How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Post-Apocalyptic Wasteland: The Mad Max Films as an Introduction to Political Philosophy

 

Years ago I was teaching political philosophy and decided to do something interesting with social contract theory. I made the point that the post-apocalypse is our state of nature. Whereas the seventeenth century contemplated the nature of authority and law from the origins of society we confront the same problem from its collapse. In each case human beings outside of the state, whether prior to or post, became the basis for thinking about both human nature, and the nature of the state. I then showed a bunch of clips from The Road Warrior and other films, all of which illustrated the intersecting problem of social contract theory and post-apocalyptic films: how does one go from disorder to order, from violence to authority?

Witness Me: Intellectual Property and Pleasure in Furiosa and I Saw The TV Glow

Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga and I Saw the TV Glow

When one looks out at another summer of sequels, reboots, and prequels it is possible to resort to the cliche that "they are out of ideas"--to pose the problem as a crisis of originality. It is for this reason, among many others that it is worth reading Daniel Bessner's piece for Harpers, "The Life and Death of Hollywood: Film and Television Writers Face an Existential Threat" One of the merits of Bessner's piece is that he makes it clear that the crisis Hollywood is facing is not one of ideas, of the imagination, but of capital, of profits. As Bessner writes,

Leave What World Behind: On Leave the World Behind

Something has changed in watching post-apocalyptic films in recent years. It is hard to pinpoint exactly when, and what exactly the cause might be, but at some point in the last few years the post-apocalypse has gone from an escapist fantasy to a figure of dread. The increasing rate of global warming leading to fires, droughts, and hurricanes; the ongoing Covid pandemic; and the rise of right wing nationalism has transformed the apocalypse from a subgenre of science fiction to a barometer of fears and anxieties. As Robert Tally argues the sense of the future has changed dramatically over the last decade: utopia has been replaced by dystopia in contemporary fiction and film and post-apocalypse has replaced predictions of a miraculous world of tomorrow. This is another way of addressing Fredric Jameson’s old adage that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. To which we could add that this imagination is no longer an idle speculation about the future, but immediately lived, as apocalypse seems to inch closer, moving from the distant horizon to the lived present. 

We Other Monsters: Living in the Interregnum with Citton and Rasmi

From Retro-Scifi arts instagram page

Yves Citton and Jacopo Rasmi's book Générations Collapsonautes: Naviguer par temps d'effondrements either arrived at the best time or the worst time.  It showed up in my campus mailbox in the week before spring break. Under different circumstances this would be a great time to get a surprise book. However, this year, the week before spring break was also the week that I learned that my campus would be closed after break, and all classes moved online, it was also the beginning of social distancing, and a week in which I did many things, visit friends, go out to eat, practice aikido, for the last time. In other words, I received it as the world began to collapse.

Tales of Post-Apocalyptic Madness: On Subjectivity and Society in Mad Max

Mad Max perhaps invented the reboot. One of the most interesting things about the Mad Max films is the way in which the backstory has changed from film to film. Nuclear war is not even mentioned in the introductory voice over of The Road Warrior only to be included in the backstory of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Mad Max: Fury Road changes the backstory as well, adding "the water wars," to the blood and fire that have made the apocalypse. It is possible to argue that each film reflects changing nature of apocalyptic fears, from gasoline shortages, to nuclear war, and finally to dwindling water supplies. We get the apocalypse we fear.

