Post-apoca­lyptic imagin­ar­ies

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First, a little back­ground for our read­ers, just to let them know where we are and what we want to do. We’re at Yassine’s house, in his living room, it’s Friday morn­ing, we’ve got pastries and coffee, a voice recorder, and we’re going to spend the next two days watch­ing post-apoca­lyptic movies and TV series to think about what’s always going on in them, what worries us about this partic­u­lar genre, and also to ask ourselves, as Anni­ina Koivu and Jolanthe Kugler (edit­ors of this public­a­tion) wish, whether a post-apoca­lyptic story can end well, have a happy ending. At Yassine’s place, the atmo­sphere is the complete oppos­ite of what we see on screen: it’s warm and lively, satur­ated with color, there are books every­where, his own paint­ings and photos hang on the walls, and there are so many plants that they partially obscure the TV screen. Yet what awaits us are scenes of horror, millions of deaths, destruc­tion, despair, and deser­ti­fic­a­tion.

Here’s the program: Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, Termin­ator, The Day After Tomor­row, On the Beach, and World War Z, the first two epis­odes of the new Fallout series… But the most inter­est­ing film of all, the one we can’t stop talk­ing about, is A Boy and His Dog, a cult film from the mid-1970s. A Boy and His Dog is some­what of an original repres­ent­a­tion of the post-apoca­lyptic desert land­scape, the purest, most concen­trated form of all the issues, all the mater­i­al­it­ies, all the philo­sophy of the genre — and what’s more, it takes place in 2024, which isn’t sinis­ter at all!

In fact, it is prob­ably no exag­ger­a­tion to say that almost all novels, films, and video games in which char­ac­ters wander through a desert world are derived in some way from A Boy and His Dog —includ­ing the Mad Max series (George Miller admit­ted that he “stole” several ideas from it) and the Fallout video game series. The film (an adapt­a­tion of Harlan Ellis­on’s 1969 short story A Boy and His Dog) tells the story of Vic, an amoral young man (played by Don John­son), and Blood, his tele­pathic dog. They wander through a post-nuclear land­scape, where all that remains of civil­iz­a­tion is covered in a thick layer of atomic dust. Together, they flee child-steal­ing slavers and maraud­ing mutants, search­ing for canned food, places to take refuge, and women to rape. The first half of the film takes place on the surface, the second half under­ground, in a kind of prep­pers’ para­dise: a huge fallout shel­ter, large enough to contain an entire fake city. What follows is a tran­script of our conver­sa­tion during the screen­ing, inter­spersed with excerpts from the film.

That’s a shame… No, but it’s true! They didn’t need to cut her down, that girl! We could have used her two or three more times.

Noam Toran
Yassine, we’ve just star­ted the movie. Can you give me your first impres­sions?
Yassine Sali­hine
Let’s say there are two or three things that I noticed right away. First of all, it’s a bit like a spaghetti west­ern. The wide shots remind me of Sergio Leone, and the whole setting, the desert land­scape, seems to fit too. But what really strikes me is the imme­di­ate connec­tion made in this universe between the amoral and miso­gyn­istic nature of the main char­ac­ter. Basic­ally, he runs around look­ing for women to rape, and he sulks when he finds one that’s too dirty to touch. The film does­n’t mince words: women are portrayed from the outset as commod­it­ies of little value. I have a feel­ing this is going to be a rough ride.

N.T.
Now that you’ve brought this up, consid­er­ing the apoca­lyptic desert genre as a descend­ant of the West­ern genre allows us to estab­lish all kinds of histor­ical and geograph­ical connec­tions. I am think­ing in partic­u­lar of the way the West­ern genre myth­o­lo­gizes stor­ies of settler survival, viol­ence, and regen­er­a­tion in the Amer­ican South­w­est, and how the desert becomes a myth­ical space where only the strongest triumph over its inhos­pit­able nature, its appar­ent empti­ness, and its savagery — and the “savages, ” i.e., the indi­gen­ous people — and can take their place and domin­ate. Stor­ies of waste­lands depict the same condi­tions as West­ern movies or stor­ies of colon­iz­a­tion: to survive in a hostile world, one must know how to identify and exploit the few essen­tial resources^[1], one must escape from the threat­en­ing “Other, ” one must accept that only viol­ence can purify soci­ety before rebuild­ing or regen­er­at­ing it. It is also about estab­lish­ing the idea that the desert is a lost space, that it is an empty space—ex­cept that it is not! It is a very rich ecosys­tem!—that its agri­cul­tural, mining, and other poten­tial is under-exploited and wasted by the indi­gen­ous popu­la­tions who live there.

