which experiments with new
social structures no longer bound and constrained by the City as a
pressurized apparatus of social capture were undertaken.
2013-03-16 12:16:39
Source: http://disquietreservations.blogspot.com/2013/03/john-david-ebert-on-walking-dead.html