Pre-mediating the End, Part 1: Introduction |
21/06/2022 |
These Final Hours (2013)
Introduction:
This series of articles explores post apocalyptic cinema, and routes through understanding why we screen devastation, how we can reconcile that with our limited perception of the world, and where we might go next. Originally, this was one piece of work, submitted as undergraduate research. Extracts have been removed and changed, and although since then Filmosophy’s thoughts, desires, and expressions have changed enough that we would probably no longer agree with much of what is written here, it serves as a jumping off point through which you might have your own thoughts, and perhaps will allow us to further explore post apocalyptic cinema in a less academically rigorous way. This initial part serves as an introduction to the theory and thoughts underpinning the following, and in the subsequent 3 articles, we will look at post-apocalyptic cinema from around the world. While written in an academic style, many of the authors mentioned here are not academics. You don't need to be either; making writing like this accessible is part of our goal at Filmosophy.
Preface
You are standing on a beach. A comet hurtles its way through the cosmos and is going to land squarely on top of your head. It is simply huge. Ginormous. It has existed for so long, travelled so far, and is so big that you will never understand it, but you have felt its effects. You heard about it on the news, you watched it pass by once as a child with a telescope, you have seen already how it has changed the world around you even though it is still two million miles away. You cannot escape it. Author Timothy Morton would call this a hyperobject. So will we.
This comet cannot be understood through your usual senses. It will vaporise everything so fast that you will not hear it break through the outer layers of the atmosphere, neither will you have time to see any details of its surface before your eyes turn to superheated dust. You will never taste or smell or touch it. You panic and pull on a blindfold. Our senses are how we understand the ever elusive idea of reality, so maybe if you alter your senses you can change your understanding of things. But is pulling a blindfold over your eyes just an expression of ‘if I can’t see it, it can’t obliterate me’? Bird Box (2018, US) is a story of altered senses and unthinkable horror, raising the question of whether our current organisation of the senses will allow us to survive. A host of other post-apocalyptic films involve altered senses too - a comet’s tail of ideas worth exploring: is a sort of sensual realignment within us what is necessary? This is our first attempt at understanding the approaching apocalypse - through our senses.
Why not talk about the comet instead? A person is next to you, and you feel a sudden urge to communicate with them. But what could you say? How can you describe what it will feel like to watch that comet blot out the sun before vaporising everything? How can you sum up in words the magnitude of loss that is about to happen? Just as good to scream unintelligibly. The Rover (2014, Australia) perhaps best embodies this oral struggle, where the apocalypse has been named The Collapse – an attempt to summarise the end of the world in a catchy name. In this post-apocalyptic wasteland people cling onto the language of capitalism, trying to keep hold of old social norms and mediate interactions with each other. It often fails. In the context of disaster, has language become nothing more than an aesthetic habit, unfit for purpose? You can call the comet a Comet, but why? Do you comprehend it any fuller? So we have our second attempt at understanding the apocalypse - through language.
But if your senses let you down, and if language simply is not functional in describing the horror of the coming catastrophe, what then? How can you put any stock in your experience? On a spatially and temporally cosmic scale the destruction of you, and of Earth, does not warrant the slightest bit of attention. Netflix’s Bokeh (2018, US) encourages us to think cinematically about what Morton calls hyperobjects and how we can understand such vast catastrophe and timescales. It explicitly leaves unresolved any potential harmony between an individual and the planet. It pre-mediates unpreparedness, and suggests that we need to become something else. Our third attempt at understanding the coming doom is, instead, an attempt at respecting the idea that we currently cannot.
Allow this tale to continue unimpeded for a while (you cannot stop a comet mid-flight). We will take our beachside journey slower, idea by idea, letting this tale frame it, and investigating further the implications these limits we have found have for us, until reaching that inevitable conclusion and finding out what reconciliation there can be.
