It often happens that whatever video I choose to watch shares some thematic similarities with whatever book lies at that moment on my bedtable. This is likely less a matter either of conscious decision or of spooky synchronicity than of a consistency in my taste both for books and movies. As that may be, my most recent read and watch were both post-apocalyptic.
The book was Finally Some Good News by an author who prefers to go by the pen name Delicious Tacos. Like many authors nowadays (David Wong, Andy Weir, Hugh Howey, et al.), he bypassed the gatekeepers of traditional publishers by first self-publishing online and building a substantial following there. Print publishers will take notice of authors who already are popular. The old path to print always has been rocky for a new writer. The handful of traditional major publishing houses in NYC, for example, receive an average of 10,000 unsolicited manuscripts per month; the chances of yours being one of the few hundred per year they opt to publish are, to put it gently, not good. At least now there is another way to attract houses’ attention – or to ignore them altogether.
Finally Some Good News is an un-PC but darkly funny tale of men and women caught up in the nightmare frustration of everyday modern life. They struggle to pay rent and bills, face rejection on OKCupid, deal with frenemies and strangers who are either actively or callously hostile, and work at disagreeable jobs that are hard to explain: “His company provided data driven solutions to optimize cross platform branded content.” When the nuclear bombs go off, a common reaction among the survivors is relief: “We were slaves. And now we’re not.”
The behavior of many survivors (not so much the two protagonists, though they are hardly pure) is utterly beastly and they seem to enjoy it. This echoes Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents in which he says that the price of civilization is unhappiness because it requires repressing much of basic human nature. Freud thought the trade-off was worth it, of course. The characters in this novel aren’t convinced.
Thumbs cautiously up.
As for the video, in the past months of covid constraints I’ve been sampling scifi TV series that only lasted one or two seasons. There are quite a few that I missed when they first aired. (So, apparently, did most other viewers.) Currently I’m halfway through the DVD set of Dark Angel, which first aired in 2000 and lasted two seasons.
Dark Angel is set 20 years ahead in a post-apocalyptic “future” (which is to say about now) in a Seattle with a trashed downtown and homeless on the street. (I won’t make the obvious remark – it’s too easy.) Every other American city is much the same. They haven’t been nuked in the usual sense. Instead, high altitude nuclear airbursts generated electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) that obliterated communications and computer records, thereby crashing banks, the economy, government records, and social order. A depression is in progress that makes the 1930s look like the Good Old Days. Government has become (more) authoritarian and corrupt. Max (Jessica Alba) is a genetically enhanced human with special abilities: as a child she escaped from a military experimental laboratory, the director of which is still looking for her. (Yes, this sounds a bit like the show’s contemporary The Pretender.) She teams up with a wealthy tech-savvy rebel to fight the good fight against the corrupt powers-that-be.
This series has a sky high audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes but only a so-so rating from critics. I usually side with the audience on a split like that, but not this time. This has the credentials for a good show. It was created by David Cameron and stars Jessica Alba, for goodness sake. Yet the characters are one dimensional. They lack the rounded humanity that Joss Whedon, for example, brought to the characters in the contemporary show Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which villains are often sincerely charming and heroes badly flawed. Dark Angel’s characters lack such complexity. The dialogue is stilted and the plotting predictable. The post-apocalyptic setting is completely unnecessary. The show would work as well without it. That’s not to say Dark Angel is a bad show. It isn’t. Alba does fine in her part within the limits of the scripts and there is enough action to hold one’s attention through each episode. The series doesn’t inspire binge-watching however – at least not by me.
Thumbs sideways.
So why all the apocalypses in literature and the arts from ancient times to the present? The word means revelations in Greek, so what is revealed by them? Something about ourselves presumably. Some of the fascination with them may be akin a taste for horror stories in which the deaths of characters in some way help us value our own lives more. Yet, I also think Delicious Tacos is onto something with his airy misanthropy. Oh, I don’t think relief would be anyone’s actual response to the real thing, but there is a widespread sense that the civilization we have built has gone terribly wrong somehow. Thinking about its destruction has a cathartic aspect. The thought is so common that Car and Driver offered a list of cars best suited for surviving the apocalypse. On some level the notion of re-starting civilization from scratch is appealing – at least until we give serious thought to what that would entail. There is also a personal question that interests us. How would we act in the circumstances? If the social order is gone, would we opt to be beasts or would we be something else? Perhaps we shouldn’t be too sure of the answer until faced with event, which one hopes means never.
Shawn Mullins – Pre-Apocalyptic Blues
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