Apocalyptic Projections: A Study of Past Predictions, Current Trends and Future Intimations as Related to Film and Literature 1443872377, 9781443872379, 9781443878807

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Apocalyptic Projections

Apocalyptic Projections A Study of Past Predictions, Current Trends and Future Intimations as Related to Film and Literature Edited by

Annette M. Magid

Apocalyptic Projections: A Study of Past Predictions, Current Trends and Future Intimations as Related to Film and Literature Edited by Annette M. Magid This book first published 2015 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2015 by Annette M. Magid and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-7237-7 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7237-9

For Hillel, Suzie & Elie, Jonathan & Tamar, Yaakov & Ayelet, Shira, Devora, Dov, Sam and Ella, who know the potential of possibilities and the strength of hope.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ........................................................................................................ ix Acknowledgements .................................................................................. xiii PART I: MESSAGES FROM THE PAST Chapter One ................................................................................................. 2 Through Different Eyes: Relative Dystopia in Post-Apocalyptic Topoi LUANA BAROSSI Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27 Mainstreaming Marxism: Death Race as Critique of Apocalyptic Capitalism NOWELL MARSHALL Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 40 Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower: Queer ‘New Stories’ of the ‘Fourth Dimension of Citizenship’ KIRIN WACHTER-GRENE Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 61 After the Plague: Race and Survival in Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague GINA ROSSETTI PART II: CURRENT THEORIES Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 80 Dystopia 101: The Millennials React to Metropolis ANNA HILLER Chapter Six .............................................................................................. 110 Caught in the Time Stream BENJAMIN DELLOIACONO

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Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 130 Getting the Doomsday We Deserve: Roland Emmerich’s 2012 and the Neoliberal Disaster Film JULIAN CORNELL Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 147 God and Machine: What it means to be Human in Deus Ex: Human Revolution PHILIP MATTHEW TRAD PART III: PREDICTIONS FOR THE FUTURE Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 162 Strange Days: Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron’s Vision of Crises of Gender, Race and Technology at the Turn of the Millennium DINAH HOLTZMAN Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 196 The “Weird Spell” of the Empty City: Reimagining America in Post-Apocalyptic Films of the Atomic Age MEGHAN OLIVAS Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 226 Hope in the Face of Annihilation ANNETTE M. MAGID Contributors ............................................................................................. 241 Index ........................................................................................................ 244

PREFACE

The majority of the papers included in Apocalyptic Projections: A Study of Past Predictions, Current Trends and Future Intimations as Related to Film and Literature were presented at the Northeast Modern Language Association [NeMLA] in Rochester, New York, 2012 as well as papers submitted for the conferences, but not included in the panels. Apocalyptic Projections: A Study of Past Predictions, Current Trends and Future Intimations as Related to Film and Literature offers an opportunity to study the past approaches to apocalyptic projection in addition to the renewed interest in the twenty-first century related to the 2012 Mayan Apocalyptic prediction. Also, this study offers a glimpse into predictions for the future of apocalyptic predictions in literature, film and other aspects of culture. While apocalyptic projections have been pondered since Biblical times, philosophers and other writers alike have used their media of non-fiction, fiction and science fiction to recall past events in order to help the population prepare for calamity and plan for the future. Even though the concept of apocalypse evokes images of total oblivion, threads of the possibility of redemption offer a potential fabric of hope. This monograph examines films and texts that reveal humanity’s past faults, offers studies of current theories, and examines apocalyptic treatises which impart avenues of possibilities in the face of total annihilation. Interests in the topic of the apocalypse have expanded across time, genres, disciplines, and cultures, from Biblical projections to science fiction accounts and beyond. The focus of this monograph includes critical analyses of the impact of apocalyptic projections and pedagogical approaches. Part I, ‘Messages from the Past,’ Chapter One begins with Luana Barossi’s “Through Different Eyes: Relative Dystopia in Post-Apocalyptic Topoi” which suggests the necessity to reclassify the terms dystopian and utopian as related to apocalyptic literature. She examines four literary narratives written in Portuguese which she translates and assesses. She asserts that experience in post-apocalyptic representations can suffer a gradation from utopian to dystopian depending on the programs of truth of a narrative community or society and the subjectivity of an individual character. She also includes a more extended reading for Nobel Prize winning author,

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José Saramago, whose work, Blindness, has been translated and adapted into film. In Chapter Two Nowell Marshall’s “Mainstreaming Marxism: Death Race as a Critique of Apocalyptic Capitalism” analyzes critical attacks against some specific apocalyptic issues which stem from intrinsic details that critics seemingly overlook. He focuses on Death Race which he asserts presents an insistent Marxist critique of capitalism and privatization of public services (in this case the prison system) in the wake of a fictional economic crisis of 2012. He asserts that Death Race’s countercultural message caused many critics to savage the film; however, that didn’t stop everyday people from seeing the film which managed something rare: it re-appropriated the science-fiction/action film medium to broadcast Marxist critique to a mainstream audience not only in theaters, but also through its eventual viewing on DVD and Blu-Ray. Kirin Wachter-Grene focuses on “Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower: Queer ‘New Stories’ of the ‘Fourth Dimension of Citizenship’” in Chapter Three where she assesses the relevance of the “idea/ philosophy/ new religion” called “Earthseed.” She argues that Earthseed, while not spiritual, is concerned with issues of truth, power, control and action. She stipulates that even though Earthseed is seemingly practical, it is also heretical in its attempt to find “truth” which can be analyzed as a derivative of black disconnectedness, black feminism, politics, family issues as well as the influence on queer theory, “queer of color” critique, and multiracial issues. She asserts that it is through an embrace of queerness in forms physical, “racial,” sexual, religious/ philosophical, and contractual, that Earthseed, a new family and form of citizenship, is engendered and mobilized as a redemptive possibility in a postapocalyptic landscape. Gina M. Rossetti’s “After the Plague: Race and Survival in Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague” is Chapter Four. She examines London’s focus on the role of Darwinian and Spencerian principles of species survival as a means to combat annihilation. She discusses the rise of racebased prejudices, issues of assimilation and anti-immigrant attitudes in the late nineteenth, early twentieth centuries. She asserts that Social Darwinists used science, particularly the adoption of eugenicist principles, to extend their notions of a stratified society. She illustrates London’s fear of a pan-Asian threat which extends from the reality of his prejudices into his fiction which uses the science of biological warfare as a final solution to eliminate the fictional Asian threat. Following Rossetti’s paper, there is a transition to Part II, Current Theories. Anna Hiller’s “Dystopia 101” is Chapter Five which offers a

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pedagogical discussion regarding the transcendence of the film, Metropolis, and its continuing relevance in a world that has profoundly changed through the development, and ensuing omnipresence, of technology. Her discussion includes first-person observations as well as an inclusion of current scholarship on Metropolis, critiques of technology in the twentieth and twenty-first century, and current demographic and/or psychological studies of the Millennial Generation. Chapter Six, Benjamin Delloiacono’s chapter assesses moral absolutes in the form of “heroes and villains” in “Caught in the Time Stream: Addressing the Challenges for Secularism in Final Crisis, The Return of Bruce Wayne, and Captain America: Rebirth.” He asserts that the act of heroism in these graphic novels becomes pre-emptive enlightenment that can be read as the modern implementation of secular time In Chapter Seven, Julian Cornell analyses the film 2012 in “Getting the Doomsday We Deserve: Roland Emmerich’s 2012 and the Neoliberal Disaster Film.” Cornell argues that the success of the film, an eschatological narrative associated with New Age cosmology, impacted the introduction of the 2012 doomsday prophecy into popular consciousness. He asserts that only a few critics attempted to debunk the film’s pseudo-science. As asserted by Cornell, even though the film was a conventionality cliché disaster movie, it was an international blockbuster that brought the Mayan 2012 Prophecies to public awareness. He asserts that 2012 brings into apocalyptic films, many of which are secular in focus, a religious aspect of supernatural cataclysm and rebirth of a small group of chosen ones in a heavenly realm. Chapter Eight, Philip Matthew Trad’s “God and Machine: What It Means to Be Human in Deus Ex: Human Revolution” assesses the “uncanniness” alluded to by Sigmund Freud regarding human behavior. Trad relates that fear is a common theme which focuses on the unknown. He asserts that the direction of technology becomes the framework which will shape the future of humanity. In Part III, Predictions for the Future, Chapter Nine Dinah Holtzman’s “This Tape is a Lightning Bolt” analyzes Strange Days (1995) as a collaborative project in which Kathryn Bigelow directed a screenplay written by her former husband James Cameron. Holtzman interprets Strange Days as a vision of a dystopian future set in racially tense postmodern Los Angeles in the aftermath of the Rodney King beating and the revelations of LAPD racism. She assesses Cameron’s fantastical future vision as fin-de-millennial Los Angeles saved from apocalyptic race war. Chapter Ten begins with Meghan Olivas’ “The ‘Weird Spell’ of the Empty City: Reimagining America in Post-Apocalyptic Films of the

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Atomic Age.” She discusses audience attitude regarding apocalyptic disaster films, for example, San Francisco (1936), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), and Earthquake (1974), that span the century and reflect Hollywood’s fascination with destruction that intrigues a large population of viewers. She illustrates that the audience finds a perverse attraction to a post-apocalyptic city. She also presents compelling examples of apocalyptic films which reflect class and race issues with intimations of future predictions. Finally, Chapter Eleven assesses the potentiality of “Hope in the Face of Annihilation” by exploring current films and recent science fiction literature. In Chapter Eleven, Annette Magid explores the ramifications of survival in a fictional atmosphere of apocalyptic despair. Her analysis examines the need to focus upon the possibilities of hope for survival as seen in films such as Hunger Games and Superman even in the circumstance of seemingly total hopelessness for the future. The studies in this Apocalyptic Projections book are reflections of society. One can learn much from societal acceptance or rejection of various doomsday theories. In addition, analyzing the multiplicity of apocalyptic treatises, both through literature and film, within a variety of generations and cultures, illustrates the need for individuals to seek answers, to attempt to create order in the continuing chaos that seems to increasingly plague societies.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to those who attended the NeMLA Convention and showed much interest in the Apocalyptic Panels which I chaired and at which I presented papers. Also, thanks to the International Utopian Society attendees with whom I shared my scholarship regarding apocalyptic research. It is a privilege to be a part of such vital communities of scholars. I am eternally grateful to my amazing husband who has encouraged me during every phase of my education and research. I appreciate his remarkable skills as a researcher as well as his ability to be a truly gracious helpmate. Thanks to my talented son, Jonathan Magid, M.A. Graphic Design,, whose painting titled “Precambrian Midnight” graced my office wall as an inspiration to keep searching for meaning in the thousands of essays and articles that passed over my desk. That painting is now the cover image of this collection thanks to the skill and cooperation of Elfreda Crehan and the skilled art department at Cambridge Scholars Press. My appreciation to Amanda Millar for her professionalism and her expertise in typesetting and to the expert editorial staff at Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Finally, special thanks to Carol Koulikourdi from Cambridge Scholars Publishing whose interest in my Apocalypse Panels as a monograph candidate enabled me to bring this scholarship to a larger audience.

PART I: MESSAGES FROM THE PAST

CHAPTER ONE THROUGH DIFFERENT EYES: RELATIVE DYSTOPIA IN POST-APOCALYPTIC TOPOI LUANA BAROSSI

‘Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?’ —Henry David Thoreau

There are several works commonly known or classified under the label of “dystopia” as a science fiction subgenre. However, this term can be read as relative to the character’s experience, depending on their programs of truth and processes of subjectivity. In other words, something may be a dystopian topos to one character and not to another. Thus, when calling a narrative ‘dystopian,’ it is important to understand that there is always a choice in structure of power relations involved in the process of accepting a narrative under this label. This issue presents a two pronged approach: when dystopia is associated to characters who are part of a hegemonic group (to the narrative or as a social representation) and do not take into consideration the perspective of other groups, it carries the danger of collaborating to the maintenance of anachronistic prejudices; on the other hand, when dystopia gives an account of minorities’ perspectives, it may be apprehended as a process of dismantling hegemonic power relations. Hereafter, I will support the above statements while interpreting some aspects of four literary narratives written in Portuguese: “O quase fim do mundo” (Almost the End of the World), by Angolan Pepetela; “Paraíso líquido” (Liquid Paradise), by Brazilian Luiz Bras; “Ensaio sobre a cegueira” (Blindness), by Portuguese José Saramago; and “Ventos do apocalipse” (Winds of the Apocalypse), by the Mozambican Paulina Chiziane. It must be stated that my choice for works written in Portuguese is based not only on the fact that it is my mother tongue, but also to bring consistency to the main topic of this paper, which is the expression of

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discourses that arise from spaces outside the hegemonic locus of enunciation. I will extend the reading of some aspects from Saramago’s Blindness a little more than the other narratives, since it is a better known work outside the Portuguese-speaking countries because it has been translated into several languages and has already been adapted into film. Besides, Saramago won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1998. So, while reading the aspects I mention, the reader may be able to relate my proposition to something familiar. The common ground among these works I mention is that all of them have been categorized as dystopias on account of their narratives, which support an apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic topos, and focus on a time of crisis which may occur during or after a catastrophe. The latter may arise in different cadences, from gradual to sharp occurrences. Dystopia is usually applied in opposition to utopia: while utopia may be described as an ideal future space in which to live or a perfect community, dystopia could be explained as a dismal place, where the ideals of a utopian dream were dismantled. Etymologically, utopia means “nowhere” or “good place,” while dystopia means “bad place.” According to the Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction,1 dystopia is: an imagined society or state of affairs in which conditions are extremely bad, especially in which these conditions result from the continuation of some current trend to an extreme; the genre of fiction set in such a society.

However, if we consider such a condition as a “dystopia,” we are automatically presuming that this place or situation could be considered bad to every individual from that society; or that the people from this narrative society who consider the situation dystopian are actually the ones who hold the ultimate truth, to the detriment of people who may see the circumstances from another perspective. While ignoring the alterity or other points of view under a circumstance that may seem bad to us, we are assuming that the others’ truths are not to be considered, and when doing so, we erase these others as individuals or group of individuals. This erasure of alterity is entailed in an establishment (or maintenance) of power relations and deterritorialization2 of the other’s subjectivities. But 1

Jeff Prucher, ed. 2007. Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction. 2007 (New York: Oxford University Press), 39. 2 The term deterritorialization was first used by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus and then better developed in A Thousand Plateaus. Although apparently related geographic territory, the concept assumes a philosophical sense and regard to ‘bodies without organs,’ such as human subjectivity. An individual

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who is this “other,” who can bring another point of view to a circumstance which was apparently set and classified? The social imagination is formed by several programs of truth3 which have been built through genealogical processes,4 that are always impregnated by power relations and domination constructs. Thus, when there is a social condition which is considered ‘normal,’ it has been probably understood so because of these processes. Fortunately, nowadays there are several social movements that aim to deconstruct this social imagination that erases the alterity’s subjectivity. However, sometimes people still accept concepts as truths without thinking of their effect on others; and by contextualizing them, it becomes possible to understand the power relations imbued in this process. Thus, the alterity in the narrative correlates to the ‘minorities,’ yet not exactly minorities in quantity, as Deleuze and Guattari explain: The notion of minority is very complex, with musical, literary, linguistic, as well as juridical and political, references. The opposition between minority and majority is not simply quantitative. Majority implies a constant, of expression or content, serving as a standard measure by which to evaluate it. Let us suppose that the constant or standard is the average adult-white-heterosexual-European-male-speaking a standard language (Joyce's or Ezra Pound's Ulysses). It is obvious that “man” holds the majority, even if he is less numerous than mosquitoes, children, women, blacks, peasants, homosexuals, etc. That is because he appears twice, once

whose subjectivity deterritorializes and reterritorializes is called nomadic subject, a concept better developed by Rosi Braidotti in Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. 3 The concept of programs of truth was developed by Paul Veyne in Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?: An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination (1984). Veyne offers a relativization of the truth(s), proposing that truth is a word which should be used always in the plural: there are only heterogeneous programs of truth, which are formed by complex genealogical processes. These programs of truth are like packets that constitute the collective narratives, and consequently affect the individual processes of subjectivation. 4 In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, Michel Foucault says “I don't believe the problem can solve by historicizing the subject as posited by the phenomenologists, fabricating a subject that evolves through the course of history. One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that's to say, to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework. And this is what I would call genealogy, that is, a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledge, discourse, domain of objects, etc. without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to a field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history” (117).

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in the constant and again in the variable from which the constant is extracted. Majority assumes a state of power and domination, not the other way around. It assumes the standard measure, not the other way around.5

By understanding the contextual specificities of knowledge and considering the voices which were historically silenced, we can avoid the trap of relativism or deletion of other epistemologies. This attitude expands the possibilities of reading, avoiding the polarizing prospect of the dominant knowledge. Henceforth, I propose a contextualized reading of the narratives, which assigns the idea of hybrid dystopia, i.e., the different experiences in the same context may lead to divergent perceptions at the same topos. “O quase fim do mundo”6 is a post-apocalyptic novel by Angolan writer Pepetela. The novel deals with the stories of twelve people who survive the consequences of a weapon of mass destruction created by a group of eugenicists called the “European Nationalist Front.” The goal of this group was to decimate humanity and initiate a new, pure society to recolonize the world. However, the neo-Nazis’ plan does not develop the way they wanted, and their bunker is destroyed in the process, killing them all. Oddly enough, they did not know there were many people in Africa, and did not set enough points of destruction in that continent. Thus, twelve people survive in the fictional town of Calpe, and they start to discuss what the best strategy for their future would be. After the catastrophe, the first character to manifest himself in the narrative is Simba Ukolo, a physician, who is also the narrator most of the time. He is always worried about testing the water of the lakes in search of still-living bacteria, just as he is always looking for living animals, hoping that they could re-colonize the world with a balanced ecosystem. He believed that the survivors should try to reproduce among themselves as much as they could, so that humanity was not extinguished. To Ukolo, then, dystopia consisted precisely in the impossibility of continuing humanity. Based on the western scientific program of truth, more specifically the medicine, which puts the maintenance of life as the primary goal, the character seeks to calculate how many children each surviving woman must give birth to in order not to let humanity to be extinct. At this point, when he assigns a task to the surviving women, he disregards their subjectivities and their programs of truth, and his utopia (re-colonizing the world), becomes, to some women, their dystopia. 5

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. 2005. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 126. 6 PEPETELA. 2008. O quase fim do mundo (Lisbon: Dom Quixote).

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The character Isis, a feminist historian, is the most affected by Ukolo’s request, since she understands that by doing so, she would be replicating the power structures propagated in the world pre-catastrophe, and starting over a male-dominated society, which was exactly what she fought against before the accident. Ukolo’s request was responsible for a deterritorialization of her subjectivity, disregarding her position as a feminist, as a woman and as someone who wants to set her own functions in the new society, erasing the gender roles stated by the ancient world. If the reader decides to classify the work generically as ‘dystopia,’ he is neglecting Isis’ position, and accepting Ukolo’s program of truth as the absolute Truth. The narrative has also the character Jude, a sixteen-year-old teenager who accepts Ukolo’s proposal for “reproduction”. However, the doctor finds himself with a moral barrier regarding Jude’s age, and refuses to have sexual relations with her. She then seeks for other surviving men as an alternative, and tries to bond with Joseph Kiboro, a thief found in a local prison. Although Ukolo’s proposal did not correspond to a dystopian experience to Jude as it was to Isis, his dystopia, i.e., the humanity’s decimation itself, wasn’t necessarily a dystopian experience to her. The girl always wanted to travel through Europe, and before the catastrophe she was prevented from going because of the European immigration policies. After the hecatomb, however, since there were no more barriers, she could go wherever she wanted. Thus, considering these particularities in the narrative, it is possible to realize that what is a dystopia to Ukolo, who holds a dominant program of truth, is actually a held utopia to Jude and the ones who could finally go wherever they liked. The South African character Jan Dipenaar was an aircraft pilot, and taught the willing characters how to pilot small aircrafts. When travelling around Europe, Jude’s utopia is turned into a dystopia: beyond the historical monuments, there is nothing of the expected glamor. A reterritorialization of desires and values is required: Now the world seemed to be theirs only, they were richer than Croesus, all material assets to be shared among a few. However, no value was to be found in gold, in diamonds, in the euros and the dollars. There was nothing to buy. Everything was there to be effortlessly consumed. It was like a castaway on an island with only a coconut tree and a chest of jewels. If a new humanity was to come from them, would these treasures still be considered treasures? A good question. Maybe the new humanity could see

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jewels in the dry leaf of a rare tree or in the flutter of a peacock's feather. Who could foreshadow what the new values would be?7

The new values or programs of truth are left to the reader’s imagination. So, the role of the reader is to choose what kind of reterritorialization the new society is set to build. There were two other women beyond Isis and Jude: the American scientist Janet, who studied the behavior of gorillas and middle-aged Ms. Geny, a practitioner of the religion “Paladins of the Holy Crown,”8 a kind of cult invented by the neo-Nazi group with the aim of controlling humanity and turning the task of eliminating it easier. The ultimate goal of this group was to create a “Brave new world,” in the style of Huxley’s society.9 It should be a theoretically perfect civilization, but unlike the English narrative, would not occur in a closed space surrounded by the “wild world.” They relied upon the complete elimination of all other human beings by means of weapons of mass destruction, as described in this document found by the survivors: It is necessary to state that the weapons from the “Gamma Alpha Bundle” are not bombs in the conventional sense. They do not cause explosions. They launch radiation. In other words, the weapons disintegrate into radiation, cleaning around a territory as big as Australia. The weapons disappear along with the targets. Of course, the fingers that will detonate them will also disappear. That is why we do not bother [considering] whether these fingers are black, gypsy or Arab; they're all fingers condemned to decimation anyway, just as long as they [the weapon launchers] are sincere prophets, believers in the virtues of our faith.10 7

With the exception of Blindness, which has an English translation, all the excerpts from the narratives were translated by me. In Portuguese: “Agora o mundo parecia ser deles apenas, eram mais ricos que Cresus, todos os bens materiais a repartir por uns poucos. No entanto, de nada valia o ouro, os diamantes, os rubis, nem os euros ou os dólares, nada havia para comprar, tudo estava ali para ser consumido sem esforço. Estava como o náufrago numa ilha só com um coquei¬ro e uma arca de joias. Se a partir deles houvesse uma nova humanidade, essas riquezas ainda seriam consideradas riquezas? Uma boa questão. A nova humanidade era capaz de considerar joias uma folha seca de árvore rara ou o esvoaçar de uma pena de pavão. Quem poderia pressagiar os novos valores?” PEPETELA. 2008. O quase fim do mundo, 330. 8 In Portuguese: Paladinos da Coroa Sagrada. 9 Aldous Huxley. 2006. Brave New World (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, Reprint edition). 10 In Portuguese: “Sobre as armas do “Feixe Gama Alfa” é necessário dizer que não são bombas, no sentido convencional do termo, não provocam explosões.

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The Paladins of the Holy Crown’s enthusiasts would be the “fingers” responsible for the elimination of humanity. However, they wouldn’t be aware of the consequences and of the real goals behind their creed. They would be mere pawns. The group responsible for this plan believed to be a “superior race,” so this belief was their program of truth. Although their “truth” was immoral in many ways, they had the dystopian experience of their own, even if this occurrence was not felt in loco. The discovery of their objectives by the disaster’s survivors through letters and documents with descriptions of the plan is enough to understand that the succession of events turned their utopia into a dystopian reality. This dystopia has two dimensions. The first regarding their own death, which was the only death they wanted to avoid, and miscalculations resulted in self-destruction. Secondly, there is the survival of twelve people in Africa, exactly the ones who were the main target-group for extermination. To the African characters considered as a group, the post-apocalyptical topos represented initially an outline of the end of the world, but at last becomes a symbol of breaking down the barriers and the rise of a new era to those who have been historically exploited, objectified, and whose narratives were erased. The story “Futuro Presente”11 (Present Future), a novella by Brazilian Luiz Bras, also intersperses the narrative focus on the individual experiences of the protagonist and the collective experiences. In the beginning of the narrative it becomes clear that this relation between an individual and a group will be important to understand how a dystopian experience can be generalized or contextualized according to identities and identifications. The main character tells her girlfriend: You may be stunned, perplexed, and gaping, but it is true: an isolated person can be unpredictable, but one billion people acting randomly always present an orderly and predictable behavior. Believe me; the chaos of collective life always produces quantifiable standards. I examine the

Lançam radiações, ou melhor, as armas desintegram-se em radiações que limpam à sua volta todo o território correspondente a um continente como o australiano. As armas desaparecem pois com os alvos. Claro que os dedos que as detonarem também desaparecerão. Por isso não nos incomodamos nada pelo facto de esses dedos serem negros, árabes ou ciganos, tudo dedos condenados a desaparecer, de qualquer modo, desde que sejam profetas sinceros, crentes nas virtudes da nossa fé.” PEPETELA. 2008. O quase fim do mundo, 342. 11 Luiz Bras. 2010. “Paraíso Líquido”. In Paraíso Líquido (Sao Paulo: Terracota).

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field research and the statistics, and I see patterns signaling: war, war, war.12

The protagonist’s obsessive-compulsive subjectivity takes place in the second part of the narrative, through a mathematic representation as a metonymy of her dystopian lived experience: When I’m alone, sometimes I scream. Fractions and percentages. Even when I’m on my medication (in my arteries, rather than blood, flow pure fluoxetine and sertraline). But shouting the result of certain probability calculations is a much less uncomfortable disorder than, for example, having memorized the position of all the objects in the room, the hallway, the whole apartment.13

This dystopian experience related to the character’s obsessive compulsive disorder is the key for her to predict that the war is coming. She starts manipulating events in her favor, always using her statistics knowledge as a strong ally. She works for the government, which in this fictional society is a new kind of capitalism in which women take advantage of the global crisis to deterritorialize the patriarchal system that has been dominant for centuries: What makes the planet turn are the successive crises that shake its institutions. The last global economic catastrophe did not put an end to capitalism, or to the vicious cycle of finances. But it ended with the male hegemony. . . . The transition was subtle, but painful. The economic and political power is now at the hands of women. That was the response of the electorate to the phallic competition that always guided investment banks. Yesterday’s predators are today’s losers.14

12 In Portuguese: “Você talvez fique pasmada, boquiaberta, perplexa, mas é verdade: uma pessoa isolada pode ser imprevisível, mas um bilhão de pessoas agindo aleatoriamente sempre apresenta um comportamento ordenado e previsível. Acredite, o caos da vida coletiva sempre produz padrões quantificáveis. Eu examino as pesquisas de campo e as estatísticas, e vejo os padrões sinalizando: guerra, guerra, Guerra.” Bras. 2010. Paraíso Líquido, 143. 13 In Portuguese: “Quando estou sozinha às vezes grito. Frações e porcentagens. Mesmo quando estou tomando remédio (nas minhas artérias, em vez de sangue, correm fluoxetina e sertralina puras). Mas gritar o resultado de certos cálculos de probabilidade é um transtorno muito menos desconfortável do que, por exemplo, acertar a posição de todos os objetos do quarto, do corredor, do apartamento inteiro.” Bras. 2010. Paraíso Líquido, 145. 14 In Portuguese: “O que faz o planeta girar são as sucessivas crises que abalam suas instituições. A última catástrofe econômica mundial não acabou com o

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This excerpt could be superficially analyzed as a feminist utopia. However, when reproducing a system which has several gaps by only changing the group that has the power of domination is a problem which has been pointed out by Jacques Derrida.15 The author draws attention to the ambush of mere exchange of positions between the hegemonic discourse and the marginalized discourse in an attempt to promote historical deconstructions. This event would maintain the focus on logocentrism, a concept criticized by him. The logocentrism would, therefore, be playing a new hierarchy with the replacement of the social position of a particular protagonist by the other, erasing the complexities imbued in this process. Then, by inserting the marginalized group in the place where the hegemonic group has been standing for centuries while the means of action remain the same, the narrative is not imbued in the process of deconstruction. However, with the female supremacy in the three governments, since the world in the story is divided into three major political blocs, the focus of the struggle ceases to be related to gender: After the war of the sexes at the end of the last century, the axis of the new conflicts has become again geopolitical competition, the clash of ideologies. . . . It does not matter if male or female, politics is and always will be led by predators.16

The three large political blocs refer, indirectly, to George Orwell’s disciplinary society from the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, not only by the similar names but because they are in constant warfare against each other. They are America, Eurasia and Oceania. The protagonist, working in the coalition of America, tries to manipulate the government in her favor. Her first purpose was to postpone the war that would be established, so that her death would be put off. This event shows the constant struggle between the individual and political goals. During an extremely ironic stream of capitalismo nem com o ciclo vicioso das finanças. Mas acabou com a hegemonia do macho. . . . A transição foi sutil, porém dolorosa. O poder político e econômico está agora na mão das mulheres. Essa foi a resposta do eleitorado à competição fálica que sempre norteara os bancos de investimento. . . . Os predadores de ontem são os perdedores de hoje.” Bras. 2010. Paraíso Líquido, 146. 15 Jacques Derrida. 1997. Of Grammatology (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press). 16 In Portuguese: “Terminada a guerra dos sexos no final do século passado, o eixo dos novos conflitos voltou a ser a competição geopolítica, o embate de ideologias. . . . Tanto faz se masculina ou feminina, a política é e sempre será conduzida por predadores.” Bras. 2010. Paraíso Líquido, 146, 158.

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consciousness, she reveals one of the scariest features of this disciplinary society, which corresponds to her great dystopia as an individual, but also to all individuals who would like to choose their professional goals: I was supposed to graduate in physics. That's why I studied so hard. But the university council, in its vast and unquestionable wisdom, decided that I should attend the geology course. America needs geologists, they said. They had in mind the Brazilian oil, of course.17

Formal education in the story is focused on the interests of the government and the large corporations. Individual dystopia is then materialized, because the choices are limited to the faculties’ regiments, the disciplines and areas of training, hiking to the interests of those segments. Personal expectations and critical skills are neglected in this process. Besides the inordinate chronology as a resource to propose the idea of relativity of time, the story embodies the statistical predictions of the protagonist: “As I had predicted, I was elected the third president of the global alliance. Also according to my predictions, before that glorious election came the war. And I died as soon as it started.”18 At first glance, the reader is led to believe that the narrative would be then a posthumous memoir. However, what happens is the suspension of the “dead” character in half-life, something like the cryogenics proposed in movies like “Abra los Ojos” and “Vanilla Sky,” but after a scientific resurrection, alluding to Shelley’s Frankenstein.19 During this period, she undergoes experiences of understanding phenomena not explained by science. This plot alludes to the relativism of the western scientific program of truth, considered by several people as the only way to understand an alleged reality. I woke up seventy years later. It was still a bit dark, but as I regained consciousness, I soon noticed the cold had passed. . . . I was the first human to go through the suspension in half-life and come back. . . . During

17

In Portuguese: “Era para eu ter me graduado em física. Foi para isso que eu matei de estudar. Mas o conselho universitário, em sua vasta e inquestionável sabedoria, decidiu que eu deveria cursar geologia. A América precisa de geólogos, disseram. Tinham em mente o petróleo brasileiro, é claro.” Bras. 2010. Paraíso Líquido, 147. 18 In Portuguese: “Conforme eu havia previsto, fui eleita a terceira presidente da aliança global. Também conforme minhas previsões antes dessa gloriosa eleição veio a guerra. E eu morri logo no seu início.” Bras. 2010. Paraíso Líquido, 159. 19 Mary Shelley. 1994. Frankenstein (New York: Dover).

12

Chapter One the seventy years I spent in the thermal bag, part of my body was artificially reconstructed; the part the explosion had ignited.20

After waking up, the character-narrator describes the moment she faces the post-apocalyptic world, destroyed by several wars while she was in halflife suspension: It was hard to accept that I would never see Bruna [her girlfriend] again. Grief made everything else seem gray and dull. The brave new world did not scare me so much. International politics was a mess. . . . The global alliance had collapsed soon after my death. The war was coming to an end, through sheer exhaustion; America, Eurasia and Oceania followed by leaps and bounds, indigent and bankrupt.21

Since the narrative is not linear, in the next chapter the character returns to the time she was cryogenized, assuming at some excerpts the role of the narrator, as if she knew what was happening outside her “parallel world.” She outlines what the scientists were hoping to find out: how it was like to be in half-life suspension; how it was like to ‘have only half of her life’: The doctors, the specialists, they were excited, beside themselves; they wanted all the details; they needed to know how it felt like to be in halflife. . . . I was tired of being just a ghost trapped in a thermal bag inside a transparent casket. I was exhausted of dwelling only in my mind.22

She also describes how it was like to be in that situation and what kind of oneiric experience made her realize that there were programs of truth 20

In Portuguese: “Acordei setenta anos depois. Ainda estava um pouco escuro, mas ao recobrar a consciência logo notei que o frio havia passado. . . . Fui a primeira cobaia humana a passar pela suspensão em meia-vida e voltar. . . . Nos setenta anos que passei na bolsa térmica parte do meu corpo foi reconstruída artificialmente. A parte que a explosão tinha incinerado.” Bras. 2010. Paraíso Líquido, 162-163. 21 In Portuguese: “Foi difícil aceitar que jamais veria Bruna outra vez. O luto fez todo o resto parecer cinza e sem graça. O admirável mundo novo não me assustou tanto. A política internacional estava a maior bagunça. . . . A aliança global ruíra logo após minha morte, a guerra estava chegando ao fim, por pura exaustão, e a América, a Eurásia e a Oceania seguiam aos trancos e barrancos, falidas na indigência.” Bras. 2010. Paraíso Líquido, 163. 22 In Portuguese: “. . .os doutores, os especialistas, estavam excitados, fora de si, queriam todos os detalhes, precisavam saber qual era a sensação de estar em meia-vida. . . . Eu estava cansada de ser só um fantasma preso numa bolsa térmica dentro de um esquife transparente. Eu estava exausta de habitar apenas minha mente.” Bras. 2010. Paraíso Líquido, 167.

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which could lead beyond the discourses proposed by the experimental scientists. This is an important field of deconstruction of hegemonic discourses, since experimental science is considered by a huge amount of people as an axiom. Proposing a displacement of perspective and the deconstruction of axioms, the narrative ironically presents, in a digression, a two-dimensional space, inhabited by two-dimensional beings, who did not believe in a third dimension for lack of empirical evidence. The narrative quips about certain human struggles and offers a critique of the Cartesian and empirical programs of truth. It might be said that the novella falls into an ontological or fantastic field, but the constant references to experimental physics and the need to weld the knowledge from theoretical, experimental and human sciences implies an ironic perspective on the axioms in which contemporary Western societies are based. The novel Blindness,23 by the Portuguese writer José Saramago, also offers a new perspective on the deconstruction of established programs of truth, but focuses on the commonplaces and clichés in which people usually believe as ultimate truths. Usually classified as a ‘dystopia,’ Blindness has complex narratives that permeate the most profound aspects of the human condition. There is a mass epidemic of white blindness that affects firstly a small group of people who are put in quarantine in an old closed hospital; and from then on, blindness also starts to affect others until the whole of society is taken by it. The novel focus is on the first group, but as the narrative progresses, the heterodiegetic narrator presents other groups of characters who are set apart because of their condition, and the reader is led to observe and feel the extremes of violence and humanity in this closed space. When the place is full and almost unbearable to endure, the first group of blind people discovers that the epidemic has reached everyone outside, so they leave the hospital guided by the doctor’s wife. She could be considered the protagonist and is the only character in the entire novel who does not lose her sight, though she pretended to be blind to be sent to quarantine along with her husband. Although this is a didactic generalization, if we consider this first group of characters as a community with similar beliefs and feelings, the dystopia in the narrative relative to their experience would result in a sine function graphic representation, thanks to the ups and downs of their undergoing situation. This happens because of the experience of the extremes present in the human condition: from the worst kind of violence 23

José Saramago. 2013. Blindness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

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Chapter One

and erasure of the alterity to the highest level of humanity. When they change physical locations, their experiences change. When the epidemic achieves a catastrophic level, blinding the entire society (with the exception of the doctor’s wife), all the spaces are taken by scatological and bestial situations, which for some critics could be the ultimate image of dystopia. However, the sense of community of the first group leads to an experience of abetment and mutual support which would be rare even in a world free of epidemics. Another interesting hybridity in dystopia is the position of the woman who does not lose her sight. In the opinion of all other members of the first group, she is privileged for this capacity, but the description of her experience proves that being the only one with sight in a blind world is not exactly a utopian feature. When the hospital gets crowded, the narrative reaches the top of the second parabola relative to the group dystopia, considering it as the second huge dystopian experience, after the individual experience of going blind. The confined space of the hospital, which represents a period in the life of the characters, can be related to Michel Foucault’s idea on heterotopias of disciplinary societies.24 Heterotopias are real spaces created at the very foundation of society, like fulfilled utopias in which representations of all other real spaces might be found. They are walled spaces in which power structures from the outside world are repeated or exacerbated, as well as the programs of truth from the cultures in which they operate. They can be classified as heterotopias of crisis and heterotopias of deviation, and in some cases, these two forms overlap. Generally they are closed spaces which aim to adapt individuals to live within pre-established social rules and conventions. I propose to read the space of the hospital to which the blind were sent at the beginning as a heterotopia that is both of crisis and deviation. At the same time, blindness could be considered another heterotopia, at the same time individual, since people cannot see the outside, and collective, since almost everyone gets trapped in this ‘space.’ Although not formed by walls, this blindness immerses the individuals in a milky fluid that prevents them from seeing, usually literally, but sometimes metaphorically, meaning they cannot apprehend the suffering of others. Throughout the work, the space that should be a deviation space which differentiates itself from the “reality” outside transforms the society itself, and what was deviation becomes the default. The doctor's wife, the 24

Michel Foucault. 1984. “Des espaces autres” (Paper presented at the Conférence au Cercle d'études architecturales, 14 March 1967, in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, n.5, Paris), 46-49.

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only person who can see, confirms the existence of the structures of power and strength within the heterotopia in which they are embedded: Standing there, the doctor’s wife watched the two blind men who were arguing; she noticed they made no gestures, that they barely moved their bodies, having quickly learned that only their voice and hearing now served any purpose. True, they had their arms; they could fight, grapple, and come to blows, as the saying goes, but a bed swapped by mistake was not worth so much fuss. If only all life’s deceptions were like this one, and all they had to do was to come to some agreement: Number two is mine; yours is number three. Let that be understood once and for all. Were it not for the fact that we’re blind, this mix-up would never have happened. You’re right; our problem is that we're blind. The doctor’s wife said to her husband: The whole world is right here.25

These two heterotopias are responsible for a post-apocalyptic topos, noticeable thanks to experiences such as hunger; living in a scatological setting, covered by feces and not having water to wash themselves; and finally the extreme violence generated by the brutalization of individuals living in such conditions. However, this brutal scenario can be experienced basically in two extreme ways, since the hybridity of the dystopian experience is always present in the topos. Firstly, by dehumanizing the other, through their reification, by naturalizing violence in personal relations, which could be a metaphorical blindness, since when that happens, it becomes impossible to see the other. This situation could be read as the banality of evil,26 since it is the reproduction of the acts of violence derived from power relations of institutionalized spaces. Secondly, by the extreme humanization, responsible for the becomingother27 at a situation in which any other—a human being, an animal, or any individual who is physically or psychologically unattached from the person in concern—is inserted is unbearable to accept even as a

25

Saramago. 2013. Blindness, 97. Banality of evil is a concept by Hannah Arendt, present in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Her thesis is that a person who performs the acts that Eichmann performed is not necessarily a sociopath or a deliberately evil person, but an ordinary person who accepted the premises of an institution which is based on acts of annihilation, turning then state and institutionalized violence into something normal. 27 Guattari Deleuze. 2005. A Thousand Plateaus, 238. 26

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Chapter One

possibility, since it is the extreme of the dystopian experience. Then, an ethics of the alterity takes place in the assemblage.28 One symptom that is part of the banality of evil in society is the basis of human and social values in commonplaces, which can be expressed in the form of adages and proverbs. When the speeches of these random and automatically repeated phrases are taken as being true, their content is inserted as truth in the social imaginary. When the first group of blind characters, in the company of the doctor’s wife, discovers that the epidemics had spread to every individual even outside the mental hospital, they leave the heterotopia and go to the house of the girl with dark glasses: She let the girl go ahead since she knew the way; she did not mind the shadows into which the stairway was plunged. In her nervous haste, the girl with dark glasses stumbled twice, but laughed it off, Just imagine, stairs that I used to be able to go up and down with my eyes closed, clichés are like that; they are insensitive to the thousand subtleties of meaning. This one, for example, does not know the difference between closing one's eyes and being blind. On the landing of the second floor, the door they were looking for was closed.29

The adage “do something with your eyes closed” is deconstructed in this context. The subtleties to which the girl with dark glasses refers, are exactly the ones that are ignored, that trivialize the commonplace, ending up into what Arendt called ‘banality.’ There is also a paradox in the adage: if she could do that with her eyes closed, why couldn’t she do it when blind? So, in some aspects, the uncritical acceptance of adages, clichés and proverbs may lead to a condition which is possibly related to the dystopian experience. There is the deconstruction of another important adage in the narrative, the Latin adage in regione caecorum rex est luscus, assigned to Erasmus of Rotterdam, that means “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” If we put a question mark at the end of the sentence: “In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king?”, and then read the excerpt from the novel when the doctor's wife can finally vent her feelings by being the only one who could see, we are able to understand the problems imbued in the assertion of the proverb:

28

“An assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections.” Deleuze. 2005. A Thousand Plateaus, 8. 29 Saramago. 2013. Blindness, 246. Emphasis added.

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…what is right and what is wrong are simply different ways of understanding our relationships with the others, not that which we have with ourselves. One should not trust the latter; forgive this moralising [sic] speech; you do not know, you cannot know, what it means to have eyes in a world in which everyone else is blind; I am not a queen; no, I am simply the one who was born to see this horror. You can feel it; I both feel and see it, and that's enough of this dissertation.30

The rupture with Manichaeist values and certainties of what is right and what is wrong is a suggestion for the reader to question their own programs of truth. It is necessary to extricate oneself of preconceived truths to understand the meanings of these issues. The emphasis in the quote corresponds to the dismantling of one of the values disseminated through the proverb. The word “king” is related to an advantage of power; the king is the voice of command, but not only that, he is the dominant voice. The king, most often does not see the horror, despite his being sometimes responsible for it. The king is supposed to act in behalf of a collectivity. But when focusing on the whole, one loses focus on the identities, particularities, and desires. The doctor’s wife sees individuals, sees all the horror up close. Then, she is not queen. What could be considered almost a utopian desire to a society of blind people, i.e., to see; is actually the hugest dystopia to this character, since she is the only one to effectively see the horror. Besides the dismantling of adages, there is another important process of deconstruction in the narrative, and it concerns the relational position of women with these issues and the female roles typically established in the societies, almost always as a second in relation to man, disregarding their plurality and subjectivities. No wonder that in the narrative, the only person who does not go blind is a woman. Saramago proposes a careful look at these issues. So, what could be a dystopia to the individuals whose aim is to maintain the power structures from the world before the catastrophe, can lead to a positive experience to the female characters, just like in Pepetela’s narrative. However, this change is gradual, and does not happen spontaneously. The first person to go blind, named in the text as “the first blind man,” considers his wife as one of his properties, characterizing her as an object and trying to prevent her from making her own decisions, including decisions related to her own body. His blindness is thus an embodiment of his inattentive gaze on the human and subjective existence of his wife. Such an occurrence is clear in various excerpts. At one point in the 30

Saramago. 2013. Blindness, 276. Emphasis added.

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Chapter One

narrative, when the first group of individuals affected by blindness is still in the hospital, a group of men takes possession of all the available food and demands that the groups from the other wards offer their women as bargaining chips. So, each ward starts to discuss what to do regarding this situation: There are few women in this ward, perhaps for that reason the protests were fewer or less vehement, there was the girl with dark glasses, there was the wife of the first blind man, there was the girl from the surgery, there was the chambermaid, there was one woman nobody knew anything about, there was the woman who could not sleep, but she was so unhappy and wretched that it would be best to leave her in peace, for there was no reason why only the men should benefit from the women's solidarity. The first blind man had begun by declaring that his wife would not be subjected to the shame of giving her body to strangers in exchange for whatever, she had no desire to do so, nor would he permit it, for dignity has no price, that when someone starts making small concessions, in the end life loses all meaning. . . . The silence that followed the interrupted phrase seemed to be waiting for someone to clarify the situation once and for all, for this reason it was not long before the person who had to speak, spoke up, this was the wife of the first blind man, who said without so much as a tremor in her voice, I'm no different from the others, I'll do whatever they do. You'll do as I say, interrupted her husband. Stop giving orders; they won't do much good here; you're as blind as I am.31

The decision the first blind man’s wife takes is both of empowerment and resignation. For the first time in her life she shows that she disagrees with those values according to which she herself acted passively during her whole life, but at the same time this decision made her endure the worst kind of violence a woman can suffer. So, her decision to go with the other women to have sexual intercourse with the bad men that take hold of the provisions is at the same time a terrible dystopian experience and the liberation from the sexist values she lived under during her whole life, subjugated by her husband. A female character who is seemingly erased and insignificant in the narrative, the woman who could not sleep, quoted in the first emphasized passage of the previous excerpt, has actually a unique and indispensable role in helping the reader to understand what it is like to suffer an erasure of subjectivity; to be seen not as a person, but as an object, and what it is like to suffer daily violence through small things steeped in patriarchal culture, reaching its apex in the most acute violence, that is, sexual abuse. 31

Saramago. 2013. Blindness, 276. Emphases added.

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The horror of such violence is carefully described, providing a humanization of these women, paradoxically through the understanding of the dehumanizing circumstance. After very specific descriptions of the sexual intercourses, the women from the first ward leave the room. The blind woman suffering from insomnia had to be carried away in the arms of her companions, who could scarcely drag themselves along. For hours they had passed from one man to another, from humiliation to humiliation, from outrage to outrage, exposed to everything that can be done to a woman while leaving her still alive. . . . Deaf, blind, silent, tottering on their feet, with barely enough will-power not to let go of the hand of the woman in front, the hand, not the shoulder, as when they had come.… She's dead, she repeated. What happened? asked the doctor; but his wife made no attempt to answer him. His question might be simply what it appeared to mean: How did she die? But it could also imply: What did they do to you in there? Now, neither for the one nor for the other of these questions could there be an answer. She simply died; from what, scarcely matters. It is foolish for anyone to ask what someone died from; in time, the cause will be forgotten. Only two words remain: She died, and we are no longer the same women as when we left here. The words they would have spoken we can no longer speak, and as for the others, the unnamable exists; that is its name, nothing else.32

At this point of the novel, the stream of consciousness of the doctor's wife leads to a kind of sublimation of these women’s condition, and a complicity between them is born and expressed through the image of their holding hands, which, together with what was to follow, provides the reader with the possibility of washing their predetermined meanings to understand the extreme affection that arose from the uttermost inhumanity. A contradiction is created as a resource to think about sexual violence as a dystopian experience. The narrator says that the women suffered, at the ward of the thugs, “everything that can be done to a woman while leaving her still alive.” However, the woman who suffered from insomnia did die after the collective rape. Her death in contrast with the previous statement is a symbol that violence is not only physical. The erasure of women’s subjectivity is not only related to psychological matter, but can reach the flesh, unifying the two instances that are genealogically constructed as separate issues, but are actually indiscernible as experience. The woman was finally able to rest. When the doctor’s wife washes her motionless body, albeit doing so with dirty water, it is an attempt to clean it from the horror, and when cleaning the still living bodies which pervade 32

Saramago. 2013. Blindness, 181-182.

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20

the same horror experience, the doctor’s wife, who is the only seeing person, understands that seeing effectively is not only related to her eyes, but with her ability to see and consider the alterity as a part of her own subjectivity. The complicity born between those women who suffered from the dystopian experience and the doctor’s wife’s watchful eye stand in contrast to most of the male characters who don’t seem to be capable of disengaging from their banality of evil and their commonplaces. Nevertheless, there is a mishap in the character’s narrative and her relation to the blind people in the hospital not belonging to the first group. When she can’t bear any more suffering and seeing other women suffer from the thugs’ violence and power, she finds a way to kill the leader of the thugs’ ward. Because of that, all the people who slept in wards other than the one of the thugs remained without food or other provisions. When discussing what they would do about it, a man says: All I know is that we would never have found ourselves in this situation if their leader hadn't been killed. What did it matter if the women had to go there twice a month to give these men what nature gave them to give, I ask myself.33

This man is the one who delves ever deeper into this milky sea of concepts rooted in patriarchal culture. The doctor's wife, in turn, antagonizes this reification of the female condition and emerges as the voice of all women when she proposes to literally fight to earn the food. The fight, culturally a male role, becomes re-signified when she says that not only the men will go, but also the women: they should return to the place where they were humiliated, so that none of that humiliation would remain. This is an important reterritorialization to change two of the elements that were leading them to a dystopian condition: the sexual violence and the hunger. Then, another adage related to gender is deconstructed: But there was no point in counting on the latter for the war. They would not even be able to grab a she-cat by the tail, an old-fashioned expression which never explained for what extraordinary reason a she-cat should be easier to deal with than a tom-cat.34

The imagery of washing repeats, as a representation of the need for change and complicity, again starred by women. This time they are out of the hospital, and after several difficulties, have managed to arrive at the 33 34

Saramago. 2013. Blindness, 195. Saramago. 2013. Blindness, 201.

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doctor’s house. The women from the group take a rain shower on the balcony. She searched in the kitchen for soap and detergents, scrubbing brushes, anything that might be used to clean a little, at least a little, of this unbearable filth of the soul. Of the body, she said, as if to correct this metaphysical thought, then she added: It’s all the same. . . . We are the only women in the world with two eyes and six hands. . . . God, how the rain is pouring down on them, how it trickles between their breasts, how it lingers and disappears into the darkness of the pubis, how it finally drenches and flows over the thighs. Perhaps we have judged them wrongly, or perhaps we are unable to see this, the most beautiful and glorious thing that has happened in the history of the city. A sheet of foam flows from the floor of the balcony; if only I could go with it, falling interminably, clean, purified, naked. Only God sees us, said the wife of the first blind man, who, despite disappointments and setbacks, clings to the belief that God is not blind, to which the doctor's wife replies, Not even he.35

It is possible to notice that there is again a rupture of the dualist perspective of body and soul; the unbearable filth of the soul is impregnated in the body. So, cleaning the body as a ritual also means cleaning the soul as a resumption of the lost humanity. The washing of the female body is described at the same time with delicate and carnal epistemology, since they are, at this time, becoming-woman.36 They become one, “the only woman in the world with two eyes and six hands.” This is the apex of female complicity and affection, the paradoxically watchful eye among blind women, from them to themselves, like the antithesis of their dystopian experiences so far. Even the narrator confesses that there were misjudgments about the female characters when he comments “perhaps we have judged them wrongly.” The imagery of washing and the narrator’s commentaries are also present in the novel Ventos do Apocalipse (Winds of the Apocalypse),37 by 35

Saramago. 2013. Blindness, 279-280. Deleuze and Guattari explain the idea becoming, relating to the thoughts on minority, majority, and deterritorialization explained before: “There is no becoming-majoritarian; majority is never becoming. All becoming is minoritarian. Women, regardless of their numbers, are a minority, definable as a state or subset; but they create only by making possible a becoming over which they do not have ownership, into which they themselves must enter; this is a becoming-woman affecting all of humankind, men and women both.” Deleuze, Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (2005), 106. 37 Paulina Chiziane. 2006. Ventos do Apocalipse [Winds of the Apocalypse] (Lisbon: Caminho). 36

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Mozambican writer Paulina Chiziane, when an itinerant group crosses a river: They reach the other river bank and continue. That stream is dwelt by good spirits; after all, none of the travelers sank. If there were any crocodiles, they closed their mouths in time; we are safe. But the little boy is still scared and trembles softly. He is cold and the sun will not rise anytime soon.38

Chiziane’s novel was analyzed under an anti-utopian Marxist perspective by Debora Leite David.39 This is the usual perspective used to analyze African works written in Portuguese. Dystopia was renamed by David as ‘utopian disenchantment,’ and it is related, in her thesis, to the disillusion which the paths the revolution took. Although this is the most usual definition of dystopia, it takes as granted the assumption that the revolutionary utopia of some is the best option for everybody. However, under a post-colonial perspective, if we consider the African countries colonized by Portugal which today have Portuguese as their official language, we may be able to understand that even the libertarian revolution proposed at these spaces to put an end to the colonial system is imported from Eurocentric theories. Of course people living there wanted freedom, but under their own programs of truth. The sole idea of ‘national identity,’ proposed by the Africanized40 intellectuals in a place marked by the welding of several different ethnicities and cultures, is a form of pressuring them into the Eurocentric culture, even if through a libertarian label. The dystopian experiences of the characters in Chiziane’s narrative reflect the perspective of those people who wish their lives, their cultures and their land to be respected, but are de-subjectified instead, since they were forced first by the dominant power of the colonization process and 38

In Portuguese: “Alcançam a outra margem e prosseguem, afinal, naquele riacho residem espíritos bons, nenhum dos viajantes se afundou. Se havia crocodilos, estes fecharam a boca na hora certa, estamos salvos. Mas o menino continua assustado e treme de mansinho. Sente frio e o sol não aparecerá tão cedo.” Chiziane. 2006. Ventos do Apocalipse, 177. 39 Debora Leite David. 2010.O desencanto utópico ou o juízo final. (Universidade de São Paulo: PhD dissertation). 40 Salvato Trigo created the term “africanizados” (Africanized), to describe the Portuguese intellectuals settled in African countries colonized by Portugal, but who supposedly communed with libertarian ideals of the black intellectuals’ descendants from native peoples. These Portuguese intellectuals assumed an African identity and began to refute their “original” nationality. Salvato Trigo. “A alteridade das Literaturas Africanas em Língua Portuguesa,” In Ensaios de literatura comparada: afro-luso-brasileira (Lisbon: Vega, nd.).

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then by the dominating power of the cultural establishment of a revolution guided by ideologies derived from the colonizing culture. Ventos do Apocalipse [Winds of the Apocalypse] is a collection of stories which are apparently independent, but when put together constitute the novel plot, which is the post-independence war in Mozambique, during which a group of people from the countryside joins other groups to escape the horrors of war and try to survive. The apocalyptic tone of the narrative brings the elements that characterize the dystopia: The curious, with their outraged eyes, watch the macabre parade that arises from the darkness. The voices and the whispers rise up to the most varied wailing. To all of them, war is a terrible hecatomb. Some of them believe this is a divine punishment. Others think that is the beginning of the end because the terrestrial world will end at the year two thousand, according to the opinion of seers.41

On one hand, the apocalyptic and anti-utopian theme in the narrative is related to the loss of their land and culture to the colonizing culture. On the other, the utopian dream is related to a sense of community and solidarity, which are lost along with their ethnic identities. So, the utopian urge, which is usually related to the revolution grounded on Eurocentric theories, in Chiziane’s narrative, is the solidarity, sense of community, and alterity ethics. Besides the apocalyptic perspective related to civil war and the colonizing culture, there is also an aspect of dystopia related to gender. The narrator always gives voice to female characters, and occasionally even assumes women’s points of view, despite being a heterodiegetic narrator most of the time. Just like in Saramago’s work, women are also forced to sell their bodies in exchange for food, and they also fight for their empowerment. Children are also important characters in the narrative. During the whole novel, the relations established between children and death are harbingers of the end of community values, along with the characters’ own existence. Young people, who are usually a symbol of renewal, are related to the end of life and thus mark the death of hope itself. After the wanderers cross the river, the baby boy who was cold dies in his mother’s arms, and a little before that they find another child holding his stiff mother’s head: There is a corpse rotting and it has its head severed. The head is laying five footsteps ahead with open eyes. A nine or twelve month-old child holds it 41

Chiziane. 2006. Ventos do Apocalipse [Winds of the Apocalypse], 185.

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Chapter One tight with his fragile little fingers, turning it nervously to one side and the other, releasing squeals of fury. Looks like they are playing with it, but they are not, they are not playing. They are desperately trying to wake their mother up to life.42

Maybe the most curious aspect about the dystopian relativity in Chiziane’s work is that it becomes explicit that dystopia and utopia are always together. When the group arrives to a community which was not yet decimated by the war, they were received with the solidarity they had lost along with their lands and identities. However, the old people from this village have already had the war experience: “To these old people, hope and despair seem to be the two sides of the same coin. People with the age to dream and build are on the warpath against death.”43 The four narratives briefly analyzed above bring different points of view upon the dystopian experience, displacing it from an institutionalized concept related to an anti-utopian perspective that presupposes one’s utopia as the ideal setting to all the other individuals. When the reading or analysis focuses on the different experiences of a same circumstance, it may be surprising to realize that a generic classification might be responsible for a process of exclusion and de-subjectivation of individuals who have been historically silenced by marginalization processes. Dystopia, as a generic classification of a narrative theme, is frequently responsible for the maintenance of dominant power structures arising from a majority,44 and consequently the conservation of perspectives that benefit exclusively the enunciation locus of this hegemonic perspective. Nevertheless, when considering the relativity of the dystopian experience, while offering a glance focused on alterity ethics and bringing points of view that differ from the hegemonic constant, we may be able to reach a multiplicity of aspects which were unknown since we had the centralizing experience only. Thereby, a decolonizing reading of the works originally classified under the label of ‘dystopia’ may be an effective strategy to see

42

In Portuguese: “Há um cadáver a apodrecer e tem a cabeça decepada. Cinco passos adiante a cabeça está tombada de olhos abertos. Uma criança de nove ou doze meses segura-a forte com os frágeis dedinhos, vira-a e revira-a nervosamente soltando gruinchos de fúria. Parece que brinca com ela, mas não, não brinca. Tenta desesperadamente despertar a mãe para a vida.” Chiziane. 2006. Ventos do Apocalipse [Winds of the Apocalypse], 168. 43 In Portuguese: “Para esses velhos a esperança e o desespero parecem ser duas faces da mesma moeda. Os homens da idade de sonhar e construir estão em pé de guerra contra a morte.” Chiziane. 2006. Ventos do Apocalipse, 201. 44 See notes n. 5 and n. 36.

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the experience through different eyes at least for an instant, as proposed by Thoreau.

Works Cited Arendt, Hannah. 2006. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Penguin. Braidotti, Rosi. 2002. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bras, Luiz. 2010. Paraíso Líquido. Sao Paulo: Terracota. Chiziane, Paulina. 2006. Ventos do Apocalipse. Lisbon: Caminho. David, Debora Leite. 2010. O desencanto utópico ou o juízo final. PhD dissertation, Universidade de Sao Paulo. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 2004. Anti-Œdipus. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London, New York: Continuum. —. 2005. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Of Grammatology. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1967. “Des espaces autres.” Paper presented at the Conférence au Cercle d'études architecturales, Paris, 14 March. Published in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, n.5 (Paris, 1984): 46-49. —. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. New York: The Harvester Press. Huxley, Aldous. 2006. Brave New World. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, Reprint edition. Orwell, George. 2009. Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: Penguin. PEPETELA. 2008. O quase fim do mundo. Lisbon: Dom Quixote. Prucher, Jeff, ed. 2007. Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press. Saramago, José. 2013. Blindness. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Shelley, Mary. 1994. Frankenstein. New York: Dover. Thoreau, Henry David. 1854. Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience. Gutenberg Project, acessed December 22, 2013, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/205/205-h/205-h.htm Trigo, Salvato. Nd. Ensaios de literatura comparada: afro-luso-brasileira. Lisbon: Vega.

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Chapter One

Veyne, Paul. 1988. Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?: An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

CHAPTER TWO MAINSTREAMING MARXISM: DEATH RACE AS CRITIQUE OF APOCALYPTIC CAPITALISM NOWELL MARSHALL

When Death Race, Paul W. S. Anderson’s 2008 remake of Death Race 2000 (1975) was released, it was widely panned by mainstream film critics. Variety’s Robert Koehler termed it “as hard as metal and just as dumb,”1 and Keith Phipps of the A.V. Club claimed the film was “ideal for those who want to watch a bunch of cars blow each other up, without having to think about it all that much.”2 However, these critical attacks on Death Race reveal more about the reviewers’ inability to recognize the cultural impact of mainstream Hollywood films than they do about Death Race itself. Perhaps more interestingly, such critical dismissals stem from the very aspect of the film that they seemingly overlook: Death Race presents an insistent Marxist critique of capitalism and privatization of public services—in this case the prison system—in the wake of a fictional economic crisis of 2012. However, Anderson’s dissemination of revolutionary Marxist principles through the platform of the apocalyptic science-fiction movie is ultimately hampered by the film’s emphasis on male disempowerment and the misogyny its narrative espouses. Death Race begins by displaying the following text in white letters across a dark screen: 2012— The United States economy collapses. Unemployment hits a record high. 1

Robert Koehler. “Death Race.” Variety 21 (Aug. 2008), http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117938036?refcatid=31. 2 Keith Phipps. “Death Race.” A.V. Club 21 (Aug. 2008), http://www.avclub.com/articles/death-race,2803/.

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Chapter Two Crime rates spiral out of control. The prison system reaches breaking point. PRIVATE CORPORATIONS now run all correctional facilities for profit.

Behind the lettering, images of industrial machinery appear. The words “PRIVATE CORPORATIONS” are capitalized, bolded, and printed in red to emphasize the danger of privatizing basic public services such as prisons.3 These initial words then vanish and are replaced by the following text, again presented in white lettering: TERMINAL ISLAND penitentiary streams a series of Cage Fights live on the Internet. Prisoners fight to the death, creating a ratings sensation. They are the new Gladiators, and Terminal Island is their Coliseum.

As in the previous passage, key words are capitalized, bolded, and listed in red; this time highlighting the name of the prison, Terminal Island. These letters fade, and the film’s third passage appears, again in white lettering: But like the mob of ancient Rome, the modern audience soon becomes bored. They demand more…DEATH RACE is born.

In this passage, the final two words, “DEATH RACE,” are capitalized, bolded, and listed in red. Taken together, color and formatting in these three passages calls attention to the words: PRIVATE CORPORATIONS, TERMINAL ISLAND, and DEATH RACE, leading viewers to associate privatization of basic public services such as prisons with the inevitable rise of remote facilities that specialize in selling death to the public. But who is this public? Throughout the film, viewers see several different classes of subjects, but the bourgeois public consuming the lives of the Terminal Island prisoners remains invisible. The film alludes to this invisible public before each of the race’s three stages when an advertisement for the pay-per-view event appears on screen targeting viewers who have the economic power to watch Death Race for $99 per stage or $250 for the entire three-stage event, but these viewers are never directly shown on the screen. Within Terminal Island, the male prisoners are subdivided into two classes of proletariat workers: the Death Race drivers, who are led to believe that they have the chance of earning their freedom by winning five races, and the other male inmates, whose labor power outfits and repairs 3

Interestingly enough, the film anticipated the wave of privatizations that Republicans in many states have attempted since its release.

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the track, as well as the heavily armored and armed cars. Another group of prisoners comprised of attractive women enters the prison to work inside the cars as navigators who help the drivers complete three laps on the course while adding sex appeal to the Death Race. Yet, the female prisoners are also subdivided into two classes: the navigators and the other female prisoners who do not participate in the Death Race and remain detained in another prison. Finally, there is Terminal Island’s warden, Hennessy, who through her control of the means of production and her focus on ratings, represents the bourgeoisie. Hennessey runs the Terminal Island complex through her guards, the most notable being Mr. Ulrich. These guards also represent the proletariat, but unlike the prisoners, the guards are loyal to Hennessey, which is to say they support the efforts of the bourgeoisie to exploit the labor power of the prisoners within the privatized prison system. In this sense, the guards (and the navigators when they sabotage their drivers’ cars at Hennessey’s request) empower Hennessey by perpetuating what Antonio Gramsci terms hegemony, her ability to use a combination of “‘spontaneous’ consent” and “state coercive power” to maintain control over and oppress the masses who she literally owns despite their greater numbers.4 The film demonstrates disempowerment of the male prisoners early in the film when Jensen Ames, the film’s protagonist played by Jason Statham, arrives at the Terminal Island facility. On a dark, rainy night, guards lead Ames to Mr. Ulrich, who photographs him, first in an orange prison jumpsuit, then half naked. Through a series of jump cuts, Ames appears naked from the waist up, then only his pecs are shown within the frame, then his abs, in both frontal and side views. The camera jumps to the prison tattoos covering his forearms, shoulders, and chest, before returning to his face, torso, and profile. While jump cuts usually emphasize the constructed nature of film, in this scene, the rapid succession of jump cuts effectively dismembers Ames’ body, emphasizing his loss of power within the female-dominated private prison. Near the end of this sequence, Ames stands in profile, turns his face toward the camera, and grimaces, eliciting the audience’s sympathy. The camera then captures a few shots of Ames muscles contracting as he assumes brief poses for Mr. Ulrich, who ends the session by simply saying, “Move.” Mr. Ulrich forces Ames to strip naked and lean against a wall where he is hosed down and beaten with a nightstick. As the scene ends, the camera pans to Mr. Ulrich,

4

Antonio Gramsci. 1998. “Hegemony,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, MA: Blackwell), 673.

