Undead Ends

Stories of Apocalypse

S. Trimble

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780813593647
• eBook ISBN: 9780813593661
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Undead Ends is about how we imagine humanness and survival in the aftermath of disaster. This book frames modern British and American apocalypse films as sites of interpretive struggle. It asks what, exactly, is ending? Whose dreams of starting over take center stage, and why? And how do these films, sometimes in spite of themselves, make room to dream of new beginnings that don't just reboot the world we know? Trimble argues that contemporary apocalypse films aren't so much envisioning The End of the world as the end of a particular world; not The End of humanness but, rather, the end of Man. Through readings of The Road, I Am Legend, 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Children of Men, and Beasts of the Southern Wild, this book demonstrates that popular stories of apocalypse can trouble, rather than reproduce, Man's story of humanness. With some creative re-reading, they can even unfold towards unexpected futures. Mainstream apocalypse films are, in short, an occasion to imagine a world After Man.

1 • TELLING OTHER TALES

Rememory in The Road

Early in John Hillcoat’s The Road (U.S. 2009), the unnamed protagonist flashes back to the moment his wife left him, choosing suicide over survival. The Man (Viggo Mortensen) stands atop a freeway overpass—the concrete ruin of a lost civilization—and, with a fingertip, pushes his wedding ring to the edge of the barrier. Then we’re watching perhaps his most painful memory. The Man and the Woman (Charlize Theron) are arguing in soft voices to avoid waking their son.1 He’s pleading and she’s numb. Eventually she walks away, the white of her nightshirt fading into postapocalyptic darkness. “She was gone,” he says in voiceover, “and the coldness of it was her final gift. But she died somewhere in the dark. There is no other tale to tell.” With the exception of a brief erotic dream later in the film, this is the last time the Woman appears on screen. Already relegated to the Man’s dreams and memories, she all but disappears at around the thirty-minute mark when her husband deliberately brings her story to an end, refusing us any further access to who she was or what she wanted. But what does The Road look like if we look from this suppressed place? How does the Woman haunt this story of a dying father keeping his son alive at all costs? And what can this haunting presence tell us, in fact, about the cost of survival? Encrypted in the narrative background and whispering untold horrors, the Woman is a lodestone for the bad feelings the Man—and the film—can’t fully admit. She conjures ghosts that threaten to tell “other” tales about the unraveling of the world.

Based on the 2006 Cormac McCarthy novel of the same name, The Road presents a Last Man clinging to an obsolete story of what it means to be human. In my introduction I discussed the work of Sylvia Wynter, who argues that the modern world is shaped by a story of good humanness that evolved, in stages, out of medieval Europe’s conception of the human as Christian. The protagonist of this story is a colonial figure Wynter calls Man, currently understood as homo oeconomicus, or “optimally economic Man” (2003, 314). Economic Man seeks to master natural scarcity through practices of extraction and accumulation. And his story is animated by a logic of chosenness that obscures the violence this entails: Man is naturally selected for survival, which means the Others he dispossesses and kills are, naturally, “dysselected” (Wynter 2003, 310). In the United States, this story permeates a national mythology that links economic progress with spatial expansion. As Richard Slotkin has shown, the myth of the frontier is structured by “the twin mythologies of bonanza economics and regeneration through savage war”—a pattern of accumulation and violent (re)authorization that’s shaped key eras in U.S. history, from westward expansion to the Reagan Revolution (1992, 642–643). The Road uneasily taps into this myth. In the aftermath of an unspecified event that’s reduced America to ashes, the accumulation of resources is almost impossible because everything is dead. But rather than turn to cannibalism, as many of his fellow survivors have done, the Man scavenges among the ruins. His travels take on aspects of a “savage war” as he journeys into a wasteland full of subhuman Others—a journey he narrates for his son as a tale of “good guys” who are “carrying the fire” across a hostile land. Don’t get me wrong: the Man is no John Wayne. He’s broken and paranoid; a desperate father with failing lungs. He may not even be at home in this story of humanness anymore. I suspect he isn’t. But he clings to it because he has no idea how else to narrate the gloom into which his child was born. And by keeping that story alive, he invests himself with patriarchal power and makes others killable.2