Y.S.
It’s inter­est­ing, this notion of waste in post-apoca­lyptic repres­ent­a­tions: of all the objects and mater­i­als of civil­iz­a­tion, all that remains now is garbage, rubbish. The idea of value has been completely over­turned: now, the only thing that has value is that which helps us survive a little longer.

N.T.
Yes! And so we end up with these unlikely, fant­ast­ical assemblages, these accu­mu­la­tions of dispar­ate objects, which consti­tute a funda­mental aesthetic compon­ent of the genre. A student recently shared with me a quote from Brian Thill: “Garbage is things and time.” ^[2]."

Y.S.
If we consider the original mean­ing of apoca­lypse, which is revel­a­tion, then post-apoca­lyptic refers to what comes after revel­a­tion. And what has been revealed is the true nature of what had been built. All those wasted lives, all that lost poten­tial, all that dissip­ated energy. A post-apoca­lyptic film does not show us a post-apoca­lyptic world, it shows us the world as it is: greed, viol­ence, commodi­fic­a­tion, exploit­a­tion. The free­dom of the white West is based on the lack of free­dom of others, those who are not white. The consumer­ist needs of the West determ­ine who has the right to live and who must die. This is what Cameroon­ian polit­ical scient­ist Achille Mbembe called “necro­pol­it­ics, ” a phenomenon that leads to the creation of what he calls “worlds of death, ” or “unique and new forms of social exist­ence, in which many popu­la­tions are subjec­ted to condi­tions of exist­ence that give them the status of the living dead.” ^[3]. This concept can be exten­ded to include necroe­co­nom­ic­s—the values that determ­ine who has the right to live and die—nec­ro­psy­cho­logy—those who are deemed sane or normal enough to deserve to live—and necro­cul­ture—rep­res­ent­ing the aesthet­ics of those whose lives are worth some­thing. So, here, when we talk about the survival imagin­a­tion, who are we talk­ing about?

N.T.
It’s truly aston­ish­ing. I would say that popu­lar apoca­lyptic imagery repres­ents an aesthet­i­ciz­a­tion of Mbem­be’s worlds of death. We consume, in a way, the necro-imagin­ary: who has the right to imagine that they can survive, and who does not? ^[4].

Y.S.
Abso­lutely. And the necrom­ics often take on an extremely bizarre form in the waste­land genre. It feels ultra-local­ized, in the sense that the link between economic decisions and death is imme­di­ate.

N.T
It reminds me of the typo­logy of the road­side truck stop, which, as a place, is a cent­ral point where services are offered to nomadic men and where lots of exchanges take place. There’s a mind-blow­ing scene in A Boy and His Dog, it almost feels like arthouse cinema all of a sudden. We see what looks like an impro­vised shel­ter, a place where solos, i.e., lone men roam­ing the territ­ory, come to relax and wash them­selves. They visit pros­ti­tutes and can watch porno­graphic films in which women are raped and subjec­ted to multiple acts of viol­ence. This is, of course, a frame-within-the-frame of the film, but also a satir­ical, crit­ical, and perhaps extremely cynical expres­sion of what we, the view­ers of A Boy and His Dog, are watch­ing, of the product we are consum­ing. I think this ties in with your obser­va­tion that we are not watch­ing a repres­ent­a­tion of the future, but rather a stripped-down repro­duc­tion of the present, where the veneer of civil­iz­a­tion is thin. This film is over fifty years old, and yet it seems incred­ibly relev­ant, almost sick­en­ing! That’s also why it’s not an easy film to watch: the miso­gyny is expli­cit and completely based on the exploit­a­tion of others.

