Apocalypse

Apocalyptexts 01: The Chronicles of Riddick

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Apocalyptexts[1] #01: The Chronicles of Riddick[2]

The Chronicles of Riddick (David Twohy, 2004) is w/o a doubt one of the smarter movies made in the aughts.[3] (And no, I don’t mean in terms dialogue, for it is wretched where that is concerned. . . .)  In the words of others mixed w/ myself: it’s like Dirty Harry meets Han Solo, Shakespeare, the second Iraq War, Messianic (neo-evangelical) Christianity, video games, postmodern irony,[4] and Hitler.[5] For instance, a thought experiment:

how many other films begin w/ an obviously world-ending (and purely) evil force bent on “conversion “ for its “POV”—literally injecting willing applicants into its military program—and then jump to a Hoth-on-steroids-Vin-Diesel-running-amok middle, ending w/ said anti-hero sitting on that selfsame evil throne?  (Answer: none.)

I remember Ted Gerstle[6] dragged my ass to this film, and, even though we walked in about ten minutes late, it was still astounding.  Twohy had done something no one else had ever done before (kidding): make an amazing SF film that no one saw.  Of course it didn’t hurt that Pitch Black was incredible, but TCoR[7]did something no other SF “action” film had done before: make me recall 2001.[8]

Sure, the fact that the ebullient choral tracks accompanied the equivalent of monoliths “falling from the sky to destroy a helpless population” helped, but it seemed to be an updated Arthur C. Clarke-vision of the future, a LeBron for an MJ[9] (if you will. . .), a “what would happen if Vinge made a horror film”-type scenario.

I cannot help but argue that it has been one of the greater crimes of this decade that no one let Twohy[10] make a sequel to this film—further, a sequel that was so obviously and gratuitously needed![11] (TCoR is something I might in fact put in my top 20 [meaning #1] of my sequel worthy films.  Wtf would he have done?  He had no Lynchian escape hatch [see: all Lynch’s films since the mid-90s]).  He would’ve had to actually write something, which, of course, was something he had built his career on refusing to do.  And this is ultimately the tragedy of TCoR: it far more represented Twohy’s orgasm than it did foreplay for something greater—i.e. there will never be a TCoR sequel. . . .

And that’s sad really.  (It is like if Milemarker hadn’t released Anaesthetic after Frigid Forms Sell.[12] All that setup, no payoff?)

In other words. . . this is all to say. . . Avatar bores me.  So yes: 1)  I cannot help but feel like it is a piece of abstract expressionism to which analysis is forever denied; 2) the narrative is boring, sucky, and downright contrived; and 3) I’m gonna miss the early aughts, in which CGI only counted for, like, 50% of the movie rather than, idk, all of it.

TCoR took its apocalypticism seriously—as in: if you can’t break off the knife after stabbing the dictator in the head, why bother type way.  Riddick ain’t a bad Bartleby figure, so if we can’t see how it would be if he ran an “Evil Empire,” then we’re all, collectively, fucked.  Please Twohy, make a sequel.

[1] Sorry, couldn’t help myself.

[2] So seriously, I’ve decided to start a new portion of this here thing (don’t worry, “Repackaging the Archive Part IV” is coming. . .).  Apocalyptexts: where the world blows up and I feel like talking about it.

[3] viz. the last decade.  (I’m committed to using this term, so if it doesn’t catch on, I’m screwed.  [This is also an attempt to not conceal the fact that David Twohy is perhaps a gigantic douchebag.])

[4] Otis Nixon.

[5] And did I mention that the dialogue is horrible, w/ the exception of: “I’ll kill you w/ my teacup.”

[6] Excuse me on the spelling of this Ted, the googles turned up a bunch of fat guys quick, who obviously aren’t you.  (Why aren’t you more easily locatable—i.e. I refuse to use facebook. . . .)

[7] I think I might be pretty into using this acronym for the remainder of anytime I talk about this heaping pile of gold-plated dung.

[8] Of course I’m lying here.  Solaris is w/o a doubt the best exemplar of post-2001 filmmaking.

[9] Sorry, I’ve been reading Bill Simons’ excellent The Book of Basketball (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009) recently (i.e. since 24 hours ago [I haven’t slept it was that interesting. . .]) and cannot help at this moment but relate everything to my favorite, and the world’s most interesting (I will stand behind this to the death) sport.

[10] No matter how much of a douchebag he is.

[11] Unlike, idk, so many others.

[12] Ik.  u have no idea.  look it up.

Excerpt from “The Inverted Nuke in the Garden”

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So I’ve just finished drafts of my project papers, and as they address some of the concerns of this blog, I thought I would post a short excerpt from the second one, titled “The Inverted Nuke in the Garden”:

That this total destruction of the archive immediately opens a field for the production of more literature, that clearing away the ground will inevitably make way for subsequent archival accumulation, makes [Hawthorne’s “The Earth’s Holocaust”] parable speak equally to the logic of archives themselves and of the anagogic phase of literature.  For Hawthorne’s speaker does indeed receive an answer to his query about whether or not “everything” was consumed from a “grave friend”: “Come hither tomorrow morning—or whenever the combustible portion of the pile shall be quite burnt out—and you will find amongst the ashes everything really valuable that you have seen cast into the flames.  Trust me; the world of tomorrow will again enrich itself with the gold and diamonds, which have been cast off by the world to-day.  Not a truth is destroyed—nor buried so deep among the ashes, but it will be raked up at last.”[1] Though the parable ultimately ends on a discussion of the human “Heart,” of “the little, yet boundless sphere, wherein existed the original wrong”[2]—that it is this which cannot be destroyed by all the burning Alexandrias one can imagine—the real anagogic lesson of Hawthorne’s tale resides in those very ashes.  In articulating its destructive encyclopedic logic, Hawthorne makes quite clear that one can never totally destroy the archive.  In the very manner that Whitman’s poetry cannot archivally accumulate itself infinitely but must leave off somewhere, Hawthorne’s text makes clear that something will remain, that even the dust and ashes are archival.  If we recall Derrida’s two fantasmatic limits of the text, the infinite book and the destruction of the archive, both Whitman and Hawthorne point to the fantastic nature of these limits.  They cannot be experienced.  As the nuclear cannot be experienced, its material possibility marks the limits of anagogy, both in terms of destruction and accumulation.

