Apocalypse and Heroism in Popular Culture: Allegories of White Masculinity in Crisis 1476667853, 9781476667850

Table of contents :
Cover
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: White Masculinity and the Liberal Apocalypse Allegory in Popular Culture
1. Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and the Status of Critique in Children of Men and Mad
2. Settler Colonialism, Gender, and Joss Whedon’s Firefly/Serenity
3. Crises of Masculine and Neoliberal Subjection in The Walking Dead
4. Futurities and Speculative Fictions in ­Sci-Fi Cinema
Conclusion: Allegory with a Vengeance in The Girl with All the Gifts
Chapter Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Apocalypse and Heroism in Popular Culture

Apocalypse and Heroism in Popular Culture Allegories of White Masculinity in Crisis

Katherine E. Sugg

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina

This book has undergone peer review.

ISBN (print) 978-1-4766-6785-0 ISBN (ebook) 978-1-4766-4566-7 Library of Congress and British Library cataloguing data are available

Library of Congress Control Number 2022002124 © 2022 Katherine E. Sugg. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Front cover image: Clark Middleton, Luke Pasqualino, John Hurt (seated), Octavia Spencer, Chris Evans in Snowpiercer, 2013 South Korea/USA (The Weinstein Company/Photofest) Printed in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com

Table of Contents Preface

1

Introduction: White Masculinity and the Liberal Apocalypse Allegory in Popular Culture

9

One.  Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and the Status of Critique in Children of Men and Mad Max: Fury Road

47

Two.  Settler Colonialism, Gender, and Joss Whedon’s Firefly/Serenity: The Limits of White Irony

88

Three.  Crises of Masculine and Neoliberal Subjection in The Walking Dead

126

Four.  Futurities and Speculative Fictions in ­Sci-Fi Cinema: Sleep Dealer and Snowpiercer

160

Conclusion. Allegory with a Vengeance in The Girl with All the Gifts

197

Chapter Notes

203

Bibliography

223

Index

229

v

Preface I did much of the final writing on Apocalypse and Heroism in 2020 and 2021, as some terrifyingly real crises unfurled in the United States and across the world and many of us watched in consternation (or worse) as news and social media videos flooded our computer, television, and smartphone screens. And sometimes those alarming images and stories seemed to feel and look like many of the apocalyptic images and narratives I explore in this book. The fictional narratives of crisis that I discuss here are stories that I have long considered to be exaggerated fantasies, though often very informative and entertaining ones. No doubt the slew of recent global crises soon will be reflected in popular culture and its criticism, and many clearheaded and thoughtful explanations and analyses will be made. But I have to admit that I hope not by me. Apocalypse and Heroism is, in part, an effort to smuggle some insights from critical and political theory into a more widely accessible understanding of the aesthetic and generic conventions of popular culture and its narratives. While much of my focus is on the roles of race and gender in cultural imaginaries and narratives, I also try to show why discussions of neoliberalism, liberal individualism, and political and social histories are useful in thinking about aesthetics and genres in popular culture and narrative—i.e., my own areas of specialization, and of training and of many of my fellow academic critics in cultural and literary studies. As such, much of my argument regarding the less obvious messages and implications embedded in some of our favorite television series and “hit” movies is also an engagement with how people experience both media and their own lives, which I and others argue is largely through narrative. My guiding idea has been to explore and sometimes critique what appear to be wide attachments to notions that many people, often including myself, still tend to hold—if only unconsciously—about individualism and leadership and all that these values imply about both various kinds of individuals and societies. Popular genres include many types of stories and images. In recent decades, images of the apocalypse and 1

2 Preface other ­world-shattering crises keep flashing across our screens and pulling our attention, so I wonder what might be learned from the narratives of destruction and visions of rebuilding or saving the world that seem to dominate television, film, and even the news? To consider how contemporary culture seems to love a crisis, I focus on the question of the “hero,” the character of that unique individual who will save others (in the family, community, nation, or world) by the virtue of their special capacities. A figure that traditionally, and often still, is presented as a white man. The intransigence of racialized and gendered ideas about who can lead, and what society and politics are even for, has taken on surreal ­real-life consequences in recent years. Even before the 2020 ­COVID-SARS global pandemic, cultural and political commentators worried about the rise of populist authoritarian leaders across the world, and particularly in the United States. For instance, political theorist Bonnie Honig noted that in the Donald Trump administration, presidential rhetoric reflected a dynamic of domestic violence that positioned the presidential “leader” as a mercurial, abusive patriarch and both foreign powers and the American public as the wife, anxiously guessing his next move.1 Much of Trump’s rhetoric relied on figures of embattled ­white-masculine authority and contempt toward the various cultural and political shifts since the 1960s that have challenged the presumptive superiority of white supremacy and patriarchal traditions. As the analysis of that rhetoric became a veritable cottage industry, many media and academic commentators have noted that the perception of traditional forms of masculinity as endangered, or in crisis, often translates into a defensive posturing among both individuals and political groups. And this perceived crisis results in attempts to shore up that threatened masculine authority—often through expressions of power, violence, and superiority that offend many but seemingly resonate with an equal number of others.2 And yet times have indeed changed and along with them, many ideologies and stereotypes of race and gender roles and capacities would seem to be outdated, even extinct. Still, in an era of perpetual war, populist authoritarian politics, and superhero blockbuster films, it would be difficult to deny that ­long-standing attitudes associated with gender and race and their role in popular narratives shape notions of who and what constitutes a hero or heroism. Such attitudes clearly persist for large segments of both the political and ­media-consuming populations, but often in ways that are not obvious or expected. Popular culture offers a useful, and often very fun, opportunity for thinking through these questions about cultural narratives and popular media that manifest deeply held stories and ideas circulating in a given social context. As I acknowledge, much of that context for this book is contemporary Western society, particularly in the



Preface3

United States, though “our” popular culture now extends across much of the world and increasingly has become an ostensibly global popular culture, albeit one that remains legible to U.S. audiences. While my main analyses explore the issues of genre—apocalypse, science fiction, romance, horror, ­action-thriller, dystopia, and family melodrama are some I discuss in detail—considerations of commercial success and global access and distribution are pertinent in several of my case studies, and I try to address those as well. These are not ­avant-garde or ­art-house movies and TV shows, although a couple were not initially huge hits or have been most popular in university classrooms and academic criticism. All, however, with the possible exception of Sleep Dealer (2008, dir. Alex Rivera), are very widely known and much discussed. Both popular audiences worldwide and scholarly debates have taken up the apocalypse as a key contemporary genre, one which seems to have become a permanent fixture in the 21st century. The ­large-scale and devastating destruction of the world is presented in stories and tones that can be variously humorous, terrifying, horrific, or incredibly sad. Why this experience is marketed as entertainment and expected to be so gratifying for large numbers of people is actually a serious question that I explore in depth. From the Christian Bible’s myths of an imminent apocalyptic “wiping away” of a corrupt, ungodly world, to modern secular visions of alien invasion, zombie apocalypse, and climate catastrophe, our collective imagining of decisive, ­world-changing crisis finds its most explicit expression in the apocalypse allegory. This function is deeply grounded in narrative dynamics and is also interesting because both apocalypse and allegory can be used in a multitude of ways. My analyses explore these nuances and try to show how the tendency to see popular culture in terms of good or bad politics and moral or corrupt visions underserves the complexities of many great films and TV shows, no matter which version of good or bad futurities or necessary critiques we may be seeking or warning against. I begin the Introduction with some exploration of political concepts and aesthetic histories important in Western liberal modernity: both its artistic and cultural tradition (its plots and allegories) and its philosophical and political concepts and assumptions, particularly those grounded in liberal humanism and influential interrogations of that tradition. This investigation seeks to map some ways popular culture both reflects and tracks the collective function of apocalyptic crisis narratives. It also interrogates the ­long-standing assumption that a big crisis needs a leader and that the responsibility for ­large-scale human survival can usefully be ascribed to a single person or small group of individuals. The persistence of the gendered and racialized associations with agency and order is vividly apparent

4 Preface in contemporary ­popular-culture mediums, particularly the growing dominance of superhero franchises in film and other media. For example, the highest grossing film of 2016 was a Marvel Comics Universe (MCU) ensemble behemoth, Captain America: Civil War (dir. Anthony Russo and Joe Russo), which follows a ­now-familiar formula: witty dialogue, expensive special effects, and plot twists and characterizations that express an ironic ­self-reflective tone and perspective on the genre. Like other MCU products, Civil War offers an updated view of superhero stereotypes and plot conventions, telling the story of a “civil war” between competing visions of freedom and good governance—and the two leaders, who are Captain America (Chris Evans) and Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.). The ensemble cast and baroque plot machinations of many MCU films in the Avengers franchise work hard to distract our focus from the main story line that often frames a crisis of governmentality and leadership as a “white man’s burden” sort of thing. And, yes, several of Civil War’s key players are female characters, including Natasha Romanoff/Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson) and Wanda Maximoff/the Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen), as well as the three Black superheroes: Sam Wilson/Falcon (Anthony Mackie), James “Rhodey” Rhodes/War Machine (Don Cheadle), and T’Challa/Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman).3 In terms of race and gender differences and their presumed functions, the problems raised by Civil War are most obvious in the plotline that begins with the catalyst for the main conflict of the movie: an accident killing innocent bystanders during a mission in Lagos is caused by Wanda, the Elizabeth Olsen character, who has not yet learned to properly control or manage her superpowers, a hint given in her superhero name, “the Scarlet Witch.” Wanda starts off as a sympathetic but rather helpless character who must be protected and managed by some man—thus, her character arc begins as a victim (of her own powers, which come along with suggestions of mental health/stability concerns) and then as something of a rogue villain who might have to be eliminated. The notion that a beautiful, vaguely outlaw and waiflike young white woman is fundamentally unstable plays into a ­long-standing current in gender ideology that projects all sorts of irrationality onto the feminine character—and is an important point of Chapter Two. Similarly, the main difficult decisions for the more sober female figure of Natasha/Black Widow concern which leading white man character she will support and counsel. Civil War illustrates how the crises of governmentality and legitimacy that organize the MCU (and many other hit films and TV series) place the women and ­non-white characters, often themselves heroic figures in the narrative, in roles that support or confirm decisions made by the centrally featured white men. I suggest that this tendency persists as a cohering



Preface5

narrative element that organizes viewers’ relationship to what an apocalyptic crisis promises or threatens, and is evident in both the MCU and the surge in apocalypse and post apocalypse films and TV shows. However, the writers of some of the works I consider are quite skeptical about heroes and their impact on collective survival and its future. And others indicate a concern and interest in the many forms that heroes and heroism might take. I discuss the mix of these narrative directions and generic conventions through an array of case studies drawn from popular media that has been commercially or critically successful, and many are both. As I note below, the selection of my examples is simultaneously a reflection of my personal apocalypse and dystopia ­pop-culture archive and an index of particular issues and examples that are important to my argument. These films and TV series allow me to explore overarching questions of genre and representation that highlight some key narrative dynamics organizing concepts of gender, race, individualism, and collective futurity. At the end of the Introduction, I summarize the book’s specific chapters and examples and the organizing arc. Roughly, I move through the apocalypse allegory from the Introduction’s mainstream liberal incarnations in popular culture to some more critical film and television examples in Chapters One and Two. Although films like Children of Men (2006, dir. Alfonso Cuarón) explicitly criticize and ironize that “old” version of white male heroism in the apocalypse, I show how they also fall into some of the generic and ideological pitfalls of neoliberal multiculturalism. In Chapters Three and Four, the work of critique shifts to a more pessimistic register in examples such as the hit television show The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010– 2021) and the film Snowpiercer (2013, dir. Bong ­Joon-ho), where I suggest generic conventions are hyperbolically invoked to reveal the futility of liberal individual agency and expose the presumptions of heroic leadership as more of an obstacle than an avenue to better worlds and visions. Chapter Four, along with the Conclusion, also addresses the utopic possibilities of apocalypse that are created once these obstacles are dealt with. In these examples (Snowpiercer, Sleep Dealer, and The Girl with All the Gifts [2015, dir. Colm McCarthy]), the tension between critique and speculation is explored through (rather than against) our identificatory attachments to various figures and their roles in the story, both the heroic and the ancillary, in order to propose a variety of new conceptions of both heroism and apocalypse. *** Writing this book was the most fun experience I’ve had as an academic scholar, until it wasn’t. The pace of both apocalyptic popular culture and contemporary politics over the past five years presented an ongoing