This comet cannot be understood through your usual senses. It will vaporise everything so fast that you will not hear it break through the outer layers of the atmosphere, neither will you have time to see any details of its surface before your eyes turn to superheated dust. You will never taste or smell or touch it. You panic and pull on a blindfold. Our senses are how we understand the ever elusive idea of reality, so maybe if you alter your senses you can change your understanding of things. But is pulling a blindfold over your eyes just an expression of ‘if I can’t see it, it can’t obliterate me’? Bird Box (2018, US) is a story of altered senses and unthinkable horror, raising the question of whether our current organisation of the senses will allow us to survive. A host of other post-apocalyptic films involve altered senses too - a comet’s tail of ideas worth exploring: is a sort of sensual realignment within us what is necessary? This is our first attempt at understanding the approaching apocalypse - through our senses.
Why not talk about the comet instead? A person is next to you, and you feel a sudden urge to communicate with them. But what could you say? How can you describe what it will feel like to watch that comet blot out the sun before vaporising everything? How can you sum up in words the magnitude of loss that is about to happen? Just as good to scream unintelligibly. The Rover (2014, Australia) perhaps best embodies this oral struggle, where the apocalypse has been named The Collapse – an attempt to summarise the end of the world in a catchy name. In this post-apocalyptic wasteland people cling onto the language of capitalism, trying to keep hold of old social norms and mediate interactions with each other. It often fails. In the context of disaster, has language become nothing more than an aesthetic habit, unfit for purpose? You can call the comet a Comet, but why? Do you comprehend it any fuller? So we have our second attempt at understanding the apocalypse - through language.
But if your senses let you down, and if language simply is not functional in describing the horror of the coming catastrophe, what then? How can you put any stock in your experience? On a spatially and temporally cosmic scale the destruction of you, and of Earth, does not warrant the slightest bit of attention. Netflix’s Bokeh (2018, US) encourages us to think cinematically about what Morton calls hyperobjects and how we can understand such vast catastrophe and timescales. It explicitly leaves unresolved any potential harmony between an individual and the planet. It pre-mediates unpreparedness, and suggests that we need to become something else. Our third attempt at understanding the coming doom is, instead, an attempt at respecting the idea that we currently cannot.
Allow this tale to continue unimpeded for a while (you cannot stop a comet mid-flight). We will take our beachside journey slower, idea by idea, letting this tale frame it, and investigating further the implications these limits we have found have for us, until reaching that inevitable conclusion and finding out what reconciliation there can be.
Verdens Undergang (1916)
What is an Apocalypse?
Cinema’s interest in the apocalypse extends back to the disquiet associated with the appearance of Halley’s Comet in 1910, embodied in August Blom’s 1916 film Verdens Undergang (Enyedi, 2012). This interest has only accelerated over time, catching up to the ancient eschatological myths that have existed for millennia. A simple Wikipedia search lists 37 apocalyptic films released in the 1990s - largely similar to the previous 2 decades’ productions. In the 2000s: 67. In the 2010s, 109. These figures are purely illustrative: they demonstrate succinctly the fast-growing trend of post-apocalyptic genre cinema.
Complimenting this growth is an increasing wealth of literature dedicated to post- apocalyptic genre fiction. Past research has suggested that these films are a way to restructure our understanding of the present (Jameson, 1982). Focus on what the apocalypse can mean as a metaphor or analogy – how the mode of destruction reflects the growing concerns of the era – is popular. The implications of this have attracted a variety of philosophers. Jacques Derrida (1984) wrote about cinema’s tendency to ‘always-already’ refer to nuclear war and destruction, in a position of epistemological concern that mirrors this dissertation. Similarly, Susan Sontag in The Imagination of Disaster argued that post-apocalyptic films reflect “world-wide anxieties, and they serve to allay them...the naïve level of the films neatly tempers the sense of otherness” (1965, p. 225), alluding to the anticipatory and reflective role of science fiction cinema. Contemporary scholarship has focused more on how the apocalypse is represented and what this means socially (Hamonic, 2017), or have directly responded to past criticism to refute it (Broderick, 1993). Other scholars have questioned how an apocalypse, the supposed end, can have a ‘post’ so to speak (Heffernan, 1995; Berger 1999), while others have suggested theories as to why the popularity of the genre - literature and film - continues to grow, both through diachronic methods (Leigh, 2008; Magid, 2015; Manjikian, 2012) and looking contemporarily (Thompson, 2007).
