The Apocalypse Archive: Reconsidering Nuclear Criticism
There has been a curious trend toward a reconsideration of the apocalyptic as a valid category for utopian possibility in some recent Marxist thought, perhaps best exemplified in the recent work of Slavoj Žižek. Responding to the economic crisis in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce,Žižek tells us that, “paradoxically, the only way to prevent the disaster is to accept it as inevitable.” It is precisely against such retrograde apocalypticism that this paper would like to propose the necessity for reconsidering nuclear criticism. Quite provocatively, in the founding document of this critical practice, Jacques Derrida informs us that nuclear war—and consequently any contemporary apocalyptic formulation—“is fabulously textual.” What this claim allows Derrida to explore is the literary archive’s relationship to disaster, that the archive is simultaneously the object of destruction as well as its agent. Though with the end of the Cold War nuclear criticism all but disappeared after 1993, I claim that, to think through the utopian possibilities contained within and around the archive, especially in light of the burgeoning new technologies of archivization attending the information age, we must take very seriously a return to a critical practice capable of not only watching over the archive of disaster—whether in terms of destruction or accumulation—but imagining the archive of possibility. It is precisely through a reconsideration of nuclear criticism as anti-eschatological, as against apocalypse in all its forms, rhetorical, messianic, or otherwise, that a path through and toward the utopian archive may be found.
So I found the following below at The Howling Fantods. I guess a bunch of people have been engaged in creating the films Himself made in Infinite Jest (985-93, n. 24). This is probably the first post among many, and clearly there are some things to be said about making a film from an imagined archive in a novel that is already highly archival (recursive feedback loops. . . go!).
The following clip is from a film made by the Air Force during 1956-7 that was recently made available by the US National Archive’s motion picture unit. Read about it and watch the full film here. I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising at all that the military commissioned a film to prepare those who might be involved for the eventuality of nuclear exchange b/t the US and USSR, but it also points toward the fact that even for the military nuclear war was a surprisingly textual (or filmic) phenomenon that could really only be imagined. Fascinating.
Newsweek (of all publications. . . ) has just made available many pages from the David Foster Wallace Archive at the University of Texas available. Check out a bunch of stuff that didn’t make the cut for the final draft of Infinite Jest here.
So I have most assuredly reached those annual halcyon days of summer when I turn into a zombified eating, sleeping, drinking, smoking, writing, media-consuming machine. The evidence for this is that I just watched both seasons of Dollhouse (Joss Whedon, 2009-10).
It happens every summer like the monsoons,[1] and when it hits, the force is equal and the downpour as brief. For instance, I quite literally had the following thoughts today: “well, if I go get food, and I walk at a fairly brisk rate while reading Wittgenstein’s The Blue and Brown Books, I not only can get multiple functional activities done at once—1) eating, b/c that will help me go back to work refreshed (maybe I’ll even take a nap), 2) reading, b/c that is what I’m doing right now and I would actually waste more reading time getting in and out of the car than if I just walked and read at the same time—but (less) importantly, I can get 3) exercise. Though exercise probably should have been one of the first thoughts about my walking/reading/eating, or at least just leaving my fucking house for pretty much any reason whatsoever should have occurred to me as a “good thing,” it not only came in as a firm third in my thinking, it was an incidental thing, an added bonus for my over-caffeinated robot-body.
But the tragedy is actually not my becoming-machine, for that is surely something to aspire to at times,[2] but that this moment of summer also always entails (desperately) finding something I can spend mind-numbingly countless hours doing. Many things, of course, have served this function, and surely not all bad, but more-often-than-not I read too many comic books, or play too many video games, or watch too many sports, or watch too much internet tv. I tell myself: I’m still consuming media, so how could it possibly be detrimental to do these activities, but the fact of the matter is, in what sick-and-twisted world does one come to the point, after seriously, rigorously, and carefully consuming media all day, where “wind downing” or “relaxing” is accomplished by consuming more media?Well, I’ll tell you. The kind of world where I feel guilty for doing anything else, like, the crippling question: “why am I wasting so much time not working?” but simultaneously experiencing the full awareness of guilty-type media-consuming (I’m like a really bad media-vegan [or vegetarian, like I eat media eggs, fish, and cheese]), as in, “why am I wasting all this time watching [insert crappy shit here.]” Most of the time this doesn’t bother me, b/c a 2 hour (at most) crappy SF movie is at least only 2 hours, but all of Dollhouse in a week? That is many, many more hours spent. Damn summer.
But anyway, so I of course have something to say about it. Dollhouse, that is. (Gotta get something out of it [for my troubles and anxieties, and esp. as a way of celebrating these halcyon days—in other words, make guilt work[3]]).
The first thing to say is that Dollhouse is overwhelmingly a “tale of archival crisis.” No two bones about it, and though of course much of what I say here will be informed by this insight, I would not like to make it the meat of the matter.[4] But to bring us up to speed. . . .
Dollhouse is a Josh Whedon affair (Buffy the Vampire Slayer [1997-2003] & Firefly [2002]), and I must admit two things: 1) his affairs are not one’s I find all that appealing, and 2) I’ve never seen Buffy.[5] It’s set more-or-less in the present in a panopticon for dolls—i.e. humans who are able to be imprinted w/ any personality whatsoever. The protagonist, Echo, is able to incorporate many personalities at once by the end (for “good,” as opposed to her male counterpart Alpha, for “evil”), and she ultimately kills the head of the evil corporation. Two episodes show us 10 years in the future, where the technology to imprint humans has made pretty-much-everyone into mindless killing machines, and postapocalyptic-savior-type-stuff occurs. Yeah, that’s about it.
The narrative aside, the place I think Joss Whedon excels is that he makes clear some possibilities for the future of serial television w/ this show. For the past few years all the really good television, though somewhat serial, resembled really ambitious comic-books more than they did the A-Team.[6] (Plots where you pretty much had to see every show to keep up, epic world building, etc. You can picture it.) What is interesting about Dollhouse is that it is the very fact that it is a tale of archival crisis that permits it to be semi-successful in heavily serialized form. Whedon has allowed himself the opportunity for his main actress, the surprisingly good Eliza Dushku, to play a different role in each episode. Couple this w/ a clear eschatology to the show, and you’ve effectively made it possible for anyone to tune in to any episode, even knowing that the series is moving toward some clearly defined end,[7] and not only understand more-or-less what is going on, but even be entertained (and perhaps think a bit). There are, of course, some really striking episodes that wholly stand out on their own, and for something that is as, well, I’ll say it, archival as Dollhouse, this feels like quite an achievement to me.