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who is removing black latex gloves, suggesting the further humiliation of an off-camera cavity search. Film scholars such as Laura Mulvey have made much of the cinematic objectification of women,5 but this scene in Death Race inverts the gender dynamics of Mulvey’s theory. Instead of positioning a woman as bearer of the male gaze, in the prison matriculation scene, Death Race uses the close up to establish Ames as the passive, masochistic object of the gaze. But whose gaze? This scene may be designed to broaden the movie’s audience by eliciting the desire of women (and potentially gay men) watching the film as the audience sees Jason Statham (a former male model) stripped, violated, and humiliated by another man. Yet, as Ames soon learns, Mr. Ulrich is only Hennessey’s pawn. Hennessey has been responsible for his wife’s murder, his daughter’s placement in foster care, and his conviction as wife killer. Keeping in mind that Jason Statham films like Death Race are primarily marketed to male audiences, the gendered power dynamics underlying this scene become poignant: he is ultimately the victim of the female capitalist warden, and the (primarily male) audience is encouraged to identify with him. According to Karl Marx, the cost of production must include both the cost of subsistence, in this case, what it costs to keep the prisoners alive, as well as the cost of reproduction, which ensures that each generation of workers can afford to raise families, reproduce, and perpetuate the labor system that supports capitalist enterprises.6 However, in Death Race, the privatization of the prison system allows Hennessey to greatly reduce and in some cases completely avoid these costs. Rather than having to pay her workers a regular wage that they could use to acquire food, lodging, and enjoy some level of comfort, Hennessey is allowed to provide them with only the bare necessities: regular prisoners live in triple-occupancy cells while more important prisoners, such as Ames, the film’s protagonist played by Jason Statham, are kept in solitary confinement—as Hennessey explains to Ames, this precaution is for his “own protection.” Privatization further lessens Hennessey’s costs to produce the Death Race pay-per-view event because she has no cost of reproduction: within the film’s apocalyptic science-fiction world, the pressures of starvation, loss of employment, and economic collapse continually produce violent offenders. These criminals are then given to Hennessey and other wardens, 5

See Laura Mulvey. 1998. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, MA: Blackwell), 585-595. 6 Karl Marx. 1998. “Wage Labor and Capital,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, MA: Blackwell), 262-267.

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providing them with cheap, easily replenished labor. Hennessey notes how this process works in her speech before the third and final stage of the Death Race when she tells the assembled prisoners, “The world gave you to me because you were not fit to be a part of it. You were not fit to be husbands. You were not fit to be fathers and were too dangerous to live with the rest of us.” In making this speech, a speech targeted at Ames, whom Hennessey has framed for murdering his wife and caused to lose custody of his daughter, Hennessey exposes how the system works: prisoners convicted of violent crimes are gifted to her; they become commodities without rights and are subject to her capitalist designs. The film accentuates this point in the first two stages of the Death Race when seven of the nine drivers, all but Machine Gun Joe and Jensen Ames, are killed on the track. These men are commodities that have value only so long as they deliver ratings and profit for Hennessey by outmaneuvering other drivers and, in Stage Two, Hennessey’s high-powered juggernaut tank. In her first meeting with Jensen Ames, Hennessey offers him the opportunity to replace Frankenstein, the most popular Death Race driver, who, unbeknownst to his fans, was killed in a race six months earlier when his navigator, Case, sabotaged his defensive weapons. The reference to Frankenstein recalls Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; yet, in describing Frankenstein to Ames, Hennessey reveals not only her misunderstanding of the classic tale but also foreshadows Ames’ role in the film: You are familiar with the Death Race and the driver the fans call Frankenstein, a man so disfigured by crashes that he’s forced to wear a mask. His return to the track is highly anticipated, and therein lies my problem. No one knows yet, but poor Frank died on an operating table not long after his last race. Anyone can wear the mask, but not just anyone can drive the car. You have the skills I require to keep the legend alive. I want you to become Frankenstein.

Like Death Race, Frankenstein remains well-known but poorly understood within non-literary circles. In consequence, people often assume that Frankenstein names the creature when it is actually the surname of his creator, Victor Frankenstein. Thus, the name Frankenstein takes on a distinct intertextual meaning within the film's narrative that derives from Hennessey's misunderstanding of Frankenstein as the name of a monster created without regard for his well-being or personal desires. Insofar as Hennessey tells one of her guards, “Frankenstein can’t die. After all, he’s just a mask,” the driver Frankenstein literally becomes an iconic monstrous commodity that Hennessey creates to increase her profit from

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the Death Race brand. What Hennessey overlooks, however, is that in Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein’s monster overthrows his creator by slaying his family, his friends, and eventually driving him into a drug-induced madness that results in his death. During Stage One of the race, Hennessey watches Ames' performance on her monitors and tells her right-hand guard, Ulrich, “12 million hits on his angle alone, and he hasn’t even started the engine. We'll do 45 million viewers today.” As Coach notes, Hennessey's position as warden imbues her with the power over life and death: “In here, she's judge, jury, and executioner. The race is her baby. Anyone who threatens it, she kills. The audience for the race has halved since Frank’s been out of the game, and so has the corporation’s profit. That’s why she needs you.” While emphasizing Hennessey’s predatory capitalist nature, this dialogue also establishes her as a female monster, a twisted maternal figure who protects “her baby,” the Death Race, and the profit it produces at all costs. This feminization of the bourgeoisie and the capitalist, both of which are condensed into the figure of Hennessey, establishes her as the cinematic counterpart to women in American literature, who Judith Fetterley argues, are often positioned as obstacles that the male protagonist must overcome. 7 Throughout the film, Hennessey becomes exactly this kind of obstacle for Ames, but this opposition is also one of class: within this apocalyptic setting, capitalism is represented as a deranged mother out to protect her baby, profit, at the expense of the male drivers, including the innocent Ames, and innocent children and families represented by his infant daughter and his wife, whose murder Hennessey arranged. When Hennessey first approaches Ames about donning Frankenstein’s mask and racing identity, she displays her power, telling him, The race is Friday, and I need your decision. Ten seconds from now, I will retract this offer and extend it to prisoner 68815 James Frances Barlini, who, clearly not of your caliber, will be quite enthusiastic about it, and you, unfortunately, will need to spend your incarceration in solitary.

As Ames quickly observes, this punishment will be necessary if he refuses to become Hennessey's new Frankenstein “since now I know your dirty little secret.” When Ames realizes that Hennessey arranged his wife's murder and framed him so that he could become Frankenstein, he refuses

7

Judith Fetterley. 1998. “On the Politics of Literature,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, MA: Blackwell), 561569.

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to continue performing his role. Once again, Hennessey demonstrates her power over his daughter’s future: Do you recognize these people? Because your daughter will. They’re her new parents. What’s her name? Piper. That’s the man she’ll grow up calling daddy, unless you do something about it. . . . You’re a smart man, Mr. Ames. Play my game, we both go home happy.

Through this display of power, Hennessey coerces Ames to continue racing to win his freedom. Later, in Stage Two of the race, Hennessey begins to lose control of Ames when he learns which driver killed his wife at Hennessey's request. Ames tells her, “You wanted a monster. Well, you’ve got one.” At this point in the film, Ames reappropriates the persona of Frankenstein’s monster by driving onto the raceway, running Pachenko off the track, pulling him from the wreckage of his car, and breaking his neck while looking directly into the camera that feeds into Hennessey's monitors. From this point onward, Ames performs the role of Frankenstein’s monster, but not as Hennessey misunderstands the character; rather than become the racing genius who she can easily commodify and control, he plays the role of the monster created without his consent who overthrows his creator, just as the monster does in Shelley’s novel. Yet, throughout Death Race, Anderson’s regendering of the creator undermines the film’s Marxist message. Instead of seeing a neo-Frankenstein narrative featuring the proletariat man/monster overthrowing his bourgeoisie male captor/creator, audiences watch Ames confront and eventually overthrow his female captor/creator Hennessey. Ames begins this process when Pachenko aims a pistol-firing gesture at him through the window of his race car before Stage Two of the race and Ames recognizes the gesture from the scene of his wife’s murder. Ames kills Pachenko on the track, and then, when Hennessey releases her dreadnought onto the track, Ames breaks the rules of driver selfpreservation by having Lists patch him through to Machine Gun Joe’s radio, saying, “How about we play a little offense?” The two drivers coordinate their maneuvers, and the dreadnought, which has killed all the other drivers on the course, is not only defeated, but demolished when Ames and Machine Gun Joe swing their cars in front of it and activate a death’s head trap on the course that sheers away the machine’s wheels. Immediately following this scene, Ames is escorted back to his cell amid a wall of cheers from the other prisoners. Through his actions, Ames has begun to unite the proletariat prisoners against the capitalist warden.

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Hennessey finally loses all control of Ames when he hears her giving the inmates a motivational speech before Stage Three of the race. She says, “Tonight is the final leg of the Death Race, and perhaps a new champion will arise, a five times winner, the first man ever to gain his freedom.” Although Hennessey intends her speech to augment the ideology into which Terminal Island indoctrinates inmates (“win five races, you go free”), Ames realizes that Hennessey never allows any of the drivers to win five races when he says to himself, “No one is ever gonna win five races. Nobody is ever getting out of here.” As he says this aloud, Ames realizes that Hennessey either uses her automatic override controls to sabotage anyone who wins four of the five races necessary to win freedom from Terminal Island, or, as seen in the opening scene, she arranges for the driver's navigator to sabotage his offensive and defensive capabilities. Either way, he dies. At this point in the narrative, Ames’ identity as Frankenstein offers a second, more nuanced point of intertextuality within the narrative. Although often referred to merely as Frankenstein, the full title of Shelley's novel is Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus. This interchangeability of the names Frankenstein and Prometheus offers insight into the events of Death Race because throughout the film, Ames embodies a kind of Promethean figure. In Aeschylus's version of the story, Prometheus is a lesser god who steals fire from Olympus and gives its power to humans, whom Zeus has continually oppressed.8 In this sense, the mythology of Prometheus contains the seeds of the class struggle and revolution that Marx would later describe in his writings. Zeus punishes Prometheus by binding him to a rock where each day, an eagle descends to eat his liver. Each night, his liver regrows, and the next day, the cycle repeats. Likewise, in Death Race, Ames embodies a Promethean resistance to Hennessey’s capitalist abuses of the prisoners. While Hennessey literally holds Ames captive through much of the film, her speech before Stage Three of the race is key to understanding the class struggle that the film demonstrates because after hearing the speech, Ames has an epiphany: it’s not enough for him to see through Hennessey’s ideology; he needs the other drivers to see through that ideology as well. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slajov Žižek builds on Marx’s definition of ideology:

8

Oskar Seyffert. 1995. “Prometheus,” in The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, Religion, Literature, and Art, eds. Henry Nettleship and J.E. Sandys (New York: Random House), 520-521.

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‘they do not know it, but they are doing it.’ The very concept of ideology implies a kind of basic, constitutive naїveté: the misrecognition of its own presuppositions, of its own effective conditions, a distance, a divergence between so-called reality and our distorted representation, our false consciousness of it.9

Throughout the remainder of the film, Ames breaks down the false consciousness of his fellow inmates, first by helping Coach review footage of an earlier crash that exposed a weakness in the Death Race track’s security measures and later by risking his life by entering the machine shop of an opposing team to confer with his nemesis Machine Gun Joe. Yet, Ames isn’t the only one who understands ideology in the film. In several key scenes, Hennessey specifically constructs an ideology around the Death Race. In addition to using the promise of freedom to lure the drivers into racing and Ames into becoming the new Frankenstein, Hennessey reveals a keen understanding of human psychology and marketing when she plans to kill Ames during Stage Three of the race. As Hennessey and Mr. Ulrich watch Stage Two of the race, Ames first targets, then crashes Pachenko’s car, steps out of his car, and grasps Pachenko’s throat. Pachenko rasps, “Hennessey. It was Hennessey,” to which Ames replies, “I know. She’s next.” As Ames breaks Pachenko’s neck with his bare hands, he gazes up at the surveillance camera to be sure that Hennessey sees his actions and understands the newfound knowledge that motivates him. The film emphasizes this escalating battle between Hennessey and Ames in the scene by shifting from Ames’ eyes to the surveillance camera, then to Hennessey’s reaction in the control room to Ames’ behavior , and finally back to a close up of Ames’ eyes staring back through his Frankenstein mask at Hennessey through the surveillance camera. Noting that Ames has not only killed Pachenko and destroyed her dreadnought, but begun to unify the prisoners against their overseers, Mr. Ulrich asks Hennessey, “Ma’am, with all respect, what are we gonna do?” to which Hennessey responds, “We’re going to kill him, of course.” “You want me kill Frankenstein?” Mr. Ulrich asks. “Don’t be stupid,” Hennessey says, “Frankenstein can’t die. After all, he’s just a mask.” In this exchange, Hennessey demonstrates her knowledge of corporate branding: Frankenstein is just iconic mask; his fans know nothing else about him, which means that he is expendable; the mask can always be worn by another driver. In this sense, Hennessey exposes herself as a cynic. In his discussion of ideology, Žižek differentiates between kynicism and cynicism: “Kynicism 9

Slavoj Žižek. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso), 28.

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represents the popular, plebian rejection of the official culture by means of irony and sarcasm.”10 In contrast: The cynical subject is quite aware of the distance between the ideological mask and the social reality, but he none the less [sic] still insists upon the mask. The formula, as proposed by Sloterdijk, would then be: ‘they know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.’ Cynical reason is no longer naїve, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it.11

Throughout the film, Hennessey is aware of the ethical problem of marketing human suffering and death as a form of bourgeois entertainment, but she is too invested in the promise of profit to care. In the scene that immediately precedes Hennessey’s speech to the men before Stage Three of the race, the camera shows Mr. Ulrich designing a bomb. The scene then cuts to Hennessey telling the men that the race may finally yield “the first man ever to gain his freedom” before the camera cuts back to Mr. Ulrich secretly placing the bomb on the bottom of Ames’ racecar. This image is immediately followed by the end of Hennessey’s speech where she tells the men that “the very same world that rejected you now lives and breathes with you, and it draws inspiration from your courage. So, race well, and know that I consider you all my heroes.” Throughout this key scene, Hennessey reveals herself as a cynic, a capitalist who understands the ideology in place and perpetuates it despite the ethical dilemma of doing so. Likewise, her guards, especially Mr. Ulrich, know how the system works, yet refuse to renounce that system because, in an apocalyptic world where patriarchal capitalism has failed, Hennessey’s brand of matriarchal capitalism provides them with jobs and the sense that they are punishing men who cannot abide by society’s rules. Even so, Ames eventually outsmarts her by collaborating with Coach and Machine Gun Joe, breaking through the protective barrier around the track, and through a series of clever maneuvers, escapes the prison. Ames' victory becomes a small-scale, localized Marxist revolution when Coach kills Hennessey and her accomplice Ulrich by sending the detonator that they intended for Ames' car to Hennessey's office.12 Although the audience 10

Žižek. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology, 29. Ibid. 12 See Karl Marx. 1998. “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, eds. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan (Malden, MA: Blackwell), 256261. Marx writes, “What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces above all, is its own 11

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is left to wonder what will become of the remaining prisoners, the movie leaves Terminal Island in a state of political upheaval with the potential for some of the inmates to escape in the chaos following the deaths of Hennessey and many of her guards. In this sense, Ames also embodies the Marxist aspects of the Promethean legend: the hero has saved the common people from the oppressive god(es)s. Death Race’s countercultural message caused critics to savage the film, but that didn’t stop everyday people from seeing it. Grossing $75 million worldwide, Death Race managed something rare: it reappropriated the apocalyptic science-fiction genre to broadcast Marxist critique to a mainstream audience not only in theaters, but also through its ongoing viewing via DVD and Blu-Ray. Although Death Race performed only moderately well in theaters, its DVD sales were strong enough to warrant two direct-to-DVD prequels (Death Race 2 and Death Race 3: Inferno) following the racing career of the original driver who wore the Frankenstein mask. Perhaps more interestingly, since Death Race was released in 2008, two other apocalyptic science-fiction films, Oblivion (2013) and Elysium (2013), have emerged with similar Marxist messages of class revolt. On the surface, both of these films follow the same narrative arc as Death Race: a working-class Anglo-American man must align himself with a woman to overthrow and kill the oppressive capitalist Anglo-American woman. In Death Race, Ames is framed and imprisoned by Hennessey, he must gain the trust of his navigator Case (a woman of color, formerly Hennessey’s pawn), kill rival driver and neo-Nazi Pachenko (Hennessey’s pawn), and eventually form a coalition with Machine Gun Joe (another rival, the man of color). In Oblivion, Jack Harper must form an alliance with Julia (a white woman) to overcome not one but two other, more powerful white women: Victoria and Sally.13 Elysium ends with Max aligning himself with Matilda to overcome Delacourt (Jodie Foster) and save Matilda’s daughter’s life—and ostensibly provide healthcare to Earth’s population. Like Death Race, both Oblivion and Elysium end their Marxist narratives with the restoration of the downtrodden American family. Yet, gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable” (260). In this sense, capitalism is, by its very nature, always already an apocalyptic enterprise. 13 Technically, in Oblivion, Jack Harper’s enemy is the alien ship, the Tet, but its true nature is only revealed near the end of the film. Throughout the film, the Tet uses edited footage of Harper’s human mission-control supervisor Sally to present itself as human. As such, both of the film’s female antagonists (Victoria and Sally) wear the face of an Anglo-American woman.

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these three films differ in the kinds of American families that they protect. Death Race suggests that restoration of the American family must happen outside of America—in Mexico, a space depicted as free of the tyranny of the white capitalist woman. Surprisingly, the film also suggests that in the wake of capitalism’s apocalypse, the American family must be reconstituted through the process of cultural hybridity when Case (Ames’ Latina navigator) reappears and assumes the role of love interest for Ames and mother-figure for his infant daughter, Piper. In Oblivion, Jack Harper overthrows Victoria and Sally to reunite with his wife, Julia; thus, Oblivion offers a slightly more traditional narrative because its Marxist revolution preserves the world for the Anglo-American family. In contrast, Elysium ends with the death of the Anglo-American male hero in an act that heals and perpetuates the American family of color signified by Frey and her daughter Matilda. The close narrative similarities between these two more recent films suggest that Death Race impacted the field in more ways than critics initially thought it would: it set the stage for a series of apocalyptic science fiction films that disseminated Marxist ideology to the American public; yet, that message is undermined in all three films by their assumption that the problems of capitalist society can be solved by destroying the body of an Anglo-American woman.

Works Cited Cruise, Tom, Morgan Freeman, and Andrea Riseborough. 2013. Oblivion. Directed by Joseph Kosinski. Damon, Matt, Jodie Foster, and Sharlto Copley. 2013. Elysium. Directed by Neill Blomkamp. Fetterley, Judith. 1998. “On the Politics of Literature.” In Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 561-569. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Gramsci, Antonio. 1998. “Hegemony.” In Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 673. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Koehler, Robert. 2008. “Death Race.” Variety, 21 Aug. http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117938036?refcatid=31. Marx, Karl. 1998. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” In Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 256261.Malden, MA: Blackwell. —. 1998. “Wage Labor and Capital.” In Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 262-267. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

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Phipps, Keith. 2008. “Death Race.” A.V. Club 21, Aug. http://www.avclub.com/articles/death-race,2803/. Seyffert, Oskar. 1995. “Prometheus.” In The Dictionary of Classical Mythology, Religion, Literature, and Art, edited by Henry Nettleship and J.E. Sandys, 520-521. New York: Random House. Shelley, Mary. 1999. Frankenstein; Or, the Modern Prometheus. Edited by D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf. Ontario: Broadview. Statham, Jason, Joan Allen, and Tyrese Gibson. 2008. Death Race. Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. Žižek, Slajov. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York, Verso.

CHAPTER THREE OCTAVIA BUTLER’S PARABLE OF THE SOWER: QUEER ‘NEW STORIES’ OF THE ‘FOURTH DIMENSION OF CITIZENSHIP’ KIRIN WACHTER-GRENE

In 2027 fire sweeps through the formerly walled Los Angeles neighborhood of Robledo, ravaging homes and tearing families apart as crazed pyromaniacs rape and murder the community’s inhabitants. Once relatively privileged, those that endure are now vulnerable and homeless and must struggle for survival amidst the dangerous, desperate street poor that have been occupying the outside world without adequate food, water, or shelter following the catastrophic deterioration of the United States.1 Four children, four couples, and a single mother gravitate toward one another in the wake of the terror and chaos as they join the sea of survivors walking the crumbling freeways that stretch northwards from Los Angeles. Together, they manifest the “idea/philosophy/new religion” called 1

While the destruction in Parable of the Sower can be, and has been read as a comment upon the 1992 Los Angeles Riots occurring a year prior to the novel’s publication, it is also fascinating to read in light of the 2011 Occupy Movement and its varied cultural responses, particularly considering that “the rumor was [the pyromaniacs] did it to fight for the poor, to expose or destroy the goods hoarded by the rich” (193). Protagonist Lauren Olamina ponders whether the destruction of her neighborhood was “Some kind of burn-the-rich movement. . . . We’ve never been rich, but to the desperate, we looked rich. We were surviving and we had our wall. Did our community die so that addicts could make a help-the-poor political statement?” (145-146). Additionally another character, Zahra, who lived in Robledo states “I thought something would happen someday. I didn’t know how bad it would be or when it would come. But everything was getting worse: the climate, the economy, crime, drugs, you know. I didn’t believe we would be allowed to sit behind our walls, looking clean and fat and rich to the hungry, thirsty, homeless, jobless, filthy people outside” (167).

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“Earthseed,” forming what Melissa Murray deems a “networked family” of “the fourth dimension of citizenship”—a family that practices kinshipbased relations of caregiving determined by affective, rather than biological, ties.2 Earthseed, founded by 18-year-old African American protagonist and narrator Lauren Oya Olamina, comprises the central vision of Octavia Butler’s 1993 post-apocalyptic novel Parable of the Sower. Earthseed is largely a concrete, rather than spiritual belief system that is concerned with issues of truth, power, control, and action. It asserts that “God is Change” and that because “All That You Touch You Change” subjects have the capacity and responsibility to shape God, together.3 The conception and practice of Earthseed as a practical and yet heretical philosophy for finding “truth” can be read as derivative of black feminist coalition building and its influence on queer theory and queer of color critique4 that sees liberatory promise in “aberrance.” Aberrance here means, as Roderick Ferguson explains, that which is antithetical to both normative subjectivities and contractual relations—such as fully recognized/legitimized citizenship.5 Habiba Ibrahim, in her study of multiracialism, describes how the black family has historically been understood as aberrant under state power that increasingly seeks to regulate aberrance in the production of normative citizenship. She suggests the 1980s (the decade prior to Parable of the Sower’s production) solidified how “the state was conceived as a representation of the American body politic…[and] a representation of the moral structure of U.S. society…producing the condition for unifying diverse social worlds into a homogenous social world of national citizens.”6 She continues: blackness—or how subjects had been constituted as black throughvarious discourses on race—determined the manner in which theblack family . . . was always already antithetical to the neutral ideal of national belonging . . . 2

Melissa Murray. 2008. “The Networked Family: Reframing the Legal Understanding of Caregiving and Caregivers.” Virginia Law Review (94:2), 385455. 3 Octavia E. Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower (NewYork: Warner Books), 174. 4 Roderick Ferguson states “Queer of color analysis extends women of color feminism by investigating how intersecting racial, gender, and sexual practices antagonize and/or conspire with the normative investments of nation-states and capital.” [2004. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 4. ] 5 Ibid. 6 Habiba Ibrahim. 2012. Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), xxvii.

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Chapter Three the black family figured those subjects who are structurally, culturally, and historically disconnected from the affective dimensions of citizenship.7

This conception of neutral citizenship borrows from Louis Althusser’s concept of state power in which there is no distinction between private and public institutions. And these institutions, such as the patriarchal family structure, serve to reiterate the values of the ruling classes to make them appear neutral and proliferate dominance.8 The aberrant subject or group is thus seen as anti-statist by antagonizing insidious modes of capitalism, such as the state’s self-reproduction through the normative, patriarchal family structure. In Earthseed, affective kinship relations displace biologically based relations to redefine family. As an aberrant networked family, Earthseed constitutes a “new story” of community and intimacy. The political impetus of Earthseed’s networked family is survival and futurity through expansive citizenship for its members, many of whom are aberrant. Earthseed is a multiracial, interclass, and inter-generational group of people primarily on the margins, including orphans, ex-sex and debt slaves, former prostitutes, and people affected by psychological disorders. Many engaged, or are engaged by choice or not, in marginalized behavior, including interracial and intergenerational relationships, multiracial reproduction, psychic orgies, polygamy, incest, and gender queering.9 The majority of Earthseed’s members are black and/or multiracial at a time (both in the world of the novel and of the text’s production) when blackness was still largely marked as pathological and multiracialism was taboo.10 Earthseed’s aberrant networked family is the novel’s metaphor for political activism and coalition building that practices disidentification. “To disidentify” Roderick Ferguson argues, “‘means to [recycle] and [rethink] encoded meaning’ and ‘to use the codes [of the majority] as raw material for representing the disempowered politics of positionality that 7

Ibrahim. 2012. Troubling the Family, 45. Refer to Louis Althusser. 1972. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press). 9 However Earthseed is frustratingly heterosexual, suggesting the scope of Butler’s investment in a multiplicity of forms of aberrance in 1993. Refer to Judith Butler’s 2002 essay “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” in Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge) for an interesting analysis of the political potential, or lack thereof, of sexuality. 10 Refer to Habiba Ibrahim’s 2012 study Troubling the Family for an extensive genealogy of multiracialism from the 1960s onward and its complicated relationship to blackness. 8

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has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture.’”11 Earthseed uses “the code of the majority”—family—to engender a vision of futurity imagined through affective, rather than nuclear-family reproduction. The group is conceived, organized, and led by a woman, and it practices collaborative intimacies and community building, and cross-cultural, multiracial/ethnic child rearing and division of labor. Thus Earthseed is the novel’s vision of “salvific” futurity; salvific meaning, as Candice Jenkins argues, a vision of social and political sacrifice with the hope of salvation.12 In order to produce expansive citizenship for its aberrant members, Earthseed requires a sacrifice of normative family structures that reproduce a capitalist system excluding such diverse subjects from full affective citizenship. The aberrance that brings Earthseed’s members together is therefore not only in reference to their subjective and behavioral marginality, but is also in reference to the group’s anti-statist politics. The group and its members disidentify by not complying with normative, patriarchal notions of identities and family structures meant to reflect, in miniature, confirmation of the “liberal nation-state and capital as sites of resolution, perfection, progress, and confirmation.”13 In other words, Earthseed is comprised of diverse, marginalized people, who, while produced by capital’s demand for labor,14 are antagonistic to the state by comprising a networked family that disrupts insidious modes of capitalist reproduction. Earthseed provides literal and psychic survival for its members. As Lauren survives on the outside, she is immersed in “interclass contact” that allows her to repeatedly choose new participants for Earthseed that she deems particularly vulnerable in their aberrance. “Interclass contact” is a term Samuel R. Delany theorizes in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue—his 1999 sociological study of pre-gentrified Times Square. Delany takes the term “contact” from Jane Jacobs’s 1961 study The Death and Life of Great American Cities and he extends her analysis to account for the benefits of cross-cultural exchange. He understands interclass contact to be a “random” and “fundamentally urban phenomenon” by comparison to networking which may be, he suggests more “planned.”15 He writes “…in a democratic society that values social movement, social opportunity, and 11

Ferguson. 2004. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique, 4. Candice Jenkins. 2007. Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). 13 Ferguson. 2004. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique, 3. 14 Ferguson. 2004. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique, 14. 15 Samuel R. Delany. 1999. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.( New York: University Press), 142. 12

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class flexibility, interclass contact is the most rewarding, productive, and thus privileged kind of contact.”16 Through interclass contact, Lauren is able to transform Earthseed from a principle into a people. As they travel northward and form a networked family, Earthseed’s members take advantage of the social opportunities provided by interclass contact. They refine the social contract,17 meaning they choose the political authority under which they live and collectively form a new community structured by mutually agreed upon rules. Earthseed’s members share knowledge that as vulnerable, aberrant subjects they must be “interdependent and…understand their contractual obligations are multidirectional”18 rather than contained in a nuclear family unit in the service of the state. The networked family of diverse, aberrant subjects used as a metaphor to disidentify cannot be overstated. The novel was written at a time when diversity seemed to hold a utopic promise that reimagining expansive citizenship in the “private” realm of the family could enact public, ideological paradigm shifts of race and gender construction; and yet, in the wake of the “age of multiculturalism,” Butler has been critiqued for “the heavy redemptive weight [her novels] place on family.”19 Indeed, it is a mistake to believe that aberrant subjects somehow inherently possess liberatory potential to trouble ideological structures such as the normative family. It is erroneous to suggest that oppression is synonymous with resistance, and/or collectivity, despite what some contemporaneous black feminist essays, such as bell hooks’ 1989 “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” and much cultural studies ideology, suggests. While Parable of the Sower flirts with the liberatory promise of aberrance and the networked family, the novel is not, ultimately, utopic in its vision of resistance. In many post-apocalyptic narratives divisions of race, class, and gender are ignored in light of the end event. However, Parable of the Sower explores how those divisions remain and are in fact exacerbated. The novel reveals the difficulty of diversity’s incorporation, which ultimately challenges its liberatory vision of the networked family structured in aberrance. 16

Delany. 1999. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, 173. Refer to Claire P. Curtis’s chapter “Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Rethinking the Social Contract” in her 2010 study Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract (Lanham: Lexington Books) for an in-depth discussion of the four ways in which Curtis understands the novel to be reimagining the social contract. 18 Claire P. Curtis. 2010. Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract: “We'll Not Go Home Again.” (Lanham: Lexington Books), 140. 19 Madhu Dubey. 2003. Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 68. 17

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The novel begins in 2024 when Lauren is 15. She is the oldest child of a black, Baptist minister father and is being raised alongside three stepbrothers by her Latina stepmother. Lauren’s father is the patriarchal leader of the Robledo community and its members see Lauren as occupying a position of relative privilege as the educated, preacher’s daughter. Parable of the Sower is narrated through Lauren’s journal entries, and the philosophies of Earthseed are aphoristically articulated often at the beginning of each entry and occasionally expanded upon in the chapters. Earthseed is Lauren’s vision of agency and survival amidst mounting hopelessness and chaos. The novel does not state specifically what the apocalyptic event was, but it has produced political, economic, and environmental upheaval. While the narrative only reveals the state of California, Lauren remarks on hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, droughts in the Midwest and rising water levels along the Eastern seaboard, cholera in the Southeast, and measles epidemics in the Northeast. Lauren’s neighborhood Robledo has tried to cope with national disasters and with the local economic and social decline by walling themselves off from the outside. Yet Lauren knows that her family’s and community’s practice of “waiting for the good old days to come back” is a “dying, denying, backward looking” philosophy. 20 And it is a dangerous one that leads them to either sit in denial and wait for inevitable destruction, or choose detrimental alternatives such as willingly moving to the company town Olivar where “something old and nasty [debt slavery] is reviving.”21 Ultimately, the community’s passivity disallows it from taking action to determine its own futurity. Security in Lauren’s life is lacking. She knows her family cannot take care of her forever. She knows the walls of her neighborhood can, and will be breached. Explaining the necessity of Earthseed to her best friend Jo who feels despondent and in deep denial at the state of their world, Lauren vehemently states, “We can get ready. That’s what we’ve got to do now. Get ready for what’s going to happen, get ready to survive it, get ready to make a life afterward. Get ready to survive…the day a big gang of those hungry, desperate, crazy people decide to come in.”22 She knows she wants to leave Robledo even before the community is destroyed and as a proactive subject and natural leader she has prepared a survival pack in preparation. Lauren knows she cannot rely on state-sanctioned power structures such as her family, politicians, or cops to “save” her from what she understands to be the inevitable—the “personal apocalypse” of the 20

Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 22. Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 143. 22 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 48. 21

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destruction of her community and the shattering of its illusion of security. When the inevitable does come she remarks on the ineptitude and callousness of state-sanctioned power structures (which, although weakened, remain) and thinks, “What had cops done for my community when it was burning? Nothing.”23 Lauren’s attitude both recognizes and counters the partially disconsolate socio-political tenor of the novel’s production.24 Parable of the Sower was published a year after the 1992 Los Angeles Riots that erupted in the wake of the infamously videotaped Rodney King beating and a shocking verdict that found the offending officers “not guilty.” This cataclysmic event lasted for six days—killing 54 people, injuring thousands, and causing nearly $1 billion in property damage.25 The Riots and their aftermath contributed greatly to how critic Min Hyoung Song conceives of the era. He states “At the start of the 1990s, or thereabout, the future became a place of national decline” that ushered in an era of profound cultural pessimism.26 Considering that Robledo is a black community (with the exception of two white families), Lauren’s disgust with the indifference of the cops in response to her “personal apocalypse” is a deeply felt, pessimistic anti-statist critique. Thus for Lauren, manifesting Earthseed is the way to survive and rebuild in a manner antithetical to the state. She knows the only way to endure is to recognize the contours of one’s circumstances and, rather than live in fear and denial or succumb to insidious forms of capitalism such as that which Olivar represents, one must take action through forethought, planning, work, adaptability, and care—the tenants of Earthseed.27 Manifesting Earthseed is Lauren’s “purposeful and constructive” action in a world that’s “falling apart.” Its radical vision gives her “something to believe in” (247). Earthseed strives to deal with epistemological failings, inequities, and turbulent social warfare, and it takes shape as a networked family to critique normative family structures that failed to provide security, stem the chaos, and 23

Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 212. Octavia Butler stated that with Parable of the Sower she “made an effort to talk about what could actually happen or is in the process of happening.” Refer to Potts, Stephen W. 1996. “‘We Keep Playing the Same Record’: A Conversation with Octavia E. Butler.” Science Fiction Studies. 23 (3:70), 331-38. 25 Min Song. 2005. Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. (Durham: Duke University Press), 5. 26 Here, Song presumably borrows from Virginia Woolf’s famous assessment that “on or about December 1910 human character changed.” Song. 2005. Strange Future, 1. 27 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 234. 24

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imagine futurity. This is one of the novel’s predominant critiques. That Lauren kills her mother in childbirth, revokes her father, and hears of her stepmother’s murder can be understood as necessities to render Lauren an orphan and agent of her own world-making. The novel represents Lauren as an aberrant subject who uses her difference to mobilize her agency. It also represents her as debilitated. Lauren’s biological mother smoked the fictional drug “Paracetco” while pregnant. As a result Lauren is an “empath,” meaning she viscerally experiences others’ pain and pleasure. While fully aware that this is a psychological response, Lauren feels the effects physiologically to the extent that they often temporarily debilitate her. Simply put, Lauren’s mother’s drug abuse while pregnant marks Lauren as a pathologized, black teenage girl. This subjectivity is a heavily loaded symbol for 1993 as this era of national pessimism, urban devastation, and the promise/problem of diversity also saw the height of the so-called “Crack Baby” epidemic. The epidemic was fueled by fears, provoked by the media, that those exposed to crack in utero would be severely physically, psychologically, and emotionally damaged and would cause strain on society as they matured.28 Lauren’s father teaches her to hide this aspect of herself as it is considered a stigma. Lauren thinks, “To my father the whole business is shameful. He’s a preacher and a professor and a dean. A first wife who was a drug addict and a daughter who is drug damaged is not something he wants to boast about.”29 And while Butler aligns Lauren, a prophet and leader, with “Crack Babies” to critique their widespread pathologizing, the novel engages in such pathologizing. For example, Zahra, an African American formerly homeless woman and one of Earthseed’s earliest members, recalls to Lauren: My mama took drugs, too…Shit, where I was born, everybody’s mama took drugs—and whored to pay for them. And had babies all the time, and threw them away like trash when they died. Most of the babies did die from the drugs or accidents or not having enough to eat or being left alone so much . . . or from being sick. They were always getting sick. Some were born sick. They had sores all over or big things on their eyes—tumors, you know—or no legs or fits or can’t breathe right. . . . All kinds of things. Some who lived were dumb as dirt. Can’t think, can’t learn, just sit around

28

Lyons and Rittner. 1998. “The Construction of the Crack Babies Phenomenon as a Social Problem,” 313-320. 29 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 10.

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Chapter Three nine, ten years old, peeing in their pants, rocking back and forth, and dripping spit down their chins. There’s a lot of them.”30

Zahra’s first-hand recollection as a homeless child and daughter of a drug-abusing black woman who sold her into polygamy reveals the manner in which the “Crack Baby” epidemic came to be conflated with urban, working-class women of color—particularly black women.31 Lauren is represented as the exception to the stereotype of the “Crack Baby” as she is both a “disabled” empath and a prodigy. After all, it is this “disabled” aspect of her character that makes Lauren an effective prophet, leader, and coalition builder. She wants those around her to physically, emotionally, and spiritually thrive not simply so she does not have to feel pain, but because she wants to engender a healthy coalition. Lauren’s vision has deep ties to the legacies of black feminist coalition building such as 1977’s groundbreaking “Combahee River Collective” statement. The statement stresses the need for a black feminist coalition due to the “interlocking,” or intersectional oppressions black women face as a result of their racist, sexist, and often classist marginalization as both black people and women.32 Because Lauren is a black woman, and because she can literally feel the pain of people—including the material realities of the oppressed street poor—she has, in effect, a deep understanding of intersectionality. She feels how one can be oppressed and harmed, physically and psychologically by race, class, and gender complicated by circumstance, environment, and poverty. Realizing how alone they are in a nation-state that fails to care for them, Earthseed member Travis at one point cynically says to Lauren, “Your [Earthseed] God doesn’t care about you at all,” to which Lauren responds “All the more reason to care about myself and others. All the more reason to create Earthseed communities and shape God together.”33 For Lauren, shaping God is much like black feminists organizing to counter their lack of political voice and to rearticulate and actualize their abilities to lead and develop and organize, as well as put into practice theory, engender policy, and effect personal, social, and cultural change.

30

Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 172. Lyons and Rittner. 1998. “The Construction of the Crack Babies Phenomenon as a Social Problem,” 313-320. 32 Barbara Smith, et.al. 1977. “Combahee River Collective Statement.” 2000. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press). 33 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 221. 31

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Just as “interlocking oppression” was a revolutionary black feminist concept that helped women to understand and challenge the conditions of their lives and support one another in the process, Lauren knows she needs to construct a new story of affective relations and give it a name. She states, “Sometimes naming a thing—giving it a name or discovering its name—helps one to begin to understand it.”34 She names her vision “Earthseed” as that which takes root “far from its parent plant.”35 To manifest Earthseed, Lauren follows a traditional feminist consciousness raising process of extricating herself from patriarchal oppression and writing herself into agency. Although while living in Robledo Lauren has important, viable ideas for survival, she lacks power as a young female. Her father reiterates this, telling her “You don’t make decisions for this community.”36 Feeling oppressed within her family and society Lauren writes Earthseed: The Books of the Living “to keep from going crazy”37— an experience validated by the black feminist collective of the “Combahee” statement who write “Black feminists often talk about their feelings of craziness before becoming conscious of the concepts of sexual politics [and] patriarchal rule.”38 Haunted by a reoccurring dream wherein Lauren “twists on [her] own personal hook…when [she] tries to be [her] father’s daughter,” she eventually rejects his Baptist religion and epistemology/ worldview because it is “all a lie.”39 Lauren intends “to speak—to write— the truth,”40 a nod toward black feminist practices of articulating “the personal is political.”41 Through writing, Lauren documents epistemological shifts in her own consciousness. She rejects normative concepts of femininity, both in terms of eschewing a desire to reproduce and, at times, to marry. Thinking about her life choices—between staying in Robledo and marrying her boyfriend Curtis, or manifesting Earthseed in the outside world—she thinks, “I like Curtis Talcott a lot. Maybe I love him. Sometimes I think I do...But if all I had to look forward to was marriage to 34

Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 68. Ibid. 36 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 57. 37 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 46. 38 Smith, Barbara, et.al. 1977. “Combahee River Collective Statement.” 2000. Home Girls. 39 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 1. 40 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 111. 41 “The personal is political” was a slogan of second-wave feminism, first articulated by activist Carol Hanisch in 1968. It suggests discourses and relations of power that play out in public social spaces always already condition subjects’ private lives. The phrase is reiterated in feminist texts, including in 1977’s “Combahee River Collective” statement. 35

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him and babies and poverty that keeps getting worse, I think I’d kill myself.”42 Furthermore, she planned to leave Robledo without Curtis and without even telling him, and ultimately does in the wake of the destruction. Lauren comes to understand that abiding by patriarchal, Christian rule and traditional expectations for the women in her Robledo community will not allow her to thrive or survive. In fact, these ideologies are, in many ways, hostile to her becoming a self-actualized woman and coalition leader imagining new stories of kinship. Choosing to find herself first in coalition building, rather than in heteronormative coupledom, is in line with black feminist thought. Patricia Hill Collins explains that for black feminists, “Self is found in the…ability to recognize one’s continuity with the larger community.”43 As she lives into Earthseed, Lauren experiences a “personal genesis,”44 allowing her to extricate herself from both the law of the biological father and the Holy Father. In doing so, she rejects one worldview and constructs another that manifests as a networked family. This is particularly profound considering “the communal nature through which family has been practiced—and officially undermined—within black communities.”45 However forming a diverse networked family is not always smooth. The complications represented seem to be responsive to, again, the political tenor of the novel’s production that had a complex relationship to diversity. For example, one of the major effects the Los Angeles Riots had was raising the “problem” of diversity to the forefront of national cultural consciousness. As critic Val Smith argues, the media coverage of the Rodney King trial “intensified the general awareness of race, class, ethnicity, and the distribution of power in late twentieth-century America, illuminating differences within communities that meting pot rhetoric and convenient group labels often obscured.”46 Perhaps more so than a liberatory tale of the value of aberrance, Parable of the Sower can be understood to be exploring the “problem” of diversity as a surplus product of capitalism that can be co-opted into institutionality and/or is non42

Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 77. Patricia Hill Collins. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. (New York: Routledge), 105. 44 Smith, et.al. 1977. “Combahee River Collective Statement.” 45 Refer to Habiba Ibrahim’s chapter “Legitimizing the Deviant Family” for a discussion of the Moynihan Report and Loving v. Virginia in 2012’s Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 46 Valerie Smith. 1998. Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings (New York: Routledge), 135. 43

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incorporable.47 Indeed, the novel represents a wary relationship to diversity. Thinking about the racial composition of Robledo Lauren remarks, “The Garfields and the Balters are white, and the rest of us are black. That can be dangerous these days. On the street, people are expected to fear and hate everyone but their own kind, but with all of us armed and watchful, people stared, but they left us alone. Our neighborhood is too small for us to play those kinds of games.”48 Yet outside of Robledo “People are setting fires to get rid of whomever they dislike from personal enemies to anyone that looks or sounds foreign or racially different. People are setting fires because they’re frustrated, angry, hopeless. They have no power to improve their lives, but they have the power to make others even more miserable. And the only way to prove to yourself that you have power is to use it.”49 While Robledo and Lauren’s own immediate family are relatively ethnically and racially diverse, such diversity seemed to be merely tolerated, and precariously so at that. In Robledo, multiracial sex and/or reproduction was still taboo to the point where, when a white/black couple was caught having sex Lauren thought “someone was going to get killed” by the subjects’ respective family members.50 Earthseed as a coalition both depends on the incorporation of diversity and strains to incorporate it in light of the tensions raised by its intimate presence and power struggles. In her Earthseed journal Lauren writes: Embrace diversity. Unite— Or be divided, robbed, ruled, killed By those who see you as prey. Embrace diversity Or be destroyed.51

47

In addition to Roderick Ferguson’s Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique, refer also to his 2008 essay “Administering Sexuality; or, The Will to Institutionality” in Radical History Review. 2008 (100) as well as Michaels, Walter Benn. 2006. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. New York: Metropolitan Books. 48 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 147. 49 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 128. Emphasis mine. 50 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 77. 51 Earthseed: 1993. The Books of the Living, 176.

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Thus, for Earthseed, incorporating diversity is a means for survival. And yet internalized bigotry, assumptions, and stereotypes have to be worked through. For example, tensions arise among Earthseed’s members when Lauren continually poses as a man to survive in the outside world. Notably this decision is motivated by Lauren’s considerations of intersectional racial and gendered oppression. Not only is she at greater risk as a woman, but also her traveling companions Harry and Zahra pose a risk to the survival of the group because they are a mixed race couple and, again, “mixed race couples catch hell.”52 By Lauren pretending to be a man, she and Zahra are able to pose as a black couple. And with two “men” in the group, it is perceived as stronger. And yet this gender queering is used against Lauren at times as it exacerbates her aberrance as a female leader and prophet. For example, Grayson Mora, an ex-slave haltingly and problematically incorporated into Earthseed, mutters “Shiiit. First time I saw her [Lauren] I knew she was a man. Just didn’t know she was the only man here.”53 He means to disparage not only Lauren by “dyke baiting” her, but the men in Earthseed as well for the way he sees them permitting Lauren to “trade on the habitual respect and authority given to men.”54 Yet, despite the manner in which Lauren’s aberrance is exaggerated, she herself also struggles with the diverse backgrounds and subjectivities of her networked family members. Zahra poses challenges to Lauren’s embrace of diversity regardless of the fact that they are both African American women. As Zahra talks about her underclass past Lauren thinks to herself, “Her alien past. It distracted me.”55 To describe Zahra’s experiences as “alien” connotes a circumstance so foreign to Lauren’s class privilege, that, despite her hyper-empathy, she struggles at times to connect, understand, or relate to Zahra. And despite her knowledge of intersectional oppression, when Lauren considers the racial and gendered complications she will experience on the road, her understanding is largely intellectual rather than experiential. Zahra is aware of Lauren’s comparably privileged life, at one point telling her, with a raised eyebrow, “I don’t need you to tell me how to live out here. I was born out here” when Lauren judges her for stealing peaches for the group to eat.56 This tension, however temporary, voices the ways in which class differences and intra52

Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 153. Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 279. 54 Claire P. Curtis. 2010. Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract: “We'll Not Go Home Again” (Lanham: Lexington Books), 151. 55 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 165. 56 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 152. 53

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gendered/intra-racial judgments can complicate coalition building. Parable of the Sower also speaks here to frustrations raised by feminist critics such as Michele Wallace and Wini Brienes57 who bemoan feminist movements as seemingly unable to account for, and absorb different ideologies and subjectivities in a manner allowing for a productive, inclusive, “multicultural” women’s movement. Aberrance may bring people together with anti-statist imperatives, but some forms of difference may prove problematic, if not impossible to incorporate into a cohesive, coalitional practice. Sometimes diversity is problematically cathected to collectivity. For instance Lauren makes assumptions, often based on identity politics, about other subjects she deems vulnerable due to their aberrance. After Zahra, Harry, and Lauren have been traveling together for some time, they observe a mixed race family comprised of Natividad, who’s Hispanic, Travis, who’s black, and their multiracial child Dominic. Lauren is drawn to them because they, like her small group, are mixed. In defending her interest in them to Zahra and Harry she states “They have no natural allies around here except us. Mixed couples or groups are rare out here. No doubt that’s why they’ve kept close to us.”58 Lauren uses the word “natural” to justify her assumption that mixed race couples/people should, or will gravitate together on the basis of assumed collectivity. Yet, Travis scoffs at this assumption when Lauren asks him and his wife and child to join her group: “Join you?” the man said. “You’re asking us to join you?” “Inviting you.” “Why?” “Why not? We’re natural allies—the mixed couple and the mixed group.” “Allies?” The man said, and he laughed. I looked at him, wondering why he laughed. “What the hell do you really want?” he demanded.

Travis is suspicious of Lauren’s desire to incorporate his family into her group on the basis of diversity. However, she remains determined, later 57

Refer to Breines, Wini. 2002. “What's Love Got to Do with It? White Women, Black Women, and Feminism in the Movement Years,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society (27), 4. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press) and Wallace, Michelle. 1975. “Anger in Isolation: A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood.” 1992. Black Women’s Blues: A Literary Anthology: 1934-1988. (New York: G.K. Hall & Co.). 58 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 186. Emphasis mine.

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reiterating the term “natural allies” to Travis, stating “You are our natural allies . . . you sneered at that last time I said it, but it’s true.” In response, “Travis grunted, still noncommittal.”59 The novel seems to be simultaneously advancing and critiquing identity politics here. It reveals both the impetus toward collectivity in the imagining of community and the limits of collectivist ideology, particularly when based on arbitrary characteristics such as race or gender and the manner in which subjects understand and relate to such characteristics that they may, or may not perceive to be shared. For example, the scenes between Lauren and Travis can be read as expressing what Habiba Ibrahim deems “the trouble between conventional black community and emergent multiracialism,”60 particularly considering that Travis and Natividad have a multiracial child while no one in Lauren’s group is mixed race. Madhu Dubey rightly points out that “Earthseed is not an organic community unified by collective memory, ethnicity, shared cultural heritage, or attachment to place”61 and its affective development requires sustained efforts of translation. She notes that a distinguishing feature of African American postmodern fiction such as Parable of the Sower is “its quest for a politics of difference that eschews essentialist notions of community.” 62 Travis’s reaction can thus be read as posing questions such as “How might a new kinship between blackness and mixedness lead us away from the conflating binds of community and toward a partnership in cultural production, social justice, or a mutual future?”63 While the novel does iterate collectivist leanings (Earthseed can, of course, be read as ideology), it constantly reveals the limits of that ideology through the challenges of translation. Dubey writes, “the process of finding unity in diversity is necessarily risky and difficult, requiring the ability to interpret unfamiliar cultural codes and the alert balancing of suspicion and trust typical of urban social interactions.”64 In Parable of the Sower this suspicion and trust is in response to the group’s hierarchy of valued subjects. A coalition developed as a counter-narrative to inequity 59

Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 191. Habiba Ibrahim. 2012. Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), viii. 61 Madhu Dubey, 2003. Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 70. 62 Habiba Ibrahim. 2012. Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 31. 63 Ibrahim. 2012. Troubling the Family, viii. 64 Madhu Dubey. 2003. Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 70. 60

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can, and often does, find it difficult if not impossible to not reify the same social hierarchies the coalition formed to combat. Whereas Lauren is “naturally” drawn to Natividad, Travis, and Dominic due to their multiracialism as well as their class status. She notes “they have better gear [than us].”65 She is exceptionally suspicious of others—generally those who are very poor, which is unsurprising, given her “personal apocalypse.” She is motivated by stereotypes and those stereotypes make it difficult for her to, at times, translate other peoples’ diversity and incorporate those subjects into the networked family. The pathologizing of the ex-slaves Emery and Grayson is particularly indicative of the tensions inherent to absorbing certain forms of difference, including in coalitions structured in aberrance. Emery and Grayson are multiracial, escaped debt slaves owned by an agribusiness corporation. This corporation used powerful systemic oppression involving violent spacial intimidation tactics and control mechanisms, forced impoverishment, familial dismemberment, disciplinary physical abuse, and incarceration to manage its slaves. This scenario is, of course, reminiscent of American chattel slavery and functions as one of the novel’s many critiques of capitalism. Like Lauren, Emery and Grayson are empaths. Because they were slaves on a plantation, their hyperempathy suggests they experienced extensive trauma, both their own and that of countless others. Emery confirms this, stating “Bosses…like you to have it [hyper-empathy]…sometimes they pay more for people who have it.”66 Emery and Grayson and their respective children, Tori and Doe, become an additional family unit in and of themselves, likely due to their experience as ex-slaves. The literal and emotional distance they keep from the other members of Earthseed further marginalizes them. Lauren describes them as “all over each other, but at arm’s length from everyone else. Strange people.”67 Emery—“the most racially mixed” person Lauren has ever met—is a half black, half Japanese woman.68 She and her black, Asian, and Mexican daughter Tori are initially configured as “intruders” and are immediately assumed to be problematic to the coalitional practice of affective kinship that Earthseed constructed prior to their arrival.69 (280). Upon being discovered by the members of Earthseed and assuming dangerous repercussions, Emery and Tori roll their bodies into tight, fetal balls on the 65

Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 186. Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 273. 67 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 265. 68 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 258. 69 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 280. 66

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ground to protect themselves.70 This is a result of what can only be inferred as a condition of the physical abuse and victimization they experienced as slaves.71 Unfortunately, this behavior renders them pathological by the other members of the group. Simply put, because Emery and Tori don’t trust Earthseed, how can Earthseed trust them? Due to this mutual mistrust they hoard and hide food for a time, presumably afraid that it will be taken from them. Although they tell the Earthseed members “‘We won’t steal. We aren’t thieves’” Lauren thinks to herself, “Of course they were thieves. How else could they live. Some stealing and scavenging, maybe some whoring…They weren’t very good at it or they’d look better.”72 They are considered to be “odd,” “stupid”73 “beggars”74 who are “so desperate they [are] dangerous.”75 And they are assumed to be “pains in the ass”76 who “will steal”77 and, ultimately, to be people the members of Earthseed “might have to kill”78 if their problematically aberrant subjectivities endanger the networked family. Later, Natividad, discussing Emery, tells Lauren “ ‘She’ll steal…she says she won’t, but she will. You can look at her and tell.”79 And Earthseed members Jill and Allie agree, stating, “Like Natividad says, she’ll steal. She won’t be able to help herself. We’ll have to watch her real good. That little kid will steal too. Steal and run like hell.”80 Zahra agrees, stating “Reminds me of me at that age. They’ll both be pains in the ass” and yet she says, “I vote we try them. If they have manners or if they can learn manners, we keep them. If they’re too stupid to learn, we throw them out.”81 These assumptions depict slaves, and, to an extent, all problematically aberrant subjects, as savages who lack integrity and “can’t help” their pathological behavior until they are “civilized” (presumably by the community). Pointedly, it bears stating that neither Emery nor Tori ever steals from the group. However, Earthseed’s treatment of them testifies clearly to the ways in

70

Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 281. Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 285. 72 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 284. 73 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 282. 74 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 285. 75 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 282. 76 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 285. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid. 79 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 286. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 71

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which certain aberrant subjects represent the challenges inherent to incorporating difference in coalition building. The other adult ex-slave, Grayson, a black Latino, is even more skittish and cold. He does not like Earthseed and makes it evident, such as when he camps away from them and does not share their food. He is referred to as a man with “something wrong;”82 something, again, seemingly difficult to identify and articulate in its problematic difference. Grayson wants to abandon Earthseed, and tries on several occasions. It is his daughter Doe, and her needs for social interaction and the affective caregiving provided her by the networked family, that keeps Grayson connected to the group. In fact, it is the affective kinship given to the ex-slave children that Lauren considers to be the key to winning the ex-slave adults’ trust and loyalty.83 In Parable of the Sower children are not fetishized as they are in normative configurations of reproductive capital; rather, children represent one aspect of the equanimity of labor practices upheld by Earthseed. The fourth dimension of citizenship this represents is what allows for personal and communal agency and futurity. The novel suggests it is those that have had their agency inhibited who will commit themselves most fully to a functioning coalitional practice of expansive citizenship. As Lauren says, “If we can convince ex-slaves that they can have freedom with us, no one will fight harder to keep it.”84 Indeed, upon finding currency on a corpse, Emery “squandered too much money on pears and walnuts for everyone. She delighted in passing these around, in being able to give us something for a change. She’s all right. We’ll have to teach her about shopping and the value of money, but she’s worth something, Emery is. And she’s decided she’s one of us.”85 And yet the treatment of Emery and Grayson testifies to the need for individuals committed to coalition building to work through the challenges of incorporating difference if the aim of such political activism is to antagonize insidious forms of state-sanctioned capitalism that produce and regulate diversity. Such coalitions cannot reiterate the intersectional oppressions of systemic inequity and hierarchies of valued subjectivities that are the problems in the first place. And yet, as the novel shows, this remains the great obstacle. In the end of the novel the remaining members of Earthseed form an unstable commune in Humboldt County called Acorn. They choose to invest in the land, in industry, and in each other, despite trepidation and concern for the sustainability of staying in any one place for an extended 82

Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 291. Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 292. 84 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 292-293. 85 Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 291. 83

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period of time. After all, the false security of such a concept is what the novel has been critiquing all along. And yet despite the questioning of this utopic fantasy, the novel is steadfast in articulating the desire that subjects have to construct a space of one’s own. Earthseed’s members feel driven to “build” something, having “never had a chance to build anything before.”86 They live into the power that affective kinship provides them to reimagine family and futurity, hoping to “shape” Earthseed and “God” together. They do not intend so much to fight the world, but to recreate it in their image, as multifaceted as that image is. The novel is, therefore, representing “an affirmation of the sheer will to change, even when this will can find no secure or satisfactory object.”87 The promise of Earthseed is its potential, not its guarantee, to mobilize aberrance in the service of imagining expansive citizenship. And expansive citizenship is what radical social movements have been envisioning for centuries, regardless of the challenges. In 1975 Michele Wallace wrote “Despite a sizeable number of Black feminists who have contributed much to the leadership of the women’s movement, there is still no black women’s movement, and it appears there won’t be for some time to come. It is conceivable that the level of consciousness feminism would demand in Black women wouldn’t lead to any sort of separatist movement, anyway—despite our very separate problems. Perhaps a multicultural women’s movement is somewhere in the future.”88 Perhaps Parable of the Sower provides a new story of the fourth dimension of citizenship and coalition building engendered in aberrance in an attempt to answer that call.

Works Cited Althusser, Louis. 1972. Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press Breines, Wini. 2002. “What's Love Got to Do with It? White Women, Black Women, and Feminism in the Movement Years.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture & Society (Summer 2002) 27:4, 1095-1133. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

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Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower, 289. Madhu Dubey. 2003. Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 72. 88 Wallace, Michele. 1975. “Anger in Isolation: A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood.” 1992. Black Women’s Blues: A Literary Anthology: 1934-1988 (New York: G.K. Hall & Co). 87

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Butler, Judith. 2004. “Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?” Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. Butler, Octavia E. 1993. Parable of the Sower. New York: Warner Books. Collins, Patricia Hill. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Curtis, Claire P. 2010. Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract: “We'll Not Go Home Again.” Lanham: Lexington Books. Delany, Samuel R. 1999. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. New York: New York University Press. Dubey, Madhu. 2003. Signs and cities: Black Literary Postmodernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ferguson, Roderick A. 2004. Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —. 2008. “Administering Sexuality; or, The Will to Institutionality” in Radical History Review, 100. Hooks, Bell. 1990. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics. Boston, MA: South End Press. Ibrahim, Habiba. 2012. Troubling the Family: The Promise of Personhood and the Rise of Multiracialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House. Jenkins, Candice. 2007. Private Lives, Proper Relations: Regulating Black Intimacy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lyons, Peter, and Barbara Rittner. 1998. “The Construction of the Crack Babies Phenomenon as a Social Problem.”American Journal of Orthopsychiatry (April) 68:2, 313-320. Michaels, Walter Benn. 2006. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. New York: Metropolitan Books. Murray, Melissa. 2008. “The Networked Family: Reframing the Legal Understanding of Caregiving and Caregivers.” Virginia Law Review. (April) 94:2, 385-455. Potts, Stephen W. 1996. “‘We Keep Playing the Same Record’: A Conversation with Octavia E. Butler.” Science Fiction Studies. (November) 23:3:70, 331-38. Smith, Barbara, et. al. 1977. “Combahee River Collective Statement.” 2000. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.

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Smith, Valerie. 1998. Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings. New York: Routledge. Song, Min. 2005. Strange Future: Pessimism and the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. Durham: Duke University Press. Wallace, Michele. 1975. “Anger in Isolation: A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood.” 1992. Black Women’s Blues: A Literary Anthology: 1934-1988. New York: G.K. Hall & Co.

CHAPTER FOUR AFTER THE PLAGUE: RACE AND SURVIVAL IN JACK LONDON’S THE SCARLET PLAGUE GINA M. ROSSETTI

In our twenty-first century landscape, biological threats emerge, plunging the global community into both panic and desperation. Part of this desperation and panic reveals itself in age-old practices, where the disease comes to be associated with particular racial/ethnic groups, attributing death and illness to this particular group of individuals. For instance, much discussion about the spread of Enterovirus 68 places the blame on this illness to the influx of undocumented children from Mexico and Central America. If they had not entered the country, the “logic” insists, then “American” children would not be infected. At the same time that this virus strikes, the global community also grapples with the re-emergence of Ebola, and with the entrance of individuals into the country from “hot zones,” discussion has centered on closing the boarders, suggesting that this act will seal off contagion from our shores. What is particularly frightening about such narratives is the sense that people who are undeserving of contracting these illnesses perish, suggesting that what lies at the root of some of these fears are entrenched notions of race and survival. One such narrative that plays on these fears and preoccupations is Jack London’s 1912 novel The Scarlet Plague. Set in a post-apocalyptic, twenty-first century America, the novel chronicles life sixty years after the arrival of Red Death, which has not only leveled the world’s population, but in doing so, has also erased civilization, leaving the survivors to return to a primitive barbarism that marked earlier centuries. For the main character Granser, who was once an English professor at Berkeley, the plague’s greatest devastation is that it has turned the world “topsy-turvey,” leaving the barbarous classes on top and plunging civilization into a permanent “outer darkness.” Granser believes that his nostalgic backward glance will compel his grandsons to rebuild

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the new civilization—according to the old stratifications—as an antidote to future outbreaks. However, their inability to carry forward this vision, along with the problematic nature of the solution, renders this return of the Saxon a failure.

Fear of the Other London’s fiction—as it concerns immigrants and other foreign-born persons—offers depictions that are fraught with contradictions and stereotypes, often in the same bodies of work. In Valley of the Moon, for instance, Saxon and Billy escape from Oakland because it is overrun with immigrants, and in a harkening back to the prairie past, Saxon argues that they must find themselves in Sonoma Valley in ways reminiscent of the old settlers. And in a short story published just two years before The Scarlet Plague, London’s “The Unparalleled Invasion” chronicles Western fears about Chinese overpopulation. Set in the 1970s and 1980s, the short story showcases the fear about race suicide, where the sudden birth rate of the Chinese threatens the white race’s ability to sustain population growth and dominance. As a solution, the Western nations band together, fly military planes to China, and drop on the nation test tubes filled with biological pathogens, annihilating the population. What is most curious in this depiction is that science and knowledge become the newest weapon, suggesting—rather ironically—that while the white race might feel overcome by fears about the Chinese—it is the Anglo’s knowledge of science that will return them to their supremacy. Equally curious is that after the devastation and the detoxification of the land, China now becomes a “second” United States, insofar as it now becomes a nation comprised of many (white) ethnicities. The role for science emerges as a possible “final solution” to those who come to be defined as the “Other.” In many ways, this approach would fit squarely in London’s use of Darwinian and Spencerian principles, suggesting that survival and adaptability are the markers of an advanced race. In his article “Jack London’s Socialistic Social Darwinism,” Jonathan Berliner outlines London’s reliance on science, and in particular, the scientist, as the barometer for success in London’s fiction. In other words, he uses Darwinian and Spencerian principles of species survival, but deploys them in a socialist context, suggesting that the fit man is the vanguard of the revolution. In many examples of London’s fiction, Berliner’s approach resonates; at the same time, though, his theory does not necessarily address the elements that compromise

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London’s socialism, and in many ways, The Scarlet Plague and other texts raise important questions about the limits of London’s fictional inclusivity.

Science and Exclusion So much of the fear of the Other, and in particular the poor and immigrant groups in late nineteenth and early twentieth century American culture, comes to be rooted in scientific language, which functions as a smokescreen, sanctioning the racism that informs these conclusions. In his text Race: The History of an Idea in America, Thomas Gossett traces the rise of race-based prejudices, and in his discussion of the period from 1865-1915, for instance, he notes the representation of the immigrant as an invading germ, quoting Bayard Taylor who argues, “their touch is pollution, and harsh as the opinion may seem, justice to our own race demands that they should not settle on our soil.”1 According to Gossett, Taylor’s theory takes root because majority culture conceives of the immigrant as “defective because of his race and thus cannot be assimilated into American civilization without having a bad effect upon it.”2 Taylor is not alone in his anti-immigrant prejudices; in fact, many later Progressivists would espouse exclusionist rhetoric, principally on the grounds of the immigrant’s inability to become absorbed by American culture. For Frederick Jackson Turner, the overcrowding in cities among the immigrant born: . . . produced a race capable of living under conditions that would exterminate men whom centuries of national selection had not adapted to endure squalor and unsanitary and indecent conditions of a dangerously crowded population.3

Curiously, Granser in The Scarlet Plague articulates the same claim when he tells his grandsons that the plague began in the overcrowded cities. What is most telling about Turner and Granser’s conclusions is that neither examines the social conditions that gave rise to the squalor. In other words, it is the immigrant, and not the culture’s lack of a social safety net, who is to blame for urban conditions, suggesting that social ameliorative acts run counter to a social application of Spencer’s “survival of the fittest.” 1

Thomas Gossett. 1997. Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York: Oxford University Press), 290. 2 Gossett. 1997. Race, 292. 3 Gossett.1997. Race, 293.

