Eschatological Anxiety

Reconsidering Southland Tales and an Old Conference Abstract

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southland tales

Appropriately, as today is 4 July, an old friend directed me to Abraham Riesman’s reconsideration of the absolutely wonderful Southland Tales (2006) and interview with its director Richard Kelly, “The World Ends with a Handshake: Unraveling the Apocalypse of Southland Tales.” (Thanks Robin!)

This is a film I have taught and written about (though before this blog’s time). The incomparable Steven Shaviro talks about it here and in his most recent book. And I guess there’s a pretty decent fan site for it: Fuck Yeah, Southland Tales.

I also presented on Southland Tales at my first academic conference ever, SLSA 2008. Here is an abstract for the paper I gave there (since I’ve never posted it):

Apocalyptic and messianic narratives have traditionally taken place in a stable, teleological temporal space, and for good reason.  The affective impact of their grand narratives have depended upon the necessity for certain forms of meaning to be stable in a world with a distinct beginning and ending.  Richard Kelly’s 2006 film Southland Tales, however, takes reiterating the present, and consequently the past and the future as well, as its dominant structural mode.  From Justin Timberlake’s lip-synched music video of a Killers song, to reversing T.S. Eliot’s famous line: “Not with a whimper but with a bang,” to the division of the protagonist into two distinctly instantiated embodiments, the constant reiteration of various cultural detritus in Southland Tales reveals not so much a postmodern “mash-up” of reference and self-consciousness, as it does a reiteration of Nietzsche’s metaphor of the gateway of the Moment from Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  In other words, Southland Tales offers an alternate history of the present, a view of temporality in which, in Zarathustra’s words, “Must not whatever can happen have happened, have been done, have passed by before?”  This paper will investigate how Kelly’s film reiterates Nietzsche’s critique of the scientific enlightenment through his figure of Zarathustra and the Eternal Return, while simultaneously reiterating the very eschatological messianism that so dominates apocalyptic narratives (and Nietzsche’s own critique) in a manner that emphasizes a much more fluid, synchronic view of history, and hence the unstable present as well.

I will hold off on posting the paper, as it is definitely old graduate work that should not necessarily see the light of day. But all this is making me want to return to Southland Tales, as I do not imagine exhausting the film anytime soon. (This also makes me want to get on Twitter, just so I can follow Richard Kelly.)

Some Thinking on the Present and Future of Disaster

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Some wonderfully bleak things I’ve run across this week: Margaret Ronda’s, “Mourning and Melancholia in the Anthropocene,” in Post45; and I am eagerly waiting for Liam Sprod‘s Nuclear Futurism: The Work of Art in the Age of Remainderless Destruction (Zer0 Books, 2013) to arrive in the mail. Post45 also has a fairly interesting piece from October on Thomas Pynchon: David J. Alworth, “Pynchon’s Malta,” Post45.

Abstract: Infinite Oppenheimers and Postnatural Metahistory: Jonathan Hickman’s Manhattan Projects

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Below is an abstract for a paper I will be presenting at the 2013 Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Conference, taking place October 3-6 a Notre Dame University.

Infinite Oppenheimers and Postnatural Metahistory: Jonathan Hickman’s Manhattan Projects

From the perspective of what number of young scholars and nuclear critics are calling a second nuclear age, I would like to suggest that one site of the “postnatural” can be found in the remarkable cultural intersection between narratives of nuclear history and contemporary ecological understandings of catastrophe and risk. Though there are any number of instances of such aesthetic correspondences and dissonances, for instance the spectacle of cinematic destruction that dominated the last decade, one might do well to look to texts that, parallel to the non-event of Mutually Assured Destruction, eschew moments of narrative disaster. Writer Jonathan Hickman and artist Nick Pitarra’s The Manhattan Projects (Image Comics, 2012- ) is such a text, imagining that work on the atomic bomb at Los Alamos was “a front for a series of other, more unusual, programs.” Hickman’s writing picks up a tradition of re-imagining nuclear history, familiar to any reader of Thomas Pynchon, and adds a superheroic twist: J. Robert Oppenheimer is consumed by his infinite personalities, Enrico Fermi is an alien, F.D.R. is reborn as an A.I., Albert Einstein plays the role of Wolverine, etc. This paper will argue that Hickman’s work emerges from a particular moment in which nuclear, information, and biological sciences are raising a host of interesting questions for contemporary narrative. Hickman’s radically alternative history of twentieth century science and politics emerges from a postnatural perspective whose horizon surpasses the globe, positioning nuclear history within a galactic ecology in order to rigorously problematize the posthuman.