To extend my discussion, I’m tempted to talk about: identity as archival in the show, which it surely is and it’s freaking obvious; the panopticon they put the dolls in, where they’re imprinted as infantile, passive, and accepting, i.e. all sorts of (whomever) undertones; having someone yet again messianically save the world who is a multiplicity; and . . . well, I guess there really aren’t really an books[8]—but anyway, these are all surely there and deserve to be commented upon. But I will refrain, and really for one reason.
No matter how many interesting things Dollhouse may be doing, I never get the sense that Whedon even remotely intends them. Not even to get into any New Critical territory, but (and this is something I rarely say) Whedon is just bad. His actors are terrible. The writing is horrible. The cinematography under-realized. And, sad to say, he has very low production value b/c of his low budget.[9]Firefly was the same. And I say this fully realizing that there are drone-cells of fans out there who worship the guy, and I think ultimately for good reason, but, b/c I feel no reason to even justify this remark w/ pretty much anything, I know he’s in the realm of Adult Swim or Bob Dylan for me.[10]
Whedon is popular b/c he’s the only person who’s shown how one might still do a serial, Law & Order-type show w/ an over-arching, compelling, long (SF) narrative. He’s bad b/c he’s the first(-ish).[11] His television sometimes feels like a naseous mix of Bionic Woman, Bewitched, Kafka and General Hospital, w/ enough Star-[something] thrown in for good measure. Don’t get me wrong, I was fucking entertained. (I mean, I watched the whole series in a week for chrissakes.) And this will be the ultimate success of this type of serial, for, deep down, our true desire is for a Knightrider remake (w/ David Hasselhof) or else a new Lynch tv show where they give him, like, billions of dollars to make a ten-season show.[12] Someone is gonna come along who learned from Whedon and perhaps give us a good mix of this. No reason to watch Dollhouse in the meantime, unless you’re interested in the intersection(s) of archives and the Apocalypse.
[2] And I mean this w/ no sense of irony, esp. not the irony of the footnote.
[3] It used to be, “make anxiety fun,” what has happened to me!
[4] If you want my take, definition, or defense of this term (as a sub-genre of SF), email me at bradfest@gmail.com for a copy of a conference paper I recently delivered.
[5] So whatever I have to say, keep this in mind. (This is also to suggest I’ve perhaps found my major summer time-suck.)
[6] I.e. a show w/ a high production value. A challenge: what year do you think they’ll remake Lost?
[7] Much clearer and more satisfying than Lost btw (but of course also not).
[8] Though learning to read is certainly an important step for Echo.
[9] I would love to see what he would do if he was given a blank check. C’mon Guggenheim.
[10] Things I simply don’t like at all that many people I very much respect enjoy w/ seeming (over-)enthusiasm.
[11] Okay, not even close to being the first. Just go w/ me.
[12] Do I hear: Television Event of the Decade? I mean, as the title?
I just recently attended the annual Science Fiction Research Association Conference held this year in Carefree, AZ,[1] where I delivered a paper entitled: “Tales of Archival Crisis: [Neal] Stephenson’s Reimagining of the Post-Apocalyptic Frontier.” I argued for the existence of a significant and unnoticed sub-genre of SF therein by way of Stephenson’s Anathem: what I call the tale of archival crisis. Though I cannot present that paper here, primarily for reasons that I still have some work to do on it and b/c I want to develop it into a slightly longer piece, I had the great luck to stumble across Pandorum (Christian Alvart, 2009) one night at the conference,[2] via the instant play available on Netflix, and was shocked at the resonance it had w/ my more general theoretical constructions of the tale of archival crisis.[3] It, mixed w/ the rather disappointing Living in the End Times, by Slavoj Žižek—my primary reading recently during various decadent kinds of vacation—has unavoidably occasioned some kind of brief commentary (following).
Pandorum is the kind of (excellent) B-SF-movie[4] that I was surprised to see Steven Shaviro has yet to comment upon.[5] And in lieu of his perhaps much more perspicuous take on it, I submit that it captures many of the features of what I call the “tale of archival crisis” very well. In short, Pandorum is a film in which the archive mutates/evolves, and this change threatens the very survival of the human species. In other words, the archive itself produces an apocalyptic-type crisis.
Pandorum is set in a far future where, of course, humans have “exhausted” the earth, have found another planet, and sent an ar/-chive/-k to populate it. This ship is filled w/ tens-of-thousands of cryogenically frozen humans who have been injected w/ something that causes their mutation/evolution to speed up exponentially[6]; in addition to this, the ship holds the “entirety” of the earth’s biological archive (i.e. DNA, seeds, animals, etc. etc. [one can imagine]). But (again, of course) things have gone terribly wrong. (Spoilers.) For whatever (dumbass) reasons, they’ve only left 3 people in charge of the ship at any time, and one of these people (for reasons that remain scientifically unclear[7]) has gone batshit insane, and killed the other two on duty w/ him. The film explains this man in mythological terms—i.e. he took total control of the ship, became a sort of god, but got bored so went back into cryo-sleep.
So, the film opens w/ two men awakening from cryo-sleep and, of course, it induces temporary amnesia.[8] One of these men is the god-man reawakened, but we don’t “know” that till the end. (There’s all sorts of hallucination, psycho-camera-work in between.) The other is our necessary hero/messiah/whatever. All this aside, there are 3 striking things about this film:
1) Near the end of the film, shortly after we have learned that the earth has been utterly destroyed, the characters open the observation windows and cannot help but see an inky blackness. Dennis Quaid’s character (the god-man) immediately assumes that all creation has been wiped away, that this little ship is the only thing left. I’m not sure if horror has ever been so effectively boiled down to its pure “essence” than in this scene.
2) Ben Foster’s (the hero’s) character, Bower, drops into a pit of mutated, sleeping demi-humans, who are usually engaged in constantly cannibalizing everything in sight b/c of the general lack of any food-stuffs on the ship, but at this moment are sleeping. These “humans,” b/c of the injection for exponential adaptation and evolution they’ve received, have quite effectively “adapted” to the ship. Their sense of smell is incredible, so Foster has to drape himself in the skin of their cannibalized victims in order to cross their mass of (orgiastically) sleeping bodies.
3) We learn near the end of the film that, though this journey was only supposed to take b/t 100-200 years, they’ve been asleep/traveling for nearly 1000. Meaning: plenty of time for evolution and whole new cultural paradigms have been provided for these “humans” to pretty much change into an apocalyptic threat b/c of their archival nature—i.e. they “awake” on occasion from the vast farms of cryogenically frozen humans and “contribute” to the various species’ changes that take place in the film.