6 Preface challenge to my capacities to “keep up” (with current events, popular culture, and exciting scholarship) and to juggle various commitments, personal and professional. I want to thank my department, the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, and Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) for their institutional and collegial support during this period, and, especially, those colleagues and students who have been so key to the development and completion of this work. My CCSU writing group consists of the smartest readers and best editors I could hope to find, much less among cherished friends: Candace Barrington, Jaclyn Geller, and Heidi Hartwig read and commented on innumerable iterations of the following chapters and gave me a model of scholarship, friendship, academic and personal support, and writing prowess that I will never forget. This project has been enriched by the many students I’ve had the privilege to teach and test ideas on, particularly in courses on Apocalypse in Literature and Film, Global Aesthetics, and Feminist and Queer Theory. There are too many to name whose engagement and intelligence made this period rewarding, but I especially want to thank George Himes, Kathryn Fitzpatrick, Bilal Tajildeen, Ryan Curcio, Matthew Kirshman, Sam Elderkin, and Denaya Christopherson. Many colleagues have been, and remain, invaluable to me for their friendship and support: Burlin Barr, Eric Leonidas, Melissa Mentzer, Aimee Pozorski, Karen Ritzenhoff, Maria Casas, Rocio Fuentes, Robert Dowling, and Mary Ann Mahoney, among many others. I am also deeply grateful to have friends and colleagues outside my university who engaged with me in this project, directly or indirectly, in so many important ways and were there for the quick (or ­not-so-quick) breaks and outings in the world that make life and work better: Brad Hebel, Julia Constantino, Sarah Ferguson, Susana Loza, E. Ann Kaplan, Susan Scheckel, Shirley Lim, Matt Christensen, John Andrews, Alyson Spurges, Troy Rasbury, Amy Schilling, Celia Marshik, Mark Bowen, Lisa Dietrich, Vicky Hesford, Adrián ­Pérez-Melgosa, and Daniela Fleisler. My particular and heartfelt thanks to friend and manuscript editor Melissa Forbis—who read every word, sentence, and reference, working expertly to help make them all into a better and clearer argument—and to Eva Cherniavsky, who gave crucial and inspired feedback just when I needed it and whose work has long been central to my own thinking. All errors that remain, in both thinking and writing, are of course my own. I also thank McFarland and particularly Managing Editor Layla Milholen for her initial interest and ongoing enthusiasm and support in getting this book written and published. My thanks also to the two anonymous readers for McFarland whose attention and insight greatly improved the final product. Parts of Chapter Three are adapted from a previous



Preface7

publication: “The Walking Dead: Late Liberalism and Masculine Subjection in Apocalypse Fictions” in the Journal of American Studies’ 2015 Special Issue on “Speculative Fictions/Fictions of Speculation,” edited by Hamilton Carroll and Annie McClanahan. Finally, I want to gratefully acknowledge my family for their patience and support during what must have seemed like an interminable process: my three wonderful children—now young adults—Patrick, Sarah, and Thomas for watching so many movies and TV shows with me, including Thomas’s ­long-ago recommendation of Zombieland that started all of this. And to my husband, Brian, whose escalating cooking skills, care, and loving and grounding companionship have proven this past couple of years that crisis can indeed bring out the best in some men.

Introduction: White Masculinity and the Liberal Apocalypse Allegory in Popular Culture “You’ve seen what people do without leadership.”—Snowpiercer “Whiteness is a cultural logic that can be understood as an affective code that positions itself as the law.”—José Esteban Muñoz1

In an early scene of Roland Emmerich’s 2009 environmental apocalypse fantasy, 2012, California is falling into the Pacific Ocean. At this moment, head government scientist Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) takes a break from trying to save the Earth to call his father, Harry Helmsley (Blu Mankuma), who is a jazz singer on a cruise ship, to let him know that the end of the world is happening ahead of schedule. The elderly widowed Harry takes this opportunity to share his ­tear-ridden feelings that “your mother and I had one hell of a great life, son. But I tell you what, the best part was, we had one hell of a great son, too.” Adrian is a government geologist who identified the scientific truth of a Mayan apocalypse prophecy three years before the film’s apocalyptic event. Up to this moment, 2012 has barreled through ­computer-generated imagery (CGI)-enhanced images of earthquakes, the ­off-scale and dramatic destruction of Los Angeles, and mass carnage. Now, viewers are gifted a brief, emotional respite as they witness the nuances of heartfelt ­father-son dynamics. Harry rejects his son’s offer to join the exclusive escape “arks.” Designed to withstand the oncoming cataclysmic events, these large ships were built by an international consortium of governments in order to save those deemed worthy (by genetics, skills, bank balance, and/or connections) 9

10 Introduction and necessary for restarting the next phase of humanity. Harry explains that he needs to stick with his ­jazz-duo buddy, Tony (George Segal), an aging ­cruise-ship lothario estranged from his own family. In this movie, men take care of men. It’s also useful to note that the characters of Adrian, his father, and the dramatically ­s elf-sacrificing President of the United States, Thomas Wilson (Danny Glover), are, in this instance, all Black men. By the early 2000s, Emmerich, a German film director/writer/producer, had become known for a series of Hollywood blockbuster apocalyptic disaster films, including Independence Day (1996) and The Day After Tomorrow (2004) that feature a similar seemingly ­p ost-racial casting of leading and supporting actors. However, this apparent decentering of popular generic expectations regarding race and masculine heroism is often undercut. In 2012, the film narrative shifts from Adrian to the efforts of underappreciated white speculative fiction writer Jackson Curtis (John Cusack) to prove himself as a good father. Jackson ultimately becomes the hero of the film’s apocalypse, saving his white family and the ark for the future of humanity. Jackson’s heroic success is confirmed by the final lines of the film, when his ­7-year-old daughter, Lilly (Morgan Lily), tells her father that after witnessing the end of the world and watching him save their ship from catastrophic destruction, she no longer wets the bed because she’s no longer afraid—“no more ­Pull-Ups,” she says with a smile. “Nice,” he responds. Here, the film’s final dialogue neatly signals Jackson’s paternal care, his manly reticence, and his restoration to his rightful position as husband and father, and—perhaps ironically but not coincidentally—as one of a few hundred thousand survivors now arriving on a newly “risen” continent of Africa. Whew. This final scene illustrates 2012’s emphasis on emotional moments and the film’s presumption that its audience wants to see the newly reconciled white heterosexual American family at the center of a global apocalyptic crisis. This link between scenarios of threatening apocalyptic devastation and the standard plot resolution of a white family man’s personal conflicts bluntly illustrates Apocalypse and Heroism’s dominant concerns: Although the allegory of apocalypse purports to explore dire scenarios of global, totalizing crisis—and even sometimes to offer speculative alternatives to doomed social orders—the apocalypse’s main thrust too often simply upholds a familiar social order (here, of heterosexual ­nuclear-family values, white American centrality, and global state capitalism’s benign international governance). In many such ­p op-culture apocalyptic allegories, including those that imagine new incarnations of the central roles and dynamics, we can discern the habits of thought and desire (that is, the logics) of a particular brand of Western liberal individualism.



White Masculinity and the Liberal Apocalypse Allegory 11

These apocalyptic allegories rest on ­long-held, fundamental understandings of the individual subject. Promising an agency (for ­world-saving and ­society-building), the category of the individual is the political prerequisite for freedom, for thriving, and for social order. Secondly, both the promise and the category of individualism are grounded in a surreptitious but foundational presumption that the only truly effective agent in such crises is a white man.

Liberal Apocalypse as Genre and Allegory What is at stake in the gendering and racialization of ­p op-culture political fantasies like 2012? Emmerich’s batch of wildly successful, and expensive, disaster/apocalypse films offers a good place to look for answers to this question. They provide a useful template for what I am calling the “liberal apocalypse” in popular culture, prominent since the 1990s. In this instance, I’m using the term “liberal” in its vernacular sense of reflecting a widely perceived, and presumably widely accepted, shift in race and gender representation in popular culture and society more broadly—often known as multiculturalism. Political philosopher Will Kymlicka calls this version of liberalism “social liberalism,” which emerged from the Civil Rights and postcolonial moments of the 1960s and ’70s and generated the social and political consensus of liberal multiculturalism and is distinct from, and some say opposed to, the “classical liberalism” of ­f ree-market individualism in political theory discussed below.2 This presumed multicultural era confirms for many the evolution of the United States as a reformed and improved society and affirms notions of national progress. That welding of liberal multiculturalism and liberal individualism is also often a central element in popular narratives of the apocalypse and other ­world-shaking crises. Since the 1990s, a surge of mainstream apocalypse scenarios have flooded the market and the screens of the early 21st century that are often less celebratory than Emmerich’s, including climate catastrophes and a plethora of zombie apocalypses. Popular culture arguably reflects and feeds audience desires, and the resurgence of the apocalypse genre in film and television (not to mention, video games and politics) suggests a collective need to anticipate experiences of cataclysmic disaster and crisis, reflecting what E. Ann Kaplan has termed ­Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PreTSS) in Western cultural imaginaries.3 Kaplan usefully tracks recent cinematic narrativizations of PreTSS through both psychoanalysis and a growing public awareness and fear of climate change, its causes, and what it might bring. In this book, I consider these anticipatory artifacts of popular

12 Introduction culture instead through the lens of genre. That is, I ask what we expect and/ or desire from these apparently satisfying crisis narratives that portray a possible or recent apocalypse and resonate as allegories. Since at least the Christian Bible’s Book of Revelation, allegory has been understood as a heightened narrative mode that is strongly pedagogical. The apocalypse allegory teaches, and reveals, a society’s faults, or sins, which precipitate the apocalyptic event, and then promises that with that society’s apocalyptic wiping away, there will be a newly redeemed world: something closer to a godly kingdom, as in the Bible. But some apocalypses demonstrate, as in 2012, that the path to redemption can also be through the restoration of an already familiar social order. Since apocalypse allegories depict the future of humanity amid a shattering crisis that threatens its end, the recent ­popular-cultural obsession with apocalypse necessarily indicates ­long-held ideas and biases. In our secular age, these are often attitudes, or ideologies, about politics, collective governance, and individual and collective merit or capacity. In other words, who will be most likely to survive the apocalypse and why? Many of these popular apocalyptic crises reveal presumptions that weld leadership to older ideas about masculinity and race. These presumptions have resurged into the national and international media sphere with a startling uptick in revanchist political posturing that often hinges on a gendered rhetoric of “strength” and “power,” a rhetoric that Emmerich’s popular (sometimes blockbuster) films both uphold and inflect with contemporary notions of racial harmony and manly caretaking. Apocalypse and Heroism examines the various ways even these so-called liberal attitudes toward race and gender remain embedded in economic liberalism: logics of Western individualism and autonomy that are foundational to widely shared ideas about human freedom and the ingredients for good governance, and a good society. In Emmerich’s and other mainstream apocalypses, such stories presume that the apocalyptic crisis’s “war for survival” needs a singular leader.4 The apocalypse genre thus intensifies and reveals the rationales, both historical and contemporary, which shape the familiar understanding of collective and individual life as guaranteed and saved by just and effective leadership. Although mainstream media suggest that such leadership requires that some white man must ride in to save the day, these films and television series often emphasize cooperation among a variety of characters and social sectors that distract the viewer away from that central narrative arc—although often, they bring us back to it, and him, in the end. Some recent films and TV series, however, work to critically expose the violence, exploitation, and even stupidity that can result from too much leadership, or sovereign power, particularly when embodied by a white