Hijacking a Train: Revolution and its Limits in Snowpiercer

I scrupulously avoided reading any reviews of Snowpiercer once I became intrigued by the basic premise. Despite this, and not reading anything after seeing it this afternoon, I was aware, in that way we become aware of things through an almost social media osmosis, that it was quickly being heralded as a new film about the 99% and the 1%, about social inequality, and, more importantly, about revolution. In what follows I would like to explore these allegories for at least two reasons. The first, and most basic, is that the film openly invites such readings. Its particular premise, the Earth is frozen after a failed attempt to solve global warming and all of the survivors are left stranded on globe circling train, is so thin in terms of any pretense at credibility, and so packed with allusions and images, I am not sure it is even possible to watch it as "just a movie." Second, and more importantly I am interested in what it means to make or interpret a film as allegory of the present, recognizing of course that the line between making and interpreting can never be rigidly defined. (Spoilers follow)

Primer for the Post-Apocalypse: The Hunger Games Trilogy

Up until now I have avoided the trend of adults reading young adult fiction. I have never read a single Harry Potter book, but I have seen a few of the movies, and I have avoided Twilight as much as possible. (Of course it is nearly impossible to completely avoid such mega-media events, I find myself picking up references to these things, to “Team Edward and “Team Jacob” by sheer cultural osmosis.) This avoidance of young adult fiction came to an end with The Hunger Games. I picked up the first book out of curiosity, having heard a few of the details through osmosis, and found myself tearing through all three fairly quickly, they were this summer’s beach reads (concealed by the blank slate of a kindle). 

Post-apocalyptic Now: Evan Calder Williams' Combined and Uneven Apocalypse

The following statement from Fredric Jameson is well known and often cited, becoming something like a pithy formulation of the contemporary political imagination, "It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imagination." One way to read Evan Calder Williams’ forthcoming Combined and Uneven Apocalypse is as an exploration of the concealed conjunction in what Jameson’s statement disjoins: what is the connection between all these images of the end of world, these post-apocalyptic wastelands, collapsing cities, and worlds overrun by zombies, and the end of capitalism, the end that we imagine and desire? Not the end of the world or the end of capitalism, but both at once (and one through the other).

Williams’ book covers many of the themes that I have covered on this blog, zombies, Wolfen, and of course the post-apocalyptic genre. However, where I have dabbled in these topics, scribbling a few lines here and there, Williams brings a focused investigation, continuing the Zero Books tradition of merging sustained intellectual engagement with an attention to popular culture. Williams’ book is a work of post-apocalyptic criticism: it reads the various images of the end, examining them for how they envision or fail to envision the end of the world, but it also examines us, our preoccupations, from this end. It asks what will remain of this world, our commodities, our obsessions, ourselves, after it comes to its inevitable destruction. It is thus an enterprise of salvage, of constructing another world from the gutted remnants of this one.

The book deserves a lengthy response, more than I have time to dedicate to it here and now. It also seems odd to review, in any thorough sense, a book that has not been released yet. There is after all no possibility for critical discussion. So I thought I would offer a few remarks on a few citations, citations coupled with their corresponding visual elements. The book is very good at reading films, paying close attention to their logics and visuals. Thus it seemed fitting to pair image and text in order to do just to the book's attentiveness to the intersection and disjunction of each.

That the book discusses The Road Warrior, perhaps goes without saying: the film has such a massive influence on the entire apocalyptic imaginary, and is being remade again and again. What is interesting, however, is the attention that Williams brings not to the familiar aspects, the mohawks and motorbikes, but to the often overlooked opening montage.



“What’s striking here neither the severity of the envisioned apocalypse nor its ideological inconsistencies, but the way that it salvages established narratives of the war against fascism and social progress and uses them otherwise. In this case, to inscribe an anti-modernization polemic in which all roads end in gasoline-obsessed hoodlums prowling the post-oil desert. So, in turns out, the slaughter on the Normandy beaches and the Maginot Line were about the panic of disappearing “black fuel.” The barricades of May 68: what are they if not a “firestorm of fear,” the frantic clawing of the masses in the “nothing” that follows the end of affordable oil? Furthermore, the films are not set in the future: the historical images are drawn from and lead up to the time in which the film was made. As such, they aren’t a projection of the far future, but a reinscription of previous events so as to make the “real world” present genuinely apocalyptic and to enable a flight into another type of fantasy.”