Some things should be clear about the above information. What is encountered in Pandorum is humanity itself encountered as archive. Both in their spatial orientation—they’re stored cryogenically for populating another planet—and at the very root of their genetic code—they can adapt to whatever their surroundings are, and if they inhabit a dark, far-past its expiration-date-ship, they’ll develop cannibalism to its nth degree. In addition, the universe itself, for the brief moment when they think creation has been deleted, can be seen as archival—in terms of the “archival remainder”: what is left after the archive has been deleted (meaning everything has been deleted) is merely this part-of-no-part, this piece of humanity left to experience its horrific dying gasps. Lastly, to traverse the ground[9] of the posthumanity that develops in the film, one must quite literally cover themselves in the archive of the dead, in the skin of those who have gone before.
So it is no wonder that the final scene of the film is the hero “ejecting” the archive from this thoroughly apocalyptic archival-formulation, b/c he’s realized they’re all actually at the bottom of the ocean on the planet they meant to go to in the first place. So when we get a wide-digital-shot of archives of human beings breaching the surface, with the implied semi-utopian reading that paradise has not only been found, but achieved, we should be skeptical. What has been released is nothing less than the part-of-no-part, the ineluctable remainder of the archive that just “happened” to be saved from the very logic of the archive itself. In other words, the archive of Pandorum has virtually no hopeful limits. The film makes very clear that when you categorize, inject, and “break-down” human beings into their constituent parts (reify them), only their end is assured. Consequently, the film’s ending is thoroughly ambiguous, b/c to take it as hopeful, we would have had to ignore the entirety of the film, and only participate in whatever ideological illusions still hold today. We should emerge from its fantasmatic archive-destroying-the-human-species-images w/ another thought in mind entirely: perhaps the only solution is to eject our archive into the void, eject the totality of human “knowledge” (and other stuff) into the void, b/c we’re absolutely doomed (unless we all become bartleby[10]), and that is the only hope we have. And this, of course, is depressing. Thank you Pandorum.
[2] After watching Allison de Fren’s excellent, disturbing, and timely Mechanical Brides (2010, unfinished), which I excitedly hope is finished and released sometime soon to the general public (i.e. festivals take note).
[3] As in: I just finished a piece delimiting exactly what is going on in Pandorum. Synchronicity like this should be outlawed.
[4] Btw, one of the arguments used during this conference was that SF represented a significant amount of the highest grossing films of all time, an argument that, if any sort of critical work was applied, would clearly be seen to be an over-generalization at best, and a total ignorance of the really interesting SF that is being made today that doesn’t really gross anything at worst. In other words, you SF scholars cannot justify yourself by referencing how much Harry Potter Whatever made, but should be consciously and responsibly investing yourselves in the actual interesting and relevant SF that is pecuniarily worthless. Sorry, this sort of polemic could not help but be occasioned by this gathering.
[5] In other words, I finished watching the film and immediately went to The Pinocchio Theory expecting to see something interesting on it. It wasn’t there, so in lieu of this imagined document, see his excellent discussion of Gamer (Mark Neveldine & Brian Taylor, 2009), here.
[6] I.e. going to a new planet necessitates quick adaptation.
[7] Suffice it to say that “being in space for inordinate, hopeless amounts of time,” is enough to drive one insane.
[8] I.e. it is thus very easy for the film to insert instantaneous memory recovery at appropriate narrative moments.
I will be attending the annual Science Fiction Research Association Conference in Carefree, AZ, taking place between June 24th-26th. I will be delivering a paper from the abstract below on the 26th at 4:00. A link to the program. Hope to see you there.
“Tales of Archival Crisis: Stephenson’s Reimagining of the Post-Apocalyptic Frontier”
With the recent publication of his novel Anathem (2008), Neal Stephenson has coherently solidified the presence and importance of what may have been until this point an unnoticed tradition within Science Fiction: what I would like to call the tale of archival crisis. In labeling the novel as such, it finds clear forerunners in Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama (1973), and Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye (1974). In each of these works, an archive plays a central role in the narrative space. This space functions in two important ways. The tale of archival crisis is thoroughly eschatological. The archive is a site of both preserving something after the apocalypse, as well as a mode of bringing another catastrophe about. More importantly, perhaps, this space is also thoroughly liminal. Each of these narratives depends upon the archive’s location at some limit, situated on the frontier of the represented world. Not only does the tale of archival crisis complicate common representations of post-apocalyptic landscapes as a sort of neo-American West, it does so by drawing complex relationships between knowledge, space, destruction, and civilization, relationships whose importance Anathem brings to bear in exploding the very notions of liminality any eschatological narrative depends upon. This paper will explore the significance of Stephenson’s reimagining of temporality and spatiality both in terms of the tale of archival crisis and, more broadly, in the radical contribution he has made to post-apocalyptic Science Fiction.
With what was probably a fairly predictable final image—Jack closing his eyes and dying—so ended last night one of the most ambitious television shows ever to appear on a network. I have been following Lost (Carlton Cuse & Damon Lindelof, 2004-10) fairly voraciously and adamantly for quite a while now, and have refrained up until this moment to comment upon it at all. The major reason for this is that the extremely large majority of any writing or thinking done about Lost has been mostly in the realm of speculation, conjecture, and theory. Though the show has wonderfully pointed toward, and at times even required these sorts of activities, I personally have never been very interested in predicting what would happen on the show. Perhaps this is merely the narrative scholar in me who is able to begin and end most narratives in a fairly short amount of time (i.e. less than 6 years) and consequently feels no reason at all to speculate (i.e. it is a futile and worthless endeavor); or perhaps it was the very strident statement by the show’s creators that they knew how the arc would play out, how it would end, and that they were writing toward it. Well, we now have that end, and I, for one, am quite disappointed.
What follows is in no way a referendum on the show. If anything, despite Cuse and Lindelof’s admission that they ended the show how they wanted to, I think the pressures of writing in such a massively popular medium such as network television (and who knows, the pressures from ABC or Disney executives) dictated the easily accessible, touchy-feely, fairly non-complex, overly-emotional ending we received.[1] To have the entire “sideways” world of season 6 be purgatory, and not just any purgatory, but one where all the characters had to come together so that they could move on to “heaven,” well. . . what more could we expect? This is television, after all, and not just any television, but network television. The recent trend w/ such slapdash shows like Flash Forward, V, and others—shows attempting to achieve Lost’s complexity and SF aspects—clearly demonstrates that the formal dictates of network television simply aren’t kind to this type of narrative. (In terms of SF, can anyone imagine Battlestar Galactica or the recent, and surprisingly good, Stargate Universe working on a network?) Needless to say, the creators of Lost gave a heroic, epic effort to attempt to make good network tv, and despite my qualms w/ the ending, they should be commended for this.
