Category: reviews (page 1 of 1)

August 18, 2015 / 0 Comments

Under the Shadow David Seed

As evidenced by the FX television channel’s The Americans (2013), about suburban Russian sleeper-agents, and the latest Die Hard installment, A Good Day to Die Hard (2013), which features not only a Russian antagonist, but is shot and set almost entirely in Russia, there appears to be a renewed popular interest in the cultural concerns and antagonisms of the Cold War. Similarly, critical attention to film and fiction from the Cold War era has also been on the rise. The subject of this review, David Seed’s Under the Shadow: The Atomic Bomb and Cold War Narratives (2013), participates in this trend and follows on the heels of a collection of essays and several book-length studies of literature and the Cold War: American Literature and Culture in an Age of Cold War (2012) edited by Steven Belletto and Daniel Grausam, Grausam’s own On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and the Cold War (2011), Derek C. Maus’s Unvarnishing Reality: Subversive Russian and American Cold War Satire (2011), and Adam Piette’s The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam (2009). But Seed, having published American Science Fiction and the Cold War: Literature and Film (1999) over ten years ago, was ahead of this trend. Indeed, he acknowledges that Under the Shadow is an extension and a deepening of the work done in his earlier study. What stands out about these recent accounts is that they all tend to focus on narrative cultures so that, in effect, what we retain from such a body of work is a developing contest over making-meaning out of the cultural production of the Cold War years.

Seed divides his account of Cold War narratives into fourteen chapters, signalling his study’s privileging of the subtleties and nuances of its corpus. The first five chapters move forward chronologically and thematically from short fictions that feature the discovery of the atom and imagine its destructive potential in chapter one, “The Atom—from H.G. Wells to Leó Szilárd,” to topics in the larger popular discourse, such as chapter three, “The Debate over Nuclear Refuge,” where he discusses Judith Merril, one of the only female authors included in the study, and chapter five, “Philip Wylie on the State of the Nation.” Each chapter analyzes a variety of non-fictional and fictional texts (from Collier’s to H. G. Wells) that establish the critical cornerstones for those chapters that follow. Chapters six through eight focus on particular authors and texts, as Seed elaborates on Walter Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo (1952), and Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7 (1959). Next, chapters nine through eleven focus on novels that have been adapted to film, such as Mark Rascovich’s The Bedford Incident (1963) and its 1965 film adaptation by James B. Harris; Harvey Wheeler and Eugene Burdick’s Fail-Safe (1962) and Sidney Lumet’s 1964 film adaptation;and, finally, Peter George’s Red Alert (1958) and Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove (1964). His final three chapters, chapter twelve, “Mapping the Postnuclear Landscape,” chapter thirteen, “Future Reportage on World War III,” and chapter fourteen, “Beyond the Cold War,” diverge from the single text study approach and consider the consequences of nuclear war in a range of popular texts. As a study of Cold War narratives, Under the Shadow does a great deal of interpretive heavily lifting, but abstains from offering analytic payout or any broad conclusions since there is no closing, summative chapter.Seed’s account of specific texts displays a wealth of knowledge that recommends Under the Shadow for scholars working on this period in general or on specific texts from his corpus. For example, his treatment of Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon (1959) in chapter four, “Do-It Yourself Survival,” is noteworthy as Seed takes up a complex novel that few scholars have addressed, but which he identifies as an early turn away from narratives of apocalyptic destruction toward post-apocalyptic new beginnings and questions of survival (he also mentions that Alas, Babylon has never been out of print). Chapter six, “Cultural Cycles in Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz,” identifies Miller’s classic sf novel as “proto-postmodern” due to its “fictional chronology” and “methodology,” which anticipates the “fiction of the 1960s and beyond referred to as ‘historiographic metafiction’” (99). In addition to in-depth analyses of outstanding works, Under the Shadow also offers insights about texts that are only briefly mentioned. For instance, in chapter 9, “Whales, Submarines and The Bedford Incident,” Seed mentions Frank Herbert’s The Dragon in the Sea (1956) as being “the first novel to make a nuclear submarine its subject”(148). Significantly, he describes it as “set in a future where America is locked in a war with the Eastern Powers to find fuel” (148), a topic which will be of interest to those engaged in the ways in which the twenty-first-century history.