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Nowhere is the contempt for the immigrant and his/her potential to “pollute” a pure American race more intense than in the writings of prominent sociologist, E.A. Ross. As with many of his contemporaries, Ross argues for immigration restrictions, noting that the immigrant harks back to a civilization marked by serfdom,4 which stands in marked contrast to the “typical American citizen whose forefathers have erected our edifice of representative democracy.”5 More virulently, Ross goes on to note that it is the immigrants’ physical features themselves that call attention to them as evolutionarily inferior. Reflecting about their entry into the United States, Ross argues: . . . in their gatherings, washed and combed, and in their Sunday best, you are struck by the fact that from ten to twenty percent are hirsute, lowbrowed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality. Not that they suggest evil. They simply look out of place. . . . They belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age. These oxlike men are descendants of those who always stayed behind.6

This fear of the immigrant as the source of “race contagion” is one that aligns with the era’s fears about race suicide, whereby the very well-born would become frightened by not only the immigrant’s presence, but also her fecundity, suggesting that this fear would manifest itself by the upper classes being unable to reproduce themselves. For Francis Walker, Professor of Political Economy and History at Yale, the decline of the birthrate among the upper classes indicates that “they became increasingly unwilling to bring forth sons and daughters who should be obliged to compete in the market for labor and the walks of life with those whom they did not recognize as of their own grade and condition.”7 Such an approach locates such “contagious inferiority” among the immigrants themselves, and for social gospel reformer Josiah Strong, these fears were hard facts, warning: . . . there is now being injected into the veins of the nation a large amount of inferior blood every day and every year. The foreign population, as a whole, is depressing our average intelligence and morality in the direction of the deadline of ignorance and vice.8

4

Gossett. 1997. Race, 293. Ibid. 6 Ibid. 7 Gossett. 1997. Race, 302. 8 Gossett. 1997. Race, 294. 5

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For many of this era, the immigrant possessed not only this ignorance and vice, but they were also a swarming host of pestilence, endangering the lives of pure Americans, who were unused to the Other’s illnesses and contagions. In particular, Gossett notes that these diseases ran rampant through the population of “sturdy stock” New Englanders, who did not come into contact with immigrants, but their susceptibility to these illnesses gave rise to the fear of “the vanishing American.”9 What is ironic about such claims is that the so-called superiority of the sturdy stock collapses in the “struggle to survive” among the masses. In other words, the Spencerian struggle does not then elevate the immigrant as the superior group; rather, the immigrant comes to be further denigrated because of the “lost ground” argument advanced by the “pure” Americans. For Walker, these lowly immigrants: . . . have none of the inherited instincts and tendencies which make it comparatively easy to deal with the immigration of olden time. They are beaten men from beaten races, representing the worst failures of the struggle of existence.10

Echoing Walker’s alarm signal, John W. Burgess notes that the absence of immigration exclusions is both foolish and dangerous because: we must preserve our Aryan nationality in the state, and admit to its membership only such non-Aryan race-elements as shall have become Aryanized in spirit and in genius by contact with it, if we would build the superstructure of the ideal American commonwealth.”11 What this claim raises is an interesting point: what is the relationship between race and evolutionary survival?

Race and Evolution What is crucial to Gossett’s analysis is the extent to which he considers the impact of interpreters of Darwinian theories, which are used, applied, and justified according to racially prejudiced theories. Indeed, according to Gossett, “the idea of natural selection was translated to a struggle between individual members of society, between members of classes of society, between different nations, and between different races.”12 Further, he contends, this notion of struggle combines with prejudice as an “indispensable 9

Gossett. 1997. Race, 301. Gossett. 1997. Race, 303. 11 Gossett. 1997. Race, 307. 12 Gossett. 1997. Race, 145. 10

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method for producing superior men, superior nations, and superior races.”13 What is critical here is Spencer’s ability to use Darwin’s science as a lens for interpreting humans. In doing so, his use of scientific jargon gives a veil of legitimacy to those whose theories exclude persons and stratify society based on race, class, and national origin. Such an approach comes to re-think, rather radically, the earlier prevailing notion of e pluribus unum because no longer does the majority envision itself as relating to the “newer” Americans, nor does it imagine that these newer arrivals might be “absorbed” into the existing national identity. What emerges, then, is an insistence upon ethnic and racial purity. For Spencer, the possibility of intermarriage becomes the most serious threat to racial purity. Using the language of animal breeders, Spencer asserts, “animal breeders had long known that the random intermixture of stocks could only lead to degeneration.”14 Such mixture, Spencer opines, jeopardizes a culture because: . . . if you mix the constitutions of two widely divergent varieties which have severally become adapted to widely divergent modes of life, you get a constitution which is adapted to the mode of life of neither—a constitution which will not work properly, because it is not fitted for any set of conditions whatever.”15

Such an approach legitimizes exclusion, and when coupled with the rhetoric of the “vanishing American,” grounds identity in the blood lines themselves, which is a concept London explores in the wake of the pandemic in The Scarlet Plague. Followers of Spencer, particularly in the United States, used separation of the blood lines as the foundation for their exclusionary theories. Such theories not only barred equal access to the immigrant-born and persons of color, but these theories also attempted to have the very structure of American government and culture reify such myopic notions of human contact and interaction. This approach also gives rise and license to the emergence of eugenics, and as Gossett argues: mental and emotional traits eventually become a part of the germ plasm, and therefore the children of educated people receive biological as well as environmental advantages from the mental activity of their ancestors. By 1900, the idea was widely accepted that both intelligence and traits of

13

Ibid. Gossett. 1997. Race, 151. 15 Ibid. 14

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character tend to be inherited, and one of the proofs of this contention was believed to be found in race differences.”16

In many ways, then, theories about eugenics and race suicide combine, emphasizing the line of demarcation between the fit, the unfit, and the future survival of the race. Just as the Social Darwinists used science as the foundation for their theories, their “adaptability” and adoption of eugenicist principles further extends their notions of a stratified society. E. A. Ross offers, for example, a dire assessment of what happens to a culture that deviates from eugenicism and offers ameliorist measures: “the Christian cult of charity as a means of grace has formed a shelter under which idiots and cretins have crept and bred.”17 What is at stake for these theorists, then, is to imagine society in a constant state of strife. Without such conflict the emergence of the superior and inferior cannot occur. It is here that Gossett identifies a fundamental flaw, undermining their approaches, revealing the racism that informs them. Specifically, Gossett posits: . . . they relied too heavily on biological analogies. In their theories, the different races of men have a relationship to one another something like that of different species among the lower animals. Struggle among the species in the lower animal world became, when applied to men, a struggle among races. . . . As long as this line of thought persisted, the result almost invariably was more and more racism.18

In doing so, these theories posit the immigrant-born and persons of color as threats against the established order, establishing American Anglo identity as not only the biologically fit group, but also as the ones to whom the future of America rests. By vanquishing the unfit, progress comes to be established along blood, race, and national origin lines of demarcation.

Jack London and Cultural Conflict What is most striking about London’s fiction is not only the extent to which cultural conflict and questions of cultural evolution and survival manifest themselves, but also the extent to which these conflicts never emerge without their own set of inherent contradictions, revealing the challenges of the ideologies that his texts espouse. Prior to examining The Scarlet Plague, it is necessary to frame this discussion in terms of some of 16

Gossett. 1997. Race, 157-58. Gossett. 1997. Race, 170. 18 Gossett. 1997. Race, 175. 17

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his selected works, which address his interest in futuristic fiction and the role of the scientist. In many ways, these issues blend in some of his short stories, allowing for the simultaneous consideration of these points. In his short stories, “The Unparalleled Invasion” (1910) and “Goliah” (1909), for instance, the role of the scientist as the guardian of the social order looms large, and for the former text, readers also see the context for the scientist’s emergence: the need to control China’s population growth as a response to race suicide in Western white nations. Set in 1976, “The Unparalleled Invasion” registers the fears about an unchecked population explosion in mainland China. What makes the threat so ominous in the short story is that it was occurring in plain sight: “the world awoke abruptly to its danger; but for over seventy years, unperceived, affairs had been shaping toward this very end.”19 The story begins, rather stereotypically, by casting China in the role of the sleeping tiger, unschooled in western ways—and vice versa—because “there was no intimate vocabulary [because] there was no way to communicate Western ideas to the Chinese mind. China remained asleep.”20 Indeed, the narrator reminds us that the reason for this seeming impenetrability of the Chinese consciousness is because “they were mental aliens.”21 Curiously, though, the nation that proves successful in translating Western ideas and concepts to the Chinese is Japan, which aligns with London’s earlier essay, “The Yellow Peril” (1904), where he asserts: . . . the menace to the Western world lies, not in the little brown man, but in the four hundred millions of yellow men should the little brown man undertake their management. The Chinese is not dead to new ideas; he is an efficient worker, makes a good soldier, and is wealthy in the essential materials of a machine age. Under a capable management he will go far. The Japanese is prepared and fit to undertake this management.22

While London identifies points of distinctions among different Asian nations and peoples, his fear of a Pan-Asian threat remains, however, impacting the representation of such persons in his fiction. While in the “Unparalleled Invasion” Japan’s “management” of China is short-lived, it 19

Jack London. 1910. “The Unparalleled Invasion.” http://london.sonoma.edu. Site maintained by Roy Tennant and Clarice Stasz Ph.D. (Date accessed October 20, 2014), 1. 20 Ibid. 21 London. 1910. “The Unparalleled Invasion,” 2. 22 Jack London. 1904. “The Yellow Peril.” http://london.sonoma.edu. Site maintained by Roy Tennant and Clarice Stasz Ph.D. (Date accessed October 20, 2014), 4.

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does result in one ominous consequence: “[China] was the colossus of nations.”23 This threat manifests itself not in warfare, but “the real danger lay in the fecundity of her loins.”24 As with any population growth, the land is not enough to contain the Chinese, and as a result, “China’s expansion, in all land directions, went on apace.”25 It is the threat of unchecked population growth, coupled with the prospect of Chinese immigration, that frightens Western white nations because “there were two Chinese for every white-skinned human in the world, and the world trembled.” 26 It is in this context of fear that the final solution emerges: the emergence of the scientist and his use of multiple plagues as biological warfare. The scientist in the story, Jacobus Laningdale, meets with the President and other leaders and shares with them his solution for defeating the Chinese. Using planes to drop test tubes filled with contagion, “the plague smote them all. Nor was it one plague, nor two plagues; it was a score of plagues. Every virulent form of infectious death stalked through the land.”27 As one expects, complete devastation occurs, but what is interesting in the aftermath—once the environment is detoxified—is that what comes to be built up in the former China is an organization reminiscent of the United States: . . . the world moved in . . . heterogeneously, according to the democratic American programme. It was a vast and happy intermingling of nationalities that settled down in China in 1982 and the years that followed—a tremendous and successful experiment in cross-fertilization. We know today the splendid mechanical, intellectual, and art output that followed.28

On the surface, it seems as if the scientist’s solution works against London’s era that met such intermingling with fear and trepidation. What remains unknown is if the American program is one of eighteenth-century American identity, drawing upon those of Anglo origin, or of the early twentieth century, where immigrants came from southern and eastern Europe. Given the tenor of the short story, it seems that the conclusion is based on a nostalgic invocation of the eighteenth-century dream, where 23

London. 1910. “The Unparalleled Invasion,” 3. London. 1910. “The Unparalleled Invasion,” 6. 25 London. 1910. “The Unparalleled Invasion,” 8. 26 Ibid. 27 London. 1910. “The Unparalleled Invasion,” 13. 28 London. 1910. “The Unparalleled Invasion,” 15-16. 24

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assimilation is possible among those with whom a common identity might be achieved. If the scientist ends the threat that China poses in “The Unparalleled Invasion” only to make way for a second American experiment, the scientist in “Goliah” emerges as an unusual figure, whose call for a socialist utopia is reinforced by his unwavering commitment to murder those who impeded its emergence. This short story is unusual because it is the scientist’s ability to harness solar power that allows for a major cultural paradigm shift to extend to the public ownership of the means of production. What makes the scientist’s dream possible is that he imagines that humans are held back from their full potential by the current government. Using language steeped in evolutionary principles, readers discover that: . . . the people are weighed down by the inertia of the established; that the government that is representative of them represents only their feebleness, and futility, and brutishness;…they do not make government, but that government makes them, and that government is and has been a stupid and awful monster, misbegotten of the glimmerings of intelligence that come from the inertia-crushed mass.29

In much the same way that Spencer’s disciples call for a reduction in the government’s intrusion upon people’s lives, this short story identifies the government as the impediment that prevents growth from happening because it is at odds with evolutionary progression. The scientist in the text, who identifies himself by his pseudonym Goliah, demands that the captains of industry and government leaders obey him, come to Palgrave Island, which houses his model utopia, learn new ways about organizing society, or face certain death. What is most compelling about Goliah’s approach is that he roots his strength, not in his desire to kill, but in his knowledge as a scientist: . . . remember that I am a scientist, and that one life, or one million of lives, mean nothing to me as arrayed against the countless billions of billions of lives of the generations to come. It is for their laughter that I seek to reconstruct society now; and against them your own meagre little life is a paltry thing indeed.30

29 Jack London. 1909. “Goliah.” 1909. http://london.sonoma.edu. Site maintained by Roy Tennant and Clarice Stasz Ph.D. (Date accessed October 20, 2014), 2. 30 London. 1909. “Goliah,” 5.

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Here, Goliah offers a jeremiad that conveys not simply the destruction of the status quo, but that current society is at odds with the scientific improvement and enrichment of all. In many ways, this narrator replicates the sentiments expressed in London’s earlier essay, “The Somnambulists” (1906), insofar as organized society has created a nation of sleep-walkers numb to their full potential; it is only by tapping into their kinship with the animals, and in particular, to the brutish quest for survival that these sleepwalkers awake: . . . the raw animal crouching within him is like the earthquake monster pent in the crust of the earth. As he persuades himself against the latter till it arouses and shakes down a city, so does he persuade himself against the former until it shakes him out of his dreaming and he stands undistinguished, a brute like any other brute.31

This vitality releases, then, only when the veneer that induces slumber withers away, and for “The Somnambulist” and “Goliah,” the veneer is government itself. For the title character Goliah, the removal of impediments to human growth come as a result of the human desire to do so, yet his own rationale for this phenomenon contains the seeds of its own contradiction: . . . they achieved it for themselves. All that I did was put the fear of death in the hearts of the few that sat in the high places and obstructed the coming of rationality and laughter. The fear of death made those in the high places get out of the way, that was all, and gave the intelligence of man a chance to realize itself socially. 32

Eschewing responsibility for threatening human lives, Goliah imagines that his brandished sword became simply an extension of evolutionary progress because those who impeded the release of the human potential became the atavisms that needed to be destroyed so that progress might occur. Or, as expressed by Goliah himself, “you are anachronisms. You stand in the way of humanity. To the scrap-heap with you.”33 By the text’s conclusion, even “the humblest citizen enjoyed leisure and time and opportunity for an immensely greater abundance of living than had the

31

Jack London. 1906. “The Somnambulists.” http://london.sonoma.edu. Site maintained by Roy Tennant and Clarice Stasz Ph.D. (Date accessed October 20, 2014), 1. 32 London. 1909. “Goliah,” 17. 33 London. 1909. “Goliah,” 19.

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most favored under the old anarchistic system.”34 What is compelling about “Goliah” is that human potential lies within each person, with only government’s insistence on regimented order as the barrier to evolutionary progression. While this short story does not rely on the fear of the Other as is the case with “The Unparalleled Invasion,” it does reify the scientist as the savior who cures social ills.

The Scarlet Plague For scholars who have examined The Scarlet Plague, interest centers on identifying the text as the manifestation of either London’s socialism or belief in a Nietzschean superman.35 What these critical discussions leave open, however, is the extent to which both of these philosophies fall short in the novel, allowing for other interpretive possibilities; what we are left with as readers is the discovery that post-apocalyptic America has come to be far too degraded to be redeemed by science, and Granser’s dream to rebuild America via the nostalgic stories of past glories comes to be the stuff of fiction itself. In Riva, Benedetti, and Cesana’s critique, the authors contextualize the novel in terms of the overarching literary tradition that addresses pandemic fear, using this opportunity to better situate the actions manifest in London’s novel. As the authors turn their attention to The Scarlet Plague, they note the extent to which the novel showcases the era’s initial trust placed in scientists to eradicate disease. At the same time, though, Riva, Benedetti and Cesana conclude that when science and its practitioners fail in the novel, such a phenomenon allows London to show what gave rise to the illness in the first place: a society steeped in inequities. For these authors, the death and destruction brought by the plague serves as London’s capitalist critique. Writing, the authors argue ; London raised a harsh critique against the society that is seen as the ultimate cause of the world’s destruction. In particular, in London’s opinion, capitalism led to the rise in population and to overcrowding, and 34

London. 1909. “Goliah,” 21. For a discussion of London’s socialism, please refer to Michele Augusto Riva, Marta Benedetti, Giancario Cesana. 2014. “Pandemic Fear and Literature: Observations from Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague.” Emerging Infectious Diseases (October 20:10), 1753-1757. For a discussion of Nietzsche, please refer to David Raney. 2003. “No Ties Except Those of Blood: Class, Race, and Jack London’s American Plague.” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature. (September 39:4), 390-430.

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overcrowding led to plague. Consequently, capitalism is presented as the ultimate cause of the pandemic and thus harshly criticized.36

The challenge with this approach, however, is that it does not attend to Granser’s dismissal of the working and lower classes, who in his opinion, are not only the cause of the pandemic, but are also the ones who spread fear and mayhem against the “better born” in the text. Nor do the authors necessarily probe the impact that such a depiction would have on his novel, especially as the discussion does not necessarily foreground how socialism emerges as an alternative to the social chaos. While the authors note that the novel does “fores[ee] the first and most severe influenza pandemic in history, the Spanish influenza of 1918-1920,” their discussion relies less on how one might demonstrate a capitalist critique in the novel.37 In turning attention to Raney’s approach with The Scarlet Plague, which offers a different consideration than one of economic critique, what comes to be revealed is that Raney’s claim that the novel advances Nietzschean philosophy rests on his reliance on the Kershew biography of London, which foregrounds this interpretation as the lens for better understanding London’s fiction. In many ways, Kershaw’s biography offers some troubling approaches to London’s work insofar as he imagines his fiction as static and uninfluenced by the multiplicity of interests London pursued, or by London’s own re-examination of earlier ideas or concepts. Instead, Kershaw approaches London’s oeuvre as simply the reproduction of Nietzsche’s philosophy in a literary context, and in doing so, offers a troubling connection between London and Hitler, suggesting: Hitler would adopt Nietzsche’s blond, blue-eyed beast as the most likely animal to survive. In Hitler’s eyes, these supermen were Aryan. As Jack saw them, they were simply his mirror image.38

With Raney’s reliance on the Kershaw biography, the challenge that emerges is he envisions the novel’s conclusion as a successful call to rebuild the white race. What complicates this interpretation, however, is that if such a call comes forth, no one hears it, and even if heard, no one can carry it out.

36

Riva, Benedetti, and Cesana. 2014. “Pandemic Fear and Literature,” 1756. Ibid. 38 Alex Kershaw. 1997. Jack London: A Life (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin), 154. 37

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It is this challenge in particular, which is Granser’s inability to convey the stories of the past so that the race may build again, that grounds my approach to London’s futuristic novel. In many ways, Granser’s frustrations with inculcating his grandchildren with this lore manifests not only a breakdown in the race, but also a breakdown in the family unit, which often serves as the locus for cultural identity. In my earlier work Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature, I foregrounded Charles Gould’s text America: A Family Matter (1922).39 While it is published ten years after The Scarlet Plague, its emphasis on “careful breeding” provides an apt lens for understanding Granser and his desire to rebuild the Teutonic dream. Just as Granser identifies the source of the plague in terms of the overcrowded cities, which are brimming with the rising tide of low-born, working-class, and immigrant persons, Gould posits that: . . . the base stock, forced into close contact and intercourse with the native population, led to mixed marriages and the consequent dilution and weakening of the blood. This has happened again and again and has broken down great empires.40

This claim resonates with Granser’s critique of the plague’s aftermath, which brings about a flattened class structure. As a consequence of this redistribution of privileges, Granser bemoans, is that individuals who were once at the bottom of society have not only emerged in powerful positions, but more abhorrent than this point is that they have taken upper-class wives, defiled them, and forced them to reproduce children. It is in this moment that Granser tells his grandchildren about the degrading treatment of Vesta, once a woman of privilege, who comes to be Chauffer’s wife, who is a man Granser describes as “a perfect brute. The most abhorrent man I have ever known.”41 The actual tragedy of the plague is not so much the loss of life, as much as it is Chauffer’s appropriation of an upperclass woman as his wife. Underscoring this point, Granser tells his grandchildren, “in the days before the plague, the slightest contact with such as he would have been pollution.”42

39

Gina M. Rossetti. 2006. Imagining the Primitive in Naturalist and Modernist Literature (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri). 40 Charles Gould.1922. America: A Family Matter (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), 15-16. 41 Jack London. 1912. The Scarlet Plague. New York: Arno Press, 1974. 42 London. 1912. The Scarlet Plague, 152.

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In telling his grandchildren about Chauffer, through whom they are related distantly, Granser hopes that they may better comprehend the plague’s ravages. Unfortunately for Granser, no such lesson comes to these boys. When he tells them that “he beat her with those terrible fists of his and made her his slave,” his grandson Hare-Lip responds with the comment, “good for Chauffer.”43 Lost in this nostalgic backward glance is Granser’s actual source of pain: “why should Vesta not have been mine? I was a man of culture and refinement, a professor in a great university.”44 What angers Granser about this reversal of fortune is the extent to which the plague’s devastation ushers in a return to the bestial. Early in the novel he warns his grandsons about the rise of this underclass in the midst of the pandemic’s devastation: . . . in the midst of our civilization, down in our slums and labor-ghettoes, we had bred a new race of barbarians, of savages; and now, in the time of our calamity, they turned upon us like the wild beasts that they were and destroyed us.45

What the plague brings about, then, is a leveling of society, allowing for the devastation to eliminate all the barriers that once held in place this tenuous peace. In order to escape from the chaos, Granser and his fellow academics initially take refuge in the Chemistry Building at Berkeley, which establishes metaphorically the culture’s trust and belief in the sanctity of science to discover and root out disease. This safe-house succumbs to the infestation, however, forcing Granser and others to flee into countryside to “outrun” the plague. It is in this countryside where he encounters Chauffer and Vesta, learning all too well the plague’s moral and cultural impact. What emerges as telling scenes, however, is the extent to which Chauffer and Granser share a common dream: the desire to rebuild in the plague’s aftermath according to “one’s own kind.” For Chauffer, this dream comes to the fore in an example of poetic justice, where he tells Granser: . . . we’ve got to start all over and replenish the earth and multiply. You’re handicapped, Professor. You ain’t got no wife, and we’re up against a regular Garden-of-Eden proposition. . . . He pointed at their little infant, barely a year old. There’s your wife, though you’ll have to wait till she

43

London. 1912. The Scarlet Plague, 150, 151. London. 1912. The Scarlet Plague, 154. 45 London. 1912. The Scarlet Plague, 105-106. 44

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What escapes Granser’s notice, however, is that he articulates a similar plea to his grandsons at the novel’s conclusion: . . . we are increasing rapidly and making ready for a new climb toward civilization . . . a hundred generations from now we may expect our descendants to start across the Sierras, oozing slowly along, generation by generation, over the great continent to the colonization of the East—a new Aryan drift around the world.47

What will make the Aryan’s rise possible is Granser’s stockpiling of the stories and lessons from the past: “I have stored many books. In them is great wisdom.”48 Complicating his dream, however, is neither his grandchildren nor the children nor grandchildren of the plague’s survivors can read and understand these stories. What he is left with at the end of the novel is the inability to make this Aryan march possible. In other words, this nostalgic turn to the past does not fill his grandsons with the desire or knowledge to carry forward Granser’s dream, plunging all into further chaos and disconnectedness. Indeed, the final image London leaves with readers is fraught with troubling biblical allusions: “an old man and boy, skin-clad and barbaric, turned and went along the right of way into the forest in the wake of the goats.”49 This final image reveals that Granser and his grandson will not re-make the race so that the Anglo-American might rise again. On the contrary, both man and boy, figured as barbarians, plunge into the forest behind the goats, which is suggestive of both an evolutionary and biblical “fall” from a once higher position. Granser’s hope for glory, then, becomes his own fiction, particularly as he and his grandsons will live out their days on the outskirts of this dream. London’s The Scarlet Plague imagines a post-apocalyptic America in the midst of dissolution and disintegration. While his era’s discussions about science, race, and progress frame and contextualize the novel, it is also one where any dream of race pride diminishes, as the flattened class structure reveals a horror that quickly eclipses the devastation that disease brought, revealing further cultural challenges and cleavages. By situating this novel in twenty-first century American culture, London gives readers 46

London. 1912. The Scarlet Plague, 158-159. London. 1912. The Scarlet Plague, 171. 48 London. 1912. The Scarlet Plague, 175. 49 London. 1912. The Scarlet Plague, 181. 47

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a skewed looking-glass into the future, one that legitimizes the fear and panic that undergird narratives about the “vanishing American.” In doing so, we are left with the fear and frustration Granser experiences: we have the knowledge of an allegedly once-glorious past that finds a hostile land in which to plant these seeds, casting all as poor planters in this land of devastation.

Works Cited Berliner, Jonathan. 2008. “Jack London’s Socialistic Social Darwinism.” American Literary Realism 41:1 (Fall), 52-78. Gossett, Thomas. 1997. Race: The History of an Idea. New York: Oxford University Press. Gould, Charles. 1922. America: A Family Matter. Charles Scribner’s Sons. Kershaw, Alex. 1997. Jack London: A Life. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. London, Jack. 1909. “Goliah.” http://london.sonoma.edu. Site maintained by Roy Tennant and Clarice Stasz, Ph.D. (Date accessed October 20, 2014). —. 1912. The Scarlet Plague. New York: Arno Press, 1974. —. 1906. “The Somnambulists.” http://london.sonoma.edu. Site maintained by Roy Tennant and Clarice Stasz Ph.D. (Date accessed October 20, 2014). —. 1910. “The Unparalleled Invasion.” http://london.sonoma.edu. Site maintained by Roy Tennant and Clarice Stasz Ph.D. (Date accessed October 20, 2014). —. 1904. “The Yellow Peril.” http://london.sonoma.edu. Site maintained by Roy Tennant and Clarice Stasz, Ph.D. (Date accessed October 20, 2014). Raney, David. 2003. “No Ties Except Those of Blood: Class, Race, and Jack London’s American Plague.” Papers on Language and Literature: A Journal for Scholars and Critics of Language and Literature. (September 39:4), 90-430. Riva, Michele Augusto, Marta Benedetti and Giancario Cesana. 2014. “Pandemic Fear and Literature: Observations from Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague.” Emerging Infectious Diseases (October 20:10), 17531757.

PART II: CURRENT THEORIES

CHAPTER FIVE DYSTOPIA 101: THE MILLENNIALS REACT TO METROPOLIS ANNA E. HILLER

Early Science Fiction Film: Historic Futures Science fiction, as narrative or film, is an X-Ray and a thermometer, diagnosing the preoccupations about the future that the current society internalizes, and testing the intensity of those fears either in the moment or retrospectively. Since the beginning of the genre’s popular surge in the early twentieth century, science fiction has been, effectively, “a diagnosis, a warning, a call to understanding and action, and—most important—a mapping of possible alternatives.”1 A merging of hope for the future, discontent with the present, imagination, and understated activism, science fiction frequently presents a futuristic vision that is, by nature, questioning of human nature and activity across time. The unique ability of science fiction to address our history as well as our future is caused by an illuminating temporal fusion that “can deal with the present and the past as special cases of a possible historical sequence seen from an estranged point of view”.2 The estranged point of view of the reader that Darko Suvin mentions here is key: it is through the differences between the novum of a work of science fiction and our own empirical reality that we are able to recognize and assess the problems that characterize our present.3 This critical potential of science fiction is often intertwined with, and emphasized by, other rhetorical-philosophical constructions, namely Utopia or its negative counterpart, Dystopia. Science fiction dystopias are diverse and historic, emerging from the utopian philosophical tradition, 1

Darko Suvin. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (New Haven: Yale University Press), 12. 2 Suvin. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, 21. 3 Suvin defines the novum as “a totalizing phenomenon or relationship deviating from the author’s and implied reader’s norm of reality.” Ibid., 64.

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but gaining significant momentum (and a large audience) in the twentieth century “as a part of a widespread anxiety in reaction to the tribulations of modernity.”4 Perhaps in an effort toward a collective purging of our anxieties through the projection of a more viscerally identifiable novum, dystopian science fiction films of the last forty years have assumed familiar settings, such as the modern city, and have infused them with the fears and preoccupations of the present. Dystopian science fiction often evokes a society that is a logical consequence of current circumstances if, that is, all potentialities are carried to their extreme. Take Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, for example. Often viewed as one of the most influential science fiction films ever made, Blade Runner imagines a year 2019 Los Angeles whose technological prowess has led to renegade technology, environmental degradation, and a stark division of classes. The film offers powerful visual landscapes of a city whose upper stratum is inhabited by the technocrats who, through their exploitation and reckless innovation, have created a hellish existence for those who still dwell on the acid rainsoaked Earth. Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick’s earlier novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, has become a fundamental text, both in narrative and film, when considering the postmodern use (and appreciation) of dystopia in science fiction. Much of the film’s power resides in Ridley Scott’s powerful visual representation of Dick’s original novum. Yet according to several critics, Scott’s vision did not emerge ex nihilo: rather, the resonance of Blade Runner’s imagery owes a debt to a much earlier film5: Fritz Lang's 1927 feature, Metropolis.6 Metropolis, a quintessential masterpiece of silent film, debuted in 1927 to a global audience. It was the most expensive project to date in Germany—it required approximately five million Deutch Marks and nearly two years to make—and one of the longest, coming in at three hours in its final form. Partially due to its length, the film was issued in 4

M. Keith Booker. 2013. “On Dystopia,” in Critical Insights: Dystopia, ed. M. Keith Booker (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press), 4. 5 “Scott’s Los Angeles is thus vertically stratified along analogous lines to those in Metropolis, between high and low, light and dark, (and here also dry and wet).” Andrew Milner. 2004. “Darker Cities: Urban Dystopia and Science Fiction Cinema,” International Journal of Cultural Studies (7: 3), 268. Barbara Mennel also mentions Blade Runner as “citing” Metropolis’ dystopian cityscape. Barbara Caroline Mennel. 2008. Cities and Cinema (London; New York: Routledge), 131. 6 Andrew Hageman calls Blade Runner the “postmodern counterpart to Lang’s film.” Andrew Hageman. 2012. “Science Fiction, Ecological Futures, and the Topography of Fritz Lang's Metropolis,” Ecozon@ (Autumn 3:2), 60.

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differing shorter cuts in Britain, North America, and Australia. Notable for its meditations on the dis-ease produced by the advent of sophisticated technologies that characterized a rapidly-accelerating modernity, Metropolis is also remarkable for its cinematography and its imagery. The filmic unity of its futuristic imaginings are in part the ur-text for cinematic science fiction. As an artefact of its time, Metropolis’ history is much more complex, reflecting as it does the unstable period between the World Wars, during the socially liberal, but politically ineffective Weimar Republic, just six years before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. The arrival of the Nazi party with its narrow aesthetic views that choked free expression perhaps explains how and why it is that the original footage was scattered and not preserved whole.7 Also, Fritz Lang himself chose not to remain in Germany, fleeing within a year of Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933. Logically, considering these circumstances, it is no surprise that the totality of Metropolis still eludes media archivists. Its contradictory political, psychological, and religious themes that represent the intellectual concerns of its time continue to perplex critics and audiences alike. The arguments regarding the film's problematic ending, one that is neither summarily fascist, nor wholly anti-Marxist, are often conflicted within themselves. Commentary on the seeming surfeit of images alluding to other topics, from the biblical-religious, to its Freudian psychoanalytic subtext, to its magnificent modernist-futurist architecture, have been treated fairly and with great skill by a wealth of critics since the film's debut. These historical data, the story of the film's genesis and reception in its own time, and how Metropolis made its journey to the present day, create a fascinating narrative that even now inspires critics of the film to return to it again and again, as more footage resurfaces, for a more nuanced analysis. Nor has public interest in the film flagged: despite its inconsistencies (or perhaps because of them), the film remains doggedly popular.8 7

The complete footage of the film has never been found; however, in 2008 several additional reels were discovered in Argentina, increasing the total footage by nearly 25%. Where previously we only had 117 minutes of the film, we now have 146 minutes. Statistics cited in A. Bergvall. 2012. “Apocalyptic Imagery in Fritz Lang's Metropolis,” Literature-Film Quarterly (October 1: 40:4), 256. For a full anecdotal history of the discovery and reinstatement of the missing footage, see Julie Wosk. 2010. "Update on the Film Metropolis,” Technology and Culture (October 51:4). 8 “Metropolis is . . . a film that is jammed almost to the point of incoherence with ideas, references, allusions, and visualizations from Oedipal triangles to Christian symbols, from futuristic modern architecture to Gothic cathedrals, from mythical

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In spring of 2011 and spring of 2013, I showed Metropolis to two undergraduate classes in the hopes of ascertaining whether these young people could see an alignment between Lang’s dystopian vision of the future and their own present moment. Partly out of curiosity, partly because Lang’s text is so fundamental to multiple critical discussions— topics include (post)modernism, film studies, science fiction, philosophy, science and technology studies, and posthumanism, among others—I wanted to know what elements this generation would find engaging, which images would last in their memory. This intellectual curiosity emerged from a growing sense of a difference between myself, a member of the socalled “Generation X,” and the students in their teens and twenties whom I was now teaching. At the time of the study, I became aware of a new classification for the generation following my own that was much more creative than the earlier term “Gen Y”: popular media had started to refer to the under-30s as the “Millennials.” The stereotype promoted by the media was that Millennials were rather entitled, gadget-happy, tech-savvy youths, and it was specifically that particular demographic’s reaction to Metropolis that I wanted to gauge. In my own view, it seemed the movie’s projection of an oppressive and socially unjust technocracy was becoming more prescient by the day. Would it seem so, I wondered, to them? Metropolis has been unsettling many generations of viewers in the 80-plus years since its first release. Would the Millennials—whose reality most approaches the novum set forth in the film—react any differently?

Millennials: An Optimistic Future… Maybe Before further discussing Metropolis, a more concrete definition of the Millennial generation is needed, if that is indeed possible. At its most basic, the Millennials are the newest generation to come of age, born between the years 1980 and 2000 (approximately). A 2012 report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce calls them “the most studied generation to date” and reports that they are “full of contradictions,” but that they can generally be defined by two characteristics: they are “technically savvy” and they are optimistic.9 On the other hand, according to a study that figures and biblical quotations to the latest technological marvels. . . . The film’s eclectic mixture of cultural elements… helps to explain why Metropolis… has remained remarkably popular and relevant.” R. L. Rutsky. 2005. "Metropolis: Between Modernity and Magic,” in Film Analysis: A Norton Reader, ed. R. L. Rutsky and Jeffrey Geiger (New York: W.W. Norton), 180. 9 “The Millennial Generation Research Review. ” 2012. (United States Chamber of Commerce), 407.

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appeared recently in The Atlantic, Millennials are deeply conflicted about politics, ideology, their financial futures, their employment prospects, and their own culture, and for that reason, they resist simplistic generational analysis. 10 Market-specific studies have reduced them to certain defining characteristics, so as to help educators, entrepreneurs, and employers understand this new breed of student/consumer/employee with whom they seem to have so little in common.11 To Neil Howe and William Strauss, for example, who write from the perspective of educators, Millennials are “special, sheltered, confident, team-oriented, conventional, pressured, and achieving”: very different from Gen-X and the Boomers, whose progeny the Millennials are.12 While this collective psychologizing has its own importance, what is most salient of these discussions is the pervasiveness of technology as the prime characteristic of Millennial existence. Millennials supposedly possess a “digital sixth sense,”13 and are the chief propagators of the stereotypes of the young men or women who rely on their smartphone for everything from getting directions to the virtual/personal relationships available through social media. Millennials have inspired the current debate about the idea of whether there exists such a being as a “digital native,” whose near at-birth exposure to technology has created the expectation that this generation has greater insights about, attachments to, and preference for all things tech-related—an assumption that is perhaps more adversarial than helpful, and that is causing difficulty in all areas where the Millennials and older generations intersect in positions of power.14 Some of these characterizations of Millennials have in a certain sense been imposed from above: previous generations tend to balk at The New, 10

Derek Thompson. 2014. “Study: Millennials Deeply Confused About Their Politics, Finances, and Culture,” The Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/03/study-millennials-deeplyconfused-about-their-politics-finances-and-culture/284277/. 11 Literature about how to market to Millennials, how to oversee employees who are themselves Millennials, and how to teach Millennial students currently abounds in the popular press. The anxiety over how to best connect with this new generation of adults is astonishing. 12 See Neil Howe and William Strauss. 2007. Millennials Go to College: Strategies for a New Generation on Campus : Recruiting and Admissions, Campus Life, and the Classroom (Great Falls, VA: LifeCourse Associates). 13 “The Millennial Generation Research Review.” 2012. 14 For an extensive discussion of the current debates about the “digital native,” see Erika E. Smith. 2012. “The Digital Native Debate in Higher Education: A Comparative Analysis of Recent Literature,” Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology (Fall 38: 3).

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and the Millennials, who are reaching maturity at the dawn of a new anthropological era—the Information Age—are not just New, they are an alien species with knowledge that previous generations do not understand, or cannot access. The oldest of Millennials will remember a more “analog” existence before the internet, but the younger ones, those born around or after 1990, have never known an “unconnected” environment. Millennial commentator, author, and activist David Burstein affirms the connection between Millennials and technology, saying that “the maturation of the Millennials has occurred…in concert with the maturation of the digital world” and has therefore produced a generation that is “synced” (pardon the pun) with its environment.15 Burstein adds that, aside from their surface technophilia, his own generation is also characterized by its collection of “pragmatic optimists” whose skepticism about “the system” does not preclude them from attempting to effect change from within.16 Therefore, it seems that the Millennials possess a hope for a better future, and a faith in their own ingenuity to make it so, that they do not seem to be diminished by a sensationalist press that likes to remind them of how bleak their future appears to be.17 They also seem to be aware of their difference from previous generations. Case in point: A student whose article appeared in March of 2014 in The Daily Californian at the University of California, Berkeley, defines rather smugly what it is that makes his generation unique: simply put, “we have access to more information than anyone else has ever had in the history of ever.”18 This lightly-phrased assessment is both easily observed and affirmed: Millennials have the entire world available for download, and nearly always have. The amount of information available to the general public at the present moment is unprecedented. Millennials are aware of this fact, but they are not aware of it as difference – that is, they have no previous experience of what it was like to live without that surfeit of easilyaccessible information. Their primary experience of the world has been made available through technology, but technology has also mediated this 15

David D. Burstein. 2013. Fast Future: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaping Our World (Boston: Beacon Press), 52. 16 Burstein. 2013. Fast Future, 6. 17 See, for example, Jordan Weissman. 2014. “Indisputable Evidence That Millennials Have It Worse Than Any Generation in 50 Years,” The Atlantic, http://m.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/indisputable-evidence-thatmillennials-have-it-worse-than-any-generation-in-50-years/283752/. 18 Jacob Leonard. 2014. “Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation: The Millennial Meltdown,” The Daily Californian, http://www.dailycal.org/2014/03/06/talkinbout-generation/.

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experience. Being aware of difference, of a “before” the tech explosion and an “after” the normalization of technological innovation, would provide Millennials with a sense of long-range history with regard to technology, of our evolution as a Post-Industrial society. For the Millennials, “progress” is generational—it is measured in the lightningfast iterations of commercial products. The author of the article in The Daily Californian blithely mentions the difficult decision-making process of deciding between an iPhone 4 and an iPhone 5.19 The short spans of these generations, planned obsolescence, and the disposable nature of innovation: it would be hard to believe that these characteristics of twentieth century life do not and will not have long-term effects on the way Millennials confront both their present and their future.

The Millennials’ Romance with Dystopia This perpetual orientation toward the future, rather than the past, has likely played a large role in why science fiction as a genre has gained momentum with the Millennials. This could not possibly be more accurate with regard to dystopian science fiction in particular, which has found rich soil in the twenty-first century. Perhaps due to the Y2K (the year two thousand) paranoia that ushered in the new millennium with visions of technological disaster, or the actual disaster of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in September of 2001, or the continuous wars being fought in the Middle East and the (un)civil political wars being fought in the United States—any or all of these could have contributed to the proliferation of a very active, very real, and very popular collection of dystopian fiction and film. The force driving the popularity of much of this literature and cinema has come from the Millennials. A rash of recent articles in Slate, The Guardian, The New Statesman, The New Yorker, and The New York Times have all commented on the popularity of dystopia among teenagers.20

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Leonard. 2014. “Talking ‘Bout My Generation.” See Charles McGrath. 2011. “Teenage Wastelands,” The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/magazine/20FOB-WWLN-t.html?_r=1&. See also Laura Miller. 2010. “Fresh Hell,” The New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/06/14/100614crat_atlarge_mil ler. Also Laurie Penny. 2014. “No Wonder Teens Love Stories About Dystopias They Feel Like They're in One,” The New Statesman, http://www.newstatesman.com/2014/03/no-wonder-teens-love-stories-aboutdystopian-futures-they-feel-they-re-heading-one. Additionally Dana Stevens, 2014. “Why Teens Love Dystopias,” Slate,

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Dystopia, for young adults, is rooted in the present culture in the United States, as well as the experience of adolescence, and its popularity is undeniable. Its incarnation at present shares many of the characteristics of earlier dystopias, as well as a heightened focus on class and survival, the oppression of individuality, and forced conformity (for example, The Hunger Games, Divergent, and The Uglies, respectively). 21 Contemporary theories about the popularity of dystopia suggest that they are consumed greedily because they are an emotional echo-chamber for the struggles of adolescence. 22 As the title of an article that appeared in The New Statesman stated, “No wonder teens love stories about dystopias—they feel like they're in one.”23 Setting the torture of adolescence aside, many of these dystopian stories are set in the (perhaps not so very distant), post-apocalyptic future. The current dystopias’ precedents in Orwellian Newspeak and GroupThink, or Atwood's abusive theocracy, among others, have given way to a seemingly collective morbid fascination with bleak futures, quite the opposite of those studies that state that this generation is characterized by its optimism.24 The popularity of dystopian fiction among this group, as well as the growing dominance of science fiction in film, television, in addition to narrative fiction, testifies to the fact that there is a curiosity about the future among the Millennials, who also arguably drive the pop culture market now.25 While it is tempting to view the popularity of http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2014/03/divergent_starring_shailene_wo odley_and_the_hunger_games_why_teens_love.html. And finally Rosamund Urwin, “Divergent: Why Dystopia Rules for Teenagers,” London Evening Standard (2014), http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/film/divergent-whydystopia-rules-for-teenagers-9220778.html. 21 The aforementioned series of books were published in the first decade of the 2000s, during the teen years of many Millennials. They only recently are being brought into film, which is allowing the next (as-yet-unnamed) post-Millennial generation to participate in the trends of an earlier Zeitgeist. 22 Urwin, “Divergent: Why Dystopia Rules for Teenagers.” http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/film/divergent-why-dystopia-rules-forteenagers-9220778.html. 23 Penny, “No Wonder Teens Love Stories About Dystopias – They Feel Like They're in One.” http://www.newstatesman.com/2014/03/no-wonder-teens-lovestories-about-dystopian-futures-they-feel-they-re-heading-one. 24 See Burstein and Chamber of Commerce. 25 See William Strauss, Neil Howe, and Peter George Markiewicz. 2006. Millennials and the Pop Culture: Strategies for a New Generation of Consumers in Music, Movies, Television, the Internet, and Video Games (Great Falls, VA: Life Course Associates).

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dystopia among the Millennials as an expression of fear, despair, or pessimism, it seems more likely that what is attractive is the catharsis that these dystopias allow; in other words, the current popularity of dystopia in film and in literature is not necessarily coming from a negativity about the future, but rather a dissatisfaction with the present and the consequent need for the involuntary purging of a generation's frustration with a society that is arguably failing them in the areas of economics, politics, and education. Dystopia as a purging of suppressed fears of the future would explain its popularity among Millennials, and what is noteworthy about that possibility is that it would provide the basis for future activism and change. By inspiring the desire to avoid a diseased future at all costs, dystopias can generate an impulse for an actionable present.26 The continuing popularity of dystopia in literature and film gestures towards its dynamism as a trope, and its openness. Many dystopias in fiction and film refuse to fully close their narrative cycle, leaving readers and viewers with open endings (and perhaps open mouths) that either imply a sequel, or that prompt the reader/audience to think further, issued as “calls to awake the present from its wrongdoings and catastrophic pathways.”27 Does this callto-action hold true with earlier works of dystopian science fiction such as Metropolis?

Metropolis and Today’s Dystopia: Critical Questions In Metropolis, the “central dystopian novum” is a cityscape which is “a synecdoche for the city's radically inegalitarian social structure,” one which portends the coming of a technocratic future that is arguably presently arriving.28 Metropolis imagines a future in which the technocracy has dominated society and created a new upper class that lives among the towers and the elevated highways of a soaring city. The citizens of 26

This positing of a desire for an actionable present emerges from my reading of Tom Moylan’s work, in which he states that science fiction dystopias in literature “teach their readers not only about the world around them, but also about the openended ways in which texts such as the one in front of their eyes can both elucidate that world and help to develop the critical capacity of people to know, challenge, and change those aspects of it that deny or inhibit the further emancipation of humanity.” Tom Moylan. 2000. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia (Boulder, CO: Westview Press), 199. 27 Sean Redmond. 2013. “Future Almost Lost: Dystopian Science-Fiction Film,” in Dystopia, ed. M. Keith Booker (Ipswich, MA: Salem Press), 273. 28 Andrew Milner. 2012. Locating Science Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), 49.

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Metropolis mimic royalty in that they possess the ability to play, frolic, appreciate beauty, and seek entertainment without an apparent need to work. The upper classes enjoy their bourgeois and quasi-aristocratic pleasures, and the technocrats’ mechanical inventions maintain the city in the sky, ensuring its progression towards an ever-perfect vision of the future. Meanwhile, “Deep below the surface of the Earth,” in the “Depths” (as the film’s intertitles state), the city of the workers offers up thousands of laborers for a new shift every ten hours in order to maintain the MMachine, which lights the city above. 29 Joh Frederson, chief technocrat, thus blatantly exploits the workers to meet the city’s energic needs. However, the labor force is not the only element of which Fredersen takes advantage in Metropolis. In spite of his prowess in administration, praxis, the extension, and the building of Metropolis, Joh Frederson is not one of the pure visionaries of the future. Those visionaries are the (mad) scientists such as Rotwang, whose creativity knows no bounds, and whose genius is equally abused by Joh, just as much as Joh abuses the labor of the workers below. The technocrat, therefore, is depicted in the film as the true villain, in that he is able to profit exclusively from both the imagination and the corporeal strength of his subjects. The technocrat exploits his human resources, and in so doing permits the existence of an entire class of privileged citizens whose sole work is to seek pleasure. The discord between classes is inevitable, considering the grotesque inequality that the film depicts. In the simplistic analogy that the film offers, the technocrat is the “head” and the workers are the “hands,” and the mediator between them must be the “heart,” which is synonymous with social conscience and communal responsibility. The ending of the film brings Freder, the son of the chief technocrat, into the role of “mediator.” After near apocalypse brought on by the revolting worker class, which is incited to riot by an evil cyborg—Maria, created by the mad scientist Rotwang— Freder brings the two factions, the chief technocrat and the chief worker, together and forces a handshake between them.30 The film closes with labor and management making peace, and no sign is given as to what effect the revolt has had, if any. It stands to reason, then, that Freder is a hero of reconciliation, not change. The impression that the film leaves as it ends is that political relations (and the kingdom) have been reestablished, not necessarily altered for the better. This rather inadequate ending stifles all conversation and debate, basically dead-ending the film by positing a 29

Fritz Lang. 2010. Metropolis, (New York: Kino International). This occurs after Freder kills Rotwang, because madness has no other solution, it would seem.

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heroic savior from the ruling class that restores order. Dissimilarly, in terms of current trends in dystopian fiction, there is penchant for strong heroes, hard-won triumph, and clear moral message. This is not the case in Metropolis, whose wholly inexplicable conclusion defies all possibility of justification. Metropolis’ ending seems to be an aborted call-to-action, a moment of “[backing] away from its nihilistic vision” in order to proclaim a hero and thereby scuttle all debate about whether there can ever be a just society.31 The frustration of the debate about social justice, the lack of a strong hero: Is this a film that could even be palatable to Millennials who generally prefer their heroes as hard-boiled underdogs who win against all odds? Reading students’ responses to discussions about the future, about image, and about the message of Metropolis, I ask if the film’s dystopic vision of the future continues to provoke both wonder and fear among a group of students who have been raised on dystopian science fiction, with ubiquitous technology, and who have never known (or only vaguely remember) the previous “analog” civilization. Is Metropolis still perceptible as a fully-fictive dystopia by Millennials, and is its vision of the future still only to be imagined, not realized? Do these young people see themselves in it, and if so, what is it about this film that provokes that moment of anagnorisis, in which that future imagined by our predecessors is recognized as our very own present? Or do they deflect Metropolis’ dystopic vision towards an even more distant future? Of course, the largest question to ask is: Is this current reality a dystopia in and of itself and if so, can it be recognized from within? This is a titillating question, but likely it misleading: dystopias are to be, as stated above, imagined, not realized, or at least so we hope. However, that does not mean they do not inspire reflection, even action, in the hopes of warding off an undesirable future society.

Methodology and Materials In order to address these questions in concrete terms, I now turn to the responses offered by my students in several collective forums that were assigned after they viewed Metropolis. These pertained to two classes that I taught: one in 2011 at the University of California, Berkeley, and the other in 2013 at Idaho State University. I must note that I presented the film to these students in two very different critical contexts. The first 31

Tom Gunning. 2000. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (London: British Film Institute), 77.

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group from UC Berkeley, was engaged with the film as a part of a class on ecocritical approaches to cultural production, mostly in the Spanishspeaking world (I am a Hispanist, after all). The students were concerned with issues such as urban development, modernization, and posthumanism; as an introduction to the concerns of urban life, we viewed Metropolis as part of our discussion about the issues surrounding the city, its problems and its explosive expansion in the twentieth century. These led into further discussions about modernization, and worries associated with unchecked technological proliferation. The class at Berkeley read as their companion pieces Donna Haraway's “Cyborg Manifesto” and (for historical context) F. T. Marinetti's “The Futurist Manifesto.” We watched the film over a series of four classes, overlapping with a reading of the book La Venus mecánica (1929) by José Díaz Fernández. The combination of the critical essays, Díaz’s novel and Metropolis animated discussions about the nature of the spaces in which discourses of technology, social class, gender, and the environment intersect and often clash. The second class, taught at Idaho State University (ISU) in 2013, watched the film in a more traditional literary-cultural, historical context, that of twentieth century modernism. There was no singular critical/theoretical lens with which to interpret the film as there was in Berkeley, other than the question of how technology revolutionized both daily life and artistic expression in the first third of the twentieth century, and how this was expressed in Modernist aesthetics. I did not teach Metropolis at ISU in a critical vacuum, however: in preparation for viewing the film, Idaho State students were asked to read selections from Marx and Engels The Communist Manifesto, William Morris’ “Useful Work versus Useless Toil,” selections from Thorstein Velben’s The Theory of the Leisure Class, and Dziga Vertov’s “A Kino-Eye Discussion.”32 I also encouraged them to draw on their previous exposure to Georg Simmel's “The Metropolis and Mental Life” when assessing their impressions of Fritz Lang’s futuristic vision of the city and its subterranean machine-world. Needless to say, the differing critical presentation of the film shifted the focus of the students' written reactions to the film. The discussion questions I presented to my class at UC Berkeley in the forums had two distinct implications: one personal and one cultural. The first, to be referred to from here on as “Foro X” posed the following question:

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All of these documents were made available to the students through the following text: Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou, eds., 1998. Modernism an Anthology of Sources and Documents (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).

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Chapter Five What does the word ‘future’ mean? Is the future in itself something that can be achieved, or is it only an imaginary, ideal thing: a goal, an objective? Is it possible that the images of the future tell us more about the present and/or the past than the future itself? After viewing Metropolis: What vision of the ‘future’ does the film present to us, and is it that [,] in part [,] this vision has been realized [in the present]?33

The subsequent forum (Foro XI) dealt specifically with the film, asking which images in the film most resonated with the students: There are many aspects of this film Metropolis upon which we could comment. I would like you to choose a scene, an image, a character, or a technical aspect of the film that particularly caught your attention, and situate it within our discussions about the city and technology.

I posed a similar question (which I will refer to as Forum 1) to the ISU students (in English): Of the many poignant images and/or scenes in Metropolis, which was most striking to you and why? What significance and/or meaning did it have that allowed you to understand the film more deeply?

Following that, in what I will refer to as Forum 2, I asked them to comment on the moral of Metropolis: What do you believe is the meaning of the phrase ‘The mediator between head and hands must be the heart’? Who represents the ‘heart’ in the film, and what is his/her purpose? How do you interpret this statement politically?

Clearly, the focuses of these forums vary to some degree. The Berkeley forums were couched in a discourse of temporality and the conflicts between technology and nature in an urban setting, whereas the ISU forums dealt more specifically with a personal reaction and a political/ historical interpretation. As is to be expected, the responses at the two universities differed in general with regard to the basic formulations of their responses. Within the boundaries of each group of students, though, there was a remarkable consistency in the responses. Overarching trends emerged, especially in the Berkeley class, which was comprised of 31 33

All of these forums for the class at UC Berkeley were written and answered in Spanish. I will be providing here accurate translations of what the students said in their original posts, with occasional corrections for grammar.

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students, compared to only two at ISU. I have chosen to focus on the presence of four distinct themes in my students’ responses, ones that reflect the extant critical literature on Metropolis. These themes are: gender and sexuality; technology and the future; man and machine; and the interpretation of Metropolis’ final “message” by the students. In the following section, I will be examining scholars’ arguments regarding Metropolis, and aligning them with students’ output in the aforementioned forums. The Millennials, as will be indicated, always retain the potential for deep insight, and frequently enough, for mild surprise.

Analysis: Student Reactions to Metropolis Theme One: Gender and Sexuality The character of Maria in particular got my attention, especially the duality that she has in the film. Primarily her name sounded biblical to me and at the beginning of the [film] she is presented as a gracious and virginal woman, protector of children, or, better said, the future. But she is copied by Rotwang and made into a machine-woman, and the character of her double is corrupt… and the woman ends up inciting violence among the men. For me this reflects the problem with the woman as Madonna or whore that existed in the 1920s. Also, it was interesting to me that the mechanical version of Maria was represented as the biblical image of the dragon with seven heads in Revelation, which is the symbol of Satan, definitively comparing technology with spiritual corruption.34

Criticism of gender in Metropolis tends to focus on the contrast between the virginal, spiritual, human Maria and the licentious, sexual, mechanical Maria. In the foundational 1981 essay by Andreas Huyssen, “The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang's Metropolis,” the author explains how female sexuality, embodied by the machinewoman Maria, addresses not only man's desire to dominate and control women, but also modernist fears about the dangers of technology. Huyssen states that “the machine vamp... embodies the unity of an active and destructive female sexuality and the destructive potential of technology”: sexuality and technology in Metropolis are purposefully entangled in order to express a complex societal anxiety about loss of control to the Other.35 Janet Lungstrum further discusses how Metropolis explores this filmic 34

Student K, 2011. Foro XI, UC Berkeley. Andreas Huyssen. 1981. “The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang's Metropolis,” New German Critique (24/25), 233.

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conflation of women and the machine: The Otherness of woman and the Otherness of technology produce terror for the patriarchy who learn quickly that “no matter how much programming goes on, woman and machine refuse to be man's perfect creations.”36 Additionally, later articles by Barbara Hales have historicized the issue of gender and female sexuality within the context of Weimar culture, demonstrating how representations of the “Neue Frau” of the 1920s—viably employed, economically powerful, and sexually liberated—expressed the anxieties about the decay of traditional values, and fears about the future.37 These analyses also all delve into the issue of the male gaze, with particular interest in the dance sequence that takes place at the pleasure palace of Yoshiwara, where the robot Maria does her seductive dance, a scene that cuts from Maria’s gyrating figure to the lustful gazes of the men who watch her. The male gaze is here multiplied at first, and the eyes of many of the spectators create a kaleidoscopic montage of male lust, which then reduces to the image of the single eye, implying that of many men, there is only one view, and one sole desire, with a singular object: Maria. The scene seems to suggest that the intensity of the gaze of the multiple spectators is concentrated into the super-saturated gaze of a singular, prototypical Male. Maria reduces men to their primary desire, making them indistinguishable from one another. It follows also that many of these analyses tend to allude to or address directly the psychoanalytical aspects of Maria and her double, fears of castration and the frustration and repression of sexual desire figure prominently in the article by Huyssen and Lungstrum. The Huyssen, Lungstrum and Hales essays are analytically and theoretically very sophisticated, demonstrative of scholarly writing and an intense specialization in film and Germanistik, exploring the murky depths of women’s sexuality, patriarchal oppression, the complicated/complicating historical context of Weimar Germany, and the complexities of Freudian analysis. The singular figure of Maria manages to embody many of the oppositional discourses of modernism and modernity—so many, in fact, that it seems to muddy the clarity of her presence in the film. What is more problematic than the density of Maria’s character, however, is simply a 36 Janet Lungstrum. 1997. “Metropolis and the Technosexual Woman of German Modernity,” in Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed. Katherina von Ankum (Berkeley: University of California Press), 130. 37 See Barbara Hales. 2010. “Dancer in the Dark: Hypnosis, Trance-Dancing, and Weimar's Fear of the New Woman,” Monatshefte (102:4). See also 2010. “Taming the Technological Shrew: Woman as Machine in Weimar Culture,” Neophilologus (94:2).

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question of number: Maria is the only significant female presence in the film. At UC Berkeley, this was very quickly noted in the forums. In a state of incredulity, Student B asked bluntly in Foro XI, “Where are the women?” The question about the absence of women was posed by Student B in response to a classmate’s post titled “Grace and Beauty in Industrial Society.” In this post, Student A discussed the machine Maria's lack of “warmth,” which they associate with the general problematic of the urban, industrial world. Student A states, “in this scene, the lack of warmth is associated with rapidity and productivity. Thus, woman as the object of the production of pleasure loses her grace and warmth in order to submerge herself in the emptiness of what we would classify in this context as a frivolous humanity.”38 Student C, relating to Student A, further polemicized this absence of “warmth” or “tenderness” as a frame for upholding the patriarchal duality regarding women: tenderness and nurturing belong to the pure virgin/maternal figure, while the lack of these qualities signals the presence of the opposite image of the prostitute or vamp. Both Student A and Student C see that the machine-Maria, in her coldness, frustrates the expectations of womanhood, while also enforcing the false duality of virgin/whore, a theme which had already surfaced in the forums through Student K’s comment (see epigraph above). Despite the sophistication of the responses of Students A, C, and K it is Student B’s question that, despite its simplicity, I find to be much more compelling. It displays a preoccupation with gender that extends beyond its hyperactive presence in the form of Maria and her machine double, to its telling absence in the rest of the film. Student B’s realization that Maria is essentially the only female presence in the movie that has any weight is indicative of the inheritance of the feminist movements of the 20th century. Asking where the women are demonstrates an awareness of gender as a crucial part of society. Second-wave feminism of the 1960s and 70s drew attention to the lack of positive images of women in literature, and the dearth of positive rolemodels for women in cultural production as a whole. By the 1990s, when the Millennials were gaining consciousness of the world around them, the struggles of early feminism had been fought and arguably won (at least to a degree), and the desire for visibility and a frank awareness of the female reality had, at least superficially, been realized.

38

Reminder that these are translations from Spanish into English, with the utmost attention to accuracy.

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The general feeling by the turn of the century was that the gender wars were at least superficially over, and that we had entered a post-feminist society. Young adults in the 1990s and the early 2000s would have been aware of women as a fundamental component of society, and also abstractly (rather than experientially) cognizant of the historical oppression of women. By asking “Where are the women?,” Student B discovers their postfeminist position, wherein s/he looks at the image, but sees absence instead, issuing a direct cry against the oppression of women through omission, and awakening to the fact that women have not always been as present or as valued in society as they (arguably) are today. In this student’s moment of anagnorisis, s/he sees that equality, even in the form of mere visibility, is not something to be taken as given. It is a moment of an awakening into history. The topic of gender, its social expression, and its manifestations in culture, is still one of vital interest both in intellectual debates and in our quotidian lives. Concerns about gender equality continue to be present in our daily debates about the global future. I find it interesting, then, that as I was doing my research for this section on Millennials and feminism, my searches turned up very little worthwhile material. I would like to make note of the fact that much of the literature on Millennials is written from a male perspective: issues of entrepreneurship, marketing, politics, religion, social relations, and technology form the bulk of the analysis of the Millennial demographic. I was hard-pressed to find anything “official” that dealt with Millennial attitudes towards gender; most of what exists regarding this topic can only be found on websites and in forums that can hardly be considered “credible sources.” With regard to the books and articles, the only time the authors even mention gender, it is in correlation with attitudes towards family, marriage, and reproductive rights. Yet, gender equality is still a pressing concern: why is this not reflected generously in the literature on Millennials? Just like Student B, I must also ask (rather indignantly, at that): Where are the women?

Theme Two: Technology and the Future I think the word “future” says more to us about the ideals and fears of the present than of a time that is actually going to come to pass. Since there aren’t many people who believe in the capacity to predict events with accuracy, the “future” is a space that we imagine in order to propose our desires and our concerns that are based on our current reality. It seems to me that Metropolis is an example of utilizing the concept of the future in this way in order to express fears about the technocracy in 1927 when the mechanization of daily life was advancing to the point where people were

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afraid that the machine would dominate human beings. I don’t know if we can say right now if this vision has been realized or not, since this version of the “future” only makes sense in the context of 1927. Nonetheless, I believe that the worries about mechanization and technocracy continue in some form in our time, thus the “future” that we are constructing now does resonate a lot with the human-machines and the mad scientists imagined by Metropolis.39

The next question I had about the Millennials’ response to Metropolis was whether these “digital natives,” supposedly possessed of an innate ability to intuit new technologies, would be willing to reflect upon and critique the power of technology to both change life and corrupt it. The generation’s characteristic optimism is reflected in the statement that “many of the smartest Millennials believe that their generation is capable of redefining society's relationship to technology.”40 It would seem that the previous generations’ negative projections of a society characterized by its slavish dependence on technology do not coincide with Millennials feelings about the same. Overall, the Millennials’ assessment of technology and daily life demonstrates the fact that they were raised with it from early on, if not the very beginning; it also suggests that Millennials will be instrumental in addressing and ameliorating older generations’ skepticism and pessimism about the role of technology in society. With their technological giftedness, combined with enthusiasm and a sense of a global community enhanced by social media, Millennials more often than not see connectedness as a good thing. This is not to say that the Millennials do not have concerns about technology. In the critical discussion about the future in Foro X, though the word technology was not explicitly mentioned, eleven of the thirty-one students in the Berkeley class brought up the topic of our dependence on technology after viewing Metropolis in class: a full third of the class made the direct connection between Metropolis’ future and their present. Many critics have tended to emphasize the internal dissonance within Metropolis’ meditation on technology, saying that it is a reflection of Fritz Lang’s “conflicted and equivocal views of twentieth-century technology and mechanization.”41 The contradictory stance takes into account the hopes for a well-designed and efficient modernity, yet also exposes the 39

Student N, 2011. Foro X, UC Berkeley. Strauss, Howe, and Markiewicz. 2006. Millennials and the Pop Culture: Strategies for a New Generation of Consumers in Music, Movies, Television, the Internet, and Video Games, 29. 41 Julie Wosk. 2010. “Metropolis,” Technology and Culture Technology and Culture (51:2), 404. 40

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darker side of the mass implementation of technology: the exploited worker upon whose hard labor the life of privilege relies. This internal conflict regarding the power of technology to both better society and also exert a tremendous toll was not only a characteristic of Fritz Lang’s attitude—it also characterizes the responses of those students in the Berkeley class who named technology as the primary feature that will determine the nature of our incipient future. To better understand my students’ responses to Metropolis’ ambivalent presentation of a technologically advanced future, I tagged all my students responses with certain keywords present in their answers. While looking at Foro X, which deals explicitly with the future, I cross-referenced the tag “technology” with several other common traits, also tagged: “hope,” “fear,” and “change,” among others. Findings revealed a relatively balanced attitude towards the future, and a healthy awareness of our increasing dependence on technology. In the first pairing of tags, I chose to investigate the interaction of “technology” and “fear” in the Berkeley forums. Students D, F, and H had insightful comments into the relationship between these two elements and our collective projections of the future. All three students, after their initial comments about their personal ideas about the future, mention a simple fact: that our projections of the future (and our associated fears) are based in the present. In the words of Student D: “Our present hopes and fears are reflected in the construction of this concept [of the future].” Similarly, Student H concludes that “with the film Metropolis, we can see the fear of the future and the bad things that can happen if the future forgets about the people.” In other words, all of our big dreaming about a better world actually has the potential to marginalize huge sectors of the population as we pursue that “better tomorrow.” In addition to commenting on the role of the present in determining our vision of the future, there was also a tendency to discuss issues of the control of technology, and the loss of it. Critics Julie Wosk, Michael Cowan, and Andreas Huyssen have discussed how control is one of the main themes in Metropolis—the exertion of control over the robot [mechanical] Maria by Rotwang and Joh Frederson, the robot [mechanical] Maria’s control over the men over the city who lust after her,42 and the subsequent loss of all control as both proletariat and upperclass men fall under her spell which incites chaos. In this way, the robot [mechanical] Maria, as Julie Wosk phrases it, is “an evil being 42

See Michael Cowan. 2007. “The Heart Machine: ‘Rhythm’ and Body in Weimar Film and Fritz Lang's Metropolis,” Modernism/modernity (14:2), 242.

