On screen the stark images. The sun pale in the dusty sky. The streets overgrown with grass. A lone survivor peering up at the infinite rows of blank windows, fragments of our world at her feet. A perfectly functioning and useless television. A game controller tossed to one side. A faded comic book asking us to believe in Captain America. âBedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and briefâ (McCarthy 2006, 12). These the words our time chooses for entertainment.
If cultural historians of the future were to look back at the early twenty-first century, they would observe that we were unusually obsessed with the end of civilisation as a form of amusement. Films lure us with spectacular images of global destruction, television series broadcast gritty post-apocalyptic dramas, and video games offer devastated cityscapes and wastelands to explore. Even the venerable novel has embraced the mania for post-apocalyptic destruction, while across every platform the zombie shuffles triumphantly. The ubiquity of these images may blind us to their fundamental strangeness: we donât decorate our homes with images of the house burning down and our loved ones dying, so why do we relish entertainment that shows our cities in ruins and humanity nearly extinct?
The post-apocalyptic is also a relatively new genre. While the apocalyptic is at least as old as the Book of Revelation , the post-apocalyptic is a distinctively modern fear. The idea that someone might survive the end of civilisation really only enters the English language with Mary Shelleyâs The Last Man in 1826. You are probably wondering why you never heard that Mary Shelley didnât just invent Frankenstein but also the post-apocalyptic genre. Truthfully, the book is hard to read and was critically panned in its own time. Yet here we first find those staples of post-apocalyptic fiction, the deadly plague that brings global panic with the âstreets of Ispahan, of Pekin, and of Delhi ⊠strewed with pestilence-struck corpsesâ (vol. II, ch. IV) and the marauding gangs of the post-apocalyptic wasteland as desperate American pirates attack the British Isles (vol. II, ch. IX). As civilisation breaks down, we are treated to now familiar scenes of survivors amidst the ruins of plenty. It is a sign of just how new the post-apocalyptic genre is that it feels odd to read such passages in Shelleyâs early nineteenth-century diction and syntax:
The novel ends as the title suggests, with one lone survivor, an Ishmael to the worldâs Pequod, left to narrate the tale of destruction. However, it didnât spawn any significant successors as audiences were lukewarm about a narrative in which the world ends.As the rules of order and pressure of laws were lost, some began with hesitation and wonder to transgress the accustomed uses of society. Palaces were deserted, and the poor man dared at length, unreproved, intrude into the splendid apartments, whose very furniture and decorations were an unknown world to him ⊠when the boundaries of private possession were thrown down, the products of human labour at present existing were more, far more, than the thinned generation could possibly consume. To some among the poor this was matter of exultation. We were all equal now. (vol. III, ch. I)
The post-apocalyptic only began to gain a mass audience after World War II, when fears of nuclear war permeated popular consciousness. Books such as Earth Abides (1950) by George Stewart or Walter Millerâs A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960) grappled with the aftermath of apocalyptic events. Films such as Planet of the Apes (Franklin Schaffner 1968) or Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick 1964) took seriously (or perhaps not so seriously) the possibility of nuclear war. The shadow of the bomb helped drive the post-apocalyptic genre, but surprisingly, when the Cold War ended, the number of post-apocalyptic films, novels, TV series, comics, and video games significantly increased.
In cultural studies, this rise in post-apocalyptic media is almost always linked with social anxieties: climate change and eco-apocalypse (Wright 2015; Traub 2016), nuclear war (Brians 1984; Hendershot 1999), pandemics (Gomel 2000), descent into political dystopias (Knickerbocker 2010; Murphy 2013), a crisis in masculinity (Sugg 2015; Kelly 2016), rampant capitalism (Christopher 2015; Schleusener 2017), and thatâs without even getting into zombies, which are often âseen as stand-ins for racial and ethnic Othersâ (Balaji 2013, 10) or , indeed, any of the above problems. As Andrew Williams argues, âthe zombie has become a flexible cultural signifier with a seemingly limitless range of significanceâ (2016, 51), making it the perfect tool for the apocalypse. It can stand in for whatever you fear or hate the most.
What is common to virtually all scholarship on the post-apocalyptic is the assumption that it reflects some kind of contemporary fear. Yet what bothers me about this reading is that it implies we are possibly the most cowardly generation ever to walk the earth. Previous generations faced down plagues, genocide, imperial conquest, world wars, famine, and fascism without embracing the post-apocalyptic genre or the modern zombie. Instead, somehow, they gave us the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the music of Mozart, the Romantic landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, Modernism, Catch 22, the cinema. Our ancestors confronted severe threats to civilisation with none of our resources; why are we the ones who return repeatedly, obsessively, to visions of global annihilation? Every era has its own troubles. Suffering certainly isnât unique to our time, but the fascination of the post-apocalyptic is. What is it, then, that fuels our dreams of doomsday?