Those interested in the genealogy of contemporary apocalyptic, disaster, and post-apocalyptic fiction will find chapter twelve, “Mapping the Post-nuclear Landscape,” a most compelling chapter. Seed identifies two phases of post-nuclear narratives, one in the long 1950s, which includes the novels of Frank, Miller, Wylie, and others, and another during the 1980s, comprised of works like Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Wild Shore (1984), Whitley Strieber and James W. Kunetka’s Warday and the Journey Onward (1984), and David Brin’s The Postman (1985). He emphasizes the latter’s “narrative reconstruction” and “exploration of the [postnuclear] terrain”(199), outlining the compelling ways that Cold War narratives begin to contest the post-apocalyptic cultural landscape even before the end of the Cold War. By recounting this narrative contest, Seed’s work participates in its own re-narration of Cold War fiction as socially reflective and often critical of the status quo.

Perhaps due to the breadth of Seed’s study, his references to genre often come across as cluttered and difficult to navigate. A list of genre and narrative descriptors that he invokes throughout the study and with varying frequency will help to illustrate this problem; he refers to:“a novel of the atomic age” (1), “nuclear novels,” (7); “future histories” (7), nuclear energy tales (9), “the nuclear sublime” (44), “political parable” (57), “protosurvivalist work” (71), “secular apocalypse” (93); “disaster narratives” (31), “encyclopedic narratives” (113), “hypothetical narratives” (48), “narratives of nuclear war” (6), “postnuclear narratives” (95), and “[the] search narrative” (10), among others. My problem isn’t with the proliferation of genres and subgenres, per se, but with the lack of the theoretical scaffolding that would allow a reader to make sense of them. How do future histories play out in relation to secular apocalypses? Which of these genres overlap and which cannot be used to describe the same text? To be fair, Seed does draw on other critics for at least some of these labels, as with nuclear sublime narratives, which he credits to Frances Ferguson (40), and with encyclopedic narratives, which he credits to Edward Mendelson (113). The introduction to Seed’s earlier American Science Fiction and the Cold War provides one answer to the genre problem of Under the Shadow: Seed explains that nuclear war is always already textual; the focus and drive of his work seems to suggest that the same holds true for history itself and by extension all narrative, thus shifting his concern from the production and reception of texts towards their content. Genre, for Seed, becomes a less complex formal term and more a way of distinguishing what happens in a given story. On a positive note, the proliferation of genres is a sign of the richness of the archive of Cold War narratives and the remaining, though sometimes conflicting, interpretive possibilities for engaging that archive.

Seed’s project to re-narrate and re-situate Cold War narratives in Under the Shadow includes “more material about” and gives “more detailed attention” to key nuclear narratives (6) and, crucially, is published at a moment when this return to the Cold War seems logically possible once more. In the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis and the ensuing global recession, globalization and capitalism appear more intensely entwined than they have since the fall of Soviet communism. This could be one reason for the return to the cultural field of Cold War narratives today. Seed’s account refreshingly draws our attention not only to the ideological battles fought over and, crucially, with nuclear energy and atomic weapons, but also, and this is where his study differs from those others mentioned above, to the ways the authors in his study discuss their ecological impacts. Today, the threat of mutually assured self-destruction seems to be arriving from a much slower, much hotter ecological war, implied in Seed’s chapter on Philip Wylie (who drew on Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring [1962] as a source for The End of the Dream [1972]). Reading Seed’s work, then, we must remain mindful of its historical mediations, as his study of the development of Cold War narratives is one and the same time a reflection on the ecological crises we face at present. As such, I recommend Seed’s book as an immensely useful critical tool for those pursuing their own theories of Cold War cultural production and its contemporary revival.

This review first appeared in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 25.2-3: Seed, David. Under the Shadow: The Atomic Bomb and Cold War Narratives. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2013. Hardcover. ISBN 978-1-60635-146-8. $60.00.