White Masculinity and the Liberal Apocalypse Allegory 13

man and his followers who share a blind attachment to notions of survival as a war between good and evil. I argue that this explosion of apocalyptic genre fiction in popular culture largely reveals not only persistent ideas about leadership and collectivities, but also the function of race and gender ideologies in those ideas. In many, if not most, of its recent film and television incarnations, the apocalypse narrative operates as an allegory that veers between a recuperation of traditional forms of both leadership and racialized masculinity and a critical diagnostic working to articulate new options for a better social order and the role of collective and individual capacities. While popular culture oscillates on questions of leadership as raced and gendered, political culture, at least in the United States, has been slower to consider alternative visions of societal futurity and good governance. Critic John Patrick Leary writes about the United States: “We live in an anxious society almost pathologically obsessed with leadership,” which he traces back to a ­19th-century ­hyper-valorizing of “men of industry” that persists in today’s ­middle-management ­s elf-help books and educational curriculums. Leary notes, along with several of my film and television examples, that the traditional criteria of dominant and aggressive masculinity for this top spot have been softened (perhaps feminized) in recent decades toward a more empathetic version of benevolent, ­world-saving authority. But even these new incarnations of the vanquishing hero play into the myth of “great leaders of men, forged in crisis,” which persists in public imaginaries.5 In its familiar ­pop-culture incarnations, crises of apocalypse and other ­large-scale catastrophes cathartically rehearse this desire to be saved. And while the figures who are doing the saving may look like new versions of heroes and heroism, the belief that the crisis requires an individual “great leader” indicates how much remains unchanged. Throughout Apocalypse and Heroism, I note that although the allegory of apocalypse purports to expose and upend doomed social orders, often the underlying logics of Western liberal individualism and the agency it promises reveal their continued operations, particularly in the white male ­hero-protagonist and his narrative functions. However, these attachments and plots also can be the vehicle for drawing audiences into stories that veer in other directions, doubling down on one of the key components of the apocalypse allegory (whether the Bible, ­17th-century Baroque tapestries, or contemporary cinema), redemption through redirection. Writing about this redirection, early ­20th-century German philosopher Walter Benjamin argues the final totalizing destruction never actually happens because something, a revelation, pushes the story and its audience toward a “redemptive leap” that derails the apocalyptic ending the allegory has either promised or threatened.

14 Introduction

Apocalypse and Allegory: Why the Crisis? The persistence of familiar stories and anachronistic desires signals the gendering and racializing of the very values that remain at the heart of U.S. and Western society, which continue to adhere to the political and economic version of the liberal logics of global capitalism and Western thought in their current neoliberal expression. In highlighting how popular culture’s dominant stories, in this case the apocalypse narrative, reveal a collective attachment to various understandings of gender and racial difference, as well as societal futurity, I argue for a sustained analysis of what we can learn from this intransigence lodged within collective popular imaginaries. From the Bible to literary masterworks of the Western canon (Dante, Spenser, Goethe), literary studies have characterized allegories as narratives that “as they go along they are usually saying one thing in order to mean something beyond that one thing.”6 This rather vague definition leads to various understanding of modern secular allegory, often criticizing its reifying and reductive tendencies. Because the meaning beyond the surface of the story is often one that is already known, the allegory recuperates and repeats familiar plots and figures. The familiarity of the allegorical referent, especially when gesturing to sociopolitical commentary, is what makes the allegory identifiable and legible. Critic ­Shu-mei Shih asserts that “allegory works and sells because it makes the … text manageable, decipherable, and thus answerable to Western sensibilities and expectations.”7 Although I have suggested in previous work that this understanding of allegorical narratives misses important complicating elements in the mode of allegorical representation and interpretation (a mode known as “allegoresis”), Shih points to a key issue that threads throughout this book.8 When a film or TV show “asks” to be read allegorically, when it signals its reference to another set of meanings that is familiar to the audience, that meaning slides toward the systemic and the totalizing. That is, allegories and allegorical reading are vehicles for totalizing critique and exposure, but the logic of the mode means that we are more likely to find “legible” a system or vision that is already known and has been widely conveyed in myth, religion, or other cosmological stories. Many of my discussions here focus on that sweeping picture to track how contemporary allegories of apocalypse work simultaneously with and against our embedded expectations for both societies and popular genres. Popular culture, and especially cinema, is where the apocalypse allegory has found perhaps its most comfortable perch: The nature of film and TV and the function of visual technologies (as opposed to realist literary fiction, for instance) collude in both medium and audience share to



White Masculinity and the Liberal Apocalypse Allegory 15

grab hold of public effects and imaginaries on a wide scale. As New York Times movie critic A.O. Scott observed in 2007, a crop of genre movies around that time (28 Days Later [2003], 28 Weeks Later [2007], Shaun of the Dead [2004], and Dawn of the Dead [2004]) demonstrated that cinema had become the most interesting purveyor of political allegory in contemporary culture.9 On the screen, images of apocalyptic destruction and the end of life—or at least the majority of people and societies—on the planet can be conveyed through special effects and other ­awe-inspiring cinematic manipulations of audience perceptions that offer a gratifying apocalyptic fiction experience. One element that almost all of these films and other media share is that their apocalypse narratives are clearly intended to be read as commentaries on the current social and historical moment and its direction (either crudely or in varying degrees of narrative and conceptual sophistication)—i.e., they work as allegories. Allegory is a distinct and complex mode of both narration and interpretation, which helps underscore some significant concerns it raises as a genre and mode. On the one hand, apocalypse allegories ostensibly offer an alternative vision of a possible future, one that is often wrapped in a critical warning concerning past and present social orders. But on the other, even a utopian and revolutionary imaginary that might generate apocalypse narratives (as prophecies, for example) hits the impasse of repetition or reification that is inherent to representation, and especially to genre. Literary theorist Frederic Jameson explains that allegory can be “timely” in two ways: one, when “a name is conferred on a hitherto inchoate and unidentified feeling,” and two, when an already named set of emotions or phenomenon is “reorganized” by another set of evaluations, whether “eudaemonic, ethical, religious, philosophical, or sociopolitical.”10 This question of systems, of the available “sets” of evaluations, has been a snag in how apocalyptic and utopic narratives might articulate new visions, especially as systems. Largely a critic of apocalyptic allegory in literature and culture, Peter Paik cautions that even the most effective speculative apocalypses ultimately only restage familiar narratives and systems, which are represented in clarified narrative forms, but can’t generate truly new or alternative visions.11 Paik’s focus on “political order” underlines the systemic nature of both allegory and political imaginations, which have tended toward either/or binaries and totalizing understandings of the plots of individual agency and collective good: either enslaved or free, hero or villain, pussies or patriots.12 However, allegory has multiple aspects and uses when shaping the visions and interpretations of apocalypse narratives and spectacles. Its multiple, sometimes ambiguous, character(s) becomes particularly pertinent in the following chapters’ explorations of critical and utopic apocalypse narratives that present themselves as allegories. Jameson’s influential

16 Introduction understanding of modern, secular allegory focuses on its dynamic “of analogies between systems” and its shift “from personification to narrative.”13 But in her excellent work on ­science-fictional representation in literature, ­Seo-Young Chu argues that “the purpose of allegory is not to refer to a specific object but to incite the reader’s mind to exegesis.” That is, she asserts that the primary feature of allegory as a mode of representation and interpretation is how it “elicits continual interpretation.”14 Here and elsewhere, we find a bifurcation in understandings of allegory that seem to oscillate between its tendency toward reifying systemic narratives and its practice as a mode of interpretation, its incitements to “read allegorically,” as Shih puts it. And for Jameson, the distinction between “allegory as a genre or fixed form and that of allegoresis as a mode of interpretation” becomes central to these oscillations between its ability to signal an inchoate new thing (a novum) and its generic reliance on “already named” sets of emotions and narratives. Even with its complexities, the utility of allegory as a political narrative practice uniquely suited to crisis moments has been noted by literary and cultural critics every generation or so, ranging from Benjamin’s The Origin of Tragic German Drama (1928) and including work from the 1960s and ’70s on biblical traditions in the early Christian era (Cohn), Milton and other ­17th-century cultural production (Murrin, Benjamin), and rhetoric of apocalypse in the Cold War era (Kermode). The New World, i.e., the Americas, also has been characterized as quintessentially apocalyptic, whether understood through its status as a geohistorical event (European colonialism’s destruction and genocide of the “pre–Columbian” indigenous world [figuratively and literally] or for its particular modes of modernist and postmodernist literary tactics [Zamora, Kettler]).15 The linkage between apocalypse and allegory in prophetic writing and art is thus generically and historically ­well-established, and its redemptive promise of “a new world” remains both powerful and suspect. Apocalypse and Heroism investigates what makes these images and narratives so satisfying right now and to such a wide range of audiences. That is, what is behind this intensified ­pop-culture impulse toward social and historical commentary, and cathartic experience, in apocalyptic form? And what are the potential impacts, both critical and colluding, on our understanding of individual and collective realities and possibilities? The apprehension of societal crisis in advanced capitalist societies, and often the planet, is an ­a lready-dominant trope of the 21st century that has been figured in popular culture, and in some political theory, through scenarios of ­large-scale civic and ­nation-state collapse and a growing cacophony of “end of history” discourses, and it is particularly explicit in apocalyptic themes in film, television, video games and other popular



White Masculinity and the Liberal Apocalypse Allegory 17

culture, and even news media. The eruption of apocalyptic discourse and story lines reflects a generally perceived experience of our historical moment as one of crisis and epochal transformation. 16 Of course, both apocalypse and crisis are not specific to this millennium; the preoccupation of modern Western society has long been trying to pinpoint the break, or crisis, that generated our modernity (the Renaissance, colonial conquest, the rise of Enlightenment democratic states, etc.) and to diagnose the one that will herald its ending.17 But while the most recent outburst of apocalyptic pop culture builds on a string of familiar concerns from the last half of the 20th century (including nuclear apocalypse, alien invasion, the Cold War, environmental catastrophe), the apocalypse in ­21st-century popular culture feels newly resonant and persistent. This rising preoccupation with apocalyptic and postapocalyptic scenarios in film and television has drawn attention from cultural critics and thinkers. Some, like Marxist critic Evan Calder Williams, have linked the explosion in cultural production to the inevitable dissolution of late capitalism, which starts in the 1960s and has been intensified (accelerated, some would say) since the financial crisis of 2008.18 For Williams and others, the genre of speculative fiction is understood to be reinvigorating political and artistic imaginaries. In this view, the speculative fictions of apocalyptic narratives, particularly but not exclusively in science fiction (­s ci-fi), signal a renewed interest in radical, even utopic, possibilities for imagining change on a global scale. More recently, critics and theorists have turned to both speculation and allegory as means of working through and against the constraining imaginative force field that dominates our narratives of political and social possibility. This foreclosing of human and representational possibilities is what Mark Fisher calls “capitalist realism” to mark the cultural and historical specificity of what we believe is true about the worlds we live in and open that presumed reality to critique, which will likely then push us to consider other possible realities and stories.19 Like Jameson and others, Fisher is most concerned with the ways that the systemic dominance of capitalism in the West has shaped and constrained the contours of how we understand what a self and a society is, or can be. Other critics, such as Jayna Brown, Sami Schalk, Alexis Lothian, and Tavia Nyong’o, are centering issues of race and gender to rework the imaginative horizons of who and what can be a hero, or a heroic action—issues that arise with some regularity in speculative genres such as science fiction and fantasy, including new directions in Afrofuturism, Africanfuturism, Latinxfuturism, and queer speculative media, which critically and/or utopically address imagined pasts and potential futures.20 Given these emergent directions, the prevalence of white male heroes in mainstream popular culture—even (or especially) when their heroism is