* * *
Instead of psychoanalysing modernity or offering jeremiads against contemporary culture, this book is going to make a completely different kind of argument. In truth, I am not temperamentally suited to the role of doom prophet, crying out in the wasteland that our civilisation has sown the seeds of its destruction and we are on the verge of reaping the bitter harvest of capitalism/patriarchy/imperialism/racism/eco-devastation/artificial intelligence/genetic engineering/[insert your particular evil here]. I am wary of how cultural critics seem to be susceptible to the Morpheus complex, the belief that you are one of the select few who can see the Matrix that entraps the masses. It is, perhaps, a dream of many cultural critics to live the scene in The Matrix (The Wachowskis 1999) in which Morpheus strides through the urban throng while explaining the truth to a bewildered Neo:
The belief that one is opening peopleâs eyes to the truth and calling them to action is a powerful drug. If I could balance Morpheusâ frameless sunglasses on my nose, I might be tempted to try it myself.The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy, but when youâre inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters, the very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged and many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.
My thesis in this book is more prosaic but perhaps more consequential. The primary reason our media have started mass-producing post-apocalyptic works is because something has changed in the mass media. This transformation has created a demand for a new type of product. The post-apocalyptic genre has risen in prominence because it is ideally suited to be such a product.
The rest of the book tries to unpack that short paragraph.
Two questions immediately arise: what is this transformation in the mass media and why is the post-apocalyptic perfectly suited to it? The obvious answer to the first question is the rise of the internet, but that doesnât do justice to the complexity of the transformation that has been wrought. It is useful to think of a media eco-system, a complex network of relationships between industrial agents, technological platforms, government regulation, and audiences that is in a continual process of adjustment and rebalancing. Small changes can have unforeseen ripple effects, but the mass adoption of the internet is like the arrival of a big new beast that has profoundly affected the entire eco-system. However, it should be stressed that the internet has not, as yet, produced a significant indigenous narrative form. Its importance for media genres, therefore, is the effect it has had on narrative media. Financial models have been upended, creative possibilities expanded, and audience expectations transformed, but these have happened unevenly on different platforms. Therefore, this book devotes chapters to the four most significant narrative mediaâfilm, television, video games, and the novelâto see the forces pushing each one towards producing post-apocalyptic fictions.
Perhaps the most significant change is the desire to share storyworlds across media. In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins used The Matrix as a case study to define a new tendency for narratives to be spread across multiple platforms, a process he termed transmedia storytelling:
For example, the success of the first Matrix film launched a transmedia franchise, with a series of animated shorts collected in The Animatrix, video games that filled in key narrative gaps, and a series of comics exploring the world of The Matrix that accompanied the release of the second and third films. Transmedia storytelling also requires new audience habits, with fans working together to build knowledge of the narrative universe. âTo fully experience any fictional world, consumers must assume the role of hunters and gatherers, chasing down bits of the story across media channels, comparing notes with each other via online discussion groups, and collaborating to ensure that everyone who invests time and effort will come away with a richer entertainment experienceâ (Jenkins 2008, 21).Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story. (2007)
Since Jenkinsâ influential study, numerous books and articles have been published on transmedia storytelling as it becomes ever more prominent in our mediascape. Yet no one has wondered about the connection between The Matrix as transmedia narrative and The Matrix as part of the post-apocalyptic genre. Perhaps this is because transmedia is a storytelling technique, a method of dispersing narrative information across platforms that can theoretically work in any genre. However, fragmented narratives often frustrate the demand for closure. A common complaint about modern film franchises is that many movies now feel like trailers for future films rather than complete works in themselves. Each text is also a paratext, pointing the way to other entries in the franchise. Transmedia thus favours infinitely suspended fictions, narratives that can forever be denied a conclusion. Given long-standing conventions regarding narrative closure in traditional media, not every genre is immediately suitable for such tales.
Because of this, transmedia has developed most fully in genres such as science fiction or fantasy that are concerned with worldbuilding. As Jenkins explains, âMore and more, storytelling has become the art of world building, as artists create compelling environments that cannot be fully explored or exhausted within a single work or even a single mediumâ (2008, 114). Matt Hills refers to this as the hyperdiegesis, âthe creation of a vast and detailed narrative space, only a fraction of which is ever directly seen or encountered within the text, but which nevertheless appears to operate ...