February 12, 2015 / 0 Comments

Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase…Frack, Gene-splice, Hinder, Immolate…We all have dystopias to write.

With an introduction and twenty-five separate essays, Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase covers impressive ground. The book comes to terms with a genre that appears to be, if anything, broadly conceived: while the sheer length of the project suggests that it might have benefited from editorial discretion, the ethos of dystopia lends itself to varied applications and interpretations. Indeed, the rewards of engaging the text as a whole are great, especially as some of the strongest work is found in its latter half.The collection, when read in sequence, does not allow one to settle in to a particular geography, national-economic space, or version of dystopia; instead, the arrangement of the chapters jumps, for instance, from alter-histories of women in the Mexican Revolution, to the deeply troubled Montreal of the mid-nineties, to Douglas Coupland’s slacker realism. The effect produced is one of cycling defamiliarization, a shuffling of imagined destinies and short-circuited hopes that comprise a dauntingly heterogeneous futurity. These vertiginous snap between futures subtends, but does not override, the critical intervention of the book: to shift contemporary studies of dystopia from an Anglo-American or loosely international frame to one that understands the dystopian literary mode, and the texts specifically produced, in the wake of the cultural changes that have taken place in North America since the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta). In this collection, held separate from its literary tradition, dystopia becomes a critical tool that assesses the unevenness of the North American political economy. Indeed, the dizziness of considering, in turn, Nalo Hopkinson’s hollowed Toronto, Alex Rivera’s sleep factories, and Neil Gaiman’s dystopian phantasmagoria emulates the free flow of goods across Canadian, U.S., Mexican, and the ever-obfuscated Indigenous borders of the continent.

From the start, I noticed a typical formal split in the author’s approaches to dystopia. On the one hand, some seem to refuse to assume the kind of shared intimacy with their object literary critics so often accept as a part of their endeavour. This variety of essay in the collection relies heavily on quotation, communicating as much as possible of the dystopia in question in its own words, be it Cormac McCarthy’s futureless future or Lisa Robertson’s critique of a gentrified Vancouver. I like this approach particularly in “‘The Dystopia of the Obsolete’: Lisa Robertson’s Vancouver and the Poetics of Nostalgia,” Paul Stephens’s essay on Robertson’s The Office for Soft Architecture (2003), precisely because he seemed able to remain true to her poetics and her politics through his citational practice. On the other hand, Sharlee Reimer insists on the critical project of interpretation championed by Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) in “Logical Gaps and Capitalist Seduction in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl”; Sharon DeGraw places Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) against Detroit’s deterioration to highlight the green urban policy of the novel; while Robert T. Tally Jr. comes closest to naming the obfuscated futurity of the global hegemon through Gaiman’s American Gods (2001) in “Lost in Grand Central: Dystopia and Transgression in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.” The essays that work through their texts, rather than alongside them, seem to extend the critical work of the dystopia in a shared world-building with their authors, developing their work, riffing on Jameson’s description of the dystopia as “near future novel,” into a near future criticism.

Although the 1993 ratification of the North American Free Trade agreement liberalized trade, it did not liberalize history, as the essays on Central American dystopias bear out. These six essays, focusing explicitly on Mexican, Chicano/a novels and film stand out for their strongly unified generic theory of dystopia. In “Archive Failure? Cielos de la tierra’s Historical Dystopia,” Zac Zimmer assesses that “as Americans, North, Central, and South, we live in a series of superimposed afters: after the conquest; after colonialism; after independence; after this revolution; after that revolution; after this war; after that war. Perhaps, one day, there will indeed be an ‘after globalization,’ an ‘after neoliberalism,’ an ‘after nafta’” (233). Thinking about the histories and present of settler-colonialism María Odette Canivell similarly posits that “when speaking about the Latina American utopian imaginary, two clearly defined camps emerge: utopias for Latin America and utopias of Latin America” (240). Further, Adam Spires argues that Homero Ardjis’s novels are “informed by Aztec history” and that they “remind us that, like the laws of nature, mythological time is cyclical not linear, and that indigenous legacy of mythology is inextricable from Mexico’s future” (352). Finally, Luis Gómez Romero describes Latin America in Borgesesque terms as “a historical labyrinth erected upon antique and new stories of oppression and inequality that seem to stretch from the sixteenth century right into the twenty-first” (373). What Zimmer, Canivell, Spires, and Romero collectively uncover is the radical critical quality of the Latin American dystopia and the penchant for such texts to outdo their U.S. counterparts, even those as developed as Gaiman’s, in their mobilization of history. One overwhelming result of this collection’s purview is the revelation of how the centre seems determined-yet-unable to represent its own decline. While this observation does little to address post-nafta unevenness, it does address the kinds of diagnosis that help to depict the system behind such liberalizing agreements themselves, reminding me of the very real dystopian settler-colonial petro-capitalist hetero-patriarchy that we live in today.