18 Introduction shared or inflected by race and gender diversity—reflects the persistence of a limited repertoire of possible plots and protagonists for apocalypse narratives, and particularly for their heroes. In her comments on the debates about the value of speculative fictions in relation to ­mass-produced popular culture, heralded ­sci-fi writer Ursula Le Guin distinguished between “commodified fantasy” of mass popular culture and the riches of “old stories.” Describing this commercialization, Le Guin’s anger is palpable: “Commodified fantasy takes no risks; it invents nothing, but imitates and trivializes … turning their action to violence, their actors to dolls, and their ­truth-telling to sentimental platitude.”21 While some of the ­p op-culture apocalypses I discuss might fall into this category, others have a more complicated relationship to processes of commercialization and generic imitation versus innovation. Like the makers of blockbuster movies, speculative writers know that representation and reinvention matter, and yet, as Jayna Brown notes, even Afrofuturism “can … desiccate into a shallow term of surface and style rather than remaining an inquiring concept.”22 Both mainstream liberal apocalypse allegories and speculative utopian artistic practices thus share an imbrication in aesthetic conventions and generic expectations, and this is particularly true in relation to two of my key terms of analysis: “allegory” and “the hero.” From the celebratory liberal narratives of masculine, and U.S., triumph that Emmerich parades to the more equivocal postapocalypse scenarios of some recent works, the ­p op-culture apocalypse is often a blunt and entertaining incarnation of the “monomyth” of the hero’s journey. As influentially outlined by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), the questions of narrative patterns and protagonist characterization have long been a preoccupation of both literary and film studies. In addition to Campbell’s “hero’s journey” template, narrative and cultural theorists underline the organizing function of established patterns of plot and characterization, i.e., genres. In ­popular-culture genres, the politics of representation is an issue with extensive history in various disciplines, though much recent criticism in media and cultural studies cautions against assuming that a difference in the gender or race of a main or supporting character significantly transforms the story being told and consumed. Previous generations of feminist narrative theorists addressed these questions of representation specifically through the operations of narrative identification. In both visual and literary media, audiences see themselves in and cathect to the principal characters and actors in a narrative drama, no matter their own individual identity, and especially to screened images of agential characters (as well as the victims, helpers, or objects of desire that surround them). But not all casting decisions and plot tweakings are transformative



White Masculinity and the Liberal Apocalypse Allegory 19

or challenging. In the superhero narratives of the MCU, most of its recent blockbuster films feature ensemble casts who incorporate a number of “heroes” of various races and genders, and sometimes sexualities, in their rebooted (sometimes repeatedly) ­character-based franchises. And yet the stories often circle back to the white men at the center: Iron Man, Captain America, ­Spider-Man, Thor, etc. In the most explicitly apocalyptic final installments of the ­record-breaking Avengers franchise, Avengers: Infinity War (2018, dir. Anthony Russo and Joe Russo) and Avengers: Endgame (2019, dir. Anthony Russo and Joe Russo), the dramatic ensemble involves a dizzying array of characters and includes some newer ­non-white male MCU heroes such as T’Challa/Blank Panther (Chadwick Boseman) and Captain Marvel (Brie Larson). As promotional materials explain, Endgame culminates the MCU and the Avengers saga by bringing “22 interconnected films” to a “story of friendship, teamwork and setting aside differences to overcome an impossible obstacle.”23 Still, the vast cinematic web of associations and references in both films ultimately comes to a clarifying climax in endings that feature ­win-lose confrontations between the heroes and the villain. Along with the wry dialogue (and an array of predictable heteroromantic and ­pseudo-family dramas) of the other Avengers films, the main plotlines of Avengers: Infinity War focus our attention on the key contenders for world domination and world saving. Thanos (Josh Brolin) is the apocalyptic enemy facing the ­meta-ensemble of heroes, clarifying their task: They must prevent Thanos from gaining enough power to enact the “snap.” This quest ends in failure in Infinity War and eliminates half of all living things in the universe, setting the stage for a restoration of order, and life, in Endgame. The apocalyptic crisis that spans the two films illustrates that no matter how many ­CGI visual feats accompany the “war” or how many Wakandans and other various Black men and white women with superpowers sign on, the stories conclude largely on the fates of the central white male heroes. In this case, Iron Man (Robert Downey, Jr.) and “the ­hunky-Chris showdown” of Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Starman (Chris Pratt), and Captain America (Chris Evans) dominate the story while the “others” (Black Panther, Captain Marvel, Scarlet Witch, et. al.) fade into a supportive background.24 Although the ensemble of diverse characters and plotlines signals a collective enterprise, I argue that these climactic finales illustrate how notions of heroism weld liberal ideas of agency and leadership and remain primarily centered on the white heroes, who uphold that familiar ethos of frontier individualism, voiced by Thanos in Infinity War: “The hardest choices require the strongest wills.” The MCU’s Avengers films help illustrate how the “tightrope of visibility” that haunts popular culture increasingly encounters the “new”

20 Introduction ostensibly colorblind racism of neoliberal multiculturalism and its ethos of ­post-racial and ­post-feminist equal opportunity.25 As many critics and fans note, and this summary does not fully explore, Infinity War makes some bold moves that highlight failure, defeat, and melancholy for its protagonists. However, this edge of generic innovation is blunted in Endgame, where the heroes in its gigantic arsenal of actors and intertextual MCU references are able to restore the expected order of good guys mostly triumphing (both Black Widow and Iron Man have sacrificed themselves for the greater good). The final move of that triumph is when the white Captain America announces his retirement and hands the baton to Black Falcon (Anthony Mackie), helping inaugurate an apparently ­post-racial superhero “universe.” Along with the immense popularity and impact of Black Panther (2018, dir. Ryan Coogler), this ending to the Avengers franchise suggests the efforts in the MCU, and popular culture more generally, to evolve toward a less ­all-white male hero universe. And yet, that evolution in Endgame is made possible, and certified as legitimate, through a white hero’s decision and seal of approval. This all illustrates the persistence of what Susana Loza terms “the ­settler-colonial white racial frame” in contemporary U.S. popular culture, even after its apparent shift to a ­p ost-racial era (marked, for some, by Barack Obama’s presidency) that presumes an achieved social progress and the demise of both “biological theories of race” and “overt racial discrimination.”26 However, Loza, following a number of other scholars of race and popular culture, explains how the insistence “that racial and ethnic groups are essentially the same” provides camouflage and justification for ongoing ­real-life disparities in distribution and access to societal resources and leadership roles. These disparities are grounded in long histories of economic and political exclusions, systems of discrimination, and racialized myths (“culture of poverty,” the “ghetto,” the “barrio,” etc.), which are now conveniently cleansed of those histories. Loza notes that with “race and racism painstakingly disarticulated, superficial forms of diversity are publicly celebrated and lingering racial inequality is chalked up to moral failure and minority deficiency.” 27 But while the MCU might ­too-often confirm what Watchmen author Alan Moore calls the “white supremacist dreams” of the mainstream superhero genre, other apocalyptic popular culture and its critics identify a range of new visions and futurities made possible by the apocalyptic crisis allegory.28 The critical counterproposition that the apocalypse presents an opportunity for transformation, as opposed to a catastrophe, is a central concern of my book. That is, because these films and TV shows invoke a terrible testing and collapse of all that we know, they give audiences a cathartic experience of crisis and disaster—whether feared or secretly desired—and



White Masculinity and the Liberal Apocalypse Allegory 21

then work through that imagined scenario over the course of the movie, television series, comic series, or video game. Evan Calder Williams offers a classification of the distinctions among crisis, catastrophe, and apocalypse that illuminates the genesis of this apocalypse in recent popular culture. He explains, “crisis is a cyclical, expected expression, not a permanent state of affairs. It will pass and be passed through” whereas a catastrophe “is end without revelation, a historical void, an end of the road that cannot point beyond itself.”29 In contrast to both crisis and catastrophe, Williams takes up the theological usage of apocalypse (eschatological, Christian, prophetic) and extrapolates it into a more secular or universal event, and one to be desired: “What we need, then, is an apocalypse. An apocalypse is an end with revelation, a ‘lifting of the veil.’ …this doesn’t mean total destruction but rather a destruction of totalizing structure, of those universal notions that do not just describe ‘how things are’ but serve to prescribe and insist that ‘this is how things must be.’”30

This understanding of the apocalypse as the disruption of calcified ideologies and perceptions through a revelation that can potentially “save us from ourselves” (whether from a dystopic totalitarian social order, environmental destruction, capitalist and state corruption, or rapacious endemic violence and despair) is in fact a deeply traditional conception of the apocalyptic as it was explained and understood by previous generations of literary and cultural scholars working in the last heyday of apocalyptic allegory, the 1960s.31 However, the growing purchase of a more positive understanding of apocalypse, like that voiced by Williams, rests on a profound shift in both the definition of apocalyptic crisis and the understanding of ­large-scale historical and societal dynamics. One key conceptual umbrella for such dynamics of collapse followed by regeneration is the notion of crisis, when, as Williams puts it, “all is laid bare, and the dividing lines are incontrovertibly clear.”32 Williams’s gloss of the ­crisis-catastrophe-apocalypse triad also underlines the role of temporality. The underlying question in each apocalypse is how to understand (and sometimes critique) what the past has produced, the present will lead to, and a future that might follow— or in some instances, how to make possible another future. Interestingly, Williams wants apocalypse to mean both “an end with a revelation” and “a destruction of totalizing structure,” which creates some tension within the temporal episteme of allegory, as well as apocalypse. Opening a space for apocalyptic allegory to not rely on predetermined generic and narrative templates in order to conceptualize a postapocalypse future, Williams pushes against its prescriptive and totalizing tradition. The question

22 Introduction of if and how apocalyptic allegories in popular culture have opened such generic and critical imaginative spaces underlies the close readings of the film and TV examples in the following chapters.

Generic Roots: Liberalism and Colonialism If a key aspect of the contemporary allegory of apocalypse is the function of gender and racial differences and their role in maintaining traditional notions of both agency and heroism, I argue that this significance reflects more than “just” a persistent misogyny or racism in ­p opular-cultural imaginaries. These associations and expectations articulate a limit in our capacity to understand the world and the future outside of familiar models of autonomous individual agency, which rely on expectations of heroism, action, and purpose that are profoundly raced and gendered; they reflect our foundational conception of the human through presumptions about the Western liberal individual. Recent ­popular-culture narratives of the apocalypse often restage an unresolved conflict within the Western political and philosophical tradition, i.e., the liberal tradition, on how to balance ­self-possessive individual freedom and the collective social good. I read this conflict as a variant of Fisher’s “capitalist realism” in that it reflects the impasse created by genre conventions in much mainstream apocalypse popular culture articulated in the return to, and reification of, the hero’s journey in popular imaginaries. Why is there an apocalypse brewing in the popular imaginary? Why is the central problem revealed by the apocalyptic crisis so often dramatized as the personal dramas of some (most often white) guy? And what are some of the apocalypses that critique and challenge that allegory doing differently, and perhaps not differently? The precedent of Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996) exemplifies some of the race and gender ideas that thread through mainstream ­p opular-culture depictions of decisive crisis that return viewers to familiar visions and stories, though sometimes after distracting them with new directions. An American epic ­science-fiction disaster film, this blockbuster success starred the popular Black TV actor and rap singer, Will Smith, as one of the film’s central protagonists in an ensemble cast. Emmerich’s interest in “redefining the event action film” genre is notable for how that redefinition and its preoccupations have continued to shape mainstream apocalypse scenarios.33 While the appeal of ­race-blind casting and powerful female characters—combined with clever dialogue and dramatic, and expensive, special effects—have been crucial to this winning formula, the veneer of liberal (as in progressive and multicultural) ideas about gender roles and racial hierarchies often leave unscathed the presumed values of a



