A heap of bones on the ground – Yassine Sali­hine and Noam Toran on post-apoca­lyptic imagin­ar­ies

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So we’d just like to paint a picture for our read­ers of where we are and what we are trying to do. We are sitting in Yassine’s living room, on a Friday morn­ing, coffee and pastries and audio record­ing device in hand, about to spend the next two days binge-watch­ing post-apoca­lyptic films and tv epis­odes, in order to think through what is consist­ent and concern­ing about the genre and to consider whether, as reques­ted by Anni­ina Koivu and Jolanthe Kugler (the curat­ors of the show), there can be such a thing as a happy ending. Yassine’s home feels imme­di­ately anti­thet­ical to the atmo­spheres on the screen: It is warm, vibrant and satur­ated with color, teem­ing with books, home-made paint­ings and photo­graphs, and awash with house plants to the point that the tv monitor is partially obscured by them. This is in sharp contrast to the scenes of mass death, destruc­tion, desper­a­tion and deser­ti­fic­a­tion which await us. We sit through The Road Warrior, Termin­ator, The Day After, On the Beach, and World War Z, as well as the first two epis­odes of the new Fallout series, but the film that stands out the most –and which we can’t stop talk­ing about– is A Boy and his Dog. A cult clas­sic from the mid-70’s, A Boy and his Dog feels like a kind of original expres­sion of the “waste­land” post-apoca­lyptic land­scape, hold­ing all the distilled ethos, mater­i­al­it­ies, and prob­lem­at­ics of the genre (and which takes place, not-at-all-omin­ously, in 2024!).

In fact, it’s not a stretch to say that most waste­land-roam­ing novels, films, and video games have their lineage traced back to the film, includ­ing the Mad Max fran­chise (George Miller openly admits to ‘steal­ing’ from it) and the Fallout fran­chise. Briefly, the film (adap­ted from a novella series by Harlan Ellison) centers around Vic, an amoral boy (played by a young Don John­son) and Blood, his tele­pathic dog, who drift across a post-nuclear land­scape where remnants of “civil­iz­a­tion” have been buried under a thick layer of atomic dust. The two spend their time evad­ing maraud­ing packs of child-slavers and mutants, digging for canned good­sand shel­ter, and scout­ing out women to rape. The first half of the film takes place on the surface, the second ‘under­ground’ in a kind of prep­pers para­dise: a vast nuclear bunker large enough to simu­late and sustain an entire town­ship. Below is a tran­script of our conver­sa­tion during the screen­ing, inter­spersed with quoted passages from the film.

Ain’t that a shame. Hell, they didn’t need to cut her! She could have been used two or three more times.

Noam Toran (N.T.)
Yassine, could I ask you to give, with just a few minutes into the film, your initial or imme­di­ate impres­sions.

Yassine Sali­hine (Y.S.)
So I’m struck by a few things. First it has a Spaghetti West­ern feel. The estab­lish­ing shots imme­di­ately make me think of Sergio Leone, and the barren desert setting confirms this. But the more strik­ing thing is the imme­di­ate artic­u­la­tion of amor­al­ity and miso­gyny of this world and of our ‘prot­ag­on­ist’. I mean, he is scour­ing the area for women to rape and sulks when he finds one too wounded to viol­ate. The movie does not take any short­cuts, it imme­di­ately posits women as a dispos­able commod­ity in this world. I feel we are in for a bumpy ride.

