I love TV shows, but as it often happens to me with books, films and so on, I have a tendency to procrastinate starting something new, ending up watching or reading the same thing for the hundredth time. Only good advice and threats from a dear friend of mine got me into watching In The Flesh, a British TV show first aired on BBC in 2013. A second season followed until last June, while the third season still has to be confirmed, and I have to admit that it is as good as I had been promised.
Here’s a bit of story, just to let you know what we’re talking about. In The Flesh is a zombie story, and its narration begins four years after your usual zombie apocalypse; the urgencies have already been dealt with, and the story is set in a moment of a re-organization. The zombies who came back to life during The Rising have been normalized and integrated into society again. They have been forgiven for the deaths and the violence they’ve been responsible for during their “untreated state”. Their condition of living dead is not reversible but it can be managed thanks to a drug that allows them to be functioning members of society. They’re fully capable of thinking and feeling emotions, and the medicine stops them from involving back into being angry killers ready to eat human brains. The resurrected come back to their lives and to their families, with a daily injection of Neurotriptlyine, foundation cream to apply on their pale skin and contact lenses to cover those vitreous eyes. Normality is restored.
This is where the zombie story gets out of the railways to evolve into something different. In The Flesh is not much a story about bloody killings (not that there’s a lack of those in the show actually) or about the fight of living against dead in exceptional circumstances, as rather the story of a nerve-wrecking daily life, of an impossible return to normality. Zombies are not an enemy to win over. That part of the story, where the living conquer back their city after the rising of the dead, is not the one you will be told. Actually, that has already happened. What everyone has to deal with now is what happens next. Zombies have not been destroyed. The righteous and democratic government of contemporary Great Britain can’t let honest citizens die only because they suffer of a “disease”, a “syndrome”, that is, PDS: Partially Deceased Syndrome, a reassuring name that sounds like something manageable, as stated by a government functionary.
Unfortunately, the reinstatement and the return to normality that the government was hoping for aren’t easy to achieve. That is how the whole show turns out to be an allegory of rejection and fear, and of the consequent discrimination towards all that is different. Fiction is tremendously real and close to us: empathizing with what we see is spontaneous, as In The Flesh is a story of discrimination and hatred, a story we experience on a daily basis. Pettiness, rejection, efforts for interaction and outbursts of hate; everything about this world where the living deal with the resurrected sounds tragically too familiar to our ears.
England as told in In The Flesh is England nowadays. It is a contemporary western country like any other. Anxieties and fear arisen from ignorance elicit a state of paranoia that leads society on the verge. Misunderstandings, resentments, minor and major tyrannies all mark an always increasing rut among the living and the (living) dead. The soil is rich for seeds of hatred, that can bloom in both sides of the barricade.
Like the characters in the story, we live in civil countries where institutions formally commit for making everyone’s rights respected, but we all know how an actual equality is out of reach. The common man’s distrust, the politicians’ abuse of power and the overwhelming boundaries and rules of an inhumane, monolithic bureaucracy relegate minorities in a factual condition of second class human beings.
That’s the trick of speculative fiction, that has always been a home for diversity and has always found a way to speak about delicate issues, through its fictional stories filled with monsters: the supernatural package makes the story captivating but hides (not too much, though) the controversial contents.
Yet in In The Flesh that diversity oversteps the thin layer of metaphor and is shown boldly. Not only Kieren Walker, the protagonist of the show, is an undead, but he also is a queer, depressed person with suicidal tendencies. The exclusion from society and the stigma of the zombies are the same ones that all “different” people suffer for, but In The Flesh is a speculative fiction that’s tired of just slightly hinting and speaking with allegories. Alterity and diversity, usually represented from supernatural elements, find concrete expression. The Partially Deceased Syndrome represents everything that can make you seem different in the eyes of the majority of people: sexual orientation, mental illness, depression, self-harm. In The Flesh though, is a totally committed fantasy, it takes up the challenge of representation and while it metaphorically speaks of something, it shows that something and “forces” the audience not only to listen to some tale, but also to look directly in the eyes that diversity. This diversity, in the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse, ends up being pretty much ordinary, thus provoking a shift of perspective in the viewer.
Kieren is Different, with a capital D: before PDS, his sexuality, his artistic flair, his social discomfort were the things that made him different from the others. He was not accepted into the small community where he was living, that always seemed to find a reason to hate him. He’s an outcast in any way, he’ll always be a monster in their eyes: too different, dangerous and unmanageable. One of the most interesting aspects of the show, tough, is to see a person who has been totally defeated by life obtain a second chance. Kieren’s path towards the acceptance of who he is now is the accomplishment of a self-acceptance journey that he couldn’t fully complete when he was alive. The depressed boy who cut his veins in a cave can now be happy.
This show exquisitely represents that witch hunt mood, the prejudice, the distrust and the hatred that poison the lives of persecuted and persecutors. The whole show is filled up with episodes and dialogues profoundly meaningful in this sense, that I would not know where to begin if I had to list them all. I will just quote, in conclusion, the speech pronounced by the former parish councilor to a crowd armed with torches and pitchforks, gathered out of the whorehouse where the living can meet PDS sufferers. As they are ready to put clients and prostitutes to a public trial, the councilor addresses them, before being fervently hushed-up by the biblical wrath of the picketers:
“I think we should stop this. I think we should all stop pretending. I could pretend for so long and then you’re back stuck with yourself. What I want to explain is that the idea that you are ever a pure person, it just makes everything else so much worse. It makes you so disappointing. People aren’t pure! We are not good any more than they’re evil or they’re inhuman. Maybe we only have to pretend they’re bad because we have to pretend we’re good. But if we could just accept our real selves and live with who we really are and love ourselves, then maybe… maybe we could accept and live with… and… and love”
Chiara Baroni