White Masculinity and the Liberal Apocalypse Allegory 23

benevolent state organization and heroic white men working to save their families. Such films and other media rely on the ­now-familiar tropes of neoliberal multiculturalism: of heterosexual couples and their families, of the productive and benign attachments among ­well-meaning ­co-workers across racial, cultural, and gender differences. The mild revisions of who plays these individualist roles are what makes these films socially liberal, as well as sentimental. But even as the apocalyptic crisis scenario has taken a darker, more critical turn in the first decades of the 21st century, many of these presumptions about social organization and leadership, and their likely emotional attachments, remain. Like others in the genre, Emmerich’s films deploy the apocalypse in a recognizable story line, one that shores up both masculinity and familiar notions of patriotism and good governance, largely understood in simultaneously paternalistic and militaristic terms. Although somewhat criticized, Independence Day opens with unabashed iconography of U.S. nationalism (the Statue of Liberty, the White House, American flags on the moon, etc.) and then uses those images to show a United States under attack, including the widely discussed sequence of the aliens blowing up the White House and other iconic symbols of American power, the supposed guarantee of world order. Likewise, the characterizations of men making difficult decisions, doing brave and dangerous things, and protecting their women and children appeal to longstanding stereotypes and ­pathos-laden understandings of the nuclear family, heterosexual love and marriage, and other presumed core values. Even though Independence Day includes a smattering of women characters who perform bravely and admirably, the principal plot arcs focus on men’s actions, whereas the female characters are valued primarily as romantic love interests and motherly figures. For this reason, I describe this mainstream fantasy vision of racialized gender as one based in “sentimental masculinity”—an ostensibly ­feel-good narrative that features the redemption and triumph of an embattled white man who is also a really nice guy.34 While it was, and is, significant that Smith’s heroic Black character dominates the dramas of Independence Day, the film also illustrates some intransigent ideological returns (especially masculine individualism) that guide mainstream incarnations of the apocalypse allegory—and ­re-emerge in more critical, or alternative, ones. To more carefully assess the work that such stories are doing for audiences and for dominant political ideologies of race and gender, I turn to key ideals and assumptions to which U.S. audiences, at least, are profoundly attached, largely of the individualism enshrined in the Western liberal tradition.35 This complex of assumptions and ideologies about human subjectivities, communities, and governments—how they work, what they can and should do, what they “feel”—is

24 Introduction rooted in what Western political theorists and economists also call liberalism, aka “classical liberalism”: the ­Enlightenment-based conception of government as bound by both the consent of the governed and the priority to maximize individual freedom of thought and action, while still maintaining some shared or collective moral code. Among my central arguments is that the historical and cultural links between mainstream understandings of what is socially liberal (nice, led by whites—but tolerant and multicultural—and ­progress-oriented) and the philosophical concept of liberalism (the individualist and ­f reedom-focused understanding of what societies should work to uphold and promote) are ­deep-seated and ­society-shaping, and particularly evident in the work of the apocalypse genre. The question of liberalism in political theory goes back to the word’s roots in various understandings of liberty, i.e., freedom.36 Debates in politics and culture often turn on which liberalism one favors or considers most legitimate: the classical variety (i.e., old liberalism), which is largely an ­Enlightenment-based understanding that capitalism and a limited ­social-contract governance best guarantee individual freedom, or the ostensibly more progressive ­20th-century version of the term that is conventionally called “liberal” in the media. This latter usage of liberalism, along with its incarnations in neoliberalism, also prioritizes individual agency and autonomy but understands them as forces that can be maximized through general (usually moral or ­justice-oriented) corrections in the economic, state, and/or civil spheres to address inequalities and structures of domination within a society. However, much of my argument—and a number of recent apocalyptic narratives—suggest that the fraught historical distinction between political and economic liberalism and social liberalism is largely moot and has evolved into the overlapping ideology of neoliberalism. In other words, these liberal perspectives assume a particular notion of the human as an autonomous individual agent, one who is in control of his [sic] actions and is “free” to act in his own ­self-interest. But recent scholarship and philosophy, as well as a long tradition of critique of the colonial and ­s ettler-colonial foundations of modern Western liberalism, underscore that these Enlightenment notions of the agential individual have historically and conceptually excluded large chunks of the human population by race, gender, wealth or property, cultural group, etc. What they share, however, is a certainty that only their liberal, agential individualism paves a path leading to a viable future and a ­well-functioning social collective: a “we” worth saving or dying for. These foundational assumptions are why I interrogate the precepts of Western liberal humanism and their links to contemporary narratives about heroes and their necessary role and agency in times of crisis. Although speculative film and television increasingly point in new



White Masculinity and the Liberal Apocalypse Allegory 25

directions, Apocalypse and Heroism considers the extent to which their narratives can remain entangled in the conceptions of an individualism and a freedom that are inherently gendered and raced, with roots in both Enlightenment philosophy and the colonial and rigidly patriarchal sociohistorical conditions that this individualism has upheld and affirmed. Jamaican writer and philosopher Sylvia Wynter tracks the origins of contemporary systemic racism, excavating its path back to the Enlightenment individual, what she calls “the Man of Reason.” For Wynter and other scholars in Black feminist and comparative colonial studies, both the Enlightenment individual and Western capitalist modernity emerged through the combination of philosophy’s demarcations of the Man of Reason and colonialism’s territorial and racial demarcations of full humans versus “the wretched of the earth.”37 Wynter writes that these histories have produced “our present ethnoclass (i.e., Western bourgeois) conception of the human, Man, which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself.”38 Revealing that the individual subject at the foundation of Western political systems is this same “Man of Reason,” these thinkers assert that the category of the individual itself carries the legacies of colonial thought and its political and economic structures. Because the “others” against which the liberal individual, ensconced via the Enlightenment Man of Reason, defines itself are categorically excluded (the ­not-quite-human, ­non-men, and ­non-rational beings who must be managed, protected, and/ or defended against), the persistence of liberal individualism and its core assumptions within the myths and narrative elaborations of both heroism and ideal societies perpetuate the genres of humanism that maintain that legacy. For these reasons, perhaps, some ­pop-cultural versions of the apocalyptic crises expose an impasse in how the individual, leadership, heroism, and agency are figured. The generic presumption of both whiteness and normative masculinity in stories about what freedom, leadership, and a better society might look like after the apocalypse underscores a problem not just within a history of patriarchal white capitalism, but for the very notions of the human and of societal possibility that are likewise emplotted in those stories and that history. Critiques of Western modernity and its categories of the human underline the threads of colonial thought and the social and economic structures that still permeate contemporary discourses of liberal individualism and governance. Neoliberalism has emerged as the term for the contemporary incarnation of this modern selfhood and its relation to social and political orders and, in effect, illustrates how both liberalisms continue to be bound together. The political theory of liberalism and the liberal social consensus of multiculturalism converge in the expectation that Western liberal individualism can apply to newly included persons, not just

26 Introduction white men. But the economic logics of autonomous individuals acting to maximize their opportunities remain the same, so that all aspects of individual life become a series of ­market-style decisions. This neoliberal ethos intensifies the role of individualism that places the burden of all choice and outcomes onto the “entrepreneurial self ” who is ascribed a unique power over all aspects of their individual destiny, a destiny that in contemporary multicultural neoliberalism is freed of the constraints of both authoritarian programs and racist histories.39 Coined to describe the shift in government and economic philosophies created by financialization and deregulation in the operations of global capitalism since the 1970s, neoliberalism also signals a ­20th-century Western expansion of market logics into spheres of life that are, or had been, ostensibly ­non-economic.40 In particular, theorists have noted the rise of “entrepreneurial subjectivity” as a mode of ­self-regulation and relationality that conscripts both the polis (the political and social collectivity) and the individual human psyche into a ­f ree-market project of individual choices and maximizing one’s options: the rise of homo economicus, as it were. Expanding on her previous definitions of neoliberalism, political theorist Wendy Brown suggests that in its ­large-scale affective operations, contemporary neoliberalism is not just economic, but has morphed into a “­market-and-morals project” that joins the classical liberal vision of individual ­free-market agency and a growing emphasis on “traditional morality” in a volatile cocktail of public feelings.41 The binding of individualism, understood as individual responsibility and freedom, in the wider workings of all social spheres to the markets and morals project of neoliberalism has generated several currents and issues that are relevant to my book’s argument and examples of the persistence of the ­white-masculine hero. As neoliberal economic transformations gained steam in the 1980s and ’90s, many noted how the norms of work and social life, as well as the law and state institutions and policies, were also overtaken by various incarnations of the “free choice” ethos of ­free-market individualism. Now, everyone is responsible for all the conditions of their life in a world whose slate has been wiped clean, so that both individual and collective experiences and histories are cordoned out of bounds, irrelevant in a “free society” purportedly expunged of the systemic inequities and exclusions of settler colonialism and patriarchy. So, the Civil ­Rights–era legal and political victories on issues of racial, gender, and cultural justice (and their reckonings with the histories and state institutions of slavery, patriarchy, racial and national exclusions from citizenship, and the Jim Crow era) are ­co-opted into this neoliberal multiculturalism that promises equality and choice for all—but it is an “all” that is foundationally exclusionary. The hero function in apocalypse allegory provides a vehicle for



White Masculinity and the Liberal Apocalypse Allegory 27

understanding how resistant to change both narrative and political imaginaries remain, and how this resistance reflects the problems created by limiting the category of the human to the liberal tradition’s Man of Reason. Even when they appear to challenge traditional social stereotypes and hierarchies through ­race-blind casting or replacing heroes with heroines, neoliberal multicultural narratives of ­post-racial and ­gender-neutral possibilities can reiterate the exclusions and presumptions that ushered in the notion of the Enlightenment individual self as agential, able to direct his own destiny and lead others. But some speculative apocalypses work to rewrite, and perhaps thus rewire, the stories we tell. Rather than the liberal apocalypse versions of heroic and national triumph against adversity, recent popular apocalypses ironically interrogate, and at times overturn, the norms of apocalypse genres to raise questions about heroism that likewise question conventional understandings of gender, race, and collective futurity.

Melodrama and Masculinity: Sincere Fictions of White Liberalism Apocalypse and Heroism argues that the preoccupation with white masculinity “in crisis” in popular culture and media reveals a foundational equation that no longer works, if it ever did, which is that the agency of the ­self-possessive, autonomous individual emerges from, and is commensurate with, the category of white heterosexual man, the quintessential Man of Reason. Across the following chapters, I explore the hero function in a selection of popular apocalypse allegories that are variously critical, celebratory, pessimistic, and visionary, often deploying a combination of these tones. To better understand the mixed messages and various modes of appeal generated by these apocalypse allegories, I focus on the affective scripts and expectations that shape our generic experiences of masculinity and heroes, both in the tradition of liberal individualism and through contemporary shifts and transformations in that tradition. If one of the operations of popular culture and genre is to give audiences what they want and yet also help shape those desires and attachments, what do audiences gain from their entrenched sympathy for whiteness and masculinity? Returning to Emmerich’s influential version of the liberal apocalypse, we might note that John Cusack’s white everyman in 2012 becomes almost ludicrously agential when he assumes the role of largely saving humanity (while showing how it would be done by a nice guy). These ­p op-culture apocalypses continue to pose the problems of collective survival and individual action tested by the crisis largely in terms of heroes and their