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representing science and technology out of control.” 43 The robot [mechanical] Maria—the conflation of technology, otherness, and unchecked desire—is “a threat to male authority and control”: the genie in the bottle, so to speak.44 Interestingly enough, these students, in a parallel with the aforementioned criticism, related the fears about technology to an anxiety in the film about losing control of the same: Student D comments that “In Metropolis the future is the incarnation of this society’s fears about the advances of technology. In many ways, the film represents the fear of loss of control.” Student F’s comment is similar, stating bluntly that Metropolis plainly “represents the fear of loss of control over technology.” But if we have these fears of loss of control, what of our hopes? The Millennials are purported to be optimists, so how do they extract hope from a dystopian future? Not many critics have discussed the presence of optimism in Metropolis, but these young students, when discussing the question “What does the word ‘Future’ mean?” manage to extract the possibility of a world constructed on our most noble efforts and desires. Student K takes a wide historical view: “I think that the future connotes the hopes of a generation, and the goals that they want to achieve. For me, the collective vision of the future indeed says more about the present and the past because it determines the inspiration that innovation will have and has had.” Despite the somewhat convoluted syntax, Student K is essentially trying to say that the future inspires innovation in the present, and launches us in pursuit of those goals. S/he goes on to mention that past inventions, such as the car, the airplane, and the train “gave flight to the imagination and the possibilities that technology would have in the future.” In a much more direct fashion, Student I begins with the essential answer of an optimist: “The future gives us the hope that things have the possibility of getting better.” However Student I’s vision darkens, and the optimism is replaced by self-awareness: society has become too dependent on technology. Student I takes more of a glib tone with their assessment, though. “It is important to have a cell phone,” says Student I, “you can arrange a wine list on your iPad, and when you get on BART, you see that we all have our headphones on. Technology makes our world turn.” Students D and F take a more serious tone, criticizing the way in which we have come to rely so heavily on technology: “People’s dependence on their phones and their computers is astounding” says Student F, after 43

Wosk. 2010. “Metropolis.” Huyssen. 1981. “The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang's Metropolis,” 226.

44

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remarking how quickly new products are launched on the market. Meanwhile, Student D comments that our dependence on technology shows that the prognostications of the future presented in Metropolis have, at least in part, come to pass. Millennials know what it means to be plugged in, they are aware of their dependence on and their romance with technology, with new products, and their collective acceptance of planned obsolescence. Viewing Metropolis exposed this group of young people to how the visceral anxiety about the power of technology in its earlier, explosive stage of development could in turn be sublimated into art. This aesthetic reimagining of our fears continues to be the mechanism for the displacement of unease about technology, or rather, the future itself. Our tie to the machines that support us is vital, nearly symbiotic in the sense that we have merged with our technology in such a way that it would be impossible to live without it. We are all now –with our iPads and our ear buds – what Donna Haraway has theorized as our posthuman condition where nature has merged with machine.45 Haraway’s “cyborg” is the contemporary formulation of what Fritz Lang imagined as “The Machine Man”: part human, part machine—the prototypical cyborg is the robot Maria. Not a miracle of human ingenuity: rather, she is an efficient path to total destruction.

Theme Three: Machine/Man Even though [Metropolis] is a film about technology, man is seen as a machine in himself. The scene which stood out most for me was when the son traded jobs with the [worker] and had to move the hands of the clock. The man had to constantly move the hands of the clock and it was a very difficult job to maintain. . . . Without man’s hands and his labor, the machines would not work. The irony of how the machine, as powerful as it is, still depends on man is very interesting to me.46

Ludmilla Jordanova, in her essay “Science, Machines, and Gender” discusses three prevalent themes at the center of Metropolis’ denselynetworked, anxiety-ridden plot: “fear of machines; the creation of artificial

45

See Donna Haraway. 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge). 46 Student L 2011. Foro XI, UC Berkeley.

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‘man,’ and the ‘mad’ scientist.”47 These three elements are the brick-andmortar of Metropolis, and therefore it stands to reason that of my students at both Berkeley and ISU, when asked to recall which image had the most resonance for them individually, most responded with a scene or character that participates in Jordanova’s taxonomy. I had expected—considering the reading we had done of Haraway at Berkeley—that the “MachineMan” would be the most popular image among the students, but it was not. The one student who chose to comment on the “Machine-Man” did so beautifully, however. This student wrote in his/her very eloquent response (which I quote here in its entirety) that the element of the Machine-Man interested her: . . . because it consists of a combination of rather ambiguous characteristics that vacillate between the human, the technological, and the imagined. In a way, it is fundamentally and totally a machine, since at its birth as much as in its death one can see its metallic interior. Nonetheless, in order to work, it needs Maria’s face, Rotwang’s hand, and something else undefined (perhaps the soul?) from Hel. In addition, Rotwang’s imagination and innovation are required in order to even think of combining technology and humanity in such an extreme manner. When the amalgamation of technology and the human is catalyzed in this way by the ideals of a mad scientist, a fatal power emerges as a result that almost destroys the city. The Machine Man perhaps represents the vision of a rather apocalyptic telos of the city in which the city itself, through the unrestrained technological innovation of mankind, causes its own end.48

No one else chose to comment on the complexity of the “Machine-Man” in such a direct fashion, though two other students did take up the topic of Rotwang. In Student R’s estimation, Rotwang inhabits a liminal space that is neither past, present, nor future, and he also mediates (in his own way) the connection between the workers and Joh Fredersen in that his house serves as a conduit to the catacombs. The idea of Rotwang as the actual mediator of the film is surprisingly insightful, adding depth to the more traditional interpretation of Rotwang as a “Creator-God,” which is Student I’s assessment of the mad scientist. Comparing him to Frankenstein (as does Jordanova),49 Rotwang “is the one who creates the technology that little by little is taking the place of humans.” 47

Ludmilla Jordanova. 2000. “Science, Machines, and Gender,” in Fritz Lang's Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear, ed. Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann (Rochester, NY: Camden House), 183. 48 Student N. 2011. Foro XI, UC Berkeley. 49 Jordanova. 2000. “Science, Machines and Gender,” 183.

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The idea of the animosity between human and machine fits with Jordanova’s analytic schema of an overwhelming “fear of machines” in Metropolis. She states that the city of Metropolis is powered by machines, which are serviced by the workers and “require constant attention; thus, while both human labor and mechanical power are required to keep Metropolis going, the former are subservient to the latter. The (male) worker must keep up with the machine, and this is unambiguously shown as the source of excessive fatigue over long shifts.”50 The exhaustion of the worker that Jordanova mentions here, the inhumanity of Metropolis’ subterranean torture chamber, these were the images that most resonated with the two groups of students. From the small detail of the clock that has only ten hours for the working class, mentioned by Student J at Berkeley, to the horrific maw of Moloch that swallows workers whole, which was cited by both ISU students as the most resonant image, both classes were very sensitized to the visual representations of exploitation and oppression. Regarding Moloch, the two ISU students were in agreement about the disturbing scene, saying that it was indicative of a “destructive [social] divide.”51 Student 1 responded to the prompt for Forum 1 with the following reaction: The image of Moloch to be the idol to which there is human sacrifice to keep the machines running was the most striking image to me. It was brutal to watch as workers were dragged into the mouth of Moloch in chains to be sacrificed for Metropolis to continue functioning. It presents this image of a sinister society run by the master of Metropolis, Joh Frederson, who is heartless in the extents to which he would go so as to retain the image of Metropolis as a utopian society. This image is parallel to the state that society could very well fall to if we continue in our selfish pursuits without a sense of altruism.52

For those students whose representative image of the film had to do with either the machine, or the exploited worker trying to keep pace with it, there was a deep awareness of the overall dehumanizing vision presented in Metropolis. In the quote which opens this section, Student L puzzles over the way in which humans and machines are still mutually interdependent in the film, noting indirectly that Metropolis, as a city, is not fully automated. Were it fully automated, the city would be inhuman(e), not dehumanizing, and it is the dehumanization of the 50

Jordanova. 2000. “Science, Machines and Gender,” 179. Student 1. 2013. Forum 1, ISU. 52 Student 1. 2013. Forum 1, ISU. 51

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workers in Metropolis that was most unsettling for many students. Student T comments in Foro X abstractly that the future is itself dehumanizing, in that our inventions frequently lead us to our own destruction like the machines in Metropolis. But for the majority of the students who mentioned either the machines in Metropolis, or their weary stewards in uniform, the reaction was much more concrete: the workers’ plight is, in the words of Student E, “tragic.” Student M perhaps summarizes best what is implicit in the answers of the 21 students (out of a total 31) that mentioned the miserable life of the workers of Metropolis: One of the most interesting aspects of the film for me was the first scene showing all of the workers as uniform and equal. It makes me think about the nonexistent difference between them and the machines. All of the machines look the same, and all of the workers look the same. The machines are controlled, and these workers are controlled and disciplined. The machines do not have emotions, and the workers do not show any either. What makes humans human is the fact that they distinguish themselves through their personality, in their appearance, and in their way of thinking. One of the problems of technology that is displayed here is the idea that all of the people working with the machines become equal, because machines dehumanize human beings. We should be careful with the advancement of technology, even if it makes life more efficient, it can also dominate our lives and we can lose sight of what is important.

Both Student M at Berkeley and Student 1 at ISU find horror in the industrial uniformity of action and visual aspect of the workers, as well as their lack of human emotion.53 Their assessments are particularly interesting in that their responses jump immediately to a moralistic conclusion and/or a warning about contemporary society, which provides us with a concrete answer to a few of my previous questions about Millennials’ discernment of a connection between Metropolis’ projected future and their own present. First, Student 1’s answer demonstrates that Metropolis’ dystopia is indeed recognizable as being dangerously proximate to the world we know now. Secondly, it appears that for at least one student, Metropolis’ vision of the future is deflected further into the distance; that is, it has not yet come to pass, but very well could, and quite soon, and we will have no one to blame for it but ourselves if we do not seek now to recover a sense of humanity and implement policies of social justice to address 53

Student 1 (ISU) comments in Forum 1 that “The synchronized movement of the workers also added to this notion of oppression as they looked like dehumanized robots, devoid of feelings, emotions and character.”

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inequalities. Finally, as Student M affirms, it is the part of us that is not defined by technology that makes us most human; in order to remain human, we must not let ourselves be overpowered by the desire for instant gratification and constant convenience. In other words: technology is great, but it could cost us our humanity in the long run. Maybe, they both suggest, we should pay more attention to what our desires could cost us.

Theme Four: The Message As the Student M and Student 1 have noted, Metropolis contains an indirect warning about the dangers of technology. This, however, is not its overt “message” to the viewer. Rather, the film ends rather heavyhandedly with the phrase “Between head and hands must be the heart!” Ostensibly, Metropolis promotes the idea of a humanist reconciliation between the power structures of technocracy and the labor that supports it. As previously mentioned, though, this ending is often muddied by its connection to its historical context, in that critics and audiences alike frequently find the abrupt end of Metropolis to be more or less a prelude to and predictor of National Socialism in Germany. The ending has been denounced as “trite” and simplistic by many, and, as I have stated, it provides no clear pathway as to how to achieve this “reconciliation of exploiter with exploited”.54 The conclusion of the film is so cut-and-dry, so pat, that it leaves the viewer unsatisfied, feeling that the resolution was too easy and that, in essence, nothing has actually changed. As Tom Gunning phrases it, the film ends in a “tepid allegory, one which intentionally or unintentionally seems to self-destruct before our eyes.”55 It is perhaps Metropolis’ weakest moment; still, for all its flaws, it does not diminish the film’s overall importance to the genre of science fiction cinema. The students at Berkeley and ISU were not unaware of the importance of the ending, though their interpretations of the moral message of Metropolis differed greatly. Both ISU students perceived a connection with Nazi Germany and saw the film as being strongly situated in its historical context: Student 2 wrote extensively about connections between Metropolis and National Socialism in the forums and the final paper. Interestingly, Student 1 was inclined to view the ending in a positive light,

54

Milner. 2012. Locating Science Fiction, 168. Gunning. 2000. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity, 78. 55

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interpreting the ending as an appeal for social justice for the working class, saying that: The phrase “The mediator between head and hands must be the heart” represents the need for an egalitarian attitude in society. The “heart” in this film is represented by Freder who [realizes there is] a class of society that lives below his hierarchy of wealth. An egalitarian in essence, he costumes himself as a mere slave of the machine and takes on the meagre tasks of his less fortunate “brothers.” He strives to gain equality for the workers below and equal rights to be treated in a humane manner. . . . This statement…reminds us that there must be mutual dependence as the rich cannot enjoy the fruits of societal advancements without respect and cognition of the proletariat that are constantly working in the background to bring about these progresses in society.56

Student 1 perceived the need for egalitarianism, and in the final paper, based on Forum 2, extended this moral to the present, saying that Metropolis is a call for “impactful change” even in today’s world, which is recognizably similar in its class structure to Metropolis (though admittedly not as extreme). The Berkeley students, however, did not take this hopeful view; rather, they expressed frustration and disappointment in the ending of Metropolis. When one student wrote that the film contains a message that revolt is necessary in order to produce change, three classmates took great issue with that assertion. Student G responded that in essence, the rebellion accomplishes nothing, not a thing changes, and that the masses “exist in order to be manipulated” by elites such as Joh Frederson. Student T states that “the scene when the workers return to their original mechanical motions represents that once again they have been manipulated, and that without a cause [for which to], there is nothing more that they can do because they don’t know how to act without a leader.” Student W adds a subtle inflection about the role of science in the continued oppression of the workers, saying that the revolt “did not liberate them or restore their humanity. Rotwang had programmed the robot [mechanical] Maria to incite the workers to destroy the machines that dominated them and in so doing, he programmed the masses as well.” Finally, in a separate thread, Student F assesses the simplicity of the ending: “Even though the end of the film demonstrates the union of the hands and the head through the heart, and implies that the lives of the workers will improve, Metropolis does not indicate just how this will be achieved.” In sum, there is healthy skepticism among these students about the moral message of Metropolis, 56

Student 1. 2013. Forum 2, ISU.

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and, as with the critical corpus around the film, no easy consensus as to what course of action, if any, the catchy phrase “Between Head and Hands Must Be the Heart” actually proposes.

Conclusion: On the Horizon Metropolis is not a perfect movie, but in the words of one critic, it is “a hoot”: not because of its humor, but because it is brimming with signification, and its eclectic discourses overlap and intermingle in such a way that the film becomes truly labyrinthine.57 Nevertheless, one aspect of the film is perfectly lucid amid the chaos, and that is the complication of the world by technology, and the threat it represents to human autonomy. The questions brought forth by Metropolis still engage us today, ostensibly because we have arrived at a point in our civilization where Fritz Lang’s vision is proving to be more than a little prophetic. This is not to say that our cities literally stand over a hellish underground where brutally exploited workers toil ceaselessly to provide comfort to the upper classes, though as a metaphor, portions of that image ring true. But we are very much indeed reliant on our machines and our gadgets, and are increasingly more so with every shiny new iteration of our e-devices. The question I have explored here is whether the Millennials, a generation that seems to be excessively enamored of technology, would be capable of thinking critically about what it means to be constantly connected, and how much reliance that hyper-connectivity breeds for us as a civilization. The Millennials are a unique breed, and often underestimated, as I hope this brief study has shown. The students I had the privilege to teach at UC Berkeley and at Idaho State University demonstrated to me that they are self-aware and not at all dismissive of the potential for technology to cause just as many problems as it resolves. They are also surprisingly socially conscious individuals: Their overwhelming response to the images of exploitation in Metropolis leads me to believe that this is a generation that has the capacity to effect significant social change, and likely will. Seeing these, their responses to a historical projection of the future, and understanding on a deeper level this generation’s view of the what is on the horizon both for them and for us, should make us all feel at least a little of some of the Millennials’ characteristic, implacable optimism about what is yet to come.

57 Gunning. 2000. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity, 70.

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Works Cited Bergvall, A. 2012. “Apocalyptic Imagery in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.” Literature-Film Quarterly (40:4), 246-57. Booker, M. Keith. 2013. “On Dystopia.” In Critical Insights: Dystopia, edited by M. Keith Booker, 1-15. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press. Burstein, David D. 2013. Fast Future: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaping Our World. Boston: Beacon Press. Cowan, Michael. 2007. “The Heart Mahine: ‘Rhythm’ and Body in Weimar Film and Fritz Lang's Metropolis." Modernism/modernity (14:2), 225-48. Gunning, Tom. 2000. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. London: British Film Institute. Hageman, Andrew. 2012. “Science Fiction, Ecological Futures, and the Topography of Fritz Lang's Metropolis." Ecozon@ (Autumn 3: 2), 5773. Hales, Barbara. 2010. “Dancer in the Dark: Hypnosis, Trance-Dancing, and Weimar's Fear of the New Woman." Monatshefte (Winter 102:4), 534-49. —. 2010. “Taming the Technological Shrew: Woman as Machine in Weimar Culture." Neophilologus (April 1: 94:2), 301-16. Haraway, Donna. 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, andSocialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." In Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149-81. New York: Routledge. Howe, Neil, and William Strauss. 2007. Millennials Go to College: Strategies for a New Generation on Campus: Recruiting and Admissions, Campus Life, and the Classroom. Great Falls, VA: Life Course Associates. Huyssen, Andreas. 1981. "The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang's Metropolis." New German Critique, (24/25), 221-37. Jordanova, Ludmilla. 2000. “Science, Machines, and Gender." In Fritz Lang's Metropolis: Cinematic Visions of Technology and Fear, edited by Michael Minden and Holger Bachmann, 172-95. Rochester, NY: Camden House. Kolocotroni, Vassiliki , Jane Goldman, and Olga Taxidou, eds. 1998. Modernism an Anthology of Sources and Documents. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Lang, Fritz. 2010. Metropolis. New York, New York: Kino International.

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Leonard, Jacob. 2014. “Talkin’ ’Bout My Generation: The Millennial Meltdown.” The Daily Californian. Published electronically March 5. ttp://www.dailycal.org/2014/03/06/talkin-bout-generation/. Lungstrum, Janet. 1997. “Metropolis and the Technosexual Woman of German Modernity.” In Women in the Metropolis: Gender andModernity in Weimar Culture, edited by Katherina von Ankum, 128-44. Berkeley: University of California Press. McGrath, Charles. 2011. “Teenage Wastelands.” The New York Times Published electronically February 19. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/magazine/20FOB-WWLNt.html?_r=1&. Mennel, Barbara Caroline. 2008. Cities and Cinema. London; New York: Routledge. “The Millennial Generation Research Review.” 2012. United States Chamber of Commerce. Miller, Laura. 2010. “Fresh Hell.” The New Yorker. Published electronically June 14. http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/06/14/100614cratl arge_miller. Milner, Andrew. 2004. “Darker Cities: Urban Dystopia and Science Fiction Cinema.” International Journal of Cultural Studies (7: 3),25979. —. 2012. Locating Science Fiction. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Moylan, Tom. 2000. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Penny, Laurie. 2014. “No Wonder Teens Love Stories About Dystopias They Feel Like They're in One.” The New Statesman. Published electronically April 3. http://www.newstatesman.com/2014/03/nowonder-teens-love-stories-about-dystopian-futures-they-feel-they-reheading-one. Redmond, Sean. 2013. “Future Almost Lost: Dystopian Science-Fiction Film.” In Dystopia, edited by M. Keith Booker, 257-74. Ipswich, MA: Salem Press. Rutsky, R. L. 2005. “Metropolis: Between Modernity and Magic.” In Film Analysis: A Norton Reader, edited by R. L. Rutsky and Jeffrey Geiger, 178-95. New York: W.W. Norton. Smith, Erika E. 2012. “The Digital Native Debate in Higher Education: A Comparative Analysis of Recent Literature.” Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology (38: 3).

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Stevens, Dana. 2014. “Why Teens Love Dystopias.” Slate. Published electronically March 21. http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/movies/2014/03/divergent_starring_ shailene_woodley_and_the_hunger_games_why_teens_love.html. Strauss, William, Neil Howe, and Peter George Markiewicz. 2006. Millennials and the Pop Culture: Strategies for a New Generation of Consumers in Music, Movies, Television, the Internet, and Video Games. Great Falls, VA: Life Course Associates. Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press. Thompson, Derek. 2014. “Study: Millennials Deeply Confused About Their Politics, Finances, and Culture.” The Atlantic. Published electronically March 7. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/03/studymillennials-deeply-confused-about-their-politics-finances-andculture/284277/. Urwin, Rosamund. 2014. “Divergent: Why Dystopia Rules for Teenagers.” London Evening Standard. Published electronically April 4. http://www.standard.co.uk/goingout/film/divergent-why-dystopiarules-for-teenagers-9220778.html. Weissman, Jordan. 2014. “Indisputable Evidence That Millennials Have It Worse Than Any Generation in 50 Years.” The Atlantic. Published electronically February 11. http://m.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/02/indisputableevidence-that-millennials-have-it-worse-than-any-generation-in-50years/283752/. Wosk, Julie. 2010. “Metropolis.” Technology and Culture Technology and Culture (51: 2), 403-08. —. 2010. “Update on the Film Metropolis.” Technology and Culture (51:4), 1061-62.

CHAPTER SIX CAUGHT IN THE TIME STREAM BENJAMIN DELLOIACONO

In 2007, a World War II veteran was assassinated on the steps of a Washington D.C. courthouse. Two years later, in 2009, the world’s greatest detective was murdered during the course of a homicide investigation. These stories were not widely covered by national media as the tragic deaths of a heroic soldier and a fearless cop but rather as the seeming end of long standing American brand names: the assassinated veteran here being Captain American and the murdered detective being Batman. While these deaths may have been initially shocking, they were not permanent. As lucrative brands integral to the economic success of separate publishing houses, Marvel for Captain America and DC for Batman, it would only be a matter of time before these characters would resurface. The American zeitgeist, to say the least, of American capitalism, would demand the inevitable return of these touchstones of pop-culture. This was to be expected; however, what was most shocking was how similarly each character’s respective death and resurrection occurred: Both Captain America and Batman are shot and “killed” by guns, both bodies somehow disappear, each character’s sidekick then picks up the mantle and replaces/becomes his mentor, and both characters survive death by being “trapped in the time stream.” Although readers would have to wait until 2010 for Captain America: Reborn1 and The Return of Bruce Wayne2 to see these heroes facing the “…ultimate challenge… versus history itself” the verisimilitude is made all the more significant given the synchronous publication. What makes an 1

Brubaker, Ed, Bryan Hitch, and Jackson Guice. 2010. Captain America Reborn (New York, NY: Marvel Comics). Original publication dates: July 2009 – January 2010. 2 Grant Morrison, Bob Kane, and Chris Sprouse. 2011. Batman & Robin: The Return of Bruce Wayne: The Deluxe Edition (New York: DC Comics). Original publication dates: May – November 2010.

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examination of these graphic novels a crucial piece within a contemporary secular narrative is their presence within the zeitgeist. Charles Taylor’s seminal work, A Secular Age,3 maps out the history and philosophy of Western religion from the sixteenth- to the twenty-first century and maintains throughout the text that secularization cannot be contained in a myopic view of faith versus no-faith but rather is a story positing that “how we got here is inextricably bound up with our account of where we are.”4 Ultimately the study of secularization is fashioned by the history of nuances and vagaries found in an evolving understanding of identity while grounded in the living present. Here, Captain America and Batman become more than just pop-culture revisions adding to the greater secular narrative; they are a self-reading and affirmation of the secularization process itself as it unfolds in the twenty-first century.

Conditions of Belief for Superheroes As secular criticism begins to enter the sphere of literary theory, the driving question appears to be “Is the novel secular?” Carried over into the realm of graphic novels, specifically the superhero genre, the answer becomes, unequivocally, yes. This, however, is not without its complications. To label something as ‘secular,’ especially a form of art, is a political choice; likewise in a twenty-first century public discussion it is a political choice to claim belief in the miracles of Christ. The prevailing contemporary dialogue surrounding the rudimentary polemics of secularism seems to then insist upon a crass “faith versus no-faith” understanding with a leaning toward the latter part of the binary; however, the vehicles of art and Literature do not allow for such absolutes. Applying the superlative of ‘secular’ denotes a certain openness to interpretation and ambiguity. So how does this work in a genre whose form is based solely on moral absolutes? Superman is good; The Joker is bad. The terms of discussion then need to be altered as secularism is not “this or that” but rather a process recognizing choices, the study of which usually requires a historical perspective centered in the living present. Setting the focus upon graphic novels, specifically superhero narratives, allows for observing the evolution of apocalypses, deaths, and resurrections as a still occurring (and reoccurring) real-time and present-tense phenomenon. Superman, Batman, and Captain America have been in the cultural consciousness for nearly a 3

Charles Taylor. 2007. A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press). 4 Taylor. 2007. A Secular Age, 772.

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century and have evolved with the times; they have shaped our American identities because they are American—not just as fictional creations but as characters who possess their own identities. Author and prolific comic book writer Grant Morrison explains that the superheroes are perhaps more real than we are: We writers come and go, generations of artists leave their interpretations, and yet something persists, something that is always Superman. We have to adapt to his rules if we enter his world. We can never change him too much, or we lose what he is. There is a persistent set of characteristics that define Superman through decades of creative voices and it’s that essential, unshakable quality of Superman-ness the character possesses in every incarnation, which is divinity by any other name.5

If this is the case then why is it that some people believe that Jesus walked on water but no one believes that Superman can fly? The similarities between Jesus and Superman are unmistakable (once they’ve been pointed out), and at first glance this statement may seem obvious or ridiculous, but the comparison opens a starting point for discussing secularization—specifically the twenty-first century’s change in their conditions of belief. Consider the similarities: He was brave. He was clever. He never gave up and he never let anyone down. He stood up for the weak and knew how to see off bullies of all kinds. He couldn’t be hurt by the bad guys, hard as they might try. He didn’t get sick. He was fiercely loyal to his friends and to his adopted world.6

This description could easily be applied to either Superman or Jesus, so why then are we conditioned to believe in the literal existence of one more than the other? When I pose this question to students, one of the first answers is usually “Because it’s in the Bible and it’s old.” While this answer eliminates embedded complications and does little to offer a real answer, it is not solely without truth. The character of Jesus is old; his story is old and was a product of an earlier worldview framed by a collective identity within an antiquated “social imaginary.” According to Taylor the social imaginary is defined as “the ways we are able to think or

5

Grant Morrison. 2012. Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human (New York: Spiegel & Grau), 14. 6 Morrison. 2012. Supergods, 15.

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imagine the whole of society” 7 and the social imaginary that produced the Bible was framed in an “enchanted” worldview where the presence of the supernatural and miracles were very real. Unraveling this conundrum of belief between Superman and Jesus then also requires that proof of existence is sought outside of the social imaginary that produced the text. Although the Bible takes place in a time and setting we can trace back to historical records, it is also a text riddled with imprecisions and contradictions. It is not the goal of this paper to belabor certain inaccuracies or to dispute the Bible’s worth but merely to denote the idea that belief in the miracles of Jesus as literal truth requires more than print. Publication and print is not an a priori for existence or belief, however, the social constructs associated with the Bible and Action Comics is indeed relevant. The Bible is a holy book widely disseminated and read, the most published book in history, the subject of countless poems, stories, sermons, songs, films, television programs, and neatly packaged with a backstory loosely framed in the real world of historical antiquity. Comic books, on the other hand, are low-brow cartoon stories for adolescent boys specifically marketed as fantastic and impossible. There is a further truth within these opposing types of texts. In the mid-1950s there was an uproar over comic books, specifically the superhero genre, that they were corrupting the youth. The prevailing tenor of the country was a unified conservative voice that insisted that comic books were exposing children to violence, homosexuality, and other various forms of moral corruption. It was promulgated by psychologists that reading about Captain America fighting and resorting to violence would lead to a more destructive child prone to ferocious outbursts, or that Batman’s relationship with his young partner, Robin, was latently homosexual, and by proxy so, too, would the children become homosexual. Some comic book titles were banned but many more were subject to the Comics Code Authority, which required that comic books adhere to watered down guidelines to ensure moral character. Those most confused by this ban were not liberal academics or forward-thinking elites but the youth themselves: the very people that were supposedly being harmed by this form of entertainment. A child can accept all kinds of weird-looking creatures and bizarre occurrences in a story because the child understands that the stories have different rules that allow for pretty much anything to happen…. Adults on the other hand, struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to 7

Taylor. 2007. A Secular Age, 15.

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know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious to the smallest child: because it’s not real.8

To put it plainly, Superman being able to fly is simply not real, and we immediately recognize this because we are products of a “disenchanted” age where we have developed more sophisticated boundaries to our ideas of self and how we experience the greater world. The answer as to why some people believe that Jesus walked on water but nobody believes that Superman can fly is intrinsically linked to an evolution in the social imaginary over two millennia. We note the older social imaginary as “enchanted” and the contemporary view “disenchanted,” but the identities correlated within these views solidify the Superman/ Jesus conundrum. Within the enchanted worldview the self acts as “porous,” while in the disenchanted view the self is “buffered.” In an enchanted world the inexplicable, seen and especially unseen, were met with attempted answers that we would today call naive; “porous” denotes a greater influence of the outside world colored by the social imaginary of enchantment, for example, the literal belief in the existence of angels and demons. When the boom of science enters the cultural consciousness, especially in the eighteenth century (where there is a strong correlation between the Gothic and superheroes that will be expounded upon later), we see a shift in the social imaginary that opens the way for newer choices: “A crucial condition for this was a new sense of the self and its place in the cosmos: not open and porous and vulnerable to a world of spirits and powers, what I want to call ‘buffered.’”9 The shift here is an inward one: By definition for the porous self, the source of its most powerful and important emotions are outside the ‘mind’; or better put, the very notion that there is a clear boundary, allowing us to define an inner base area, grounded in which we can disengage from the rest, has no sense. As a bounded self I can see the boundary as a buffer… This [buffered] self can see itself as invulnerable, as master of the meanings of things for it.10

Given this logic, the miracles of Superman and Jesus are only as real as we choose for them to be or in some cases need them to be. While there may be debate concerning the beginnings of the Bible and the origin story of Jesus, we can decidedly mark the beginning of the superhero genre to 8

Morrison. 2012. Supergods, 55-6 Taylor. 2007. A Secular Age, 27. 10 Taylor. 2007. A Secular Age, 38. 9

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1938. Published in June of that year, Action Comics #1 marks the first appearance of Superman ushering in the Golden Age of comic books. Unlike the Bible and Christianity, which took almost 300 years to find widespread followers via Emperor Constantine, Superman’s fan base flourished almost immediately. Superman arrived while the country was still in recovery from World War I, the Stock Market Crash of 1929, and the Volstead Act (1919-1933), only to find itself in the middle of an economic Great Depression, all while Hitler was poised to invade Poland in 1939, setting into motion World War II. America needed a superhero: In Superman, some of the loftiest aspirations of our species came hurtling down from imagination’s bright heaven to collide with the lowest form of entertainment, and from their union something powerful and resonant was born, albeit in its underwear. . . . He was Apollo, the sun god, the unbeatable supreme self, the personal greatness of which we all know we’re capable. He was the righteous inner authority and lover of justice that blazed behind the starched-shirt front of hierarchical conformity. In other words, then, Superman was the rebirth of our oldest idea: He was a god. His throne topped the peaks of an emergent dime-store Olympus, and, like Zeus, he would disguise himself as a mortal to walk among the common people and stay in touch with their dramas and passions. . . . He was like the baby Moses or the Hindu Karna, set adrift in a ‘basket’ on the river of destiny. And then there was the Western deity he best resembled: Superman was Christ, an unkillable champion sent down by his heavenly father (Jor-El) to redeem us by example and to teach us how to solve our problems without killing one another.11

This return to the “master narrative” of the messiah is most striking given the superhero genre’s greatest innovation: the secret identity. In the enchanted social imaginary, Jesus is always Jesus, the Son of God and the Redeemer, whereas Superman is also Clark Kent, a mild-mannered reporter for the Daily Planet. Similar to the transition from porous to buffered, with the social imaginary of the self now turned inward, the secret identity allows us to see the divinity within ourselves. This wholly modern trope lends a certain formal realism to a genre framed in an enchanted social imaginary and thus allows Superman to become real for a disenchanted reader. Superman is the prototype for all superheroes, an otherworldly messianic alien sent from the heavens blending with us mortals by pretending to be Clark Kent. He, like his Christian counterpart, can’t really die—whether in our cultural consciousness or in the comic books 11

Morrison. 2012. Supergods, 15-16.

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themselves. The death of Superman, which happened in 1992, was shortlived after it was revealed that he was never really dead to begin with (at least not in a human or disenchanted understanding of death); rather his body was dormant and slowly rejuvenating itself. This, given the rules established in the character’s origin is plausible. Captain America and Batman, on the other hand, are not aliens or endowed with superhuman strength or speed. They are just humans at the highest peaks of physical conditioning and training; they have limitations. This is what makes Reborn and The Return of Bruce Wayne so unique as examples of secularization within the present-day social imaginary: they are forcing the superhero “master narrative” to adhere to the rules of a disenchanted world.

The Superhero Master Narrative In 2010 Marvel and DC, two separate comic book companies known for their competitiveness, employing two separate writers and separate creative teams, published analogous story lines in two separate fictional universes too striking to be considered coincidence. In separate but eerily similar resurrection narratives, both Batman and Captain America are “master narratives” becoming self-aware in the time-stream of their own independent mythoi. Although the universes in which these narratives inhabit are rife with the supernatural, emphatic religious expressions are scant—save for the resurrections themselves—in each instance the protagonists become self-aware and plant knowledge of the future within the past, not to change the past but to make contact with modernity. By one account these could be considered “subtraction stories” where the implicit logic is that “once we slough off our concern with… attending to any other transcendent reality, what we’re left with is human good, and that is what modern societies are concerned with.”12 These “subtraction stories,” however, have a tendency to disregard their foundation in the “master narrative[s]” which are “broad framework pictures of how history unfolds” that “have come under some considerable attack in our time, and are thought to be (ideally) a thing of the past.”13 In this dichotomy Taylor is referring to the “master narrative” of belief as aligned with the “subtraction story” of modernity: “the death of God.” It is the intent of this article to illustrate within these graphic novels a correlation with one of the main arguments secular theory attempts to unravel: that the natural 12 13

Taylor. 2007. A Secular Age, 572. Taylor. 2007. A Secular Age, 573.

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progression toward modernity is an inevitable disenchantment with a world colored by the supernatural. Good and evil binaries are still, and will continue to be, crucial to the formula of the superhero genre, and the study of secularism itself, where the social imaginary is bifurcated into an enchanted world versus that of a disenchanted world. Taylor uses “enchanted” to primarily engage with the social imaginary of the Middle Ages and early modern era as separated with that of the “disenchanted” modern era; however, the contention of this paper is an argument for a “contemporary enchanted” world as found in the social imaginary of superhero comic books. Although we are firmly rooted in twenty-first century disenchantment, the phenomenon of enchantment persists in our fictions, especially superhero comic books where people routinely exhibit superhuman powers and are impervious to death (reminiscent of faith-based myths across cultures and times). To further this query is the underlying question: Why do cultures repeat the same myths? This question is perhaps evocative of Joseph Campbell’s theory of the “Monomyth”14; however, Campbell is more concerned with the phenomena of form rather than the philosophical and cultural implications of these repeated myths. Addressing superheroes as the contemporary model of the fantastic and supernatural, reminiscent of tropes found in the eighteenth-century Gothic and Romantic periods, affirms the position that secularization is circuitous albeit working within different ideas, beliefs, “habits, dispositions, and postures that are themselves carried out and performed within changing institutional contexts.”15 Denoting specific instances of enchantment in our pop-culture increases the scope of secularization and opens itself toward a complication found in the overall influence of the social imaginary. What is the real influence of comic books? Or better still, what is the meaning behind these repetitions in the contemporary institutional context of pop-culture and marketing? It is true that the social imaginary often repeats myths and folklore over time, (the current trend in pop-culture is to re-imagine and remake before the older versions ever really get “old”). If secularization follows the change of placement of belief, pop culture and the zeitgeist, then they work as a guide to uncovering the spin within specific trends. This question “Why do cultures repeat the same myths?” is also asked by

14

See Joseph Campbell. 2008. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Novato, CA: New World Library. 15 Colin Jager. 2007. The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 1.

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Diane Long Hoeveler in Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary 1780-182016 and asserts that: …[Gothic] works attempt to negotiate and mediate the reform of religious beliefs and rituals, the changing dynamics of companionate marriage, the contours of the new, more egalitarian family structure, the rights and responsibilities of women in a newly evolving capitalistic society, and finally, the implications of a society based on merit and financial status rather than birth (‘blood’) privilege. In short, the gothic’s ideological agenda is primarily a “whiggish” attempt to expose and then relieve for its readers the anxieties produced in a new world in which neither a king nor a pope (nor their representatives) dominate the subjectivity or agency of the new bourgeois citizen.17

Hoeveler’s guiding thesis is that the repetition and remediation of “gothic riffs” should not be limited to just novels, as they are the subject and source for numerous operas, burlettas, melodramas, popular gothic ballads, and chapbooks of the period, and as such, offer insight into the cultural influence of the genre and its lasting historical effect. Further: The canonical Romantic Movement has to be understood as less original than it has been purported to be. Canonical male romantic poets borrowed from the popular literature and performances of their day, altering [these forms] by giving them an elite veneer that distanced their origins in more humble literary productions.18

Before the scientific revolution the Gothic genre was already challenging ideas of cosmology and religious certainty; it began to lift the veil of magical thinking, exposing the contentions between differing understandings of spirituality. Within the Gothic ideas of belief and unbelief an intellectual problem arises between that of an enchanted worldview versus that of a disenchanted worldview. Hoeveler’s analysis then places the origins of the secularizing differentiation of design and disenchantment within the popular culture of the eighteenth century Gothic. In the question “why do cultures repeat the same myths?” I would argue that the Gothic has an academic as well as ideological correlation to the superhero genre. Early twentieth century criticism on the Gothic genre contains a logic of the reactionary lowbrow embedded in its discourse. For 16

Diane Long Hoeveler. 2010. Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780-1820. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press). 17 Hoeveler. 2010. Gothic Riffs, 15. 18 Hoeveler. 2010. Gothic Riffs, 12.

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example, Tale of Terror19 by Edith Birkhead, focuses solely on the presentation of Gothic tropes and motifs with no real argument other than the subliminal statement that the genre be taken seriously by scholars. Birkhead approaches her scholarly work almost apologetically, making clear to the academic reader that her analyses are that of unraveling the influence of the “tale of terror” and not the lowbrow form of the Gothic: “Though the title assumes a special literary significance at the close of the eighteenth century, the tale of terror appeals to deeply rooted instincts, and belongs to every age and clime.”20 Early historicizing of the genre lent to this air of academic undesirability asserting that the widely popular genre was merely a reaction to the Enlightenment and moreover the French Revolution. Literature of Terror21 by Donald Punter addresses this contention and finally gives the genre academic credibility by following the larger elements and influence of the genre, proving that theories of political reaction do not mesh well with a genre considered solely as lowbrow escapism. Since then the Gothic has been roundly recognized for its cultural impact on the eighteenth century and beyond. Hoeveler follows this trend arguing that: The gothic needs to be understood, not as a reaction against the rise of secularism [within ideas of the Enlightenment], but as part of the ambivalent secularizing process itself, providing a satisfactory explanation of the main challenges facing its critics.22

Similar to early critics of the Gothic, comic books and the superhero genre, too, are deemed less of an influence due to the fact that their target demographic is the young, they are lowbrow, and that they are marketed for mass-consumption. These, however, are precisely why they need to be examined. If we follow Taylor and Hoeveller’s readings then the zeitgeist and pop-culture are inseparable to the process of secularization: “how we got here is inextricably bound up with our account of where we are.” Or perhaps better put:

19

Edith Birkhead. 1963. The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance (New York: Russell & Russell), Originally published 1921. 20 Birkhead. 1963. The Tale of Terror, 15. 21 David Punter. 1980. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. (London: Longmans). 22 Hoeveler. 2010. Gothic Riffs, 6.

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In this regard comic books and the superhero genre are the inheritors to the Gothic, although the twentieth and twenty-first centuries may not be processing the same exact fears. They can each, however, be traced back to a shift in cultural identity. This is perhaps another reason why the superhero genre may be dismissed: to the lay reader Superman is always Superman, Batman always Batman, they are so iconic that whether you keep up with their stories monthly or have never seen a cartoon, movie, or TV show, you have a sense for who these heroes are. This is missing the fact that our myths and “master narratives” change with our times; we mold our heroes to fit the given social imaginary and cultural consciousness. The space that superheroes take up (comic books) acts as their own “master narratives” where they create their own authority. Within the prevailing superhero form of the last century parallels can be drawn to faith-based texts and even older mythologies bent on the simplicity of “good versus evil” as moral absolutes in the form of “heroes and villains”; these have defined the super-hero genre since its inception. The challenge, however, in these twenty-first century apocalypses, specifically, Final Crisis24 and Civil War25 is that the villains are ultimately self-aware ideas. These narratives, their subsequent resurrection followups, Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne and Captain America: Reborn, and by extension the genre, reflect changing trends in the cultural consciousness and revealing our contemporary disenchantment with moral binaries. This would seem to reflect the current trend of secularism as not a loss of belief but a change in the placement of belief. These master narratives as form and influence remain constant but it’s not just the stories that evolve to fit the times, it is the way in which we experience them that have evolved as well. Superheroes mark a necessary step in our understanding of these master narratives. Although the character of Jesus Christ has been evoked in every form of media 23

Vincent P. Pecora. 2006. Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, & Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 22. 24 Grant Morrison, J. G. Jones, Doug Mahnke, Carlos Pacheco, Alex Sinclair, and Rob Leigh. 2009. Final Crisis. (New York: DC Comics). Originally published: July 2008 – March 2009. 25 Mark Millar and Steve McNiven. 2007. Civil War: A Marvel Comics Event. (New York, NY: Marvel Pub.), Originally published: July 2006 – January 2007.

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imaginable, the person of Jesus, the human part that is Christ, remains static in the Bible: But the moment at which Jesus became the hero of a novel, of a “prosepoem,” he also became fictional. The old estate broke. Jesus lost his divinity, became only an inspiring fantasist. We may wonder what use Jesus is if he is a figure no different from Socrates on the one hand Daniel Deronda on the other. Why should we heed his difficult words, what is the flavor of his command once the taste for his authority has evaporated?26

This is not to say that the teachings of Christ, Mohammad, or Moses do not evolve or that they are ultimately irrelevant in our contemporary social imaginary but that they are associated with traditions that require priests, rabbis, imams, and other third party intermediaries to explain their significance at weekly services. Although attendance at religious services is down, the number of people who identify as adhering to a religion is up. If a change in the conditions of our belief is due to an evolution in our development of self, perhaps the greater change is that we require our master narratives to also possess an identity. Jesus is a static character whose only real exploits are contained in the New Testament; Superman, Captain America, and Batman, on the other hand, have identities that have grown and evolved, simultaneously mirroring and influencing our own identities. This identification with the disenchanted social imaginary is what led to the stark similarities between Captain America: Reborn and Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne, making them quintessential secular narratives. When Jesus returned from the dead he was still Jesus, the enchanted social imaginary required no further comment; Captain America and Batman on the other hand would require, to draw a further comparison to the Gothic, something of the “explained supernatural.” Thus, in order for them to return from the dead and still retain the vital part of their identities which make them “real,” that of being embodied selves of a disenchanted era, they would have to grapple with the enchanted foundations found in the resurrection myths of the master narrative. They would have to experience the past and the “time stream” in order to “subtract” the inexplicable and unsaid in order to secularize resurrection.

26

James Wood. 1999. The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (New York: Random House), 250.

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American Apocalypses and the Immanent Frame …American apocalypses are commonplace, at least in the sense that they are so fundamental to American writing as to be virtually ubiquitous—but, at the same time, that they are by no means unproblematically so. American apocalypses—American works that adopt some interpretive stance toward the end of the world—at once undermine basic American values and definitively express those values; they essay both a rejection and a signal exploration of American ideologies of the self, of nature, of God and the supernatural, and of the community. Because they present a thoroughgoing challenge both to dominant American ideologies and to our customary ways of thinking about such ideologies, American apocalypses place demands upon our understanding, in response to which thematic interpretation has often proved inadequate.27

‘Event comics’ have long been associated with both the Marvel and DC universes as marketing ‘crossover’ tools designed to create sales—in order to know the whole story you have to buy the whole story as found in second-tier titles and various tie-ins ad infinitum. It’s not enough anymore to just follow the exploits of one hero in their own autonomous title, you have to buy all of them; the stories are so large that they must contain every character and hero within that narrative’s universe (or multiverse). In order to ensure the sales of every crossover and tie-in book there is the inherent promise of threat so big it requires all of the superheroes. These comic book ‘events' are modern-day apocalypses and control the direction of the universes inhabited by these heroes. This trend, while designed to sell more comic books, has an unintended consequence directly correlated to secularization: recognition of a larger world. What has allowed the evolution in our social imaginaries from enchanted to disenchanted, our collective identities from porous to buffered, is the possibility-for and openness-to choices: So that our present predicament offers a gamut of possible positions which extend way beyond the options in the late eighteenth century. It’s as though the original duality, the positing of a viable humanist alternative, set in train a dynamic… spawning an ever-widening variety of moral/spiritual options, across the span of the thinkable and perhaps even beyond. This phase extends up to the present.28

27

Douglas Robinson. 1985. American Apocalypses: The Image of the End of the World in American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), xi – xii. 28 Taylor. 2007. A Secular Age, 299.

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As a result of this superhero pluralism the master narrative continues to evolve and thus eschews the old formula of benign threats from ineffectual ‘bad guys’ looking to rob a bank for the sake of robbery. Given this change the multitude of protagonists found in the Marvel and DC universes are then allowed to interact with other actualized identities. This superhero cosmopolitanism further secularizes comic books via the creation of an ‘immanent frame’ versus that of a ‘transcendent frame’ or a recognition of a ‘natural order’ versus that of a ‘supernatural order’: “We are part of this greater whole, arise from it, and don’t escape or transcend it.”29 What I’m suggesting here is that the formula has changed. Comic book stories of the Golden Age were basic, concise, and predictable: a minor threat in the form of a thug or bully disrupts the status quo. It is brought to the attention of the community to which our hero belongs; he or she then switches to their secret identity, locates the bad guys, quickly dispatches them, and, once order is restored, returns to their community. There was never any concern that Superman was not going to save the day—this formula represents a ‘transcendent frame’—but the comic books of the twenty-first century no longer function in this basic formula. Civil War, the Marvel ‘event’ of 2007 which led up to the death of Captain America, found the superheroes of the Marvel Universe fighting among themselves over the “Superhero Registration Act,” the premise being that if we require training and registration for our police and fire departments then why are superheroes, who contain far more power, allowed to go unregulated? The main factions were split between Captain America, who embodied a libertarian model of non-registration, and Iron Man, who stood for the more conservative side of registration. This all culminated, in classic comic book fashion, with an enormous battle between both sides, all the heroes fighting one another in gratuitous full page spreads on the streets of New York. In the end Captain America’s side won the battle with Cap even stating “Now I’m fighting dirty”30 to a beaten Iron Man. We see a broken Iron Man on his back, his armor destroyed, his bloody face exposed through his broken mask. Captain America is standing over the defeated Iron Man with his arm cocked ready to give the final blow, while Iron Man asks with a gasp “What are you waiting for… finish it.”31 This would all be in accord with the traditional comic book storytelling of a transcendent frame, however, Captain America is stopped at the last minute and tackled by a pack of civilians—regular non-superhuman people. Civil War then 29

Taylor. 2007. A Secular Age, 547. Millar. 2007. Civil War, 179. 31 Millar. 2007. Civil War, 183. 30

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takes a huge step toward the immanent frame in that it pans the camera back to view the devastation left in the wake of a massive battle between supercharged meta-humans. The camera angle of the superhero comic shifts to that of the survivors and the common people who will invariably have to clean up the mess left in the wake of this civil war and in so doing firmly places the master narrative within an immanent frame. If Civil War’s recognition of the immanent frame occurs by recognizing the outward, then Final Crisis, on the other hand, secularizes the genre by focusing inward. Final Crisis illustrates the trauma of the immanent frame displacing the transcendent frame in the DC universe by “dramatizing the breakdown of the rational enlightenment story of progress and development as it succumbed to a horror tale of failure, guilt, and submission to blind authority.”32 Here, author Grant Morrison “tried to show the DC universe breaking down into signature gestures, last-gasp strategies that were tried and tested but would this time fail, until finally even the characterizations would fade and the plot become rambling, meaningless, disconnected”33 In Civil War secularization can be found in the recognition of a greater world outside the supernatural, however, in Final Crisis the threat is inside the tropes and plot devices of the superhero genre itself; what drives this narrative toward annihilation is the sense of ending found in structure and form of the master narrative that has until this point sustained the DC universe. The apocalypse in Final Crisis comes in the form of a MacGuffin called the “anti-life equation” employed by the villain Darkseid whereby he can control the minds of all sentient beings, to which he almost succeeds. This unstoppable and inexplicable force is disseminated to the world via “anti-life equation emails,” which, as a plot device cannot be contained either by the writers of these graphic novels or the fictional superheroes that inhabit these worlds. In the end, this MacGuffin is only thwarted by a deus ex machina in the form of a wish machine whereby the author was “trying to say, this is what happens when you let bad stories eat good ones. This is what it looked like when you allow the Anti-Life Equation to turn all your dreams into nightmares.”34 This dichotomy of inner (DC) and outer (Marvel) will come to frame both resurrection narratives of Batman and Captain America respectively.

32

Morrison. 2009. Supergods, 367. Morrison. 2009. Supergods, 368. 34 Ibid. 33

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Caught in the Time Stream It has been established that for these narratives of resurrection to be read as literary products of secularization, they must adhere to the disenchanted social imaginary and buffered boundaries of the self; found in the real world—their protagonists must be human and without overt supernatural powers. It has been further established that their means of return would have to be explained (not that a literal real-life explanation is required but that the methodology in which the resurrection occurs must be addressed and explored—characters cannot return from the dead via the deus ex machina of omnipotence) thereby placing the narrative in an immanent frame. This begins to explain the similarities between the respective deaths of Captain America and Batman via gunshots, and also their subsequent escapes from death via the science fiction of time travel. Both of these narratives, however, diverge within the “time stream” and maintain the prevailing ethos their respective universes: for Captain America the exploration becomes outward whereas Batman’s adventure is more inward. In Captain America: Reborn the protagonist finds himself lost in the “time stream” of his own narrative—he only once goes further back in time preceding the events of his first appearance in Captain America Comics #1 (1944)—whereas Batman is initially hurtled back to prehistoric times and never crosses his own past until the very end. This makes Reborn more contained (albeit less linear) within its own master narrative, where essentially two stories are taking place: Captain America unstuck in time, reliving the past, while his teammates, the Avengers, work in the present day (2010) to bring him back. We follow Captain America as he jumps sporadically between all the iconic events associated with the character, we see him storm the beach at Normandy during the Allied Invasion of 1944, he quickly jumps to his assassination in 2007, then back to an unnamed battlefield set during World War II, and continues to appear in and out of events from the 60s all the way to the 90s. At first the character appears to be “a passenger in [his] own body… or an extra consciousness in [his] own mind…”35 like he is reliving all of these events as memories, but soon discovers that his consciousness can take control and reclaim his agency in the time stream. As soon as Captain America recognizes his control he immediately questions whether he should take control; Captain America is cognizant that changing the past would invariably affect his future; he thus resigns himself to play out all of 35

Brubaker. 2010. Reborn, 50.

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his memories (even the bad ones) as they occurred, thus rendering him passive and impotent. Here, the identity of Captain America has become subject to the influence of his past social imaginary, he is cognizant of his boundaries only so far as they apply to his past, thus addressing a contention between the buffered self as it is affected by the porous self. It is not until Captain America reaches a more recent memory from the Kree-Skrull War (1972) that he finds a loophole; Captain America encounters the android character, the Vision, and records a message in 1972 that the Vision will then replay in the present, 2010. It would appear that technology is ultimately what allows Captain America to make connection with modernity and thus recover from the time stream by outside help, i.e. The Avengers. The Return of Bruce Wayne similarly has its protagonist grappling with memories; only in this case it is amnesia. As Batman/Bruce Wayne is thrust back to prehistory we follow his forward jumps through the time stream. This narrative is linear and follows a steady progression through time: prehistory, a seventeenth century Puritan colony, the eighteenth century pirate ship of Blackbeard, a frontier town in the nineteenth century “Wild West,” a mid-twentieth century detective-noir setting, and finally “Vanishing Point,” the literal “end of time.” As we follow the narrative’s progress through the epochs Batman retains the characteristics and skills of Batman but without the identity or memories of Bruce Wayne. For example, while in the seventeenth century, with no memory of the names or identities of “Bruce Wayne” or “Batman,” the protagonist takes the name “Mordecai” and becomes an inquisitor for the local Puritan settlement during a series of witch-hunts. Here he uses his detective skills to debunk crimes and accusations that would have been otherwise blamed on witchcraft. The traditional paradigm of the superhero has been laid bare with only the archetype of “the Batman” remaining; he is a narrative force losing none of the potency without his identity. Both Captain America and Batman appear to be disenchanted/buffered selves experiencing enchanted/porous times; however, Batman is allowed agency within the confines of time whereas Captain America only achieves agency from reaching out. Although Batman also gets help from the Justice League to return, Reborn is a secular resurrection confined only to the character, whereas The Return of Bruce Wayne is secularizing the myth of resurrection itself. The Return of Bruce Wayne also goes one step further toward secularizing storytelling itself in that Batman/Bruce Wayne’s plan to return to modernity also requires leaving information for the future. Early on this appears to only be an attempt to help the amnesiac time-traveler to remember and recover memories after every successive jump in the time

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stream but eventually is shown to have other purposes. During the first jump from prehistory to the seventeenth century the iconic cape and cowl of Batman is left behind in a cave. During the Puritan witch hunts “Mordecai” begins to remember the name “Wayne” but as of yet cannot trace the significance. Prior to his next jump forward he fails to save a woman accused of witchcraft and right before being burnt at the stake by an ancestor, “Nathaniel Wayne,” she curses the Wayne family “until the end of time.” With the pirate Blackbeard the amnesiac Batman/Bruce Wayne goes in search of the lost treasure of the “Bat-People” which turns out to be the cape and cowl left from prehistory. This begins to stir some memories for the amnesiac and before he jumps again he instructs a companion to write an account of the “Bat-People” and leave it in the care of the “Wayne” family. Thus far we can see the evolution of a myth: in prehistory we have the “origin” where the archetype exists as a primal instinct. Then in the seventeenth century there is a curse and the first recollection of a name; here we are given the “word.” Then on the treasure hunt it becomes “legend.” The consecutive jumps in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries show the archetype of Batman evolving into “folklore” of the Wild West and then in the Noir-Detective genre as “pulp.” Given over to this new style—a narrative of inner and outer complexity as found in an immanent frame—modern graphic novels and superhero stories embody the contemporary social imaginary and thus challenge traditional apocalypses, deaths and resurrections, as they would have been previously perceived in a transcendent model of superhero storytelling. These modern day apocalypses work within a definite eschatological frame, haunted by an omnipresent looming sense of ending where doom is around every corner, but nevertheless they, themselves, are never ending—every Tuesday is New Comic Book Day which promises more and more adventures of Superman, Batman, and Captain America. Time itself and the “immanent frame” then becomes crucial in understanding Reborn and The Return of Bruce Wayne as secularization stories: And so we come to understand our lives as taking place within a selfsufficient immanent order; or better, a constellation of orders, cosmic, social, and moral… these orders are understood as impersonal. This understanding of our predicament has as background a sense of our history: we have advanced to this grasp of our predicament through earlier more primitive stages of society and self-understanding. In this process, we have come of age.36 36

Taylor. 2007. A Secular Age, 543.

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For Captain America and Batman the act of heroism and resurrection in Reborn and The Return of Bruce Wayne is not focused on immobilizing a force with violence but becomes pre-emptive enlightenment that can be read as the modern implementation of secularization, where the transcendent frames of the Marvel and DC universes shift to that of immanent frames. If the differentiation between these opposing frames (one supernatural, the other natural) is to be the locus of literary secularism, what then clarifies these narratives as secularization stories is that their search for identity leads to a desire for symmetry (immanent frame) rather than the genre’s previous exploitation of dualities (transcendent frame). Mirroring the actuality of the real world that we, the readers, inhabit, the social imaginary contained in the superhero genre has turned toward the real, the identities of the characters have become more real, and thus the universes in which they inhabit have become more real, and yet they remain fictional. Thus, the natural progression toward modernity is not a dismissal of belief or faith but a refined version offering more spiritual freedoms and greater authenticity.

Works Cited Birkhead, Edith. 1963. The Tale of Terror; a Study of the Gothic Romance. New York: Russell & Russell. Brubaker, Ed, Bryan Hitch, and Jackson Guice. 2010. Captain America Reborn. New York, NY: Marvel Comics. Campbell, Joseph. 2008. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Novato, CA: New World Library. Hoeveler, Diane Long. 2010. Gothic Riffs: Secularizing the Uncanny in the European Imaginary, 1780-1820. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Jager, Colin. 2007. The Book of God: Secularization and Design in the Romantic Era. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Millar, Mark, and Steve McNiven. 2007. Civil War: A Marvel Comics Event. New York, NY: Marvel Pub. Morrison, Grant, Bob Kane, and Chris Sprouse. 2011. Batman & Robin: The Return of Bruce Wayne: The Deluxe Edition. New York: DC Comics. Morrison, Grant, J. G. Jones, Doug Mahnke, Carlos Pacheco, Alex Sinclair, and Rob Leigh. 2009. Final Crisis. New York: DC Comics. Morrison, Grant. 2012. Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human. New York: Spiegel & Grau.

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Pecora, Vincent P. 2006. Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, & Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Punter, David. 1980. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day. London: Longmans. Robinson, Douglas. 1985. American Apocalypses: The Image of the End of the World in American Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Wood, James. 1999. The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief. New York: Random House.

CHAPTER SEVEN GETTING THE DOOMSDAY WE DESERVE: ROLAND EMMERICH’S 2012 AND THE NEOLIBERAL DISASTER FILM JULIAN CORNELL

For many cinema audiences Roland Emmerich’s 2012 was their introduction to New Age eschatology and pseudoscientific hypotheses regarding our world’s impending demise. Despite its Mayan prophetic trappings, and broad overview of Charles Hapgood’s theory of Earth Crustal Displacement, 2012, turned out to be a fairly conventional, paradigmatic genre exercise creatively synthesizing of virtually every longstanding cliché of the disaster movie and providing that kinetic, visceral spectacle of wholesale disaster, beloved by audiences and despised by critics. The film’s release was preceded by an innovative, extensive viral advertising campaign. With minimal identification that would indicate fabrication by the publicity department of Sony Pictures Entertainment, three promotional websites and a YouTube vlog, received attention prior to the film’s wide domestic release on November 13, 2009. Vlogs and Tweets were the most apparent signpost of the film’s marketing as they featured a recognizable Woody Harrelson as Charlie Frost the film’s prophetic conspiracy theorist. Frost’s website, ThisIsTheEnd.com, signed off on November 12th, after posting an amusing animated summation of the various pseudoscientific theories, such as the role of Solar Flares, Planetary Alignment and Hapgood’s Earth Crust Displacement Theory, that form the basis of the film’s ‘explanation’ of the literally earth shattering cataclysm to befall our world.1 Another 1

Woody Harrelson. 2009. “Charlie Frost: Watch My Animation” YouTube video, 1:21 (February 25). http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgM65EOfyGU&index=14&list=UU-02u3ftoZjNWmVa61Y0Mw. The humorous cartoon sequence briskly explaining three

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intriguing website was identified as The Institute for Human Continuity (IHC), where readers were encouraged to register for a lottery affording them a slim chance of survival past the day of reckoning through a seat on the arks being built to withstand the Earth’s decimation. The homespun and amateurish Frost site (which also promoted survival gear and provisions) and the graphically rich, professional looking IHC contained links to other fake sites, including a sample chapter from the novel Farewell, Atlantis, written by the film’s everyman hero Jackson Curtis (John Cusack).2 Ostensibly a work of apocalyptic and hopeful science fiction, the book becomes a pivotal plot device in the film. 3 Preceding 2012’s release, a few authors ventured to debunk the pseudoscience referenced in the film. Most prominent amongst them was E. C. Krupp, Director of the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, who penned a cover story for Sky And Telescope magazine, (reprinted on NASA’s official website), discrediting the various sources upon which the scriptwriters Emmerich and Harald Kloser based their future cataclysm scenario.4 The

New Age notions of how civilization will end reappears in the film in its entirety when Frost explains to Jackson Curtis the origin of the frequent and severe earthquakes happening in Los Angeles and Yellowstone as well as the world governments’ response to the coming catastrophe. 2 Woody Harrelson. 2009. “Charlie Frost’s YouTube Channel: ThisIsTheEnd.com.” YouTube (January 27) http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC02u3f-toZjNWmVa61Y0Mw. “IHC History,” The Institute for Human Continuity. Accessed May 28, 2014, http://archive.bigspaceship.com/ihc/. The IHC’s site indicates it was founded in November 1978 as a consortium of “the world’s most powerful business leaders and former government officials” and “top scientists” with a Mission Statement asserting its endeavors “to ensure the survival of the human race beyond 2012” due its research indicating a “94% certainty that in the year 2012 cataclysmic forces will decimate our planet and much of its inhabitants.” Telling, the IHC History page suggests that it “has always sought to ensure the end of the world is just the beginning for mankind,” an overt statement of apocalyptic yearning and hopefulness. 3 A picture from the dust jacket of the novel provides an unsubtle clue to the promotional aspect since ‘the author’ is obviously John Cusack. The “excerpt” is brief but the sample also includes a Forward by Nick Sagan, famed astronomer Carl Sagan’s son and author of science fiction novels. 4 Edwin C. Krupp. 2009. “The Great 2012 Scare” Sky and Telescope (November), 22 – 26. Krupp acknowledged the pivotal role played by Emmerich’s film in creating apprehension in the public. Don Yeomans. 2009. “12-21-2012 – Just Another Day” NASA Jet Propulsion Lab: California Institute of Technology. November 11. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.php?id=876.