That doesn’t let them off the hook for the finale though. To paraphrase a contributor to one of the many comment-forums I was surfing through last night to see how people reacted,[2] the finale revealed that all the SF, physics, time-travel, weird twists and turns, etc. etc.—anyone who watches Lost knows what I’m talking about—all of that was a mere prop for what ultimately proved to be an emotional, character-driven soap opera. I don’t think I’m alone in saying I didn’t watch the show for its character development, let alone its acting. W/ the exception of Locke (Terry O’Quinn), Sayid (Naveen Andrews), and Ben (Michael Emerson), I think anyone would have to agree that the acting was pretty wretched on the show as a whole, at times bordering on the wholly melodramatic.[3] The characters were fairly “stock,” and were shallow enough, even w/ the massive effort put in to making them complex, that they felt like a prop to all the interesting mysterious stuff. Well, we should’ve known better. The whole format of the show—flashbacks, flashforwards, and flash-sideways—always privileged character development, so of course the show ends on this. I’m not surprised per se, just disappointed to realize that I’ve been invested in what I thought was a fascinating show, w/ massive intellectual ambition, only to discover that all that intellectual ambition was a mere prop, mere window dressing to a fairly normative narrative—i.e. redemption (gag).
Furthermore, this is not a rant about the “questions” that may or may not have been “answered.” No, what I am trying to suggest here, is that the appeal of Lost was always, I think for the majority of people—i.e. why people watched it rather than other dramas, be they doctor-related or not—an intellectual appeal. The show didn’t dumb itself down, but did the opposite. It asked its viewers to really strive at their mental limits in terms of narrative construction (see all the theorization and speculation). Though I wasn’t expecting a James-Bond-villian-type-explanation for all the mysteries of the island, it perhaps would have been more satisfying intellectually. They really could have used a page from detective fiction, noir, or even Sherlock Holmes on this one. But what last night’s finale so clearly emphasized, was that the show was never really about its intellectual aspects, at least to its writers, but rather about these poorly written, poorly constructed characters, who I always gave the benefit of the doubt to b/c of the show’s intellectual ambition. I, and most viewers—all the people who poured out complex theories, the cult of rabid fans, the Lostpedia, etc.—we were all duped. And I’d like to briefly suggest why this may have been so, though I’ll leave a more fully fleshed-out commentary for elsewhere (or later).
Basically, the appeal of Lost for, I would like to suggest, most of its really hardcore and even casual fans was an archival appeal. The show was probably the most reference-heavy popular artifact ever (?). Characters were unapologetically named after philosophers, literary figures, and scientists.[4] References to literature, film, music, science, math, politics, and pretty much anything one could think of were more than liberally inserted into the narrative; the show was inundated w/ them[5]; the show required its own wiki. And perhaps no other single popular document inspired as many searches through Wikipedia than Lost. And all this intellectual allusiveness was fun. If Lost was so popular, this was the reason. The show was hyperarchival par excellence.
What got really completely abandoned in the finale and the last season as a whole was the archival nature of the show. The plot boiled down to protecting some “light” (the source of life in the world) and a struggle b/t good and evil (sorta). All the intellectual, archival, referential, postmodern work the show did ended up being completely empty. I read recently somewhere that the relationship b/t Lost and its viewers was an unprecedented one, fostered by the internet like never before, and that this was adversely affecting the show. This is perhaps true, but what we surely didn’t receive last night was a gesture toward the fans (though it unapologetically was trying to do that, to thank the fans for watching). Rather, we got what should’ve been apparent the whole time. None of the intellectual stuff mattered. Cuse and Lindelof were interested in one thing, and one thing only. Telling a story. And this, if anything, is what should really be taken from the show.
Lost was a masterpiece in narrative form (even if it had horrible dialogue). For any aspiring writer, Lost would be a good place to start w/ investigating all that is possible w/ narrative. The show’s writers really pulled almost every narrative trick out of the hat—seriously, time travel, flashbacks and forward, fragmentary narrative, cliffhangers, near perfect narrative arcs, etc.—and they did so w/ a clear end in mind. In terms of narrative, the show is incredible. That is, except for the fact that the entirety of the show, and esp. season 5, was shown to be ultimately unimportant. The show was always, and still was w/ last night’s finale, about its teleology. The purposes of characters, their “destiny,” what the island in fact is (or was)—these were the things, intimately linked w/ the Lost’s hyperarchival nature, that drove the show. To end in the afterlife on a gooey note of camaraderie and community simply departs from the show’s narrative thrust. The ending was not faithful to what had been constructed. And I mean this statement formally.
For example, all of season 5 boiled down to whether to detonate the nuke or not,[6] whether destiny, time, etc. could be changed, whether eschatology was written in stone. And w/ the opening of season 6, we thought that it wasn’t: that we were given two worlds: one in which the bomb did its work, one in which it didn’t. B/c of the need to end, however, the bomb had to not work (sorta). So much effort was put into getting the characters where they were at the beginning of this season, but ultimately, so little of it was necessary. Did the narrative really require going back in time? No. Did it require leaving the island? Not really. Lost perhaps went through more gymnastic narrative contortions than any other network television show ever, only to end in the most simple manner. And I have to look at this as a failure.
Lost was an incredible opportunity to really do something quite amazing w/r/t narrative, archivization, and eschatology, and it totally balked at all three, taking the most normative, cliché, redemptive way out possible. The show could have proven that not only are most viewers far more intelligent than the networks would have us believe (seriously, one more cop show and I’m going on a tv hiatus), but that most tv viewers are starved for intellectual stimulation, and thus perhaps a more rigorous ending could have shown a new path to tv execs for making shows. In short, I don’t think we can lay the blame for the ending of Lost at the feet of the show’s creators, but rather the very popular culture it is so stridently situated in. It was an impossible show to begin w/, and the ending only reveals the failure of its impossible ambition. Given two options, between Entertainment that sublimates our own individual “emotions” and a rigorous, intellectually demanding, narrative experiment, network television will always choose option one. It sells. Consequently, Lost is entertainment plain and simple. Extremely well-made and captivating, yes. (I refuse to write off the whole show b/c of this end, btw.) But it provides what we want: that there is “meaning” to life, that everything will turn out “okay” even though we all die, that our relationships w/ people matter in the grand cosmic picture, that our own individual struggles and qualms really are important. Lost had a chance to take tv into the realm of art, and it failed, and this was ultimately an archival failure. We should not bemoan this. We should simply perhaps learn the lesson that ends are far more difficult to do well than virtually anything else in narrative, esp. when those ends are coming for so long and so ambitiously. The one thing everyone wanted that watched the show, what drove the whole damn thing, was “how is it gonna end?” Well, now we know, and perhaps if the show really achieved anything, it is the revelation that we should collectively stop caring about ends so much, any ends. Whether it be the end of the world or the end of a beloved television show, we need to be more archival and become non-eschatological. And if Lost is able to show this through its ultimate failure, then hats off.
