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POST-APOCALYPSE NOW

Mark Fisher

In cinema, the post-apocalypse has become a recurring theme offering endless opportunities to envisage and keep on reimagining the end of the world as we know it. Here Mark Fisher explores the post-apocalyptic in Children of Men (2006), The Road (2006) and Terminator Salvation (2009), and asks whether these seminal fi lms point towards a tendency to imagine the end of existence over the end of capitalism.

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McG, Terminator Salvation, 2009The desolated CGI landscape of McG’s Terminator Salvation fi ts with the burned-out ideological terrain of the world after the fi nancial crisis.

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The question that hangs over Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 fi lm Children of Men is: has the catastrophe already happened? Or is it about to happen? Or does the particular form of catastrophe in question resist any kind of periodisation? The crisis is as unexplained as it is total: there has been a failure of fertility, so that no children have been born for a generation. The catastrophe, therefore, is not a punctual event so much as an ongoing decline: the world ending as a long drawn-out whimper. The premise of any number of previous post-apocalyptic fi ctions is undercut, because in Children of Men, the moment of apocalypse and of post-apocalypse are coterminous. There is no question of surviving the catastrophe and reconstructing society afterwards. With no coming generations, there is, evidently, no one to reconstruct society for, nor anyone to continue the work of reconstruction. The catastrophe, in fact, consists in this failure of the future, this absence of continuity.

One of the most powerful scenes takes place inside Battersea Power Station, which now functions as a ‘Ministry of Art’, in which the elite preserve and enjoy cultural treasures (Picasso’s Guernica, Velázquez’s Las Meninas, Pink Floyd’s infl atable pig). The lead character, Theo (Clive Owen) asks his cousin, Nigel, one of the ministry’s curators, what the point of it all is if, in a hundred years, there won’t be anyone left to see any of it. Nigel’s answer exemplifi es a kind of suave nihilism: ‘You know what it is, Theo. I just don’t think about it.’ Without any possible connection to the future, cultural objects become museum pieces, a set of decontextualised ornaments (which can, of course, be recombined at will). The Ministry of Art, we can’t help but feel, is an image of Postmodern culture itself – a culture that, as the Marxist cultural critic Fredric Jameson persuasively argued, is characterised by a tendency towards retrospection and pastiche. Is this, then, our post-apocalypse, the apocalypse proper to a Postmodernism which Jameson called ‘the cultural logic of late capitalism’?1 Will there really never be anything new again? Or can we only expect more of the same, forever?

John Hillcoat’s 2009 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) does not even hold open the picturesque pleasures of dereliction that Children of Men offers. Here, just as in Children of Men, the catastrophe is never explained. But it works quite differently. Whereas the malaise in Children of Men affects only humans, leaving nature (beautifully shot by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki) unmolested, in The Road it is nature itself that dies. The ultimate effect is the same, however: there is no future.

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Culture has literally been stripped away – there are few signs (in any sense) of the commodity system that once reigned over the planet. The houses that remain are gutted; the images on billboards have, for the most part, long since been effaced as humanity descends from the cybernetic empire of signs back into animality. When the two lead characters, the unnamed ‘man’ and his son, discover a can of Coke, it is a holy relic from a lost regime of commodity fetishism. The world may be ending, and capitalism may be over, but The Road does nothing to undermine the truth of Jameson’s famous claim that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’.2

The Road’s end of the world has terminated capitalism, but it does not clear a space for any sort of alternative to it. Despite the seemingly redemptive fl avour of the fi lm’s fi nal scene (in which the orphaned boy is taken on by another family), the theme of post-apocalyptic reconstruction is as redundant in The Road as it is in Children of Men. To reproduce means only to extend the process of extinction, and, in any case there is nothing to reconstruct with, since both nature and the products of dead labour are close to being totally used up. In The Road, as in Children of Men, the old Leninist question ‘What is to be done’ has no possible purchase.

The theorist Jean-Pierre Dupuy has argued that the only way for us to avert an ecological catastrophe is for us to put ourselves into the position where it has already happened and ask: What we would have done to have avoided it?3 As the Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek has suggested, the problem with accepting eco-catastrophe as a realistic possibility is that our everyday experience of the life-world contradicts what science tells us: ‘Common sense fi nds it diffi cult to really accept that the fl ow of everyday reality can be perturbed … It is enough to see the natural world to which my

mind is connected: green grass and trees, the sighing of the breeze, the rising of the sun … can one really imagine that this will be disturbed?’4 The potentially political function of The Road then, arises from its removal of green grass and trees, prompting us to confront what everyday life would be like when the life-world is dead.

McG’s Terminator Salvation (2009) offers another version of Dupuy’s gambit. We are fi nally plunged into the midst of the future-world confl ict between Skynet and the human population that we have only seen glimpses of in the previous fi lms in the series. Here, CGI fi nally codes for cybergothic. If Children of Men captures the pre-2008 feeling of neoliberalism’s inertial vaingloriousness (there is no future but this, for ever), then Terminator Salvation’s burned-out world, its scorched-earth terrain patched together out of a black metal artifi cial nightmare, is strikingly in tune with the derelicted ideological terrain after the fi nancial crisis. Now that ‘[t]he assumptions that ruled policy and politics over three decades suddenly look as outdated as revolutionary socialism’,5 neoliberalism is in a ‘dilapidated state’ and its ‘former pretensions to intellectual superiority and realism will no longer be sufferable’.6 If, as Terminator Salvation’s pulp existentialist slogan has it, ‘there is no fate but what we make’, that’s not because everything is possible again, but because everything – very much including what is left of the status quo – is suddenly impossible. The ‘only possible way’ has collapsed, and all that’s left is an ideological landscape strewn with relics and junk. 1

Notes1. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso (London and New York), 1992. For the arguments on retrospection and pastiche, see especially ‘The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, pp 1–54.2. Fredric Jameson, ‘Future City’, New Left Review 21, May/June 2003, pp 65–79. Jameson actually attributes the observation to an unnamed source: ‘Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.’3. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Petite métaphysique des tsunami, Seuil (Paris), 2005.4. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, Verso (London and New York), 2009, p 465. 5. Martin Wolf, ‘Seeds of its Own Destruction’, Financial Times, 8 March 2009; see www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c6c5bd36-0c0c-11de-b87d-0000779fd2ac.html.6. Gopal Balakrishnan, ‘Speculations on the Stationary State’, New Left Review 59, September/October 2009, pp 5–26.

Text © 2010 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images: pp 70-1 © Warner Bros/Everett Collection/Rex Features; p 72(t) © Universal/Everett Collection/Rex Features; p 72(b) © Dimension Films/Everett Collection/Rex Features

Alfonso Cuarón, Children of Men, 2006opposite top: Post-apocalypse as sterility: the chaos and entropy of Cuarón’s Children of Men provide striking images of a culture with no future.

John Hillcoat, The Road, 2009opposite bottom: Post-apocalypse as eco-catastrophe: Hillcoat’s The Road is set in a world in which both nature and culture are dead.