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connection between the film and pseudo-scientific eschatology is more than tangential. Indeed, listed in the credits is the statement that the script was “inspired in part by the book Fingerprints of the Gods by Graham Hancock,” a New Age best seller by the prolific British journalist, whose theories about ancient civilizations are influenced by previous accounts of Atlantis and Hapgood’s Earth Crustal Displacement Theory. 5 Upon release the film was largely dismissed by critics but was an international box office smash, grossing $769 million worldwide.6 What In addition to reprinting Krupp’s article NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at CalTech posted a reassuring video entitled “12-21-2012 – Just Another Day” featuring Don Yeomans of the JPL’s Near-Earth Object Program that further took the film’s premise to task. Interestingly, following massive solar flares on March 7, 2012, the video was reposted allaying fears that the Solar Storms were validation of the Mayan prophecies. Woody Harrelson. 2009. “Charlie Frost: The Package” YouTube video. (November 11) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRoi01LY0BE&list=UU02u3f-toZjNWmVa61Y0Mw One of the Frost vlogs “The Package” references NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as Frost receives some classified documents from a Professor Meyers who has been tipped off to the government’s doomsday planning. 5 Graham Hancock. 1995. Fingerprints of the Gods (New York: Three Rivers Press). Hancock’s work explores various theories about lost continents and polar shifts and is indebted to Charles Hapgood’s work Earth’s Shifting Crust published in 1958. Indeed, Hancock’s exhaustive account begins with a discussion of Hapgood’s analysis of the Piri Reis World Map of 1513. In Hapgood’s view the Map, drawn by an Ottoman Admiral, provides intriguing hints that the continent of Antarctica was once closer to South American than today. It seems to indicate that at least the northern coastal portion Antarctica was not only verdant and hospitable some 6000 years ago, but was once located about 2000 miles north of the South Pole. As Hancock reports, Hapgood’s concluded that “the continent moved to its present position inside the Antarctic Circle as a result of a mechanism known as ‘earth-crust displacement’” which is a different process than the generally accepted theories of plate tectonics. Hancock. 1995. Fingerprints of the Gods, 19 – 20. One of the many reasons that Hapgood’s theories have proven so compelling for adherents of pseudo-science and the New Age Earth Changes believers is that the forward to Earth’s Shifting Crust was written by no less an authority than Albert Einstein, who attested to the Crust Displacement hypothesis’ scientific possibility. Einstein contended that Hapgood had “set forth, cautiously and comprehensively, the extraordinarily rich material that supports his displacement theory. I think that this rather astonishing, even fascinating, idea deserves the serious attention of anyone who concerns himself with the theory of the earth's development.” Albert Einstein, 1958. Foreword to Earth’s Shifting Crust: A Key to Some Basic Problems of Earth Science (New York: Pantheon Books), 1 – 2. 6 “2012.” Box Office Mojo. Accessed May 28, 2014.

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was unexpected, perhaps, was the impact the film had upon the public consciousness regarding the Mayan 2012 Prophecies and the Long Count Calendar, bringing into the mainstream an eschatological narrative previously little known except to adherents of New Age spirituality, conspiracy theorists and other marginalized groups. The viral campaign, the anecdotal accounts of the anxiety generated by the film’s release, and NASA’s demystification, does not demonstrate a sudden interest in Mayan civilization but, instead, the on-going cultural currency of disaster narratives particularly the ability of popular culture, as articulated by mainstream, big budget American filmmaking, to situate prevailing social, political and economic anxieties within a pre-existing narrative template – the apocalyptic. The relatively easy assimilation of this particular end of the world narrative, and seeming readiness of popular culture to absorb the notion of a pre-ordained apocalyptic scenario reflects not an acceptance of the prophecies themselves, or an attempt to understand an ancient civilization’s cosmology, but rather a striking demonstration of the continuing viability and efficacy of the traditional Judeo-Christian apocalyptic template – an eschatological narrative that continues to be influential in American cultural and political discourse. The apocalyptic continues to be compelling due to its utility as a sense making paradigm, as a means by which history’s meaning can be interpreted and circumscribed, rendering historical events and political processes comprehensible, while regulating social behavior. The 2012 film serves this social function—to allegorize, literalize and render comprehensible, public discourse regarding pressing material issues for American society such as neoliberalism and globalization.

http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=2012.htm. “2012.” Metacritic. Accessed May 28, 2014. http://www.metacritic.com/movie/2012. “2012.” Rotten Tomatoes. Accessed May 28, 2014. http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/2012/. Review aggregator sites Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic reported a positive review rate of 39 percent according to the former and 48 percent for the latter. A negative response from critics should come as no surprise, as disaster movies are routinely savaged by film critics and ignored by scholars, perhaps due to their emphasis on special effects and thrills over characterization, script and narrative complexity. Indeed, reviews were predictable – great special effects, but really a bad movie with preachy dialogue, simplistic moralizing, scenes that warp credulity, and a blithe attitude about the deaths of billions. Domestic grosses were comparatively slight at $166 million accounting for only 21.6 percent of the total haul. However, the film had a respectable opening weekend garnering $65 million.

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Traditionally, the apocalyptic is an abstruse, densely symbolic, prophetic literary form that purports to ‘unveil’ the divine presence hidden behind worldly events and provides a totalizing framework for comprehending historical occurrences.7 The apocalyptic—to borrow Hayden White’s terminology—can be seen as a mode of emplotment, a schematic narrative used to render crises as stories of a particular kind, to make meaningful and comprehensible historical traumas and social change.8 Emplotting experience as a series of allegorical signs enables believers to find divine meaning and purpose in their existence. The apocalyptic narrative is defined by its particular relationship to reality – the revelation of hidden knowledge about the meaning of historical process. This relationship to history and trauma, makes it possible for apocalypse to continue to exist as a sense-making paradigm, a totalizing, clarifying narrative that is always available to our culture as a template through which any event can be filtered to discern its ultimate, metaphorical significance. Due to its relationship to the historical process, particularly from the vantage point of the disenfranchised, the apocalyptic narrative can be understood as a form of political allegory. The ancient apocalyptic was formed in opposition to empires, as a form of protest literature that expressed a desire for liberation from, and a revenge fantasy against, conquerors by the disenfranchised. Destruction is a necessary, but not sufficient, component in this scenario; catastrophe needs to be accompanied by a particular structure and intentionality. Modern iterations—such as disaster movies—may be secular, and may not be protests against empires, but also retain some of the original cultural and social aspects of traditional apocalyptic narratives. Following Frank Kermode’s influential formulae in A Sense of an Ending, apocalyptic narratives such as disaster films can be seen not merely as entertainment and spectacle but as sense-making systems, as ways of making and fixing meaning in the contemporary world, frameworks for understanding social and political crises. Any urgent social issue can be framed in apocalyptic terms, as an existential threat.9 Vestiges of the traditional usage of apocalyptic narrative persist, as politically inflected allegories, symbolic narratives about the exercise of imperial military and state power, about the relationship between structures of domination and 7

Alex Heard. 1999. Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End Time America (New York: W.W. Norton), 16. 8 Hayden White. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 7. 9 Frank Kermode. 1966. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (London: Oxford University Press), 3 – 9.

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control and their impact on the communities and individuals. Thus, the apocalyptic is located, not only in the supernatural cataclysm or spectacle of destruction and rebirth, but in the manner in which the story depicts power and hegemonic relationships. There are innumerable reasons why 2012 is a paradigmatic apocalyptic disaster fiction. Wholesale destruction provides thrills and spectacle, but what makes the film apocalyptic, ultimately, is how it envisions the end of one plane of existence (the terrestrial) and the reemergence of a small group of chosen ones in a heavenly realm (Mount Ararat after the Biblical Flood or the peaks of the Drakensberg Range that emerge from the waters at the conclusion). In apocalyptic films where civilization is destroyed, the narrative suggests the solution to social crises is total decimation—the world simply cannot be fixed—it must be obliterated and a group of Elect saved to begin anew.10 There is the sense, regardless of the specific ideological underpinnings of the apocalyptic film, that the existing order cannot be reformed but has to be totally destroyed, radically transformed through purifying, cleansing violence in order to salvage some eternal essence. The film 2012’s gripping finale, in which the planet is completely flooded to the point where only Mount Everest appears above the deluge, concludes with the waters receding after a month and the reemergence of dry land in the place human life and civilization came from in the first place: the continent of Africa and the Cape of Good Hope. Just as the Kingdom of Heaven descends to Earth in the penultimate chapter of Revelation, our beleaguered heroes, and 400,000 other chosen, go back to the beginning and hit the reset button on civilization. The ending of the film is overtly apocalyptic, directly and simultaneously echoing the final moments of Revelation, and the story of Noah, another direct intertextual reference point.11 Emmerich’s 2012, demonstrates the continuing relevance of disaster fictions and illustrates the notion of the apocalyptic narrative as a mode of emplotment. Disaster movies are allegories of history and politics, indirect, symbolic and metaphoric engagements with social and political 10

One of the conventions of the ‘post-apocalyptic’ film scenario is that the events typically take place after destruction has occurred; the end of civilization is referenced but the actual cataclysm precedes the events of the film. Examples include such titles as The Road Warrior, Waterworld, The Postman, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Road, The Book of Eli, Day of the Dead and Escape From New York, to name but a few. 11 Perhaps to ensure that no audience member misses the Genesis references, the ships built to withstand the crust displacement are called arks, and Jackson Curtis’ estranged son is named Noah.

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issues. Because of the way in which the story unfolds, from the lengthy pre-credits prologue where geologist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) learns of the Earth’s Crust Displacement due to Solar Flares, to the long played out denouement where the deluge engulfs the planet, to the obsessive repetition of conversations about families (especially patriarchal ones), the film isn’t really about cataclysm, but something else. Despite the innovative convincing special effects and beautifully imagined choreography of devastation the narratives is not really about the end of the world due to Mayan prophecy or geological phenomena. Instead, the film is really about the loss of American hegemony in an increasingly global, corporatized and neoliberal world. The emphasis upon visceral awe inspiring destruction can serve to mask or downplay one of the central, defining aspects of disaster films, which is the interrogation of the structuring elements of American civil society, of its literal and figurative sites of power. Regardless of a film’s overt premise, there is recurring reference to the same limited set of political and cultural institutions, those that define nationhood and are signifiers of “American Values”, even, in the case of Emmerich’s other disaster epics Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, American Exceptionalism. Those institutions are, traditionally—the state, the military, and the church. The modern disaster film adds a fourth term— science—a modern iteration of the supernatural, with the pseudoscientific ‘explanation’ fulfilling the requirement for magical elements and standing in for revealed sacred knowledge. In many science fiction disaster films, the tribulation or catalyzing event is dispatched from the heavens— sometimes as alien invaders, sometimes as a meteor—or in 2012 solar flares and the once in a million year alignment of the planets which leads to the Earth’s Crust being bombarded with neutrinos. The plot of the film commences with the unveiling of a secreted scientific knowledge. In 2012, that unveiling is that pre-industrial Mayan civilization ‘got it right’ in the words of Adrian’s colleague Dr. West (John Billingsley). The knowledge, the foretelling, the prophecy of the earth’s demise had been hidden in plain sight all along. The apocalyptic tenor of the Disaster Movie is a means to express a deep ambivalence and anxiety regarding the nature, status and utility of civil institutions—rendered most compellingly and broadly in scenes where universally recognizable symbolic indicators of American society are blown to smithereens, such as the implosion of the White House, the President’s (Danny Glover) impalement by the Aircraft Carrier John F. Kennedy, the strangulation of the Las Vegas strip by the dust cloud from the Yellowstone Caldera, the annihilation of the Hawaiian islands by

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reactivated volcanoes, the collapse of the Southern California coastline and freeway system into the Pacific. As spectacle, such obliteration is exhilarating, a source of pleasure for audiences, articulating a sense that such markers of American society have become irredeemably corrupt, in need of destruction. At the same time, such scenes, articulate an existential dread and material fear regarding external threats to those same institutions, and the plot often functions to restore the values signified by the same set physical markers that have been laid to waste. In this manner the apocalyptic disaster fiction enacts a tension between affirmation of ideology and protest against structures of power, between a desire for change and an apprehension regarding the same. In one sense, the terms of the apocalyptic narrative are affirmed – the military (the Navy builds the Arks which sail to safety), the government (World leaders put aside differences to save as many people as possible—400,000 to be exact—not much more than the 144,000 souls sealed in Revelation)12, the spiritual (The Mayans—the test from the heavens one of the two children is named Noah, conspiracy theorist Charlie Frost, is right about everything and therefore a prophetic figure, a John the Baptist, lone voice crying in the wilderness, baptizing our heroes in the secret, sacred, revelatory knowledge of the Mayans and Hapgood, the ship where Adrian’s father works is the Genesis) and the supernatural (scientific) all contribute to the salvation of the main characters. At the same time, as in the traditional apocalyptic narrative, 2012 articulates a yearning for destruction and the hope of a better future in a world yet to be, but also expresses a sense of despair and cynicism. A dialectic of destruction animates and invigorates the narratives, and enables disaster films to straddle a line between affirmation of hegemonic ideals and their negation, between hope for change and resignation regarding remedial social action. So while all four terms are affirmed as being central to the survival of the human race, they are also, simultaneously held up to scrutiny and critique. The military aids in the cover up, the government hides the truth from the people and sells tickets which only billionaires can afford, to salvation on the arks, the world’s religious leaders are powerless in the face of actual apocalyptic destruction and cosmically generated crustal displacement (one set piece has the Vatican collapse upon the Conference of Cardinals, the Pope and the Italian Prime Minister), and the scientists can do nothing more than confirm that the earth will be destroyed. The social utility of the disaster 12

In Revelation Chapter 7 Verse 4 (New International Version) “Then I heard the number of those who were sealed: 144,000 from all the tribes of Israel.”

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film resides in its ability to hold in tension a critique and affirmation of hegemonic ideologies that pertain to social institutions, and walk a fine line between affirmation and negation, hope and nihilism. The forfeiture of American hegemony in a globalized world is demonstrated by the failure of its civil institutions but the corrective for this loss is, apparently, the reconstitution of the family. Because it is so difficult to conceive of a terminus for civilization, apocalyptic destruction forces something to survive, and the apocalyptic narrative turns upon the question of what, if anything, will survive cataclysm (especially when catastrophe is understood to be a metaphor for social change). The key elements of the post-apocalyptic film are “that which survives” and “that which ends,” and the relationships, convergences, and contrasts between them. Often, the remainder is some essential, eternal aspect of American society, something from the past that is seen as imperiled in the present and the future. In apocalyptic films such as 2012, social renewal is an act of reclamation, offering the past as corrective to the present, to history and progressive social change, hence the desire to return to the beginning. That which remains after the conflagration is most telling, most ideological, most tethered to the historical coordinates of the film. Often, the remainder is some essential, eternal aspect of American society, something from the past that is seen as imperiled by the present and the future. Within this scenario it is imperative that one element of what survives past the cataclysm is humanity itself, but more its moral and spiritual dimensions than physical ones. According to James Berger, what often ends up being unveiled in the contemporary apocalyptic story is a human essence. The narrative of disaster is staged so that a universal human subject can be revealed.13 The solar flares may end civilization but they bring people together, dissolving national and political borders along with the geographic boundaries of pesky things like oceans and mountain ranges, so that the essential goodness of humans can be affirmed, which is also the theme of the book within the film, an obscure novel penned by the hero Jackson Curtis, whose words inspire Adrian to beseech the leaders of the surviving world governments to allow a few thousand more stragglers aboard the arks that are humanity’s only hope for survival. The neoliberal ideologies and negative aspects of globalization melt away when the question of humanity’s essential goodness is posed; the leaders of the world’s economic powers and the global elites just needed a reminder, a

13 James Berger. 1999. After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 5 - 6.

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loving remonstration from scientists and artists that globalization need not be so harsh and destructive. Because so few filmed apocalypses end on downbeat notes, films such as The Postman, Waterworld and Planet of the Apes, can be seen as cultural attempts to reinstate a transcendent subject, a ‘traditional’ hero and society. They can also be seen as attempts to contain troublesome aspects of a contemporary moment. And what seems to be imperiled in the contemporary moment is the family. In the logic of narrative, billions of people die in order for Jackson and Kate Curtis (Amanda Peet) to rediscover their love for one another and get married again, after the untimely demise of Kate’s current paramour, the shallow, if well meaning, Dr. Gordon Silverman (Thomas McCarthy). The world perishes so Noah Curtis (Liam James) can refer to his no longer estranged father as Daddy for the first time in years; or that seven year old Lilly Curtis (Morgan Lily), once the family has been reconstituted, no longer needs to wear nighttime diapers; or that shy Adrian can meet and marry art historian and President’s daughter, Laura Wilson (Thandie Newton) so that they can start a family of their own, having taken inspiration from Curtis’ hopeful novel.14 Thus, the film ends with the reconstitution of a ‘proper’ family and the beginning of a new one. Those who do not represent a normative family are meted out the poetic deaths that only a disaster movie can provide.15 Amidst all the death and tribulation 2012 is a resounding affirmation of a certain kind of family structure and masculinity. Nearly every single scene has a character mention their family or children; if things are not being blown up, characters are engaged in negotiating family dynamics. A few examples that seem particularly instructive and telling draw the connection between disaster and the imperiled patriarchal nuclear family. The first line of dialogue in the film is spoken by Adrian to a cabbie in India, a caution not to run over his colleague Satnam’s son Ayjit (Mateen Devji); after greeting Satnam (Jimi Mistry), Adrian refers to Ayjit by saying, “he’s a little man already”, which is followed by the introduction 14

A major bit of dramatic business is that Noah calls his father Jackson knowing it hurts his dad’s feelings. Lilly utters the penultimate line of the film, “Hey Dad, No more pull-ups.” 15 The characters without normative families, save the Curtis clan, are seen as ethically challenged or forbidden entrance into salvation. Anheuser, whose mother is suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease to the point where he lies to her about what’s happening, is cynical and hardened; Yuri keeps Tamara as a trophy, while Sasha (Yuri’s pilot) and Tamara engage in an affair; Gordon is shallow and cowardly.

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of Satnam’s wife Aparna (Agam Darshi), and some requisite complaining about her cooking. A scene that begins with Gordon suggesting to Kate on a late night trip to the supermarket that they have a child of their own ends with an earthquake splitting them apart, literally. When the Curtis family enters Yellowstone, Lilly and Jackson are singing Will the Circle Be Unbroken, a gospel hymn about families reuniting in heaven; Jackson’s attempt to show his kids where he and Kate used to camp out during their newlywed days – which Noah recognizes as the romantic tryst that lead to his birth – leads to their discovery of Charlie Frost and his prophecies, as well as an encounter with the military and a meeting with avid Curtis acolyte Adrian. When we’re introduced to Adrian’s itinerant father Harry (Blu Mankuma), and his musical partner Tony (George Segal), the two men argue about Harry’s interest in Tony’s family life – Tony is alienated from his son because he’s married to a Japanese woman, to which Harry replies that such a marriage is “not the end of the world.” Harry reminds Tony that while he doesn’t see Adrian, he does talk to him on the phone every week, a conversation that is interrupted by another earthquake. When Adrian briefs President Wilson (Danny Glover) in the oval office, Laura storms in angry about Picard’s assassination and its cover up, the Chief Executive’s first line in the film is ‘you look like your mother when you’re angry;’ when Chief of Staff Anheuser (Oliver Platt) chides Adrian to forget the public and keep focused upon geological transformations, he concludes his dressing down of the scientist with another admonishment: Ask Laura out before it’s too late. As they form their relationship, Adrian and Laura discuss their childhood, with the First Daughter admitting that she didn’t have any boyfriends because they were all afraid of her father. Later, when the destruction has begun in earnest and Anheuser begins the evacuation of the government, he finds President Wilson praying in the White House chapel; the President greets his Chief of Staff by addressing Adrian instead, saying “Did you ever meet my wife Dorothy?” and just before the aircraft carrier JFK impales him, Wilson says “I’m coming home Dorothy.” After Anheuser departs with the remnants of the Wilson administration, the President, who has chosen to stay behind and die with the citizenry, remarks to an aide: . . . all that’s left now is to tell the truth to the people. At least, if they know, families can say goodbye to each other. A mother can comfort her children. And a father can ask his daughter for forgiveness.

which is followed by a shot of Laura. When Tenzin (Chin Han) refuses to let the Curtis family and Gordon sneak onto the ark with his grandparents

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and brother Nima (Osric Chau), Kate convinces his grandmother (Lise Lu) to prevail upon him by saying “please, as a mother, I’m begging you.” Lastly, when Adrian attempts to convince the world’s remaining leaders to open the doors of the three surviving arks to allow more passengers to board, and thus survive the oncoming tsunami, by relaying news of Satnam and his family’s death under the great wave saying that his colleague died needlessly and, “everybody out there has died in vain, if we start our future with an act of cruelty.” Addressing the camera and breaking the fourth wall he says, “what will you tell your children? What will they tell theirs?” Laura interjects and echoes his sentiments by telling the heads of state that “If my father were here, he would open the gates,” letting the desperate multitudes on board. Though a compendium of disaster movie conventions and codes, 2012 does provide a novel twist on the genre, one appropriate to the social and political anxieties engendered by the economic collapse of 2008 and strengthening of neoliberal hegemony. What makes 2012 innovative is that it adds a new fifth term to the apocalyptic narrative structure— globalization. It is that which needs to be destroyed, the thing which requires total destruction, cannot be redeemed and can only be addressed through a cataclysm which returns civilization to sources, ones that look like the restoration of patriarchy and American hegemony. Through its anxious depiction of globalization, the film introduces a new institution and structure to the apocalyptic paradigm, but one that is qualitatively different from the other terms—it exists outside of the constraints and limits of nations apart from the other institutions of the apocalyptic narrative, but, at the same time, though distinct, globalization (i.e. neoliberalism) is buttressed and sustained by the institutions of state, military, church and science that are the constituent elements of the contemporary apocalyptic narrative. In the logic of the disaster movie and the apocalyptic tale, the world has become irredeemably corrupt and can only be destroyed in order to save that which is most valuable. Globalization is a threat to the family, and the family is offered as palliative. That globalization is the threat which cannot be redeemed only destroyed is indicated at the start of the film. In the prologue, the choice of locales and emphasis upon the role of the state as the source of authority and power allegorizes the neoliberal economic structure that undergirds globalization. Showing the entire globe is perhaps appropriate to an end of world story, though most disaster films limit the bulk of the action to the United States even if the world is imperiled, or briefly shown, as is the case with films such as Mars Attacks!, Independence Day, Deep Impact,

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Armageddon and The Day After Tomorrow. In 2012. a through choice of locale underlying meanings are revealed and the purpose of this particular apocalyptic story made manifest. Representation of the G8 countries is explicit in the text, as that political and economic entity covertly approves and then secretly enacts the salvation of the elect through the ark plan, as opposed to the United Nation or some other organization, and no charities or humanitarian groups are involved. The G8 maintains its control over the plan, and the future of the human species through intimidation and extrajudicial assassination.16 The other key national actors are the members of the Plus Five (China, India, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil) as emerging economies play a crucial role in the scenario, from the discovery of the impending disaster in India, to the building of the arks in China (Anheuser remarks upon seeing the finished product, “Well, leave it to the Chinese. I didn’t think they could do it”), to Central America/Mexico by allusion to Mayans and to a mass suicide of indigenous peoples in December 2012, to the chilling scene of riots in the favelas in Brazil which ends with the collapse of the Cristo Redentor statue, to South Africa at the end of the film—the action is limited to the nations of the G8 and the Plus Five. Even an early scene where a Saudi royal (Parm Soor) is told the price of admission to the ark—one billion Euros rather than dollars, to the surprise of the prince, a message delivered to him by an MI6 agent with the surname Isaacs (Gerard Plunkett) —takes place in London. Through the visual logic of editing, the episodic opening transitions from outer-space, where the celestial tribulation begins in the form of a solar flare, to India, to Washington, to Canada, to China, to London, to Paris, binding these disparate locales together through montage, showing a globalized world, where national boundaries are easily traversed and where events in one space are causally motivated by events in another. Each scene refers to aspect of the neoliberal economic order as well: the India sequence shows an emerging economy where the technological and scientific prowess of Satnam and his brother has led to the discovery of the oncoming calamity; in Washington, a political fundraiser introduces the notion of a corrupted undemocratic political practice: to British Columbia, where an anti-G8 protest is brutally curtailed by the police as an SUV, a reference to climate change, is overturned and burned, at the exact 16

In the prologue Laura’s colleague Roland Picard (Patrick Bachau) discovers the plan to preserve the world’s great works of art and attempts to alert her to the cover up. As he phones her, his car explodes (apparently in the same tunnel where Princess Diana tragically perished). Frost’s source at CalTech, Professor Meyers is shown in a press clipping to have met his fate in a suspicious accident after he mailed the documents to Charlie.

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moment that the President briefs his seven associates on the impending demise of our planet; which is followed by the China segment, in Tibet, where the Red Army recruits workers for another “Dam project,” an allusion to the Three Gorges Dam which opened in 2008 amid controversy; which is followed by the briefing of the Saudi prince by the British intelligence official; and finally, a scene in the Louvre, where the Mona Lisa is removed and replaced by a duplicate. Another aspect of neoliberal economic orders and the social ambivalence regarding them can be seen in the very notion of Mayan Prophecy foretelling the end itself. Far from being merely prophetic.It can be viewed as a contagion, as attempt to usurp the rightful apocalypse, the hopeful ending where the chosen survive. In a sense the Mayan prophecy can be seen as analogous to illegal immigration, to the free flow of labor, cultural labor, across international and global borders. While Mayans “got it right” in predicting the time of the earth’s demise, their narrative was incomplete. The Mayan apocalypse, a threatening notion is recast as a return of the flood, as Noah’s story in Genesis foretold and retold. Cumulatively, we see a globalized world: one in which everywhere, there are signs, and portents, not just of the apocalypse but where the United States is one nation amongst many, where its hegemony and influence are waning, where the country is increasingly dependent upon the whims and good will of other nations. It is in the choice of locales and the role they play in the narrative that indicates the reification of a new economic order, one the narrative, and Jackson’s novel within the film, suggests has alienated us from one another, from our essential humanity, which we can only recover in the face of catastrophe. That the world is determined by economic factors that imperil the United States is made clear through symbol and allusion throughout the film. For instance, when Charlie explains to Jackson why the knowledge has been secreted away from the world’s citizens, he laughs maniacally as he says, “you have to keep things under wraps. First the stock market would go, then the economy, the dollar, boom! Pandemonium in the streets.” When Jackson rejects the notion of ships being built, Charlie tells him that seats are being sold but “guys like you and me don’t have a chance. You’d have to be Bill Gates or Rupert Murdoch. Or a Russian billionaire or something.” This encounter is followed by a scene in the supermarket, a place of commerce and metaphor for abundance, perhaps, which is literally rent asunder by the earth’s shifting crust at the moment where Gordon dares to suggest or further alter the family and having a child out of wedlock. The next scene introduces that Russian billionaire to whom Frost had unknowingly referred: Yuri Karpov (Zlatko Buric), Jackson’s boss. In the

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neoliberal world, the hero has a menial, demeaning job as a chauffeur to a nouveau riche, arrogant and brutish Russian, with two obnoxious twin sons Oleg and Alec (Philippe and Alexandre Haussmann) and Tamara (Beatrice Rosen) and a vacuous trophy girlfriend. In this case, the American hero, out of economic necessity, takes a subservient position to the Russian billionaire, to the grotesque from the emerging economic superpower, who made his billions quickly and probably illegally. Later we learn that Yuri confirms for Jackson that Charlie was right—they really were selling tickets for one billion Euros (and he could only buy three thus consigning Tamara to her fate) —and that regular guys were left behind, ordinary Americans shut out of a chance at survival, a salvation and election that has been the American birthright since the Puritans founded Massachusetts Bay Colony as a New World, a New Kingdom of Heaven on earth, as the place to undertake their divinely sanctioned errand of preparing the world for Christ’s return. Jackson’s association with Yuri, and Gordon’s connection to Tamara (he performed her breast augmentation surgery), does provide the means for the heroes to escape Las Vegas in the billionaire’s mammoth transport plane, and Yuri’s Bentley collection saves them from a crash landing but the pivotal moment towards the end of the film, the one which stirs Adrian and Laura to make their impassioned Farewell Atlantis inspired speech that forms the moral of the story, is when the two Doctors learn from Anheuser about the sales of tickets. At first Anheuser suggests people were chosen by some sort of egalitarian genetic testing and selected according to skills and knowledge but when Laura spots the Saudi prince and his family, she realizes that money was the real deciding factor. Angrily, Anheuser responds: Anheuser: That’s right Dr. Wilson, without billions of dollars from the private sector this entire operation would have been impossible. Adrian: We sold tickets!? And what about all these workers? They all get passes? Anheuser: What, life isn’t fair? Is that it? You wanna donate your passes to a couple of Chinese workers, you be my guest.

Anheuser, the closest character in the film to a villain, enunciates the rhetoric of the neoliberal project. Without billionaires and the private wealth of elites working together across national boundaries and in secretive consort, civilization and culture would surely perish. While it’s tempting to see Anheuser as a cartoon villain, representing for Emmerich and Kloser the corrupt system of neoliberal economics and Social Darwinism, Adrian actually echoes the same rhetoric when he says to Laura, “I believe nature will choose for itself, from itself, what will survive.”

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At the end, it is Adrian’s recitation of a crucial passage from Farewell, Atlantis that delineates the film’s ambivalence about globalization. Imploring the G8 leaders to let the panicked passengers of malfunctioning Ark 3 onto the departing Ark 4, he quotes Curtis’s book saying “the moment we stop fighting for each other, that’s the moment we lose our humanity.” What convinces the leaders is the insistence upon this universal humanity, this transcendent ethic and impulse, that which supersedes economics and the emerging social order, a value system of the regular guy, the average American male, as expressed through Jackson’s novel. America now oppressed and marginalized, denied of its birthright, needed succor in the form of fantasy resolution to crises. 2012 intervenes to provide a reassuring narrative of return, a reassertion of a familiar, reassuring apocalyptic paradigm. The return to sources is a return to a time before emerging economies, when the economic empire building project was the exclusive domain of Americans and their families. Indeed, the foreign contagion posited by the metaphor of the Mayan prophecies is rendered familiar by recourse to a more pleasing story, that of Noah, the ark, the salvation of the family. The threat posed by emerging economies, such as Latin America, is defalted by recasting it through the prism of the Biblical apocalyptic. The world united in 2012 betrays its tensions, the citizens of the global world are just like us, sharing an essential humanity and innate goodness, while they pose a threat to our privilege and dominance. Global emerging economies increase wealth, produce science, technology and knowledge but cement the neoliberal order and imperial American hegemony. At the heart of 2012 is an ambivalent utopian wish for globalization just in a different way, where regular guys like Jackson and their families don’t have to take a back seat to people from emerging economies. In that sense, and by transforming the alien unwelcome Mayan Prophecy into the comforting Noah’s tale, 2012 gives us the apocalypse that we deserve.

Works Cited 2012. 2009. Directed by Roland Emmerich. Culver City, CA: Sony Pictures Entertainment, 2012. Blu-Ray. “2012.” Box Office Mojo. Accessed May 28, 2014. http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=2012.htm. “2012.” Metacritic. Accessed May 28, 2014. http://www.metacritic.com/movie/2012. “2012.” Rotten Tomatoes. Accessed May 28, 2014.

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http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/2012/. Berger, James. 1999. After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Einstein, Albert. 1958. Foreword to Earth’s Shifting Crust: A Key ToSome Basic Problems of Earth Science. New York: Pantheon Books,1 – 2. Hancock, Graham. 1995. Fingerprints of the Gods. New York: Three Rivers Press. Hapgood, Charles. 1958. Earth’s Shifting Crust: A Key To Some Basic Problems of Earth Science. New York: Pantheon Books. Harrelson, Woody. 2009. “Charlie Frost’s YouTube Channel: ThisIsTheEnd.com” YouTube. January 27. http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-02u3f-toZjNWmVa61Y0Mw. —. 2009. “The Package” YouTube video, 2:09. November 11. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRoi01LY0BE&list=UU-02u3ftoZjNWmVa61Y0Mw. —. 2009. “Watch My Animation” YouTube video, February 25. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgM65EOfyGU&index=14&list=U U-02u3f-toZjNWmVa61Y0Mw. Heard, Alexander. 1999. Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End TimeAmerica. New York: W.W. Norton. “IHC History,” The Institute for Human Continuity. Accessed May 28, 2014, http://archive.bigspaceship.com/ihc/. Kermode, Frank. 1966. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. London: Oxford University Press. Krupp, Edwin C. 2009. “The Great 2012 Scare.” Sky And Telescope. November 22 – 26. Sagan, Nick. 2014. “Forewords.” Nick Sagan. Accessed May 28, 2014. http://nicksaganprojects.com/works-2/forewords/. White, Hayden. 1973. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Yeomans, Don. 2009. “12-21-2012—Just Another Day.” NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: California Institute of Technology. November 11. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/video/index.php?id=876.

CHAPTER EIGHT GOD AND MACHINE: WHAT IT MEANS TO BE HUMAN IN DEUS EX: HUMAN REVOLUTION PHILIP MATTHEW TRAD

Sigmund Freud addresses a term he calls the “uncanny” in the essay by the same name. In this, he references an existence of something that exists within the boundaries of what we fear, something altogether different yet similar at the same time. It is undoubtedly related to what is frightening—to what arouses dread and horror; equally certainly, too, the word is not always used in a clearly definable sense, so that it tends to coincide with what excites fear in general. Yet we may expect that a special core of feeling is present which justifies the use of a special conceptual term. One is curious to know what this common core is which allows us to distinguish as ‘uncanny’ certain things which lie within the field of what is frightening.1

Considering these criteria, the idea of human enhancement through technology would seem to fit along these lines: something to be feared yet is separate from fear. In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, fear is a common theme that is addressed: fear of the unknown, for what the future holds for humanity, and even what direction humanity should explore. The point of contestation is the idea and practice of human augmentation; the use of mechanical replacements or implants to enhance and improve the base human condition. What some call progress, however, others see as a means to end of society and civilization. Within the world of the game, the technology, with all its troubles and consequences, has reached a catalyst

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Sigmund Freud. 1919. “The Uncanny,” PDF. 1.

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where it can no longer be ignored, and the direction this technology is taken, is framed, to shape the path that humanity will follow. Video games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution offer their players the opportunities to not only reflect on questions of morality, but to actively engage with the world surrounding these debates. The medium allows the player to take on an active role within the debate, to experience the fear and hope firsthand while they make their way through the interactive story. In the case of Deus Ex, the questions provoked revolve around the idea of human augmentation, as the world of the game stands at the brink of seeing this technology come into mainstream use. As figures in the story call for or against regulation, it offers a curious shadow of our own world, where the merging of organic and technology becomes more possible with each passing month, and the player finds themselves wondering what it means to be human. This is mirrored in real world debates, where transhumanists and bioconservatives debate these very points, questioning the morality or benefits that would follow this kind of technology. Nick Bostrom addresses and frames the idea of transhumanism, “A loosely defined movement that has developed gradually over the past two decades, and can be viewed as an outgrowth of secular humanism and the Enlightenment. It holds that human nature is improvable through the 2 use of applied science and other rational methods.” These ideas have been taken to an exaggerated but still foreseeable path in the story, allowing the debate to become more than a simple work of fiction and opens the idea that the choices and debates in game may become just as prominent within the real world soon. The game opens by focusing on a single man after he has traveled down an elevator to the scientific wing of his building. There are reports of a fire, but no one on that level is answering queries, and worse, something is actively jamming the central security feed. The figure the camera is focused on is Adam Jensen, head of security for Sarif Industries, a cybernetic augmentation firm. The great irony of Adam’s existence is though he is head of security for a company specializing in human augmentation, literally to make people better, faster, stronger, he remains unaugmented, but Adam’s lack of augmentation does not reduce his effectiveness. It is made clear that Adam is highly trained and good at his job. Even when outnumbered, he comes away unscathed and still hurrying through to protect and save whomever he can. His ability is brought into question the moment he sees augmented soldiers among the attackers. 2 Nick Bostrom. 2005. “In Defense of Posthuman Dignity.” Bioethics (19.3), 202208.

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These new arrivals simply wade into the midst of their targets by brawn or stealth, crushing them like ants or slipping from seen to unseen like a ghost. When he does finally encounter one of these augmented soldiers, it becomes clear how insignificant Adam’s training and skills are; his body is wrecked, ruined, and left to die as a fire begins to consume the labs. It is at this moment that the ethics of the narrative begin to manifest, and where the debate for the transhuman and bioconservative begins in earnest. The results of Adam’s attack and the surgery to save his life are shown in stunningly graphic detail. Images of a hospital monitor show his chest and one arm are totally crushed, while internal shots to his body show ravaged bone and organs. Laced with these are scenes from Jensen’s mind as his consciousness shifts from the real world to the memories that come in a deluge. As the scene progresses, haunting voices argue over how to proceed to save his life. “He doesn’t need that!” “His body can take it!” “He’s useless to me like this.” “Miraculous . . .” 3

Mixed among the voices, images of his surgery are shown in instances of horrifying clarity. The internal scenes return, but where there was a wrecked and damaged body before, now we see whole and functioning organs… but no longer solely organic. Circuitry laces over lungs and veins, and metallic reinforcements bind and strengthen bones. The scene comes to a close with Adam’s surgery finished, the power core for his new augmentations being locked into place. It’s immediately clear that Adam’s survival required the surgery to enhance his body, transforming him into something that is potentially amazing or terrifying. Adam Jensen has emerged from the fires far more than what he was before; his legs have been replaced, allowing him greater speed and endurance. Both of his arms are now clearly mechanical, granting him strength surpassing anything humanly possible. Even his internal body has seen itself “upgraded.” Filters are built into his lungs, allowing him to ignore gas or airborne toxins, while his skin has been laced with artificial layers to produce a layer of natural armor and the ability to bend light around him to disappear from sight. Even his eyes are new, flashing and shifting focus like a pair of cameras. When we see Adam next he has the same silhouette as the man from before, but despite a familiarity it is clear he is no longer the man he was. What do these changes mean for him now, 3

Deus Ex: Human Revolution. 2011. Square-Enix.

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having been brought from the brink of death? What, if anything was sacrificed; these augmentations obviously offer benefits many would find desirable, but are not welcomed by everyone. This is an argument taken on by so called bioconservatives: One of the central concerns of the bioconservatives is that human enhancement technologies might be ‘dehumanizing.’ The worry, which has been variously expressed, is that these technologies might undermine our human dignity or inadvertently erode something that is deeply valuable about being human but that is difficult to put into words or to factor into a cost-benefit analysis.” 4

Simply stepping through the halls of Sarif Industries’ lobby gives voice to these fears; LIMB clinics, treatment centers specializing in mechanical augmentation and care, are under the threat of near constant protests. These protests are shown to lead to riots and simply stepping outside to the streets of the world shows the remnants of a protest and flyers and signs give stark contrast to otherwise clean streets and walkways. A growing theme emerges from the protestors in graffiti and signs lingering in the area: they claim to fight for humanity. Alongside these extreme measures are heard the concerns of the average citizen, where debates rage back and forth on the topic of this new technology. What will become of “normal” humans who cannot compete with their augmented peers? Will they become second class citizens, unable to find a place in a world that has moved beyond them? What will these mechanical augmentations eventually do without any sense of restriction or regulation? Already we have seen the darker side of these augmentations in the form of nearunstoppable super soldiers, who move unopposed and unchallenged through those without their enhancements, and clearly this is what the bioconservative point of view warns against. Quoting Bostrom again, “Inequity, discrimination, and stigmatization—against, or on behalf of, 5 modified people—could become serious issues.” Already Adam has been augmented against his will, but what of the voices that were heard during his surgery. When he was called useless, was that because of his wounds, or his unenhanced body. Did those responsible simply take the steps needed to heal him, or was he simply “improved.” Adam’s future becomes a mirror to the rest of humanity as a new technology emerges: Will it be a tool and boon, or will it become lost in circuits and gears?

4 5

Bostrom. 2005. “Defense of Posthuman,” 203. Bostrom. 2005. “Defense of Posthuman,” 208.

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These are the questions that form the core of the morality of the game. Ultimately, Adam will discover many groups, each with a stake in the matter from one end to the other, forming the core behind both sets of beliefs. The three previous augmented soldiers seemed to revel in their status as inhuman killers, dealing with their targets with what seemed like measured contempt for their unaugmented state of being. Adam, however, shows a different path than those before him. He fights to retain his humanity, mindful of what his choices mean and what weight his actions will carry. In doing so, he manifests a point that transhumanists quickly use to address the fears of bioconservatives, that simply having greater ability does not bring someone to act immorally. Even though he is driven to determine the nature of the attackers who mutilated him and are believed to have killed the woman he loves, he does not lose sight of this goal. We live in a world that holds the promise of these changes, where talk of the integration of man and machine becomes less fiction and more reality with each passing year. With that understanding comes the question for what that integration means for our own world: What, if anything, will we surrender if we were to embrace this mixture of technology and biology? At the end, like Adam Jensen, it will be our choices that define our humanity, and our actions that will speak for who we are. It shatters the idea of defined roles, fully allowing people to embrace what they wish to become, rather than what they must become. Donna Haraway talks about this complication of cyborgs, “The cyborgs populating feminist science fiction make very problematic the statuses of man or woman, 6 human, artifact, member of a race, individual entity, or body.” While Haraway refers to feminist science fiction, the example can easily be utilized for a wider scale, questioning basic roles that are simply assumed. To understand the debates in the world of the game, it is important to understand the groups that feature prominently on either side. Each group embodies a belief and desire not only for augmentation, but for humanity at large, either benign or dangerous, yet none are innocent. On the side of unlimited augmentation and the transhumanist ideology stand Sarif Industries. On the side of restrictions on augmentation and bioconservative stand the Illuminati. These two groups personify the games thoughts and ideals, showing both the transhuman approach to augmentation and the promotion of this technology, and the bioconservative approach which

6

Donna Haraway. 2006. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments, 117-158.

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decries the ideas and motivations of transhumanists and calls for a focus on the body as born to nature. Sarif Industries [SI], as stated, holds a strong ideological belief with the growth of their company behind the improvement of humanity through augmentation. For SI, augmentation is the means for humanity to take the next step in evolution, surpassing the limits of the body and the constraints of biology. They offer the promise not only of overcoming any disability, but surpassing any shortcomings a person would wish to conquer. For Sarif Industries it is not enough to match humanity; they will actively seek to improve and enhance beyond normal human capabilities. The company’s scientists work not only to improve augmentation, but to find a solution for the side effects that plague every person who does undergo augmentation. In turn, this would make augmentation far more widespread, opening up the procedure for anyone in the populace without risk or fear of side effects. The person who most embodies the ideals of SI is, appropriately, the founder, David Sarif. This idea is mirrored with real world transhumanists: Transhumanists believe that, while there are hazards that need to be identified and avoided, human enhancement technologies will offer enormous potential for deeply valuable and humanly beneficial uses.7

For David Sarif, mechanical augmentation is only the beginning for what this technology can mean for mankind. Idealistic in the extreme with his outward persona, David scoffs at the idea of regulation against augmentation, seeing those ideas as short-sighted and needlessly restricting the promise of humanity. He himself replaced his arm, simply to improve his performance at the company baseball game. As the CEO of Sarif Industries, he is also in the position as Adam Jensen’s direct superior, and as is discovered also the driving force behind Adam’s extreme augmentation. David’s reasoning was two-fold; to bring Adam into the capabilities needed to handle this new threat against his company and employees, but also to push Adam into what David sees as the man’s, and humanity’s, birthright. David is quick to dismiss the cost or side-effects of augmentation; for him these are necessary stepping stones that will be surpassed. The idea of losing one’s humanity to augmentation is something he finds ultimately ridiculous; for David, such thoughts come from fear of bioconservatives which are ultimately harmful arguments from a close minded approach. In essence, the bioconservative standpoint

7

Bostrom. 2005. “Defense of Posthuman,” 203.

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is simply another method of discrimination. On the subject of diversity Bostrom has this to say: Painting alarmist pictures of the threat from future technologically modified people, or hurling preemptive condemnations of their necessarily debased nature, is not the best way to go about it. 8

Bostrom does not, however, simply dismiss these fears out of hand, nor does he ignore that there would indeed be legitimate social concerns about such steps for humanity. Once again the game’s narrative addresses these subjects when Adam moves through the cities of the world, and he is greeted with distrust, fear, or awe. People hold an innate understanding that his capabilities surpass what they can do; his very existence threatens the status quo for society, and due to that he becomes an unknown factor. This is also addressed by Freud, speaking further on the matter, “We are tempted to conclude that what is ‘uncanny’ is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar. Naturally not everything that is new and unfamiliar is frightening, however; the relation is not capable of inversion. We can only say that what is novel can easily become 9 frightening and uncanny.” Freud’s meaning on this matter is clear; sometimes people fear something simply because it is new, or different. This is a case that can be clear within the game, as people react towards Adam negatively not because they know him, or have seen him act in some great atrocity, but simply make a judgment at the sight of his augmentation, and they make no little effort to hide that point of view “Excuse me; I really don’t want to talk to people like you” “Back away, aug!” “Why would you do that to your body?” 10

Bostrom goes into further detail with this in his idea of human and posthuman dignity, and specifically how one does not necessarily mean the exclusion of the other. However, the game does show a dark side to the desire for augmentation; an addictive and dangerous drug called Neuropozyne. Neuropozyne is the game’s answer to implant rejection, acting to suppress key aspects of the human immune system to allow safe, longterm use of cybernetics. Without the drug, the body ultimately rejects the 8

Bostrom. 2005. “Defense of Posthuman,” 208. Freud. 1919. “Uncanny,” 2. 10 Deus Ex: Human Revolution. 2011. 9

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implants and augmentation in violent and painful fashions. The solution to the problem of rejection is not free, in any sense. The game makes certain aspects of Neuropozyne painfully clear: it is prohibitively expensive, and extremely addictive. These reasons alone act in a fashion that keep the transhumanist ideals in the game in check, and in turn allow the bioconservative standpoint to be, previously, content to let the augmentation argument fester on its own accord. Standing apart from the masses that require the use of this drug to continue to function and live, is, once again, Adam Jensen. In another way he stands as a promise to the world, but now as a means to breach this dependency on this drug, and truly allow for augmentation to take mankind to the next step of their progression as a species. Knowing the side effects of this drug, why do people still desire these augmentations? This becomes the role of the drug within the game, silently asking the question: ‘What price would you pay?” Even those at the highest echelons of power, who have the most information regarding this drug and the side effects it produces, still augment themselves. One could argue that with their position comes an ability to have an unlimited supply, but that does not ignore the addiction and price; others are claimed to have been wealthy users, but the cost has brought them to poverty, and the addiction drives many to desperate and violent acts. Many of the concerns of augmentation do not come directly from the implants but from the drug required to utilize them. To use the augmentations, you must use this drug for the rest of your life. Again, Adam does not require the drug to maintain his augmented existence, something that Sarif Industries was hoping to present to the world, but others in the world do not yet benefit from this knowledge. However, it does show the case of someone who can act freely and responsibly without the harrowing limitations that Neuropozyne gives, and shows that the transhumanist ideals do not simply come from profit: Sarif is one of the major controllers of the drug, so it makes little sense that they would desire to find a cure. Yet that is one of the driving forces behind Sarif Industries in the game, to seek a freedom for all augmented people from Neuropozyne. The drug’s placement in the game is to act as a limiter for why augmentation has not grown more widespread, but more so it shows that a posthuman dignity is not solely tied to augmentation of the human body, but a myriad of factors. Neuropozyne’s existence is the true enemy of a posthuman dignity, which is why Sarif Industries desires to remove the need for it. The Illuminati stand in the shadows for much of the game, but their presence is felt from the start. Seeing themselves as shepherds for mankind, they seek to maintain a tight control over all aspects of progress.

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Augmentation, with its promise of enabling humans to surpass their limitations, becomes the greatest threat to this power and goal. It is the Illuminati who are behind the opening scene attack on Sarif Industries with the intent to halt the research that bypasses Neuropozyne. Part of their belief follows the idea that people could not be trusted with this much power, and it comes to their influence to protect humanity from itself. They follow the ideas of bioconservatives closely as laid out by Bostrom, “The best approach…is to implement global bans on swathes of promising human enhancement technologies to forestall a slide down a slippery slope towards an ultimately debased, posthuman state.”11 At the core of their tenets, the Illuminati see their control as a protection for the masses, sheltering people from dangers they could not hope to face. Civilization itself would be in peril. To promote their agenda, they remain behind the scenes and in the shadows, utilizing fronts in companies and people to foster fear and hatred in the masses; the end result in game are two very prominent yet different threats that Jensen must encounter. In doing this, however, they ignore the idea of a human dignity as much as a posthuman dignity. Leon Kass, as quoted in Bostrom’s work, lays out the fundamental argument, “Most of the given bestowals of nature have their given species-specified natures: they are each and all of a given sort. Cockroaches and humans are equally bestowed but differently natured. To turn a man into a cockroach…would be dehumanizing. To try to turn a man into more than a man might be so as well. We need more than generalized appreciation for nature’s gifts. We need a particular regard and respect for the special gift that is our own 12 given nature.” Kass’ ideals fit perfectly with how the Illuminati approach humanity in the game; focusing on an appreciation of one’s own nature and, in effect, contentment with one’s place. What it also does is encourage an acceptance of the status quo, and a limiting restriction born of fear simply due to something being, even as Kass describes, “more” than it was before. By their very argument the bioconservatives ignore the idea that their description of what these augmentations would do in fact would be a lessening of humanity, when in fact they themselves describe the process as making someone more than what they were before. By focusing on the idea of a loss of dignity, they are in fact stating that these augmentations should make someone “less” than what they were, but that argument is never given. Instead they simply present the mindset of fearing something simply due to a change of nature, with no substance 11 12

Bostrom. 2005. “Defense of Posthuman,” 203. Bostrom. 2005. “Defense of Posthuman,” 204.

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given that their ideals will hold true. It is a fallacy born out of a ‘What if?’ The argument also ignores the agencies and laws currently in place to keep people from acting in a fashion that bioconservatives warn could occur if a “second class” of humanity was born from posthuman origins. The bioconservative outlook is not shown to be totally without cause in the game, and the summation of their fears, and the public opposition to the ideals of Sarif Industries on the subject of augmentation is William Taggert. He serves as the face for the Illuminati as a whole, and the face behind the idea of regulation and restrictions against augmentation. A man who had lost his wife to a Neuropozyne addict, Taggert has devoted his life to seeing the threat of augmentation curbed and regulated, to better protect society against the anarchy that he believes would come as a result. Set as the immediate foil to David Sarif, the two men stand in direct opposition to one another. Where David sees only the promise of augmentation, Taggert can only see the dangers. A magnificent public speaker, Taggert’s words incite at least one major riot seen in game, as he focuses on the fear and suspicions that the public has for this emerging technology. These riots and outbursts are Taggert’s—and in turn the Illuminati’s—desired response, forcing reaction from world leaders to address the “augmentation problem.” Brendenoord makes an excellent summary of this outlook, “Certain enhancements and anthro-technological devices may increase or decrease relational dignity. . . . 13 Some may argue that even favorable enhancements constitute a violation.” Once again this moves to promote and further the bioconservative agenda that the Illuminati in public appeal by highlighting the violence that stems from these discussions. They blame the violence on augmentation, while glazing over the fact that it is their own actions that cause the destructive behavior, not the augmentation they speak against. Despite his less than honest approach to matters, the game does not try to paint Taggert in the role of villain; instead he comes across as sincerely concerned for humanity; he is worried about the freedom in which David Sarif desires to pursue this technology would result. This is another important point to consider for bioconservatives, in that they are sincere in their desires and in general not speaking from malice, but fear. For the Illuminati, by solely focusing on what negative consequences might happen, they needlessly limit their understandings and expectations of humanity. The idea is to show technology as not only dangerous, but 13

Annelien Brendenoord. 2010. “Toward a “Post-Posthuman Dignity Area” in Evaluating Emerging Enhancement Technologies.” The American Journal of Bioethics (July 10.7), 55-57.

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subversive. Taggert himself embraces his humanity, yet sees the replacement of organic components with mechanical as sacrificing what makes a person human. Later on this is discovered to be from the loss of his wife to a man suffering from Neuropozyne withdrawals. Taggert’s decisions and actions are revealed to be motivated by grief and fear; though he does indeed mean well, he ignores the influence of personal moral behavior when juxtaposed against enhanced ability from external sources. The Illuminati’s goals all revolve around a central tenet, “total freedom is no better than total anarchy.” Mankind, in their mind, is unable to act without some sense of control or direction, and they are all too willing to provide that from the shadows behind the rulers of the world. They are not against augmentation itself, only the idea of it remaining unrestricted. This is what brings them into conflict with Sarif Industries with the promise of a way to bypass Neuropozyne. Without the drug to act as a limiter, nothing would hold back cybernetics from being used by everyone. The Illuminati see their control, and in turn civilization and order, falling to pieces within a short period under the augmented feet of the uncontrolled masses. Because of David Sarif’s unrelenting nature, the Illuminati order the attacks and kidnappings, unwilling to let one man threaten everything for which they have worked. As one of the leaders claims through a computerized meeting, “The world will not change simply because David 14 Sarif wills it.” To maintain their control, there is no length the Illuminati will not go. They do not seek a higher ideology, or a gathering of power for the sake of power, they act to strengthen their shield and yoke over the masses, to protect humanity from itself. To realize that goal, they sacrifice their own humanity and the humanity of their agents. As I have mentioned throughout this section, Adam is not the only augmented character within the game; we are shown a variety of people wandering cities at various levels of augmentation. Some simply have a hand or arm replaced; others see massive sections of their bodies modified. Ultimately, Adam’s counterparts come in the form of three specific augmented soldiers: the three who led the attack on Sarif industries and in the reason for his current state of existence. Where Adam struggles with how to define his own humanity, these three seem to have given up any pretense of remaining human. They are cold, lethal, and utterly deadly to anyone who stands in their way, even if that person poses any sort of true threat. Their separation from humanity is not only in how they act to others, but how they carry themselves. One, a woman, never is shown to 14

Deus Ex: Human Revolution. 2011.

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speak or communicate, instead she simply travels from point to point in utter silence. Even her appearances in game seem to hint at a kind of discomfort from the presence of others unlike herself: she is often seen appearing and disappearing from sight through the use of her optical camouflage, acting like a kind of wraith who defies anyone to prove her existence. The only time she remains visible as she appears or leaves a scene is in the presence of another augmentic, or her death. Their leader, meanwhile, is even more heavily augmented then Adam, leaving his face as the only recognizably human feature he has left. The rest of his body is totally replaced by augmentics, allowing him to even disguise himself as a statue so perfectly that Adam walks right past him and does not notice until he’s come under attack. For this man, there is no redemption or idea of integration with humanity; he and others like him are doomed to remain apart. As he tells Adam near the games conclusion, 15 “You’ve lost her Jensen. Men like us, we always lose what we love” The meaning and inflection for Adam to understand is that his search for love, or any kind of human feeling or emotion, is a pointless endeavor. Ultimately, like other dismissals of his humanity, Adam rejects this thought, pushing forward to preserve what he is while he continues on his own journey. At the game’s climax and through the conclusion, it is Adam who bridges the gap between the artificial and organic; the machine and humanity. This is a factor of modern life that is often overlooked in many arguments, and one Donna Haraway addresses specifically, “By the late 20th century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized, and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. This cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers 16 structuring any possibility of historical transformation.” Slowly, Adam accepts not only his augmentations, but the understanding that his actions from the time of his accident were still his own, not a program or desire that was implanted. The use and method of his augmentation rests solely on his own action; he controlled the implants.Having moved past his initial reservations of what these changes meant for himself, he instead focuses on what he can do to use them to move forward. At the same time, he does not sink towards desperation as the other augmented soldiers do; in his passion to remain human, Adam ironically finds that he has always been human. He no longer a distinction between those who are augmented 15 16

Deus Ex: Human Revolution, 2011. Haraway. 2006. “Cyborg Manifesto,” 118.

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and those who are not; just as his existence offers the promise to blur the lines between the artificial and the machine, his choice gives the promise of the acceptance of the two sides incorporating with one another to move forward for the betterment of both. Instead of the artificial or humanity seeking dominance over one another, there is now the promise of coexistence; it is messy and still dangerous, but now the hope and possibility exist.

Works Cited 2001: A Space Odyssey.1968. Dir. Stanley Kubrik. MGM. Battlestar Galactica. Universal, 2004-2009. DVD. Bostrom, N. 2005. "In Defense of Posthuman Dignity." Bioethics, 19.3: 202-208. Brendenoord, Annelien. 2010. “Toward a “Post-Posthuman Dignity Area” in Evaluating Emerging Enhancement Technologies.” The American Journal of Bioethics (July 10.7), 55-57. Davis, Erik. 1989. “A Cyberspace Odyssey.” Nation, 248.18: 636. Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Square-Enix. 2011. Dick, Philip K. 1996. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: RandomHouse. Freud, Sigmund. 1919. “The Uncanny.” PDF. Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. 2002-2005. Dir. Kenji Kamiyama, Masaki Tachibana, Itsurô Kawasaki. DVD. Ghost in the Shell 2 – Innocence. 2004. Dir. Mamoru Oshii. DVD. Haraway, Donna. 2006. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments, 117-158. Hawk, Julie. 2011. “The 2010 William E. Brigman JPC Award Winner Objet 8 and the Cylon Remainder: Posthuman Subjectivization in Battlestar Galactica.” Journal of Popular Culture (44.1), 3. Jones, J. B. 2010. “Beyond Cyberpunk: New Critical Perspectives.” Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries (48.4), 674. Jones, Steve. 1994. “Hyper-Punk: Cyberpunk and Information Technology.” Journal of Popular Culture (28.2), 81. Klein, Herbert. 2007. “From Romanticism to Virtual Reality: Charles Babbage,William Gibson and the Construction of Cyberspace.” Interdisciplinary Humanities (24.1), 36. McHale, Brian. 1992. “Elements of a Poetics of Cyberpunk.” Critique (33.3), 149.

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Millanvoye, Marc. 2001. “Teflon under My Skin.” UNESCO Courier (54.7/8), 57. Savage, Robert. 2010. “Paleoanthropology of the Future: The Prehistory of Posthumanity in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: T Space Odyssey.” Extrapolation (University of Texas at Brownsville) (51.1), 99. Schaub, Joseph Christopher. 2010. “Mecha-topia: Imagining a Posthuman Paradisein Osamu Tezuka's Metropolis.” Interdisciplinary Humanities (27.2), 94. Shirow, Masamune. 2003. Ghost in the Shell 1.5: Human-Error Processor. Oregon: Dark Horse Comics. Manga. Shirow, Masamune. 2010. Ghost in the Shell2: Man-Machine Interface. New York: Kodansha. Manga. Silvio, Carl. 1999. “Refiguring the Radical Cyborg in Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell.” Science Fiction Studies (26.1), 54. Starrs, Paul, and Lynn Huntsinger. 1995. “The Matrix, Cyberpunk Literature, and the Apocalyptic Landscapes of Information Technology.” InformationTechnology & Libraries (14.4), 251. Stockton, Sharon. 1995. “‘The Self Regained’: Cyberpunk's Retreat to the Imperium.” Contemporary Literature (36.4), 588. Wood, Brent.1996. “William S. Burroughs and the Language of Cyberpunk.” Science Fiction Studies (23.1), 11.

PART III: PREDICTIONS FOR THE FUTURE

CHAPTER NINE STRANGE DAYS: KATHRYN BIGELOW AND JAMES CAMERON’S VISION OF CRISES OF GENDER, RACE AND TECHNOLOGY AT THE TURN OF THE MILLENNIUM DINAH HOLTZMAN

Two controversial best-selling non-fiction books appeared at the start of the last decade of the twentieth century: Robert Bly’s Iron John: A Book about Men (1990) and Susan Faludi’s Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991). Bly and Faludi discuss crises of masculinity and feminism respectively. Bly decries what he perceives to be the emasculation and feminization of men in the era of late capitalism. By contrast, Faludi analyzes a hegemonic masculine conspiracy to systematically dismantle gains women made in the aftermath of second wave feminism. The influence of both texts can be seen in a number of 1990s films depicting crises of gender roles such as Thelma and Louise (1991), Falling Down (1993) and Fight Club (1996). David Fincher’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel operates as a cinematic translation of Bly’s Iron John theories. Both the novel and film conclude with a white heterosexual couple observing what appears to be the apocalyptic end of digitally facilitated global capitalism. With two key differences, the explosive denouement bears a striking resemblance to the conclusion of the 1995 film Strange Days (co)written by James Cameron and his former wife Kathryn Bigelow who also directed the film.1 Strange Days draws to 1

Though Cameron acknowledges co-writing aspects of the screenplay with Bigelow and Jay Cox after he crafted the initial treatment/script, Bigelow’s name is absent from the film’s writing credits on IMDB (the Internet Movie Database). However, in response to an interviewer’s query whether he and Bigelow wrote side-by-side, Cameron notes, “Yes, at a certain phase…I went off to my cave and

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a close with an inter-racial kiss between a white man, Lenny Nero, and a black woman who by exposing racism and corruption within the Los Angeles Police Department prevent an apocalyptic race war. While Palahniuk and Fincher correlate apocalyptic violence with a crisis of heterosexual white masculinity, Cameron and Bigelow associate the millennial end of days with racial tensions catalyzed by a crisis of the institutional authority of the LAPD (Los Angeles Police Department) in the wake of the 1992 LA (Los Angeles) riots. The 1990s were characterized by widespread questioning of “normative” gender roles as well as other socially constructed categories involving race and ethnicity. The filmmaker(s) most actively engaged with the era’s debates around the imbrications of postmodernism and identity politics are Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron. In this essay, I argue that their collaborative projects, in particular Strange Days, represent a treatise on larger cultural debates around the politics of race and gender (and their imbrications with technology) in the last decade of the twentieth century. While critics frequently characterize Cameron as a creator, producer and director of wildly popular “blockbuster” films, Bigelow has long been considered something of an anomaly as a female filmmaker whose projects are typically action-heavy and set in homosocial masculine environments. Cameron’s commitment to creating strong female characters—including Sarah Connor of The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Ellen Ripley in Aliens (1986) and Neytiri of Avatar (2009)—is rare among male “blockbuster” directors especially given the recent glut of comic book superhero films. While a number of women have accomplished successful careers as filmmakers, the vast majority tend to produce romantic comedies or dramatic ensemble pieces. In this regard, both Cameron and Bigelow represent a deviation from “normative” gendered filmmaking practice. This shared kinship for gender role subversion is foundational to their personal and professional collaborations.2 Bigelow and Cameron were married from 1989-1991. came up with the initial document…Kathryn and I hammered it out in the old Hollywood tradition of just sitting in an office banging away…the script that emerged from that was certainly the best script I’ve been involved in.” Bill Moseley. 2012. “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: The Movie Director as Captain Nemo,” in James Cameron Interviews, ed. Brent Dunham (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press), 102. 2 Cameron and Bigelow first encountered one another when he paid a visit to the set of Bigelow’s Blue Steel (1989) in order to try to convince actress Jamie Leigh Curtis to star in True Lies (1994) opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger. At the time, Cameron was married to his second wife, Gale Ann Hurd.

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Toward the end of their brief matrimony, Cameron produced the Bigelow directed film Point Break (1991). Four years after their divorce, they collaborated again on Strange Days a film based on a “scriptment” by Cameron and directed by Bigelow. Cameron provides a definition for the hybrid neologism, “It was supposed to be a treatment, but it was almost as long as a script, so we called it a “scriptment.”3 There is much to discuss with regard to gender roles and gendered behaviors in Point Break; however, I focus on Strange Days as an exemplary Bigelow/Cameron collaboration because both participated in the process of writing the version that appears onscreen. The term “auteur” typically signifies a lone author. However, it is impossible to assign authorship of Strange Days to either Bigelow or Cameron. Once Bigelow agreed to direct Strange Days, she worked with both Cameron and Jay Cox to revise the original outline into a narrative more focused on racial politics than romance. Both Cameron and Bigelow have openly discussed their collaborative revisions of his original treatment though Bigelow’s name is absent from the writing credits. With the knowledge that she did in fact participate in the writing process, I argue that Strange Days ought to be considered the work of both. I propose a model of auteurist theory in which texts produced by partners are considered as an oeuvre separate from either figure’s solo productions or works produced with other partners. This approach to Strange Days offers a template through which to explore both Cameron’s collaborations with his second wife, producer Gale Ann Hurd, as well as Bigelow’s subsequent partnership with journalist/screenwriter Mark Boal on The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012). In terms of racial politics, Strange Days represents a departure for Bigelow whose prior films focus almost exclusively on white protagonists. However, Cameron’s relationship to explorations of racial politics is more complicated. His screenplay for Rambo: First Blood, Part II (1985) features a Vietnamese woman, Co Bao, who partners with Rambo to liberate prisoners of war captured by the Communist Vietnamese Captain Vinh and Russian Lieutenant Colonel Padovsky. Cameron appears to have embraced the template he created with Co Bao for his subsequent films featuring female protagonists of color in the that he inevitably pairs them with heroic white men. In Strange Days, Cameron matches African American Lornette “Mace” Mason with Lenny Nero and in Avatar he couples Na’vi Neytiri with human Jake Sully. This particular tendency is one of the primary reasons why I discuss Strange Days and other Cameron 3

Moseley. 2012. “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” 102.