The anthropocene is a specific concern of a number of scholars (Gergan, Smith & Vasudevan, 2018; Del Rio, 2016). While all of the above authors hold varying opinions on causes, concerns, and functions, there is a broad acceptance that post- apocalyptic cinema is reflective of the time it was released in, and that we can use this fact to influence and develop our thinking about the present, and the future.
This short series of articles, taken from some undergraduate work Filmosophy did a few years ago, will look at the films themselves as symptoms of coming change, as efforts to mediate and pre-mediate a decentring of humans, and our experience. Instead of looking at the apocalypse from the collective fears of a ‘society’, we look at the apocalypse from inside the individual, from a position of epistemological doubt, unresolvable horror and unthinkable thoughts.
These articles examine the assumed reliability and centrality of human experience in post-apocalyptic genre films, and how these films explore the limits of human experience. Necessarily, these films contain an implicit suggestion that we need to reconfigure our place in the world, and our idea of place itself.
Using post-apocalyptic films is, of course, limiting in some ways: it is an excellent vehicle with which to traverse this theoretical terrain, but it is not the only one. Michaelangelo Frammartino’s quiet drama Le Quattro Volte (2010, Italy), David Lowery’s supernatural A Ghost Story (2017, US), Paul W. S. Anderson’s horror sci-fi Event Horizon (1997, UK) are three examples of the range of potential avenues for exploration, and there are myriad tangential theories which have not been enmeshed within this study.
As the foundation upon which to build upwards and outwards, Richard Grusin’s Pre-mediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (2010) is essential. He argues that in an attempt to prevent the trauma and shock from events of such unexpected magnitude as those of 11th September 2001, United States and global media are pre-mediating catastrophes, as a way of preparing for every possible future. The post-apocalyptic genre has been said to do this since Sontag’s 1965 article, but Grusin’s book places this function in a more pervasive and widespread context, relating it to global media and the perpetual state of fear it professes we should live in. This pre-mediating function of the post-apocalyptic genre is evident throughout time, and much of the existing literature assumes its existence, or investigates it under a different name.
The decentring of the human is explored in post-apocalyptic film in the three ways I have listed above: senses, language, and becomings. These films operate reflexively on the basis of non-anthropocenema – a proposed name for the growing zeitgeist of cinema that argues for a redefinition of humankind and a re-framing of the Anthropos (see footnote). Graham Harman, and his summary of Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (2018), is of particular significance. This work decentres human existence in favour of an approach in which objects and their qualities are independent of one another, and exist regardless of this fact. Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) serves as an effective model for methodically decentring the human, as it critiques the notion of what knowledge is readily available to us. Various other theorists in this study could be said to work in the bracket of OOO, and Harman’s work synthesises many of these into what stands as a flexible manifesto of sorts.
The idea of a worldwide apocalypse, and indeed the various modes of that apocalypse such as climate change, meteors, disease, fossil fuels, and Capitalism are unthinkable for humans, and this lack of comprehension is often visually or discursively depicted in post-apocalyptic films. Morton’s work on hyperobjects relates closely to OOO and is specifically about how we can(not) understand objects of such magnitude. The mode of destruction can be used as a way to pre-mediate the limits of our thinking; Harman and Morton both advocate for doubt to be placed on the extent to which we can perceive and understand the world.