[1] Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Earth’s Holocaust,”  Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tales and Sketches (New York: The Library of America, 1982), 904, emphases mine.

[2] ibid., 906.



The Road: A Brief Comment on the Post-Apocalyptic Western

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So I recently saw John Hillcoat’s excellent adaptation of The Road (2009), and though there are probably a number of ways to talk about it, as the film offered a plethora of post-apocalyptic issues to consider, what struck me most was the continuing resonance of the post-apocalyptic narrative w/ the Western genre.  I was only made aware of this after seeing the film, but Hillcoat also directed the fabulous The Proposition (2005), an Australian Western written by, of all people, Nick Cave.

The Proposition not only proved that there are still productive paths to pursue in the genre in general, but that this gritty, morally ambiguous, post-spaghetti Western was able to transcend the genre’s traditional US borders and communicate w/ other post-colonial experiences of something like the “frontier” in a serious manner.  The fact that the Australian Outback is just as appropriate a setting for a Western as the United States beckons to a far larger relevance to the Western genre (as, of course, did the multitude of Italian Westerns of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s), a relevance that goes far beyond privileging the American experience of the frontier as singular and unique.  The Proposition offers a version of a colonial past, of the nineteenth century, steeped in blood as it was, which does not shirk the weight of history, as did so many specifically American Westerns.  It clearly and unambiguously understands how the colonial war machine worked on the frontiers, interstices, boundaries, and edges of the “civilized” world; in other words, the violent logic of The Proposition can clearly be read as an extension of the logic of British colonialism.  Despite the perceived temporal distance of the Western genre, its lessons still resonate today, if for no other reason than so many of today’s violent encounters occur in just such marginal spaces: harsh, blasted landscapes where not only the rule of law has been suspended, but access to something resembling “civilization” is one or two steps removed at best.  Merely to inhabit Australia was, in some sense, to already be criminal, and there are of course many such zones today.

Furthermore, The Proposition, being the (at least critically) successful film that it was,[1] its indie and Sundance cred (perhaps) paved the way for No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood cleaning up at the 2008 Oscars.  (It need hardly be noted here that No Country was also a Cormac McCarthy adaptation.)  In a few short years, a genre that had been perceived dead, had bounced back not only w/ gusto, but with critical and box office success.[2] I have a number of times myself declared, and don’t necessarily disbelieve this statement today, that it is quite difficult if not impossible to make a (“traditional”) Western after Unforgiven (1992).  Much like Gran Torino (2008) was a send-off of Eastwood as an actor, Unforgiven represented to Eastwood his final statement on the Western, the culmination of his many years in the genre.  Though the ‘90s saw some excellent Westerns made after Unforgiven, there didn’t appear to be much more to say w/in the realm of its specific mode.  Jarmusch’s Dead Man (1995) is perhaps a perfect example of this.  It is thoroughly and unapologetically a Western, delivers one of the best soundtracks in the genre from Neil Young, and does much to quite self-reflexively play w/ Western tropes, but for all that, it does not have a clear genealogical descent from past-Westerns, a genealogy defined in the 70s and 80s by Eastwood, and sewn-up tight w/ Unforgiven.  Dead Man, despite its successes, was strangely and perhaps purposely divorced from the genre, sending out feelers for how to continue, how to stay relevant, and how to change.[3]

So what, if anything, does this all have to do w/ The Road and w/ post-apocalyptic narratives?  For one, when I finally figured out who directed the McCarthy adaptation, it came as no surprise to me that it was John Hillcoat.  That he would have been tapped to direct a(ny) McCarthy novel made to me complete sense.  But, peculiarly, the logic of this was not based on McCarthy’s own long interest in the Western.  Rather, it directly and clearly presented me w/ the now long affinity b/t the Western and the post-apocalypse.  As early as Walter M. Miller Jr.’s Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), w/ its setting in the Arizona or New Mexico desert, there has been a symbiosis b/t the genres.  (Examples of this would be too long to list, but suffice it to say even the forthcoming Book of Eli clearly picks up on this.)  The Road, even filmed in Western Pennsylvania (Pittsburgh, yay!) as it was, unambiguously plays w/ many Western conventions: the journey, the lone hero (w/ son), a haunting past before the protagonist’s or civilzation’s fall—specifically in the form of a lost woman (Charlize Theron)—a moral “code” by which the hero lives by (good guys and bad guys—i.e. those who eat humans and those who don’t), a tragic but noble fate, and, ultimately, riding off into the sunset for a “better tomorrow.”  Mix in a harsh, unforgiving landscape, restless and dangerous “natives,” an old wise coot, even a reappearance of Guy Pearce. . . take away the end of the world stuff, and one has a pretty solid formula for a Western.

This, of course, should not be surprising at all, considering McCarthy’s previous work, and the obvious apocalypticisim of something like Blood Meridian, but The Road the novel, w/ its lack of specific geographical referent, the quite vague cause of the Apocalypse (as opposed to the film where it is a bit more clear that it is nuclear in nature), and the persistent, all-encompassing ash,[4] reads far more like wandering outside the windows of Beckett’s Endgame than it does Apocalypse-made-Western.  The novel’s prose is sparse and simplistic, as opposed to the baroque eloquence of Blood Meridian, and it has striking existential moments wholly—and I think for the better—missing from the film:

“He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world.  The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth.  Darkness implacable.  The blind dogs of the sun in their running.  The crushing black vacuum of the universe.  And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover.  Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”[5]

Suffice it to say, these moments of reflection and prosodic expression are rare in the novel, and importantly so.  The novel is incredibly sparse and consequently ridiculously allegorical in a way simply not possible to successfully portray in an adaptation.  And I don’t think this is for the worse.  To me, it doesn’t so much matter whether the novel or the film is “better.”  In fact, each seems to stand on its own quite adequately.  The differences b/t each could be listed and nit-picked ad nauseum, but I think simply the difference b/t the mediums is enough to place each in different aesthetic, or generic, regimes.  In other words, the visual image provided by the film creates a much clearer Western generic marker than does the work of the novel.  I agree that this could be debated, esp. b/c it is difficult to read McCarthy at all w/o the Western in mind, but to my thinking, The Road the novel is McCarthy attempting to take on some quite different, more (as mentioned before) Beckettian material than his previous work, and I think he is ultimately successful in doing so.  The film’s stunning, if still harrowing and drab visuals, create a specificity, a “real” referent, a localization, and a sense of the past which are all absent from the novel.  This, of course, is simply a result of pointing the camera at something (I assume), but even the presence of Charlize-Theron-as-memory,[6] which was definitely played-up in the adaptation, reveals the sovereignty of Hillcoat’s lens no matter what the source-material.