The Man’s fantasy of survival is that the world he remembers will live on through, in his own words, the “old stories of courage and justice” he passes on to his son. So both his survival and the violence that supports it are authorized by his status as paternal protector. As he explains in voiceover at the beginning of the film, “All I know is the child is my warrant. And if he is not the word of God, then God never spoke.” The story the Man is telling himself is one in which the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is all the good left in a corrupt world, which means his life is more valuable than the lives of all the others they meet along the road. The “we” this story conjures is limited to the father/son duo at the heart of the film—a limitation the Boy can’t abide. In this sense, the Boy makes trouble for The Road’s conservatism. He pushes back against his recruitment into the Man’s story as “the word of God,” a figuration that provides, in Wynter’s terms, “extrahuman” authorization for his papa’s violence (2003, 264). But the film ultimately recaptures the Boy, drawing him in its final moments into a second family unit with another patriarch at its head. Though the Man dies before this new family materializes, its appearance seems to confirm the rightness of his worldview. Slotkin observes that, in myth, the “narrative of the hero’s action exemplifies and tests the political and/or moral validity of a particular approach to the use of human powers in the material world” (1992, 13–14). The connection between “savage war” and “bonanza economics” seems broken in The Road, which makes it a strange fit, perhaps, for an investigation into the ideological coordinates of neoliberal storytelling (642, 643). But the film turns, instead, to one of the primary sites of accumulation in the long history of capital: the family. As Silvia Federici has shown, the patriarchal family is a site of primitive accumulation in that it harnesses women to the labor of reproducing workers while mystifying this labor “as a natural resource or a personal service” (2004, 8). Writing specifically about American neoliberalism, Melinda Cooper similarly argues that the history of capital “entails the periodic reinvention of the family” and that, in the 1970s, American neoliberals worked to “reestablish the private family as the primary source of economic security and a comprehensive alternative to the welfare state” (2017, 17, 9). The entropic world of The Road might mean that economic Man is finished, but the film’s investment in the patriarchal family holds open the possibility of beginning his story all over again.

I’m drawn to The Road because it stages—and suppresses—a familial conflict. The Man and the Woman see the end of the world differently. And while the film manages this difference by making the Woman ghostly, it lingers nonetheless in The Road’s unsettled emotional register. For the Man, paternal love transcends horror. In a 2007 interview with Oprah Winfrey, McCarthy described his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel as “a love story to [his] son.” Approaching the film adaptation, Hillcoat and Mortensen took McCarthy’s cue, drawing on their respective relationships with their own sons for creative and affective insight.3 But this love story is haunted. The Woman infuses it with a gothic undercurrent that amplifies the terror her husband tries to contain. So while the Man claims in voiceover that “cannibalism is the great fear,” a flashback shows the Woman anticipating a future in which one horror cascades into the next: “They’re going to catch up with us and they’re going to kill us. They’re going to rape me and then they’re going to rape your son and they’re going to kill us. And eat us.” In both its literary and cinematic forms, The Road is bleak. But with the exception of this one bit of dialogue, Hillcoat’s film suppresses organized rape as a feature of the postapocalyptic world McCarthy imagines—one that activates that “other” postapocalyptic timeline that, I’ve argued, is encrypted in the story of Man. The New World accumulations of homo oeconomicus are premised on legacies of dispossession that include the institutional rape of enslaved black women. From this perspective, postapocalyptic time has been happening for centuries. In this context, the end of Man’s world is also, potentially, the end of his world-destroying story. But the colonial violence encoded in “old stories of courage and justice” comes into focus only if we attend to the ghosts (plural) that haunt The Road. The Boy is open to this haunting. And it takes the shape of a question mark written by his mother’s suicide into his papa’s story of survival.

The Boy is born into nuclear winter.4 His arrival is entangled with other emergences—cannibals, slaveholders—that reanimate realities and fantasies belonging to the birth of a now defunct nation. An early sequence establishes this convergence as the source of the Woman’s horror, the reason her suicidal plans included an infanticidal wish. In a flashback, she screams in protest at the Boy’s birth. The sounds echo into the present, where her husband awakes to the ominous rumble of a diesel engine coming through a darkened tunnel.5 The road gang that emerges—a small assemblage of armed (mostly) men, one wearing a gas mask, another a balaclava—is as close as Hillcoat comes to the Mad Max–style visualizations of apocalypse that, he says, he deliberately chose to avoid. But Hillcoat’s aversion to the “big cannibal armies” of George Miller’s Mad Max franchise leads him to leave out of his film a moment from McCarthy’s novel in which all the Woman’s fears are condensed into a single spectacle.6 Shortly after the Man recalls the conversation in which his wife insists that infanticide is “the right thing to do,” he and the Boy hide by the side of the road as an “army in tennis shoes” tramps past (McCarthy 2006, 48, 77). There are phalanxes of pipe- and spear-carrying men. And then “behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illclothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each” (78). McCarthy’s vision of “slaves in harness” on a forced march recalls the New World scenes of migration and white settlement that produced a profitable place in the midst of a supposed wilderness. The scene haunts Hillcoat’s adaptation of The Road, suggesting the future of sexual servitude and forced reproduction the Woman anticipates is what Toni Morrison, in Beloved, calls “a rememory that belongs to somebody else” (1987, 34). The End of the United States is shaking loose sights, sounds, and feelings that are out there, waiting, as Morrison imagines it, for those who remain to “bump into” them (34).