Y.S.
Oh yes! Miso­gyny pervades this film, but it is a complic­ated form of miso­gyny and, I believe, misun­der­stood. It is not as if new forms of miso­gyny are being intro­duced, a miso­gyny of the future. The film shows us what is happen­ing now, today. It shows us that the economy does not depend on money, but on assets, on surplus value that can be extrac­ted and controlled. Power is the abil­ity to control the exchange of assets, and the asset­s—the things that have value—in A Boy And His Dog are cans of food and women.

N.T.
I had never thought about that. But now you’ve got me think­ing, and I see paral­lels with The Road, both Cormac McCarthy’s book and John Hill­coat’s film. I’m think­ing in partic­u­lar of the boy’s mother (played by Charl­ize Theron), who prefers to kill herself rather than try to survive and protect her child. The instinct­ive reac­tion to this suicide is to think that she is a coward, that she is abandon­ing him, but I believe instead that it should be seen as a very power­ful act of protest. She refuses to contrib­ute to the creation of power, she does not want to parti­cip­ate in it, she does not want to support it. More specific­ally, she refuses to encour­age the extreme expres­sion of white patri­archal power that post-apoca­lyptic stor­ies usually prom­ise. If you like, the tradi­tional family is not a sanc­tu­ary for her, nor can she take refuge in anything outside the family. There is a truly horrific, heart­break­ing passage in the book (so heart­break­ing, in fact, that the scene is not in the film), where a group helps a preg­nant woman survive so that they can then—along with the mother!—eat the newborn.

Y.S.
Yuck, that’s disgust­ing. But then again, I don’t know if there’s a better example of women being treated as commod­it­ies. It even goes a step further: women as produc­tion units. Baby-making machines, pleas­ure machines, servants. It reminds me of Thomas Jeffer­son, the pres­id­ent of the United States and a major slave owner, who said: “In my opin­ion, a woman who produces a child every two years is much more prof­it­able than the most product­ive man on the farm. She provides surplus capital, while the product of a man’s labor is swal­lowed up by consump­tion^[5].”

N.T.
A minute ago, you were talk­ing about white West­ern­er­s—or maybe you were address­ing them. Perhaps now is the time to reveal that we come from two diasporas, Jewish and Muslim, and that one of us—y­ou—has brown skin? (Laughter.) I mean, it may be obvi­ous, but most films about the end of the world are told from the perspect­ive of the survival and salva­tion of white Chris­ti­ans, and all other peoples live on the margins or simply don’t exist. Or if they are there, it’s only to give a slightly more general impres­sion of human­ity. As if human­ity were neces­sar­ily the cause of the end of the world, and as if human­ity alone were going to rebuild it!

Y.S.
Yeah, I think the best thing to do is ask ourselves: for whom is this an apoca­lypse? The white apoca­lypse is most often projec­ted into the future, but for indi­gen­ous people, black people, people of color, and colo­nial subjects, the apoca­lypse is being lived in the present, in a kind of ongo­ing real­ity, or they have already lived through it. In a sense, the atomic bomb, Auschwitz, and the rite of passage repres­ent apoca­lyptic expres­sions of colo­nial modern­ity…

N.T.
…and their lives contin­ued beyond the end of the world, forcing all these people to exist in a state of perpetual recon­struc­tion. As if the apoca­lypse was a perman­ent state.

Y.S.
Moreover, just being able to imagine hell or the apoca­lypse is a form of priv­ilege, because it means you are not already living in it^[6].

— Why are they there?
— Disrespect, bad atti­tude, refusal to obey author­ity.
— Lectures?
— Three.
— The usual, then.
— More or less, yes.

N.T.
I’d love to hear what you thought of the bunker scene in A Boy and His Dog. It comes halfway into the film and intro­duces a sudden break, a discord­ant note, to such an extent that it almost feels like we’ve changed genres. We were on the surface, in a devast­ated world, and suddenly we find ourselves in an under­ground place, fertile, protec­ted, where a whole community of super prep­pers has built a real city, called Topeka, a kind of ersatz para­dise, a small Midwest­ern town that seems to have been frozen in the 1950s. A young woman from this under­ground city seduces Vic and forces him to follow her: he is captured and forcibly baptized in a bathtub, under the gaze of the entire community. So…

Y.S.
I’m sorry to inter­rupt, but I have to say that the bathtub scene reminded me irres­ist­ibly of The Matrix: Neo agrees to take the red pill, wakes up in an amni­otic sac, and discov­ers that millions of human beings are being used (as he was until that moment) as a source of energy. Neo awakens and sees the world as it really is—rev­el­a­tion! The bathtub scene in A Boy and His Dog shows exactly the oppos­ite: Vic wakes up in the Topeka matrix. Incid­ent­ally, just before Neo begins to feel the effects of the red pill, Cypher (who is actu­ally the traitor in the story) says to him, “Buckle up, Dorothy, because Kansas is about to get the hell out of here!” And what is the capital of Kansas? Topeka.