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films as evidence of his white male messiah complex. Cameron’s female heroines typically function as supportive (romantic or familial) partners to white male characters responsible for saving humanity (or humanoids) from threatening aliens, robots or corporations.4 Strange Days opened nationally amid a welter of divisive racial and political issues. The film was released a mere ten days after the jury of the O.J. Simpson double homicide trial announced the defendant’s acquittal due to evidence of racism endemic within the LAPD.5 Both the lengthy televised trial and the contentious verdict proved to be two of the most racially divisive moments of the late twentieth century.6 Strange Days also deliberately responded to the 1992 LA Riots, making it an especially volatile statement on race in contemporary America. The conclusion of Strange Days lends itself to interpretation as an example, similar to white outrage over the Simpson acquittal, of a widespread white inability or refusal to see and confront institutional racism even in the face of seemingly indisputable visual (or aural) evidence of its existence within the LAPD. In this regard, Cameron and Bigelow’s film can be understood as an ideologically loaded artifact reflecting the particularly fraught

4

Ripley of Aliens is the lone exception to this rule though both her male love interest and surrogate daughter also remain alive at the conclusion indicating the possibility that the trio may function as a “family” in the future. Thus, a powerful female protagonist is ultimately recuperated for a bourgeois heteronormative “happy ending.” 5 Here I am referring to the defense team’s presentation of audio recordings of homicide detective Mark Fuhrman repeatedly using the word “nigger” despite his testimony under oath that he had never used the term. Notably, at the conclusion of Strange Days, after Deputy Commissioner Strickland arrests “loose cannon” officers Steckler and Engelman, Steckler addresses Mace as “nigger bitch,” suggesting a parallel to the Fuhrman tapes of the Simpson trial. 6 Cameron cites the Simpson trial as evidence of a burgeoning surveillance culture coupled with a rise in everyday voyeurism evidenced by the rise of reality television and viewer generated content on wildly popular file sharing platforms such as YouTube and YouPorn. He explains Strange Days’ fictional SQUID technology as an allegory representing how new media technologies, particularly the internet, catalyzed the efflorescence of both panoptic and voyeuristic entertainments and state-sponsored privacy abuses. The director notes, “We’re a society under surveillance. And we all participate in that surveillance. At the same time we are more watched and monitored than we have ever been as a populace…And the Simpson trial, where we’re morbidly fascinated by every detail as a society.” Ray Greene. 2012. “Rich and Strange,” James Cameron Interviews Brent Dunham, ed. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi), 72.

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historical moment of its creation and distribution.7 While the film acknowledges the existence of corrupt racist white male officers, Nero describes Steckler and Engelman as “two loose-cannon cops running around covering their butts” thereby relieving the institution of any responsibility for the practices of its officers. As the subsequent Ramparts scandal of 1999/2000 demonstrated, racism and corruption were widespread problems particularly within the LAPD’s anti-gang units.

Technology and Transcendence of the Body Strange Days debuted in the midst of the digital turn defined as the start of the widespread adoption and popularization of digital cell phones and computer-based access to the Internet. While some critics argue that contemporary digital communications devices such as smartphones function as de facto prostheses, others argue that our dependence on such tools has rendered us effectively cyborgian.8 Strange Days presciently foreshadows the moral panics decrying the development of a widespread societal addiction to and dependence upon various digital devices whose effects are similar to that of narcotics. Such pronouncements borrow liberally from the cultural scripts detailing similar hysteria surrounding the emotional and physiological effects of exposure to “new media” such as cinema, television and video games as various examples of twentieth century media forms as “opiates of the masses.” In 1995, when the film was released, the turn of the millennium was rapidly approaching and another decidedly different moral panic around digital technology gained media traction. The 1990s saw the efflorescence of ominous predictions of a potential apocalypse catalyzed by the catastrophic failure of computer programming in response to a new epoch characterized by 00. Pundits commonly referred to this “millennial bug” as 7

A Cameron citation describing the film’s primary protagonist is printed on the inside cover of Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment’s 1995/96 laser disc release of Strange Days; it reads “Lenny gives us a snapshot of this exact moment in history…the date, the time, the city and the energy building up to the New Year. We see Christmas lights still up. Santa Clauses on the lampposts. We hear the talk radio host giving us a manic connection to the world we now know. This is not some wild Blade Runner future, but our future. The future we are going to be living all too soon” from Strange Days scriptment. 8 See Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Socialist Review 80 1985, 65-107 and Marquard Smith and Joanna Morra’s anthology The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 2006).

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Y2K (the year two thousand), referring to the turning of the millennium as the root of the problem. Y2K describes a computer virus that would cause all digital communications devices to short-circuit in the face of programming codes incapable of comprehending the temporal reset necessitated by the shift to 00 understood as 2000 rather than 1900. Thus, Y2K posed the possibility of both a literal and figurative loss of an entire century—a scenario that lends itself well to dystopic fantasies involving technologically induced catastrophe. Expectations of a computer catalyzed Armageddon at the exact moment of the millennial turn bear an uncanny resemblance to the plot of Cameron’s The Terminator (1984). A mere two years after Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner debuted to critical acclaim, Cameron released his own take on humans’ conflicted relationship to the advanced artificially intelligent machines that humans, like the God of Genesis, create in our own image. The existential dilemma underlying Blade Runner is best characterized as probing questions about how and whether to differentiate between humans and their uncanny cyborg doppelgangers. Cameron delineates a far more dichotomous view of human/machine relations in Terminator; however, Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) explores whether cyborgs can understand and/or experience (human) emotion. Like Cameron’s initial treatment for Strange Days, Terminator similarly explores human attempts to transcend the limitations of rational temporality. Nero not only compulsively relives his past (in the present) via his private stash of SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) clips he also makes a living peddling other people’s past experiences for escapist entertainment purposes. Intriguingly, the protagonist of Terminator, John Connor, whose existence sets all of the filmic action in motion, never actually appears on-screen. According to Cameron’s logic, he exists in the future and has yet to be conceived in the first film’s present. Indeed, John Connor, who shares his initials with both Jesus Christ and James Cameron, orchestrates his own conception by sending his father back in time to procreate with his mother. In this regard, John Connor functions much like the God of Genesis albeit Connor actually creates himself. His conception is of the utmost importance since he is in fact a veritable messiah who will lead humans to victory in their decades long war against the machines. In the world of Terminator and Terminator 2, only human men and male cyborgs are endowed with the ability to time travel, thus reifying the notion that technology (and messiah status) is largely the purview of white men. Intriguingly, Cameron casts Joe Morton, an African-American actor, as Miles Dyson the innovator of the subsequently deadly Skynet computer network. In this way, he challenges entrenched stereotypical myths

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correlating white men with rationality and science in contrast to white women and people of color who are associated with the body and nature. However, Dyson’s empathy for and subsequent collaboration with his would-be assassin Sarah Connor reflects their shared status as “other.” John Connor represents the first of many subsequent white male messiah figures created by Cameron. Connor could be considered the progenitor of Avatar’s Jake Sully, a Marine ordained to save the Na’vi people of the planet Pandora from their human colonizers. Sully cannot time travel; however, like Nero, he has access to advanced technology that enables him to transcend his body. While Lenny uses SQUID to compulsively repeat his own past, Sully, a paraplegic, is able to inhabit the body of a ten-foot tall blue skinned male Na’vi. In a nod to postmodern theorists’ characterization of the dissolution of sovereign subjectivity, Sully is invited to inhabit the Na’vi avatar only because his DNA is identical to that of his dead twin. While Cameron presents Sully as the white male messiah, in reality, the hero is characterized by his ability to inhabit/mimic the bodies of other men. As savior, he appears to be another derivation of Connor. However, his propensity for inhabiting bodies that do not belong to him makes him closer kin to the T-1000 of Terminator 2. Like Robert Patrick’s villainous liquid metal “man,” Sully inhabits the bodies of others. Both characters indicate how, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, white men exist as identity-less ciphers. Even in the face of the alleged death of his sovereign subjectivity and his demystification as the “universal” subject, heterosexual white men retain the superior skills necessary to rescue white women and people of color who lack the expertise.

Messiah Men and Time Travel As in Terminator and Terminator 2, the SQUID technology around which Strange Days’ apocalyptic plot revolves also enables a return to the past albeit from the present rather than the future. Indeed SQUID offers a possible solution to the loss or destruction of time portended by Y2K and the millennial bug. The SQUID user dons a playback device or headset that projects archival visual, aural and haptic records of others’ real time past experiences in the present. SQUID users temporarily embody other(s’) subjectivities by inhabiting their bodies and reliving scenarios from their past. SQUID harnesses the power of digital technology enabling users to transcend their bodies and/or experiment with inhabiting other(s’) bodies. In essence, SQUID functions as a tool enabling immersion in others’

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multisensory realities. As Nero’s obsession with viewing SQUID recordings of his own past demonstrates, the technology also enables a kind of temporal stasis by way of repetition compulsion. Reliving recorded memories in the present offers the possibility of capturing moments for posterity seemingly negating the passage of time and correlated loss or fading of memories. In this regard, SQUID endows its white male users with the power to metaphorically time travel back to the past. SQUID users cannot control the past they experience via playback thus they aren’t endowed with God-like capabilities of Connor. However, as with the Terminator films, in Strange Days it is only white men who appear to have ready access to the technology that enables time travel. In addition to referring to himself as “the King of the World” during his Academy Award acceptance speech, the technology Cameron invented to realize Avatar bears more than a passing resemblance to SQUID. Shot in 3D, with advanced motion/performance capture technology, Cameron aimed to produce a kind of immersive multisensory cinematic spectacle in which users inhabit the body/subjectivity of Sully the white (blue) male hero and experience Pandora through his eyes much as viewers of Strange Days experience the film’s diegetic world through the eyes/perspective of Nero. Sully’s evolution from human to Na’vi resonates with utopian predictions that the web would enable users to experiment with inhabiting racial and gender identities different from their “real life” selves.9 While the majority of Strange Days’ SQUID users are white men, white women frequently function as actresses objectifying their own bodies. Strange Days is dedicated to exploring the gender politics of the gaze. In her iconic essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) Laura Mulvey contends that the cinematic apparatus is inextricably intertwined with masculinity in the sense that the camera replicates the point of view of an active male subject endowed with the power of the gaze.10 By contrast, Mulvey argues that women are positioned as passive objects beholden to the active male gaze. A frequent criticism directed at Mulvey’s theory is that she assumes both male and female heterosexuality. With heterosexuality as given, women are permitted one of two viewing positions with regard to the cinematic apparatus. She can either narcissistically identify with the passive objectified woman on screen or she can adopt a “transvestite gaze” by identifying with the active male

9

See Sherry Turkle. 1995. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet (New York: Simon and Schuster). 10 Laura Mulvey. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Screen (Autumn 16.3), 6-18.

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protagonist.11 To create a truly feminist (or non-sexist) cinema, Mulvey argues it is necessary to depart from the visual and narrative codes of classical Hollywood in favor of a radical new avant-garde film language. The porn clips shot from nude white women’s subjective points of view in Strange Days have the effect of reifying Mulvey’s contention that women must take one of two possible positions in relation to a cinematic apparatus inherently grounded in the gender politics of the male gaze. As recorder/producers of SQUID clips commissioned by heterosexual men these nude white women quite literally adopt a transvestite gaze in that they record themselves as if from a heterosexual masculine perspective. However, taking up such a perspective in relation to one’s own body from a subjective point of view may entail a degree of narcissism—a tendency Freud famously correlated with heterosexual women and homosexual men. In extra-diegetic terms, the clips these women produce are actually mediated thrice over through Nero whose gaze is ultimately relayed through Bigelow. Thus, the director can be understood to inhabit a transvestite gaze (in her guise as Nero) if we imagine that she produces these sequences by imagining what heterosexual men would wish to voyeuristically observe. However, such a view, like Mulvey’s iconic essay, posits Bigelow as exclusively heterosexual; thus presumably she can only direct a desiring gaze at women’s bodies by way of cross-sex identification. Some of Nero’s expository dialogue provides an exegesis on the clichéd gender politics of the SQUID porn he solicits. While wheeling and dealing from the confines of his car via cell phone, Nero describes a client who “wants a guy and two girls and the guy wears. Yeah, I know, he’s trying to be original. The girls need to be young, OK?” Lenny carries on his side of this conversation immediately after watching two women tackle and mug a man dressed as Santa Claus. Thus Bigelow juxtaposes the conventional gender/sexual roles of the proposed porn clip against the image of two women not only engaging in violent crime but assaulting that most festive of mythical Christian figures. Here women actively victimize men rather than serving as passive objects vulnerable to victimization by men. This scenario, along with another instance of two women engaging in sadomasochistic nipple torture at the Retinal Fetish nightclub, trouble any simplistic view of white women as both passive objects of desire for white men and helpless victims of masculine abuse. Eventually we see the pornographic clip Nero describes over the phone through his point of 11

Mulvey fails to consider the possibility that a female viewer who takes on the transvestite gaze would presumably experience (homosexual) desire for the diegetic female object.

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view. The recording opens with a subjective point of view shot of a white woman’s breasts viewed from a prone position below indicating that she is sitting atop or riding whomever wears the recorder. The camera tracks down to reveal another pair of breasts signaling “girl-on-girl” action presumably recorded by “the guy (who) wears” though he never appears onscreen in the clip’s diegesis. In exchange for the clip, Nero offers a white man, who drapes his arms possessively over the two female stars, cash for their services—coding him as pimp. In a subsequent scene, Nero offers a Latino man named Eduardo money to record himself “banging a beautiful babe.” Early in the film viewers are meant to understand that white women and people of color record SQUID clips at the behest of white men presumably for the consumption of other white men—a division of labor and power not unlike that of most Hollywood studios. In fact, people of color are largely absent in the SQUID clips the audience views through Lenny. Iris, the white prostitute who records LAPD officers Steckler and Engelman executing Jeriko One, was hired by Philo Gant, a powerful white man, to surreptitiously surveil his AfricanAmerican client. The white men who fiscally underwrite the SQUID clips appear to use the technology for voyeuristic and/or panoptic purposes often without the permission of those who appear in the recordings. Bigelow and Cameron position Mace as a staunch opponent of SQUID thereby reifying stereotypes that white women and people of color are more closely connected to their bodies than rational white men who are associated with technology. This power to eclipse the corporeal qualifies them for their messianic roles as saviors. This is especially true in the case of Avatar’s Sully who uses the avatar technology to abandon his whiteness and transfer his consciousness to his Na’vi avatar’s body. The fact that human Sully is paralyzed below the waist adds an additional twist in the sense that his disability codes human bodies as deficient or “impotent” in comparison to the Na’vi peoples’ size, shape and hyperathleticism. In this regard, human/Na’vi difference can be understood as an allegorical interpretation of stereotypes positing that African-Americans are superior athletes by virtue of some racial essence. Sully’s installation as the Na’vi savior is somewhat more palatable considering that his stint on Pandora began with him agreeing to spy on the Na’vi for the racist imperialist Colonel Quaritch. He represents a more technologically advanced fantasy of the white male colonialist “gone native,” especially given his Na’vi lover. The romantic kiss between Nero and Mace that concludes Strange Days indicates that Cameron envisions the redemptive possibilities of inter-racial relationships. However, Sully’s romance with Na’vi Neytiri may not technically qualify as inter-racial

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since they act on their romantic feelings only when Sully inhabits the body of his Na’vi avatar. There is, however, a striking scene in which Neytiri rescues the unconscious oxygen deprived human Sully from his avatar chamber and cradles his limp, far smaller body across her lap. Cameron positions the duo in a classic pietà coding: Neytiri as the Virgin Mary to the body of her martyred son (of God). Oddly this has the effect of implicitly suggesting an incestuous relationship between (virgin) mother and (God’s) child. John Connor’s orchestration of his own conception from the future also bears connotations of incest particularly since Connor knows his father, a soldier under his command in the future, will die shortly thereafter leaving him unfettered access to his mother. Cameron claims that his mother was the inspiration for his strong female protagonists, an explanation that in part reveals why his heroic single soldier/mother characters are so resolutely desexualized.

White Men Transcending the(ir) Bodies SQUID offers recordings of subjective multisensory past experience as a form of escapist entertainment, a commodity to be purchased. During playback, the user temporarily transcends his own identity in exchange for that of the person who produced the initial recording. In this sense, SQUID replicates aspects of cinema such as temporarily escaping one’s own identity through identifying/empathizing with the characters on screen. With cinema, however, the experience is merely aural and visual. Because SQUID records “pure and uncut straight from the cerebral cortex,” users experience the clips as a wholesale immersion within an/other’s mind, body and senses. By Cameron’s own account, his development of advanced 3D technology for Avatar represents an attempt to create a cinematic experience closer to that made possible by SQUID. As in Strange Days, within the diegesis of Avatar, it is almost exclusively white men who have access to technology that enables them to transcend their bodies. While Nero’s clips of choice enable him to revisit his own past from his point of view, his white male clients choose to inhabit bodies other than their own. Nero functions as the reverse of most of his customers in the sense that he must eschew SQUID in order to identify and/or empathize with “others” namely Mace as representative of a profoundly wronged African American community. However, Nero may have also gained empathy for white women by virtue of sharing Iris’ perspective in relation to witnessing Jeriko’s assassination as well as her own rape and murder. Via SQUID, Nero experiences a black man and a white woman’s vulnerability in relation to white masculine violence.

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Lenny’s dependence on these narratives similarly marks him as a passive and/or “feminine” figure. His personal SQUID trove is comprised of tapes documenting his sex play with Faith. Bigelow sutures viewers into Nero’s first person point of view while he nostalgically wallows in his memory traces. However, she cross cuts to omniscient or third person views of Nero reliving those moments. In such sequences, Nero strokes parts of his own body as if to visually indicate his arousal for the gaze of an external other. Diegetically there is no one else present. However, extra-diegetically viewers inhabit a voyeuristic gaze mediated through Lenny whose point of view is mediated through Bigelow. On both a diegetic and extra-diegetic level, men inhabit the subjective perspective of women and vice versa if we understand Nero’s gaze as originating with the film’s director. During the sequence in which Lenny watches the Faith clips it remains unclear whether he imagines himself touching Faith’s body when he caresses his own lips or if he is erotically stimulating himself. The delicacy of his gestures evokes the specter of female performances in pornographic films. However, in extra-diegetic terms he is the masculine object of a female director’s active gaze. The gender politics of the gaze are confounded by SQUID’s ability to temporarily deposit white men (and a black woman) into female bodies and points of view. The technology enables both cross-sex and cross-racial identifications. One of Nero’s potential customers, a “virgin brain” or first time SQUID user, mirrors Bigelow and Cameron’s coding of Nero as feminine. Offered experiences ranging from sex with a gorgeous Filipina as a man, sex with a woman as a woman, or sex with a man as a man Nero’s client chooses a tape in which he appears as a nude and nubile young white woman fondling her own breasts in the shower. Bigelow moves between shots depicting the client’s first person female point of view to an omniscient perspective of him stroking his own (imaginary) breasts. In this instance, as with Lenny’s nostalgic SQUID marathons, it remains unclear whether he is aroused by experiencing his body as feminine, by transposing the tactile sensation of stroking a virtual female body to his own masculine body or some combination thereof. Each possibility suggests the dissolution of boundaries strictly delineating gendered identification and desire. Part of the technology’s appeal for Nero’s exclusively white masculine clientele may be that it enables them both to “have” and to inhabit female bodies and cerebral cortexes. The ubiquity of this masculine desire to inhabit feminine minds, bodies, and experiences within Strange Days demonstrates a widespread longing to identify across sex. Notably this diegetic phenomenon flies in the face of the sexist mantras invoked by

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Hollywood studios that male viewers are incapable of identifying with female characters or stories. The preponderance of male characters desirous of female embodiment in Strange Days offers an interesting counterpart to Bigelow’s career as a filmmaker. In addition to being the only woman to receive an Academy Award for Best Director, she also works almost exclusively within the hypermasculinist action/war film genres. In this regard, Bigelow, like the white male characters of Strange Days can be understood to embody a cross-sex point of view. Strange Days’ representation of SQUID technology as the exclusive purview of white men as well as Bigelow and Cameron’s collaboration on the film pose any number of challenges to the gender politics of the gaze. Though he is the white male protagonist of an action movie, Nero is a symbolic “woman.” His “feminization” suggests that advanced technology has the effect of emasculating (male) users much as Bly contends that the shift from a manufacturing to an information economy feminizes men by funneling them into service oriented desk jobs rather than rewarding physical labor. Nero’s “feminine” vulnerability becomes especially apparent in the sequence during which a presumably male intruder records himself breaching the space of Lenny’s home with the aid of a SQUID recording device. Once inside the apartment, the perp gazes at sleeping Nero’s prone body. He then proceeds to graze his knife across Lenny’s throat making a shallow incision. Not only does the intruder objectify Nero he also metaphorically invaginates him. Lenny’s assailant anonymously mails him the recording documenting his intrusion and bodily violation. In the act of watching the clip, Lenny takes on the first person perspective of his attacker. Thus he voyeuristically gazes upon his past self and penetrates his own flesh. Not only has Nero become the object of a sadistic male gaze, the technology in which he deals has been turned against him threatening to transform him into the victim of the one genre of SQUID he refuses to traffic in, blackjack or snuff. Throughout the film, via his viewing of SQUID clips, Nero repeatedly inhabits the first person perspective of white women subject to rape and murder at the hands of white male assailants. Presumably these are the experiences that enable him to empathize with Mace, who as an African-American woman, is subject to both racist and sexist discrimination and victimization. In the scenarios involving women wearing SQUID recording devices, they do so at the behest of men who wish to use the technology to exercise control over other men’s behavior. It bears noting that the women who wear the recording device are invariably physically victimized, thereby suggesting punishment for attempting to circumvent the gender politics of the gaze.

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As a dealer of SQUID clips, Nero is a purveyor of bodily and sensory doubles. Throughout the film, a female character, Iris, a Caucasian prostitute, functions as his opposite sex doppelganger. Early in the film, Iris delivers to Nero a SQUID recording of two white male LAPD officers summarily executing Jeriko One, an outspoken African American rapper, after a “routine traffic stop.” It is not clear what kind of relationship Lenny and Iris have to one another or why she trusts him with the incendiary recording. In addition to receiving Iris’ tape documenting murderous LAPD malfeasance, Nero is subsequently gifted with a SQUID recording of Iris’ rape and murder. After fleeing from the mercenary cops who know she has a tape of Jeriko’s assassination, Iris hides out in a hotel room. Iris, like Lenny, is assaulted by an intruder who documents his own crimes by way of SQUID. He records his rape and murder of Iris from his first person perspective. However, in an act of brutal sadism, he also uses a split signal device and receptor helmet forcing her to experience her own rape and murder through his sensorial perspective. Thus, she feels her murderer’s psychic and bodily pleasure in killing her, while also experiencing the pain of her own death by stabbing. Iris’ assailant anonymously gifts Nero with the SQUID recording of her death. Upon watching the tape Lenny experiences a second-hand identification with Iris, a female victim, as well as her presumably male killer. Bigelow replays the tape of Iris’ murder seen through the dual first person perspectives of both victim and killer crosscutting to third person shots of Nero moaning and trying to fend off Iris’ actual but his virtual assailant. Urban postmodern nihilism involving a messiah-like man ambivalently engaged with advanced technology is one of Cameron’s most cherished narrative conceits. Humans are at war with machines in his Terminator films. However, in Strange Days, white men appear to have become de facto cyborgs by virtue of their narcotic-like dependence upon technology enabling multifaceted sensory stimulation. Intriguingly, white women and people of color appear impervious to the addictive aspects of SQUID. Within the diegesis, they serve as objects of the recordings inhabited by heterosexual white male users. In this respect, Strange Days depicts pleasures inherent to the confusion of boundaries. The appeal of SQUID technology lies in its unsettling of hegemonic barriers around race, gender, sexuality and class identities for white men. However, the film’s overarching narrative also presents some of the more painful realities inhering to inhabitation of both non-white and non-masculine real life bodies. Strange Days’ wholesale conflation of SQUID use with white men raises questions about who has access to advanced technologies and which populations are marked for objectification and surveillance by those

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same tools. Within the film’s diegesis, the primary function of SQUID technology appears to be enabling white men to inhabit the minds and bodies of their identity categorical to others by colonizing their cerebral cortexes. White women and people of color remain firmly rooted in their frequently victimized bodies while white men revel in the postmodern bliss of temporarily becoming “other.”

Postmodern LA, the LAPD and the Apocalypse Strange Days provides a window onto Los Angeles of the late twentieth century in which the notoriously postmodern metropolis functions as a localized microcosmic view of national racial politics. As Aaron Betsky notes in his analysis of popular cultural representations of LA, it is “the prototypical postmodern city.” He goes on to describe the metropolis as: A completely artificial and abstract development driven by forces of technology and demographic shifts. . . . The social life of the city takes place inside. . . . What public spaces do exist are so heavily patrolled that they are almost unusable…any sense of community and corporeality are disappearing . . . dystopia is always inherent in LA . . . in April 1992.12 [Armageddon] appeared to be taking place, . . . a postmodern television riot that, . . . only cohered in the electronic realm as a collage of images. Violence seemed to be everywhere and nowhere, and as a result its dystopian image overwhelmed the city; . . . Los Angeles is dissolving.13

Betsky’s characterization of the quintessentially postmodern cityscape aptly describes the dystopic millennial metropolis as seen through Nero’s gaze. Named for the decadent emperor who fiddled on a rooftop watching Rome burn from on high, Bigelow and Cameron’s fin-de-siècle Nero similarly distances himself from the citizens inhabiting the dying empire in which he hustles. Ensconced within the protective shell of his automobile, Lenny scarfs down fast food, rapidly shifts through radio channels broadcasting discordant musical genres and talk show predictions of the end of time. All the while, dystopian scenes of urban chaos unfold through his windshield. The surrounding environs are peopled with paramilitary cordons, fires, looters, police officers harassing pedestrians and two women mugging Santa. Baudelaire’s nineteenth century flâneur became 12

Aaron Betsky. 1994. “Riding the A Train to Aleph: Eight Utopias for Los Angeles” in Heterotopia: Postmodern Utopia and the Body Politic. Ed. Tobin Siebers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 116. 13 Ibid.

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voyeuristic master of his urban universe by circumnavigating it on foot.14 Nero, however, remains aloof inside the confines of his own mobile universe. His solipsism is inextricably intertwined with the various technologies (automobile, radio, cell phone, processed fast food) that enable him to distract himself and maintain his distance from the physical spaces of the city as well as from empathizing with the others who exist outside of his own immediate self-interest. The West coast city, like its East coast counterpart, New York, is home to people of myriad races, ethnicities, nationalities, classes and religious beliefs. However, the eight million or more inhabitants of New York City co-exist within a much smaller area than LA whose population of ten million is spread over hundreds of square miles. While there are certainly largely segregated neighborhoods in New York, public transportation has the effect of bringing diverse populations into contact with one another if only temporarily. Los Angeles is a diffuse metropolis lacking a center. It is in large part due to its diversity, urban planning and geography that has led critics to dub it the postmodern city par excellence. As theorists correlate postmodernism with the dissolution of sovereign subjectivity, LA is defined by a similar lack of a consistent regional identity. The metropolis is understood to be comprised of an assortment of atomized individuals isolated from one another in their own circumscribed networks. The car culture of LA as well as its comparative lack of effective public transportation contributes to the city’s de facto racial segregation. Bigelow’s past engagement with academic theory, via her involvement with the Art and Language art collective as well as her co-editing of an issue of the journal Semiotext(e) dedicated to the theme of polysexuality, underlies Strange Days apparent interest in the role Los Angeles plays with regard to postmodern theory. In fact, the film functions as a kind of primer in relation to then current theories of postmodernism—particularly Fredric Jameson’s seminal text Postmodernism, of the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991). Our (anti)hero Nero functions as a kind of apolitical spectator of the postmodern theoretical debates that take place between Max and Jeriko One, a politically radical rapper, whose execution by two white male LAPD officers, Steckler and Engelman, was recorded by Iris, a prostitute, whose name bespeaks her function as camera. In light of the role that fictionalized versions of the King beating and LA riots play in Strange Days, there is a certain logic in divvying up competing versions

14

Charles Baudelaire. 1964. The Painter of Modern Life (New York: Da Capo Press).

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of postmodern theory between a (jaded and profoundly corrupt) white male former cop and a radical black rapper.15

The Death of the Subject and the End of History In Postmodernism, Jameson traces much of what he deems the negative characteristics of postmodern aesthetics to “the death of the subject or the bourgeois monad.”16 Though he does not describe whom he envisions this “bourgeois monad” to be, likely he is referring to that formerly “universal” subject of the master narratives postmodernism allegedly killed—middle class Christian heterosexual white men. The postmodern notion of the death of the subject can be understood as less about literal mortality than about the many challenges posed to bourgeois heterosexual white masculinity in the aftermath of the Civil, Women’s and Gay rights movements of the 1960s and 70s. For Jameson, “the formal consequence” of this “disappearance of the individual subject” is “the increasing unavailability of the personal style [which] engenders the well nigh universal practice today of what may be called pastiche.”17 He goes on to define pastiche as “like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic styles, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry.”18 However, the appropriation and revision of pre-existing cultural forms long predates the origins of postmodernism in the 60s since much of American popular culture is comprised of white artists’ appropriation of African-American form and aesthetics. Jameson’s major bone of contention with postmodern aesthetics is its “weakening of historicity.”19 However, his interpretation of postmodernism demonstrates 15

In an odd twist, when the media began to report news of the LAPD Ramparts’ scandal, (1999/2000), three of the accused officers were implicated in the execution style shooting of East Coast rapper Christopher Wallace/Notorious B.I.G. These three officers were thought to be employed by Suge Knight, the CEO of Death Row Records, who had a longstanding feud with Puff Daddy, Bad Boy records and Notorious B.I.G. as representatives of East Coast rap. Faith Evans, R&B (Rhythm and Blues) singer and Wallace’s widow, brought a civil suit against the LAPD for involvement in her husband’s death. As in Strange Days, mainstream media initially blamed both the Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G.’s murders on gang violence. 16 Fredric Jameson. 1991. Postmodernism , or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, (Durham: Duke University Press), 15. 17 Jameson. 1991. Postmodernism, 16. 18 Jameson. 1991. Postmodernism, 17. 19 Jameson. 1991. Postmodernism, 6.

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a similar weakness with regard to historical authenticity since he fails to detail white America’s long history of appropriating African-American culture. As Strange Days’ Jameson’s stand-in, Max, unlike the scholar, at least gestures toward this history of racial appropriation even if only implicitly by voicing his views in response to TV coverage of Jeriko’s death. After playing a music video entitled “Here We Come,” jointly attributed to Jeriko and the Prophets of Light, the news channel broadcasts clips of a press conference in which the rapper proclaims: The LAPD is a military force turned against its own people. We live in a police state! The mayor and the city council sit up in their offices with their social programs that don't work. . . . They're rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. But the new day is coming! Two-K is coming! The day of reckoning is upon us. History ends and begins again right here! Right now!20

As a black man, presumably Jeriko One is referring to the lengthy history of LAPD racial profiling. For example, the King beating points to an ongoing practice of racially discriminatory traffic stops colloquially described as “driving while black.” Ultimately, the “rogue” cops Steckler and Engelman execute Jeriko after he dares to confront them with the racism inherent to such “random traffic stops.” The speech Jeriko delivers during the press conference alludes to several other revolutionary historical moments.21 In response to TV coverage of Jeriko’s death, allegedly at the hands of the “gangbangers” who seem to make an easy scapegoat for any and all violence perpetrated by and/or against black men in Los Angeles, Max responds to Jeriko’s televised call to arms with a cynical and apparently apolitical Jamesonian view of late capitalism. As with Jameson’s Postmodernism, Max associates the end of days with widespread cultural

20

His description of the end and beginning of history evokes the dawn of the French Revolutionary calendar a method of temporal organization formulated in relation to pertinent revolutionary dates. The phrase “Right here, right now” recalls the eponymous Jesus Jones song whose lyrics and video refer to the felling of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In this regard, Jeriko’s pronouncements draw a parallel between Communist East Germany and LA. Both are police states dominated (in the case of LA) by the authoritarian LAPD. The toppling of the Berlin wall also resonates with the Biblical Battle of Jericho to which Cameron refers in the rapper’s nom de plume. 21 Ibid.

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inability to produce anything novel or unique. Toasting Jeriko’s revolutionary proclamations, Max responds: To the end of all things! You know how I know it's the end of the world? Because everything's been done, every kind of music's been tried, every government's been tried, every fuckin' hairstyle; bubblegum, cereal, every type of fucking. . . . How you gonna make it another thousand years, for Chrissake? I am telling you it’s over. We’ve used it all up.

Via Max’s dialogue, Bigelow and Cameron present a kind of populist interpretation of Jameson’s diagnosis of postmodern subjectivity as schizophrenic and postmodern aesthetics as derivative and simulacral. On the surface, Jeriko’s predictions about the end of history resonate more closely with Jameson’s bemoaning the weakening of historicity than Max’s views. However, Jameson correlates postmodernism with the end of historicity or historical authenticity rather than with the end of history proper. In that regard, Jameson may simply be decrying the evolution of a version of history that can no longer be considered what Jean-François Lyotard terms a “master narrative.”22 Ultimately, what Jameson deplores is a postmodern predilection for simulacra of the past that bear little to no resemblance to the era they ostensibly reference. In a sense, Strange Days’ revisions of the King beating and the LA riots are best characterized in Jamesonian terms as simulacral. Their version of events paradoxically offers wish fulfillment fantasies of African-American retaliation against an abusive LAPD as well as attempting to foment renewed faith in the authority of the much-maligned institution.23 Jameson argues that the efflorescence of simulacra in the postmodern era has direct effects upon our perceptions of history: The new spatial logic of the simulacrum can now be expected . . . to have a momentous effect on what used to be historical time. The past is thereby itself modified: what was once . . . the retrospective dimension indispensable to any vital reorientation of our future-has meanwhile itself become a vast collection of images, a multitudinous photographic simulacrum . . . a society bereft of 22

See Jean-François Lyotard. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. (Manchester: Manchester University Press). 23 Prior to the sequence in which several SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) officers beat Mace, she manages to assault both Steckler and Engelman with a nightstick and uses their own handcuffs to chain them to a transmission tower. Refusing to believe her contention that the white male cops are the “bad guys,” the SWAT officers subject her to a similar beat down. A young African-American boy incites the crowd observing her victimization to jump the officers who assault using Mace.

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all historicity one whose own putative past is little more than a set of dusty spectacles.24

This passage could be referring to SQUID since the technology does in fact modify the past by enabling users to repeat it ad infinitum in the present. By enabling subjective multisensory repetitions of real time moving images of past events in the present SQUID effectively transforms the past. Certainly both LA and Nero’s recent past become photographic simulacra since much of the film is devoted to suturing viewers into repetitions with a difference of the King beating and LA riots as well as Lenny’s subjective point of view of his past as cinematic spectacle. Nero is clearly addicted to reliving isolated scenes from his past with his exlover Faith. He houses the much-perused clips in a tattered shoebox beneath his bed. His method of storage harkens back to an age of old media in which meaningful photographs were filed away in similar containers. The location of the shoebox also codes the clips as akin to porn. Indeed Mace informs Nero that he makes his living selling “porno to wireheads.” Some of the clips viewers see via Nero’s point of view lend themselves to interpretation as soft-core porn since Faith is clad only in thong underwear. Indeed Nero’s compulsive viewing of the clips indicates the possibility that he too is a “wirehead” or someone who prefers recordings of the past to reality in the present. Lenny is constructed as a voyeur even during the real time sex on view in the clips since he watches himself fondling Faith’s breasts in a mirror. Notably Nero observes many of his present day interactions with Faith in mirrors thereby affirming the notion that he enjoys watching himself with her. Faith suggests as much in Lenny’s favorite clip informing him during sex “I love your eyes. I love the way they see.” She laughs out loud when Lenny pleads with her that Philo is more into playback than her. While Nero is clearly obsessed with Faith even in the present, he prefers his playback version of her to the Faith that exists in real time and no longer loves him. In that sense, he is enraptured with an image of Faith (or simulacrum) that has little to do with who she is in the present. Thus, Lenny functions as a fetishist reliving moments when he possessed (Faith) in order to disavow his loss/lack (of Faith) in the present. In such a formulation, Faith, a white woman who spends much of her time onscreen topless, functions as a substitute for the penis/phallus in Freud’s notion of fetishism as a technique through which men deny castration anxiety catalyzed by the sight of women’s genital “lack.” By focusing on fragmented body parts of women’s bodies, the 24

Jameson. 1991. Postmodernism, 18.

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fetishist transforms woman into her missing penis/phallus. Both Max and Mace correlate Nero’s “impotence” with his loss of Faith. Indeed Nero appears to regain his/the phallus only after he watches the “good” LAPD officers loading a handcuffed Faith into the backseat of a cruiser thereby catalyzing his subsequent embrace of Mace in her stead. Christopher Sharrett expands upon the parallels Jameson draws between simulacra, the weakening of historicity and the popularity of apocalyptic cinema in the 1990s: Cinema . . . illustrat[es] the characteristics of the society in which it isproduced, even if the culture of the simulacra makes this relationship problematical. It is perhaps because cinema so clearly apprehends theconundrums of the present circumstances that is able to convey the ground tone of society . . . especially since the discourse of cinema has in the 70s, 80s and 90s been so heavily involved in a new yet familiarAmerican apocalyptic based first in a crisis of meaning, second in the end of the social, two key elements which now seem to be the thing called postmodernism.25

In an interview with Tavis Smiley, Cameron observes that “Science fiction doesn’t really predict the future, that’s not what it’s there for. It’s there to hold a mirror up to the present and look at the human condition, sometimes from the outside.”26 A related sentiment voiced by Cameron is inscribed on the inside cover of laser disc version of Strange Days. In this epigraph, the screenwriter/producer argues, Lenny gives us a snapshot of this exact moment in history . . . the date, the time, the city and the energy building up to the New Year . . .this is not some wild Blade Runner future but our future. The future we are going to be living all too soon.

Cameron, like Max, takes a nihilistic view of the millennial future. Indeed, he has Max ventriloquize some of his own views by having him inform Lenny, “It’s not a question of whether you’re paranoid but whether you are paranoid enough.” Faith’s lover, music producer Philo Gant makes a similar comment in the face of accusations that he has become paranoid due to excessive playback use. Thus, the film’s “bad” white male

25

Christopher Sharrett. 1993. Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Postmodern Narrative Cinema (College Park: Maisonneuve Press), 1. 26 Tavis Smiley. 2012. “James Cameron.” James Cameron Interviews. Brent Durham, ed. ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi), 193.

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characters are strongly associated with a paranoia that Cameron seems to share. In an interview with Ray Greene, Cameron observes, I think of myself as an optimistic paranoid. And I mean that very very very literally. I am very optimistic about the human animal and our potential, and I am paranoid about some of the darker potential inherent in these technologies.27

Perhaps Cameron identifies with Nero more than with Max since Lenny is perhaps the sole white male character who is not presented as paranoid. Strange Days’ anti-hero might even be considered an optimist in the sense that he paints a positive image of himself as a provider of humanitarian aid in contrast to Mace’s accusation that he sells “porno to wireheads.” Both Max and Philo, the two characters who treat white female prostitutes like play things. They die by the end of the film indicating that their paranoia could not save them in the long run. While Strange Days associates white men with postmodern nihilism, surveillance, paranoia, violence and addiction throughout the film, several African-American characters repeat phrases Jeriko One uses in his public call to action. As Nero passes through the city in his car rapidly switching between radio stations playing Christian religious music, heavy metal, opera and talk radio, we are treated to various callers relaying their thoughts about the impending millennium. Though we cannot see the callers and can only hear their voices, their viewpoints structure the film’s overarching breakdown of postmodern nihilism (coded white and male) versus a readiness for revolution (African-American). A man named, Dan calls in. I imagine he is white since his negative complaisance mirrors Max’s theory that it is the end of days because “everything’s been done.” The host inquires whether he is looking forward to the new year. In response, Dan observes “Not really. What’s the point? Nothing changes New Year’s Day. The economy sucks. Gas is over three dollars a gallon. Fifth grade kids are shooting each other during recess. The whole thing sucks. What are we celebrating?” The next caller identifies himself as Dewayne and much of his rhetoric predicts Jeriko’s manifesto. His name and use of slang terms like “yo” and “Boo” suggest that he is African-American. Dewayne’s point of view differs from Dan’s defeatism. He informs the host, “I got a New Year’s resolution for the police. Hey yo, five-0, you better get down with the 2K…Two K the big 2000. Coming up tomorrow night. Out with the old in with the new. See for the man no new is good new. We’re gonna take it 27

Greene. 2012. “Rich and Strange,” 75.

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and make it new, our own. History’s gonna start right here. I wanna give a shout-out to Boo.” The visuals accompanying Dewayne’s commentary begin with a SWAT officer frisking a figure he has shoved up against a storefront grate. A Latino LAPD officer stands to their left staring into space. Two white male looters run in from the left frame past a black man clad in a leather jacket with a Native American chief emblazoned on the back. He slaps at the looters as they run past and turns around to throw his empty cigarette pack at them. The “angry black man” passes two young Asian men, possibly Vietnamese, who stand outside their shop guarding it with machine guns.28 Two empty handed dark haired women run past the black man who also touches them as they pass. Two more figures, one holding a sign, run past screen right. The camera then cuts to an image of another SWAT officer frisking a man in an alley, followed by a low angle shot of an LAPD helicopter shining a high powered beam on a building that looks to be a public housing unit. Shortly after the end of Dewayne’s call and a (white) female caller’s citation of the Bible, Nero approaches an LAPD checkpoint and is waved through. Since he is granted passage immediately after Dewayne’s threats against the LAPD, Nero’s ease of travel demonstrates his racial and gender privilege with regard to police surveillance. Dewayne’s call for revolution against the police visualizes Jeriko’s subsequent contention that LA is a police state. Oddly neither Jeriko nor Dewayne mentions racial profiling or the fact that it is disproportionately African-American and Latino men who are the victims of “police state” surveillance. The juxtaposition of Dan and Dewayne’s calls foreshadows a subsequent scene in which Max’s views on the millennium are juxtaposed against the views espoused by Jeriko—beliefs that resonate strongly with Dewayne’s beliefs. Mace is also presented as a Jeriko acolyte in the sense that she appears in the bar at the moment that Max responds to Jeriko’s press conference with his own soliloquy about the possible end of days. Despite the fact that Mace repeatedly proclaims her opposition to SQUID, she makes an exception to her ethical code when Nero requests that she watch the clip of Jeriko’s execution by two white male LAPD officers. 28

Cameron and Bigelow may have included this image as a reference to a 1991 event correlated with the building of racial tensions in LA. Soon Ja Du, a female Korean shop owner, shot a fifteen-year-old African American girl Latasha Harlins to death for shoplifting a bottle of juice. Du faced no jail time rather she was fined, sentenced to probation and ordered to perform community service. During the LA riots, participants razed several Korean-owned businesses perhaps in retaliation for Harlins’ death and the lack of consequences for her killer.

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Intriguingly this is the only instance in the entire film of a woman viewing a SQUID clip. While Iris records clips at the behest of a white man (Philo) she is never pictured using the technology for pleasure as white men do. As with Iris, Mace does not watch the clip for pleasure but to “see” at Nero’s behest after he has watched the clip himself. Mace contends that the tape must be made public. Not surprisingly it is Max, the voice of postmodern nihilism, who tries to convince her otherwise. In a confrontation with Nero over his predictable desire to rescue Faith, Mace stomps on the cherished clips he keeps in the shoebox under his bed. Lenny drops to his knees to try to save them at which point Mace throws him against a wall and schools him with words culled directly from Jeriko’s speech: This is your life! Right here, right now. It’s real time, you hear me? Real time! Time to get real, not playback. You understand me? . . . These are used emotions. It’s time to trade them in. Memories were meant to fade. They’re designed that way for a reason.

Despite Mace’s tutelage, Nero still plans to exchange the clip of Jeriko’s execution for Faith, a decision that catalyzes another similar contretemps between Lenny and Mace. Mace responds to Nero’s plan: This is the original. There are no copies. This tape is a lightening bolt from God. It’s worth. Before we all go off the end of the road. You do not have the right to use it for currency. So if you, go, you go alone. I care about you Lenny . . . but if you pawn this tape you mean nothing to me.

Notably, Mace describes the clip as the antithesis of Jameson’s simulacra, a unique iteration capable of fomenting historical change rather than changing history by transforming it into a meaningless visual spectacle. Her characterization seems to reference Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936) in which he argues that analogue photography threatens to dissolve the aura of the unique work of art.29 After viewing the clip, Mace takes up the martyred Jeriko’s call for revolution during a debate with Max, informing him, “The only card we got to play is the tape. Get it to the media.” Lenny backs her up, “That’s right. Blow it wide open.” Max responds in kind, “Run that on the news and by midnight you’ve got the biggest riot in 29

Walter Benjamin. 1968. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Hannah Arendt, ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich, Inc.).

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history. They’ll see the smoke in Canada.” Frustrated, Mace inquires, “What are you saying? Just pretend it didn’t happen? . . . The LAPD murdered one of the most important black men in America. Who the fuck are you to try to bury it?” Max calmly replies, You want blood running in the storm drains go ahead and do it. Two hundred thousand gangbangers will spread through this city and burn it to the fucking ground. Once the fire starts the cops will cap off anything that moves. It’ll be an all out war.”

Echoing both Dewayne and Jeriko’s martial rhetoric, Mace replies, “Maybe it’s time for a war.” Nero, ever obsessed, switches the conversation to Faith yet again privileging a white woman over the African American community. Max’s contention that an army of “gangbangers” would burn the city to the ground in the wake of public airing of the Jeriko clip draws an analogy to the biblical narrative of the Battle of Jericho. By casting legions of gang members as soldiers, he draws a direct parallel to the origins of the martyred rapper’s stage name. In the Bible, God assists Joshua, the king of the Israelites, in defeating the inhabitants of Canaan, thereby proving God’s preference for the Israelites over the Egyptians. Mace’s contention that the assassination clip is a “lightening bolt from God” suggests that “God” is on the side of African-Americans (as the much persecuted Israelites) rather than the LAPD who stand-in for the Canaanites. In the biblical version of Jericho, Rahab, a prostitute, harbors two of Joshua’s spies within her Canaan residence, gaining protection from the wrath of God, who, according to Joshua wished that every living creature within the city walls be destroyed. Joshua’s army felled the walls of the city either by shouting or bugling trumpets. Notably, Jeriko One is not named for Joshua, the reluctant king, but for the battle in which the walls of the decadent city collapsed. This suggests that Lenny is the king who, assisted by God, conquers a decadent city characterized by a corrupt police state. Iris, clearly inhabits the role Rahab, in that she records Jeriko’s assassination, escapes the murderous Steckler and Engelman, and provides Nero with what he needs to “save” the decadent city from the reign of the LAPD. Unlike Rahab, however, Iris’ relationship to Lenny cannot ultimately save her since Max rapes and murders her. Rather than functioning as a messiah, Cameron writes Jeriko’s character as

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prophet/martyr not unlike Rodney King whose victimization by the LAPD and the Simi Valley jury ultimately gave rise to the LA riots.30

Mace and Masculinity Lenny’s two best friends, Max and Mace, attempt to convince him to “man up” by getting over his “pathetic” response to his loss of his relationship to Faith. Both are strongly coded as emotionally hardened, physically tough individuals who unapologetically carry guns unlike Nero who complains that toting guns ruins the structural integrity of his Armani jacket. Regardless of their biological sexes, his two pals demonstrate more normative masculinity than Nero since they are both capable fighters who are far less concerned with fashion and appearances than their mutual friend. Max and Mace are also both employed as security for male VIPs. Max, like Nero, is ex-LAPD now employed in the private sector as security/body guard for record producer Philo Gant (Faith’s new beau and former manager of LAPD assassinated rap artist Jeriko One). In addition to providing security, Mace acts as chauffeur of an armored limousine. Racial stereotypes about black men and women as physically superior than other races are offset somewhat by the twinning of Max, the archetypal hardboiled white male tough, with Mace’s similarly situated black female character. Since the two are employed to provide protection, both black and white working-class characters are associated with the body; thus, a class stereotype stands in for a racial stereotype. Mace’s musculature is highlighted by way of sleeveless shirts making her kin to the white male action stars of the 80s such as Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis. Max is stocky and looks capable of holding his own but his body is not objectified in the same way as Mace’s especially when she dons a sequined mini-dress for the New Year’s Eve party at the Bonaventure Hotel. Despite Max’s position as bodyguard he notes that he was discharged from the LAPD due to a disability—namely a bullet fragment permanently lodged in his brain. Therefore, Max’s body is represented as partially comprised coding him as corporally deficient (not unlike Sully in Avatar) in contrast with Mace. In addition to acting as Nero’s unwilling chauffeur, Mace also functions as his bodyguard, teacher and moral compass. Being a hustler, Lenny capitalizes on Mace’s affection/unrequited love for him by exploiting her for access to her car and her protection. Her devotion to a 30

King famously responded to the riots with the plea, “Can’t we all just get along?”

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man who so clearly uses her for what she can offer him codes her as servant to Lenny. In fact, the scenes in which Nero begs rides from Mace and attempts to sell his SQUID wares to one of her clients is entitled “Driving Mr. Lenny” on the Strange Days DVD. The scene opens with Mace voicing the same line. She references the racial politics of the film Driving Miss Daisy (1989) in which an African-American man, Hoke Colburn, (Morgan Freeman) acts as both chauffeur and “magic Negro” who enlightens the film’s white female protagonist Miss Daisy (Jessica Tandy). While “Driving Mr. Lenny” can be understood as Cameron and/or Bigelow’s ironic wink at (racially) savvy audiences, in fact, the dynamic between Nero and Mace does evoke the same cliché of the “magic Negro” acting as spiritual guide to a white protagonist on a moral journey. In an interesting twist on obvious racial and gender stereotypes, it is Mace who must step in as the “phallus/gun” that Nero lacks to save him (in his position as the damsel in distress that he incorrectly imagines Faith to be). Nero’s delusions about Faith are clearly structured by his need to believe in what are clearly presented as antiquated gender roles in the film. While he positions himself as white male savior to a “helpless” and apparently agency-less Faith, in fact he is the one who requires rescue from both his obsession with Faith and from his “impotence” by a phallically endowed black woman. Notably, Bigelow’s camera fetishizes Mace’s sinewy musculature particularly her arms which she frequently uses to punch, drive or shoot. On the one hand, Cameron and Bigelow’s evocation of a black woman with a phallus represents a radical departure from Hollywood narratives. Cameron has a demonstrated history of representing empowered and phallically endowed (read weapons toting) white female protagonists— namely Aliens’ Ripley and Terminator 2: Judgment Day’s Sarah Connor. However, with the exception of a handful of 70s era Blaxploitation films starring Pam Grier, there have been few films featuring black female action heroines. Strange Days’ conclusion also offers an unprecedented representation of inter-racial romance between a black woman and a white man. However, depicting a black woman as embodying a “masculinity” that is physically and phallically superior to the white male protagonist’s apparent impotence reifies a number of stereotypes about black women. While Mace is nearly always clad solely in a black pants suit throughout the film’s present, in her flashback to the moment she first met Nero, she wears a hyperfeminine pink waitress uniform. Her outfit not only suggests a blue-collar form of feminine “service” labor; the skirt and the color evokes uniforms associated with nostalgic 50s style dinners or drive-in theaters. Bigelow presents the “past Mace” as feminized (single)

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mother to a young boy in contrast to the “present Mace” who dresses and moves like a black clad ninja. The flashback suggests that in addition to becoming hardened by life as a single mother, Mace has had a gender transformation. In contrast, Nero has become more feminized in the present since he wears a non-descript LAPD windbreaker in Mace’s flashback but repeatedly draws attention to his expensive tight-fitting leather pants, velvet shirts and Armani jacket in the present. Mace appears to have no problem exposing either her clothes or her face to possible damage from fighting. Nero repeatedly calls upon her to save him from physical violence and imminent death, which she does by way of her gun handling, martial arts and driving skills. Mace’s character reifies stereotypes about black female strength by positioning her as more successfully “masculine” than Nero. By implication, black women are better “men” than dominant hegemonic white men particularly Nero a seemingly “impotent” white man and former LAPD officer. However, Mace undeniably plays second fiddle with regard to Strange Days’ focus on Nero’s transformation from selfinvolved sleazy rapacious capitalist to moral arbiter of racial justice. Nonetheless, she is explicitly coded as a Christ-like messiah figure during the scenes in which she, like Rodney King, is beaten while prone and handcuffed by multiple LAPD officers. As a result of the assault, for the rest of the film, crisscrossed rivulets of blood adorn her forehead evoking the image of Christ wearing a crown of thorns. Christ’s persecutors forced him to wear the crown in order to mock his claim to be the king of the Jews. Mace’s bloody crown suggests that she is the savior of AfricanAmericans at least in an apocalyptic LA perilously close to edge of an allout black vs. white race war. As a woman of color, Mace’s character offers a potentially radical move away from both Bigelow and Cameron’s focus on heterosexual white male heroes.31 However, like Neytiri of Avatar, ultimately her function is to act as an amalgam of romantic partner and “magic Negro” for her white male lover who must inevitably save the world. Both Mace and Neytiri act as moral compass and spiritual guide for Lenny Nero and Jake Sully respectively. While both are as skilled and as strong as well as arguably more intelligent and/or strategic than their white male counterparts, their role is to support the triumphant white male messiah. Cameron presents Ripley and Connor as veritable woman warriors via the tropes of male action heroes namely physical strength and facility with 31

With the exceptions of Blue Steel (1989), Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and arguably The Weight of Water (2000).

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technological machinery. What differentiates these two white women from white male action heroes is their maternal instinct. Intriguingly, for Cameron, it is maternal instinct that enables women to become fighters as fierce as men if not more so. Oddly, however, their maternal instincts appear to necessitate their desexualization since Ripley and Connor are coded as heterosexual but profoundly more invested in children than in romantic partners. In Strange Days, Bigelow and Cameron indicate that Mace suffers from unrequited love of Nero. However, in contrast to the secondary white female characters, Faith and Iris, both of whom are explicitly associated with prostitution and appear in mini-skirts, Mace typically appears in black pants suits. It is only toward the conclusion of the film on New Year’s Eve that Mace dons a dress. Unlike Faith and Iris who are respectively objectified and/or victimized by technologically aided male gazes, Mace accessorizes her black sequined cocktail gown with a gun that she straps to her inner thigh. Thus even when she appears in hyperfeminine body revealing clothing she is coded as phallic. Lest the audience miss the visual cues pointing to Mace’s possession of the gun/phallus as counterpoint to Nero’s lack of gun/impotence, Bigelow has her deliver the clip of Jeriko’s assassination to the Deputy Commissioner in front of a urinal in the men’s room. Mace, who packs a black pistol between her legs, confidently enters a gender-segregated space to confront a white male authority figure whose dick is quite literally in his hands. In other words, he, like Nero, is less phallically endowed and less capable than Mace. Shortly after the confrontation of black female and white male phalluses in the men’s room, Steckler and Engelman, exemplars par excellence of the 1990s phenomenon of “angry white man,” beat her mercilessly with their phallic black nightsticks. In chronological terms, her beating can be understood as her punishment for usurping the phallic privilege of white men. The assault hews closely to George Holliday’s footage of the King beating. Viewed in tandem it is difficult not to interpret the LAPD officer’s clubbing of King as reflective of a larger cultural fear and envy of black men’s purported phallic superiority. Subjecting prone black bodies male or female to blows with phallic black instruments works perhaps as a kind of fetishistic catharsis as in “I know the black (wo)man has a superior phallus but nevertheless.” By wielding guns and nightsticks against black bodies white men endow themselves with (prosthetic) phallic dominance over black people even if only temporarily. While Mace is punished severly for her possession of the phallus, , she does not end up bloodied and alone. Presumably she is granted the

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egalitarian heterosexual romance that is ultimately denied to the gunwielding Turner. Rather than lead the revolution predicted by Jeriko, Mace opts to walk off into the veritable millennial sunset with her now requited love, white male former LAPD love object. Strange Days’ conclusion foreshadows the end of Avatar in which the white male messiah saves the world and gets the (black/blue) girl. At the conclusion, presumably Nero is somehow rehabilitated by way of recognizing Mace’s value as a romantic partner as well as by “doing the right thing” regarding the recording of Jeriko One’s racially motivated assassination. The romantic union of Nero, a newly sensitive white male former LAPD officer and Mace, a single black mother from South Central LA, functions as fantasy wish fulfillment in which an interracial relationship functions as microcosm for an LA(PD) cured of the institutional racism so clearly evidenced in the King beating, the Simpson trial and the Ramparts scandal. The marital union of Cameron and Bigelow did not ultimately come to such a happy Hollywood end. Bigelow, however, won possession of the proverbial phallus with her 2010 Academy Award win over Cameron for Best Director. Following her win, Bigelow went on to characterize herself as “a delivery system” for content generated by journalist Mark Boal who adapted his own articles into screenplays for both The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty.32 Imagining herself as a delivery system for content produced by a white male partner positions her as a figure akin to Strange Days’ Nero whose gaze mediates clips produced by others for viewers (both within and outside of the film’s diegesis). As discussed in earlier sections of this essay, in Strange Days, many of the clips Nero views and sells were recorded by white women who were commissioned by white men to generate content that would appeal to other men. Thus, Bigelow, like Nero and Iris, functions as a intermediary for others’ visions. Becoming the first woman to win an Academy Award for direction arguably freed Bigelow from Cameron’s shadow. Indeed, Amy Pascal, cochairman of Sony pictures observes that until she won an Oscar, Bigelow was “one of the most overlooked, underappreciated directors working— including by our own community.”33 Rather than relishing her success and newfound status as auteur, she opts to credit that success to a man with whom she is rumored to be having a romantic relationship. In an article 32

Mark Harris. 2012. “Inside Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow’s Mad Dash to Make Zero Dark Thirty.” Vulture.com. (9 Dec). http://www.vulture.com/2012/12/mark-boal-kathryn-bigelow-on-zero-darkthirty.html 14 July 2014. 33 Harris. 2012. “Inside Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow’s Mad Dash to Make Zero Dark Thirty.”

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entitled “Inside Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow’s Mad Dash to Make Zero Dark Thirty,” journalist Mark Harris notes of the pair that “Their collaboration…is so intense that many assume it is, or was, romantic, something the two have never acknowledged, denied, or discussed.”34 Observing the trajectory of Bigelow’s career as a whole she has always collaborated with men on all of her film and television projects. From a feminist stand point it is tempting to wish she would acknowledge herself first and foremost rather than deflect credit to her male collaborators. However, she appears to be committed to a model of authorship that involves cross-sex collaboration and identification not unlike the heroines who populate both Bigelow and Cameron’s films. Her partnerships with Cameron and Boal can be understood to pave the way for a new approach to auteur theory by celebrating a pair rather than the modernist modus operandi of penning paeans to individual heroic male artist geniuses.

Works Cited Abrams, Peter, and James Cameron, Rick King, et al. 2005. Point Break. DVD. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment. Allan, Mark, and Edward S. Feldman, Steven-Charles Jaffe, et al. 2009. Near Dark. DVD. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Santa Monica: Lions Gate Films Home Entertainment. Austin, Stephanie, and James Cameron, Gale Ann Hurd et al. 1997. Terminator 2: Judgment Day. DVD. Directed by James Cameron. Santa Monica: Artisan Entertainment. —. Pamela Easley, et al. 1999. True Lies. DVD. Directed by James Cameron. True Lies. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment. Baudelaire, Charles. 1964. The Painter of Modern Life. New York: Da Capo Press. Beasley, William S., and Stephen Brown, Nana Greenwald, et al. 2000. Falling Down. DVD. Directed by Joel Schumacher. Burbank: Warner Home Video. Beaumont-Thomas, Ben. 2014. “Tom Hardy set for Kathryn Bigelow’s Post 9/11/ Drama True American.” The Guardian. 15 May. http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/15/tom-hardy-kathrynbigelow-true-american.

34

Ibid.

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Bell, Ross Grayson, and Céan Chaffin, John S. Dorsey, et al. 2000. Fight Club. DVD. Directed by David Fincher. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment. Benjamin, Walter. 1968.“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt, 217-252. Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich, Inc. Benson-Allott, Caetlin. 2010. “Undoing Violence: Politics, Genre and Duration in Kathryn Bigelow’s Cinema.” Film Quarterly (64.2), 33-43. Betsky, Aaron. 1995. “Riding the A Train to Aleph: Eight Utopias for Los Angeles.” In Heterotopia: Postmodern Utopia and the Body Politic. Edited by Tobin Siebers, 96-121. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bigelow, Kathryn, and Moritz Borman, Winship Cook, et al. 2002. K-19: The Widowmaker. DVD. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Hollywood: Home Video. Bly, Robert. 2004. Iron John: A Book about Men. Boston: Da Capo Press; Reprint edition. Boyer, Peter J. and M. Kirk. 2008. “LAPD blues: The story of Los Angeles’ gangsta cops and the corruption scandal that has shaken the once great LAPD.” PBS Frontline. August 20. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/lapd/race/protecserve. html 12 July 2014. Breton, Brooke, and James Cameron, Laeta Kalogridis et al. 2010. Avatar. DVD. Directed by James Cameron. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment. Breuer, Josef, and Sigmund Freud. 2000. Studies in Hysteria. Translated and edited by James Strachey. New York: Basic Books. Brown, David, and Robert Doudell, Jake Eberts, et al. 1987. Driving Miss Daisy. DVD. Directed by Bruce Beresford. Burbank: Warner Home Video. Cameron, James, and Pamela Easley, Al Giddings, et al. Titanic. 2001. DVD. Directed by James Cameron. Hollywood: Paramount Home Video. Cameron, James, and Steven-Charles Jaffe, Lawrence Kasanoff, et al. 2002. Strange Days. DVD. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment. Carroll, Gordon, and David Giler, Walter Hill. 2004. Alien. DVD. Directed by Ridley Scott. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment. –. Gale Ann Hurd. 2004. Aliens. DVD. Directed by James Cameron. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.

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Cheadle, Don, and Betsy Danbury, Sarah Finn, et al. 2009. Crash. DVD. Directed by Paul Haggis. Santa Monica: Lions Gate Films Home Entertainment. Daly, John and Derek Gibson, Gale Ann Hurd. 1997. The Terminator. DVD. Directed by James Cameron. Chatsworth: Image Entertainment. Deeley, Michael and Hampton Francher, Brian Kelly, et al. 1997. Blade Runner. DVD. Directed by Ridley Scott. Burbank: Warner Home Video. Faludi, Susan. 2006. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Woman. New York: Broadway Books, 15th Anniversary Edition. Freud, Sigmund. 1959. “Hysterical Fantasies and Their Relation to Bisexuality.” Edited by James Strachey, 155-166. In Standard Edition, the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 9: Jensen’s ’Gradiva’ and Other Works, London: Hogarth Press. Gitlin, Mimi Polk, and Callie Khouri, Dean O’Brien, et al. 2004. Thelma and Louise. DVD. Directed by Ridley Scott. Beverly Hills: MGM Home Entertainment. Grillo, Michael, and Lawrence Kasdan, Meg Kasdan, et al. 2001. Grand Canyon. DVD. Directed by Lawrence Kasdan. Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment. Greene, Ray. 2012. “Rich and Strange.” In James Cameron Interviews, edited by Brent Dunham, 71-76. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Haraway, Donna. 1985. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Socialist Review (80), 65-107. Harris, Mark. 2012. “Inside Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow’s Mad Dash to Make Zero Dark Thirty.” Vulture. 9 Dec. http://www.vulture.com/2012/12/mark-boal-kathryn-bigelow-on-zerodark-thirty.html 12 July 2014. Henson, Lisa, and A. Kitman Ho, Steven-Charles Jaffe, et al. 2002. The Weight of Water. DVD. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. Santa Monica: Lions Gate Films. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Moseley, Bill. 2012. “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: The Movie Director as Captain Nemo.” In James Cameron Interviews. Edited by Brent Durham, 77-109. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Moynihan, Daniel P. 1965. Moynihan Report: The Negro Family: The

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Case For National Action. Office of Policy Planning and Research United States Department of Labor, March. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen 16.3 (Autumn), 6-18. Nakamura, Lisa. 2002. Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet. London: Routledge. Nietszche, Friedrich. 1968. The Will to Power. Translated by William Kaufman and R.J. Hollingdale, and edited by Walter Kaufman. New York: Vintage Giant. Nordau, Max. 1895. Degeneration. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Google Books. http://books.google.com/books?id=ZkISAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontc over&dq=max+nordau+degeneration&hl=en&sa=X&ei=9JXBU_asM 8mLyATj4YK4Dg&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=max%20n ordau%20degeneration&f=false 12 July 2014. “Ralph Fiennes in Strange Days, Production Notes.” 2014. Fiennes forum.com. http://www.fiennesforum.com/strangedays/RalphFiennesStrangeDays Notes.htm 12 July. Redmond, Sean. 2012. “All that is Male Melts into Air: Bigelow on the Edge of Point Break.” In The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor. Edited by Deborah Jermyn and Sean Redmond, 106124. London: Wallflower Press. Riviere, Joan. 1929. “Womanliness as Masquerade.” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis (10), 303-313. Salisbury, Mark. 1991. “Kathryn Bigelow Talks to Mark Salisbury.” The Guardian. 21 November. Sharrett, Christopher. 1993. Crisis Cinema: The Apocalyptic Idea in Postmodern Narrative Cinema. College Park: Maisonneuve Press. Smiley, Tavis. 2012. “James Cameron.” In James Cameron Interviews. Edited by Brent Durham, 189-199. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Smith, Marquard, and Joanna Morra. 2006. The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future. Cambridge: M.I.T.Press. Stepkovich, Romi. 2003. “Strange Days: A Case History of Production and Distribution.” In The Cinema of Kathryn Bigelow: Hollywood Transgressor. Edited by Deborah Jermyn and Sean Redmond, 144158. London: Wallflower Press. Turkle, Sherry. 1995. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon and Schuster.

