The classic views of police officers within our society for years now have been that they are meant to protect and serve the people, and that they are the people to go to when you need help. Even as a kid that is who I was taught to go to if no one else I knew was around. They have always been known to have authority and be the people with the power, but that has changed in AMC’s The Walking Dead.
The Walking Dead was originally a comic book series created by Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore, and was published in October, 2003. The first episode of the show was called Days Gone By and was aired October 31st, 2010; what a perfect night to air such a show. Within the first three minutes of the episode we encounter our first zombie. The episode had jumped ahead in the story to start us off with a bang, literally! We meet our protagonist Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) as he walks to a gas station surrounded by empty cars and tents, with a sign that says no gas. He is wearing a sheriff’s uniform and we see that he drives a sheriff’s car. He sees out of the corner of his eye a little girl walking behind one of the cars and comes up behind her and says “Little girl.. I’m a policeman.. Little girl, don’t be afraid.” When the little girl turns around our worst fears have come true, she is in fact a zombie.
She has a giant gash on the side of her mouth, is pale white, and has little bloody holes all over her shirt. She is even equipped with a teddy bear, bathrobe and slippers. This is a brilliant decision for the first zombie we see because it goes out of its way to show us that the world has changed. This is shown by taking something we all see as innocent and pure, a little girl with a teddy bear, that couldn’t hurt anyone, and making it something dangerous and physically distorted. It shows us that even the most innocent things have become dangerous. The zombie charges Rick and he shoots her in the head. This scene, and this episode shows the world in a different light than how it really is. In this episode we see the police as people without the power and the authority and instead having to defend themselves and be just as, if not more, vulnerable than everyone else. It flips the roles of the average person and the cops.
One of the ways that we see a shift in power between the cops and average people is the circumstances that Rick finds himself in when he awakens from his coma into this new zombie infested world. Before his coma we see Rick as a pretty normal cop, sitting in his car with his partner talking about girls and his wife. When they are called about a high speed chase they set up a roadblock on a highway to stop the pursuit. Rick seems to be giving orders to the other cops which gives us the impression that he is in charge which adds to our view of him and gives us more of a feeling that he is an authority figure. Things go south when Rick gets shot in a firefight with the criminals that they stopped at the roadblock. Due to his injuries he ends up in a coma. When Rick wakes up from his coma after being shot on the job, he expects to find his wife Lorey (Sarah Wayne Callies), his son Carl (Chandler Riggs), and his best friend and partner Shane (Jon Bernthal). We see a scene where his friend has a vase of flowers and he was standing over Rick talking to him. Then we see Rick awake and he says “that vase, that’s something special.”(Walking Dead) But we see him now with a beard and the flowers are dead so obviously time has gone by. When he gets out of bed he is very weak and falls yelling “nurse help” but there is no one there to help them. This flips the way the real world is, showing the cop vulnerable in a hard situation, unable to help themselves or get any help from others. It is ironic because in real life it is the police who are supposed to help people when they are in a vulnerable position, it breaks the “norm”. As Rick goes searching for his family at his house he sees his first zombie, a decomposed woman that has been cut in half, this obviously makes Rick panic and he takes off on a bike. Here we see the man who is supposed to be calm and cool under pressure, and it his job to deal with problems most people can’t and he is having problems dealing with the reality of the situation, he even goes on to try and “wake himself up” as if he was dreaming.
He comes across a father and his son that have seeked refuge in the house next to his old house. They take him in and clean his wound and start to try and explain everything that has happened while he was in his coma. They basically teach him how to survive in this new world, they show him the ropes. This includes how to kill the zombies, what’s safe and not safe, what to look for, things that would help one survive. Rick is still having trouble understanding the zombies so they decide to have him kill one, before he does he says “are we sure they’re dead? I have to ask one more time”. The father reassures him that they really are dead and has him kill the zombie. This is flipping the position of power as it typically is in real life, the citizens are teaching the cop what he needs to do and are basically “in charge”. This also applies to how the police are portrayed in horror films. They are either typically the heroes of the story who are able to save the day, but in this, the situation is not savable. It puts Rick, and police in general in a situation that they don’t have all of the answers, and are more like everyone else. Another aspect in this specific case is that the father and his son are African American so here we have an African American man telling a cop what to do, which stereotypically never happens in real life. They really helped Rick to grow and accept what has happened, we can see this in one specific scene where Rick is leaving to go find his family. He passes by the zombie that was cut in half that has startled him in the beginning. He walks up to it and says “I’m sorry this happened to you” then kills it. This is a significant scene because it shows that Rick has grown as a character and has been able to accept the situation he is in while still being a good person, and he owes that to the father and the son that helped him.
The reason this is an important aspect to look at is that this first episode flips societal roles in a way that makes us look at if from a different perspective. We typically see cops as the strong people who are going to save it but instead this episode decided to totally change that stereotype and show the cop as the less informed one. Not only does it almost give us some perspective on how the cop could be bossed around and not be the “right” one. We also get a chance to see the cop as a scared and “real” human being instead of some of the stereotypes that go around especially in today’s society. Rick is forced to change throughout this episode from just being a cop to being a typical person. Society has broken down, the world is in chaos, it evens out the playing field because no one has a job or any more authority than anyone else. It has stripped Ricks authority away, so not his job is to survive just like everyone else. We get to see the authority part of Rick strip away in this episode as he starts to accept he is not in charge of everything, and that he is at the mercy of the situation. What does remain is his willingness to help people, and his care for others as we see when he apologizes to the zombie before killing it. I think the show does this in order to humanize police, especially due to the recent stereotypes about police today. We as a society need to keep in mind the stress and the the situations that police have to go through, an the tough calls that they have to make, like the people in the Walking Dead.
Chris' House of Horrors 