Abstract
A surge of interest in apocalyptic narratives in millennial media forms the basis for a new collection of essays entitled The Last Midnight, by Leisa A. Clark, Amanda Firestone, and Mary F. Pharr, in the McFarland series of Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Exploring cultural anxieties about the future, this collection’s look at convergence culture creates a highly interdisciplinary dialogue about what it means to be human in a postapocalyptic world. While their scope is largely limited to American popular culture, these short essays introduce readers to critical theories and global issues in an accessible way that will make this text an attractive option for undergraduate courses on popular culture and science fiction.
An incisive prelude by Andrew McAlister traces how technological developments of the 20th century have altered our viewing experiences and ushered in the age of convergence culture, although his extensive focus on the minute details of technology feels like a divergence from the collection’s more sociologically oriented objective.
The first part of the collection looks at “Culture, Values, and Anxiety.” An essay by Angela Tenga explains how The Walking Dead explores cultural anxieties about racial and political tensions through an alternative imagining of an American South overrun by the undead, who function as proxies for freed slaves and the racial Other. Mark McCarthy, writing on the “Lost Apocalypse,” notes a critical shift in apocalyptic narratives; rather than approaching the apocalypse as a surmountable event, post-9/11 narratives are marked by an unresolved sense of fatalism and impotence in the face of disaster. The next two essays look at gender performance and hegemonic masculinity in so-called “prepper” narratives, and at how Battlestar Galactica dramatizes post-9/11 themes such as the equilibrium between liberty and security during times of crisis while often taking the position of a counternarrative to political developments.
The second part, “Globalization, Corporate Power, and Class Struggles” starts with Schweitzer’s essay on Contagion, which examines how reactions to globalization through the lens of outbreak narratives reveal cultural anxiety about the breakdown of global barriers that are supposed to demarcate self and otherness. Tim Bryant’s essay then looks at reimaginings of the Christian Apocalypse around the millennium, while Bill Clemente turns his lens to the growing abuses of power by corporate America and the corresponding trend in militarization of the police through Romero’s Fido and the 2014 remake of Robocop. The fourth essay dissects the critique of class stratification in recent films such as The Hunger Games to show a millennial pushback against the socioeconomic and political structures that enable oppression.
The third section looks at how Americans have turned to dystopian narratives to explore problems of “Memory and Identity” in the face of an uncertain future. Here, the apocalypse functions as an event that disrupts memory and that distorts our understanding of the Self and our construction of the Other. Despain and Lizardi’s essays look at stories in which memory and experience are mediated through technology in a way that alters the protagonists’ ability to make sense of their identity and their relationship to their past. Frances Auld’s essay reads the zombies in the BBC’s In The Flesh as a metaphor for the destructive power of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in a world where war and terrorism loom large in the media. The horror of these zombies, whose condition is marked by intrusive distorted memories of their own guilt, seems to derive from their liminal state between Self and Otherness. That blurred boundary is the focal point of the fourth essay as well, which looks at confrontations between apocalyptic survivors in The 100.
The fourth section, “Simulation, Psychology, and Evitability,” builds on Baudrillard to examine stories that decenter the apocalypse in favor of an examination of the human psyche and narrative constructions of the apocalyptic experience, as, for example, in Sharon Diane King’s reading of Cloverfield. Patrick Smith provides a psychoanalytical reading in which he argues that apocalyptic narratives are less about the plot than about the forces that govern human behavior, such as the Darwinian drive for survival and Freud’s ego defense mechanism, as well as the primal pull toward chaos. Editor Mary Pharr’s essay reads Simon Pegg’s The World’s End as an exploration of free will as the fundamental marker of humanity, even when it (temporarily) steers us toward chaos.
In the final section, entitled “Being Human in a Techno-Universe,” Leisa Clark looks at constructions of gender in Sci-Fi narratives where the boundary between organic and inorganic is blurred. Two essays about technoscience explore the intersection of technology, faith, and humanity, as well as the reducibility of human life to information patterns as technology invades our lives in destructive ways. The last essay, by editor Amanda Firestone, turns to smartphone game Zombies, Run! to explore the metarealities created by convergence culture and transmedia storytelling.
At times the collection could benefit from consideration of more global issues and narratives, as it focuses primarily on American culture, much like Pharr and Clark’s previous collection of essays on The Hunger Games. Many of the essays cite the cultural impact of the devastating imagery of 9/11 and its sociopolitical impact on America as a critical factor for a shift in focus among apocalyptic narratives, although similar trends can be seen outside America as well. Nevertheless, the authors and editors engage productively with a wide range of issues such as terrorism, disease, environmental collapse, worldwide conflict, and millennial technologies to create an insightful examination into millennial culture and the anxieties that govern its cultural production.