28 Introduction enemies (villain, alien invasion, zombie virus, or environmental catastrophe). As extensions or variations on superhero narratives, the core notions of who acts and why reflects widely held presumptions that are played out in an often overtly reductive spectacle and melodrama. These expectations are embedded in crisis pop culture, including the Hollywood “disaster films” of the 1990s that also take Independence Day as a generic model. Amy Taubin wrote in 1996, “Independence Day is a ­feel-good picture about the end of the world, or rather about how the end of the world is averted by good men who put aside their racial and ethnic differences to come together in a common cause. It’s the answer to Rodney King’s plea in the aftermath of the LA riots: ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’”42 The “good men” who help save the world in such liberal apocalypse fantasies are most often family men—embedded in heteronormative domestic and caring relationships that motivate and counterbalance their public heroism. Usually, the actions that ostensibly constitute that heroism are framed within their domestic and other emotional dramas: marriage conflicts, father issues, and the homosociality of men working together to do the saving, often across racial lines as in Emmerich’s films, the MCU, and Pacific Rim (2013, dir. Guillermo del Toro). Since the 1990s, neoliberal multiculturalism has helped import melodrama’s generic associations with femininity and domestic concerns into the masculine genre of disaster/ apocalyptic action film. Film scholar Despina Kakoudaki notes how “the melodramatic encounters that are staged within the disaster/apocalyptic film” of the 1990s allow for an analysis of the political meanings inscribed in these portrayals of racial and gender differences and conflicts. 43 While the cultural moment and memory of the Rodney King uprising/riots of 1992 mark both Emmerich’s film and its analysis as belonging to another, seemingly remote (but yet again resonant), era of racial conflict and controversy in the United States, these readings illustrate concerns and through lines that continue to preoccupy both popular culture and it commentators 30 years later. Then and now, asking why such cinematic spectacles “feel good” raises useful questions about what dramatizing a crisis and its possible resolution in ­popular-culture narratives teaches its audiences. Noting the elements of “melodrama” within the disaster/apocalyptic genre also further underlines the affective scripts that shape and uphold the generic expectations and tropes of apocalyptic crisis as entertainment. With its distinct generic associations, the term “melodrama” both alerts and enables an analysis of what the recent crisis spectacles in film (and television) are actually doing for their viewers. Early 2000s television series like the Fox hit, 24 (2001–2010), reflected how certain crisis fantasies in popular culture combined melodrama’s appeal to sentiment with nostalgic recuperations of masculine agency and heroism. As Hamilton Carroll notes, both



White Masculinity and the Liberal Apocalypse Allegory 29

the series’ protagonist Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) and ­then–President George W. Bush conjoin the imagery of “home” and “homeland” (and their paternal responsibilities to both) in the context of the ­crisis-threat scenarios of September 11, 2001 (9/11), and the War on Terror to justify “a reinvigorated but reactionary formation of masculine activity grounded in the affective logic of ‘us versus them.’”44 Carroll emphasizes how the elements of melodrama in the characterization of Jack Bauer help maintain audience sympathy for his actions, which become coded as reluctant heroism in the face of circumstances that “require a return to decisive masculinist action.”45 Like Carroll, the literary theorist Peter Brooks holds that melodrama’s appeal to readers and viewers lies in its blunt and simplistic divisions between good and evil and right and wrong.46 This recourse to melodrama in ­action-apocalypse films and television narratives becomes a generic vehicle for the ongoing operations of the sincere fictions of whiteness—and, I argue, masculinity—in contemporary popular culture. Appealing to “positive images and beliefs” about white men who protect and serve both home and homeland effectively helps these films and television uphold the colonial liberal legacy, though it stays camouflaged amid newer affective supplements and story arcs that point us in other directions. Loza’s Speculative Imperialisms explores how the sincere fictions of whiteness serve multiple purposes that allow ­sci-fi popular culture to maintain a “­settler-colonial white racial frame” while deflecting any implication in that history or its institutions. For example, in Infinity War and Endgame, the apocalyptic enemy Thanos is played by white actor Josh Brolin but presents ­on-screen as a ­CGI-enhanced, enormous ­blue-skinned ­monster-humanoid with awesome powers. While the MCU does not usually dwell on questions of race or its histories, it’s interesting that a distraught and terrified Bruce Banner/Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) describes Thanos’s threat in terms that neatly fit ­settler-colonial violence and administration: “He’s a plague, Tony. He invades planets, he takes what he wants and wipes out half the population.” Like others in the genre, Avengers’ ostensibly colorblind casting and narrative inversions help it to convey that the thirst for power and domination is innate, not just white or even “human,” and to invert the question so that the white “we” are newly innocent, and threatened. The array of relationships and character histories, such as Bruce Banner’s struggles with both his Hulk identity and his own personal sense of agency, adds further emotional ballast to the good guys versus bad guys plot. Pitting the villain Thanos against the mainly white male heroes—who protect and represent the vast array of endangered humanity—establishes a common and clearly legible threat from which all must be saved and describes that threat as one of colonial violence and its genocidal and authoritarian usurping

30 Introduction of local control (as well as its paternalism, in that Thanos explains that his brutal plan is really “better” for the universe). I suggest that this familiar ­sci-fi recourse to inverting the ­settler-colonial story through a CGI spectacle in such ­p opular-culture apocalypse hero stories is a useful example of what Loza calls “playing Indian” in ­popular-culture narratives. Discussing Avatar (2009, dir. James Cameron), another film that “imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America’s foundational act of genocide,” Loza notes that “swapping racial sides” becomes an avenue for the “symbolic expiation of settler sins.”47 The general narrative and screen dominance of the central white male Avengers organizes the films’ apocalyptic spectacle and allow those figures to simultaneously assume their place as victims of a genocidal authoritarian power and be anointed to lead (and save) their fellow endangered humans. Indigenous studies scholar Audra Simpson explains, “spectacles do all sorts of political work in every society but are especially useful in settler societies because they continue to redirect emotions, histories, and possibilities” away from ongoing operations of dispossession, disenfranchisement, and containment.48 The prevalence of the “white men as heroes” story arcs in the neoliberal multiculturalism of much contemporary media thus perpetuates what critic Annalee Newitz calls “the white guilt fantasy”: “It’s not just a wish to be absolved of the crimes whites have committed … not just a wish to join the side of moral justice in battle. It’s a wish to lead people of color from the inside rather than from the (oppressive, white) outside.”49 The readings in the following chapters explore these appeals to white innocence and the presumptions of white male leadership more closely and analytically. My examples include the plucky frontier adventurers with integrity in Chapter Two’s discussion of the television series, Firefly (Joss Whedon, 2002), and the interrogation of the apparent need for a strong ­leader-hero in the film Snowpiercer. The concept of sincere fictions emphasizes the work of affect and belief in our attachment to, and receptiveness toward, particular narratives and characters and their embodiment of expected values. So, when the apocalyptic crisis becomes an opportunity for a particular sort of hero (a white male leader), popular culture invokes the sincerest fictions of liberalism. Even when revised for multicultural and ­post-feminist sensibilities, the crisis threat of the end of the world too often produces a recourse to those historically linked pillars of Western modernity: white supremacy, patriarchal gender ideologies, and ­settler-colonial racial imaginaries. Both concepts, melodrama and sincere fictions, address how questions of genre and narrative patterns shape and constrain popular culture. Genres both reflect and organize how we think of “human being” through



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their repetitions of, and innovations on, narrative elements such as protagonists and plots, characterization, tone, and narrative time, as well as through a received history of various versions of the human as an individual subject in Western thought, religion, and philosophy. What my project shares with speculative aesthetics and ­s ettler-colonial critiques is a consideration of how popular culture and its genres are enmeshed in various ­race-gender delineations of who “counts” and what they are able and likely to do within a given narrative. Because popular culture often depicts variations on resonant Manichean conflicts within a society through genres such as melodrama, its forms often signal themselves as allegories. I have argued elsewhere that in their literary depictions of cultural conflict, allegorical narratives “help an ‘us’ to resolve or cover over conflicts of power and interest with a ‘them.’”50 But allegory, like myth and speculative fictions, can harness and generate new emotions and distinct narrative patterns and audience desires. The potential for speculative aesthetics and new narratives in popular culture is not just to propose useful revisions but to challenge and even transform how we understand what is important about humans, as well as about the past, present, and future.51 Still, the sincere fictions of liberalism lodged in many apocalypse allegories continue to recuperate the functions of whiteness and masculinity: sometimes through cosmetic changes that nevertheless keep those fictions alive, but sometimes in more complicated and critical innovations.

Capitalist Realism and Speculative Aesthetics Other critics working on apocalypse and allegory have also turned to the relationships between our ideas about the past, present, and future to identify prevailing historical imaginaries that feed why and how the apocalypse accrues its cultural power. Apocalypse and other crisis plots articulate a desire to forecast and explain ­large-scale dynamics in societal moments of acute anxiety and fear about both “what we are” and “where we are headed.” In his classic work of literary criticism, The Sense of an Ending (1967), Frank Kermode uses the term “concordance” to show how the fictional temporality of apocalypse is a ­meaning-making enterprise that reconciles specific invested versions of the past, a “present moment of crisis,” and expectations or hopes for the future. As a mental structure that allows us to make sense of time, Kermode argues that apocalypse, like other fictional narratives, provides for “temporal integration.” He notes, “all such plotting presupposes and requires that an end will bestow upon the whole duration and meaning.”52 Kermode is largely critical of this collective impulse to see one’s own time as exceptional and to be drawn to “doctrines of crisis, decadence,

32 Introduction and empire, and the division of history into mutually significant phases and transitions.”53 Noting that apocalyptic fictions have become “a permanent feature of a permanent literature of crisis” that characterizes Western cultural forms, Kermode cautions that too often, readers forget the fictionality of apocalyptic narratives and “sink quickly into myth, into stereotype.”54 Kermode and his contemporaries in literary studies in the 1960s and ’70s were both more attuned to U.S. society’s ongoing links to eschatological Christian thought and more dubious of the fantasy element—or wish fulfillment— of secular apocalyptic allegories. Another critic of apocalypse narratives, Norman Cohn, likewise warned against their totalizing and illusory promise of social transformation, criticizing what he called “the central fantasy of revolutionary eschatology” that promotes a systemic vision with binary divisions that forecloses individual variation and freedom in favor of an allegory of totalizing world change.55 Regarding this problem of totalizing apocalyptic imaginaries, Jane Elliot has suggested that for these mid–­ 20th-century critics, “the absolute, binary split created by the imminence of underlying narrative totalization produces a world that can only exist in two mutually exclusive versions” and thus all revolutionary or radical change is understood through a Cold War liberal lens in which political transformation itself is seen, by definition, as totalitarian—as well as apocalyptic.56 Somewhat ironically, this suspicion toward myth and other totalizing narrative explanations as structures of delusion and mass hysteria has recently been displaced by artists and theorists who latch onto exactly that “speculative” aspect of apocalyptic narrative. Here, ­non-realist projections of apocalyptic crisis, catastrophe, and possible postapocalyptic futurity speak to the utopian desire for radical change, for that cleansing end to “life as we know it.” From Slavoj Žižek and Jameson’s work on utopia and the groundbreaking contributions in Afrofuturist cultural production and analysis, scholars of speculative fictions and other forms of “irrealism” (or ­non-realism) in literature and media laud the capacity of science fiction and other forms of ­non-realist narration to “think the break” narratives of apocalyptic crisis as a means of formulating imaginative alternatives to current social organization.57 Critic Jayna Brown understands these utopic artistic and political practices as involving “a radical refusal of the terms by which selfhood and subjectivity are widely understood” and thus “reach for ways desire and fulfillment can be imagined outside of individualist claims.”58 Speaking to the lingering skepticism that both utopian and apocalyptic projects encounter, Brown adds, “I am not interested in tracing utopian blueprints or totalizing remedies” and argues that utopian visions



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are valuable because they “bring into question marriage, heterosexualism, and capitalism” and other normalizing structures.59 Brown’s position offers a subtle sideswipe against one of the apocryphal claims of the contemporary moment: “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”60 These two poles of emergent left critique can be characterized as utopian speculative optimism versus ­capitalist-realist pessimism. Brown’s work and that of other theorists of speculative aesthetics convey that utopic narratives and figures that might be partial and inconclusive but still generate imaginative and real possibilities. These directions counter the difficulty, even some claim impossibility, of thinking or imagining coherent alternatives to the overwhelming dominance of neoliberal Western modernity. On the topic of the barriers against thinking outside the confines of economic measures of self and society, one of the most influential recent analyses comes from Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009). Fisher’s definition of “capitalist realism” has become perhaps the other key ­oft-quoted observation regarding the contemporary moment in cultural criticism: “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.” For Fisher, this cognitive impossibility is experienced by most people as a depressive apprehension of “realities” that are presented as necessary, and ultimately good: “Lowering our expectations, we are told, is a small price to pay for being protected from terror and totalitarianism.”61 The operative definition of realism is pragmatic acceptance and common sense: a framing that has been dominated by both the Western liberal tradition and its articulations in media, the state, and ideology (all of which are cornered, according to Fisher, by capital) so that everything else is dismissed as dangerous illusion or foolish sentimentality. But realism is also a mode of narrative representation, with roots in literature and dominant in popular media, which purports to present the world as it “really is,” using the aesthetic tactics of detailed verisimilitude, psychological characterization, and plausible sequences of cause and effect. When he adds, “Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of realism; it is more like realism itself,” Fisher underlines how the widespread experience of entrapment within the logics of market economics and monetization that now seems to penetrate and smother every aspect of life (social, political, and psychic, as well as economic) also captures the horizon of what is thinkable in cultural representation.62 Realistic constraints on what we think makes sense or might succeed (that is, which isn’t “crazy,” as we hear in the finale of Snowpiercer) often reflect, and reveal, the constraints on our individual and collective imaginations, choices, and ability