[1] Let me also include the words sappy, cliché, heart-string-pulling, safe, easy, and perhaps even lazy.
[2] For the most part, even the people who appreciated the ending, don’t really have that much to say. The people who were slamming it, mostly didn’t even really watch the show, or were hyperbolic like: “Lost has wasted the last 6 years of my life.” Yikes. Like all the other disappointing cultural crap they were imbibing wasn’t just as worthless?
[3] For instance, Harold Perrineau’s performance as Michael was particularly awful. If I never hear “WALT!” again it will be too soon. Perrineau is esp. interesting w/r/t acting b/c he was excellent on OZ (Tom Fontana, 1997-2003), as was Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje who played Mr. Eco on Lost.
[4] Though I did appreciate Kate’s “really!?” when learning Christian Shepherd’s name.
[5] Even if these references were most often of the “pop” variety. For instance, the scene of Benjamin Linus reading Ulysses on the plane. Of course Ben is reading Joyce. . . .
[6] Important for this here blog, but I will refrain. . . .
(So first off I’ll fail to apologize for only now realizing that I have not posted anything on here for over a month, and that my continual engagement w/ Otis Nixon should not have perhaps been heading this page for as long as it has—which is to say, hopefully there will be a slight flurry of activity re: this blog on my part in the near future, as I hope to have posts on a bunch of new work from people of some eminence: Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City, Don DeLillo’s Point Omega, John Ashbery’s Planisphere, and perhaps a piece on a short story from the March edition of Harper’s, “The History of The History of Death.” But for all that, I thought I’d start w/ a film I saw recently that legitimately surprised me in more ways than one.) (Also, like all my posts, there will be spoilers galore.)
I in no way intended to see Repo Men (Miguel Sapochnik, 2010). Like many other things in my life recently, I’ve inexplicably taken a break from my frequent and unapologetically saccharine foray into commercial cinema. So a few days ago I realized I desperately needed, for whatever indefensible and inexplicable reason, to see Hot Tub Time Machine (I did, btw, but snuck in after Repo Men).[1] The reasons for this are probably more complex or simple than I would like to pursue, but suffice it to say, the film was peculiarly suggesting itself to me.[2] I also very much wanted to see Scorsese’s new effort, which was playing ten minutes after Time Machine. Due to an inexplicable lane closure for construction that was nowhere apparent as being done, there was a familiar intensity of traffic over the Homestead High-Level Bridge and I arrived, of course, too late to see the beginning of either film. Not wanting to wait around, my only chance for immediate darkness infused cinematic bliss was Repo Men, and even though I’d thought little-to-nothing good about the previews, I decided—hell, why not; it couldn’t be worse than Hot Tub Time Machine. And I was right.
I should’ve known better than to dismiss this film so off-handedly as just another vehicle for Jude Law’s increasingly weird and inconsequential career (which I’m tempted to say isn’t inconsequential at all). I mean, Forest Whitaker is in it for christ’s sake.[3] From the previews it appeared to be yet another Fahrenheit 451 rehash: agent of the oppressive dystopian police force turned resistance sympathizer, etc. Don’t get me wrong, it is that. And it very easily could have been very little but that, despite the interesting and complex friendship b/t Forest and Jude, the commentary it is so obviously making on our current economic crisis, and its portrayal of late-capitalistic posthuman cyborgicity. Basically, I should’ve known better b/c of the fact that many recent SF films have been deceptively incisive and captivating despite their mundane genre trappings and crappy trailers. In other words, unlike, say “comedies,” or even Hot Tub Time Machine specifically, in which all the best, funniest, most worthwhile moments are portrayed in their trailers, this type of film is fairly exemplary of putting none of why it may be interesting in the trailer. The typical contemporary comedy often feels simply like a device shuttling you from one recollected moment of the trailer to the next. We’ve already seen many of these films, for like most jokes you hear twice, they simply aren’t as funny on the second go-round. At first glance, Repo Men appears to be doing just this. It’s political, social, aesthetic, and economic stakes are clear: a 451 for the cyborg generation. It looks exciting, action-packed, violent, bloody, and perhaps just complex enough w/o being too difficult to garner some mild amount of attention.[4] And of course it is these things. But why Repo Men is worthy of some attention is for completely different reasons. (Say, in the same way Steven Shaviro finds Gamer interesting.)
For my own purposes, the readily suggestive reading of the film is an obvious one, but the film’s specific archival engagement is only grounded upon this blatancy. Basically, the premise of the film,
is that a massive corporation—sterile, all-encompassing, and totally ruthless in its pursuit of the bottom-line[5]—has cornered the market on artificial organs, enabling them to charge extravagant prices for them. As a majority of these organs are vital [sic] for the customer’s continued existence, of course. . . they pay, and they pay w/ credit. Inevitably, they miss a few payments, at which time the repo men repossess these organs, often killing the customer in the process.[6] There are clear things at stake here: 1) an engagement w/ our current mode of late capital and a critique of consumer debt; 2) a surveillance society in which the body is literally marked w/ its own potential death; and 3) a clear engagement w/ the (hopefully soon to be) aftermath of the wars of the early 21st C.[7] If this were all the film did, I believe it would still be worthwhile as, even though it is grossly heavy handed, it raises some important questions about the role of capital w/r/t the body in both the future and the present. But ultimately it would be so heavy handed as to be eminently dismissible—yet another dystopian, paranoid speculation on an idea taken to its obscene limits.
Repo Men avoids simply being another generic entry into SF’s archive for two reasons: 1) the important, yet obvious twist that occurs in the film; and 2) the frankly incredible scene at the heart [sic] of the Union corporation: its organ reclamation center. And, for reasons that will soon become apparent, I’ll address the second of these first.
The film (of course) culminates in an all-out-assault on the Union Corporation’s headquarters, w/ all the necessary Matrix-esque action, gunplay, and some pretty gruesome (actually) knife-wielding by a small band of people to topple the very structure that makes the Corporation run. At the heart of Union, behind an (appropriately) pink door, is the database of all the people w/ artificial organs and, if one were to delete the database, everyone who currently had an organ would be “free” to “enjoy” it w/o worrying about paying or missing a payment. Like so many of these films, Law’s character has descended into the underground—that of course gets brutally wiped out[8]—and the only recourse to possibly getting off the grid is attempting a last-ditch desperate effort to destroy the corporation which manufactures the very thing keeping him alive.[9] But none of this is the point.