Several chapters are worth mentioning outside of my interpretative synthesis: Janine Tobeck on William Gibson’s Bigend trilogy; Richard Gooding on the ya dystopian novel Feed; Annette Lapointe on eating and eating disorders in Atwood’s Maddadam trilogy; and Lee Skallerup Bassette on Canada and Quebec’s cultural responses to nafta. Whether for teaching or research, I anticipate this collection will prove an invaluable reference, opening up new pathways and connections for those well versed in science fiction’s dystopian variants as well as for those newly embarking down the pathways of the future.

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Cecily Devereux for the opportunity to review this book and to Alexandra Carruthers and Adam Carlson for their editorial suggestions. This review first appeared in English Studies in Canada 40.2-3: Brett Josef Grubisic, Gisèle M. Baxter, and Tara Lee, eds. Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier UP, 2014. 480 pp.

January 23, 2014 / 0 Comments

Contagion *

Contagion (Steven Soderbergh US 2011). Warner Bros Pictures. NTSC Region 1. Widescreen 16:9. US$31.98.

* – this DVD Review was first published in Science Fiction Film and Television 6.1 (2013), 119-123, and is reprinted here with permission from Liverpool UP. I’d like to thank and acknowledge the input of the excellent editors of SFFTV, Mark Bould and Sherryl Vint, as well as my colleague Jeff Diamanti with whom I had quite a discussion about optics, picture thinking, and totality (you can check out Jeff’s excellent blog here).

Contagion, like Steven Soderbergh’s earlier Traffic (Germany/US 2000), maintains a dynamic – one might even say dialectical – relationship between space and time. Just as Traffic works as a realist mapping of social space, charting the transnational drug trade and the limits to politics over the US–Mexico border, so Contagion does more than just follow an epidemic. It appears to be a study in global circulation, picturing the spread of the disease, press conferences, international and multinational video conferences and, ultimately, global circuits of capital in the form of commodity shipments earlier in the film and vaccine shipments later on. Traffic and Contagion can therefore be thought of as bookends to the first decade of the twenty first century, with the former imagining border concerns that fell out of public notice after 11 September 2001, and the latter – focused, as it is, on the circulation of disease, vaccine, rumour and speculation – following on the heels of the fallout from another type of speculation, the 2008 financial crisis. While Traffic suggests that everyone, drug lords and officials alike, is corrupt or corruptible (save, perhaps, for Javier Rodriguez (Benicio Del Toro)), Contagion suggests that ‘in a world gone catastrophically wrong, the only folks to be trusted are government officials’ (Clover 8). However, the complicity of government officials in the film seems to have little to do with what the circulation of disease renders visible.

In contrast to other contemporary apocalyptic and disaster films (for a review of a number of global pandemic films, see Maio), such as 2012 (Emmerich US 2009), Contagion rarely gives in to imagining the globe from the outside or above. Instead, the narrative tends to follow characters and end up in locations that are intimately related to the disease itself. Even the grandest shots of treatment centres, food lines or vaccination centres are only as wide or as long as a hockey arena or a public square could allow. The film works from within government agencies, families and villages, much like Traffic, elaborating the relation between space and time in two major zones: the United States and Hong Kong/China. Indeed, the dividing line between the two zones can be drawn between the politics of the family and the politics of the village – Dr. Ellis Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) calls his wife to warn her to leave Chicago before the city is quarantined, while Sun Feng (Chin Han) takes a world health official, Dr Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard), hostage in order to ransom her for the vaccine to save his village.