N.T.
Now that you’ve drawn atten­tion to it, think­ing of the waste­land apoca­lyptic genre as being a descend­ant of the West­ern instig­ates all sorts of histor­ical and geograph­ical connec­tions. I’m think­ing specific­ally of how the West­ern myth­o­lo­gizes narrat­ives of settler survival, viol­ence and regen­er­a­tion in the Amer­ican south­w­est, and how the desert becomes a mythic space where those strong enough to over­come its wild­ness, its supposed harsh empti­ness, and its savagery (and “savages”, in the form of native/indi­gen­ous peoples), can secure their place, or domin­ion. ^[1]. Waste­land narrat­ives embody much of the same condi­tions as West­ern or fron­tier narrat­ives: The know­ledge required to survive in a territ­ory with limited life-sustain­ing resources, the threat of “others”, viol­ence as found­a­tional to the build­ing of a soci­ety “again” or “anew”. It’s also about estab­lish­ing the idea of the desert as a wasted space; that the desert is empty (It’s not! It’s a thriv­ing ecosys­tem!) and that its “poten­tial” (agri­cul­tural, extract­ive etc.) is wasted by the indi­gen­ous popu­la­tions that inhabit it.

Y.S.
It’s also inter­est­ing to draw out the double-mean­ing of “waste” in these depic­tions of the post-apoca­lyptic, because virtu­ally every object or mater­ial is now a piece of garbage; what has worth and what is worth­less is completely reordered based on its abil­ity to prolong survival.

N.T.
Yes! And you then get these chimeric assemblages made from whatever is avail­able, which is a defin­ing aesthetic compon­ent of the genre. A student shared with me recently a quote from Brian Thill: “Waste is any object plus time.” ^[2]."

Y.S.
If we keep in line with the original mean­ing of apoca­lypse, which is revel­a­tion, then post-apoca­lypse is post-revel­a­tion. What is revealed is the true nature of the world that was built. The wasted lives and poten­tials, the wasted energy. The post-apoca­lyptic movie does not show us a post-apoca­lyptic world. It shows us the world as it is: The greed, the viol­ence, the commodi­fic­a­tion, the exploit­a­tion. The free­dom of the white west is built on the unfree­dom of the colored rest. The west’s consumer habits decide who gets to live and who gets to die. This is what Cameroon­ian polit­ical theor­ist Achille Mbembe calls Necro­pol­it­ics. A result of this is the creation of what Mbmebe describes as “death­worlds”, or “new and unique forms of social exist­ence in which vast popu­la­tions are subjec­ted to living condi­tions that confer upon them the status of the living dead.” ^[3]. This concept can be expan­ded with Necroe­co­nom­ics (who has the currency to live and die), Necro­psy­cho­logy (who is deemed sane or normal enough to live) and Necro­cul­ture (the aesthet­ics of whose life is valu­able). So whose imagin­a­tion of survival is this?

N.T.
That’s really astound­ing. Like I think most of the popu­lar apoca­lyptic imagery aesthet­i­cizes Mbem­be’s death­worlds, and so what we are consum­ing is some­thing like the “Necroima­gin­ary”, or who gets to imagine surviv­ing and who does­n’t. ^[4].

Y.S.
Yeah, and Necroe­co­nom­ics takes on some really weird form in the waste­land genre. It feels like it’s ultra-local­ized in the sense that there is an imme­di­ate link between economic decisions and death.

N.T.
That makes me think of the typo­logy of the truck­stop, this hub coordin­ated around the needs of itin­er­ant men, where goods and services are exchanged. There is an amaz­ing scene (almost arthouse-ish) in A Boy and his Dog that takes place in just such a place: A make­shift compound where the “solos” –lone male surviv­ors roam­ing above ground– come to unwind, wash, pay for sex, and watch a projec­ted “blue” movie. The movie screened at this “truck­stop” depicts rape and other forms of viol­ence against women. It’s a kind of mise-en-abyme of the film itself, but also a satir­ized, crit­ical and perhaps highly cynical expres­sion of what is really being “consumed” in the present. I think it connects with your obser­va­tion that we are not watch­ing a depic­tion of the future but rather a stripped down, the-veneer-of-civil­iz­a­tion-is-thin repres­ent­a­tion of the present. And this film is almost fifty years old and yet feels totally, sick­en­ingly, relev­ant! In this way it’s a really tough film to watch, like I mean the miso­gyny is expli­cit and exploit­at­ive.