34 Introduction to reshape the world’s structural options. Some of these constraints reflect shifts in how both individuals and collective governance are understood to actually be operating in contemporary political and social life. Following the French historian Michel Foucault, political and cultural theorists have explored the evolution of “biopolitics” to more precisely describe the operations of the liberal and neoliberal state after a ­2 0th-century pivot to methods of ­techno-scientific “control” of populations to both ensure an adequate living population and promote economic efficiency. This biopolitical governmentality bypasses—and exposes the illusory nature of—­Enlightenment-based political models of democratic consent between government and citizens.63 Such conditions also foment a relation between self and society in which capitalist realism works “like a transpersonal psychic infrastructure” that “convinces people that it is an irresistible force.”64 The question of what that psychic infrastructure is doing to us, and moving us toward, underlies much ­pop-culture apocalypse allegory, sometimes revealing a triumph that is variously individual, collective, and even systemic—though sometimes by exposing a critical failure, as I argue happens in The Walking Dead and Snowpiercer, at least for the heroic white male leader and what he represents. The concept of biopolitics further underscores the problematic status of our naturalized ­f ree-market models of individual agency and freedom, which must contend with the likelihood that individual “choices” are likewise enmeshed in this realist “psychic infrastructure.” Fictional realism encounters similar problems as capitalist realism, because it “invites readers/audiences to accept what is offered as a slice of life because the narrative contains elements of ‘fact.’”65 This assertion by Wahneema Lubiano emphasizes the role of “recognition” in realism: the cognitive and linguistic operation of identifying what is true through its plausibility and familiarity. Since the 19th and 20th centuries, realism has largely been considered the most “politically effective literature,” though this generic requirement is increasingly questioned as thinkers and artists seek ways to destabilize liberal humanist models of what we should expect, or look for, in reality.66 In this effort to “interrupt the realist legacy” and rethink and reframe what is possible, popular culture has increasingly turned to speculative modes such as those in science fiction and other ­non-realist genres, which are also the dominant genres used for presenting contemporary apocalyptic narratives.67 From Black Mirror and Orphan Black to The Watchmen and Lovecraft Country, television, like film, is newly saturated by various forms of speculative aesthetics, deploying modes of “irrealism” that include ­sci-fi, horror, fantasy, and the paranormal. Caren Irr explains that irrealist, or ­non-realist, narrative modes and genres mix or ignore the conventions of plausible



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causal logics, temporalities, and/or psychological characterizations of traditional realism and thus mark a turn from its generic roots in normative personhood and the dominant logics and constraints of ­s o-called common sense.68 An umbrella term that covers both traditional ­sci-fi and fantasy, “speculative fiction” allows artists to mix elements of realism without following the “rules of reality” and even exploring counterfactual scenarios. Speculative fiction has been particularly useful for interrogating “the process by which cultural producers reconfigure their historical present in order to speculate about what a possible future might be,” as Alexis Lothian does in her work on the history of queer speculative practices.69 Likewise, critical theorist Tavia Nyong’o lauds such speculative aesthetics, which he says work within what is “the classic paradox of fiction … that a story we know to be untrue can nevertheless inspire belief, emotion, and attachment.”70 As this overview suggests, many critics and artists deploy speculative and utopian aesthetics to create alternatives to the complicities of realist social imaginaries, as well as realist representations. However, critics Alison Shonkwiler and Claire Leigh La Berge worry that the recourse to forms of speculative ­non-realism “only shows the necessity of using fantasy to imagine other alternatives.” Further, they comment on how “if it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, this must be at least partly because capitalist representation now specializes in previews of the apocalyptic.”71 These critics help underline a problem presented by the apocalypse narrative in popular culture: What if, rather than opening toward alternative horizons, its recent dominance merely indexes the extent to which our cultural imaginaries are already captured, or metabolized, by capitalist realism? How, and when, do these allegories of apocalypse become interventions that can transform those imaginative horizons? If it’s true that general experiences of late capitalist society are sliding into a “statically catastrophic” state, this apprehension of both a crisis and a stasis in current modes of governance and social relationality has pushed popular culture to reimagine the future through an eschatological mode of apocalyptic prophecy, in revelatory allegories that can diagnose the current crises and help remake political and psychic imaginaries. Yet, the very ubiquity, and some say banality, of the apocalypse in popular culture—the banking on it, as it were—suggests the validity of worries voiced by Shonkwiler and La Berge and echoed elsewhere. This banality colludes with the problem of the catastrophic and totalizing imaginary of apocalypse, one that is often understood as nihilistic and offering no hope, no avenue forward, and no actual alternative possibilities. Echoing Francis Fukuyama’s worries in his 1989 book about what “the end of history” will produce, Fisher and Jodi Dean note that “for all capital’s rhetoric of

36 Introduction novelty and innovation, culture has become increasingly homogenized and predictable.”72 Fisher and Dean assert that this predictable homogeneity is the consequence of “an economic and political formation that emphasizes free choice, personal responsibility, and competition [that] gives a certain shape to the subjectivity even of those who ostensibly reject it, a shape that is rather stunted, meek, and compliant.”73 This compliance within subjectivity shapes and threads through our individual psyches, experiences, and relationships to our lived social orders, and overcoming (or escaping) that entrapment is often both the catalyst for apocalyptic allegorical speculations and the bug in the works. One influential understanding of the dystopia/utopian speculative tradition is that critical ­non-realist, especially ­sci-fi, narratives operate through “cognitive estrangement” to expose the gaps and falsehoods of social and psychic received truths, both about people and systems. As explained by ­sci-fi scholar Carl Freedman, cognitive estrangement in science fiction occurs when a realist depiction of familiar elements of setting and character and plausible causality are mixed into “an alternative fictional world” in a way that “performs an estranging critical interrogation” of the known world and how it works.74 ­S eo-Young Chu emphasizes that this dialectic (one between cognition as a process of recognition and estrangement as grappling with a new or unknown element) has the ultimate goal of bringing forth “a difficult referent,” which is whatever object or phenomenon the text seeks to represent.75 For Marxist critics such as Freedman and Jameson, that referent is political systems themselves, and speculative aesthetics provide fictional support for critiques and theories of capitalism, utopia, and social change to produce a more critical “historical ­self-reflectiveness.”76 But the work of cognition and representation in narrative carries with it the issue of repetition, both in genre and in cognitive understanding, and one question this book considers is how and when do modern apocalypse allegories produce something genuinely new, even as the genre and its features become increasingly familiar? In a number of the discussions in the following chapters, I consider apocalyptic allegories in popular culture that take aim (either explicitly or in more covert ways) at the horrors and injustices of both past and present political orders; i.e., that critique, through exposure and estrangement, the ways the histories and social orders of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism generate the apocalyptic crises and scenarios that these popular texts want to work through. Interestingly, the question of how narratives incite critique (as well as interpretation, thinking of Chu’s definition of allegory) helps me hinge together some of my central questions. If we can say that the genre of apocalypse works toward revelation, then the mode of allegory relies on a ­two-fold approach. It signals that there is another story that



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it wants to tell, or refer to, but it also relies on tactics of defamiliarization and introduces emblematic objects and images to derail or interrupt the realism of the known world and its order. Noting that traditional allegory relies on its “profound breaks in realist continuity (and reading mode),” Jameson suggests that allegory works through a process of “defamiliarization.”77 Both defamiliarization and cognitive estrangement are used to shift a reader’s or viewer’s perspective on, and understanding of, the represented object (or order) by seeing it in a new, cognitively unfamiliar, way. This process or operation can also serve as a good working definition of “critique,” which Eva Cherniavsky summarizes as “a mode of defamiliarization or estrangement,” suggesting that the goal of critique, as contemporary scholars and critics understand it, is to “unmake this readable world, to reveal its incoherencies, contradictions, and bad faith.” However, Cherniavsky holds that this project is increasingly limited by the ways that subjectivities are shaped in these neoliberal times to be “particularly unresponsive to established modes of critical apprehension.”78 In the following chapters, I suggest, following Cherniavsky, Fisher, and others, that this unresponsiveness is often because subjectivities (both narrative and ideological) remained largely enthralled by the operations of a heteropatriarchal ­settler-colonial capitalist realism. Exploring the problem of what critique does, or can do, Apocalypse and Heroism tracks some distinctions between various incarnations of the apocalypse in popular culture, especially what I describe as (1) the liberal and recuperative, (2) the critical but repetitive, and (3) the utopic and possibly novel. Many of my discussions focus on moments when the narrative or vision of a film or television series, purporting to offer a critique of social and political orders, still retains significant elements of those criticized orders. While these readings themselves often rely on the strategies of critique, even sometimes a hermeneutics of suspicion that identifies and tracks the various ways race and gender ideologies remain embedded in much pop culture, it’s also true that the mode of allegory and the genre of apocalypse can illuminate other ways out—other directions and ideas likewise embedded in our favorite movies and TV shows.79 Cherniavksy notes that “normative culture … the ensemble of discourses, media, institutions, and customary practices that perform the work of social reproduction” provides some unexpected archives for understanding what might be possible in politics, and in popular culture—and in “reading” it attentively, as well as critically.80 In thinking about culture production across forms and mediums, scholars like Cherniavsky, Lothian, and Brown model the speculative aesthetics and critical practices of minoritarian artists and thinkers who are most engaged in changing normative culture. Lothian’s consideration of the “old stories” that creep into utopian narratives and “the figuration of gender

38 Introduction and queerness in black imagined futures” generates a critical method that allows for, even welds, critical dissection of the returns of genre with attentiveness to the productive affects and departures of speculative media that propel in new directions. In her analysis of Children of Men, which I discuss in Chapter One, Lothian advocates for a more sustained attention to specific figures (such as the character, Kee) that somehow “elude” being fully enclosed in their narrative’s reiterations, its returns to familiar stories.81 Being attentive to the odd affinities and queer gestures embedded in perhaps otherwise reproductive visions in popular media provides material for reframing the details of image, character, and even plot, and following their various associations and implications toward more uncertain and interesting possibilities. In allegory, the sheer proliferation of images and emblems has been said to exceed interpretation, i.e., reading as critique, which indicates the tension of allegory that I try to track in the following chapters. Like myself and others, Jameson often characterizes allegory as a process of nominalization and totalizing systemic narrativization, but he also says it is a mode that works by “separating an object from its background and ‘foregrounding’ it in a mesmerizing way … such a moment very precisely constitutes that amplification or amplificatio, that heightening and differentiation, dishabituation and endowment with new value, that we will henceforth begin to associate with allegory.”82 So, while much of my reading of the raced and gendered figurations of apocalypse in popular culture hew to a familiar notion of critique, of reading as exposure and sometimes against the grain of what these allegorical media say they are doing, I also draw from speculative aesthetics to give attention to their elements that offer audiences “objects of wonder (objects that produce in us ‘a ­horizon-effect of the known, the unknown, and the unknowable’)”—where futurities and allegories push against our realist understanding of what is possible.83