Eco-Disaster and Surveillance, Some Links

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So some articles of interest.

At Jacobin, Alyssa Battistoni has followed up her piece on disaster in the wake of Hurricane Sandy with “Back to No Future,” a pretty bleak essay on environmental change and the (lack of a) future.

Jeff Goodel has a piece in Rolling Stone,  “Goodbye, Miami,” about what (now inevitably) rising sea-levels will do to Miami.

And here’s a number of links re: the ongoing NSA drama.

Philip Bump has reported at The Atlantic Wire that the US has filed espionage charges against Edward Snowden.

Naomi Wolf raises a number of questions about Snowden, and then raises some more.

Falguina A. Sheth writes for Salon, “Snowden’s Real Crime: Humiliating the State.”

And Michael McCanne has a very interesting essay, “Total Information Awareness,” at The New Inquiry.

And linking ecological disaster and surveillance together, Nafeez Ahmed wrote a piece for The Guardian, “Pentagon Bracing for Public Dissent Over Climate and Energy Shocks.”

Notes on This is the End

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This is the End 2013

So, let’s get this out of the way quickly. This is the End (dir. Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen, 2013) is a terrible movie. (I had a previous inkling that it was going to be pretty wretched.) It is adolescent (if self-consciously so), puerile (viz. Satan’s giant phallus), and misogynist, among its other sins. Perhaps most damning: it is poorly imagined. There are a number of other ways that actors playing themselves in a movie about the end of the world at James Franco’s house could have gone. Seriously. This is a brilliant premise[1] but This is the End is embarrassing.

Despite this pretty damning opinion, the spirit of The Hyperarchival Parallax’s subtitle obliges me to give this onanistic bropocalypse its due. For if nothing else, the film is somewhat fun. This is largely due to the constant metafiction the film is engaged in: Michael Cera is a degenerate, the Back Street Boys exist(ed) (right!?), Aziz Ansari is not generally liked, etc. And this is funny/interesting b/c each actor plays themselves.[2] (Or at least it is supposed to be [and often is] funny.)

But the true failure of This is the End lies in never asking itself what its basic premise means.[3] Namely, what does it mean to make a film about the “Christian” Apocalypse with a cast of goofballs (who made it big for whatever reason) playing themselves in 2013? Yes, the film is self-aware about how indulgent of a film it is (is it really though?), but if you are going to parody the currently (very) popular craze with representing megadeath and mass-destruction[4]—and in a time of danger, a time of surveillance, climate change, war, revolution, torture, and disaster—without once asking why one might make such a film nor why such a film might be interesting, timely, or important at this late and exhausted date in 2013 . . . this is a mistake.

To my mind, This is the End is a product of the 2013 orgy of disaster (see fn. 3) finally turning in on itself. And it is about time. (Whatever one may think about David Foster Wallace’s irony or sincerity) This is the End is very necessarily ironic in this time of serious-ass superhero movies destroying significant amounts of urban real-estate over and over. But it is not ironic enough. There are too many dick and fart jokes, and not enough acknowledgment of what it is and what it is doing: that it is metafiction satirizing contemporaneity and its multiplying disastrous projections of national fantasy. This is the End, if nothing else, emphasizes that we should be wary of the sincere expression of eschatological national fantasy at the present time.

[1] It really is. Though I will refrain from speculating too much how differently this film could have gone, it is a tempting activity.

[2] Though this is also to assuredly stress that the film could have benefitted from a quick refresher course on John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Cynthia Ozick, David Foster Wallace, etc. Maybe especially Wallace’s “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way” (1989).

[3] Its other true failure rests upon its mistaken idea that, at the end of the day (literally), experiencing the end of the world w/ your friends would be kinda fun.