This is all a long way of suggesting a couple of hypotheses which would take me much more time and thought to fully flesh out, but since I already have been far from brief in getting to them, will be so to conclude. 1)  That perhaps the real disappearance of the Western, if in fact we mark it around the 1992 appearance of Unforgiven, was in fact the result of something quite different.  Namely, the end of the Cold War.  W/ the threat of nuclear war, presumably, off the table, the aesthetic logic of the Western—its reliance on harsh, blasted, post-apocalyptic landscapes—ceased to have the same subconscious cultural cache than it did previous to 1992.  Eastwood himself had long relied on overtly religious or apocalyptic themes in his work (see High Plains Drifter and Pale Rider), and though Unforgiven may not be as clearly apocalyptic, it definitely puts to rest the avenging, angel-of-death type of messianic judge who Old Munny clearly is even there.[7] 2)  That it is perhaps not retroactively inappropriate to re-read many Westerns as ultimately tarrying w/ thoughts of the nuclear or the post-apocalyptic.  I’m esp. inclined to include Leone here.[8] What was able to break the Western out of its celebration of the US was implicitly an awareness of how this very cowboy logic would/might lead to the final scene in Dr. Strangelove: waving a cowboy hat while riding the bomb. . . . The brutality and violence of the Spaghetti Western, more than simply historically revisionistic, was actually an imagined future, a projection of the same sort we get in The Postman or perhaps even Syriana.  3)  Finally, that the re-invigoration of the Western genre is inextricably linked to changes in the apocalyptic imagination and the plethora of present day global conflicts.  The specific lack of nuclear narratives of late (see my postings on 2012 and its addendum), have consequently led to a more subtle, less-overt apocalypticisim in the Western, one that now highlights oil and border crossing (No Country and Blood respectively) rather than the nuclear.  Suffice it say, however, that if we place The Road firmly in the Western tradition, it is apparent that the nuclear is still very much w/ us, but that it has been sublimated to such a degree that it takes an overt nuclear post-apocalypse to reveal a Western, rather than the other way around.  This is not necessarily to suggest that perhaps the Western has been wholly absorbed into other genres, and can only function, say, how it does in Star Wars, but it is to say that, b/t Unforgiven and The Proposition, something has changed, and whatever that change is, the ultimate result is The Road.

All in all, I’m almost embarrassed to be even be posting all this, as it seems far too obvious, but hopefully what it really speaks to is how The Road is an incredibly timely and important film, esp. compared to something like 2012.  It is, in other words, no accident that it was filmed in Pittsburgh, as the atmosphere of economic collapse both past and present, simply oozes in every frame.  And who knows, maybe even right now Hollywood execs are contemplating what would be a truly terrifying film—one which didn’t have recourse to the fantasmatic nuclear or whatever to destroy the world, but might simply show what could have happened, and still might, in our current economic climate.  I can only imagine these films would also find the burgh adaptable.  28 Years Later anyone?

[1] And of course it didn’t hurt that it was bolstered by some star power: Nick Cave’s screenplay and Guy Pearce’s captivating role as the protagonist.

[2] For instance, on Wikipedia’s list of Westerns released in the 2000s, it says only 4 were released in 2004 (which I don’t quite believe).  Of these, one was a French film, Blueberry, that went straight to DVD (though it does look fascinating) and Disney’s animated Home on the Range.  How this last fits into the “Western,” I’m not quite sure, but then again. . . (thank you Wikipedia), it also lists From Dusk till Dawn 3, Grey Owl—a Richard Attenborough production(!)—Shanghai Noon (w/ Jackie Chan), The Last Samurai, Joss Whedon’s Serenity (which isn’t such a stretch. . .), The Quick and the Undead, and The American Astronaut (which is excellent, but perhaps not a Western).  Suffice it to say, that this list is classic-Wikipedia in many ways.  Not only does it not even include No Country or There Will Be Blood, but what is there is quite suspect.  My point still stands, however, that from a #-of-releases-per-year-in-the-genre standpoint, in the early aughts (read before 2005, the year The Proposition was released) there was a distinct slowdown in the production of Westerns.  Afterward, in addition to No Country and Blood we received a number of more-or-less classic western films that probably wouldn’t have even been made in the first place if not for the mid-aughts Western revival, among them: 3:10 to Yuma (a fair remake), Appaloosa, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and Seraphim Falls.

[3] An oft overlooked and at times fascinating film, Way of the Gun (2001) w/ Ryan Phillipe and Benicio del Toro, also attempted this if in a wholly different direction.  Unapologetically a nod to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Way of the Gun, however, ultimately found itself w/o a solid generic foundation other than its references to older films in a strikingly similar, if wholly non-parallel manner to Dead Man.

[4] The ash is noticeably absent from the film, except in its washed-out light, perhaps simply b/c it would have been nearly impossible to portray this visually and still be able to construct an interesting image.  The film is already bleak, who wants to watch a completely gray film?

[5] Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), 110.

[6] Btw, why is it that Theron so often plays a role in which the drab, even ugly appearance of her only serves to highlight how “beautiful” she is?  Would this effect even be possible w/ a “truly” ugly, or even an “average-looking” woman?

[7] Again, to invoke Dead Man, Jarmusch’s idiosyncratic way of tarrying w/ the apocalypticisim of the Western was in not-at-all-subtle references to William Blake.

[8] For the purposes of brevity, I’m not going to even get into Mad Max or such.  And, of course being Australian, Hillcoat does give a nod to the Thunderdome in the wardrobe of many of the characters in The Road.

2012: An Addendum

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Just picked up Žižek’s new short book on the economic crisis, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, and it struck me while reading it last night that perhaps, even though 2012 was in production far before the “economic downturn” which struck in the Fall of 2008, the real horizon of the film is in fact the “seemingly out of nowhere,” “once-in-a-century credit Tsunami” (Greenspan).[1] (I am indebted to Kirk Boyle for making me recall this insight, as he made much the same point about 2012 on a panel we were both on last fall in NY.  Check out his abstract for “Metaphors that Destroy Us: Projections of the Financial Crisis,” and his very interesting article “Children of Men and I am Legend: the disaster-capitalism complex hits Hollywood.”)