The film works through a variety of explanations for the breakout before positing a final narrative explanation. The foremost explanation is a moral one, with patient zero, Beth Emhoff (Gwyneth Paltrow), being punished by the disease for her extra-marital affair. Indeed, we only get a brief shot of the man in Chicago she sleeps with and thus kills through the spread of MEV-1 (Meningoencephalitis Virus One). This narrative plays itself out between her step-daughter, Jory Emhoff (Anna Jacoby-Heron), and husband, Mitch Emhoff (Matt Damon). Jory’s father protectively keeps her in the house throughout the majority of the film, sheltering her from the disease and the outside world. Another narrative – conspiracy – is touted by blogger Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law), who traces responses to the disease back to the financial relationship between corporate interests, the US government and the Center for Disease Control (CDC), even while he is paid off and lies about the effectiveness of forsythia, a homeopathic treatment described as a cure for the contagion.

Perhaps the strongest force in Contagion, though not necessarily as an explanation for the disease, is the enlightenment narrative of progress implied at the CDC as scientists store the cured MEV-1 alongside H1N1 and SARS and eight to ten other disease storage vats. In the film, this type of progress is brought about largely by rogues: Professor Ian Sussman (Elliott Gould) does not follow orders to destroy his attempts to grow the virus – a necessary step in curing the disease – and Dr Ally Hextall (Jennifer Ehle), in the spirit of her father’s story about the discovery that bacteria not stress caused ulcers, injects herself with the vaccine rather than waiting months for the approval of test subjects. However convincing this may be for the audience, the explanatory power of medicine and progress is challenged in the film as Dr Erin Mears (Kate Winslet) struggles to explain the R0 (the basic reproductive rate) of the disease to Minnesota health officials. Their response is not encouraging: ‘We’re gonna need to walk the government through this before we start to freak everybody out. I mean, we can’t even tell people right now what they should be afraid of. We tried that with Swine Flu and all we did was get healthy people scared. It’s the biggest shopping weekend of the year.’ While these narratives animate the film, offering different plot threads to follow, a material, and thus more accurate, explanation is implied in the film’s final scene.

It is one of only a few scenes that fall out of narrative sequence, and the only one conspicuously to do so. Unlike Traffic’s inconclusive final scene, Contagion offers a narrative closure that retroactively answers any lingering questions the audience may have, but I will hold off on discussing it just for a moment. Other shots from out of sequence do not read as conspicuous because they rely on Dr Orantes reviewing the Hong Kong casino’s surveillance footage in the hopes of finding patient zero, and these dreamy shots of Beth Emhoff alive and enjoying herself shed little light on the causes of the disease. Caetlin Benson-Allott provocatively suggests that in the final scene ‘what we are seeing is the video record Orantes wants, not the one she has’ (15). Unlike the narratives generated by morality, conspiracy or the enlightenment, this final scene offers up a different interpretation, as the restoration of the status quo in the Emhoff household – Mitch Emhoff gives his daughter the prom she never got – signals the film’s final moment, an indication that nothing has taken place outside the status quo since the start.

In the scene in question, the camera moves in a revelatory fashion, tying together loose threads: a dissolve from the Emhoff household to dusky Macau Forest is sustained by what was the diegetic sound of prom music now turned non-diegetic, signalling, as we will see, a jump in temporality. The camera tilts up past dense foliage in the foreground to reveal heavy machinery bearing the discernible corporate marker AIMM: Alderson International Mining and Manufacturing, the company Beth Emhoff worked for and the reason for her trip to Hong Kong. The camera tracks left as it follows the machinery and tilts up to reveal trees, which then fall out of the shot as bats take flight from them. After a dissolve, the camera follows a bat from its perch on some bananas through its flight to a large structure. The shot cuts to frame the bat hanging from the ceiling inside the structure, which is only revealed to be a pig barn once the camera tilts down to follow some fruit and/or guano the bat drops amongst the pigs. The tempo picks up as a series of shots – reminiscent of those earlier in the film that elaborated the movement and development of the disease – follow the pig off the farm and into a restaurant, which is then revealed to be in the casino where Emhoff caught MEV-1 in the first place. The circle is completed as the chef who was preparing the pig goes out to greet Emhoff without washing his hands. A definitive title, ‘Day 1’, is displayed in the bottom centre of the shot just as the film ends.

