The Walking Dead’s Hyperreal Hillbilly

AMC’s The Walking Dead is back for its 9th season. We’re going to run a series of posts about the series that are distilled versions of the arguments of chapters in our edited collection, The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead, recently published by McFarland. This collection is not at all the last word –and we’d like to open up more conversations about all these things in the show, especially as the issues raised in the book–and the arguments that get made–change as The Walking Dead narrative continues. To that end, we’re inviting submissions to Horror Homeroom that enter into conversation with this series of posts taken from our book. How do these arguments play out in seasons 8 and 9? If we publish your submission, we’ll send you a free copy of the book.

The third post in the series is from Carter Soles and Kom Kunyosying . . . This is what they have to say:

The following is a taste of our argument in “The Hyperreal Hillbilly: Horror, Melodrama, and Backwoods White Protagonists” in The Politics of Race, Gender and Sexuality in The Walking Dead, edited by Elizabeth Erwin and Dawn Keetley (McFarland, 2018).

AMC’s The Walking Dead’s dystopian, post-apocalyptic environment shapes people of color in different ways than it does the show’s central white characters. These culturally charged differences are best exposed through the lens of the melodramatic rise of the hillbilly protagonist.

Film scholar Linda Williams argues that the melodramatic mode “[moves] us to pathos for protagonists beset by forces more powerful than they and who are perceived as victims” regardless of their actual level of privilege in society.¹ In melodrama, suffering equals virtue and moral superiority. A poor, rural, culturally maligned white identity is a marked and therefore morally sympathetic one. The Walking Dead utilizes the melodramatic mode to foreground the subjectivity of its white male protagonists, despite making strides toward well-rounded representation of characters of color and women. Nevertheless it reifies dominant ethnic and gender hierarchies, appropriating backwoods American qualities to re-center white masculinity.

Protagonist Rick Grimes is a middle-class Southern gentleman sheriff whose white maleness and iconic good looks invite easy viewer identification. Rick transforms from sensitive, law-abiding family man to violent, unhinged wild man over the course of the first four seasons without being deposed as group leader.

Second lead — soon to become main star — Daryl Dixon is a mostly sanitized embodiment of folksy, traditional masculine values. Daryl functions as a “hyperreal hillbilly” whose suffering, premised upon his growing up impoverished with absentee parents, implicitly enhances his stereotypical backwoods survival abilities such as hunting, trapping, tracking, and combat. However, negative attributes stereotypically associated with such an upbringing are muted in Daryl. He is giving, open-minded, and egalitarian towards people of color and queers. The long-term effects of Daryl’s childhood traumas and penniless upbringing are mainly emphasized in terms of the internal suffering Daryl endures as he performs acts of noble self-sacrifice on behalf of his group.

Indeed, Daryl is one of the series’ most popular characters and his storylines often eliminate the stories of non-white characters who appear in the comics. Thus he is emblematic of how AMC’s The Walking Dead re-centralizes its hillbilly leads’ ethnicized white maleness, moving characters of color into the background.

The show’s depiction of supporting characters of color reinforces the centrality and three-dimensionality of its white male protagonists. Korean-American Glenn Rhee is especially important in this regard since he is right-hand man to Rick from the second episode of the series. He consistently acts as a group mediator, bolstering the ultimate authority of the white leaders (Rick, Abe) to whom he plays second-in-command.

Glenn specializes in scurrying around undetected, reifying stereotypes about Asian Americans, historically depicted as shifty and vermin-like. Glenn is good at scavenging, yet he cowers in battle on early seasons of the show; for example, in “Nebraska,” Glenn freezes in a gunfight, forcing Rick to defend him and exemplifying the feminized, hyposexual Asian male.

Glenn’s first appearance is a visual play on another Asian icon: Short Round from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Glenn is twenty-two in the comic but visually infantilized, sporting a backpack and baseball cap, while Rick, Glenn’s Indiana Jones, towers over him, rangy and lined, juxtaposing Glenn’s youthful energy with world-weary reserve (issue 2).  Daryl confirms this reading, calling Glenn “Short Round” on the show (“What Lies Ahead”). Thus Rick’s position as the group’s hillbilly leader relies upon people of color willing to act as his followers. The social hierarchy within the group reaffirms white, male authority, simultaneously appeasing liberal viewers with inclusive multiculturalism while assuring more conservative viewers that people of color still know their place in the hierarchy.