The lack of any concrete, “real” cause of disaster in 2012, the fact that the films just spirals out-of-control between one seemingly unrelated disaster to the next (i.e. how could Yellowstone turning into a Volcano and the San Andreas Fault be related. . .), that drastic measures must be taken immediately w/ little to no concern for the constituency of the country, that the leaders in power ignore any other solution to the problem other than vast influxes of capital into abstract arks—rather than say mobilizing the workforce to save itself (the economy)—all these point toward the fact that 2012 may in fact be (metaphorically) dramatizing the global economic disaster.  And yes, this is perhaps to give Emmerich too much credit, that the film seems far more enamored w/ its special effects and lackluster narrative, but despite all this, what is on display in 2012 is the disaster at the heart of capitalism itself.  Not some pseudo-scientific excuse to blow up the world again, but an acknowledgment that the apocalyptic rhetoric spread around the financial collapse was far more extreme than for real natural disasters; only a film like 2012 could actually give us an image of what was being imagined in the minds of bankers, financiers, and government officials at all levels: total global destruction.

Strikingly, and I’m inclined to not wholly agree w/ him on this, Žižek focuses on various sites of apocalyptic threats as the only sites which could give the communist “Idea a practical urgency.”[2] In his latest book more clearly than ever before, capitalism contains a multitude of apocalyptic scenarios in the heart of itself—it is apocalyptic.  And it is the very ways in which it is apocalyptic which could create new antagonisms for the universality contained w/in communism, not a hearkening back to the past, either its successes or failures, but rather reinventing the lines along which the battle must be waged entirely.  He is very clear that there are four such sites of impending capitalist disaster which may in fact provoke such a reinvention:

The only true question today is: do we endorse the predominant naturalization of capitalism, or does today’s global capitalism contain antagonisms which are sufficiently strong to prevent its indefinite reproduction?  There are four such antagonisms: the looming threat of an ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of the notion of private property in relation to so-called “intellectual property”; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics); and, last but not least, the creation of new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums. . . . What the struggles in all these domains share is an awareness of the potential for destruction, up to and including the self-annihilation of humanity itself, should the capitalist logic of enclosing the commons be allowed a free run.[3]

Prior to the release of 2012, there was a viral marketing campaign of videos (even though they were also OnDemand) which showed Woody Harrelson’s character running through the list of possible scenarios that would “prove the Mayans right” (including nanobots, the Hadron collider, aliens, nukes, eco-disaster, etc. etc.—all the usual suspects and more).  What is interesting about these, is that 2012 could have made use of any of these threats, most of them a result of capitalism (or its future).  They are all contained w/in the logic of the film.  So the fact that 2012 had to pull a magical-rabbit-disaster out of its pseudo-scientific hat proves all the more what is at stake.  For Emmerich, and for Žižek as well, we are living at the end times.  And, whether acknowledged or not, capitalism is the horizon in which we experience what that actually means.  Of course, knowing that one is living near the end of the world is nothing new, but notice Žižek’s conviction that we are in fact there:

We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject, a subject reduced to the evanescent point of the Cartesian cogito.  For this reason, a new emancipatory politics will stem no longer from a particular social agent, but from an explosive combination of different agents.  What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletariat who have “nothing to lose but their chains,” we are in danger of losing everything: the threat is that we will be reduced to abstract subjects devoid of all substantial content, dispossessed of our symbolic substance, our genetic base heavily manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment.  This triple threat to our entire being renders us all proletarians, reduced to “substanceless subjectivity,” as Marx put it in the Grundrisse.  The ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure—in a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance.  Today, we are all potentially homo sacer, and the only way to stop that from becoming a reality is to act preventatively.  If this sounds apocalyptic, one can only retort that we live in apocalyptic times.  It is easy to see how each of the three processes of proletarianization refer to an apocalyptic end point: ecological breakdown, the biogenetic reduction of humans to manipulable machines, total digital control over our lives. . . At all these levels, things are approaching a zero point; “the end of times is near.”[4]

And this is the whole problem.  If on the one hand, we have Bush, McCain, and Obama declaring the end of the world as we know it unless we push through the stimulus package, and Žižek saying that it is the very threats capitalism introduces which would cause the end of the world and may become sites for radical political upheaval, AND Roland Emmerich getting us all collectively “off” w/ abstract spectacles of some vague disaster-reality—do we not need to dial it back a bit?  Yes, 2012, you may be “about” the Fall of 2008, but that simply puts you (and Žižek and all the rest) in a ridiculously long tradition of this sort of thing.  A tradition that has at the heart of itself the fact that this apocalypse never happens! We are always living in the end times.  This is why all these rhetorical eschatologies are so effective.  If in fact what 2012 is enacting is financial meltdown, thank god it looks so familiar, that it is just another rhetorical disaster which will never occur, but whose effects will have real world consequences—i.e. more banking corruption, etc.  Perhaps the real lesson here is that we should just multiply possible rhetorical apocalypses, all so to insure that none of them ever happen.

[1] And perhaps nowhere is this Tsunami imagined better than when it is sweeping over the Himalayas.

 

[2] Žižek, Slavoj.  First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.  New York: Verso, 2009.  90.

[3] ibid., 90-1.

[4] ibid., 92.

2012

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I’ve been eagerly anticipating Roland Emmerich’s recent 2012 for quite some time now.  One of the first previews for the film released early this last year showed a Tibetan monastery high in the Himalayas being engulfed by gigantic waves.  This and other previews seemed to promise a spectacle of global destruction heretofore only hinted at, a disaster so large and frankly absurd that even the highest point on Earth wouldn’t be immune from its sublimely catastrophic effects.  Except for the strangely missing nuclear referent, Emmerich has tackled most of the major versions of global apocalypse and epic disaster.  He gave us aliens destroying the White House and the Empire State Building in dramatic fashion in Independence Day (1996); attempted and failed to revamp the monster movie in Godzilla (1996); gave us a global warming eco-apocalypse based on ridiculously sketchy science in The Day After Tomorrow (2004); and even gave us a pre-history apocalypse—in the sense of massive civilization change—in 10,000 BC (2008) (btw, for those who are following, yes that is two movies in a row whose titles are dates).[1] W/ 2012 I could only imagine that he would go above-and-beyond the all-out destruction of those previous films, as he would have to simply go bonkers-overboard to top them.  I even permitted myself to hope that he might actually deliver on his and our desire to see it all end spectacularly on the big-screen in all the CGI glory he could muster.  In all earnestness, I was excited for 2012 not because it would be some genre-bending, metacinematic commentary on apocalyptic tropes, nor would it be some prophetic warning to humanity,[2] nor would it be some careful and subtle exploration of a post-apocalyptic situation. . . no, I was excited for 2012 for the sheer spectacle of the thing: no substance, just everything going to hell.  And in that, it was pretty successful.