CHAPTER TEN THE “WEIRD SPELL” OF THE EMPTY CITY: REIMAGINING AMERICA IN POSTAPOCALYPTIC FILMS OF THE ATOMIC AGE MEGHAN OLIVAS

The cinematic city seems to tempt apocalyptic destruction. Places like New York, Paris, London, and Los Angeles, have been subject to massive volcanoes, tsunamis, fires, alien invasions, earthquakes, atomic weapons, and attacks by mutant beasts, more times than they perhaps deserve. As Mike Davis asserts, Los Angeles alone has been subject to disaster “in at least 138 novels and films since 1909.”1 There are so many films that feature urban disaster it is difficult to name them. From San Francisco (1936), to The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), to Earthquake (1974), and more recently, 2012 (2009), these films have been a ubiquitous and popular part of Hollywood fare. They seem to revel in their destruction, and have thus invited occasional disapproval. Such condemnation was especially passionate when films began to represent nuclear war and its effects, a phenomenon that many considered “(quite literally) unthinkable.”2 Responding to the explosion of apocalyptic films during America’s “Atomic Age,” Susan Sontag argued that these disaster spectacles offered an “aesthetic view of destruction and violence—a technological view,” which was ultimately an “inadequate response” to the threat of nuclear war.3 Although Sontag concedes that envisioning disaster might help people cope with threats, she ultimately argues that they are 1

Mike Davis. 1998. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, (New York: Vintage Books), 276. 2 Susan Sontag. 1974. “The Imagination of Disaster,” Hal in the Classroom: Science Fiction Films. Ed. Ralph J. Amelio. (Dayton: Pflaum Pub.), 37. The idea that nuclear war was unrepresentable, or unthinkable, was a common refrain in the nuclear criticism that emerged in the decades after WWII. 3 Sontag. 1974. “The Imagination of Disaster,” 28, 37.

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dangerously escapist, that they can “normalize what is psychologically unbearable, thereby inuring us to it.”4 Yet, as films like Ranald MacDougall’s The World, the Flesh, and The Devil, and Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach indicate, the image of a dead or destroyed city can engage audiences in critically thinking about the mutability of the structures in which they live. In such apocalyptic film, cities and those who live within their streets, change dramatically overnight, and in this fantasy of transmutation lies the possibility to reassess structural and ideological norms, as well as social identities. Even Sontag seems to realize this potential within the disaster genre, as she acknowledges that “the lure of such generalized disaster is that it releases one from normal obligations.”5 Although she dismisses this tendency as escapist, there is something quite powerful about a fantasy in which one is no longer bound to one’s old social role, especially when one considers the ways in which ideologies of race, gender, class, and sexuality, are strong determinants of one’s social positioning. In this way, post-apocalyptic cities can serve as places of possibility; stages upon which to try out new social relationships and new modes of being. While films that focus on the spectacle of disaster can invite such utopian imagining, the genre’s imaginative potential has been most potently realized in the postapocalyptic empty city, which—rather than distracting characters (and audiences) with the disaster itself, offers audiences a landscape that is seemingly familiar, but whose strangeness enables new modes of perception. Further, the sheer emptiness of the city tempts dreams of the future in an audience bred on the myth of the American frontier. The need to reimagine the American city, and the individuals and community who reside within, was driven by an increase in urban problems in the post-war period—and perhaps by an exaggerated perception of that increase—as well as by the corresponding validation of the suburban environment, the residential utopia of the 1950s. The housing shortage which followed the end of WWII added urgency to an already ubiquitous belief in the need for city transformation. In fact, “from 1941 to 1948, legislatures in twenty-five states passed urban redevelopment acts.”6 However, despite the hopeful Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954, which sought to improve post-war housing options, by the late 1950s it was apparent that living conditions for many urban residents were getting 4

Sontag. 1974. “The Imagination of Disaster,” 37. Sontag. 1974. “The Imagination of Disaster,” 28. 6 Alexander Von Hoffman. 2000. “A Study in Contradictions: The Origins and Legacy of the Housing Act of 1949,” Housing Policy Debate, Vol. 11, Issue 2, Fannie Mae Foundation. 5

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worse. Even though there were efforts to shift from urban redevelopment to urban “renewal” with the Housing Act of 1954—which focused more effort on the rehabilitation and conservation of existing buildings—the federal housing acts tended to create what many critics deemed “second ghettoes” and to displace low-income communities.7 Such urban deterioration coincided with the unprecedented development of single-family suburban homes. Suburbia was booming: “By 1950 the national suburban growth rate was ten times that of central cities, and in 1954 the editors of Fortune estimated that nine million people had moved to the suburbs in the previous decade.”8 However, while whites fled to the new Levittowns, poor people of color were trapped in “blighted” areas by restrictive covenants and redlining practices; and these urban conditions became even worse. As the white middle-class moved to the suburbs, “the inner-city housing market was deprived of the purchasers who could perhaps have supplied an appropriate demand for the evacuated neighborhoods.” 9 Subsequently, urban low-income housing became even more overcrowded because many slums were destroyed but not sufficiently replaced with affordable alternatives. For example, one 1966 survey done by the National Commission on Urban Problems found that, “of 1,155 projects, 67 percent were predominantly residential before urban renewal, but only 43 percent were residential afterward,” and that “most of the residences built in redeveloped areas were too expensive for the former occupants.”10 Ultimately it would become evident that the splendor of the suburbs and the dismal conditions of the city were results of some of the same policies.11 To many, it seemed, similar cities were in the process of decay while the ideal American community was burgeoning in suburbia. As Kenneth Jackson contends, “As the suburbs drew off the wealthy, central cities became identified with social problems.”12 7

Von Hoffman. 2000. “A Study in Contradictions,” 313. Kenneth Jackson. 1985. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States, (New York: Oxford University Press), 238. 9 Jackson. 1985. Crabgrass Frontier: 244. 10 Qtd. in Von Hoffman. 2000. “A Study in Contradictions,” 318. 11 In Crabgrass Frontier Kenneth Jackson argues that while public housing “has become an important institution” in other countries, in the U.S. “government assistance has served mainly to create invidious distinctions between city and suburban life.” (229). Further, because “the beneficiaries of [home ownership] programs were typically white and middle-class” such programs have also clearly increased the nation’s racial divide. 12 Jackson. 1985. Crabgrass Frontier, 274. 8

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By the late 1950s American cities were also associated with civic corruption, as well as with a general immorality amongst the populace. These negative perceptions were at least partially grounded in reality. Cities did offer many temptations which smaller towns could not provide, making them easy scapegoats for juvenile corruption and adult vice. More condemning, however, was the apparent corruption of the men bound to regulate such iniquity, and to keep the city safe for its inhabitants. A controversy emerged which spotlighted police corruption after the beating of seven men by over fifty members of the LAPD on December 25, 1951. Deemed “the Bloody Christmas,” the victimized men had already been taken into custody when they were beaten, illustrating the ludicrousness of the force imposed upon them. This event forever tarnished the reputation of the LAPD and widened the divide between law enforcement and communities of color.13 Tales of police corruption made popular news stories and were likely disproportionately represented in accounts of police procedure. For example, a Chicago Tribune happily quoted a story from a London newspaper that criticized the New York police department for being “laughingly called New York’s finest” when they were, in fact, “probably the world’s most consistently corrupt law agency.”14 Such tales of corruption at the city center were echoed and thereby amplified by popular film and fiction. Perceptions of the city as a space of lawlessness and corruption were a centerpiece of film noir, which, in the 1950s dominated cinematic representations of the city. The film noir city was the place of the gangster, the criminal, and the corrupt politician; it was often dark, dirty, and stiflingly crowded. It was a place, as Raymond Chandler famously argued in “The Simple Art of Murder,” “where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practicing.”15 The noir city required the figure of the upright detective, the figure who might provide a moralistic center to an otherwise nihilistic world. While Chandler’s Marlowe may have been more clearly moral than Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer, both detectives were defined by their honesty and integrity in a world in which 13

Edward J. Escobar. 2005. “Bloody Christmas and the Irony of Police Professionalism: The Los Angeles Police Department, Mexican Americans, and Police Reform in the 1950s,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 72, No. 2 (May), 171-199. 14 “Call New York World's Most Corrupt City.” 1959. Chicago Daily Tribune (1923-1963); Nov 22; ProQuest Historical Newspapers: Chicago Tribune (18491990), 36. 15 Raymond Chandler. 1988. The Simple Art of Murder (New York: Vintage Books).

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no official civic or national body was sufficient to take care of things. The popularity of this figure, as well as his position as both savior and detective, indicates just how bleakly the city was imagined during this period. In film noir, the city was a dangerous labyrinth that required superior strength and vision to navigate.16 Of course, this depiction of the city as a place of darkness and corruption was not wholly a 1950s phenomenon. Fritz Lang’s 1927 film, Metropolis, which is perhaps the most popular depiction of the city in early film, presented the city as a space of both technological wonder and severe class oppression. For the multitudes condemned to dwell beneath Lang’s futuristic city, the metropolis was a veritable Hell. In their investigation of the city in cinema, John Gold and Stephen Ward argue that since the 1920s cities have been represented to reflect an increasing sense of their oppressiveness: “Cities were now typically enclosed, overcrowded, noisy and tense.”17 Yet, as John Gold points out, the gangster movie in the 1930s and the darkness of film noir in the 1940s and 1950s “reinforced the cinema's negative portrayals of cities.”18 Such representations of urban corruption were so pervasive in the post-war period that, as Colin McArthur argues, the only positive cinematic representation of the city during the era could be found in the Hollywood musical. 19 Complementing this negative portrayal was a recurrent positive representation of small town America. Consider Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), or William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), two films which trace their protagonists’ journeys to rediscovering the value of their small-town lives. By the 1950s this small town spirit was being relocated in suburbia, a place that could simultaneously represent traditional American values and modern living. As Elaine May asserts in 16

James Donald writes that the labyrinthine or enigmatic city is “a dangerous but fascinating network of often subterranean relationships in need of decipherment. The detective embodies knowledge of the city’s lore and languages, and the daring to move at will through its society salons, its ghettos, and its underworld.” James Donald. 1995. “The City, the Cinema: Modern Spaces,” Visual Cultur, Ed. Chris Jenks. (London: Routledge), 79. 17 John Gold and Stephen Ward. 1997. “Of Plans and Planners: Documentary Film and the Challenge of the Urban Future, 1935-52,” The Cinematic City, David B. Clarke. (London: Routledge), 61. 18 John R. Gold. 2001. “Under Darkened Skies: The City in Science-fiction Film,” Geography, Vol. 86 (October), 339. 19 Colin McArthur. 1997. “Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls: Tracking the Elusive Cinematic City,” The Cinematic City, Ed. David B. Clarke, (London: Routledge), 32.

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Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, “the suburban home, complete with modern appliances and furnishings, continued to serve as a tangible symbol of the American Way of Life, and a powerful weapon in the Cold War propaganda arsenal.” 20 May recalls Richard Nixon’s assertion that “the essence of American superiority” lay in the “consumer-oriented suburban home.” 21 The most prevalent and therefore most powerful presentation of the suburban ideal was occurring on television. In her assessment of the relationship between the media and the postwar suburbs, Lynn Spigel recalls that “while in 1950 only nine percent of all American homes had a television set, by the end of the decade that figure rose to nearly ninety percent.”22 Spigel argues that both suburban migration and television profoundly changed notions of American community. As people of color were “zoned” out of the neighborhood, suburban space could “purify communal spaces, and television could “keep youngsters out of sinful public spaces, away from the countless contaminations of everyday life.”23 Television shows like Leave it To Beaver (1957-1963), and Father Knows Best (1954-1963) offered idealized versions of upright American families. Such shows promoted a particularly sanitized version of the American family while they also allowed families to remain inside their homes, safely removed from the world outside. Of course, not all believed in small-town morality and urban corruption. Since most people of color were not invited to the suburban party, and since de facto housing segregation had been growing for many decades, regularly restricting people of color from new residential opportunities, African-Americans often understood the city as a place— not of more pronounced corruption—but rather as a site which embodied the structural inequalities with which they grappled. Yet it was also a place where political groups could come together, and thus the city was often where an empowering revolutionary consciousness could develop. Amiri Baraka argues that this “revolutionary black nationalist,” consciousness, which was “violently anti-white,” had long been growing in the cities, from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement.24 Although the HUAC hearings of the 1950s transformed the cities from places of protest 20

Elaine Tyler May. 1999. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, 1988. (New York: Basic Books), 144. 21 May. 1999. Homeward Bound, 154. 22 Lynn Spigel. 2001. Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs, (Durham: Duke University Press), 33. 23 Spigel. 2001. Welcome to the Dreamhouse, 34, 35. 24 Spigel. 2001. Welcome to the Dreamhouse, 155.

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into “courtrooms of inquisition and places where [African Americans] could be placed in virtual house arrest,” the cities themselves were not uniformly dismissed as the central problem to social welfare.25 Instead, white supremacy and racism—which could occur in both city and suburb—remained the clear impediment to black freedom. In fact, many African-American writers have tended to see the city as a space in which individual identity and freedom can finally be discovered and /or secured.26 Thus, it is important to note that the anti-urbanism that characterized mainstream film and fiction was primarily the work of white writers and filmmakers who viewed the city as a place that curtailed individual freedom and success. Many such works, Toni Morrison argues, view black people, “as patients, victims, wards, and pathologies in urban settings, not as participants.” 27 While there may have been some disagreement about the relative value and influence of the city in American life, the threat of atomic attack prompted many to wonder if the city was merely a national liability. As Hiroshima and Nagasaki had shown, the atomic bomb was capable of wiping out entire urban populations and structures in one fell swoop. And the hydrogen bomb was even bigger. As Americans contemplated the possibility of nuclear attack, it seemed that the safest place to be was away from America’s cities; some even argued for programs of active decentralization. As Matthew Farish argues, “Salvation, for some families, meant moving – as Washington, DC realtors advertised –‘beyond the radiation zone’.” 28 This “zone” was more than a place of the imagination; 25

Amiri Baraka. 1981. “Black Literature.” Literature & the Urban Experience: Essays on the City and Literature. Michael C. Jaye and Ann Chalmers Watts, eds. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), 151. 26 As Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert Butler write in The City in AfricanAmerican Literature, “A substantial reversal of this anti-urban drive in American literature may be found in African-American writing. . . While one of the central drives in our classic literature has been a nearly reflexive desire to move away from the complexity and supposed corruption of cities toward idealized non-urban settings . . . very often the opposite has been true in African-American letters” (9). For example, they claim, “For both Ellison and Johnson the modern city is what the West is in mainstream American literature, an indeterminate open space creating the independence, freedom, and mobility necessary for achieving genuine selfhood” (15). 27 Morrison, Toni. 1981. “City Limits, Village Values: Concepts of the Neighborhood in Black Fiction,” Literature and the Urban Experience. Michael C. Jaye and Ana Chalmers Watts, eds. (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 37. 28 Matthew Farish. 2003. Disaster and Decentralization: American Cities and the Cold War, Cultural Geographies (10), 128.

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it was rather, a distinct mapping of urban risk based on maps made after Trinity, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. While such mapping varied slightly across the nation, Farish argues that “virtually all of these imaginative damage maps were centred precisely on the urban core—an extraordinary assumption, given the admitted inaccuracy of such bomb exercises, but also a strategic decision that created zonal models with profound structural and moral repercussions.”29 This is because, regardless of their accuracy, such mapping ultimately “bolstered calls for the spatial independence of new communities from urban centres,” thus exacerbating the rift between city and suburb. However, films like The World, the Flesh and the Devil, and Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach, suggest that people did not want to abandon their cities, nor watch them die, but instead, sought new ways of perceiving their possibilities. Was it possible to have a city without crowds, noise, or cars, a place in which one could run barefoot through the streets with unlimited mobility? Could one imagine a city where a new type of American community could flourish, in which segregation and racial tension were not the norm? The nuclear apocalyptic scenario offered new ways of commenting, not only on war and technology, but also on social relations and city structures, and the empty cityscape became a place to articulate progressive visions of America’s future. The cities in these films are at once familiar and alien, recognizable but unknowable, and it is something in this particular blend of the uncanny that invites viewers to reimagine the possibilities of the city, and the structures of social relations which they often symbolize. While Kramer’s empty San Francisco paradoxically incorporates the feeling of the open West into the city, creating a new type of urban pastoral, MacDougall’s film seeks to dismantle the racial hierarchy which the boundaries of the city—both geographic and ideological—tend to proliferate. Despite their many differences both films stand as clear testaments to the desire for both social renewal and urban transformation which drove many apocalyptic narratives in 1950s America. Produced by Harry Belafonte’s newly formed company, HarBel Productions, and directed by Ranald MacDougall, The World, the Flesh and the Devil (1959) depicts the struggles of three survivors in postapocalyptic America. The film opens with Ralph Burton (Harry Belafonte), a black miner, getting trapped underground when nuclear war wipes out the majority of the population above him. Burton surfaces only to find that he may very well be the last man alive. He travels from his small 29

Farish. 2003. Disaster and Decentralization, 131.

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hometown in what might be Ohio or Pennsylvania to New York City only to find the city empty. Eventually he meets Sarah Crandall (Inger Stevens), a young white woman, and they form a friendship that is shortly complicated by suggestions of romantic desire. However, when they meet another survivor, Benson Thacker (Mel Ferrer) a love triangle ensues. After a conflict between the men that almost ends in homicide, the three survivors walk hand-in-hand into the streets of New York as “The Beginning” flashes across this concluding image. In his review of the The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, Bosley Crowther lauds the “weird spell” cast by the imagery of a seemingly dead post-apocalyptic New York City. 30 Emptied of its well-known sights and sounds the city that never sleeps is made astonishingly strange. While Crowther and others criticized the film for its clichés and evasive handling of race relations, almost everyone seemed to agree that its ghostly urban spectacle was worth seeing. For example, Philip Scheuer calls the film “a technological triumph,” and is amazed that the film “contains no process shots, no trick shots, no double exposures and no fake backdrops.”31 Yet, the film plot falls short for Scheuer who concludes that “it might have been a sociological triumph too, but it falters in the stretch.” This point was echoed in a Variety review, which pointed out that “MacDougall shot a great deal of the film in Manhattan, and the realism (and the pains taken to achieve it) pay off.” Variety praises cameraman Harold J. Marzorati who “takes full advantage of the empty, echoing streets and the peculiar spirit of a city deserted.”32 Fifty years later TCM reviewer Jeff Stafford would offer a similar assessment of the film’s power, arguing that, “the sexual competition over Stevens gives the second half of The World, The Flesh, and The Devil a blunt, melodramatic fascination but it’s the first half of the film which is genuinely haunting and memorable.”33 These reviews suggest that such remarkable imagery could overcome the limitations of the film’s somewhat stifled narrative, but more importantly, they suggest that the spectacle of an empty cityscape was clearly enticing for audiences; that the absence of people, sound, machinery, etc. at the city center is more interesting than their presence. At first glance this may seem problematic, for one might ask if the attraction 30

Bosley Crowther. 1959. “Screen: Radioactive City: The World, The Flesh, and the Devil Opens. New York Times (May 21). 31 Philip K. Scheuer. 1959. “World, Flesh, Devil’: Old Problem Besets ‘Last’ Man on Earth.” Los Angeles Times (May 3, E1). Proquest. 32 Variety. 1959. (April 8), 6. 33 Jeff Stafford. 2009. ”After The Apocalypse: The World, The Flesh, and the Devil.” TCM.com (April 9).

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to a post-apocalyptic city precipitates an attraction to nuclear apocalypse. Perhaps Susan Sontag is right when she argues that fantasies of disaster “are in complicity with the abhorrent.”34 Yet, MacDougall’s film is clearly interested in the causes and consequences of bellicosity. Although The World is not about the terror of the atomic bomb and does little to mention the politics of the Cold War, the film uses nuclear war as an example of the extreme consequences of hate and aggression. The specter of total war hangs over the tale of Ralph, Sarah, and Benson, adding urgency to their attempts at social harmony. According to MacDougall, Sol Siegel, the film’s producer, wanted to tell a story about both racial tensions and survival, because, "Siegel felt strongly, as do many historians, that these two problems are interrelated and that we must solve both in order to solve either."35 Ultimately, the apocalyptic scenario associated racial conflict with mass death and destruction while aligning interracial harmony with social regeneration, offering a powerful statement to its 1959 audiences. By envisioning a group struggling with the impositions of racism, and realizing the need to overcome racist ideologies within a survival context, The World made a clear argument about what transformations were necessary in America’s future. Ultimately the film’s conclusion is not merely about the potential cooperation of romantic rivals but about the potential cooperation, intimacy, and perhaps polygamy, of a small interracial group within an American city. Before the film makes such a claim for America’s future, it illustrates the problems of racial ideology. The film begins by emphasizing Ralph’s low social position in America: while miner’s work is itself often dangerous and underpaid, Ralph is at the literal bottom of the American economy, and he soon finds himself abandoned and in the dark. Seeing no rescuers, Ralph works his way up the vertical shaft of the mine towards the sunlight. Once on the surface, Ralph is shocked to find his town empty. He reads old headlines which proclaim “Millions Flee from Cities,” and “U.N. Retaliates for Use of Atomic Poison,” and realizes that he has survived a nuclear war. Yet his social position has immediately improved. Now aboveground, he has the freedom to select a new car from a local showroom and he soon heads towards NYC. When cars clog the bridges into the city, Ralph finds a small fishing boat; as he paddles towards Manhattan, the Statue of Liberty stands behind him, a symbol forever tying America’s political aspirations to its famous urban landscape. From 34

Sontag. 1979. “The Imagination of Disaster,” 37. The World, The Flesh, and The Devil. 1959. American Film Institute Catalog, Dir. Ranald Mac Dougall. Accessed January 20, 2014. http://afi.chadwyck.com.libproxy.usc.edu/home.

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his initial ascent, to his commandeering of the new car, to his arrival to Manhattan, Ralph has gained economic freedom and mobility. In a representation of social hierarchy reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Ralph’s rise to power is seemingly complete once he is seen at the very top of New York, gleefully looking down at his penthouse apartment from atop a skyscraper.36 However, it is clear that ridding the world of people is not enough to eradicate the racism that had relegated Ralph to the lower rungs of the social ladder. Initially the structure of the city itself seems oppressive, for when walking through the deserted streets of lower Manhattan, Ralph is visually dwarfed by the skyscrapers. Viewed in long-shot from above, Ralph can be seen as a small figure moving through the streets; then, shot from below, Ralph looks up at the empty buildings towering over him. The camera spins slightly, and as Ralph begins to run through the streets once again, he spins, adding a sense of disorientation which makes the city seem even more sinister. Ralph’s diminution and the extreme scale of New York are repeatedly emphasized as his small form is framed by the large cement walls of city buildings. Such sequences initially highlight Ralph’s utter isolation and loneliness. As he honks the horn of an abandoned car, he looks up at the buildings around him, but they offer only indifference. The Empire State Building stands untarnished, but it has lost all of its promise; without the social connections Ralph so ardently seeks, these architectural wonders are now merely “monumental gravestones.”37 Ralph’s first response to the desolate metropolis is despair; but he soon grows suspicious as he looks up at the empty windows peering down at him and his sadness turns to anger. As his frustration reaches a crescendo he fires a pistol aimlessly and shouts: “Come out! What are you hiding for?! What did I do? I know you’re there, I can feel you staring at me!” Despite the fact that the nuclear apocalypse has emptied New York of would-be racists, Ralph carries the history of his persecution within, 36

Leslie Fiedler traces this stark representation of social hierarchy from Dante’s Hellish (underground) city to E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” to Metropolis, recognizing that it has long been a trope in science fiction. Leslie Fiedler. 1981. “Mythicizing the City, Literature and the Urban Experience: Essays on the City and Literature, Eds. Michael Jaye and Ann Chalmers Watts. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press), 119. 37 Vivian Sobchack writes, “Marking the death of the city as an actively functional structure, skyscrapers in these films [i.e. The World, The Flesh and the Devil, Five, and On the Beach] stand as monumental gravestones.” Vivian Sobchack. 1999. “Cities on the Edge of Time: The Urban Science-Fiction Film,” Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science-Fiction Cinema, Ed. Annette Kuhn, (London: Verso), 132.

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and he knows, as Ximena Gallardo argues, that “the wealthy whites who used to own and populate the now-vacant skyscrapers would consider him undesirable in this part of town.”38 His isolation is further emphasized through the juxtaposition of his echoing footsteps and cries for help with the silences of city sights. It is apparent, that Ralph’s sense of being watched and measured is a sign of his own internalized racism. Stephanie Larrieux argues that this is most apparent when Ralph stands looking at a statue of George Washington. She writes: The image of Ralph crouched at the feet of George Washington in conjunction with the film’s racial narrative make visually literal Ralph’s double consciousness—that of being both black and American. The statue of George Washington serves as a stand-in for the absent racialized social structure that Ralph has internalized. Although located in the background, the statue of Washington is center frame. The iconic representation of George Washington as one of the founders of American democracy has added meaning. Both black and American, Ralph is simultaneously present in and invisible to society.39

The film thus reflects the feelings of isolation and alienation which many black men likely felt in 1950s America. The physical structures of the city contribute to Ralph’s feelings of alienation: the skyscrapers and statues confront Ralph with traces of the racist world that, though dead, live on symbolically in the architecture of the city. Yet, it is soon evident that the empty city is not subject to the rules of the pre-apocalyptic world. In fact, the apocalypse has improved Ralph’s opportunities. He now has a greater freedom to make a life for himself, to manipulate the environment around him to suit his needs in whatever way he sees fit. Indicating the future he can build in the city, Ralph begins to pick up trash along the street. Showcasing his many talents, he fixes up a modern penthouse apartment and gets the electricity working again. Always donning his tool belt, and showing his skills with welding tools, motors, and telephones, Ralph works around the clock to build a nice home in the city. The apocalyptic scenario has thus offered a glimpse, not only into the social and psychological experiences of a black man in America, but has shown him to be a productive and skilled survivor. 38

Ximena Gallardo. 2013. “Aliens, Cyborgs and Other Invisible Men: Hollywood’s Solutions to the Black ‘Problem’ in SF Cinema,” Science Fiction Film and Television (6), 222. 39 Stephanie Larrieux. 2010. “The World, The Flesh, and the Devil: The Politics of Race, Gender, and Power in Post-Apocalyptic Hollywood Cinema,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video (Worchester: Clark University), 135.

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Further, as the only known person left in the world, Ralph has become the new normal; he has become, in other words, the human left among the inanimate remains of the city. This fact is driven home by his procurement of two white mannequins whom he names Betsy and Snodgrass, two figures whose plastic smiles are cold and unusual compared with Ralph’s vitality. By the time Ralph meets Sarah Crandall he has been fully humanized by the post-apocalyptic landscape. She is thus terrified when she thinks that he has jumped from his apartment balcony; and is relieved when she realizes he has merely discarded Snodgrass. Seeing Sarah from his balcony, Ralph runs quickly down to find her. As the last humans on earth, the two are drawn together; when Ralph asks Sarah if he will see her again, she replies, “I need you Ralph Burton.” As they quickly become friends, race seems irrelevant. Ralph is clearly more industrious, and one could argue that he is serving Sarah; however, as he connects their telephones and runs a wire of electricity to Sarah’s apartment, his care for her seems to stem from his manliness—and apparent attraction to her— rather than from any racial hierarchy. But, when Sarah asks Ralph if she can move into his building, he refuses, explaining sarcastically that “People might talk.” Ralph’s reluctance to allow Sarah in might have made sense in pre-apocalyptic 1950s America, but the apocalypse has destabilized such social taboos, making them seem quite strange and counterintuitive. The pair struggle with this paradox. When Sarah asks Ralph to cut her hair, he can hardly stand the intimacy it requires. He becomes overwhelmed and as he tries to leave, the two become engaged in a discussion of the relevance of their racial differences. Pleading to him for more closeness, Sarah tells Ralph, “I know you. You’re a fine and decent man! What else is there to know?” Ralph replies, “In that world that we came from, you wouldn’t know that. You wouldn’t even know me. Why should the world fall down to prove what I am and that there’s nothing wrong with what I am?!” As she breaks into tears, Ralph calmly says, “Look, we leave it the way it is and I won’t mention it again, OK?” Sarah pauses and replies, looking up at him, “We haven’t said anything about love, have we?” But Ralph walks out the door, refusing to engage her further. The persistence of this racial ideology ultimately leads to the film’s central conflict, as Ralph’s reluctance to pair up with Sarah leaves an opening for a new suitor. When Benson Thacker shows up, a love triangle arises; as a middle class white man, Ben is Sarah’s less desirable, but ostensibly more suitable partner. Many critics disliked this plot turn, feeling that it was too formulaic. However, the film’s love triangle, which

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could be seen as a simple plot device, reveals the ways in which racial boundaries in America are repeatedly policed through the imposition of sexual boundaries. The film may not challenge these limits as much as many wished. In fact, according to Belafonte, such sexual control was occurring behind the scenes of the film as well, as the unmistakable chemistry between Belafonte and Stevens led to massive rewrites of the script in order to decrease the intimacy between Ralph and Sarah.40 Yet, despite the limitations imposed upon physical contact between the actors, The World does succeed in making taboos against miscegenation seem unusual and irrational. In fact, the film’s rendering of interracial intimacy was radical enough that the film was boycotted by several Southern theaters.41 Such fears of reprisal and racial unrest likely led to the film’s somewhat ambiguous ending, as it is unclear what will ultimately become of the trio. Ben initially instigates a fight with Ralph in order to win Sarah, and the two men play a game of cat-and-mouse through the empty city streets. Ben soon throws down his weapon, not coincidentally, in front of the UN building, and it is clear that the men must find some way to live with one another. Sarah joins hands with Ralph, and then with Ben, and the three walk into the city hand-in-hand before “The Beginning” flashes across the screen. This ending suggests that the three will build a new community together in which black and white will no longer take up arms against one another, and with the appearance of the UN, such local cooperation is aligned with international peace. While this ending might not clearly resolve the romantic dispute, it does leave an opening for the possibility of interracial sex and even potential polygamy. In fact, friendship is only the first step in building a future, for in a postapocalyptic world, every living human counts, and the future of the city, and the nation which it represents, depends upon the successful communion and procreation of its few inhabitants. In order to create a future, the trio will inevitably need to have children. While some critics thought the film should have gone farther, and been more explicit,42 40

Harry Belafonte. 2011. My Song (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), 199-200. The film was “boycotted by some theatres in the South and in one case a showing in Georgia was halted because of erupting racial tensions in the audience,” Jeff Stafford. 2009. ”After the Apocalypse: The World, The Flesh, and the Devil” (TCM.com April 9), 2. 42 Bosley Crowther felt that this ending was “such an obvious contrivance and so cozily theatrical that you wouldn’t be surprised to see the windows of the buildings suddenly crowded with reintegrated people, cheering happily and flinging ticker tape.” Albert Johnson argued that “This parable exemplifies today’s approach to 41

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MacDougall explained that, "The precise ending must take place in the minds of those who see the picture. It was not our purpose in making the picture to tell people what to think. They must think for themselves."43 The ways in which The World, the Flesh, and the Devil wrestles with issues of racial integration and the possibility of miscegenation indicates that the film is not merely a response to the nuclear fears which were running rampant in 1959, but that it is clearly a response to the changing race relations in the 1950s. With segregation no longer legal and a Civil Rights Movement on the rise, the United States was undergoing a momentous sea-change when HarBel released The World. While desegregation would take decades to transform the American landscape, legislation like 1954’s historic “Brown vs. the Board of Education” was challenging long-held American social norms. Resistance to racist legislation and social practices was also becoming more visible. When Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders were arrested in Alabama in 1956, it made the national news and King’s conviction made the front page. “Even network television covered the boycott and arrests. For the first time (as would later be said), the whole world was watching.”44 America was in the process of transition, and the postapocalyptic landscape of The World offered one such landscape in which to envision this new social space. To imagine an interracial community cooperatively rebuilding America from ground zero of a city almost destroyed was a radical conception. Such an image not only made an argument for integration, but brought a sense of utopian possibility that such transformations could occur in places they were increasingly disregarded and abandoned. While in 1959 Senator Jacob K. Javits would claim “that New York City was in ‘grave peril’ from urban blight and decay,”45 suggesting that the city was already an “almost destroyed” dystopian site, The World seemed to answer with a hopeful look at the transformations possible if racial hierarchies and social the theme of interracialism; vague, inconclusive, and undiscussed” (7). Melvin Maddocks claimed that “What starts out bluntly and starkly, ends up in glib clichés, with a softly ambiguous sideglance at the race issue and a resolution so bland and evasive as to be meaningless.” Melvin Maddocks. 1959. “Theme of Survival Treated in ‘The World, Flesh, and Devil,” Christian Science Monitor, (May 11). 43 American Film Institute. 44 J. Hoberman. 2011. An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War (New York: The New Press), 323-324. 45 “Javits Says Blight May Overtake City.” 1959. New York Times ( Nov 11), 1. ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times (1851-2010), 28.

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aggression could finally be overcome. It called for a transformation of the idea of American community, and perhaps of the international community. Rather than cast the city off as a site worth abandoning for the greener pastures of the suburbs, The World suggested that America’s ideal community can blossom within the city streets. The World’s visualization of empty urban space adds power to its calls for social change. By depicting New York City with amazing realism (using “no trick shots” etc.), but also presenting a city that is quite alien, The World ultimately defamiliarizes New York. In other words, while viewers may feel that they know the city—know its structures and rhythms, social rules and norms, they find, in The World, that they do not. Its iconicity makes New York the perfect site for this process, for after years of representation through photography, fiction, and film, the city seems knowable even to those who have never been there. This act of defamiliarization undermines such repetitive representations, encouraging new ways of seeing life in the city. For instance, while taboos on interracial romance might be naturalized in the real world of 1950s America, in Ralph and Sarah’s post-apocalyptic world such social restrictions seem, not only strange, but ridiculous; and while the color line may inhibit young black men from owning property in downtown Manhattan, or from having real social power, Ralph’s choice of housing in the film seems both logical and well-suited, while his control over the radio, newspaper, and electrical system seems like the natural results of his presence as the last man alive. The World thus makes normative racial ideology seem like a strange social construction; in fact, the very idea of racial difference seems strange when humanity is on the brink of extinction. Coming together is a necessity of survival. In this way the apocalyptic film’s urban protagonists are pointedly distinct from their noir counterparts: unlike the private “I” of detective film and fiction, the postapocalyptic survivor is bent on finding others to connect with; he, or she, is emphatic about the need for social connection.46 This estrangement of normative ideology can powerfully affect viewers’ perceptions of what is possible in the world around them, and is therefore, a critical step in utopian thinking. For example, as one begins to 46 As Frank Krutnick argues in “Something More than Night: Tales of the Noir City,” “the noir detective is a privatized hero, customized to the atomistic regime or noir’s urban Gesellschaft [ . . .] Marlowe, like other noir dicks is a private “I.” “Striving constantly to justify his status as private ‘I,’ the detective rejects the claims of social identity. Marlowe’s contacts with others are fleeting. . .” Frank Krutnik. 1997. ”Something More Than Night: Tales of the Noir City,” The Cinematic City. Ed. David B. Clarke. London: Routledge), 89-90.

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see interracial taboos for the changeable social constructions they are, rather than as ahistorical rules for preserving the so-called natural order of things, then it becomes possible to move past such social prescriptions. Utopian thinking is primarily the ability to think beyond the limitations of common sense reality. As a mode of thought, rather than a concrete place, “Utopia must be the exploration of alternatives in a way that supports or catalyzes social transformation.”47 For this reason, scholars like Tom Moylan align utopian thinking with “counter-ideology” and argue that it is “the negative thinking of utopia [that] stands opposed to the affirmative culture of the present dominant system.” 48 Fredric Jameson has made a similar point. Arguing that our dreams of what is possible are limited by our experience, Jameson argues, “that at best Utopia can serve the negative purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment.”49 By defamiliarizing New York City and the people living within its streets, and by presenting a world in which blacks and whites can live together in harmony, The World creates a spell which draws viewers out from behind their habitual lenses and allows them to see the possibility, and apparent necessity, of a new type of American community. When Crowther asserts that The World’s dead city creates a “weird spell,” he indicates how successfully such imagery works to estrange viewers from their normal relationship to city space. Although it pleaded for a different manner of social transformation, a similar spell was cast by Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (1959), a film adapted from Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel. Often considered one of the most pessimistic films of the era, On the Beach depicts a world in which nuclear fallout has killed everyone and everything outside of Australia; however, during the course of the film a cloud of nuclear radiation sweeps towards the Southern hemisphere until even Australia is doomed to perish. The film’s final shots are a series of stills of Melbourne; empty and silent, its only moving objects are old newspapers blowing through the streets under a banner which ironically proclaims: “There is Still Time . . . Brother.” On the Beach, which was shot in black and white by cinematographer Giuseppe Rotunno, includes visions of a deserted San Francisco, an empty 47

Ruth Levitas and Lucy Sargisson. 2003. “Utopia in Dark Times: Optimism/Pessimism and Utopia/Dystopia,” Dark Horizons: Science-Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination. Eds. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (New York: Routledge), 13. 48 Tom Moylan. 1982. “The Locus of Hope: Utopia Versus Ideology,” Science Fiction Studies (9), 163. 49 Fredric Jameson. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso), xiii.

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San Diego, and finally, an empty Melbourne as part of its post-apocalyptic landscape. While many noted the dramatic impact of the empty scenery, most reviewers discussed the relative realism of the film’s depiction of a postnuclear landscape, and/or the film’s potential ability to provoke antinuclear sentiments.50 For example, Ernest Callenbach argued that On the Beach was “a useful film to have around, since it may scare people into thought, and there is virtue in any new reaction in politics these days. But it will not scare them in any useful direction, really, except perhaps to strengthen anti-fallout and hence anti-bomb-testing sentiment.” 51 Bosley Crowther argued that the film’s most powerful anti-nuclear argument lay in its celebration of life. Crowther writes, “The great merit of this picture, aside from its entertaining qualities, is the fact that it carries a passionate conviction that man is worth saving, after all.”52 Several politicians criticized the film, arguing that its bleak portrayal of the aftermath of nuclear war was exaggerated. Utah’s Senator Bennett, also a member of the Joint Congressional Atomic Energy Committee, argued that the film’s portrayal of such widespread nuclear contamination was “unscientific, unrealistic, and dangerously misleading” and claimed that the Atomic Energy Committee had “clearly demonstrated’ there would be many survivors even in a country subjected to heavy nuclear attack.”53 This political conversation was, of course, the aim of the film’s director. Kramer, who would become famous for the social message film, held strong convictions about the deadly totality of nuclear war and in order to emphasize the seriousness of nuclear catastrophe, he worked with United Artists to ensure that On the Beach was released simultaneously in more than twenty cities worldwide (including Moscow) in December of 1959.54 In the service of his social mission, Kramer utilizes empty city imagery in a variety of ways. First of all, rather than depict any decaying or mutated bodies, as Shute does in his novel, Kramer draws attention to the 50

Such eerie scenery was implicitly celebrated by the Academy who nominated On the Beach for Best Film Editing and Best Musical Score and was the reason reviewer Richard Coe claimed that “No matter what you think of this tingle, you’ll certainly not forget it.” Richard Coe. 1959. “Here’s One to Remember,” The Washington Post (Dec. 18). 51 Ernest Callenbach. 1959. “Review: On the Beach,”Film Quarterly (Winter 13: 2), 56. 52 Bosley Crowther. 1959. “Screen: On the Beach.” New York Times (Dec 18). 53 “‘On The Beach’ Scored: Senator Bennett Calls Film ‘Distorted,’ ‘Unrealistic.’” 1960. New York Times (Jan 6), Proquest Historical, 24. 54 On the Beach. 1959. American Film Institute [AFI].

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structures and people that remain after the end. Death, as well as its cause, is an invisible reality within the film, and as a result, the threat of nuclear fallout seems unreasonable while the cities pictured seem relatively nonthreatening. However, the seeming benignity of both the city and Australia is a dangerous illusion. Kramer asserted, as did Shute, that the most hazardous effects of nuclear war might be invisible. Such perceptions of nuclear danger were becoming increasingly commonplace--as the American public became more aware of the long-term results of radiation exposure in places like Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bikini Atoll—yet there was still debate about the extent of nuclear fallout and about the potential survivability of nuclear war. In response to such debates, Kramer depicts a chilling vision of the end of humanity which captures the magnitude of species extinction, while remaining grounded in a story about several individuals. The film contains many sequences of happy end-of-days carousing; those lucky enough to live in Australia are given a little extra time to enjoy their Earthly paradise. As the title intimates, On the Beach positions life “on the edge,” illustrating the transience of love, family, and simple pleasures within a world of nuclear threat. Although some hold out hope for life after nuclear Armageddon, it is soon apparent that radiation levels are rising and no one will survive the spreading fallout. As submarine Cmdr. DwightTowers (GregoryPeck) and his crew discover, there is no one left alive in California—the mythical site of possibility—and this fact seems to seal humanity’s fate. In one of the film’s most devastating scenes, Cmdr. Towers leads his crew back to the U.S. in order to pursue the source of a scrambled Morse code message. The crew has been trying to decode the message for days, and can only guess that someone must be alive along the California coastline. However, when one man, wearing full radioactive regalia, is sent into a harbor in San Diego to investigate the message, he finds a Coke bottle hooked on a window shade tapping out an incoherent signal to a mostly empty world. In Kramer’s post-nuclear world there is no hope of survival. To fully foreclose the future, and to add a strong sentimental edge to his the film, the impossibility of romance, procreation, and child rearing are emphasized. While a love affair blossoms between Moira (Ava Gardner) and Dwight (Peck), it is clear that there is no time left for their romance. This point is made most evident near the film’s conclusion as Dwight’s submarine cruises away from shore leaving Moira alone on the ocean cliffs as the daylight diminishes. We know from Moira’s earlier dialogue that she is smitten with Dwight, and it is difficult to see their time together

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cut short. This unfinished romance defied the typical Hollywood ending and likely frustrated audiences who enjoyed seeing the two stars together. Yet even the film’s most unsentimental viewers are saddened when confronted with the imminent death of Lt. Peter Holmes (Anthony Perkins), his wife (Donna Anderson), and their newborn baby. Kramer introduces this trio early in the film in a scene in which Peter attends to a crying baby while his wife sleeps. When she wakes, Peter reminds her that they must go out and buy more milk because “no more milk will be delivered.” Thus, it is immediately clear that the bliss of the family unit has already been altered by a quickly disintegrating society. Over the course of the film the Holmes family tries to maintain a semblance of normalcy. Along with their friends Dwight and Moira, we see them playing on the beach, hosting a party, and speaking of their love for one another. However, it is quite clear that their time together will soon be over and that their new baby will never have a chance at life. Aware that the coming nuclear radiation cloud will cause a slow and painful death, Peter secures suicide pills for his family, and though his wife initially resists it, they ultimately decide to kill themselves and their daughter. Kramer carefully crafts his presentation of the Holmes family and the love affair between Dwight and Moira in order to elicit a powerful emotional response from his viewers. His ability to evoke emotional suffering in his audience enables him to convey some sense of the magnitude of loss inherent in nuclear apocalypse. The enormity of loss is similarly conveyed by the film’s empty cityscapes. They stand both as emblems of human achievement and emblematize the magnitude of loss which Kramer hopes to tether to the prospect of nuclear war. This is first evident when Dwight’s crew reaches San Francisco Bay, which is introduced through the iconic image of the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge, now deserted, is a haunting reminder of the greatness which man can accomplish, and thus, adds to the sadness of his demise. It is, like the skyscrapers of the city, a kind of “monumental gravestone” of man’s aspirations.55 Kramer’s choice of this particular iconography was deliberate. The empty, undamaged city which the men explore in Shute’s novel is near Seattle. In contrast, when they encounter San Francisco they find disaster. By depicting the Golden Gate and its city still standing, still splendid, Kramer gives viewers a site they have likely seen a hundred times: not only was the bridge often a stand-in for the city itself, or even California more broadly, it had also been featured in countless films by 1959. With its steep hills rising up from the bay and 55

Sobchack. 1999. “Cities on the Edge of Time,” 132.

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visible trolley-car tracks, the city is similarly iconic. Standing empty, these icons are now a sign of man’s greatness and of the great waste he has made of his future. The sense of loss upon seeing San Francisco’s landmarks is narratively augmented by the reactions of the submarine crew, whose view of the city is now limited to the small frame of the sub’s periscope. As each crew member takes a turn looking through the periscope at the city, their faces grimace with disappointment. The streets of San Francisco are empty. No cars climb up its steep hills, no pedestrians clog its sidewalks, and no boats sail in its harbors. The men seem to finally realize the stakes of the nuclear catastrophe: the city offers a visual narrative of total death. In reaction to this undeniable reality, Swain, a member of the crew who once lived in San Francisco, jumps from the escape hatch and begins to swim ashore; he chooses to live and die in his hometown. A similar sense of loss emanates from an empty San Diego harbor where the crew next travels to find the source of the Morse signal, and finally from the concluding shots of Melbourne. Looking at places that once teemed with life and movement, it is haunting to see such spaces empty; each empty space is a ghostly “memory palace,” each city an elegy to human civilization. Yet, while Kramer’s empty cityscapes add to the film’s pathos, they also provide new ways of seeing the city, encouraging shifts in perception that ultimately support Kramer’s more overt anti-nuclear argument. Like The World’s New York City, Kramer’s post-apocalyptic cities are eerily strange. For example, viewed from the center of the road in one long shot, the Golden Gate Bridge is completely empty, and the strangeness of this fact is exaggerated both by the time spent on the image and by the film’s eerie soundtrack. The soundtrack is equally disturbing when Kramer shows a now abandoned San Diego hydroelectric plant, whose mundane industrial architecture and dirt roads seem like an alien landscape as Lieutenant Sunderstrom passes through in his cumbersome radiation suit. By making such sights strange, Kramer provokes viewers to see their familiar cities with fresh eyes. Once defamiliarized, new possibilities can be imagined, and.Kramer’s empty San Francisco conveys more than a sense of loss and/or danger; it also suggests new modes of inhabiting the city. Once Swain has left the ship, he experiences an excitement and a feeling of freedom that is actually quite appealing, especially compared to the cramped quarters of the grey, mechanical submarine. His exuberance is clear when he refuses the Captain’s orders to return to the ship saying, “I have a date on Market Street! I’m going home!” When the men encounter Swain the next day he has become the picture of vitality. Illuminated by the sunshine, Swain sits

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on the edge of his boat with his feet dangling in the water, fishing. Swain tells the Commander that he has a case of beer to share, and seems playful and relaxed. After telling Towers that everyone is dead, he asks about radiation poisoning; however, resigned to his fate, he looks up at the clear sky above and says, “Well, the weather’s OK if the wind would die down a little.” When Towers tells him he will become sick and asks him if he needs anything before they leave, Swain responds, smiling, “I’ve got two hundred drug stores to choose from.” The city is now open to Swain like an expansive playground. As Swain sits on the edge of the boat with his pants rolled up and his hands on his fishing pole, he embodies rural figures like Huck Finn. A young white man within an open, uninhabited expanse to explore as he pleases, Swain seems to have regained the freedoms of the mythic American landscape. Even his name supports this bucolic characterization: called “Yeoman Swain” by the crew, his association with the countryside is almost redundant. Yet, as he sits in San Francisco Harbor, Swain brings this rural ideal to the city, creating a new type of urban pastoral. His presence in the Bay indicates that one can embody the physical strength associated with rural living within an urban environment, and also that one can enjoy the freedoms associated with the natural world without giving up the luxuries of the metropolis. Swain is a living example that while the old city—of cars, roads, crowds, and machinery is dead, another city can be (re)gained. Now water is underfoot instead of asphalt, now a shoeless young man enjoys the San Francisco sunshine, rather than a confining vessel. As the cold, grey submarine disappears from sight, Kramer leaves his audience looking over Swain’s shoulder, alone and very much alive. For many Americans, the pastoral ideal was located in the nation’s frontier past, and this particular portrayal of freedom reflects the cult of the frontier that was experiencing resurgence in the 1950s. As the landscape was being developed at a more rapid rate than ever before, the idea of the American West survived in the imagination, and was represented ubiquitously in popular culture. Swain’s Huck-like boyishness and comfort in the natural world would have made him a popular figure to audiences steeped in what J. Hoberman calls “Davy Crockett madness.”56 Hoberman argues that this frenzy for Crockett was catalyzed by Disney films like 1955’s Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, Disney shows like “Davy Crockett: Indian Fighter” (1954), and songs such as “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” which, after its release in March 1955, sold 56

J. Hoberman. 2011. An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War (New York: The New Press), 287.

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more copies in less time than any in recording history.57 These updated versions of Davy Crockett emphasized his abilities as a fighter and his connections to the natural world.58 The popularity of the Crockett ballad, and the fandom that urged thousands of young boys to save their money up for coonskin caps, speaks of a strong desire for a reconnection with nature—and for all the adventure that it might offer. Swain is now the King of the post-apocalyptic frontier. He has escaped the confines of the military submarine, has shown his strength and resilience by swimming ashore, and has shown his ability for playfulness even in the face of his imminent demise. Although he will die, Swain invokes a version of the American Dream, breathing life into a dead city. Likewise, the sheer emptiness of Kramer’s city would have been an attraction for audiences used to associating open spaces with utopian possibility. The popularity of the Western during the period, both in film and television, indicates the hunger for open landscapes during the postwar era. Westerns became defined by their visual presentation of space, and their narrative references to the American frontier. Films like Bend of the River (1952) portray families seeking to build new utopian communities in the West; and “Bonanza,” a television series which debuted in 1959 featured the lives of the Cartwrights on their “thousand square-mile ranch.”59 Even outside the boundaries of the Western genre, the Beat movement romanticized concepts of open American highways. Published in 1957, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road revealed a deep longing for liberation from social and domestic norms, and visualized America as a space to be traveled through, and transcended, rather than settled. Thus, as this context suggests, when On the Beach arrived in theaters in 1959 an American appetite for open spaces had been building throughout the decade. In this way, the filmic depictions of an empty San Francisco, an empty San Diego harbor, and an empty Melbourne did more than scare audiences; such images were also enticements. These empty spaces appealed to the utopian desires of many Americans to find spaces in which new communities and new identities might be possible While Kramer leaves these possibilities relatively open, he clearly advocates for a renewal of the pastoral spirit—and perhaps community— 57

Hoberman. 2011. An Army of Phantoms, 288. Richard Slotkin writes that Crockett spent his early years “wandering from farm to farm on the frontier, with intervals of militia service, Indian fighting, speculation, and hunting.” Richard Slotkin. 2000. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860, 1973 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press), 414. 59 “Bonanza.” ( 1959–1973), IMDB, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052451/ 58

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that can exist within the city. By 1959, thanks to boosterism, television, and the movies, the pastoral ideal was firmly planted in the suburbs. The suburbs did, of course, represent a kind of “middle landscape.”60 They were not rural and yet they were a reprieve from the more industrial urban cores. As Chris Sellers argues, “If anything, in comparison with life among the skyscrapers, suburban living meant a closer acquaintance with open space and sky, with non-human flora and fauna. With its abundant plant life, both trimmed and weedy, with its ubiquity of pets and wilder creatures, from deer to songbirds, urban-edge living has kept alive those aspirations dreamed by Rachel Carson in the opening of Silent Spring.”61 However, as many environmentalists have noted, this harmonious association between the suburbs and nature was devastatingly misleading. 62 Not only did suburban development destroy the natural landscape; many suburban homes had relatively small outdoor areas. Appearing as “little boxes” in a row, their ability to evoke the feeling of the countryside was often limited. Yet, as both the small town and suburb had been so 60

As Leo Marx has famously argued, the idea of the “middle landscape,” has long been an ideal in American culture. This is a space where one can live within a civilized society without giving up “the regenerative power [that] is located in the natural terrain” (228). Leo Marx. 1964. The Machine in the Garden (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Reprinted in 2000. 61 Chris Sellers. 2010. “Cities and Suburbs,” A Companion to American Environmental History, Ed. D. C. Sackman, (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell), 476. Sellers refers to Carlson’s description: “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. . . . The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. (1962),1.” 62 Sellers argues that “The main profile of ‘suburbia’ in environmentalists’ arguments was as nature’s nemesis; most environmental historians turning to suburban history have emphasized the resulting environmental destruction.” He cites Adam Rome’s Bulldozer in the Countryside (2001) as a key example. Sellers. 2010. “Cities and Suburbs,” 475. Many of these environmental concerns were raised in the 1950s and 1960. One result of such environmental concern was the California Land Conservation Act of 1965 and Article XXVII of the California Constitution (1966) which offered financial incentives to encourage landowners from selling their land to developers. Article XXVII asserts in Section 1: “The people hereby declare that it is in the best interest of the state to maintain, preserve, conserve and otherwise continue in existence open space land for the production of food and fiber and to assure the use and enjoyment of natural resources and scenic beauty for the economic and social well-being of the state and its citizens.” Such conservation programs soon spread across the nation.

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fervently celebrated by film and television, as places of natural beauty, moral uprightness, and community values—as places of true American values—it was difficult not to believe in their mythology. Kramer’s suggestion that one could bring this mythic ideal into the city was powerful. Not only does On the Beach suggest that the relationship between the city and the country can be renegotiated, but it also suggests that such a renegotiation can aid in the fight against nuclear war. As Crowther so rightly notes, Kramer’s film indicates that “man is worth saving, after all,” and it is not only because of his technological triumphs, but also because of his strength and vitality; and vitality is cultivated in nature. Kramer makes this point clear by positioning the pre-apocalyptic fun and frolicking in the Australian countryside. Before they die, Dwight and Moira join countless others who retreat from the city to enjoy their last days fishing, swimming, drinking, and picnicking. Both wearing checkered camp-style shirts, the pair seek some last-minute adventures in the woods. It is in the country, at a small hotel in the rain, where Dwight and Moira finally embrace. This country frolic is accompanied by the sound of “Waltzing Matilda,” Australia’s unofficial national anthem, which is incessantly sung by the carousers, but also provides the theme to the film’s soundtrack. In part, the song is a joyful invitation to seek adventure in nature. The song, which begins, “Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong,/Under the shade of a Coolibah tree,/And he sang as he watched and waited till his billy boil,/You'll come a Waltzing Matilda with me,” continually asks the listener to come walking (“waltzing”) with him. As the speaker is a”swagman,” or itinerant worker, his invitation is really to come walking towards the shady stream (or “billabong”), and possibly along to other places where he may roam. During the course of the song, this swagman dies, but continues to entreat the listener to join him. However, the invitation to adventure in the song’s refrain ultimately emphasizes the need to choose movement into nature—to choose life—even in the face of death. When the world ends in On the Beach, “Waltzing Matilda” plays across Melbourne’s empty streets. It is both an elegy to humanity and a plea for a human future that can somehow bring life back into the city. After all, as Kramer emphasizes in his last shot, “There is Still Time . . . Brother.” To some extent, these films do indeed revel in their imagination of destruction. It is, after all, quite exciting to watch Harry Belafonte run through a post-apocalyptic landscape and wonder if he truly is the last man alive. Kramer’s haunting film is equally emotionally provocative. The suspense that underlines such (im)possibilities is titillating, and at times,

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cathartic. Yet what is truly destroyed in these films is the normalcy of everyday life; what is disrupted is perception; and perhaps what is most exciting is the hope for change that remains at each film’s edges. For films of the atomic age were not primarily about destruction, but about transformation. As Joyce Evans argues, “transmutation became a key motif in nuclear films from 1950 onward,” because “atomic technology was presented as transforming all it came into contact with—nuclear survivors, atomic spies, and alien invaders”63 While such metamorphosis often involved physical change, represented by monstrous insects, mutant humanoids, and devastated landscapes—the bomb was also understood as a force that could forever alter people and places internally. In these visions of apocalypse one sees man’s potential to become something wholly new; they illustrate precisely where utopian politics and the imagination of apocalypse converge. For, as William Katerberg argues, one sees in these apocalyptic narratives, “an openness to humanity becoming something that it is not yet, something it can hardly imagine, beyond cognition, inarticulate, and sublime.” 64 As these films imagine new ways of interacting in and with the metropolis, they recurrently present their viewers with a striking openness that invites such utopian imagining. It is important not to overlook the sheer impact of such imagery, even if the films themselves seem arrested in their political aspirations. As Stephan Heath argues: “Narrative never exhausts the image . . . Narrative can never contain the whole film which permanently exceeds its fictions.”65 The cinema has been a powerful force in shaping perceptions of the city. In fact, because they developed contemporaneously, “The city has been shaped by the cinematic form, just as cinema owes much of its nature to the development of the city.”66 Film is responsible, in part, for making New York City iconic; it is because of film that the Golden Gate Bridge can so quickly identify San Francisco. Over time, such depictions make it nearly impossible to see our cities outside of the Hollywood narratives that have shaped them, but they also remind us of the power of film to alter our understanding of the spaces in which we live. As Colin McArthur argues, 63

Joyce Evans. 1998. Celluloid Mushroom Clouds: Hollywood and the Atomic Bomb (Boulder: Westview Press), 8. 64 William Katerberg. 2008. Future West: Utopia and Apocalypse in Frontier Science Fiction (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas), 175. 65 Stephan Heath. 1994. qtd. in Stuart C Aitken, and Leo E. Zonn, Place, Power, Situation, and Spectacle: A Geography of Film (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.), 18. 66 David Clarke, ed. 1997. The Cinematic City (London: Routledge), 2.

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“cities (and, indeed, all urban spaces and even ‘natural’ landscapes) are always already social and ideological, immersed in narrative, constantly moving chess pieces in the game of defining and redefining utopias and dystopias. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that cities in discourse have no absolute and fixed meaning, only a temporary, positional one.” 67 When one considers the social and political consequences of the binary that positioned the city as a dystopia and the suburbs as utopia, it is clear why re-presenting the city was so imperative in the 1950s. This binary conceptually separated communities who might otherwise pool their resources for societal improvement. Convinced that they were not, in fact, a part of the city, suburban homeowners could avoid any sense of civic duty towards the blighted areas which touched the edges of their communities. In addition, this binary influenced social programs, federal funding, and disaster preparedness programs. As Matt Farish argues: The discourse of urban decline and the various distinctions maintained and encouraged between central city and suburb were of very specific strategic value – in channeling money not spent on inner-city improvement to the national arsenal, but also inconsistently locating, through a powerful combination of lurid drama and rational science, the locus of atomic danger in the heart of America’s cities. Such circular histories are a telling reminder of the peoples and places literally left behind by the combination of geopolitics and science during the early Cold War.68

Adding insult to injury, those left behind to suffer in the deteriorating neighborhoods were routinely pathologized in subsequent decades; as the Moynihan Report, or The Negro Family: The Case for National Action would argue in 1965, the problems facing African-Americans could be traced to their disintegrating family structures.69 The post-apocalyptic empty city emerged at a time when American cities were being abandoned, both physically and politically. They speak, not only of a desire for urban transformation, but also of the limitations of 67

McArthur. 1997. “Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls,” 20. Farish. 2003. Disaster and Decentralization, 141. 69 Although Moynihan acknowledged the deleterious effects of centuries of injustice on the African American community, his report concluded that “In a word, a national effort towards the problems of Negro Americans must be directed towards the question of family structure. The object should be to strengthen the Negro family so as to enable it to raise and support its members as do other families.” Daniel Moynihan. 2014. “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” 1964, Blackpast.org. Accessed May 20,: http://www.blackpast.org/primary/moynihan-report-1965#chapter4. 68

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the supposed suburban ideal. While suburbia was always suspect to those it excluded, as many others would soon discover, the suburbs were not the places of freedom and moral safety of which many had dreamed. In fact, as films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and novels like Fahrenheit 451 (1953) would indicate, suburbia could be a dystopian space whose prefabricated and homogeneous nature could suffocate its inhabitants. This realization complicated any easy condemnation of the urban environment, and stimulated a reassessment of its possibilities.

Works Cited Aitken, Stuart C. and Leo E. Zonn. 1994. Place, Power, Situation, and Spectacle: A Geography of Film. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. American Film Institute Catalog. 1959. On the Beach. —. 1959. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. Baraka, Amiri. 1981. “Black Literature.” Literature & the Urban Experience: Essays on the City and Literature. Eds. Michael C. Jaye and Ann Chalmers Watts. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Belafonte, Harry. 2011. My Song. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. “Call New York World's Most Corrupt City.” 1959. Chicago Daily Tribune 1923-1963 (Nov 22), ProQuest. Callenbach, Ernest. 1959. “Review: On the Beach”. Film Quarterly. 13: 2 (Winter), 52-56. Chandler, Raymond. 1988. “The Simple Art of Murder.” New York: Vintage Books. Clarke, David. Ed. 1997. The Cinematic City. London: Routledge. Coe, Richard. 1959. “Here’s One to Remember.” The Washington Post (Dec. 18). Crowther, Bosley. 1959. “Screen: Radioactive City: The World, The Flesh, and the Devil Opens.” New York Times (May 21). —. 1959. “Screen: On the Beach.” New York Times (Dec 18). Davis, Mike. 1998. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. New York: Vintage Books. Donald, James. 1995. “The City, the Cinema: Modern Spaces.” Visual Culture. Ed. Chris Jenks. London: Routledge. Escobar, Edward J. 2003. “Bloody Christmas and the Irony of Police Professionalism: The Los Angeles Police Department,Mexican Americans, and Police Reform in the 1950s,” Pacific Historical Review. 72:2 (May).

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Farish, Matthew. 2003. Disaster and Decentralization: American Cities and the Cold War, Cultural Geographies, 10. Fiedler, Leslie. 1981. “Mythicizing the City.” Literature and the Urban Experience: Essays on the City and Literature. Michael Jaye and Ann Chalmers Watts, eds. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Gallardo, Ximena. 2013. “Aliens, Cyborgs and Other Invisible Men: Hollywood’s Solutions to the Black ‘Problem’ in SF Cinema.” Science Fiction Film and Television, (6). Gold, John R. 2001. “Under Darkened Skies: The City in Science-fiction Film.” Geography (October: 86). Gold, John and Stephen Ward. 1997. “Of Plans and Planners: Documentary Film and the Challenge of the Urban Future, 1935-52.” The Cinematic City. Ed. David B. Clarke. London: Routledge. Hakutani ,Yoshinobu and Robert Butler. 1995. The City in AfricanAmerican Literature. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Hoberman, J. 2011. An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War. New York: The New Press. Jackson, Kenneth. 1985. Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States. New York: Oxford University Press. Jameson, Fredric. 2005. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso. “Javits Says Blight May Overtake City” 1959. New York Times (Nov 11), Proquest. Johnson, Albert. 1959. “Beige, Brown, Black.” Film Quarterly, Vol. 13. Katerberg, William. 2008. Future West: Utopia and Apocalypse in Frontier Science Fiction. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Krutnik, Frank. 1997. ”Something More than Night: Tales of the Noir City.” The Cinematic City. Ed. David B. Clarke. London: Routledge. Larrieux, Stephanie. 2010. “The World, The Flesh, and the Devil: The Politics of Race, Gender, and Power in Post-Apocalyptic Hollywood Cinema. Quarterly Review of Film and Video. Worchester: Clark University. Levitas, Ruth and Lucy Sargisson. 2003. “Utopia in Dark Times: Optimism/Pessimism and Utopia/Dystopia.” Dark Horizons: ScienceFiction and the Dystopian Imagination. Eds. Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan, New York: Routledge. Maddocks, Melvon. 1959. “Theme of Survival Treated in ‘The World, Flesh, and Devil” Christian Science Monitor (May 11). Marx, Leo. 2000. The Machine in the Garden.1964. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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May, Elaine Tyler. 1999. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. 1988. New York: Basic Books. McArthur, Colin. 1997. “Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls: Tracking the Elusive Cinematic City.” The Cinematic City, Ed. David B. Clarke. London: Routledge. Mohl, Raymond A. 2001. “Race and Housing in the Postwar City: An Explosive History.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (94:1). Morrison, Toni. 1981. “City Limits, Village Values: Concepts of the Neighborhood in Black Fiction,” 35-43. In Literature and the Urban Experience. Michael C. Jaye and Ana Chalmers Watts, eds. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers University Press, Moylan, Tom. 1982. “The Locus of Hope: Utopia Versus Ideology.” Science Fiction Studies ( 9), 159-166. Moynihan, Daniel. 2014. “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” 1965. Blackpast.org. Accessed May 20. On the Beach. 1959. Dir. Stanley Kramer. “‘On The Beach.’ 1960. Scored: Senator Bennett Calls Film ‘Distorted,’ ‘Unrealistic’.” New York Times (Jan 6), Proquest Historical. Scheuer, Philip K. 1959. “World, Flesh, Devil’: Old Problem Besets ‘Last’ Man on Earth.” Los Angeles Times (May 3: E1), Proquest. Shute, Nevil. 2010. On the Beach. 1957. New York: Vintage Books. Slotkin, Richard. 2000. Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. 1973. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Sobchack, Vivian. 1999. “Cities on the Edge of Time: The Urban ScienceFiction Film.” Alien Zone II: The Spaces of Science-Fiction Cinema. Ed. Annette Kuhn. London: Verso. Sontag, Susan. 1974. “The Imagination of Disaster.”Hal in the Classroom: Science Fiction Films. Ed. Ralph J. Amelio Dayton: Pflaum Pub. Spigel, Lynn. 2001. Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs. Durham: Duke University Press. Stafford, Jeff. 1959. ”After the Apocalypse: The World, The Flesh, and the Devil.” TCM.com 4/9/2009 Variety. (April 8). Von Hoffman, Alexander. 2000. “A Study in Contradictions: The Origins and Legacy of the Housing Act of 1949,” Housing Policy Debate, (11: 2), Fannie Mae Foundation. The World, The Flesh, and the Devil. 1959. American Film Institute Catalog.accessed January 20, 2014. Dir. Ranald MacDougall. http://afi.chadwyck.com.libproxy.usc.edu/home.