N.T.
I love it, you’ve managed to connect everything, through a distor­ted imit­a­tion, to The Wizard of Oz! Who could have guessed that Kansas was at the epicen­ter of it all^[7]! (Laughs.) Okay, I’ll continue my descrip­tion. So, after Vic’s baptism, we find him dressed in over­alls and a plaid shirt, like the stereo­typ­ical farmer. He is taken to a county fair, with a march­ing band, a banquet, girls wear­ing bonnets and aprons, an a cappella singing group, and all the trim­mings! Not only are all the villa­gers white, but they’re also wear­ing makeup to make them­selves look even whiter­—white­face! This film is truly mind-boggling; it’s typical of the genre it repres­ents, while at the same time taking a crit­ical look at that genre. The 1970s were a really great time!

Y.S.
(Laughs.) Yes, that’s a really fascin­at­ing aspect of this film. The under­ground Topeka is meant to be a reflec­tion of the world above ground, mean­ing that the world above ground corres­ponds to the world as it really is, while the under­ground world depicts the world to come, where everything is well organ­ized, well ordered, where abund­ance, law, and moral virtues reign. But this is only a facade, a theat­rical repres­ent­a­tion—which is perfectly symbol­ized by the villa­gers’ exag­ger­ated makeup. These white people are play­ing a role: they are play­ing the role of white people! They embody white­ness—and by that word, I am refer­ring to the Nigerian thinker Báyò Akómoláfé, who defines white­ness as the project of creat­ing indi­vidu­al­ity, of separ­at­ing^[8]. The commune is admin­istered by a group call­ing itself the commit­tee, which performs all the rites of white­ness, i.e., it holds meet­ings, reviews plans, produces charts, and inflicts punish­ments. Basic­ally, all the rituals of the colo­nial bureau­cratic appar­atus. These prac­tices are part of a super­struc­ture whose expli­cit goal is to enable indi­vidu­als to real­ize their dreams. But in real­ity, it is a decept­ive facade, because the author­ity of the law is essen­tially used to get rid of—that is, kill—those who are differ­ent from others. Necro­pol­it­ics in action. Vic repres­ents the white, virile explorer that Topeka needs to revital­ize itself, to reseed itself.

N.T.
Yes! And the expres­sion of white­ness as a tech­nique of separ­a­tion can be linked to the great fear of ethnic mixing that obsessed imper­ial and colo­nial author­it­ies in the 19^th and early 20^th centur­ies: the impossib­il­ity of prevent­ing, on the margins of their domain, the mixing of races, which was perceived as an infec­tion that would inev­it­ably lead to the end of the empire. After all, zombie stor­ies tell us noth­ing else: an alleg­or­ical infec­tion whereby one group is replaced by another.

Y.S.
Which brings us straight back to Mbem­be’s worlds of death, to the world of the undead.

N.T.
Oh yes! On that subject, World War Z is prob­ably the most compel­ling mani­fest­a­tion of this phenomenon. In this film, exist­ing power struc­tures—pro-West­ern, hetero-patri­archal milit­ancy—are duly repres­en­ted as the only ones capable of saving human­ity. Not to mention, of course, this funda­mental narrat­ive element: Israel had quar­ant­ined Jeru­s­alem from the outset to prevent it from being contam­in­ated by zombies. The Muslim world and the Palestinian people become, by force of circum­stance, monsters. It almost seems like a propa­ganda film in favor of separ­a­tion tech­no­lo­gies: surveil­lance, wall build­ing, milit­ary power, brutal­ity, exclu­sion, etc.