Y.S.
Yeah, the miso­gyny of the movie is pervas­ive but complic­ated, and I think misun­der­stood. It does not intro­duce new types of miso­gyny, or a ‘future’ miso­gyny. It just shows what is already going on. It shows that economy is not about money but about currency, surplus value that can be extrac­ted and controlled. Power is control over the flow of currency, and the curren­cies in A Boy and his Dog are canned foods and women.

N.T.
I’ve never considered it that way, but now you’re making me rethink and draw paral­lels to The Road, both the book (by Cormac McCarthy) and the film (direc­ted by John Hill­coat), and in partic­u­lar the decision by the boy’s mother (played by Charl­ize Theron) to kill herself rather than try to survive and protect her child. One’s initial reac­tion to her suicide might be to see it as an act of cowardice, or aban­don­ment, but I think it should be considered as a tremend­ous act of protest: a refusal to parti­cip­ate in, contrib­ute to or help in main­tain­ing the matrixes of power, and specific­ally the extreme expres­sion of white patri­archal power that the post-apoca­lyptic, for the most part, “prom­ises”. Like, the nuclear family is really not a sanc­tu­ary for her, nor is what lies “outside” of it. There is also an abso­lutely harrow­ing passage in the book (and so harrow­ing that it was cut from the final version of the film)where a preg­nant woman is kept alive and gives birth so that she and her compan­ions can eat the newborn child.

Y.S.
Woah, that’s just awful. I mean, if that isn’t an expres­sion of women as currency then I don’t know what is. It is the exten­sion of the woman as a unit of produc­tion: a breed­ing machine, a service machine, a pleas­ure machine. It reminds me of Amer­ican Pres­id­ent and slave owner Thomas Jeffer­son, who said :"I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more prof­it­able than the best man of the farm. What she produces is an addi­tion to capital, while his labors disap­pear in mere consump­tion." ^[5].

N.T.
You just spoke of (or to) the white west. Is this the right moment to reveal to the read­ers that we are muslim and jewish diasporic peoples and that you are a person of color? (laugh)…I mean, is it too obvi­ous to acknow­ledge that the major­ity of end-of-world films center around white chris­tian survival and salva­tion, and that all other peoples are either peri­pheral or non-exist­ent, or are there only to help repres­ent a shared expres­sion of “human­ity”? As if human­ity was the reason the world ended and human­ity will be how we rebuild?

Y.S.
So yeah, I think this is a moment to seek a level of accur­acy and ask whose apoca­lypse this is. White apoca­lypses tend to take place in the future, whereas BIPOC and colo­nial subjects either are living through a rolling apoca­lypse of the present or have endured some­thing like it already. Like if we think of the atomic bomb, or Auschwitz, or the middle passage as apoca­lyptic expres­sions of colo­nial modern­ity…

N.T.
…and their after­lives have ensured that those peoples are already, always, forced into a state of ‘rebuild­ing’. Like the apoca­lypse is just a continu­ing condi­tion.

Y.S.
Also to be able to imagine hell or apoca­lypse is a kind of priv­ilege. It means that you are not already living it. ^[6].

— Why are they there?
— Lack of respect, wrong atti­tude, fail­ure to obey author­ity.
— Lectures?
— Three.
— Cut and dry, then.
— I’d say so.