The point is that when Law and his girlfriend make it behind the pink door, sealing themselves inside, there is no keyboard. Instead, all there is is yet another sterile white room w/ scanners to literally scan the barcodes of the organs into the database. In other words, there is no way to delete the archive. The basic thing Law and his girlfriend confront in this scene, is not only that humanity has become totally and utterly archived, at the most bodily, vital level, but this archive’s logic is impenetrable: it can’t be burned (i.e. deleted w/ a keyboard). The body throughout the film is always at the mercy of the most brutal of archival processes. Your specific, numbered organ’s “time is up,” it must be put back into archival circulation to be repossessed again and again, and all through this process human bodies are piling up. This, in many ways, is more sinister than everyone being implanted w/ RFID tags or barcodes.[10] The very thing that marks and distinguishes these bodies, that archives them in the state’s (or capital’s) panoptic gaze is absolutely essential to the continual existence of the lives of those bodies. What appears clearly at stake w/in the context of the film is an extension (and perhaps complication) of Giorgio Agamben’s comment on the notion of survival w/r/t biopower:
“the most specific trait of twentieth-century biopolitics: no longer either to make die or to make live, but to make survive. The decisive activity of biopower in our time consists in the production not of life or death, but rather of a mutable and virtually infinite survival.”[11]
Agamben says this mostly w/r/t Auschwitz, but I think it is equally applicable here. This making survive is in capital’s best interest, in the case of the film, as it will funnel the last available resources out of the subject trying to survive. They will go into debt so deep it causes death—the final logic of capital. Most importantly, this making survive takes the form of placing directly into the body the very limits of its survival. The artificial organ simultaneously makes survive and when biopower no longer has use for this survival, reclaims it to begin the process over. As long as you are surviving and paying exorbitant amounts of money to survive, the corporation will let you. Once you cease to do this, biopower no longer has any interest in continual survival.
The archived nature of this survival, however, I think slightly extends or complicates Agamben’s notion of survival. Survival here is wholly dependent upon being w/in the systemic archive (i.e. making one’s payments) or else going off the archive’s grid (not making payments and “running.”) Either way, however, when Law enters this room and realizes there is no way to ultimately delete one’s presence in this archive of survival, something is made very clear. When the very processes of the body become the site of archival logic and the interest of biopower in survival, there is (virtually) no recourse. The archive and survival become synonymous. Nothing is outside the logic here and everything is caught w/in the camp. Consequently, and this is what is so important about this film, for all Law’s Matrix-esque shenanigans, there is nothing to be done.
Sorta. And what Law and his girlfriend do, and what director Sapochnik portrays so well, is an alternative. Law has an artificial heart, his girlfriend some ten (or so) artificial organs, including lungs and kidneys. Obviously they cannot simply cut these organs out and scan them, for their very survival would be compromised. Instead, Law sees that the only recourse they have, the only way to get off the grid, to get out of the archive, is to cut into each other’s bodies and scan the organs while they’re still operating, while they’re still alive! (And furthermore, this is perhaps one of the most erotic scenes I’ve ever seen in any film.[12]) Anesthetizing each other while making out, Law’s girlfriend, actress Alice Braga, cuts into his chest, inserting her hand all the way to his heart to scan it, to take him out of the survival archive. This ultimate act of love, freeing the other from biopolitical control, however, requires this ultimate penetration of the body (and it is, of course, important here that it is the female penetrating the male body, and not just anywhere, but precisely at that point [the heart] where it is most vulnerable). Then it is Law’s turn to “scan” Braga: her eyes, her ears, her throat (he pushes his hand to the back of her throat), her knees, and ultimately her lungs and kidneys, mirroring and complicating her own penetration of himself. Blood is flowing everywhere, their bodies intertwined, “passionate kisses,”[13] etc. And, less it be unclear, this act is neither sadistic nor masochistic. The only power over the body that is expressed by either sexual party is the act of getting rid of power over the body. No pleasure is taken in the inflicting or receiving of pain, but rather in liberating the other’s body. No genital sex takes place here, and this weirdly pure, violent, horrific, gruesome act of lovemaking may very well be what Gilles Deleuze had in mind when he talked of “non-genital sex.”
The point this scene seems to be making w/r/t the film as a whole is that, though the very survival of the body may be inscribed into the archive in totality, the body’s sexual role w/in this constellation defeats this reification through what I would like to call “archival erotics.” The act of deleting one another from the archive, is the erotic act par excellence. This is not sex as: two people simply masturbating w/ each other. Rather, sex here becomes a liberatory, vital act of not only survival, of emancipation, but of escaping a totalizing archival logic. And most importantly, there is no other option available w/in the space of the film. The “way out” is only available through a radical re-imagining of two bodies relationship to each other at the most primal level. Bodies interacting ceases to be procreative and becomes liberatory. Sex (w/o genitals) becomes a mode of escape.
But of course, and this is why this film is so interesting, that is not the end of the story. Whitaker bursts through the door to perceive Braga and Law in post-(non-genital)-coital bliss, revealing he has a bomb. Since Braga and Law have entered their organs into the archive, the machine is asking for those organs to be placed into a receptacle. Conveniently, Whitaker’s bomb is placed in this receptacle, which is then taken into the archive where it explodes, deleting the archive. The characters then sit back against the door, laughing. And it is this laughter that is so captivating.
If they had just let Whitaker in a few moments earlier, this entire erotic scene would have been unnecessary. Perhaps they are laughing at the absurdity of what they were forced to do. Or perhaps they’re laughing at something else. What I would like to suggest is that they are laughing at the absurdity that it is only after such a violent and poignant moment where biopower’s control over them is displayed so keenly that it becomes possible to literally penetrate the archive and delete it through, of course, technology. In the space of the film, the laughter is important. It not only signals that something is (perhaps) slightly amiss w/ this whole spectacle we’ve just witnessed, but that this act has been procreative. The technology (of the bomb) was produced in this act. What Law and Braga have given birth to is the very technological tool w/ which to delete the archive. And this is fucking hilarious. But it is hilarious because it is ultimately false. Pain is funny, and the pain we’ve just seen was ultimately for no reason whatsoever.