Eugene Thacker’s triple-volume descent into the limits of human knowledge and the unknowability of nothingness (to which, of course, the apocalypse is referent) Horror of Philosophy (2011, 2014a, 2014b) is central to expanding on this. In the series, Thacker reads works of horror as works of philosophy, and vice-versa, which will form an important aspect of the analysis that takes place later. This way of reading films as works of philosophy is similar to David Fleming and William Brown who theorise “how the film thinks or advances its own distinctive blend of [ideas]” (2018, p. 341) in their analysis of the science-fiction film Arrival (2016, US). This method is essential, I believe, to embodying a position whereby cinema can transcend the limits of sensory and linguistic comprehension as an ‘object-in- itself’ – part of Harman’s flat ontology that has affects and effects, indirect exchanges with objects in its surroundings and that it surrounds.
Thacker’s work is focused primarily on how the horror genre mediates these ideas, and embodies attempts to come to some resolution about these vast doubts and limits that we come up against. With these limits, there is the implication that our experience needs to occupy a less privileged position. Not necessarily to bask in un-knowing, but to allow room for an alternative to emerge that might have more success. Thus, Thacker is an important figure in theorizing ways to do this, complimenting Harman and Morton.
Language becomes an integral part of our conception of ideas and objects. Vilem Flusser writes that “poetry expands the territory of what is thinkable, but it does not diminish the territory of what is unthinkable” (2014, p. 61). The first part of this quote is a testament to the pre-mediating function of post-apocalyptic cinema, and how we can perhaps use it to prepare for the limits of the anthropos, while the second part emphasises Thacker and Morton’s work on how pre-mediation of the apocalypse is a futile attempt to think something our existence currently prevents us from thinking. For Flusser, language is how we comprehend the world around us: everything outside oneself is simply waiting to be mediated by language.
Ecocritically, Jason Moore’s conception of the Capitalocene relates to these decentring theories from Morton, Harman and Thacker. Moore coined the word Capitalocene in 2014, in a then-unpublished essay on his website. This came at a time when academics were questioning the assumptions that the term anthropocene made about the unity of the human race. (Haraway, 2015; Moore, 2014; 2015). This argument is crystallised by Françoise Vergès (2017) in the article Racial Capitalocene. Theories surrounding the Capitalocene are often eco-centric, since it is concerned with world-ecology and human’s positioning on the planet.
Although new, there are already disagreements and revisions amongst scholars about the term ‘Capitalocene.’ Donna Haraway (2015) asserts that the idea cannot be summarised in just one word, and suggests others that can be used in conjunction such as Chthulucene and Plantationocene. Haraway argues for reframing our understanding of the world to be less human-focused, and more concerned with finding kinship with other existing organisms in an ever-changing, evolving way. The parallels between Haraway, Morton, Moore and Harman are clear. She responds to the framing of post-apocalyptic narratives as anthropocentric, suggesting that the revelation of knowledge should present a new world of these “diverse, earth-wide tentacular powers” (2015, p. 160). Haraway features in Moore’s Anthropocene or Capitalocene? (2016), as do several other writers on the topic. The book embodies the growing popularity (and tentacularity) of the theory.
The Capitalocene relates extensively to the work of Thacker, Morton, and Harman, in its radical decentring of humans. What separates Moore’s work from these authors is that he attacks the anthropocene as a synecdoche for the broad, comprehensive change that Harman, Thacker and Morton argue for and this diversity in approach illustrates the growing zeitgeist in philosophy and film. The non-anthropocene, extending to the non-anthropocenema.
In the next instalment, we look at perceiving the end of the world through our senses, and films which sensorially destabilise us.