N.T.
So I want to ask you to share your thoughts on the bunker sequence in A Boy and his Dog, which takes place just after the halfway point of the film, and produces a kind of jarring rift in it, to the point that it feels like we’ve jumped genres. We move from the devast­ated above­ground into a seem­ingly fertile sanc­tu­ary below, where a community of super prep­pers have construc­ted a vast under­ground town­ship named Topeka, simu­lat­ing a midwest­ern pastoral para­dise frozen in the 1950’s. Vic is effect­ively seduced and coerced into follow­ing a young female citizen of Topeka down under, but he’s captured and imme­di­ately baptized in a tub while the community watches. He’s then…

Y.S.
Sorry to inter­rupt, but the bathtub scene reminded me of The Matrix, when Neo takes “the red pill” and wakes up in an amni­otic sack to discover that he and millions of other humans are being kept as sources of energy. Neo wakes up and sees the world as it truly is (revel­a­tion!). The bathtub scene in A Boy and his Dog is the inverse of that, as Vic wakes up into the “matrix” of Topeka. By the way, right before the red pill kicks in for Neo, Cypher (who later turns out to be the Judas of the story), tells Neo to “buckle your seat­belt Dorothy, because Kansas is going bye-bye”. And Topeka is the capital of Kansas!

N.T.
I love it, you’ve managed to connect us to the distor­ted “mirror­ing” of the world from The Wizard of Oz! Who knew that Kansas was the epicen­ter of it all! (laughs). ^[7] Ok, let me continue with the descrip­tion…so after Vic’s baptism, he’s clothed in a quint­es­sen­tial farm­er’s outfit (plaid shirt, over­alls), and led around what appears to be a full blown county fair, replete with a banquet, march­ing band, girls in bonnets and aprons, barber­shop quar­tet, etc. The townspeople, who are all white, are also painted in white­face! I mean, this film is just amaz­ing, it feels like an original expres­sion of the genre and a crit­ical revi­sion at the same time. God bless the 1970’s.

Y.S.
(Laughs) That is such a fascin­at­ing facet of this movie. The under­ground Topeka func­tions as a mirror to the above­ground world. So the above­ground world is the world as it really is, but the under­ground world is how we portray the world to be: organ­ized, orderly, abund­ant, ruled by law and morals. But it is all a facade, a perform­ance, symbol­ized by the fact that every­body down under wears white­face. They are liter­ally perform­ing white­ness! Now when I say white­ness I refer to how Nigerian thinker Bayo Akomolafe defines it, which is as a scheme to create indi­vidu­al­ity and separ­ate­ness. ^[8]. And Topeka is run by a govern­ing body called “The Commit­tee” who perform the rituals of white­ness, namely they conduct meet­ings, review plans, make charts, meet out punish­ment­s…­basic­ally the rites of colo­nial bureau­cracy. All these rituals are super­struc­tures inten­ded to create room for indi­vidu­als to pursue their “dreams”, but in real­ity it is a facade because the rule of law is used to elim­in­ate (i.e. kill) all who do not conform. This is Necro­pol­it­ics in action. And Vic is the virile white “fron­ti­ers­man” they need to revital­ize or “reseed” their town­ship.

N.T.
Yes! And this expres­sion of white­ness as a tech­no­logy of separ­a­tion is also connec­ted to the great fear of misce­gen­a­tion that obsessed the imper­ial and colo­nial powers of the 19^th and early 20^th centur­ies; the inab­il­ity to control, at the peri­pher­ies of their domin­ion, the mixing of blood that inter­ra­cial rela­tions would produce, and that the “infec­tion” would invari­ably lead to the end of Empire. I mean, zombie apoca­lypses alleg­or­ic­ally are all about that; the infec­tion and replace­ment of one group of people by another.

Y.S.
And now we’re back again with Mbem­be’s death­world, the world of the living-dead.

N.T.
Abso­lutely, like World War Z is maybe the most egre­gious contem­por­ary expres­sion of that, not only in how it promotes exist­ing power struc­tures (west-cent­ric, hetero­pat­ri­archal, milit­ant) as human­ity’s only salva­tion, but espe­cially in how its main premise –that Israel has sealed off Jeru­s­alem from zombie infec­tion– produces an unveiled “monster­ing” of Islam and Palestinian peoples. It’s like a propa­ganda film promot­ing tech­no­lo­gies of separ­a­tion: Surveil­lance, walls, milit­ary force and brutal­ity, exclu­sion, etc.

