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| Ain’t no party like an “Everybody’s dead” party |
What I Think About Stuff-From Post-Apocalypse to Post-Misery
The idea of
the end of the world and the annihilation of our species (along with everything
else) is nothing new to fiction. As a matter of fact, the end of the world has
been a staple of human civilization since the time of the Babylonians, who were
the first to annihilate the world by floods, barely a few thousand years into
the birth of civilization.
The
Hinduists predict the end of the world at the hands of one divine emissary,
called Kalki, an avatar of the god Vishnu, who will purge the world of sinners
and destroy any wayward civilizations before finally crushing the Universe in
the palm of his hand, by himself.
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| In short, don’t fuck with Kalki. |
Islam
predicts an epic, two-fisted cross-over: Jesus and Mohammed versus the
Al-Dajjal, the Muslim antichrist, locked in a battle to determine the FATE OF
THE UNIVERSE itself (possibly high-fiving each other the entire time). Moving
on beyond religion, Mary Shelley is the writer of the earliest example of
modern post-apocalyptic fiction, with her book The Last Man, in 1826, written
in the style of the memoirs of the last man left alive in Europe, following the
outbreak of a lethal flu epidemic.
Edgar Allan
Poe killed us all with meteors in 1839, in his short story The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion, while H.G. Welles destroyed
human civilization twice, once in his
The Shape of Things To Come (through conventional warfare) and the second time
with superior Martian technology, in War of the Worlds (though he pussied out
at the last minute, creating one of the most original and misrepresented clichés
in science-fiction).
With the
invention and field application of the Atomic Bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
and the subsequent development of atomic weapons by the USSR, our secret
fantasy of killing everyone was provided with a very convenient (albeit maddeningly
powerful) plot device: nuclear annihilation. Coupled with the paranoia
cultivated by the Cold War and our couple brushes with disaster in the 60’s and
suddenly, nuclear post-apocalypse was the way to go!
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| “Yes sir, only muthafuckin’ way to genocide…” |
In the interim,
of course, we had destruction by plant-life, ecological payback, robot uprisings,
evil AIs, plain old super-viruses and, when you got sick and tired of being
afraid of everyone dying in your life-time, there was of course the inevitability
of Universal Heat-Death, spiking your optimism-cocktail with that bitter taste
of ‘eh, at least we had a good run’.
It wasn’t
long before post-apocalypse became disaster-porn, with destruction taking place
for destruction’s sake. Robert Bloch’s This
Crowded Earth depicted a senseless (though terrifying) war between opposing
species of Homo Sapiens. Howard Philips Lovecraft became a legend, by coming up
with cosmic bogeymen. Entire libraries’ worth of stories were written with no
other purpose than to depict particularly gruesome endings of the world,
without any thought or focus to its characters. We drank in the disaster like
the nihilistic addicts that we were and we reveled in it.
And then,
it all changed. All of a sudden, the stories we wrote about the apocalypse’s
trends altered in a very subtle but very important way: a paradigm shift that
served to swerve our attention away from
the ruins and the fire and the pools of blood and the warring gods above and
below and focus into the huddled little creatures stuck in their nuclear
fallout shelters or gunning down Route 66 in a crappy little RV.
Post-Apocalypse
was suddenly no longer a genre about the end of the world. It was a genre about
the end of the characters’ world, with the death of billions serving as
backdrop. Cormack McCarthy was the first to hit it big with The Road and I had
trouble grasping why: the entire thing seemed like a subdued narrative about a
son and a dad pissing about in the wasteland. It wasn’t until the Walking Dead,
that I finally realized exactly what the hell had been going on…
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| Post-Apocalypse had transmuted into Post-Misery |
We no
longer care about the end of the world. Oh sure, it captures our imaginations
and it makes our shriveled little hearts beat feebly in our chests, but it’s
not the megadeaths that make us swoon. Instead, it’s the little deaths and the
little lives of the tiny creatures that have made it through the end of the
world and are ekeing out their meager existence.
The Walking
Dead is a perfect example of this, with its veritable hours of dialogue shoved
into our faces, showing the struggle of characters, with the zombies set aside
as more of a past-time to alleviate the viewer’s boredom when he can’t stomach
Rick’s new tryst with whomever-the-fuck-wants-a-gun-now. Stephen King’s The
Dark Tower is about an epic quest and a race against time before the
annihilation of existence, but nowhere do we actually ever come face-to-face with the specifics of the disaster.
Game of
Thrones does pretty much the same: promising a wintry, zombie-infested
apocalypse, while at the same time causing a number of tiny disasters in the
main characters’ lives, killing them off or taking away everything they love.
The series provides us with a ton of small disasters, while we wait for the Big
One to swoop down and turn Westeros into a bone-white wasteland.
Audiences
no longer care about disaster, but have changed their expectations for the promise of disaster. Our tastes have
become more refined, seeking out the small, concentrated, well-cooked dosages
of misery and injustice, in the face of the greater threat.
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| We go for Chocolate Ganache Tarts instead of buckets of Cream and Cookies. |
We’d rather
see a dozen poor bastards killed tragically in what seems like safe haven by a
small group of blood-thirsty barbarians (or to watch some poor son of a bitch
waste away in a cellar) than to bathe in the glow of atomic fire as the White
House is, yet again, reduced to rubble.
We are no
longer interested in the reclamation of civilization or the rise of heroes from
its ashes. The time for good men and women to restore humanity to its past
glory has long since passed. Now, it’s all about misery. We want lives
destroyed, we want fear and we want empty bellies and gun hammers stricking
empty chambers as we hold them against the roof of our mouths. We want the
skittering of claws in the dark and the chattering of tiny teeth coming closer
to two huddled, starved children. We want women set aflame, their skin peeling
off their bone, their fists feebly sticking at the safety glass through which
their weeping husbands watch.
Starvation
for famine. Murder for genocide. Wasting for plagues.
Post-Misery
is the way to go, in this day and age. Because our world is no longer under the
threat of intelligently-abetted suicide and the next disaster seems so far
away. Our lives may not be absolutely pampered, but we are, in one way or
another, content. Our fiction needs to find ways to make us miserable. And to
do that, it will have to make its characters suffer.
Addendum:
Take some
time and visit the website EXIT MUNDI, btw. It hasn’t been updated in a while,
but it’s very well-written and has a ton of takes on popular culture’s (and
science’s) speculations of how we are all going to die. If anything, it’s
definitely worth a read.
http://www.exitmundi.nl/exitmundi.htm
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