Complimenting this growth is an increasing wealth of literature dedicated to post- apocalyptic genre fiction. Past research has suggested that these films are a way to restructure our understanding of the present (Jameson, 1982). Focus on what the apocalypse can mean as a metaphor or analogy – how the mode of destruction reflects the growing concerns of the era – is popular. The implications of this have attracted a variety of philosophers. Jacques Derrida (1984) wrote about cinema’s tendency to ‘always-already’ refer to nuclear war and destruction, in a position of epistemological concern that mirrors this dissertation. Similarly, Susan Sontag in The Imagination of Disaster argued that post-apocalyptic films reflect “world-wide anxieties, and they serve to allay them...the naïve level of the films neatly tempers the sense of otherness” (1965, p. 225), alluding to the anticipatory and reflective role of science fiction cinema. Contemporary scholarship has focused more on how the apocalypse is represented and what this means socially (Hamonic, 2017), or have directly responded to past criticism to refute it (Broderick, 1993). Other scholars have questioned how an apocalypse, the supposed end, can have a ‘post’ so to speak (Heffernan, 1995; Berger 1999), while others have suggested theories as to why the popularity of the genre - literature and film - continues to grow, both through diachronic methods (Leigh, 2008; Magid, 2015; Manjikian, 2012) and looking contemporarily (Thompson, 2007).
The anthropocene is a specific concern of a number of scholars (Gergan, Smith & Vasudevan, 2018; Del Rio, 2016). While all of the above authors hold varying opinions on causes, concerns, and functions, there is a broad acceptance that post- apocalyptic cinema is reflective of the time it was released in, and that we can use this fact to influence and develop our thinking about the present, and the future.
This short series of articles, taken from some undergraduate work Filmosophy did a few years ago, will look at the films themselves as symptoms of coming change, as efforts to mediate and pre-mediate a decentring of humans, and our experience. Instead of looking at the apocalypse from the collective fears of a ‘society’, we look at the apocalypse from inside the individual, from a position of epistemological doubt, unresolvable horror and unthinkable thoughts.
These articles examine the assumed reliability and centrality of human experience in post-apocalyptic genre films, and how these films explore the limits of human experience. Necessarily, these films contain an implicit suggestion that we need to reconfigure our place in the world, and our idea of place itself.
Using post-apocalyptic films is, of course, limiting in some ways: it is an excellent vehicle with which to traverse this theoretical terrain, but it is not the only one. Michaelangelo Frammartino’s quiet drama Le Quattro Volte (2010, Italy), David Lowery’s supernatural A Ghost Story (2017, US), Paul W. S. Anderson’s horror sci-fi Event Horizon (1997, UK) are three examples of the range of potential avenues for exploration, and there are myriad tangential theories which have not been enmeshed within this study.
As the foundation upon which to build upwards and outwards, Richard Grusin’s Pre-mediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11 (2010) is essential. He argues that in an attempt to prevent the trauma and shock from events of such unexpected magnitude as those of 11th September 2001, United States and global media are pre-mediating catastrophes, as a way of preparing for every possible future. The post-apocalyptic genre has been said to do this since Sontag’s 1965 article, but Grusin’s book places this function in a more pervasive and widespread context, relating it to global media and the perpetual state of fear it professes we should live in. This pre-mediating function of the post-apocalyptic genre is evident throughout time, and much of the existing literature assumes its existence, or investigates it under a different name.
The decentring of the human is explored in post-apocalyptic film in the three ways I have listed above: senses, language, and becomings. These films operate reflexively on the basis of non-anthropocenema – a proposed name for the growing zeitgeist of cinema that argues for a redefinition of humankind and a re-framing of the Anthropos (see footnote). Graham Harman, and his summary of Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything (2018), is of particular significance. This work decentres human existence in favour of an approach in which objects and their qualities are independent of one another, and exist regardless of this fact. Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) serves as an effective model for methodically decentring the human, as it critiques the notion of what knowledge is readily available to us. Various other theorists in this study could be said to work in the bracket of OOO, and Harman’s work synthesises many of these into what stands as a flexible manifesto of sorts.