Williams is not interested in this as prophecy, as peak oil avant la lettre, but as the way it imagines the present. After all, the series of images end with the present in both senses, with the present of the film's date (the early nineteen eighties) and the present depicted in the film as a “white line nightmare.” The introduction rewrites history as a history of warring tribes, in some sense naturalizing a battle of all against all. Williams does not comment on what has always struck me about this introduction and that is what is conspicuously absent from it; namely, the familiar mushroom cloud of atomic war. This will be included in the third film, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome when a different history of the present is given, one that is not a cinematic montage but a mash-up of different historical modes of narrative and visuals: storytelling, cave art, radio sound effects, View-Master. I have always found that little bit of rewriting curious. Why not include the iconic image in the second film? Or why does everyone assume that the bomb has been dropped in the second film? Is it possible that the second film was simply received as post-nuclear war because that fit into the anxieties and fears of the eighties? If nuclear war is not part of the trilogy's narrative, then why included in the third film? Is it a matter of rewriting the narrative to conform to everyone’s expectation?

That the bombs never fell, or The Bomb never fell, in the second film is its most utopian dimension, suggesting that the demise of society is more about our fascinations with cars, property, and weapons than the world becoming unlivable. The locations of the two films suggest this as well: the first is shot in the outback, which is still populated, as much as it ever was with rabbits, snakes, and dingoes. It is still relatively green. The third film, however, is shot in the desert, a desert where nothing lives, or could live (with the exception of the oasis where the children reside).

Williams returns to this reading of The Road Warrior later in the book, contrasting it to the closing credits sequence of Wall-E.



“This sequence only makes full sense when compared with its inverted partner in crime, the opening of The Road Warrior discussed earlier. In both cases, a rescripting of inherited cultural images is used to situate the present of the film in terms of a constructed lineage of Western history as such. Yet while the peak oil catastrophe image story of The Road Warrior describes its present moment (the time of the film’s narrative and the early‘80s historical moment when it was released to the “real world”) as the descent into the apocalyptic collapse, the cooptation of art styles serves to describe a different arc in Wall-E. It’s telling that it does not include any approximations of painting after Van Gogh: like the gentle techno-ethos of steampunk, the narrative it tells never gets to the full technocracy, chaos, and pollution of the 20th century, resting instead in the slow pastoralism of its last image before black. And furthermore, we’ve already seen the final image in the story, the entire film of Wall-E itself. Retroactively, the film we have seen itself becomes the last image in the sequence, a clue to the lurking darkness behind the move forward. A move forward that, like the conclusion of the Mad Max trilogy, means going back, starting over, and “getting back to basics,” even as the post-post-apocalypse it describes is a return to the normal of late capitalism.”

Here the continuity is not that of Hobbesian conflict, which is presented as our past, present, and future, but that of technology. Technology is the disease and the cure in Wall-E: it has made us docile, passive, and pathetic, but it is only through it that we can claim and repopulate the earth. Williams criticizes this failure to engage with the apocalyptic, to think about how far we have already gone over the cliff, and how much we will have to change, socially, politically, and aesthetically.

Williams also points to the fascist themes of homeland and soil, of a cleansed and reborn race, that animates this segment. This is one theme that I wish there was more of in the book. Brian Massumi once called survivalism a uniquely American form of fascism, and it too is part of the post-apocalyptic culture. Ultimately, The Road Warrior and Wall-E can only indicate politics, economics, and social relations negatively, it is at the limit of their oddly circular and thoroughly naturalized histories, in which the past is the future and vice versa.

There is also a great reading of Return of the Living Dead.