Don’t get me wrong, 2012 is an awful film that even the intrepid John Cusack couldn’t save.  Like all of Emmerich’s films, rather than the disaster taking center stage, he inevitably only uses it as a background to tell a laboriously clichéd, trite, normative, banal “family” narrative that barely holds together.  For all the quite visually captivating death and destruction, the entire film culminates in Cusack having to free a stuck gear.  That’s it.  A wire is coiled around a gear that is preventing the gate from closing on one of the arks.  And it takes twenty minutes for this to resolve in the manner we were all expecting in the first place—i.e. Cusack fixes the gear, the gate closes, everyone is saved from drowning, he reunites with his ex-wife[3] and kids, etc. etc.[4] Up until that point, the narrative was simply a convenient vehicle to transport us from one site of disaster to the next, with ridiculous, last minute escapes from each: L.A. falling into the San Andreas Fault and the Pacific Ocean, Yellowstone Park blowing up (largest volcano ever),[5] the proverbial waves coming over the Himalayas, etc.[6] (I won’t even get started w/ all the other convoluted, unnecessary plot points except to mention the whole thing still ends up being conservatively “moral” at the end and the science is even worse than The Day After Tomorrow: gigantic solar flares have caused a new (new! how does he get away w/ this shit!?) radioactive element in the Earth’s core, and it is heating up the entire planet, causing the tectonic plates to massively shift and, you know, sorta melt.  Clear?)  But for all that, my anticipation was still satisfied.  L.A. dropping into the San Andreas fault was perhaps one of the most captivating images of massive destruction yet “captured” on film.  I won’t even really try to describe it, and really anything less than the big screen won’t do it justice, but I will say that the detail is so fine one can actually see tiny people falling through the smashed windows of toppling skyscrapers.

My desire to see this film was simply a desire to see how he would pull off more destruction.  Mercifully, this film was (fairly) free of big, famous, historic landmarks blowing up or being encased in ice (w/ the one exception of an aircraft carrier smashing into the White House riding the back of a Tsunami[7]; I wish I could say it was some sort of commentary on the military industrial complex or perhaps New Orleans, but frankly Emmerich probably thought it just looked cool.[8])  What this film appeared to promise (and almost fulfill) was disaster w/o context, disaster simply for the sake of it, w/o warning, narrative, or meaning.  This was ultimately what his previous work bordered on, but the obvious eco-guilt-trip parts of The Day After Tomorrow, the strange patriotism of ID4—esp. considering Emmerich is German[9]—prevented this.  These films were still part of the Hollywood-summer-blockbuster ethos that you can only show disaster to this extent if the end result is uplifting for the human spirit or whatever.  2012 is not a summer blockbuster.  It came out in November for chrissakes.  It skirts the “human spirit,” but ultimately the moral question it asks—who gets saved and why if we can only save a percentage of a percent on the ark—seems tacked on at best, and completely opaque and mishandled at worst.[10] The moral dilemmas raised by the film are an afterthought, something to “justify” the rest of it.

And this is ultimately Emmerich’s problem.  His films don’t need justification.  If he took a Koyaanisqatsi approach to disaster filmmaking (70mm visuals w/ Philip Glass music), he would finally achieve what he’s been trying to all this time because at this point no one cares about the who, what, when, where, why, how, etc.  We just want the image.  An anti-narrative apocalyptic disaster film w/ a Hollywood Budget, now that would be something.  He comes mighty close to this in 2012, perhaps the closest because it is arguably the worst film out of them all (or best. . .) in that it is more difficult than ever to care about any of the loosely constructed characters, but it ultimately fails because you could tell exactly the same story w/ [insert disaster, however minor (say, a broken leg), here].  His films try so desperately for substance, pulling every possible heartstring and using the rhetorical gravity of global catastrophe to do so, but always ultimately ignore what is so enticing and brilliant about them: their special effects.  Nothing else.  If he was faithful to what he was actually doing, making a film which resided completely and only on the surface, he might actually achieve some depth.  Rather than trying to insert meaning w/ whatever hackneyed father has to save his children bullshit that winds up in every one of his films, if he simply eschewed meaning, gave up cause-and-effect, morality, messages of warning, the human spirit. . . really everything except the special effects, he’d really be on to something.  I know we’ll never get this film, but hey, we do have 2012.

[1] Also, one can easily see from his first student film, Das Arche Noah Prinzip—in which a “weather” satellite has the power to create massively destructive natural disasters—that Emmerich has for a long time been in the business of megadeath.  He also looks like he’s about to take on another version of this by making Asimov’s Foundation (at least according to imdb).  I’m sure hardcore SF fans the world over are groaning.

 

[2] There isn’t any, b/c this film reverts to an apocalypse wholly outside of human control.  It is destined, prophesied in the old traditional style.

[3] Who, not ten minutes before this had lost her current husband, and poor-ole Amada Peet acts like it never happened once Cusack comes through.

[4] I feel no guilt if I’ve “spoiled” the movie here.  This is sorta the point.  The narrative doesn’t matter at all.  We already know what is going to happen.  It is moot.  My question, why even bother w/ a narrative at all in such a film?

[5] Though Woody Harrelson does have a delightful cameo here as the crazy End-is-Nigh guy.

[6] Actually, for the global nature of the disaster in 2012 we get quite a limited version of it.

[7] Literally.

[8] It did.

[9] He also made The Patriot (2000) w/ Mel Gibson, btw.

