Disaster Guide from TV and Cinema: Preparing for the Global Blackout

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• Publisher: ibidem
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN:
  9783838276618
• Edition: 0

Dead phones, chaos in hospitals, looming nuclear meltdowns: For years, experts all over the world have been warning of a widespread power blackout—and the devastating consequences for society as a whole. However, just as before the Covid-19 pandemic, politicians and the public are hardly aware of the far-reaching risks: A blackout would catch us almost completely unprepared.As for other (supposedly improbable) disruptive events, disaster movies and sci-fi series have long shown what would happen if modern society were to lose its lifeblood. Denis Newiak looks into those filmic fictions for answers to pressing questions: How can we prepare ourselves for the dramatic consequences of such a crisis? And can the collapse of modernity still be stopped?

Table of contents

• Contents
• This time, we know better: Learning from cinematic disasters
• 1. Blackout everywhere: On the omnipresence of a fragile modernity
• 2. Electricity crisis scenarios and their causes
• 3. They grope in the dark: Power failures and their heroines
• 4. Attack on modernity: Blackout terrorism and criminality
• 5. Now everything will be different: On the road to post-modernity
• 6. The psychology of the blackout: How characters react to the crisis
• 7. Terror waits in the dark: Blackouts in thriller and horror
• 8. Blackout as apocalypse: Life in the de-electrified world
• 9. Modernity must go on: The comedy of the blackout
• The Checklist: What you should have at home
• Literature
• Discussed films and TV shows