Y.S.
And this returns us back to Akomolafe’s defin­i­tion of white­ness as a scheme of separ­ate­ness. It’s about seal­ing off, walling off, forti­fy­ing…

N.T.
…which in turn gets us back to the settler “fort”, which always makes me think of a quote from Fred Moten: “Settlers always think they’re defend­ing them­selves. That’s why they build forts on other people’s land.” Plus the bunker is a perfect tech­no­logy of separ­ate­ness…to seal oneself off from the world, and from others. Same with the space­ship. I mean, what is a space­ship if not a bunker flying around in outer space?! But I think if we go too far down that rabbit hole we will never get out. I instead want to think through the totally sinis­ter employ­ment of nostal­gia in the film, and specific­ally the ideal­ized, “Rock­wellian” white conser­vat­ive Amer­ican nostal­gia that is so expli­citly “performed” in Topeka. It’s both a cari­ca­ture and a scar­ily accur­ate premon­i­tion of Trump’s “MAGA”.

Y.S.
I think the agrarian or pastoral angle of Topeka is not coin­cid­ental. To cultiv­ate the land is to civil­ize it, to bring order to it, to control it. Y ou seed, you nurture, you harvest. I looked it up and Topeka means “Good place to dig pota­toes” in the Kansa-Osage language. Funny enough the white settlers never saw Native Amer­ic­ans as agrari­ans, as people who cultiv­ated and in that sense as people of culture. What they failed to see is that a lot of native peoples prac­ticed a form of agri­cul­ture that was not based on destroy­ing whole ecosys­tems to produce crops. They integ­rated crops in accom­mod­at­ing ecosys­tems in such a way that it seemed that they grew there natur­ally. The first settlers were so amazed by the seem­ingly boun­ti­ful Amer­ican land­scape that they described the wild as gardens and believed that God prepared the land for them. This led to ideas of mani­fest destiny, which is the great ancestor of MAGA ideo­logy.

N.T.
So after consum­ing so many post-apoca­lyptic repres­ent­a­tions, let’s try to honor the ques­tion that’s been posed to us by Annina Korvu and Jolanthe Kugler: Is there such a thing as a happy ending when the world ends?

Y.S.
There are so many follow-up ques­tions to ask after that ques­tion! A happy ending for whom? Humans, anim­als, machines, plants, rocks? What does the ‘world’ ending mean?Culture, nation state, civil­iz­a­tion, the planet, the universe? We could go on, and on. We could take the happy ending in the fairytale or Holly­wood sense, where everything returns to “normal”. Where our prot­ag­on­ists live happily ever after. In light of the conver­sa­tion that we are having that would mean that a lot of people died for noth­ing. That the people who will survive will be the people who already have most or all of the power and agency.

N.T.
I worry that for many, the destruc­tion of the world is the happy ending, and the prolif­er­a­tion of this imagin­ary (and the prepar­a­tion for it) helps increase its prob­ab­il­ity. This is the viol­ence of linear time. And we know that the prolif­er­a­tion of these fanat­ical, or spec­u­lat­ive visions have real-world impact; they inform conscious­ness, and they inform legis­la­tion.

Y.S.
I think that if the apoca­lypse is revel­a­tion, then that is a “cannot unsee” moment. It may mean that some would like to keep the situ­ation as it is, but that a lot of people would be encour­aged to call for change or even enact change. And by change I mean to get rid of “capit­al­ist, white suprem­acist patri­archy”, as bell hooks would say. In that case that would be a happy ending.

N.T.
(laughs) I can’t help but think of those who have fully commit­ted to this imagin­ary, who are hard-core prep­ping…what bitter disap­point­ment if the apoca­lypse does­n’t come! Like, who is going to eat all them canned peaches?

Y.S.
(laughs) And who gets to clean the under­ground swim­ming pool from the decades of algae buildup?

Rotter­dam, April 12–13, 2024