[10] I.e. the governments of the world knew about this impending disaster 3 years beforehand, but kept it under their hat so the world wouldn’t descend into anarchy, secretly building 4 arks to save government members and the fabulously rich.  When one of the arks fails near the end the major moral question is: do we let these 100,000 people on knowing that it might endanger those already here.  This is of course to gloss over the fact that everyone might have been saved if the initial decision was to tell the planet and mobilize the entirety of global production toward one single goal: survival.  Where to enter this morass, or even worse why one would enter it, is beyond me.  No one could take this film seriously enough to seriously answer the moral questions it tentatively raises.

The Eco-Jeremiad: Projecting Crises of the “Moment”

/ Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

Here’s my paper from the CUNY conference “Projections: Speculating on Presence, Absence, and Nonsense. . .”

One of the really curious recent narrative trends in the representation of ecological disaster has been its projection into what could be called, more-or-less, the “present.”  The apocalyptic imagination, of course, has a long tradition of conceiving its present moment as a site of eschatological fulfillment: John of Patmos imagined the scenes he depicted in Revelations to be only a short time away; in the sixteenth century the Anabaptists wholly believed that they were in the process of establishing a New Jerusalem in Münster; the nuclear narrative of the twentieth century, from its earliest instantiation in Nevil Shute’s 1957 On the Beach to the short-lived (2006-8) television series Jericho, has been singular in projecting an imagined nuclear holocaust into its present moment; and, perhaps most noticeably, the Left Behind series has taken the whole history of Christian teleology and unapologetically found itself to be at the moment of the Bible’s eschatological culmination.  As Frank Kermode has pointed out: “the great majority of interpretations of Apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near.  Consequently the historical allegory is always having to be revised; time discredits it.”[1] This is, of course, the inherent problem in prophesying or predicting the End to be so near: time discredits it, and this holds just as true for secular and nuclear apocalypses as it does for millenarian ones.  This is perhaps why there has been equally such a gamut of post-apocalyptic, far-future narratives which dispensed with prediction and simply posited themselves after the end.   This has been precisely the case for a large number of eco-apocalypse or eco-disaster narratives.  Early films like Soylent Green, to the cyberpunk of the ‘80s, to Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road, took it as a given that whatever future they could imagine was one in which eco-disaster had already occurred, for in a large sense, they were right; it already had.

Unlike the grand narratives of Christianity or Cold-War-era Mutually Assured Destruction, eco-disaster narratives really only emerged after it was clear that the Earth was already disastrously and unalterably affected by human action.  It need hardly be mentioned that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is largely seen as initiating this awareness, but more important for my purposes, is the mode in which it was presented, which was rhetorically blatant in its evocation of human extinction.  Carson, from her opening “Fable for Tomorrow” and her first chapter “The Obligation to Endure,” immediately draws the connection between nuclear and ecological disaster: “Along with the possibility of the extinction of mankind by nuclear war, the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man’s total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm—substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ shells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.”[2] For Carson, and many after her, the implications are clear: ecological meltdown is equal to, if not more of a threat than nuclear war.  Indeed, Lawrence Buell has said as much: “Apocalypse is the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal.”[3] The recent appearance of such texts as Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital Trilogy, consisting of Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005), and Sixty Days and Counting (2007),[4] Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and forthcoming 2012 (expected to be released in November, 2009), M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008), and Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us (2007), all, notably, released within the last five years, are nothing if not mobilizations of this master metaphor, of harnessing world-historical anxieties of a global eschaton[5] for their own rhetorical and affective ends.

What is perhaps so curious about their appearance, however, is that they all more-or-less posit a singular moment of crisis, an apocalyptic moment equal to pushing the fated “big red button,” or your friends and loved ones suddenly and rapturously vanishing.  For Robinson, Emmerich, and Shyamalan, these are not their first dips into the environmental disaster pool—ecological or apocalyptic themes have made many appearances in their work.  Robinson’s Mars and California Trilogy, Shyamalan’s The Village, Emmerich’s Independence Day, Godzilla, and Das Arche Noah Prinzip, all tackled environmental themes, at times displaying high-levels of narrative, aesthetic, and most importantly for my purposes, ecological complexity.  The texts I will be discussing today, however, in Greg Garrad’s words, are places where the “apocalypse provides an emotionally charged frame of reference within which complex, long-term issues are reduced to monocausal crises.”[6] These texts seem to blatantly ignore the facts that ecological disaster a) has already occurred and is always already occurring, b) that simply the term ecology should evoke the interconnectedness and complexity of the site of the disaster in question (the world), and c) that environmental disaster is not this absurd(ly simple).  Robinson, to his credit, is only positing abrupt rather than instantaneous climate change, the kind that can occur over a period of three years with extreme variation and complexity, but he must do some fancy scientific footwork to enable this narrative device, citing

the almost unbelievably quick beginning of the Younger Dryas, which analysis of the Greenland ice cores revealed had happened in only three years.  Three years, for a major global shift from the world-wide pattern that climatologists called warm-wet, to the worldwide pattern called cool-dry-windy.  It was such a radical notion that it had forced climatologists to acknowledge that there must be nonlinear tipping points in the global climate, leading to general acceptance of what was a really new concept in climatology: abrupt climate change.[7]

Sadly for Robinson, abrupt climate change is completely not “a really new concept” when it comes to narrative fiction.  In Kermode’s seminal work on apocalyptic narratives, The Sense of an Ending, he credits the multicultural ubiquity of eschatological narratives to the fact that “we think in terms of crisis rather than temporal ends; and make much of subtle disconfirmation and peripeteia.”[8] Kermode’s notion of peripeteia, which comes from the Greek, meaning: a reversal of circumstances or turning point, is what narrative fiction depends on to make sense of the world, a world in which we are denied satisfying ends in reality, a world in which we are in what he calls the “middest”; and apocalyptic fiction depends upon peripeteia all the more so.  So it is unsurprising that Robinson’s trilogy ends in such a classic comic mode as to almost be a parody of itself: a wedding with three marriages.