The theory of the disease’s outbreak that ends up proving true is floated earlier in the film when Dr Hextall says, ‘somewhere in the world the wrong pig met up with the wrong bat’. My reading of the last scene picks up on Benson-Allott’s analysis of Contagion as a critique of hypervisibility. Discussing films, from Fantastic Voyage (Fleischer US 1966) and Innerspace (Dante US 1987) to Blade: Trinity (Goyer US 2004) and The Thing (van Heijningen Jr US/Canada 2011), that ‘teach viewers that computers can render truths our senses cannot’, she argues that ‘by separating digital visual aids from the rest of the characters’ environments, Contagion indicates that seeing the virus – or even the moment of its transmission – can never fully explain the biological catalysts behind the epidemic’ (14). She nuances the spatial relations within the film by buttressing them with a dialectic of visibility. The ending of the film pulls back the veil on its ideological content – the film’s apparent moral lesson about Emhoff’s fidelity is revealed to fall short – and the scene with the bats and the pigs suggests a different narrative explanation, a different containment strategy: things are chaotic, the world is a big messy place, and the ways that we understand our place within it are propped up by little more than narrative alone. Benson-Allott reads this final scene in terms of what it reveals and the inherent limits of that representation: ‘Because it must find a way to represent transnational capital, Soderbergh’s final sequence participates in a logic of visible evidence that only leads to certain kinds of culprits – those which can be seen and identified – such as Beth Emhoff’s company’ (15). Indeed, that Dr Hextall’s explanation is shown to be accurate at the end of the film takes us closer to what it portrays throughout; a bridge is made between capitalist circulation and large-scale manufacturing and farm production, each with its intrinsic risks. The necessity of a named culprit results in a bad form of politics – AIMM is a bad corporation with bad practices, meaning that what is needed, then, is a good corporation.

Instead of stable explanation, we are left with a question about narrative film and its relation to depicting totality, about the relation of aesthetics and politics, which drives at the absent cause of Contagion itself. Contagion depicts not just the collision between the microscopic circulation of MEV-1 and the visibility of global actors through surveillance and digital technologies, but also figures the representability and manageability of the world as globe as a problem. The question is not about the mystery of the disease, which in retrospect is so easily vanquished (in an affirmation of enlightenment progress), but about the real remainder of Contagion, the real gap between the capitalist dialectics of circulation and production. The film suggests an answer in Jory’s question – ‘Why can’t there be a shot that keeps time from passing?’ – which can be read as a clever pun, if one has the inclination or desire to read film as having the potential to accomplish what Contagion sets out to do – to come to an understanding of social relations and the way disease, rumour, speculation and capital spread around the world. Jory’s question leaves out the element of space, an acute problem treated very carefully throughout the film. That is, if the world is now a fully global one, then Contagion reminds us that it is a fully capitalist one, too, but in such a way that implies we look to the absences for explanation, rather than what is made entirely, accurately visible. At its core, the film points out that the precise remainder of enlightenment progress cannot be represented – that is, the picture thinking of a contagion could only produce the question of totality and not its thought, not its cognitive map. That practice is left to us.

Works cited

Benson-Allott, Caetlin. ‘Out of Sight’. Film Quarterly 65.2 (2011): 14–15.

Clover, Joshua. ‘Fall and Rise’. Film Quarterly 65.2 (2011): 7–9.

