ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses on the various ways that death anxiety underwrites dystopian myths and the quest for immortality, on the one hand, and how the heroes that these myths produce paradoxically function as both a defense against death anxiety as well as an adaptive model for personal resiliency, on the other. As the prospect of achieving embodied immortality threatens to reach the tipping point between science-fiction and science-fact, the impulse to transcend the bounds of mortality and temporality has reached a fever-pitch. This parallel increase in interest defies coincidence. In numerous cases, dystopian myths serve as a catalytic holding environment for expressing and identifying latent strivings for immortality, which the author argues manifests in embodied and disembodied forms that correspond to one’s metaphysical predilections. Focusing on the contemporary television show The Walking Dead, the author uses cinematic examples to explicate how prominent themes of death anxiety and the corresponding desire to achieve immortality psychically translate into specific styles of ‘hero’ identification that amplifies and gives expression to an uncanny fusion of ‘I-ness’and ‘otherness’ that flirts with the boundaries between reality and phantasy.