The idea of a worldwide apocalypse, and indeed the various modes of that apocalypse such as climate change, meteors, disease, fossil fuels, and Capitalism are unthinkable for humans, and this lack of comprehension is often visually or discursively depicted in post-apocalyptic films. Morton’s work on hyperobjects relates closely to OOO and is specifically about how we can(not) understand objects of such magnitude. The mode of destruction can be used as a way to pre-mediate the limits of our thinking; Harman and Morton both advocate for doubt to be placed on the extent to which we can perceive and understand the world.
Eugene Thacker’s triple-volume descent into the limits of human knowledge and the unknowability of nothingness (to which, of course, the apocalypse is referent) Horror of Philosophy (2011, 2014a, 2014b) is central to expanding on this. In the series, Thacker reads works of horror as works of philosophy, and vice-versa, which will form an important aspect of the analysis that takes place later. This way of reading films as works of philosophy is similar to David Fleming and William Brown who theorise “how the film thinks or advances its own distinctive blend of [ideas]” (2018, p. 341) in their analysis of the science-fiction film Arrival (2016, US). This method is essential, I believe, to embodying a position whereby cinema can transcend the limits of sensory and linguistic comprehension as an ‘object-in- itself’ – part of Harman’s flat ontology that has affects and effects, indirect exchanges with objects in its surroundings and that it surrounds.
Thacker’s work is focused primarily on how the horror genre mediates these ideas, and embodies attempts to come to some resolution about these vast doubts and limits that we come up against. With these limits, there is the implication that our experience needs to occupy a less privileged position. Not necessarily to bask in un-knowing, but to allow room for an alternative to emerge that might have more success. Thus, Thacker is an important figure in theorizing ways to do this, complimenting Harman and Morton.
Language becomes an integral part of our conception of ideas and objects. Vilem Flusser writes that “poetry expands the territory of what is thinkable, but it does not diminish the territory of what is unthinkable” (2014, p. 61). The first part of this quote is a testament to the pre-mediating function of post-apocalyptic cinema, and how we can perhaps use it to prepare for the limits of the anthropos, while the second part emphasises Thacker and Morton’s work on how pre-mediation of the apocalypse is a futile attempt to think something our existence currently prevents us from thinking. For Flusser, language is how we comprehend the world around us: everything outside oneself is simply waiting to be mediated by language.
Ecocritically, Jason Moore’s conception of the Capitalocene relates to these decentring theories from Morton, Harman and Thacker. Moore coined the word Capitalocene in 2014, in a then-unpublished essay on his website. This came at a time when academics were questioning the assumptions that the term anthropocene made about the unity of the human race. (Haraway, 2015; Moore, 2014; 2015). This argument is crystallised by Françoise Vergès (2017) in the article Racial Capitalocene. Theories surrounding the Capitalocene are often eco-centric, since it is concerned with world-ecology and human’s positioning on the planet.
Although new, there are already disagreements and revisions amongst scholars about the term ‘Capitalocene.’ Donna Haraway (2015) asserts that the idea cannot be summarised in just one word, and suggests others that can be used in conjunction such as Chthulucene and Plantationocene. Haraway argues for reframing our understanding of the world to be less human-focused, and more concerned with finding kinship with other existing organisms in an ever-changing, evolving way. The parallels between Haraway, Morton, Moore and Harman are clear. She responds to the framing of post-apocalyptic narratives as anthropocentric, suggesting that the revelation of knowledge should present a new world of these “diverse, earth-wide tentacular powers” (2015, p. 160). Haraway features in Moore’s Anthropocene or Capitalocene? (2016), as do several other writers on the topic. The book embodies the growing popularity (and tentacularity) of the theory.
The Capitalocene relates extensively to the work of Thacker, Morton, and Harman, in its radical decentring of humans. What separates Moore’s work from these authors is that he attacks the anthropocene as a synecdoche for the broad, comprehensive change that Harman, Thacker and Morton argue for and this diversity in approach illustrates the growing zeitgeist in philosophy and film. The non-anthropocene, extending to the non-anthropocenema.
In the next instalment, we look at perceiving the end of the world through our senses, and films which sensorially destabilise us.