[4] It appears that every week a new film that imagines really massive destruction or post-apocalyptic waste will come out for the remainder of the summer. (In fact, there are a number of them playing right now!) In 2013 (just off the top of my head) we’ve seen: Olympus has Fallen (dir. Antoine Fuqua), which imagines a terrorist attack on the White House; there is the forthcoming White House Down (the new Roland Emmerich joint), also imagining a terrorist attack on the White House; there will be the xenocide of Ender’s Game (Gavin Hood); the nepotism of After Earth (M. Night Shyamalan); the (weirdly) promising looking Elysium (Neil Blomkamp); Oblivion (Joseph Kosinski) . . . ; Pacific Rim (Guillermo del Toro), which looks like it will bomb; The World’s End (Edgar Wright), another eschatological buddy-movie; World War Z (Marc Forster), Brad Pitt’s “adaptation” of Max Brook’s compelling and interesting novel of the same name (2006) (that came out today and according to Vanity Fair the film looks to be wanting); and of course finally there is Man of Steel (dir. Zack Snyder, 2013), a film I’m still puzzling over, which imagined something like two trillion dollars in damage to downtown Metropolis. There are many more such films coming out this year.

Quite simply, 2013 is the year of disaster porn. It’s everywhere. It even comes in the guise of children’s fantasy. Transformers (1984-1987) and Action Comics (1939- ) have been repurposed into visions of Armageddon and mega-death. Think about this for a second.

More selfishly, this summer blockbuster movie season is yet another reminder that a critic of the writing of the disaster will never be out of work. We are in the age of frequent, diverse, ubiquitous, and excessive disaster. It is multiplying. This is the point. The multiplication of real or imagined disaster scenarios in contemporaneity requires its own archive. Trying to deal with the reality of this requires what I have been and will continue to call hyperarchival realism.

Nuclear Pasts and Presents

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Mark Frauenfelder, founder of Boing Boing, has reported about this little gem he found on Realtor.com: 87 Hale Hill Lane, Lewis, NY 12950. Or, to be less precise, an old missile silo that has been converted into a home. It’s on sale for only $750,000. Scott Garner (who I assume is the listing agent) has explicitly advertised it as: “Live in the Launch Control Center of this Cold War Missile Silo.”

missile silo

On the phenomenon of old missile silos and bunkers being repurposed, see photographer Richard Ross‘s Waiting for the End of the World (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), a fairly wonderful photo-essay on the subject. Sarah Vowell also interviews Ross in the book.

silo

The Nuclear Uncanny of Robert Longo

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When looking earlier today at a bunch of striking photorealist painting and drawing, I came across the image below. It is a charcoal drawing of the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki by artist Robert Longo. (Strangely enough, in addition to being an artist, he also directed the 1995 film Johnny Mnemonic, based on a William Gibson short story. It was Longo’s only feature film.) He has a whole series of charcoal drawings of nuclear explosions. His website is here. His work is also currently part of a group exhibition, “Disaster: The End of Days,” at the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris.

Robert Longo Drawing of Nagasaki

Nuclear Morale Crisis?

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On 8 May 2013, Michael R. Gordon for The New York Times and others reported that “The Air Force removed 17 officers assigned to standing watch over nuclear-tipped Minuteman missiles after finding safety violations, potential violations in protecting codes and basic attitude problems.” This has caused the AP  to ask “Is There a Morale Crisis in the US Nuclear Force?” Well, yes. And it is history and those damned politicians’ faults. If they just stopped trying to reduce the nuclear arsenal, morale would be higher. An excerpt:

Bruce Blair, a former missile launch officer and now a national security scholar at Princeton University, said Friday that morale has dropped in part because the ICBM mission that originated in 1959, deterring the Soviet Union from attacking the U.S. or Europe, is less compelling than it was generations ago.

“This dead-end career is not the result of shrinking nuclear arsenals, but rather because the Cold War ended decades ago and because so few senior commander jobs exist within the missile specialty,” Blair said. “Most crews can’t wait to transfer out of missiles into faster-track careers such as space operations, but the Air Force doesn’t make it easy.”

[Air Force Secretary Michael] Donley came close to blaming the White House for any malaise. He said that when officers see “the national leadership” contemplating more nuclear reductions “this does have a corrosive effect on our ability to maintain focus on this mission.” He also said “critics or others” contribute to this when they suggest getting rid of the ICBM force entirely.

Yeah, because this should all be our primary concern with regard to nuclear weapons: that the morale of soldiers stays high. I don’t know what to say.