The Road’s journey south through the remnants of the United States stages a repeatedly deferred confrontation with the shadows—the blackness—that organize the gothic imagination. As Morrison writes in Playing in the Dark (1992), this blackness is shifting and heterogeneous, “a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire” that was, in the context of the early U.S. literature she examines, essential to “the architecture of a new white man” (38, 15, emphasis original). Drawing Morrison together with Wynter, the gothic genre manifests—and seeks to manage—the emotional ambivalence that permeates Man’s story.7 The American gothic tradition demonstrates that new-world dreams are haunted by what Morrison diagnoses as a “fear of boundarylessness,” which is, she says, “the terror of human freedom” (1992, 37). Putting it differently, gothic terror registers the frightening proliferation of possible worlds that arises from postapocalyptic terrain—the ruins Man makes but disavows. The narrative production of savage bodies and landscapes allows colonial Man to project excess and disorder as emanating from elsewhere—a projection that authorizes his violence. Within this imaginary, Man-made ruins become a history-less darkness inhabited by what Wynter formulates as the “naturally dysselected Native/Nigger figure” (Wynter and McKittrick 2015, 47). And Man becomes, in turn, what Leslie Fiedler ironically describes as a “carrie[r] of utopia” into an unproductive, uninhabitable wilderness (1966, 143). So seeing The Road through a gothic lens exposes the colonial logic of the Man’s injunction, to the Boy, to keep “carrying the fire.” In the face of his terror, the Man tries to stabilize a future he won’t see by claiming the Boy as his “warrant” for survival, elevating his son, as a carrier of the fire, above the monstrous Others who menace them from the shadows. But the gothic is a notoriously slippery genre. The feelings it mobilizes tend to slide in unexpected directions. And when the Boy begins to see that some of the others they meet are just as frightened as his papa, that his papa sometimes terrifies just like the “bad guys,” the emotional underpinnings of (the) Man’s story come loose.8

The Boy’s capacity to revise his papa’s story derives from his mother’s ambivalence about survival. This chapter excavates that maternal inheritance, prying open a claustrophobic vision of the end times by listening to a ghost. But here’s the thing about ghosts: there’s never just one. I read the Woman who haunts The Road as, to return to Morrison’s language, possessed by rememories that aren’t her own. In her reading of Beloved, Avery Gordon writes that the concept of rememory speaks to how “social relations as such are not ours for the owning. They are prepared in advance and they linger well beyond our individual time, creating the shadowy basis for the production of material life” (1997, 166). Before the world ended, the Man and the Woman lived a presumably middle-class life in a nation structured by white supremacy and settler colonialism.9 At world’s end, they’re forced to confront—or continue to defer—those shadows. In conjunction with the Woman’s desire to kill her child, her suicide opens up a question within the narrative that she doesn’t explicitly ask: When is it time to stop? The question pushes on The Road from the outside, from an American gothic tradition that’s been repoliticized by Morrison’s agitations, in fiction and theory, for critical narratives that attend to what Wynter might call the “hidden costs” of Man’s story (Wynter 1994, 60). Morrison’s Beloved explores these costs by asking, as Gordon puts it, “What is too much?” (1997, 140–141). And how might this too-muchness—too much history, too much horror—find expression in the imagining of a child’s death as warding off a wounding future? Clearly there are important differences between the white, formerly middle-class woman in The Road and Morrison’s ex-slave protagonist, Sethe, who cuts her baby’s throat rather than see her claimed by her former master. I’m proposing a method of reading that attends to ghostly presences, narrative traces that belie The Road’s mechanisms of closure and containment. By detouring into another tale, I discern questions that intrude their shape on the story in spite of the fact that the Man doesn’t hear them and the Woman doesn’t exactly ask them.10 Phantom questions. Hearing them might prompt us to hear, too, the story behind the story: the devastating violence that the white family in The Road is living with, in a sense, belatedly. Because reckoning with the end of Man’s world means exposing the cost of its beginnings.

MAN, OR, HOMO OECONOMICUS AT WORLD’S END

Beneath layers of rags and grunge, the Man, like his son, is far too thin. His hair and beard are matted and his face is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Storytelling and Survival
• 1. Telling Other Tales: Rememory in The Road
• 2. Adaptations and Mutations: I Am Legend’s Double Helix
• 3. Revolting Reanimations: The 28 Films
• 4. Maternal Backgrounds: Children of Men
• 5. Myth and Metamorphosis: Beasts of the Southern Wild
• Epilogue: After Man, or, Death by Story
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author