Y.S.
Which brings us back to Akómoláfé and his defin­i­tion of white­ness as a project of separ­a­tion. The goal is always to enclose, to wall off, to forti­fy…

N.T.
And so we return to the settlers and their forts, which always remind me of a quote from Fred Moten: “Colon­izers always believe they are only defend­ing them­selves. That is why they build forts on other people’s land.” ^[9]. "What’s more, the bunker is the perfect tech­no­logy for separ­a­tion: you lock your­self in, you get rid of the world and other people. The same goes for a space­ship. Because what is a space­ship if not a bunker flying through inter­stel­lar space? But anyway, all this is taking us too far afield, we’d never get out of it. I’d rather change the subject and talk about the perfectly sinis­ter use of nostal­gia in this film—­more specific­ally, the conser­vat­ive, white, ideal­ized, Rock­wellian nostal­gia that is expli­citly portrayed in Topeka. It is both a cari­ca­ture and a fright­en­ingly accur­ate premon­i­tion of Trump’s Make Amer­ica Great Again (MAGA).

Y.S.
In my opin­ion, Topeka’s rural, pastoral setting is no coin­cid­ence. Cultiv­at­ing the land means civil­iz­ing it, organ­iz­ing it, controlling it. We plant, we grow, we harvest. I did a little research and discovered that Topeka means “ideal place to harvest pota­toes” in kansa-osage. The irony is that white settlers never considered Native Amer­ic­ans to be farm­ers, cultiv­at­ors, or people with a culture. What they could­n’t under­stand was that many Native Amer­ic­ans prac­ticed a form of agri­cul­ture that did not destroy the ecosys­tem in order to produce a harvest. Their crops were integ­rated into the ecosys­tem, which gave the impres­sion that the plants were grow­ing natur­ally. The abund­ance of the Amer­ican land amazed the first European settlers, and they left us descrip­tions of the wilder­ness as a kind of immense garden. This convinced them even more that God had destined these lands for them. This led directly to the notion of mani­fest destiny, which can be seen as the ancestor of Trump’s MAGA ideo­logy.

N.T.
After examin­ing all these post-apoca­lyptic repres­ent­a­tions, perhaps we should try to answer the ques­tion posed by Anni­ina Koivu and Jolanthe Kugler: is the end of the world a happy ending?

Y.S.
The prob­lem is that this ques­tion only raises others. If the ending is happy, who is it happy for? Humans, anim­als, machines, plants, rocks? And in “end of the world, ” what does the word “world” refer to? Culture, nation, civil­iz­a­tion, planet, universe? And so on. A happy ending can be under­stood in the Holly­wood sense of the term, or as in a fairy tale: in the end, everything returns to normal. The main char­ac­ters live happily ever after. After the conver­sa­tion we just had, that means that many, many people would have died for noth­ing. It also means that the surviv­ors are, in any case, those who already held power before, those who had the abil­ity to act.

N.T.
What saddens me is that, for many people, the end of the world is, in itself, a happy ending. The more stor­ies belong­ing to this imagin­ary world prolif­er­ate, the more prepared we are for its real­iz­a­tion, and the more likely that real­iz­a­tion becomes. Such is the viol­ence of linear time. And then, as we know, the prolif­er­a­tion of this fanat­ical or spec­u­lat­ive imagery has a real effect, an impact on real­ity. It shapes our collect­ive conscious­ness and influ­ences legis­lat­ors.

Y.S.
In my opin­ion, if the apoca­lypse is a revel­a­tion, then we have to admit that, for some people, it would have been better not to see what has been revealed to us: they would like the situ­ation to remain unchanged at all costs. For many others, however, the revel­a­tion repres­ents encour­age­ment, an
incent­ive, a call to bring about change. Now, if by change we mean putting an end to white suprem­acist capit­al­ist patri­archy, then yes, it is a happy ending.

N.T.
(Laughs.) When I think of all those people who have thrown them­selves whole­heartedly into this fantasy, all those fanat­ical prep­pers… If there is no apoca­lypse, they may be bitterly disap­poin­ted! They’ve stock­piled all these crates of canned peaches… Who’s going to eat them?

Y.S.
(Laughter.) And the pool at the back of the bunker­—who’s going to have to disin­fect it, when mold has been grow­ing there for decades?

Rotter­dam, April 12 and 13, 2024