I would like to suggest that what is at stake here, is that there is a fundamental failure of these recent environmental apocalyptic narratives to do what Kermode finds so important about having a “sense of an ending”—they simply do not make sense of the world.  For more traditional end-time narratives, nuclear and Christian, the peripeteia, the singular moment of the bombs dropping, of Christ’s triumphant return to Earth, in Kermode’s terms, made sense of a world and history which didn’t end.  His justification of this was largely rooted in the “centuries [long tradition] of disconfirmed apocalyptic prediction,”[9] with its interminable postponement of the prophecy in Revelations, with a temporality in which individual humans may have ended in death, but that temporality found no culmination in-and-of-itself.  The major difference in conceiving environmental apocalypse, is not that there is no true end, but that it is always occurring as a process, and in our current discourse, as always ending/beginning (the old tale of nature as a cycle of birth and death).  Species go extinct, the ice caps melt, New Orleans floods.  These are all “ends,” not one, big, garish, world-historical ending, but each one contributing to a categorically different sense of an ending.  This is not simply living in the middest, in a moment of crisis; instead, crisis ceases to make the kind of sense that Kermode is suggesting it does when it is not only ubiquitously and globally in our present, but in the deep geological past.  What is at stake here, is simply the nature of change, that change is more fundamental than the stability seen on both sides of the peripeteia.  In fact, everything becomes peripeteia from within a rigorous ecological perspective.  In Brian Massumi’s terms, the environment is “that which includes rupture but is nevertheless continuous.”[10] Consequently, to imagine environmental disaster which takes the singular moment in a present as its point of origin in the traditional mode of eschatological narrative, is to construct a narrative that, at a very fundamental level, is obscuring and simplifying its own ends with regard to its rhetorical call for environmental consciousness—this is a clear case of ends not being coterminous with their means.  What is occurring in such narratives, is a genealogy of the apocalypse which Lee Quniby traces in her book Anti-Apocalypse: “In attempting to represent the unrepresentable, the unknowable—the End, or death par excellence—apocalyptic writings are a quintessential technology of power/knowledge”[11]; in other words, the environmental apocalypses I am discussing, posing as Green or eco-conscious, because of their hyperbolic attempt to represent some singular, unrepresentable (and physically and scientifically impossible) eschaton, find themselves within a far different ideological regime, one with a long tradition in the American milieu: what Bercovitch calls the jeremiad, or in this case, the eco-jeremiad.

Perhaps nowhere is my point made more clearly than about midway through The Day After Tomorrow. In the film, scientist Jack Hall, played by Dennis Quaid, warns the United States government of an impending ecological catastrophe on a level heretofore unseen brought about by the melting of polar ice.   His entreaties, of course, go unheard and nothing is done to avoid the approaching disaster.  What consequently occurs, is a kind of meteorological singularity, where a higher level of “order spontaneously emerges out of chaos.”[12] The chaos here, is global weather, with all of its intricacies and moments of unpredictability organizing itself into, for lack of a better term, a “perfect storm.”  This storm subsequently covers most of North America in glacial ice in a few days, and provides the film with its requisite spectacular special effects and disaster sequences.  This is in-and-of-itself completely implausible and fantasmatic—a necessary device, a peripeteia, to get the disaster film rolling.  But the film doesn’t stop there in its complete disregard for meteorological science.   In the eye of this storm, is a peculiar meteorological anomaly, which causes anything to freeze, and not simply freeze, but become literally frozen in place.  The result of this, is that we see characters literally running from the cold, as if cold could be run from, as if it were some crazy knife-wielding psycho in a slasher-flick.  All of the heterogeneous, rhizomatic, and non-linear complexity involved in ecological systems, converge in this absurd scene as something completely singular, locatable at a localized point, an origin, a specific moment in a temporal and spatial present.  One could assume, that the film is attempting to convey its thinly veiled and simplistic eco-politics (which boils down to something like “we have to save the planet”) in this hyperbolic scene.  The opposite, however, occurs, as the film reduces complex ecological processes into a singular fantasmatic spectacle, subsequently pulling a veil of māyā over any potential political or ecological consciousness which might have been produced.  In short, this scene completely exposes The Day After Tomorrow’s ideological project as one wholly based upon a propagandist paranoia, creating such a monumental level of terror and fear through its spectacle of destruction, that its “ecological message” is difficult to divorce formally from the discourse of “threat levels.”  And of course, the duration of the film is devoted to the banally normative narrative of Dennis Quaid, having failed to save the world, attempting to save the only thing “he has left”: his children, or in other words, “the future.”

A very similar catastrophic singularity occurs in Shyamalan’s The Happening. In this film, reacting to a humanity now both grown out of proportion and having become a very real threat to the stability of the biosphere, vegetable nature has to decided to collectively “organize” and release a toxin into the atmosphere of the North-Eastern United States which causes humans to spontaneously commit suicide.  Again, the message here isn’t terribly subtle: that we are all collectively committing suicide by treating the environment in the way we do.  And again, we have the characters played by Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel literally running from a nature turned into malign killer, and the ominous rustling of leaves that accompanies the toxins’ release.  The significant difference here, is that Shyamalan is very much ascribing a kind of emergent subjectivity to nature itself; the environment is “striking back,” if you will.  That this takes the form of “cleansing” or “purifying” itself of the human scourge, not only simplifies the complex interactions between humans and their environment, relying on the age old binary of human vs. nature as separable entities and the edenic myth of a pure or untouched mother earth, it also imagines that there is still a “nature” left (as opposed to the postmodern discourses of Jameson and others which argue that the category of nature has very much disappeared).  What is at stake for Shyamalan, then, is very much a kind of throw-back, second-wave ecological awareness which uncritically simplifies environmental consciousness into the act of anthropomorphizing nature, to respecting it as a quasi-subject.  In short, there is very little here except an impossible cry to return to an idyllic pastoral which never existed in the first place.

My last example is Alan Weisman’s non-fictional, speculative account of what would happen if humans suddenly vanished, in his book The World Without Us.  Weisman’s book functions quite nicely as a kind of companion piece or handbook to the whole of my discussion today.  His entire exploration depends upon a massive, speculative, and fantasmatic peripeteia:

Suppose the worst happened.  Human extinction is a fait accompli.  Not by nuclear calamity, asteroid collision, or anything ruinous enough to also wipe out almost everything else, leaving whatever remained in some radically altered, reduced state.  Nor some grim eco-scenario in which we agonizingly fade, dragging many more species with us in the process.