Between Genre and Generic: The Book of Eli and the Post-Apocalyptic Film

The Road Warrior and Blade Runner were both released (at least in the US) in nineteen eighty-two. Neither were incredibly successful films, at least initially, but both have had a huge impact on the general social imagination. Mike Davis has labeled Blade Runner Los Angeles “official nightmare,” noting the way its polygot distopia haunts some of the most reactionary projects in LA. Beyond that one would be hard pressed to find a vision of the future in contemporary film that didn’t borrow from its rain slicked, smog choked skyscrapers (even if they were mostly borrowed from Metropolis and other films). The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2 to the rest of the world) has left even more of an indelible mark on the popular imaginary. It has pretty much invented the genre of the post-apocalyptic action movie, and its imagery makes appearances in everything from Simpson’s episodes to a Tupac video. This has gotten to the point where movies can be accurately described as “The Road Warrior at sea,” as in the case of Waterworld, which substitutes jet-skis for motorcycles and a super-charged catamaran for the last of the V-8 Interceptors. We have all more or less unconsciously accepted the fact that the future will either be one of rain soaked neon or a desert of mohawked motorcycle gangs.

 

 The last entry in this long list of post-apocalyptic films is the Hughes brother’s The Book of Eli. The film concerns the quest of a lone man across the post-apocalyptic wasteland, Eli, played by Denzel Washington, to deliver a book to the west, dispatching anyone who gets in his way with sword and shotgun. The book turns out to be, quite predictably, the King James Bible. When I first heard of this film I had hoped that it would borrow a page from Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, in which the sacred and treasured text turns out to be a rather mundane manual of electrical engineering. The conceit of that book is that after the apocalypse, in which much of mankind’s knowledge was destroyed, everyday knowledge, the knowledge of a textbook or midlevel engineer, would be exponentially more valuable than it is today.

At the level of aesthetics the film lazily borrows from The Road Warrior, but it avoids both the sartorial excesses of the latter film (in other words, no mohawks) and any real attempt to give a consistent rationale for clothes and weapons. The people generally dress in post-grunge style that wouldn’t be out of place on the street today: I swear that a woman wearing the same plaid dress as the female protagonist, Solar (played by a miscast Mila Kunis) once made me a latte. Apparently, it is a society without the ability to fabricate soap, but with the ability to manufacture bullets. Bullets in a post-apocalyptic film always strike me as off, perhaps indicating how much I am influenced by The Road Warrior, but not as much as the use of an ipod, which, given that the film takes place thirty years after the collapse of society, seems like product placement combined with a cruel joke.

At the level of plot much has been made of the quest, guided by faith, to bring a Bible across the country to the people who could restore it to its proper place. This is supposedly one of those movies for real Americans in the heartland, a brief interruption in the steady stream of pinko-communist films that Hollywood churns out. The actual situation of the Bible is a little more complex than that, however. First, we have the character of Carnegie, played by Gary Oldman (it is an unwritten rule of Hollywood that an actor who begins his career with interesting performances will end it chewing up the scenery as the villain in various blockbusters) who knows the location of a water spring, and uses this knowledge to run a small town. Carnegie has read his Machiavelli, in the film he is shown reading a biography of Mussolini, and thus he knows that,“Only ecclesiastical rulers have states, but no need to defend them; subjects, but no need to govern them.” For him the Bible, possibly the last remaining Bible, is a source of power, making it possible to expand beyond what he can command with guns and a armored short bus. Since the events of the film take place thirty years after the apocalyptic war, and the destruction of civilization, most of the people who would remember the Bible are dead. The power of the Bible is not based on its immense hegemonic power as a common point of reference, as it was for Machiavelli, but on its sheer force as an aesthetic object, “the power of its words” as it is said in the film. This idea of the Bible as something that would have force ex nihilo seems a bit strained to me. Or, more to the point, it overlooks one of the most interesting elements of the post-apocalyptic narrative: the cultural bricolage of a society after some cataclysmic destruction of society, the way in which bits and fragments of the old culture are reassembled and given new meaning. (For example: Timothy Truman’s Scout comic books in which there is a new religion based on a combination of the Bible and the Lord of the Rings.) The utopian dimension of post-apocalyptic films lies in exactly this reinvention of the remnants of the old world (something that the Talking Heads understood): mundane objects take on new meanings, shoulder pads become acceptable everyday wear. Post-apocalyptic films are often about the revenge of use value, understood as myriad of acceptable uses, against the imperialism of exchange value. To return to the chain of thoughts begun above regarding the status of religion in the film, the film tries to present a liberal critique of religion, which attempts to differentiate its true core from its evil misuse, in these two figures of religion: the main of faith and the cynical exploiter of religion. Ultimately, the meaning of the Bible becomes more ambiguous, as I discuss below.