Even though Glenn gets more screen time than any other character of color on the show, his death in the season seven opener is reduced to an afterthought caused by Daryl’s impulsiveness. Glenn’s death transpires in order to create melodramatic suffering for his white cast-mate, setting up a “darker Daryl” according to Reedus.² Furthermore, Glenn utters his last line to Maggie as an abject, googly-eyed monster, his melodramatic sendoff compromised by B-movie special effects. Meanwhile Abe gives a final, silent peace sign to Sasha, the type of emotionally overdetermined gesture that signals the ennobling presence of the melodramatic mode.

Along similar lines, two African-American protagonists, Michonne and Morgan, possess or acquire fantastical martial arts abilities. Whereas Daryl and Rick’s skills serve to accentuate the benefits of backwoods white culture in a post-apocalyptic environment, Michonne and Morgan’s skills are disconnected from real-world potency outside of genre films. Michonne and Morgan’s talents are variations on waif-fu, defined as waifish protagonists able to defeat larger opponents using outlandish, acrobatic fighting styles that differ from those of most other characters. Despite giving power to individual protagonists, waif-fu is not ideologically empowering as it implicitly highlights that these protagonists can only prevail via extra suspension of disbelief. Michonne and Morgan are able to fight but their fantastical abilities do not empower or draw attention to the positive qualities of a real-world cultural group the way Rick and Darryl’s do. When Ezekiel joins the cast as another major African-American character, his formidability — hinging on a tiger’s effectively supernatural loyalty to a zookeeper — is similarly based in suspension of disbelief and unconnected to a cultural identity.

The hillbilly protagonist’s whiteness is key to his appeal because it allows mainstream audiences to identify with him while simultaneously taking pleasure in the more grotesque elements of his marginalized milieu. It also allows media producers to “portray images of poverty, ignorance, and backwardness without raising cries of bigotry and racism from civil rights advocates and the black and minority communities.”³ This ambiguity contributes to contemporary hillbilly media’s ideological insidiousness: via melodrama, it allows its audiences to vicariously align themselves with retrograde sexist and racist ideological positions.

Notes 

1. Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” in Refiguring American Film Genres: Theory and History (Ed. Nick Browne, UC Press, 1998) p. 42.

2. Baxter, Joseph. “The Walking Dead: Norman Reedus Hints a Dark Future for Daryl.” www.denofgeek.com. Posted 24 Oct. 2016. <http://www.denofgeek.com/us/tv/the-walking-dead/259495/the-walking-dead-norman-reedus-hints-a-dark-future-for-daryl>

3. Anthony Harkins, Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon (Oxford UP, 2004), p. 8.

Carter Soles, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the English Department at The College at Brockport (SUNY). His research interests include ecomedia studies, gender and identity studies, and film genre studies. He has published articles on the rise of geek culture for Jump Cut (with Kom Kunyosying) and on Team Apatow for Bright Lights Film Journal. His ecocritical work includes a chapter on the cannibalistic hillbilly in 1970’s slasher films in Ecocinema: Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2012) and on environmental apocalyptic themes in 1950s horror films for Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment. He teaches film theory, genre studies, and ecocinema courses at The College at Brockport, and is the Director of the college’s Interdisciplinary Film Studies Minor. 

Kom Kunyosying was born and raised in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia. His fondness for the state’s cultures and peoples led him to become interested in depictions of Appalachian identities in media. He earned a Ph.D. in English at the University of Oregon where he studied the overlap between iconic and ethnic representation in U.S. comics in relationship to other visual and prose media. He has published articles on the rise of geek culture for Jump Cut (with Carter Soles) and on metonymy and ecology in Charles Burns’s Black Hole for Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. He teaches writing at Nashua Community College in New Hampshire.

See the first in our series, on masculinity and race in The Walking Dead, and our second on how fire functions in the TV show.