Instead, picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished.  Tomorrow. [13]

Weisman’s central question in this book is to ask: “Is it possible that, instead of heaving a huge biological sigh of relief, the world without us would miss us?”[14] and in this his project is admirable in its attempts to be complexly aware of the two-way street of interconnectedness between humans and their environment.  Ultimately, however, the book argues that in a period of geologic time, all the evidence that would really be left that homo sapiens ever inhabited the Earth, would be a thin layer of plastic in the geologic record.  What is really notable about Weisman, however, is that he requires an even more wild, science-fictional scenario for his more-or-less scientific purposes than Robinson, Emmerich, or Shyamalan.  To actually deal with the reality of eco-apocalypse, he requires an even more implausible and radical peripeteia than does speculative fiction.  He is operating in a completely narrative mode in this book, and his narrative requires the complete absence of any human presence, for his project would be categorically impossible with it.  In other words, projecting the presence of humans into imagining the future of the world would absolutely prevent his imaginative work; the future only makes sense here as a projection of absence.

What makes possible the categorization of these examples under the term “jeremiad,” is that they use prophecies of doom, singular, momentary events to orbit around as a way of catalyzing their rhetoric, catalyzing their thinly veiled calls for ecological repentance before it is “too late.”  Is it any wonder then, that the Puritan “errand into the wilderness,” becomes here a call for an errand to bring back the wilderness so that once again a horizonless field of potential can be opened up, rather than the enclosed, decimated, mapped, and measured space of late-capitalist post-urbanity?  And what better way to bring back the wilderness than the apocalyptic expurgation of the humans responsible for its corruption in the first place?  This yearning for natural purity, of a nature which reasserts itself as a clearly defined category when it wipes out human civilization, which affirms its own existence through negation, completely misses the fact that this was only made possible by the degradation of the planet in the first place—i.e. the “purity” with which nature strikes back in these texts is precisely only possible through human intervention, as if nature had a fuse.  Massumi writes: “The concepts of nature and culture need serious reworking, in a way that expresses the irreducible alterity of the nonhuman in and through its active connection to the human and vice versa.  Let matter be matter, brains be brains, and jellyfish be jellyfish, and culture be nature, in irreducible alterity and infinite connection.”[15] This is of course not to suggest that every ecological narrative/text functions like this, nor even every eco-disaster text, but rather that these texts’ close-appearance to one another, their high-level of visibility and popularity, and their situatedness within the political climate of the last eight years, are very much involved in an ecological imagination which sees the current moment as singularly enmeshed in anxiety about the sustainability of the present.  In projecting their crises wholly within the moment, in privileging the singular and specific over the distributed and general, however, they’ve elided the necessary temporal backdrop which is necessary for an aesthetic of environmental crisis that is not over-and-above all simply an expression of and emergence from the function of narrative.

And this gets to the heart of the matter.  If “real world” disasters like Katrina have taught us anything, it is that catastrophe and disaster, even more-so ecological disaster, is not linear nor narrative—there is no peripeteia.  Rather, disaster occurs rhizomatically, as a distributed network of effects, in smooth rather than striated space, as “tendencies—. . . pastness opening directly onto a future, but with no present to speak of.  For the present is lost.”[16] The ancient and more recent apocalyptic traditions simply are not transferable in their mode of projecting temporality into some singular moment in the future which legitimizes or ends history.  Consequently, I would like to end today with the idea that it is quite possibly the failure of certain narratives to adequately imagine ecological disaster, the failure of the apocalyptic tradition itself when mapped upon the environment, which may in fact be productively revealing, which may open up a more complex field.  These failures point toward the potential emergence of literary and critical eco-discourses not constrained to imagine themselves at a singular moment of crisis, but rather into a multiplicity which might be able to project itself into a temporally non-linear smooth space which can view crisis and possibility simultaneously.

[1] Kermode, Frank.  The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 8.

 

[2] Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring (New York: Mariner Books, 2002 [1962]), 8.  Emphases mine.

[3] Buell, Lawrence.  The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 285.  Cf. Greg Garrard, Ecocriticism (New York: Routledge, 2004), 93.

[4] Anyone familiar with Robinson will surely note his penchant for trilogies titled in this manner.

[5] Although always curiously locating their epicenters in the United States.

[6] Garrard, 105.

[7] Robinson, Kim Stanley.  Fifty Degrees Below (New York: Bantam Books, 2005), 25.

[8] Kermode, 26.

[9] ibid., 16.

[10] Massumi, Brian.  Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 51.

[11] Lee Quinby. Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1994), xiii.

[12] DeLanda, Manuel.  War in the Age of Intelligent Machines (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 15.

[13] Weisman, Alan.  The World Without Us (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2007), 3-4.

[14] ibid., 5.

[15] Massumi, 39.

[16] ibid., 30.

/ Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment

I’ll be presenting a paper at the 2009 CUNY English Graduate Conference: “Projection: Speculating on Presence, Absence, and Nonsenese. . .” this friday, at 1:00.  Here’s my abstract.

The Eco-Jeremiad:
Projecting Crises of the ‘Moment’

In recent years the long history of end-time projection has seen added to its corpus an increasingly numerous amount of ecological disaster narratives which, unlike religious or nuclear apocalypses, would seemingly not depend for their narrative coherence upon what Frank Kermode calls peripeteia (moment of change or turning point), if for no other reason than environmental disaster has been/is already occurring, and as such its originary moment cannot be clearly localized.  This is arguably significantly different than the nuclear text, which Derrida claims to be a “phenomenon [which] is fabulously textual. . . to the extent that, for the moment, a nuclear war has not taken place: one can only talk and write about it.”  And yet many eco-disaster texts have retained the narrative necessity of the moment of disaster, as if one can only talk or write about it because it has not taken place: Kim Stanley Robinson’s abrupt climate change in the Science in the Capital trilogy, the paradigmatic instance of this when characters literally runfrom the cold in The Day After Tomorrow, the instantaneity of nature’s revenge in Shyamalan’s The Happening, or the speculative necessity of Weisman’s non-fictional The World Without Us to have humanity vanish in a flash—all depend upon disastrous peripeteia.   This paper will investigate the relationship between the recent prevalence of such narratives and their rhetorico-ideological function—a mode which I would like to call the eco-jeremiad—so as to ultimately propose/project the possibility of an emergent eco-discourse capable of accounting for the failure of traditional eschatological temporality to represent eco-disaster, a failure all the more productive in revealing the impossibility of mapping past projections of disaster upon a present in which it is or has been always already occurring.