 

What is perhaps a little more interesting is that the film is in some ways a film about literacy. Franco Berardi has coined the term “post-alpha generation” to refer to the current generation, to those who have learned more words from machines than from their parents. This idea of a post literate generation, of a fundamental shift from reading, at least engaged reading of anything more than one hundred and forty characters, shows up in multiple places, from the works of Bernard Stiegler to the pages of the New York Times. The film stages this generational gap by inverting it: it is not the conflict between an older literate generation and a younger, post literate generation, raised on instant messaging and YouTube clips, but between an older generation that can read and a younger one that cannot. In this way the film becomes a strange staging of a generation in cultural decline (and aging). One of the best (but still botched) scenes in the films shows an isolated farmhouse where an elderly couple is holed-up against the rampaging gangs of the post-apocalyptic wasteland. At one point they put on an old hand crank turntable to play a record: one expects to hear some song that would be appropriate to a hand cranked turn table only to hear Anita Ward sing “Ring My Bell.” The incongruity makes sense, given that the movie takes place at least thirty years in the future, the old couple are us, the film’s audience. The film asks its generation X audience (who else even remembers the Hughes brothers) to contemplate their own decline and obsolescence. As much as it is a film about a kind of cultural decline, however, it is also a film of the advantages of the “alpha” generation, of the skills of reading and memory against those who live in the perpetual present of survival.

Now back to that Bible: Eli eventually makes it west, to Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay, where a small group of people have dedicated themselves to salving the cultural treasures of the old world. One of the final scenes of the film details the reprinting of the Bible, showing with loving detail layout of the typeset and the production of pages. This Bible, with the words “Alcatraz Press” on its spine, is then shelved with the Torah and Koran (either the 200s in the Dewey Decimal system or BL in the Library of Congress system). This could be seen as the ultimate message of tolerance, undermining the film’s vaguely Christian theme of faith guiding a man through the desert. However, I prefer to see this last scene, with all of these great books in a prison differently. Religion is referenced in the film as a source of the war and conflict, and placing the name of a prison on the spine of these hallowed tomes seems to send a different message than one of faith of tolerance. As Marx wrote, "The Tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living."


These last scenes of the printing of the Bible are juxtaposed with shots of the Solara, Eli's companion, leaving the prison of cultural patrimony to return to the desert, listening to an ipod. Perhaps this last image invokes a different idea of the Bible, not faith but exodus.

Dead Mall: Or, Postapocalyptic Now

I caught the tail end of a show on Weekend America (npr) about Deadmalls. I then went online to follow the rest of the show and it turned out that it was not about deadmalls in particular, but in a very specific deadmall, Randall Park Mall. This Mall is near where I grew up, and I logged many hours there, wandering between the Hobby Shop, Record Store, and movie Theater. I find its collapse to be oddly satisfying, perhaps because it is the ruins of capitalism or perhaps because it is the physical embodiment of my fading memory. The story also has links to photos of an abandoned Holiday Inn next door. I went to my first comic book convention there, and it seemed to be a kind of magical place. I think it is because I had never stayed in a hotel, only motels.

The End of the World, as We Imagine It

The following quote from Fred Jameson has been discussed a great deal on the internets as of late, "It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imagination." In some way this statement cannot be disputed, however, I want to stress that the weakness of the imagination, the fact that we must always imagine the end of the world in some specific form, reveals something. In some way it is a matter of what could be called the apocalyptic sublime. The end of the world is too big, it is beyond our capacity to envision, yet that does not keep us from imagining it, representing it, in some finite way, nuclear holocaust, zombie invasion, asteroid, etc. The specific image reveals something of the historical situation from which we imagine. Which is why every generation gets the apocalypse it deserves.