Maio, Kathi. ‘It’s A Small (Sick) World – But Love Still Makes It Go Round’. Fantasy &

Science Fiction 122.1/2 (2012): 158–63.

November 17, 2012 / 0 Comments

We are Apocalyptic!

Evan Calder Williams. Combined and Uneven Apocalypse. Zero Books, 2011. 264pp. – Originally published in Reviews in Cultural Theory 2.2 (1 September 2011).

Evan Calder Williams’ Combined and Uneven Apocalypse tracks apocalyptic visions of the future back to their occluded origins, which, for Williams’, is to say, back to the present moment. In different contexts, Teresa Heffernan and Slavoj Žižek have similarly asked: what if the apocalypse has already taken place, and we missed it? (Heffernan 6; Žižek 150-151) Williams’ book takes this provocation seriously, theorizing and critiquing the pervasive “apocalyptic fantasies of late capitalism…in the cinema and the wider cultural, political, and economic landscape from the end of the ‘60s to now” (1).

Williams puts pressure on apocalyptic narratives by reading cultural texts as symptoms and signposts of the contradictions of global capitalism. He declares that the symptoms accompanying crisis—specifically the 2008 financial crisis—can, and should, be diagnosed as terminal. Here, Williams depends upon a distinction between crisis, catastrophe and capitalist apocalypse that is useful. Williams maintains that crises happen as a part of the normal and smooth functioning of the capitalist mode of production. Collectively we pass through them without experiencing structural change. Unlike crises, structural catastrophe represents a broken system—an end to prosperity without meaning or hope. When compared with etymological understandings of apocalypse (from the ancient Greek apokalupsis meaning revelation or unveiling of the true order), catastrophe is an end “without revelation” (4). Finally, capitalist apocalypse involves an active recognition of the apocalyptic present—for example, a naming and acting on the 2008 collapse of financial capital as terminal for capitalism. Capitalist apocalypse “is the possibility of grasping how the global economic order and its social relations depend upon the production and exploitation of the undifferentiated, of those things which cannot be included in the realm of the openly visible without rupturing the very oppositions that make the whole enterprise move forward” (8). Given this reading of catastrophe and capitalist apocalypse, crisis is left aside as work for other analyses. The focus of this book is, on one hand, to theoretically analyze the symptomatics of apocalyptic thinking as they surface in contemporary film and, on the other, to urge contemporary thought and action to respond and take responsibility for the apocalyptic presence in our everyday lives.

Following his introduction, Williams divides Combined and Uneven Apocalypse into three sections: “Salvagepunk,” “Plague in the Gears,” and “Combined and Uneven Apocalypse.” The first chapter reads like a manifesto, urging new and critical ways of seeing and knowing the present. It attends to the cyberpunk and steampunk subgenres of Science Fiction (SF), adding salvagepunk as a third, generative variant. Williams describes the relation of salvagepunk to its predecessors in the first chapter: “To put the punk into salvage is to occupy it too well, not to stand outside the logic of the game, but to track it to its far horizons. There we see the frayed hems of a mode of thought…. [Punk] had to do with the intersection of a close attachment to its historical present with the fact that it no longer believed in a future – the present is already the hollowed-out promise of that future” (32). With a similar understanding of political time, salvagepunk recognizes the apocalyptic nature of the present, and instead of grasping a wholeness or unity, it takes up the leftovers of the capitalist mode of production that do not fit neatly into the system of which they are a part. Principle among Williams’ examples in this vein are Richard Lester’s 1969 film The Bed Sitting Room and the Mad Max films (George Miller 1979, 1981, and with George Ogilvie 1985).