And this brings me to my first point of why this film is interesting. Long before the scene I just described, there is a “final showdown/confrontation” b/t Law and Whitaker during which Whitaker hits Law over the head w/ a chain(-thingy). Immediately after this, the screen goes blank (evoking Law’s voice-over of “being knocked out”), and then Law’s life flashes before his eyes. The twist at the end of the film is clearly perceptible here. Throughout the film, a system that would preserve consciousness in the case of catatonia is repeatedly referred to, and it was at this moment I realized that Law “died” and that everything that was to follow in the film was taking place in his catatonic-consciousness.[14] And, as the film closes, this is precisely what is revealed: the twist. Everything we’ve seen b/t this moment and now was pure simulation. The whole moment of archival erotics was simply a projection of Law’s (un)consciousness. Consequently, his badassness in killing virtually everyone while storming the castle is revealed as pure fantasy. In other words, the laughter following the amazing, erotic scene is nothing but the acknowledgment that this sort of narrative, poignant and incredible though it may be, is impossible w/in the system all the characters are inhabiting. And this is why Sapochnik’s first feature-length is so incredible. He simultaneously gives us an incredible, gorgeous, brutal “answer” to the whole problem while acknowledging that this answer, this “way out” is complete fantasy. Furthermore, it occurs in a kind of hyperarchival [sic] mode. Law has become totally subject to the survival archive. His very consciousness only persists w/in its logic. This “survival” will now only be maintained by Whitaker continuing to repo organs (i.e. this life-after-life is very expensive). Whitaker asks: can we know what he’s thinking, and of course the answer is no. Survival here, and indeed consciousness itself, becomes only a function of the dominating totality of the archival logic. Not only is there “no way out,” but there are further ways in. Consequently, the entire amazing, incredible scene b/t Law and Braga becomes merely how archival erotics themselves get absorbed into the system. Something posited as a way out only is possible by being more thoroughly w/in the system than one ever was before. Love and sex are merely (hyper)archival expressions.
And this is why Sapochnik’s vision is so much more terrifying than merely a rehash of 451. There is no alternative here. The only, quite provocative alternative is ultimately presented as part of the whole damn thing. Even resistance is a function of archivization. And if this is terrifying, it should be, for it presents us w/ the truly terrifying prospect of the only solution being a fantasmatic one that can only come as a result of being so thoroughly plugged into the machine that we cannot survive w/o it.
[1]This is also of course to suggest that part of my unapologetic enjoyment of commercial cinema is seeing multiple movies for the price of one.
[2]I also have absolutely nothing to say about it.
[3]Also of impressive note, is that Repo Men is director Miguel Sapochnik’s first feature-length film. How he got Forest and Jude, I presume, would be an intriguing back-room Hollywood story if I cared to do any research.
[4] For how little attention it may have indeed garnered, however, it need be noted that I was the only person present in the fairly major cineplex during its screening—something I always thoroughly enjoy b/c it affords me the opportunity to smoke cigarettes and see the smoke rising in the light of the projector. Mild crimes like these are strangely enjoyable.
[5] I.e. the film goes as far as to suggest that the company desires people to have their organs foreclosed upon as it insures that the Union company can re-sell that specific organ to someone else. The fantastic scene in the seemingly endless, sterile, white manufacturing center of Union also appears to suggest that this company is doing very well indeed. (On a side note, the Repo Men also give a semi-hilarious twist to the notion of the body w/o organs. In the case of the debtor, their bodies are w/o organs b/c they’ve quite literally been removed. A tangent to this is that in the opening scene Jude Law is, by law, required to ask the “patient” whether or not they want a doctor or ambulance present. This is totally absurd, as Law’s character clearly perceives, b/c he asks this of the “patient” after he has been stunned unconscious, of course implying that a body w/o an organ, in this scene the liver, clearly will very soon have no need of a doctor nor an ambulance.)
[6] It also need be noted that there is no affinity whatsoever b/t this film and the fantastic punk classic, Repo Man (1984).
[7] Law and Whitaker are both veterans of (presumably) the Iraq (or some other) war. They are highly trained soldiers who have found the perfect venue for their training, and b/c their actions are clearly sanctioned by the state, they can approach it as “just a job.” One of the most important parts of the film is that both Law and Whitaker are portrayed as not terribly intelligent; indeed, there is a quite hilarious flashback where they are shown to be specifically bodily suited for operating a tank: they have large heads and small brains, the better to prevent concussion. They’re just dumb, “normal” guys who are violently carrying out the whim of capital.
[8] The aftermath of this scene is actually quite affective as Law’s character walks over piles of corpses. The resonance w/ other genocides is quite clear here.
[9] Oh, btw, predictably, Law’s heart fails and has to get an artificial one. He of course misses the payments now that he can empathize w/ his victims and subsequently doesn’t make any money. (Also of note, how weird is it that these dudes work off commission, like some sort of used-car salesman death squad.)
[10] I distinctly remember one techno-industrial-kid who worked at my local zia in t-town, AZ who had a barcode printed on the back of his neck—the “subversive” irony of this I thought was dumb then, and I surely do now, btw, if you’re interested.
[11] Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 155.
[12] W/ the exception of Marina de Van’s Dans ma peau (In My Skin, 2002).
[13] Mary Chapin Carter had no idea her “Passionate Kisses” may ever have been used in such a manner.
[14] Thus the penultimate scene on the beach is obviously a pure dream-construction.
I have to admit that the recently released The Book of Eli (The Hughes Brothers, 2010)[1] constitutes a moment of personal gratification for myself and my recently completed PhD project in that it only serves to further cement the work I did there.[2] In short, a bulk of my project constituted a revivification of the now long dead and mostly forgotten practice of “nuclear criticism,” a theoretical framework most explicitly laid out in Jacques Derrida’s “No Apocalypse, Not Now (Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives),” which he delivered in1984 at a colloquium on nuclear criticism at Cornell University. At the time, Derrida argued that all literature is marked by the nuclear epoch in that the historical and literary archive is that which is most threatened by nuclear war. What The Book of Eli represents so dramatically is exactly this logic: whatever else may be going on in its world, the real stakes of the post-apocalyptic wasteland Denzel Washington (Eli) traverses throughout the film are ultimately archival ones.
Disregarding for a moment the conflicted and confusing Christian ideology which infects the film like an out-of-control tumor, as well as the film’s problematic geography, weak characterization, the presence of Mila Kunis,[3] and its overall ridiculous premise, this film is about a book, and not just any book, it is about the Christian Bible.[4] Denzel has been told by a voice (Christian God) to carry the only remaining Bible west, and that he would not only be protected during this journey,[5] he would “know” when he arrived where he needed to be.[6] Threatening his progress is Gary Oldman’s character, who is desperately seeking a Bible for its powers of populace-manipulation (think Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals). There is also a pretty great scene when a bunch of books are plopped down on Oldman’s desk, right after he was reading a biography (?) of Mussolini; he of course instructs his underlings to burn these books (archival destruction!).