CHAPTER ELEVEN HOPE IN THE FACE OF ANNIHILATION ANNETTE M. MAGID

Even though apocalyptic representations in film and literature seem to impose a threat of obliteration on the future of humanity as we know it, one of the common themes of post-apocalyptic fiction “often reflects hopeful celebrations of human ingenuity in their detailing how people start over again.”1 The purpose of my paper is to examine the overt and, at times, hidden messages of impending hope in apocalyptic and postapocalyptic film and literature. The American film industry’s fascination with images of cataclysmic endings intensified in the late 1970s through the 1980s and twenty-first century post-apocalyptic novels often focus on the possibilities of starting over replete with the potential of hope and utopian theories. While threats of nuclear annihilation, global pandemics and destruction of the ecosystem threaten human existence on a global level, there is a “psychological need for . . . [a] sense-making narrative.”2 It is my conjecture that since most apocalyptic scenarios are used to project social criticism, the element of hope is intrinsic in human nature. It may seem paradoxical that stories projecting the end of the world incorporate an element of hope, yet as Zamora asserts, apocalyptic stories “[mock] the notion of conclusive ends and endings even as [they] propose just that—the conclusive narration of history’s end.”3 In addition,

1

Claire P. Curtis. 2010. Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract: ‘We’ll Not Go Home Again’ (New York: Lexington), 37. 2 Elizabeth K. Rosen. 2008. Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination (Lanham, MD, New York, and Plymouth, UK: Lexington), xix. 3 Lois Parkinson Zamora, ed. 1982. The Apocalyptic Vision in America: Interdisciplinary Essays on Myth and Culture (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University), 17.

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apocalyptic narratives are often used as “an instrument of criticism.”4 James Berger notes: The end is never the end. The apocalyptic text announces and describes the end of the world, but then the text does not end, nor does the world represented in the text, and neither does the world itself. . . . [S]omething remains after the end.5

Because the conjecture is that something remains, I view this as a means of imparting hope where there seems to be oblivion. The purpose of my paper is to examine the overt and, at times, hidden messages of impending hope in selected apocalyptic, dystopic and post-apocalyptic film and literature. The American film industry’s fascination with images of cataclysmic endings intensified in the late 1970s through the 1980s. One 1981 film example, Escape from New York, turns the entire island of Manhattan into an ultimate maximum-security prison. The film ends with the seemingly untimely revelation of the president’s top-secret pre-taped plan to preserve world peace, reflecting the initial desire for hope in a hostile environment. Hope is suggested even in Alan Moore’s graphic novel Swamp Thing: A Murder of Crows, his postmodern Armageddon,6 which examines the nature of evil and spins it into an “ongoing circle of existence.”7 Swamp Thing states: “Perhaps evil . . . is the humus . . . formed by virtue’s decay . . . and perhaps it is from . . . that dark, sinister loam . . . that virtue grows strongest.”8 By idealizing ongoing existence, the concept of hope for the future perpetuates and grows strongest within the darkest medium. As Elizabeth Rosen states in Apocalyptic Transformation “Endings are part of beginnings.”9 Two perceptions resonate with the concept of apocalypse. One is shown as cataclysm and the other as revelation:

4

Rosen. 2008. Apocalyptic Transformation, xxi. Berger’s emphasis. James Berger. 1999. After the End: Representations of PostApocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota), 5-6. 6 Where Swamp Thing focuses on Moore’s environmental concerns and the issue of New Jerusalem, Watchmen, illustrated by Dave Gibbons, focuses largely on reworking the superhero genre and the idea of an apocalyptic deity. Rosen. 2008. Apocalyptic Transformation, 18. 7 Rosen. 2008. Apocalyptic Transformation, 17. 8 Alan Moore. 2001. Swamp Thing: A Murder of Crows. Book 4. Illustrated by Stan Woch, Ron Randall et al. (New York: Vertigo, DC Comics), 195. 9 Rosen. 2008. Apocalyptic Transformation, 18. 5

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Chapter Eleven The combination of violent hatred for the world as it is and violent desire for the world as it should be has characterized apocalyptic representations and apocalyptic social movements since their first recorded instances, the Biblical and apocryphal apocalypses.10

Both share a common path toward the primality and immediacy related to the unitary unmodified event and the absolute resolution. The focus for most apocalyptic writers and film makers seems to be an urge to reveal the ultimate apocalyptic event that will inspire the ultimate ethical and moral change needed for Mankind to move in a direction away from the abyss of total annihilation. It is interesting to note that even though the apocalypse is, resembles, or explains The End,11 nearly every apocalyptic text presents the same paradox which reveals that the end is never the end. The text predicts and describes the end of the world, but the text does not end, nor does the world within the text end. In nearly every apocalyptic presentation, something remains beyond the proscribed end. I suggest two exceptions to this observation: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and Byron’s poem “Darkness,” where the end of the narrative reflects the end of the world without hope of any future; however, more than likely, the end of most other apocalyptic narratives suggests that something is left from the previous world to ignite a spark of hope. For example, in a real-life scenario during the Cold War,12 a future for the world is alluded to even if there is total nuclear destruction of the two major powers, Russia and the United States. Under the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction, if Russia sent nuclear missiles in the westerly direction of the United States, then there would have been an immediate retaliation from the United States who would send nuclear missiles in the easterly direction of Russia, thus ostensibly obliterating both major powers. Even if those two countries were totally obliterated, other smaller, less powerful nations associated with the Non-Aligned Movement founded by Egypt, India and Yugoslavia would have been put in the position to take over once the major powers were gone, thus seemingly fulfilling Nostradamus’ prediction in Century IX Quatrain 66:

10

James Berger. 1999. After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. (Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota), 34. 11 My emphasis. 12 Often dated from 1945-1991 with the powers aligning with United States, NATO and other allies in the Western World and the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact and other allies in the Eastern World.

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There will be peace, union and change Estates, offices, low high and high very low: To prepare a trip, the first offspring torment, War to cease, civil process, debates.13

According to Edgar Leoni, the classic interpretation of this quatrain is that a ‘Utopian age’ shall come to be; but not without much pain.14 Doug Yurchey in ‘Nostrodamus 2000’ questions: “Is this when the meek inherits [sic] the Earth?”15 The ‘low’ becoming ‘high’ seems to be an allusion to an inkling of hope often reflected in most dystopian and apocalyptic literature and film. A clear example of this spark of hope is reflected in a most recent trilogy, The Hunger Games from which the books have been made into film versions. Like the book, the premise for the movies features children, ages twelve through seventeen, who are selected in a lottery-type system from the post-apocalyptic twelve districts in a Panem (North America after nuclear destruction). Each district has a reaping every year where one boy and one girl are selected to serve as ‘tributes’ to fight in violent ‘games’ designed by Gamemakers to entertain the wealthy individuals living in the Capital. The children from the selected districts battle each other to the death with only one winner remaining. Besides entertainment, the games serve as a means to control the poor masses living in the various districts outside of the Capital. In the movie, once the tributes are selected, none of the people in District 12 cheer, instead they raise their right hand in solidarity, a gesture that looks similar to the raised hands of the Serbian dissidents16 The Hunger Games identified District 13 as a post-apocalyptic location, kept secret from the other districts by the villainous President Snow. District 13 is said to have been “obliterated,”17 yet its existence is 13

John Bruno Hare, ed. 2010. ‘The Prophecies of Nostradamus’. Internet Sacred Text Archive Santa Cruz, CA: Evinity (Accessed 14 December 2012), n.p. 14 Edgar Leoni. 1892. Nostradomus and His Prophecies (New York: Bell), 140. 15 Doug Yurchey. 2000. ‘Nostrodamus 2000’ http://www.worldmysteries.com/awr _5.htm. (Accessed 14 December 2012), 5. 16 According to Edward T. Hall, “Sixty percent of our daily communication is nonverbal” Roger E. Axtell. 2007. Essential Do’s and Taboos: The Complete Guide to International Business and Leisure Travel (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley), 7. The raised hand and the three finger salute seen in The Hunger Games seems to echo the gesture that is commonly recognized as a sign of Serbian supremacy in rallies by supporters of Radovan Karadzic and Ratlo Mladic, the Bosnian Serb leaders who later were indicted for genocide (MacKinnon. 1997, n. p.). 17 Suzanne Collins. 2008. The Hunger Games (New York: Scholastic), 18.

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known to a few individuals within the Capital District. In District 13 people can live as relatively free individuals, unbound by the Capital’s reaping of their children, yet to keep order, a militaristic atmosphere is strictly enforced and inhabitants are made to adhere to a rigid behavioral schedule which is tattooed daily into the forearm of each person and removed each evening. It is ironic that District 13’s real motive to help those who are being tortured in the Hunger Games and offer a means of escape into District 13 is for their own self-preservation. Many of the inhabitants of District 13 have been rendered infertile by “some sort of pox epidemic”18 and those who escaped from the tyranny of the Capital are viewed by District 13 as “new breeding stock.”19 While the authorities from District 13 grant every single refugee with ‘automatic citizenship’, additional efforts are implemented to train newcomers for work. In addition, children are being educated so that they will be more suitable for propagating the next generation. Within District 13, even the concept of the military is viewed as a positive opportunity since those over fourteen are given entry-level rank of ‘soldier’ and most importantly, respect as individuals.20 Even though District 13 leadership is presented as corrupt in Mockingjay, the final volume of The Hunger Games trilogy, Collins seems to be insinuating that hope for future generations will be achieved only by initiating a clean slate, destroying all maniacal leadership and allowing the people to form a democratic self-government. Once the people return to their districts after the corrupt government tries to destroy them, they will be able to re-start their own communities. In this way, the apocalyptic event that destroyed a majority of North America will be put behind the inhabitants so they can build on hope for a better future. The end of book two, Catching Fire, reveals the total devastation of District 12, the area in which the protagonist, Katniss Everdeen, grew up. Threaded within the rhetoric of the first few pages of book three, the concept of hope compels Katniss to return to her bombed-out home district where she locates items in her former Victory Circle home (the only area in District 12 that was not bombed by the Capital). Not specifically looking for each item, but recognizing their emotional value, she locates memorabilia that suggest snippets of her family history such as her mother’s wedding photo, her father’s hunting jacket, Buttercup, her sister’s cat, and a book of medicinal plants drawn with precision by her 18

Suzanne Collins. 2010. Mockingjay (New York: Scholastic), 8. Ibid. 20 Ibid. 19

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Hunger Game partner, Peeta. Each item that brings a semblance of normalcy to her mother, sister Prim, and to herself at the beginning of Mockingjay, brings the solace of memory to Katniss at the end of the book. These items focus on a glimmer of hope which helps to dissipate the sense of despair represented by their total loss of District 12. The items help deflect the chaos in which they find themselves and illuminate some hope that one day at least they may return to the calm Katniss and her family experienced in past times before her participation as a ‘tribute’ for the Games. She takes the items found in the Victory Circle home with her to her new, but temporary, home in District 13. When District 13 is threatened with bombing from the Capital, it is these items that her friend Gale gathers from her assigned room in District 13 and brings them to Katniss in the bomb shelter. Each of the items symbolizes that which has passed and that which brings hope for normalcy in the future. It should be noted that Katniss’ battle cry against the Capital is, “If we burn, you will burn with us.”21 This chant suggests the belligerence embraced by the districts’ inhabitants who have a chance and possible hope of defeating the oppression of the Capital if they fight back against them. The Capital is depicted as being very hedonistic as well as highly materialistic; therefore, they would find the message of their own possible destruction to be highly disconcerting. Katniss, becomes the personification of the Mockingjay, symbolized in a pin given to her by her wealthy friend Marge, the mayor’s daughter, in Book One, The Hunger Games.22 Once Katniss becomes the Mockingjay, she is sent to various districts as a mascot to help provide hope for other militants’ efforts to over-throw the ironically named Peacekeepers of the Capital. The last district that is not totally bombed out is District 2 where the Capital trains Peacekeepers [equivalent to storm troopers] inside a granite-filled mountain called ‘The Nut’, a virtually impenetrable natural fortress. When Katniss’ friend Gale who is helping the anti-government Special Defense Forces from District 13 suggests that an avalanche might be the best way to overpower the enemy stronghold, Katniss remembers many victims, including their fathers, who died in a similar mountain disaster when it blew up while they were mining coal. She views Gale’s plan similar to that which President Snow might implement: show no mercy, allow no hope. Even though they did bomb the unstable areas above “The Nut,” to create an avalanche, one concession Gale made to Katniss was to keep an exit 21

Collins. 2010. Mockingjay, 186. In the movie, this is changed and the Mockingjay pin is given to her by her District 12 boyfriend, Gale, immediately before the Games begin.

22

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accessible to those trapped in the mountain. Gale and his Special Defense Forces could have bombed a tunnel through which trains reached the interior of the mine; however, by allowing the tunnel to remain open, there was an element of hope, a possible escape route, allowed to the survivors of the crushed mountain.23 While Collins’ novels is presenting a fictional set of details with sociological implications, it is interesting to note that in Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel, The Wanting Seed, focuses on a similar sociological problem of population control. Rather than using an artificial device of deadly games to control population over-growth, Burgess’ movie employs more realistically harsh government measures—similar to those utilized in China—to limit additional population growth by creating ‘Population Police’ to enforce arrest or imprisonment of English couples who have or attempt to have more than one child. Through his history teacher protagonist Tristram Foxe, Burgess presents the conundrum of history in which there are three phases representing the cyclical nature of history. The first phase is based on tolerance and liberalism in which government serves as a guide rather than an oppressive force for the citizenry. The second phase is an intermediate zone which realizes the lack of government control and the inevitable abuse which follows, no matter how well-intentioned the first phase seems to be. The third phase focuses on the sinfulness of humankind; therefore, strict government control is considered necessary and is imposed on the citizens to maintain obedience. Ironically, this last, most stringent phase in human history lends itself to hope for human perfectibility. The logic proceeds with the thought that if mankind is capable of obedience, then there is “a perception that people are perfectible”24 which leads back the first phase of tolerance and hope. Of course, Burgess does not regard this as a simplistic formula for categorizing individuals since he asserts that all individuals embody a combination of the behaviors “either in cyclical phases, or, through a kind of doublethink, at one and the same time.”25 The duality of human nature is also suggested several decades earlier in dystopian novels that present the ‘doublethink’ alluded to by Burgess. It should be noted that neither Huxley’s Brave New World nor Orwell’s 1984 suggest an ‘either/or’ conclusion concerning the most acceptable form of society. Both would reject an ideal society that embraces rightness, justness and truthfulness as the exclusive doctrine of the entire population. 23

Collins. 2010. Mockingjay, 211. John H. Dorenkamp. 1981. ‘Anthony Burgess and the Future Man: The Wanting Seed’. University of Dayton Review 15.1 (Spring), 108. 25 Burgess, Anthony. 1978. 1985 (Boston: Little, Brown), 53. 24

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In Huxley’s Brave New World, all aspects of life are designed to increase consumption and enhance pleasure within a society which lacks individual liberty. Huxley’s dystopia is more subtle than the overbearing government in Collins’ Hunger Games. Rather than the overt exercise of power that Collins depicts, Huxley “imposes more subtle manipulations [of] modern bourgeois society in the West.”26 Huxley also presciently anticipated the ‘sex, drugs, and rock and roll’ counterculture of the 1960s and Huxley’s 1962 more positive novel Island depicts drugs that lead to a mystical enlightenment and spiritual growth.27 Huxley uses artificial means such as drugs to control the population and as in the story line of Brave New World and Island, a method to embrace positiveness toward consumerism, an exaggerated version of capitalism in which new production and consumption are essential to keep the economy functioning: Orwell, on the other hand, in his fictional city of Oceana, uses almost every motif associated with dystopian fiction to depict a negative aspect of traditionally held beliefs. For example, he depicts the mechanical application of technology as a means for spying on the population. In addition, religion has been conscripted by the state. Sexuality is strictly controlled to prevent strong emotional attachments. Also, art and culture are used as tools for direct propagation of Oceana’s official ideology. Orwell introduces the notion that if science and technology are politicized, it will have a suffocating effect on science. Orwell’s official government propagandist Winston Smith invents “Comrade Ogilvy,” an idealized party leader who, like the fictitious Soldier, Lieutenant Andrew Summer Rowan in A Message to Garcia28— created by Elbert Hubbard— is intended to serve as model of an exemplary person who is obedient, following orders as presented by authority figures.29 In Orwell’s 1984, the character Smith describes Ogilvy in terms with “clear religious undertones, making him a sort of Communist saint.”30 Ogilvy was portrayed as an individual who practiced 26

M. Keith Booker. 1994. Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 171. 27 Walter H. Clark. 1975. ‘Drugs and Utopia’. Peyton Richter, ed. Utopia/Dystopia? (Cambridge, MA: Schenkman), 112. 28 Elbert Hubbard’s story was originally included as “filler” in his magazine The Philistine; “A Message to Garcia” was reprinted as a small chapbook which sold over one million copies and was translated into multiple languages and used as an inspirational story to encourage loyalty and obedience in soldiers and workers. 29 In Hubbard’s story, the authority figure was United States President William McKinley. 30 Booker. 1994. Dystopian Literature, 209-10.

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all the behavior that was considered exemplary in Oceana: “He was a total abstainer and nonsmoker, had no recreations except a daily hour in the gymnasium, and had taken a vow of celibacy, believing marriage and the care of a family to be incompatible with his twenty-four-hour-a-day devotion to duty.”31 As in The Hunger Games, the population in Oceana is totally under control of the oppressive government. Language and mind control used to manipulate the population in the dystopian novel 1984 are the most powerful forces for the government of Oceana as well as the Districts of Panam in The Hunger Games. In spite of the oppressive societies Huxley and Orwell created, like Collins and others, each writer alludes to a kind of justice and the right to free, truthful expression of thought in a functional, vital society. This pursuit of justice offers an element of hope to those who are seeking to emerge from an oppressive society. The last stanza of the song at the end of Mockingjay depicts the hope that emerges from the screaming nightmares Katniss will never fully erase from her subconsciousness: Here it’s safe, here it’s warm/ Here the daises guard you from every harm Here your dreams are sweet/ and tomorrow bring them true. Here is the place where I love you. 32

In the 1974 pre-apocalyptic novel, Walk to the End of the World, threats of misogyny and sterility put women, rather than children on a path to annihilation by the male population. Women are treated not only “as inferiors and slaves, but as enemies. The opposition to females provides a central unifying force for the men who have already eliminated other natural ‘enemies’ like animals and nonwhites.”33 Unlike Collins’ trilogy which exposes complex levels of amoral political behavior, Charnas’ Walk to the End of the World satirizes a number of social evils including “slavery, exploitation, burning of women, rape, drug dependence, institutional stifling of creatively, sexual perversion, pogroms, Nazi-like research on human subjects and nuclear devastation.”34 Within the apocalyptic framework of Walk to the End of the World, the rebel hero of 31

George Orwell. 1961. 1984 (New York: New American Library), 42. Collins. 2010. Mockingjay, 389-90. 33 Booker. 1994. Dystopian Literature, 112. 34 Marleen Barr. 1983. ‘Utopia at the End of a Male Chauvinist Dystopian World: Susy McKee Charnas’s Feminist Science Fiction’. Marleen Barr and Nicholas D. Smith, eds. Women and Utopian: Critical Interpretations (New York: University Press of America), 49. 32

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the book is a homosexual man, Eykar Bek whose quest is Oedipal since he must murder his father, leader of Troi, to implement change toward women, especially Alidera, a female leader. The hope that emanates from Bek’s realization regarding the futility of total male dominance at the expense of total female subservience is projected near the end when Alidera escapes into the wilds, where she will “encounter tribes of ‘Riding Women’ . . . and experience various additional adventures.”35 In the apocalyptic genre, the warning of destruction, usually from an uncontrollable outside source or a higher authority is so complete that total devastation seems to be the only prognosis; however, following the traumatic event or events, the focus is on new possibilities which might thwart the finality of life and the threatened, nearly annihilated humanity. The implication that humanity may have some hope of revitalization if it is dissuaded from continuing down the same foreboding path, suggests to me that fear is used as a means to implement a more positive behavioral change. At times when the element of fear is generated by a particular catastrophe or cataclysmic choice, one or two characters such as Katniss in Collins’ The Hunger Games or Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984, to name two protagonists in a genre filled with parallel scenarios, come forward to attempt to resolve the vexing dilemma of total annihilation. An example which offers implications of employing fear through apocalyptic endings is seen in Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Road. The didactic message presented in the novel seems to be intended as an object lesson to those experiencing the impact of the story as well as to those who are apathetic to the issues in the novel. Since the outcome of the book, as well as the movie, is shown as being a hopeless cause for the human race, I see this as a means to inspire readers to seek and implement change. The novel, as well as the movie, serves as a warning so that the reader/viewer and generations to come will not end up in the same hopeless position as the protagonist father and his son.36 (Curtis 39-40). The Road offers a view of the future that does not bode well for the human race; however, it does offer a somewhat positive view into human nature embodied in the father and his son when they are faced with the direst set of circumstances. The barbaric, cannibalistic behavior that occurs following the cataclysmic destruction of the United States suggests that the absence of human needs has a tendency to yield despicable behavior; however, it should not be interpreted as the result of the apocalyptic cataclysm. The choices that can be made by individuals 35

Booker. 1994. Dystopian Literature, 113. Claire P. Curtis. 2010. Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract: “We’ll Not Go Home Again” (New York: Lexington), 39-40.

36

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following any set of stimuli do not necessarily have to be those horrific choices indicated in movies and literature such as McCarthy’s The Road.37 Even though survival is paramount, the father and his son demonstrate more positive, compassionate behavior lending credibility to the notion of hope for the future. James Berger’s study of representations of post-apocalypse, After the End, studied the parallelism between theories of post-apocalypse and the Holocaust. Even though he clearly details the psychoanalytic term for apocalypse as ‘trauma’, the post-apocalypse yields evidence of healing and hope. For example, in a real-life scenario, the town of Freiburg which was nearly totally bombed during World War I, was rebuilt to its medieval appearance based on photos before the war, pre-apocalypse. In fact Berger asserts that “No historical plaques mention the reconstruction [of Freiburg]; guidebooks overlook it.”38 Berger suggests that Freiburg and other German cities such as Munich are “post-apocalyptic simulacra, products of a purposeful historical amnesia, rebuilt so as to deny that the years from 1933 to 1945 ever really took place.”39 Like the attempt in The Hunger Games to erase District 13 from the consciousness of the Panem inhabitants, Berger suggests that even though the events occur and seemingly leave no trace, the ‘trauma’ did take place: The apocalyptic sign is the mirror image of the traumatic symptom. . . . Both apocalypse and trauma present the most difficult questions of what happened ‘before,’ and what is the situation ‘after.’40

When analyzing apocalyptic trauma, Slavoj Zizek’s theories suggest that there will always be some kind of disruptive force, of different types and magnitudes, which will push a symbolic order into some ideological adjustment.41 Post-apocalyptic theory of trauma is evident in a multiplicity of media. For example, the regard for catastrophe is universal as is suggested in the theme of the nineteenth century poet Walt Whitman’s ‘This Compost’ when he expresses his fears, “Something startles me where I thought I was safest,” ending with his revelation that what he viewed as a catastrophe has some value, "Now I am terrified at the Earth, 37

The screenplay based on The Road was written by Joe Penhall and produced by Dimension Films in 2009. 38 Berger. 1999. After the End , 20. 39 Ibid. 40 Berger. 1999. After the End, 26. 41 Slavoj Zizek. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso), 202.

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it is that calm and patient. . . . [I]t grows such sweet things out of such corruptions" . . . and "distills exquisite winds out of such infused fetor. . . ."42 Twentieth century writer Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart43 presents another example of catastrophe ending somewhat positively. It should be noted as with several apocalyptic films and books, the catastrophe is not relegated to one disastrous episode which may seem to have sparked the cataclysmic results, but “it provides a method of interpretation and posits that the effects of an event may be dispersed and manifested in many forms not obviously associated with the event.”44 (Berger 1999: 26). In fact, Berger suggests that “the idea of trauma allows for an interpretation of cultural symptoms—of growths, wounds, scars on a social body, and its compulsive, repeated actions.”45 It is interesting to note that Freud recognized that it was possible for someone to “remember but not remember, to tell the story of a traumatic event and yet fail to acknowledge its effects.”46 A person ostensibly suffering from a traumatic experience may acknowledge that something happened, yes, but the person would be relieved to agree that since the trauma has passed, the problem is over now and “I am all better.”47 This line of thinking would help to eradicate the negative thinking that might undermine hope. Once the negativity of trauma is eliminated, whether from omission, delusions or free will, the process of healing renews hope. It is the hope for secure lives after the chaos of the apocalyptic event and its aftermath that inspires Lazarus in Marge Piercy’s He, She and It to actively work to unify the Glop48 workforce. Even though the anarchy of the Glop leads to a great deal of crime and violence, the relative independence of direct domination by the Glop makes it a potential source of social and cultural revival. Lazarus, leader of the Coyote Gang, a locus 42

Walt Whitman. 1996. ‘This Compost’ The Complete Poems (London, New York, and Australia: Penguin), 390. 43 Yeats’ apocalyptic rhetoric suggests, “things fall apart” and “change utterly,” but that “remainders and reminders, signs and symptoms survive” (Berger 1999: 26). 44 Berger. 1999. After the End, 26. 45 Ibid. 46 Sigmund Freud. 1955. “Negation.” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth. 23: 209-53) , 236. 47 Freud. 1955. “Negation,” 236. 48 In Piercy’s novel, the majority of North America is covered by either barren wasteland or the “Glop” which is a violent, dirty, crime-ridden, gang-ruled Megalopolis that stretches from what had been Boston to what had been Atlanta. The Glop is a dystopian projection of contemporary urban problems. Donna Haraway. 1985. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Socialist Review (15.2), 68.

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of utopian energy in the Glop, organizes the inhabitants, incorporating historical change with their ethnic and racial diversity. The Glop’s opposition is the multis, employers of sterile technical/ business language that leaves little room for the expression of ideas contrary to official corporate policy. By presenting a utopian alternative to complement her dystopian vision, Piercy offers an element of hope in a mixture of utopian and dystopian energies characterizing some “feminist imaginative writing [that shows] dystopian warnings in no way require the complete surrender of any hope of a better future.” 49 Often radical hope seems to have vanished, even in the present-day real world, or at the very least hope is viewed as “barely shimmering at a far horizon.”50 However, some issues once considered disastrous—such as the bleak economic situation of Ireland—may be overcome after an announcement regarding the recently published positive outlook of Ireland’s newly elected President Michael D. Higgins. Higgins succinctly stated, “Hope, and the work of making hope take palpable shape in the transformation of society, is alive and well.”51 On the other hand, in the fictional world of The Hunger Games, for example, hope, as expressed by President Snow, is “necessary to keep people moving forward”; yet he warns that “too much hope can create rebellion.”52 To quote Elizabeth Rosen from her Apocalyptic Transformation, “Apocalypse is a metaphor and a story, just as it is simultaneously a sense-making structure and a promise of hope held out to a troubled people.”53 Often used as a means to gain understanding of oppression, governmental or otherwise, apocalyptic treatises are at once warnings and pathways to enable humanity to move forward. Even when total destruction seems inevitable, rather than succumbing to despair, an element of hope is presented in various scenarios which will perhaps guide the reader and in turn mankind on a path away from oblivion and toward survival.

49

Constance Penley and Andrew Ross. 1992. “Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway.” Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, eds. Technoculture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 16. 50 “Michael D. Higgins inaugurated as President.” 2011. http://www.rte.ie/news/ 2011/1111/president.html (Accessed 28 February 2012), n.p. 51 “Michael D. Higgins.” 2011. n. p. 52 Suzanne Collins, Gary Ross and Billy Ray. 2012. The Hunger Games, movie (Lionsgate. 23 March). 53 Rosen. 2008. Apocalyptic Transformation, 174.

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Works Cited Achebe, Chinua. 1994. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor. Axtell, Roger E. 2007. Essential Do’s and Taboos: The Complete Guide to International Business and Leisure Travel. Hoboken, NJ: JohnWiley. Barr, Marleen. 1983. ‘Utopia at the End of a Male Chauvinist Dystopian World: Susy McKee Charnas’s Feminist Science Fiction’. Marleen Barr and Nicholas D. Smith, eds. Women and Utopian: Critical Interpretations. New York: University Press of America. 43-66. Berger, James. 1999. After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota. Booker, M. Keith. 1994. Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Burgess, Anthony. 1978. 1985. Boston: Little, Brown. —. 1976: The Wanting Seed. New York: Norton. Byron, George Gordon, Baron. 1927. The Complete Poetical Works of Lord Byron. New York: Macmillan. Charnas, Suzy McKee. 1974. Walk to the End of the World. New York: Ballantine. Clark, Walter H. 1975. ‘Drugs and Utopia’. Peyton Richter, ed. Utopia/Dystopia? Cambridge, MA: Schenkman. 109-23. Collins, Suzanne. 2008. The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic. —. 2009. Catching Fire. New York: Scholastic. —. 2010. Mockingjay. New York: Scholastic. Collins, Suzanne, Gary Ross and Billy Ray. 2012. The Hunger Games, movie. Lionsgate. 23 March. Curtis, Claire P. 2010. Postapocalyptic Fiction and the Social Contract:“We’ll Not Go Home Again.” New York: Lexington. Dorenkamp, John H. 1981. ‘Anthony Burgess and the Future Man: The Wanting Seed’. U of Dayton Review 15.1 (Spring): 107-111. Freud, Sigmund. 1955. ‘Negation’. Trans. James Strachey. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth. 23: 209-53. Haraway, Donna. 1985. ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’. Socialist Review 15.2: 65-107. Hare, John Bruno, ed. 2010. ‘The Prophecies of Nostradamus’. Internet Sacred Text Archive Santa Cruz, CA: Evinity (Accessed 14 December 2012). Hubbard, Elbert. 1899. A Message to Garcia. East Aurora, New York: Roycroft.

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Huxley, Aldous. 1965. Brave New World. In ‘Brave New World’ and ‘Brave New World Revisited’. New York: Harper. —. 1962: Island. New York: Harper. Leoni, Edgar. 1892. Nostradomus and His Prophecies. New York: Bell. MacKinnon, Catharine A. 1997: ‘Serbian Salute’

(Accessed 16 December 2012). McCarthy, Cormac. 2006. The Road. New York and Toronto: Vintage. ‘Michael D Higgins inaugurated as President’

(Accessed 28 February 2012). Moore, Alan. 2001. Swamp Thing: A Murder of Crows. Book 4. Illustrated by Stan Woch, Ron Randall et al. New York: Vertigo, DC Comics. Orwell, George. 1961. 1984. New York: New American Library. Penhall, Joe. 2009. The Road, movie. Dimension Films. 25 November. Penley, Constance and Andrew Ross. 1992. “Cyborgs at large: Interview with Donna Haraway.” Constance Penley and Andrew Ross, eds. Technoculture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P. 1-20. Rosen, Elizabeth K. 2008. Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination. Lanham, MD, New York, and Plymouth, UK: Lexington. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. 1826. The Last Man. London: Henry Colburn. Whitman, Walt. 1996. ‘This Compost’ The Complete Poems. London,New York: Penguin. Yeats. William Butler. 1956. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan. Yurchey, Doug. 2000. ‘Nostrodamus 2000’ (Accessed 14 December 2012). Zamora, Lois Parkinson, ed. 1982. The Aocalyptic Vision in America: Interdisciplinary Essays on Myth and Culture. Bowling Green, OH:Bowling Green U. Zizek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.

CONTRIBUTORS

LUANA BAROSSI is a researcher and PhD candidate in the Program of Comparative Studies of Lusophone Literatures at University of Sao Paulo [USP]. She received a B.A. degree in Language and Literature (Portuguese) also from USP. Her research interests lie in the area of comparative literature and literary theory. More specifically, her work examines science-fictional aspects in Lusophone Literatures. As converging themes, she discusses relations between literature and philosophy, feminist studies, postcolonial theory, and gender studies. She has recently given papers and presentations for Brazilian conventions, as well as international conferences such as Eaton and Science Fiction Research Association. JULIAN CORNELL, PHD in Cinema Studies from New York University; his dissertation The End At The End: Apocalyptic Cinema at the Close of the Millennium, examined the confluence of the secular and sacred in mainstream filmmaking as articulated in apocalyptic disaster fictions of the 1990s. He teaches Film and Media Studies at New York University and Queens College – CUNY(City University of New York) and is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Film Studies at Wesleyan University. His research and teaching interests are primarily in the ideologies and politics of American, Scandinavian and Japanese popular culture and genre cinemas. In addition to further writing on American disaster, science fiction and horror, he is currently doing research on representations of race, class and gender in contemporary American Children’s Films. His other areas of interest and teaching include Film Theory, Science Fiction, Musicals, Documentary and the cinemas of Scandinavia. BENJAMIN DELLOIACONO, MA English (Rutgers) specializing in Eighteenth Century Literature and the secular polemics of the novel. He is an adjunct professor at Rutgers University – Newark, Montclair State University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, and prisons within the New Jersey STEP (Scholarship and Transformative Education in Prisons) program where he teaches rhetoric, composition, and literature courses ranging from Shakespeare to postmodernism.

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ANNA E. HILLER, PH.D. graduated in 2010 with her doctorate in Hispanic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley. She has since taught at Kansas State University and Idaho State University. Her publications include an essay on ecocritical approaches to Argentinian literature, published in Words for a Small Planet in 2013, and a dual-language book of translations and critical introductions published by Dover Publications, also in 2013, titled Great Spanish and Latin American Short Stories of the 20th Century. She continues to research and write about topics in the areas of Science and Literature, the Spanish historical Avant-garde, translation theory, and ecocriticism. DINAH HOLTZMAN, Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester is a visiting lecturer in the department of Gender Studies at Indiana University where she teaches courses focused on Bollywood cinema and LGBTQ (Lesbien, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer) media representation. Her research interests include contemporary art, popular culture, celebrity studies as well as cultural studies and psychoanalytic, critical race, feminist and queer theory. ANNETTE MAGID, PH.D. is affiliated with SUNY Erie Community College, Buffalo, NY, USA. Her publications include: Wilde’s Wiles, Cambridge Scholars Press 2013; You Are What You Eat: Literary Probes into the Palate, Cambridge Scholars Press 2008 and Tunnel of Stone, Mellen Poetry Press 2002. In addition, she has published articles in a variety of Utopian journals and monographs. Currently she is the editor of this monograph on Apocalyptic studies and she working on her second monograph on Oscar Wilde as well as articles on utopian communal and transnational studies. NOWELL MARSHALL, PH.D. is Assistant Professor at Rider University where he specializes in critical theory, Romantic and Gothic literature, and the history of gender, sexuality, and emotion. His book Romanticism, Gender, and Violence: Blake to George Sodini (Bucknell University Press, 2013) theorizes the social and psychological causes of depression and violence in people who over invest in gender norms. He is currently writing another book titled “Gothic Whiteness,” which theorizes the relationship between excessive whiteness, gender, sexuality, and monstrosity, spanning from late 18th-century British literature through Romantic and Victorian texts to contemporary American Gothic authors such as Anne Rice.

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MEGHAN OLIVAS is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Southern California. A scholar of twentieth century American literary and cultural studies with a penchant for speculative fiction, her research draws on film studies, eco-criticism, and critical race studies. At present she is working on a dissertation which investigates the ways in which apocalyptic film and fiction have fueled conceptions of race and the environment in twentieth century American culture. GINA M. ROSSETTI, PH.D. is an Associate Professor of English at Saint Xavier University in Chicago, Illinois. Her scholarship and pedagogy center on American literary naturalism, and in particular, Jack London’s fiction. Currently, she is working on a book of Jack London’s fiction in terms of class and race. PHILIP MATTHEW TRAD, MA graduated from California State University Fullerton. As a Ph.D. candidate, he has focused his research and studies towards new media and the effect they have on storytelling for the reader, and shows a particular interest in electronic forms of media such as interactive novels and video games. KIRIN WACHTER-GRENE is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her current research traces representations of transgression in postwar African American literature. Her work has appeared in Callaloo, The International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities, and Nations, Revue de Recherche en Civilisation Américaine, and is forthcoming in African American Review, The Black Scholar, and InVisible Culture.

INDEX

1950s, 133,197, 198, 199, n199, 200, 201, 203, 207, 208, 210, 211, 217, n219, 221, 222, 223 2012, 27, n50, 83, 107, 108, 129, 130, 131, n131, n132, 133, 135139, 141, 142, 145, 146, n163, 164, n164, 194, n229 2012 [the film], n41, n42, n54, n112, n133, n145-146, 196, 239 aberrance, 41, n42, 43, 44, 50, 52, 53, 55, 58 action/adventure, 10, 35, 41, 45, 46, 72, 80, 90, 103, 106, 141, 142, 163, 167, 183 Action Comics. 113, 115 action/ androgynous, 174 action/ female, 171, 188 action/ male, 171, 187, 189, 190 Affect Theory, 13, 125 affect, n4, 13, 125, 211 African American, n37, 54, 167, 171, 174, 175, 178, 179, 180, n180, 183, 184, n184, 186, 188, 189, 201, 202, n202, 207, 222, n222 alien, 52, 68, 115, 116, 136, 145, 165, 196, 203, n206, n207, 211, 221, 224, 225 landscape, 216 See also landscape ship, n37 species, 85 Aliens, 163, n165, 188, 193 alterity; 3, 4, 14, 16, 20, 23, 24 America, 7, 10, 11. 13, 32, 37, 38, 41, 47, 50, 61, 67, 72, 74, 76, 82, 115, 142, 179, 159, 196, 209, 210, n219, n226

See also 1950s, Captain America and postapocalyptic American, 55, 63, 64-67, 69, 70, 110, 112, 133, 136-138, 144, 178, 198, 200, 201, 202, 207, 210, 217, 218, 241 See also twenty-first century Anglo, 67, 76, n37 apocalypses, 122, n122, 129, 182, 203 capitalism, 110 cities, 43, 59, 65, 66, 197, 199, 200, 202, n202, 205, 211, 212, 214, 222 culture, 76, 133, n219, 242 families, 38, 201, n201 film, 205, n205, n210, n213, 226, 227 hegemony, 141, 145 landscape, 210, 217 Latin, 242 literature, 202, n202, 224, 242 male, 145 Native, 184 superiority, 201 women, 52 vanishing, 77 apocalypse, 38, 89, 111, 122, 124, 127, 134, n134, 139, 143, 145, 166, n204, 207, 208, n209, 221, n221, n226, 227, 228, 236, 238, 240 Mayan, 130, n132, 133, 136, 137, 142, 143, 145 nuclear, 205, 206, 215 personal, 45, 46, 55 post-, 2, n138, n227, n228, 236, 239

Apocalyptic Projections pre-, 236 twenty-first century, 120 See also American/ apocalypse apocalyptic, 2, 4, 23, 27, 30, 32, 3637, n37, 38, n44, 45, n82, 101, 131, n131, 133- 135, n135, 136138, 141, 142, 145, 162, 163, 182, n182, 189, 196, 196, 197, 203, 205, 207, 211, 221, 226, n226, 227, n227, 228- 230, 234237, n237, 238, n238, 241, 242 city, 197, 203 film, 135, 182, 187, 243 landscapes, 160 plot, 168 post-, 4, 8, 12, 15, 41, 44, n44, n52, n61, n72, n76, 87, 204, 205, n207, 208, 209, 211, 213, 216, 218, 220, 222, 224, 226, 227, n226, 227, 229, n235, 236 pre-, 207, 208, 210, 211, 220, 234 apocalyptic fiction, Strange Days, 176 Winds of Apocalypse, 21, n21, 23, n23, n24 apocalyptic film, 135, 138, 196, 197, 211, 226, 227, 237 See also 2012[the film] and disaster movies atomic age, 196, 202, 205, 213, 221, n221, 222 Atwood, Margaret, 87 augmentation, 144, 147-158 avant-garde, 170 Avatar, 171, 172, 187, 189, 191 Batman, 110, n110, 111, 113, 114, 116, 120, 121, 124-128 Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne, 110, n110, 116, 120, 121, 126, 127, 128 Bigelow, Kathryn, 162, n162, 163, n163, 164, 165, 170, 171, 173-

245

177, 180, n184, 188-190, 191, n191, 192 bioconservative, 148-152, 154, 155, 156 black feminism See feminism Boal, Mark, 164, 191, 192 Bras, Luiz, 2, 8, n8 See also futurism/ “Futuro Presente” [Present Future] Brave New World, n3, 7, n7, 25, 232, 233, 240 See also Aldous Huxley and society Brubaker, Ed, n110, n125, 128 buffered, 114, 115, 122, 125, 126 See also porous Butler, Octavia E., 40, 41, n44, n46 Cameron, James, 162, n162, 163, n163, 164, 165, n165, n166, 167, 168, 169, 171- 176, n179, 180, 182, n182, 183, n184, 186, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 195 capitalism, n5, 9, n10, 27, 32, 36, n37, 38, 42, 46, 50, 55, 57, 72, 73, 110, 162, 177, n178, 179, 233 Captain America, 110, 113, 116, 121,123-128, Captain America: Reborn, 110, n110, 111, 120, 125, 128 call-to-action, 88, 90 children, 4, 5, 23, 32, 40, 55, 57, 66, 76, 113, 140, 141, 190, 209, 229, 230, 234 American, 61 family, 139 grandchildren, 74, 75, 76 Mayan, 137 progeny, 84 protecting, 93 reproduction of, 74 undocumented, 61

246 Chiziane, Paulina, 2, n21, 22, 25 cinema, 130, 162, 166, 169, n169, 170, 172, 181, 182, n182, 196, 199, 200, n200, n206, n207, n211, 212, 221, n221, 241, 242 citizenship, 40-44, 57, 58, 230 city, 21, 71, 81, 88, 89, 91, 92, 98, 101, 102, n166, 196-199, n199, 200, n200, 201, 202, n202, 203, 204, n204, 205, 206, n206, 207, 208-210, n210, 211, n211, 212215, 216-222, 233 cinematic, 196 postmodern, 176, 177, 179, 182, 183, 186 technology, 92 cityscape, n81, 88, n88, 176, 215, 216 civil war, 23 Civil War, 120, n120, 123, n123, 124 civilization, 7, 61-64, 75, 76, 90, 106, n131, 132, 133, 135, n135, 136, 138, 141, 144, 147, 155, 157, 216 class barriers, 32, 34, 37, 42-44, 48, 50, 52, 55, 61, 65, 66, n72, 73, 74, 76, 81, 88, 89, 91, 105, 150, 156, 175, 178, 187, 197, 198, n198, 200, 208 climate change, 142 coalition, 10, 37, 41, 42, 48, 50, 51, 53-55, 57, 58 cold war, 201, n202, 205, n210, n217, 222, 228 Collins, Susan, n229, 230, n230, n231, 232, n232, 233, 234, n234, 235, n238, 239 See also film/ Hunger Games trilogy colonialist, 22, 171 conspiracy, 130, 137, 162 conspiracy theories, 130, 133 constitutive imagination, 26, 35 contextual analysis, 4, 5, 8, 72, 76

Index culture, 14, 18, 20, 22, 23, 36, 43, n53, 63, 66, 67, 75, 76, n82, 84, n84, 87, n87, 94, n94, 96, n97, 118, 134, 144, n165, 177, 178, 182, 212, 233 African-American, 179 American, n219 counterculture, 233 popular ‘pop’ culture, 110, 111, 118, 119, 133, 217 cybernetics, 148, 153, 157, 159, 195 cyberpunk, 159, 160 cyborg, 100, 151, 158, 160, 166, 207, 224, n238, 240 See also film/ Metropolis “Cyborg Manifesto”, 91, 100, n100, 107, 151, n151, n158, 159, n166, 194, 238, 239 humanity, 89, 166, 167, 175 DC Comics, 110, n110, 116, n120, 122-124, 128, 129, 240 Death Race, 27, n27, 28-35, 37, 38, 39 Death, 8, 10, 12, 19, 23, 28-38, 39, 43, 59, 61, 69-72, 101, 110, 111, 116, 117, 123, 125, 127, n133, 139, 141, 150, 158, 168, 175, 178, n178, 179, n184, 189, 205, n206, 214, 215, 216, 220, 229 of capitalism, 27 See also Death Race of children, 23 of elderly, 24 dehumanization, 102 desire, 6, 17, 18, 30, 31, 49, 53, 58, 70, 71, 74, 75, 76, 88, n88, 9396, 99, 104, 120, 128, 134, 137, 138, 151, 153, 154, 156, 158, 170, n170, 173, 185, 202, 203, 204, n212, 218, 222, 224, 227, 228 difference, 16, 47, 50, 53, 54, 55, 57, 67, 80, 83, 85, 86, 103, 137, 162, 181, 203 class, 52

Apocalyptic Projections human/ Na’vi, 171 indifference, 46, 206 racial, 208, 211 disaster movies, 134, 135 disease, 61, 65, 72, n72, 75, 76, 77, 88 Alzheimer’s, n139 disenchanted, 115, 116, 117, 118, 121,122, 125, 126 domestic norms, 218 See also film/ domestic doomsday, 130, n132 dystopia, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13- 24, 80, 81, n81, 83, 86, n86, 87, n87, 88, n88, 90, 99, 103, 107109, 176, 210, n212, 222, 223, 224, 229, 232, 233, n233, 234, n234, n235, n237, 238, 239 Earthseed, 41, 42, n42, 43- 51, n51, 52, 54-58 ecocriticism, 242 Emmerich, Roland, 130, 131, n131, 135, 136, 144, 145 empty, n4, 104, 203, 204, 206, 211, 212, 214, 216, 218, 220 city, 196, 197, 203, 205, 207, 209, 213, 215, 222 enchanted, 113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 121, 122, 126 See also disenchanted eugenics, 66, 67 evolution, 64, 65, 67, 70, 71, 72, 76, 86, 111, 114, 121, 122, 127, 152 human to Na’vi, 169 See also difference experience, 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11-17, 24, 25, 47, 50, 52, 55, 56, 77, 85, 86, 87, 114, 120, 121, 134, 148, 167, 168, 169, n170, 173, 174, 175, n202, n206, 212, 216, 223, 224, 225, 231, 235, 237 Avatar, 172 See also Avatar dystopian, 18-22 psychological, 207

247

family, 41, n41, 42, n42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 80, n50, 51, 52, n54, 5558, 59, 74, 77, 96, 118, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, n165, 214, 215, 230, 234 American, 37, 138, 201 Anglo-American, 38 Frankenstein, 92 Hunger Games, 231 mixed-race, 53 Negro, 194, 222, n222, 225 single, 198 Wayne, 127 See also Batman female film makers, 163 feminism, 49, n53, 95, 96, 162, 185 black feminism, n41, 49, 58 See also revolution Socialist-Feminism, n100, 151, n166, n237 Fiedler, Leslie, n206, 224 See also city film, 29, 80, 81, n81, 82, n82, 83, n83, 86, 87, n87, 88, n88, 91, 92, 113, 130, 131, n131, 132, n132, 133, n133, 134, 135, n135, 136, 137, 139, n139, 140145, 174- 177, 181, 182-183, 199, 202, 208, 209, n209, 214, 217, 220, 221, n221, n236 apocalyptic, 138, 196, n196, 197, 203-205, n205, n206, 210, n210, 211, 212, 213, n213, 215, 216, 218, 223, 226-229, 237 disaster, 137 domestic, 130, n133 gender role, 162, n162, 163165, 166, n166, 167, 169, 184-185, 188, 189, 207, n207 German, 81, 82, n93, 94, n94, 104, 107, 108, n179, 236 Hunger Games trilogy , 87, 229, n229, 230, 231, 233, 234, 235, 236, 238, n238, 239

248 Last Man, The, 228, 240 Metropolis, 88-90, n90, 93-95, 98-104, n104, 105, 106, n106, 200, n200 See also city Death Race, 27, 28, n28, 30-37, n37, 38 Portuguese, 3 post-apocalyptic, 138 Strange Days, 169-171, 173, 190-192 Final Crisis, 120, n120, 124, 129 fourth dimension of citizenship, 40, 41, 57, 58 Frankenstein, 11, n11, 25, 31- 35, 37, 39, 101 See also family Freud, Sigmund, 147, 153, n153, 159, 170, 181, 193, 194, 237, n237, 239 Freudian, 82, 94 frontier, 126, 197, n198, 217, 218, n218, n221, 224, 225 futurism, 3, 5, 8, 33, 46, n46, 54, 58, 60, 62, 67, 68, 74, 77, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, n85, 86, n86, 87, n87, 88, n88, 89-93, 94, 96-101, 103, 106, 107, 108, 116, 125, 126, 131, 137, 138, 141, 142, 147, 150, 153, 160, n165, n166, 167, 168, 172, 180, 182, 195, 197, 200, n200, 203, 205, 207, 209, n212, 214, 216, 220, n221, 224, 226-228, 230, 231, n232, 235, 236, 238, 239 “Futurist Manifesto”, 91 “Futuro Presente” [Present Future], 8 futurity, 42, 43, 45, 47, 57, 58 gender, 6, 10, 20, 23, 30, 33, n41, 42, n42, 44, 48, 50, 52, 54, 59, 60, 91, 93, 94, n94, 95, 96, 100, n101, n102, 107, 108, 162, 163, 164, 169, 170, 173-175, 184, 188-190, 197, n207, 224

Index generational psychology, 42, 84, 86 globalization, 133, 138, 139, 141, 145 Gothic, n82, 114, 117, 118, n118, 119, n119, 120, 121, 128, 129, 242 graphic novels, 111, 116, 124, 127 Harraway, Donna, 107 See also cyborg/ ”Cyborg Manifesto” hegemony, 2, 3, 9, 10, n10, 13, 24, 29, n29, 38, 135- 138, 141, 143, 145, 162, 175, 189 See also American heresy, 41 hierarchy, 10, 54, 105, 203, 206, n206, 208 Hoeveler, Diane Long, 118, n118, 119, n119, 128 Hollywood, 27, n163, 170, 171, 174, 188, 191, 193, 195, 196, 200, n207, 215, 221, n221, 224 blockbusters, 163 homosexuality See queering hope, 23, 24, 43, 75, 76, 80, 83, 85, 90, 97, 98, 99, 105, 106, 131, n131, 137, 138, 139, 143, 148, 155, 159, 197, 210, n212, 214, 215, 221, 225, 226-232, 234238 hopelessness, 45, 51 See also salvation humanity, 5, 6, 7, 8, 13, 14, 21, 71, n88, 95, 101, 103, 104, 105, 138, 143, 145, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 153, 155-159, 165, 211, 214, 221, 226, 235, 238 inhumanity, 19, 102 Hunger Games trilogy See film/ Hunger Games trilogy Hurt Locker, 164, 191 Huxley, Aldous, 7, n7, 25, 232, 233, 234, 240

Apocalyptic Projections See also Brave New World and society hybridity, 14, 38, 158, 164 dystopia, 5, 15 hyper-empathy, 52, 55 ideology, 34, 35, n35, 36, n36, 38, 39, 44, 54, 84, 137, 151, 157, 212, 225, 233, n236, 240 racial, 205, 208, 211 normative, 211 imagery, 20, 21, 82, 204, 212, 221 apocalyptic, n82, 107 Blade Runner, 81 empty city, 213 immanent frame, 122-125, 127, 128 immanent, 120, 122-125, 127, 128 See also transcendent individual, 3, n3, n4, 8, 10, 11, 1418, 24, 57, 61, 65, 74, 87, 101, 106, 135, 151, 177, 178, 187, 192, 197, 202, 214, 229, 230, 232, 233, 235 interclass, 42, 43, 44 Jager, Colin, n117, 128 Kerouac, Jack On the Road, 218 kinship, 41, 42, n42, 50, 54, 55, 57, 58, 59, 71, 163 LA [Los Angeles] riots, 165, 177, 180, 181, n184, 187 See also Los Angeles LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department], 163, 165, 166, 171, 175, 176, 177, n178, 179, n179, 180, 182, 184, 186, 187, 189, 190, 191, 193, 199 landscapes, 197, 210, 217, 218 alien, 216 apocalyptic, 160 natural, 219, 222 post-apocalyptic, 208, 210, 213, 220

249

post-nuclear, 213, 221 twenty-first century, 61 visual, 81, 218, 219 See also American/ landscapes and urban/ landscapes Lang, Fritz See film/Metropolis Last Man, The, 228, 240 See also film and Mary Shelley Los Angeles, 40, n40, 46, n46, 50, 60, 81, n81, 131, n131, 163, 176, n176, 177, 179, 192, 193, 194, 196, n196, n199, n204, 223, 225 Lusophone Literatures, 241 machines, 97, 100, n101, 102, n102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 175 intelligent, 167 Marinetti, F. T., 91 See also futurism/ “Futurist Manifesto” marketing, 35, 36, 96, 117, 122, 130 viral 130, 133 Marvel Comics, 110, n110, 116, n120, 122, 123, 124, 128 See also DC Comics Marxist, 22, 27, 33, 36, 37, 38 anti-Marxist, 82 masculinity, 139, 162, 163, 169, 178, 187, 188 Mayan Prophecies, n132, 145 See also apocalypse/ Mayan Metropolis, 80, 81, n81, 82, n82, 83, n83, 88, 89, n89, 90- 92, 93, n93, n94, 96, 97, n97, 98, n98, 99, n99, 100, 101, n101-106, 107, 108, 109, 160, 176, 177, 200, 206, 217, 221 See also film, Fritz Lang Millar, Mark, n120, n123, 128 millennials, 80, 83, 84, n84, 85, n85, 86, 87, n87, 88, 90, 93, 95, 96, 97, n97, 99, 100, 103, 106, 107, 109

250 millennium, 86, 162, 166, 167, 183, 184 Modernism, 91, n91, 94, n98, 107 postmodernism, n44, n54, n58, 59, 83, 163, 177, 178, n178, 179, 180, n181, 182, 194 monstrosity, 242 Morrison, Grant, n110, 112, n112, n114, n115, n120, 124, n124, 128, 129 Morrison, Toni, 202, n202, 225 multicultural, 44, 53, 58 narrative, 2, 3, 4, n4, 5, 6, 7, n7, 814, 16-18, 20, 22-24, 27, n30, 31, 33, 34, 37, 38, 44, 45, 54, 61, 77, 80, 81, 82, 87, 88, 111, 115, 116, 120- 128, 133-139, 141, 143, 145, 149, 153, 164. 169, n169, 170, 173, 175, 178, 180, n182, 186, 189, 195, 203,204, 207, 216, 218, 221, 222, 226, 227, 228 See also 1950s, and apocalyptic Neoliberalism, 130, 133, 136. 138, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145 networked family, 41, n41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 50, 52, 55, 56, 57, 59 New Age, 130, n131, 132, n132, 133 new media, 165, n165, 166 nineteenth century, 63, 126, 127, n134, 146, 176, 236 Nineteen Eighty-Four, 10, 25 See also George Orwell and society nostalgia, 71, 141, 182, 213, 214, 215 O.J. Simpson trial, 165, n165, 191 verdict, 165 Olamina, Lauren Oya, 41, 43-57 Online learning environments, n151, 159 On the Road, 218 See also Jack Kerouac

Index organic, 54, 148, 149, 157, 158 Orwell, George, 10, 25, 87, 232, 233, 234, 235, 240 See also Nineteen Eighty-Four, society Pandemic, 66, 72, n72, 73, n73, 75, 77, 226 Panic, 61, 77, 145, 166 Parable of the Sower, 40, n40, 41, n41, 44, n44, 45, n45, 46, n46, n47, n48, n49, 50, n50, n52, 53, n53, 54, n54, n55, n56, 57, n57, 58, n58, 59 pathological, 42, 56 Pepetela, 2, 5, n5, n7, n8, 17, 25 popular culture, 118, 133, 159, 176, 178, 217 popular, 80, n83, 101, 119, n165, 196, 217 blockbuster films, 163 Death Races, 31 dystopian fiction, 86 film, 199, 200 literature, 118 media, 83, n201, 225 press, n84, 199 porous, 114, 115, 122, 126 See also buffered post-apocalyptic, 2, 3, 5, 8, 12, 15, 41, 44, 61, 72, 76, 87, n135, 138, 196, 197, 203, 204, 205, n207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 213, 216, 218, 220, 222, 224, 226, 227, 229, 236 landscape, 208, 210, 213 post-colonialism, 22, 241 post-humanity, 5, 8, 138, 160, 220 See also humanity postmodern, n44, 54, n54, 58, 59, 81, n81, 163, 168, 176, n176, 177, 178, n178, 179, 180, n180, n181, 182, n182, 183, 193, 194, 195, n226, 227, 240 aesthetics, 178, 180 nihilism, 175, 183, 185

Apocalyptic Projections urban, 175 post-structuralism, 187, 197, 201, 203 prehistory, 126, 127, 160 primeval See prehistory prison, 6, 27, 28, 29, 30, 36, 37, 227 imprisonment, 164, 212, 232 prisoners, 28, 29-35, 37, 164 programs of truth, 2, 4, n4, 5, 7, 12, 13, 14, 17, 22 psychology, 35 punishment, 32, 174, 190 divine, 23 queering, 42, 52 homosexuality, 113 race, 32, 44, 52, 54, 61, 63, 64, 67, 74, 75, 76, n131, 162, 163, 165, 204, 208, 210, n210, 225 evolution, 65 makers, 31 memory mixed, 52, 53 suicide, 62, 64, 67, 68 war, 189 Red Death, 61 religion, 2, n34, 96, 111, n120, 121, 233 Baptist, 49 Earthseed, 40-41 reproductive capital, 57, 96 Resurrection/ Rebirth, 115, 135 revolution, 22, 23, 34, 38, 62, 91, 180, 184, 185, 191, 201 African-American, 183 black feminist, 49 Deus Ex: Human Revolution, 147, 148, n149, n153, n157, n158, 159 French, 119 Marxist, 27, 36 scientific, 118 Rodney King, 50, 187, 189 video, 46

251

salvation, 43, 137, n139, 142, 144, 145, 202 See also hope salvific, 43 Saramago, José, 2, 3, 13, n13, n15, n16, 17, n17, n18, n19, n20, n21, 23, 25 science fiction, 2, 3, n3, 25, 38, n46, 59, 80, n80, 81, n81, 82, 83, 86, 87, 88, n88, 90, 104, n104, 107, 108, 109, 125, 131, n131, 136, 151, 160, 182, n196, n206, n207, n212, n221, 224, 225, 234, 239 secular, 111, n111, 112, n113, n114, 116, 117, n117, 118, n118, 119, 120, n120, 121, 122, n122, 123, n123, 124, 125, 126, 129, 134 humanism, 148 secularism, 111, 117, 119, 120, 128 secularization stories, 127, 128 theory, 116 Secular Age, A, 111, n111, n113, n114, n116, n122, n123, n128, 129 See Charles Taylor Shelley, Mary, 228, 240 See Frankenstein and The Last Man slaves, 42, 45, 52, 55, 56, 57, 75, 105, 234 ex-slave, 55, 57 Social Darwinism, 62, 67, 77, 144 social revolution, 22, 23, 34, 49, 62, 91, 118, 147, 148, n149, n153, n157, n158, 159, 179, n179, 180, 183, 184, 185, 191, 201 French, 119 Marxist, 27, 36, 38 social action, 137 society, 3, 5, 9, 11, 13, 14, 16, 17, 36, 41, 47, 49, 65, 66, 67, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 80, 81, 88, 90, 95, 97, 98, 99, 103, 105, 113, 120, 128, 139, 147, 153, 156,

252 n165, 181, 182, n200, 207, 215, n219, 225, 232, 234, 238 American, 133, 136, 137, 138 capitalistic, 38, 118 democratic, 43 females in, n53, 58, 96 male-dominated, 6 Huxley’s, 7, 233 See Aldous Huxley and Brave New World Orwell’s, 10, 233 See also George Orwell and Nineteen Eighty-Four post-industrial, 86 utopian, 102 Soviet-feminism See feminism space, 3, 14, n14, 22, 25, 44, 58, 91, 142, 174, 184, 199, 200, n200, 202, 218, n219, 221, 223, 225 city, 212 closed, 7, 13, 14 cyber, 159 dystopian, 223 empty, 216, 218 future, 3, 38, 96 institutionalized, 15 liminal, 101 open, n202, 218, 219, n219 outer, 142, 159, 160, n206 public, 176, 201, n202 real, 14, 176, 177 social, n49, 190, 201, 210 superhero, 115, 117, 120, 124, 127 two-dimensional, 13 urban, 211, 222 See also city SQUID [Superconducting Quantum Interference Device], n165, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 181, 184, 185, 188 Statham, Jason, 29, 30, 39 Strange Days See film

Index subjectivation processes; n4, 24 subjectivity, 2, n3, 4, n4, 6, 9, 18, 118, 168, 169 postmodern, 180 sovereign, 168, 177 women’s, 19, 20, 47 subtraction story, 116 suburban, 198, n198, 223, 224 development, 219 environment, 197 history, n219 homes, 198, 201, 219, 222 space, 201 superheros, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 163, n227 See also space/ superhero Batman See Batman and Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne Captain America See Captain America and Captain America:Reborn Superman See superman and Superman Supergods, n112, n114, n115, n124, 129 superman, 112, 114, 115, 116, 120, 123, 127 Jesus, 112, 113, 115, 121 Nietzsche, 72 Superman, 111 Taylor, Charles, 111, n111, 129 See also A Secular Age technology, 81, n82, 83, 84, n84, 85, 86, 90, 91, 92, 93, n93, 94, 96, 97, n97, 98, 99, n99, 100, n100, 101, n101, 103, 104, 106, 107, 108, 109, 126, 145, 147, 148, 150, 151, n151, 152, 156, 159, 160, 162, 163, n165, 166, n166, 167, 168, 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 181, 185, 194, 203, 221, 233, n237, 239

Apocalyptic Projections

digital, 166, 168 emerging, 156 new, 150 Terminator See film/gender role Teutonic, 74 transcendent, 116, 127, 139, 145 frame, 123, 124, 128 transcendental, n4 See also immanent transhuman, 148, 149, 151, 152, 154 twentieth century, 63, 69, 80, 81, 86, 91, n100, 107, 118, 126, n151, 159, 162, 163, 165, 166, n166, 176, 192, 193, 194, 237, 243 twenty-first century, 61, 76, 86, 111, 112, 117, 120, 123, 168, 226 uncanny, 118, n118, 128, 147, n147, 153, n153, 159, 167, 203 urban, 47, 54, 63, 92, 177, 202, 203, 224, 225, 237 chaos, 176, 196, 200, 201, 210 landscape, 81, 197, 205, 211, 217, 222, 223 planning, 177, 197, 198, n200 populations, 202, 211, 219 postmodern, 175 renewal, 198, 203 Urban Theory, 43, 81, 91, 108, n202, 203, 204, n206, 223 utopia, 3, 5, 6, 8, 14, 70, 80, n88, 108, 193, 212, n212, n221, 222. 224, 225, n233, n234, 239 feminist, 10 socialist, 70 suburban, 197

253

utopian, 3, 14, 17, 24, 145, 197, 210, 211, 218, 238 anti-utopian, 22, 23, 24 dream, 23, 218, 221 Metropolis, 102 See also Metropolis Los Angeles, 176 philosophy, 80, 212, 226 politics, 221 predictions, 169, 229 urge, 23 video, n179 games, n87, n97, 109, 148, 166 music, 179 Weimar Germany, 82, 94, n94, 107, 108 Weimar film, n98 See also Fritz Lang/ Metropolis weird, 113, 196 weird spell, 204, 212 Western ideas, 68, 228 fears, 62 nations, 62, 68, 69 religion, 111, 115 See also A Secular Age scientific, 5, 11 societies, 13 westerns, 218 working-class, 37, 48, 73, 74 102, 103, 105, 117, 187 Y2K [the year 2000], 86, 167, 168 younger world, 85 Zero Dark Thirty, 164, n189, 191, n191, 192, 194