I came to think this after reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Stephen Shaviro has already written an interesting commentary on this book, one that happens to call into question the possibility of producing any interpretation of it. Well, here goes anyway...

First the basic plot, it concerns a father and son making their way south across a barren post-apocalyptic landscape. The specifics of how the world came to an end are vague at best, although, the cold and ashen snow suggests that it takes place during a "nuclear winter." However, the book is not situated in the immediate aftermath. This is not the day after. All animal and plant life has ceased to exist, and human beings are left to cannibalism or foraging for canned goods. In some ways the book is almost post-post-apocalyptic; in that it takes place after the dramatic struggle for survival that makes up the plot of most post-apocalyptic stories. When the novel begins even the murderous gangs have begun to die out. This is the end of the end.

What interests me is the way the novel sketches out some sense of the social and political dimensions of this world. For the most part the novel focuses on the relationship between the father and son, which is a fragile bound of love in a world that constantly threatens to destroy it. This bound is set against the threatening cannibalistic gangs, "bad guys" as the boy puts them. Now, at some point in reading this novel I became frustrated with this, despite its enthralling prose. It began to seem reactionary, the family against brutal society. However, I now think that there is more to it than that. At a few points in the novel the characters refer to "good guys," to even "communes." But these are never really depicted or encountered, except almost mystically at the end. (Shaviro alludes to McCarthy's gnosticism, of a salvation that can only come from outside the world.) In some way I think that the novel is gesturing towards the limits of our own imagination. It is easy for us to imagine society collapsing into murderous biker gangs (Hence the central place of The Road Warrior in representations of post-apocalyptic world. Its dominance is an effect not a cause: it is popular because it conforms to our own Hobbesian imaginary.) It is much more difficult, however, to imagine the creation of a new world (the end of capitalism). McCarthy's novel does not try to present this, but rather draws the limits of our ability to imagine it. Perhaps the "communist sublime"?


In a completely different way Idiocracy is also a story of the end of the world. Its premise is a kind of Darwin in reverse, "stupid" people continue to have many kids while the "educated" elites have few. Add to this the "dumbing down" of popular culture, and you have a future in which the slightest act of intelligence, like reading, is considered gay. Now this film clearly stems from the age of George W. Bush and Paris Hilton, and it could be considered the spontaneous ideology of Bush's America. An ideology which states that the one thing wrong with the world is stupidity.


Two things about this film. First, as my friend Hasana points out it is clearly about male stupidity, women are largely absent from this future, a future of monster truck rallies, pornstar presidents, and television shows based on guy getting hit in the testicles with various objects. Second, the movie has to go to great narrative lengths to explain how such a world could be possible. Its question is not the old question posed to communists, "who will clean the toilets," but rather "who will keep the cars running." It begs the question of minimal competence, not untranscendable toil. The film solves this problem by depicting a society in which everything is either automated, like the touch screen keypads at the hospital, making a diagnosis no more complicated than ordering a Big Mac, or in crisis, like the system of agriculture. In doing so the film stretches to the absurd suggesting, albeit obliquely, that stupidity is not a sufficient cause to destroy the world. In other words, while the world may appear to be stupid, that is only because the intelligence has become automated, placed in various machines, human and inhuman.


Finally, I should add that the film is completely oblivious to the existence of class. This is the main way in which its imagination of the end is circumscribed by the existing historical moment. It posits stupidity as an entirely natural phenomenon. It sees it as a cause, not an effect. It fails to see stupidity as a product of capitalism, as Marx writes, “It replaces labor by machines—but some of the workers it throws back into a barbarous type of labor, and the other workers it turns into machines. It produces intelligence—but for the worker idiocy, cretinism.” Having said that I did not hate the film. That one line, "You like money too?" Hil-a-rious.