Focused On A Big D—I Mean, Stick—And An Eyeball, TWD Swings And Misses
My neighbor, myself, and my ornery cat Olive packed ourselves on my couch last night waiting with bated “antici….. PATION” to find out who Negan offed at the end of the last season of The Walking Dead.
There was quite a bit of foreplay before they satisfied our curiosity. A lot of build up. Tension. Fantasizing. (You see where I'm going with this.)
Negan’s barbed wire bludgeon, as the internet has widely noted, is a metaphor. A metaphor for his dick.
Negan walks around the circle of Rick and his crew and dangles his thorned bludgeon in their faces, the camera often angling up at him just in case we weren't already pretty sure the thing is a phallic symbol. We get it. He’s swinging his dick around. It’s real dangerous. It hurts cause it’s so big. It’s named after a woman because he’s that comfortable with his manhood. After all, real men name their boats after babes. Why not a bludgeon?
There's the metaphorical sexualization, and then there's the plain fact Negan’s hot as hell, too. My neighbor (let’s just call her Jess so I can stop calling her my neighbor) and I kept saying things like “They’re gonna have to try reeeeal hard to get me to see past how gorgeous he is.” Is that an accident? Or are we just shallow as hell? Or both?
Jess loves Jeffrey Dean Morgan because of his stint on Grey’s Anatomy, and I’m pretty sweet on him for his role in The Good Wife. As Jess pointed out, “What kind of villain has dimples like that?” We’re not talking scary ass Jack Nicholson dimples here, people. No. We’re talking, Javier Bardem and Paul Rudd had their DNA mixed up and the result came out on the burly side but with the charming as hell dimples. (And thanks to my trusty Google search of images for Jeffrey Dean Morgan, I came to discover he in fact OWNS A CANDY SHOP WITH PAUL RUDD. So yeah. Now try not to be sweet on him)
(Swoon)
Negan is dominant. He spends the entire episode breaking Rick in like a dog -- teaching him who's boss. The bludgeon, both for its violence and its prominence (and well, it's shape) becomes a sexualized symbol of that dominance.
I hate using the word “rape” as a comparison to anything. It’s offensive to rape victims, and should also be offensive to humanity, really. But combine The Walking Dead’s blatant, eye-roll worthy sexual symbolism of Negan and his bludgeon and Gaston-like swagger with the way he makes people bend to his will through fear and intimidation with his giant painful stick, and yeah. It seems fairly apparent to me that's metaphorical comparison the show is going for. Slow claps all around, folks.
First to die is (SPOILER ALERT Y’ALL) Ginge, aka Abraham. And it felt kind of right that it was the Big Ginge. The guy rose chin up and defiant with a look on his face that said “Kill me, I’m taking one for the team. And also, fuck you.” So it was sort of hard to be sad that he died. It felt like he won, in a way.
Then Daryl, our beloved hot head, shot his mouth off. And Negan took it out on Glenn.
Many of us suspected Glenn would die. From what I’ve read, if the show were totally faithful to the comics he would have been dead already. The fact that he escaped that mess with the walkers after hiding under a dumpster or whatever that was last season AND somehow made it back to Maggie was nothing short of miraculous.
If they were going to kill anybody, let’s face it – me and probably the large percentage of the fandom were crying out, as we always do: “NOT DARYL.” But right after Daryl, we’d say: “Not Glenn!”
So Negan took his big spiky di—I’m sorry, Lucille—and bashed the shit out of Glenn’s head in full view. And Jess and I both had our hands over our mouths, but not because we were shocked that it was Glenn or devastated that it was Glenn, or worried about Maggie and their unborn child. Nope. It was more of a, “Oh they really just – yeah they just showed that. They’re still going? But his eyeball! But… Why though?”
I get that the writer's room may have been testing the audience. If they’ve got so many fans of the comics watching – and from what I understand those are unapologetically gruesome – they must have thought, “Yeah man let’s go for it. Let’s see if it works. Let’s see if they can handle it.”
Here’s the thing about art. If you see a painting or a comic or a sketch, it’s a representation of the artist’s reality that he or she is creating for you. Film is also this way, but it has the potential to be infinitely more visceral because, like life, it moves. Yet some of the most frightening films revolve around what you CAN’T see. Seeing a still drawn image of a guy with his head bashed in is one thing. It’s representational. It’s shocking, but it’s not moving. Something about the stillness is not gratuitous.
Seeing the love child of Javier Bardem/Paul Rudd/George Clooney bash a dude’s head in – in all it’s corn syrupy, food dye glory with a popped out eye to boot – seems more comic-esque than an actual comic book or graphic novel. A Roy Lichtenstein-esque painting could only do justice to what I’m saying here. So someone get on that, or I will.
After all that preamble, allow me to make my point.
I love Glenn. I’ve loved Glenn through this whole series. But in his moment of death, instead of crying like I have for the show’s other characters (this coming from someone who once cried during a Polaroid commercial) I felt nothing. Nothing other than: “Wow. That eyeball though.”
The point of the show is the cast of characters. They’re what make us watch the show – not the violence. That’s a backdrop. A setting. When your setting becomes the vehicle that moves the plot in a show where the characters are its true center of gravity, the nervous system, the bloodline to its audience . . . well, you’ve cut them off from the beating heart of the program. What makes it pulse.
Someone, get the paddles.
Setting can move film. That’s a thing, and it's a thing that can be beautiful. But this show is not about that. If it were, all we’d be tuning in for would be a bunch of zombies moaning in a forest in Georgia. We wouldn’t be watching to see how a group of heartbroken, physically broken, fucked up people who survived hell come together and form a family to survive. We wouldn’t be watching to see what happens when those people fall in love, and hurt each other, and live and die. And also try not to get eaten by zombies.
Glenn’s not an eyeball, man. He’s a badass in a baseball cap who braved the streets of a zombie-ridden urban metropolis for his friends. He’s a guy who’ll risk his life to get birth control so he can woo a woman. He’s someone who lived and died for his adopted family.
Glenn’s not an eyeball.