The real crux of the film for myself is the reason it gives for there being only one Bible remaining. Basically, after what appears to be global nuclear war, the survivors got together and burned all the Bibles in the world, blaming this text for the devastation. (This also implies that this was a religiously motivated war, like b/t Islamic States and Christian ones, rather than a good ole’ ideological nuclear war.) Denzel’s ultimate task is to bring this Bible, which he memorizes—so doesn’t need the actual object (memory as archive. . .)—to Alcatraz, where a printing press and archive has been set up to rebuild civilization. The film ends with the Christian Bible being placed on a rack of books including the Torah and the Qur’an, as well as a host of other religious texts.[7]
In all of this, The Book of Eli is a deeply confused film. It simultaneously acknowledges the really insidious, destructive aspects of religion while attempting to uphold the importance of the Bible’s teaching—namely “faith.” Denzel-as-blind-prophet directly communicating w/ God as signaling the importance of the restoration of the New Testament (one would assume the Old Testament was present on that shelf already. . . .) runs directly into the Bible as “just another book” in the last scene. The Apocalypse portrayed is simultaneously one caused archivally (by religion) and one that can be lived-through afterward only archivally (by, again, religion). (Need I mention that if the nuclear war wasn’t the Apocalypse of Revelations, it is, in Derrida’s phrase, “still to come” in the space of the film. . . .)[8] The film, ultimately, has no idea what it is trying to communicate, no idea where it stands, no idea what Christianity really has to do w/ anything, other than being a convenient trope for an apocalyptic film.
And, at day’s end, this is what is so impressive about the film. Its archivally apocalyptic logic overwhelms it, takes center-stage, and demonstrates that the archive’s destruction (or restoration) is the limit of the nuclear. Once one invokes such a post-apocalyptic landscape, all questions become archival. The visual presentation of the film is at times breathtaking—man I love what CGI enables w/r/t post-apocalyptic landscapes—but in every case, the visuals are simply archival markers of what has been destroyed: the Golden Gate Bridge, Nuclear Power Stations, Freeways, old burned-out automobiles, gigantic craters, and of course the presence of “Western” towns run by a malignant “boss” (Oldman’s character is unsubtly named “Carnegie”). The main object Denzel carries around as a marker of the “good” of humanity, the Bible aside, is in-and-of-itself an archive: an old beat-up iPod (man he loves listening to that iPod).
Basically, the Bible in The Book of Eli is merely a stand-in for archival maintenance or restoration. It doesn’t really matter what book it is in the space of the film, only that the Bible is perhaps the most manipulatively affective sign of this restoration[9] and that it allows all sorts of other heavy-handed bullshit to enter the narrative space.[10] In short, The Book of Eli is yet another marker of the reliance of aesthetics upon imagining the archive as both producing apocalyptic destruction and saving the world from that very same destruction. This is nothing new, of course, but the overt manner in which this happens throughout the film combined w/ the work I just completed, makes it a singularly interesting (for me at least) instance of this, and one which shouldn’t be ignored just b/c the film is so awful.
[1] This is actually a slightly odd entry into the Hughes oeuvre, as they had previously made films like From Hell (2001), American Pimp (1999), Dead Presidents (1995), and Menace II Society (1993).
[2] In other words, during my written project exams I referred to its imminent release, and while we were waiting to get started with my oral exams, my committee and I had a brief conversation about it. Needless to say, if The Book of Eli proves anything, it is that I will always have a career talking about archivally apocalyptic films. . . .
[3] And how “hot” she looks in a world where pretty much all the other characters look like irradiated mutants, i.e. Tom Waits’ cameo (though he does look alright).
[4] Btw, I’m going to spoil this movie all over the place here, so don’t read on if you care about such things. (I’m going to spoil it in 3, 2, 1. . . .) That said, it wouldn’t really hurt you knowing whatever it is I’m going to say b/c you already know what is going to more-or-less happen the minute the film opens—i.e. both my friend Adri and I kinda knew Eli was blind pretty early on, and just sorta forgot this fact as the film progressed, making the big “reveal” or “plot twist” pretty funny/not surprising at all (that he was blind the whole time and, lo and behold, the book he was carrying around was in brail!)—poor Gary Oldman.
[5] Consequently, ridiculous action scenes ensue where Denzel is pretty much a badass.
[6] For those of you looking for a clear analogue b/t Denzel and the biblical Elijah, there is none. The closest it gets is Malachi 4:1-5: “See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all the evil-doers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the Lord of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings. You shall go out leaping like calves from the stall. And you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet, on the day when I act, says the Lord of the hosts. . . . Lo, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes. He will turn the hearts of parents to their children and the hearts of children to their parents, so that I will not come and strike the land with a curse.” (Note: this is taken from The New Oxford Annotated Bible. Other Bibles place this as Malachi 3:19-24.)If indeed Elijah-as-prophet-of-messiah-and-eschaton is the reference for Denzel, then the film botches this quite badly—i.e. the burning has already happened. The film makes a point of stressing how humans (not God) caused this destruction, however, so within the theological-eschatological space of the film, perhaps all this means is that the messiah and “real” burning (the landscape of the film looks pretty burned though. . .) is in the future—the apocalypse hasn’t “happened” yet. Kunis’ character, Solara, also seems to be an analogue for the biblical figure Elisha, but again, the Christian or Old Testament themes are pretty damn loose everywhere here, so reading the film in such a way doesn’t really generate much (or so I believe).
[7] There is also something to be said about this being a “‘New’ King James Bible,” rather than a translation from the Hebrew or Greek. English gets privileged as the language of God in a very real way, which, the more I think about it, is deeply disturbing. (To say nothing about the textual inaccuracies of the King James Bible. . . .)
[8] This is also to say nothing about the cannibals, George and Martha (Washington) and the shootout which occurs at their (little) house (on the apocalyptically devastated prairie—i.e. also see my entry on apocalyptic Westerns w/r/t The Road).
[9] Furthermore, the film doesn’t even address the glaring fact that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time, and to destroy every copy but one is ludicrous, no matter how fanatical the Firemen or Tetragrammaton Clerics may be.
[10] In that, it really isn’t much better than something like the Left Behind series, and may in fact be more insidious b/c of the presence of Denzel rather than, say, Kirk Cameron.
The Hyperarchival Parallax 