Chapter 2, “Plague in the Gears,” provides a loose cultural history of zombies and zombie films. Beyond clearing up misconceptions, including the fact that fast zombies were actually an innovation of Dan O’Brannon not Daniel Boyle[i], Williams reads a host of zombie movies (for example, George A. Romero Night of the Living Dead 1968, John Carpenter They Live 1988, O’Bannon Return of the Living Dead 1985, and Boyle 28 Days Later 2002), tracking the historical development of what he calls the nightmare image of the day (72). He deploys ‘nightmare image’ in a twofold sense: first, zombies are a “reigning cultural bad dream” (72); and, second, they represent “an eternal present of the world not coming to an end” (72). Part of the work behind this cultural history of zombie movies involves dispelling surface readings and misconceptions common to thinkers and fans of the genre. Williams takes issue with academic and intellectual readings of zombie movie that just scratch the surface: “Simply because a film seems to point out problems of social inequality does not mean that it is a radical film, or even one that is therefore ‘smarter’ and more aware than those films hell-bent on entertainment, social critique be damned” (79). In other words, for Williams there remains something to be desired in readings that take the movie’s setting, a mall for instance, to stand as a critique, of say, consumerism. Williams reads such interpretations themselves as reified thought, suggesting that lacking a theory of aesthetic or cognitive realism sufficient to the condition of late capitalist culture, “zombie films better capture the logic of the times, that opaque ‘almost-thought’ which always escapes the closure of facile critique” (86).

But the critical importance of zombie movies should not be over-read. For Williams, it isn’t that zombies no longer mean what they used to; rather, “they no longer mean what they could” (143). He identifies the problem, in the larger framework of apocalyptic literature, as a cultural blindness. These films seem to be unable to think beyond the individual, the family, or the lovers, beyond the smallest and least collective portions of human life and culture. But, Williams refuses to give up or give in to these objects. He still sees in them “apocalyptic potential” (156).

The final section, “Combined and Uneven Apocalypse,” operates doubly as a theoretical culmination and working through of the first two chapters on salvagepunk and zombies, and as a projection for and a program of action. With the term “apocalyptic potential,” Williams hopes for something that is not tied to forms of catastrophe or crisis and for a space generated by apocalyptic thought that has some level of autonomy (although I doubt he would use that word). Following the denotation of the word apocalypse, Williams calls for a “permanent visibility of the hidden” (156). By carrying on with his analysis through films and books, Williams reveals the nearest approximation of the structures undergirding capitalism’s totality: combined and uneven development (157). He considers such a view post-apocalyptic and reorients the implication of the ‘post’ from a temporal to a political axis. For Williams, a post-apocalyptic view is “a necessary optic onto the flourishing wastelands of late capitalism, the recognition that the apocalyptic event has been unfolding” (my emphasis; 158). At the heart of his project lies a commitment to the way things could be. If we are already apocalyptic, Williams’ book suggests that we begin the work of uncovering the image of the nascent post-apocalyptic subject.

An exposure to an object threatens to become, according to Adorno in “Culture and Society”, a “cultural criticism [that] shares the blindness of its object.” (27) There is a feeling that Williams’ book may at times be victim to this familiar critical tendency. I believe this closeness to the object, which here I admit at times risks becoming a problem in the text, also enables some of the more compelling aspects of the book. Of course this book, like the genre of narratives it engages, repeatedly spell out certain doom and a lack of future; but Williams shows that this need not determine how we read apocalyptic narratives. Combined and Uneven Apocalypse is not the mind trap that it could be, considering the pervasive tendency of contemporary apocalyptic narratives to foreclose revolutionary thought rather than generate it.

Beyond the fear of the object though, the closeness of Williams approach often left me wanting a clear outline, which is not to say that , working through his argument did prove rewarding. Yet, his readings of individual films sometimes felt like they carried on far longer than they needed to. To the issue of these sometimes too drawn out readings, I would also add a small complaint about the chapter breaks, which often felt more like a way to categorize the different objects of analysis than logical or methodological breaks.

One element of his book which I find immensely useful is the work he does in categorizing apocalyptic narratives, in light of the different types of (capitalist) crisis covered earlier. For instance, his detailed taxonomy of eco-apocalypse narratives is a valuable contribution to the very active scholarship on this sub-genre today.

Notes

[i] Williams’ description of O’Brannon’s 1985 film Return of the Living Dead features more than just fast zombies. It actualizes the cultural references and pastiche so common to postmodernism, entrenching both the aesthetic tenets of the zombie film and the deep symptoms of late capital.