The Suburban Undead: Killing Gender Expectations
The new Netflix series, Santa Clarita Diet, brings the recent obsession with zombies to the pristine suburbs of California. This show stars Drew Barrymore as Sheila, a suburban mom who awakens one day as a member of the undead. Her husband, Joel, and daughter, Abby, both struggle to find ways to cope with this drastic change to their family dynamics. The show manages to combine horror and comedy as the family bonds over their new need to murder “bad” people in order to allow Sheila to eat. However, Sheila’s transformation does more than just change their family hobbies, but also changes the gender dynamics of their family life.
After Sheila’s transformation, she can no longer be mistaken for an average suburban mom. Before her undead rebirth, Sheila was meek and unwilling to take any risks. However, once the “primitive” part of her brain had taken control, she becomes impulsive to a fault. She becomes driven by her needs and desires and is unable to maintain control over her own behavior. While this makes their lives more exciting in some ways, it also puts them at risk of having their family split apart on a nearly daily basis.
Interestingly, she also becomes more angry and volatile. Before becoming a zombie, she allowed her boss to demean her and enforce sexist expectations in the workplace. He constantly belittles her intelligence and ability, giving all the praise and opportunities to her male counterparts. However, after her transformation she is unable to tolerate this behavior any longer. In fact, she even has to quit her job in order to prevent her from attacking her boss in a fit of rage. This is an interesting choice that is used quite effectively to show her animalistic and untamed nature.
With this new portrayal of an “uncultured” female, the show provides an interesting take on the traditional idea that women are more emotional and yet somehow more civilized than men. In the show, the opposite is very clearly true since Joel is unable to kill or harm others with the reckless abandon Sheila displays. Joel begins to fill a more traditionally female role by taking care of cleaning, cooking, and keeping their lives from spiraling out of control. Sheila, on the other hand, becomes more and more uncultured and uncontrolled — even to the point that they are required to chain her up in the basement for a short period of time.
However, despite the fact that she is spiraling out of control, she also begins to take a more dominant role in their relationship. She makes more demands than ever before and asserts her opinions in ways that she would not have before she ceased to be human. This is also an interesting contradiction to the common portrayals of women as weak and submissive.
One of the most interesting elements of this is that her and Joel’s relationship does not suffer as the result of her newfound assertiveness. Rather, they begin to function better as partners and parents since he embraces her and works to not feel threatened by their greater equality in certain areas. He even embraces the ways in which she is stronger or more dominant than him and recognizes that the balance and teamwork in their relationship is not dependent on traditional gender roles. In this way, the show provides not only a critique of stereotypical feminine portrayals, but of toxic masculinity as well.