Narrative Identification, White Masculinity, and the Promises of Apocalypse Addressing this question of whether the apocalypse allegory repeats and replicates normative genres of the human and political orders, my readings often return to interrogate the central protagonists: the heroes or ­would-be heroes populating the ­pop-culture apocalypse archive. With visual styling, narrative characterization, and positioning of the main character, many of these films and television series both confirm and, sometimes, contest the desires lodged in audiences who enjoy and consume these ubiquitous apocalyptic scenarios—desires that often rest on the presumption of a



White Masculinity and the Liberal Apocalypse Allegory 39

­decision-making, ­event-changing individual at the core of human affairs. When President Whitmore in Independence Day ultimately proves both his competence and bravery by handling the alien invasion’s threat to humanity, his character affirms a ­long-standing trope in U.S. cultural representations concerned with the fate of white “national manhood.” Resurging into the national imaginary at various times of perceived crisis, the question of national manhood is tracked by Dana Nelson in her seminal work on masculinity and U.S. national culture. Nelson defines “national manhood” as a particularly U.S. “republican” subjectivity “consolidated … in imagined affiliation with other men who have power over groups of people—the power to objectify, to identify, to manage.”84 I suggest that the apocalypse allegory in my film and television examples is often surreptitiously, but precisely, concerned with the fate of this “professional manhood” and its deep links to Enlightenment and mercantile social formations, including democracy, the ­nation-state, and neoliberal discourses of individualism and agency. Film theorists have long argued that cinema is a particularly effective medium for this confluence of discursive and historical concerns, given especially that, as Constance Penley notes, classical Hollywood film “is powered by the desire to establish by the end of the film, the nature of masculinity.”85 The ­settler-colonial roots of the Western modernity and particularly the United States helped generate this conception of a white masculinity measured by its capacity to manage, dominate, and decide— often a central element in the contemporary apocalyptic crises in popular culture. In each of the examples in this Introduction and the following chapters, the question persists of who should lead. Sometimes, however, that leadership role itself becomes a problem, and the white male hero emerges as an object of critique and cognitive estrangement, and not just reinstatement. Much of this critique in popular culture is not necessarily new, as I illustrate in several references to a primary archive of U.S. ­history in the national and global popular imaginary: the Hollywood Western. Along with the ­apocalypse-disaster genre, the Western shows how historically, popular culture has historically hewn to a familiar plot of both masculinity and leadership, while affirming the value of their being bound together. Often, the ­p op-culture apocalypse largely continues to tell that story about a protagonist confronting and managing “others” (or failing to), i.e., a frontier, or ­settler-colonial, story. Given that these stories persist—as do our cultural assumptions about racialized masculinity and heroism—even when given new incarnations and exciting twists, I turn to the heady beginnings of feminist film theory for further insights. The 1970s and ’80s saw the explosion of political energy from the women’s movement shake the foundations of film and narrative theory, often using the newly discovered (in the United States and England)

40 Introduction tools of psychoanalytic theories of human development, which put sexual difference and gender ideologies at their very core. This unlikely, and controversial, welding of French psychoanalytic theories and cultural studies generated a foundational body of work that argued vociferously for the seriousness of popular forms and what we can learn from them. Whereas some critics saw only dangerous political complicity and affective mass delusion in Hollywood cinema, Claire Johnston argued in 1974 that “a feminist strategy should combine, rather than oppose, the notions of film as a political tool and film as entertainment.”86 On the role of gender ideologies in popular Hollywood film, Johnston notes, “In order to counter our objectification in the cinema, our collective fantasies must be released. Women’s cinema must embody the working through of desire; such an objective demands the use of the entertainment film.”87 Johnston’s call is picked up by other early feminist film theorists, particularly Laura Mulvey and Teresa de Lauretis, who remind readers that to achieve any social and artistic revolution in popular culture, not only must feminist critics and filmmakers (and audiences) attend more rigorously to the psychoanalytic insight that audiences desire, but they must also understand what audiences are “trained” to desire (through ideology, subjectivation, and interpellation) and how the expressions of that training (by society, history, family, and such) are made visible in the narratives, and narrative pleasures, offered by Hollywood cinema and other popular culture. Keeping in mind that the paradigms of psychoanalysis are themselves often criticized for perpetuating heterosexual normative gender (and white supremacist race) ideologies, we can see why these early feminist film theory interventions, particularly Mulvey’s, have become their own objects of debate and controversy. In revisions and postscripts to her influential essay, Mulvey worked to unfix the gendered positions of “the male gaze” that appear to grant audiences only binary and heteronormative gender positions in any given film or visual narrative. The question of “narrative desire” explored by de Lauretis more rigorously attends to the question of subjectivities by reframing the heteronormative psychic organization described by Freud as a historical issue of social and individual subjectification, of how we come to understand and experience the operations of gender in narratives that position readers and viewers in specific ways. By attending to genre and the function of “narrative identification,” de Lauretis underlines the power of genres to perform the associations of agency with ­white-masculine protagonists whom audiences are primed to expect and find legible. As she explains: [C]ertain patterns or possibilities of identification for each and all spectators must be built into the film. This is undoubtably one of the functions of genres, and their historical development throughout the century attests to the need for



White Masculinity and the Liberal Apocalypse Allegory 41 cinema to sustain and provide new modes of spectator identification in keeping with social changes. Because films address spectators as social subjects, then, the modalities of identification bear directly on the process of spectatorship, that is to say, the ways in which the subjectivity of the spectator is engaged in the process of viewing, understanding (making sense of), or even seeing the film.88

Feminist and queer theorists argue that the available gendered positions of identification and representation in cinema, as in society, have been transformed in ways that undermine psychoanalytic presumptions regarding both heterosexual desire and an active male gaze versus a passive female object of “scopophilia.” But de Lauretis uses questions of genre to interrogate how narratives structure “the process of viewing, understanding … or even seeing” these “new modes of spectator identification.” The possibilities opened by “queering” the positions of identification produced by genres and genders in popular film and TV are one important element in some contemporary apocalypse popular culture, especially given the foundational welding of heterosexuality and masculinity in normative assumptions about leadership and heroism—of what it means to be a man. Although most examples in this book hew to a heteropatriarchal line, there are a few suggestive figures and narratives that offer alternative identificatory options and directions. However, as Lothian and others caution, while it’s true that queer identifies “those who ‘evade’ straight timelines of normalized heterosexual, reproductive … narratives,” queer narratives in popular culture can themselves reproduce straightening constraints and their intersections with other histories and social orders, such as race and colonialism, which are often significant. Lothian notes, “Even as [we] seek to highlight the speculative production of queer possibility,” our critical work should remain “attentive to the ­co-production of possibilities and impossibilities along [the] lines that histories of empire, race, nation, and global capitalism set in place.”89 The work of de Lauretis and Mulvey remains one of the most forceful and clear articulations of how this connection between a popular culture that aims to be liberatory, and to release us from “our collective fantasies,” must reckon with its enclosure inside the psychic and affective logics of ideology and language. My own key questions about race and gender ideologies repeat the inquiries of these feminist theoretical forebears. Not only, what do “we” desire and why? But also, how do we—as consumers or producers of new cultural stories—transform those stories and desires into something else, something not contained and produced by dominant history, political economy, and structures of power? This clutch of questions, and the function of popular culture in addressing it, illustrates how some collective fantasies cut across the apparent divides of us and them, masculine and feminine, white and ­n on-white. Even when against an

42 Introduction individual’s or a population’s apparent “interest” or identity, such foundational presumptions of whiteness and masculine authority remain powerfully embedded in Western popular culture and discourse. And yet, even as traditional conceptions and persistent associations of social order, justice, and the benevolence of ­well-meaning authority continue to be upheld by an overarching array of political and economic institutions, as well as cultural, kinship, and other social forms, clearly, we do want something different. Contemporary apocalyptic allegory is one ­popular-cultural form that often reaches toward that goal of transformative alternatives, though sometimes it promises something new while delivering an ­all-too-familiar, and legible, vision and story. For example, the dominant narrativity of the popular MCU superhero blockbusters arguably cuts along the lines of traditional gender stereotypes, despite introducing compelling figures such as the Scarlet Witch/Wanda, who is both the most powerful and the most dangerous recent Avenger and yet, at least in Civil War (2016), her character satisfies ­long-standing fantasies of feminine difference as threat and instability, offering audiences the satisfaction of both protecting and fearing a powerful, yet waiflike, young woman (see Preface). This is an uncharitable reading, to be sure, but I use these broad strokes to highlight a recurrent theme in narrative theory and analysis: the role of narrative genres and their relation to historical contexts, especially in times of transformation or change. The white women characters and the ­non-white sidekicks in Civil War are indeed more active, exciting, and powerful in ways not likely a few years back. The growing prevalence of female and ­non-white action heroes and protagonists is a development in popular cinema that speaks to de Lauretis’s emphasis on “social changes” (see Black Panther [2018], Wonder Woman [2017], and the Star Wars movies [2015, 2017, 2019]). Yet, the controversies generated by the recent Star Wars’ films’ (ultimately broken) promise of new race and gender options for its main heroic characters indicate the ways many films and TV narratives continue to rely on the persistent stereotypes and fixity of gendered positions and racial hierarchies (particularly in terms of who is the primary agent or actor in a story) that continue to dominate mainstream popular representations of “crisis,” including—perhaps especially— the apocalypse.

Chapter Overview Apocalypse has a varied history of interpretation and use, which many literary critics have tracked as a diagnostic tool for revealing the character and direction of Western modernity. Since the early 19th century, the



White Masculinity and the Liberal Apocalypse Allegory 43

notion of a redemptive apocalypse with roots in Christianity, and especially the Book of Revelation, has been understood as alternatively hopeful or nihilistic. D.H. Lawrence called the Book of Revelation “the product of the spiteful wish fulfillment of the underprivileged, an expression of frustrated power lust.” In contrast to this Nietzschean version of apocalypse as a resentful fantasy of the weak and oppressed against those with power, other critics have emphasized the utopic aspects of apocalyptic transformation as showing the “epochal and triumphant social transformation” that catastrophe can create.90 In these polarized characterizations, the question of ­white-masculine agency in the apocalypse emerges as likewise ambivalent, particularly thanks to its roots in the ­s ettler-colonial formation of Western modernity. Given that the “crisis” of late capitalist society is so often pictured as a crisis of masculinity and white authority, what fantasies or prospects of triumph or revenge are being projected in such narratives? Are these popular narratives the ­last-gasp ventings of an obsolete and defeated dominant imaginary? Or are they the creative reworkings of the given material of genre—and of race, gender, and political and economic orders—into new visions of what may be possible? Sometimes, many are a strange and complex mix of both. While the discussions in Apocalypse and Heroism focus on film and TV case studies that most effectively illustrate these links, each chapter explores some principal ideas in cultural and political theory and their relation to popular culture that are helpful for understanding the discourses of political and economic liberalism in U.S. and Western societies that are the focus of much of my argument. While the archive I draw on is eclectic, each of the central examples is verifiably “popular” (whether through ­box-office returns and/or online afterlife among critics and fans), and they often hold a significant place in academic as well as popular fan discussions and, for many, ­box-office and ­television-viewer-share history. And I too love all the films and TV shows I discuss in these chapters. The questions of pleasure, attachment, and narrative desire that I interrogate are therefore also my own. The close readings of various cultural texts in this book constitute an archive of my personal attachments and desires that help me track various threads of narrative generic expectation and desire and reflect on the questions of representation and cultural imaginaries that this book works to untangle. The chapters also map what I think are some key generic categories in the recent archive of contemporary popular apocalypse allegories that roughly mark a journey from liberal (or neoliberal) critique (Chapters One and Two) to negative critique (Chapter Three) and, finally, to combined critical and utopian speculative allegory (Chapter Four and the Conclusion). Each of these allegorical tendencies engages elements of the liberal

44 Introduction tradition, and each works toward revisioning that tradition within an apocalyptic, that is totalizing, form. There is inevitably some overlapping and smudging of the boundaries of my mapping, which I note as I go. The liberal (and neoliberal multicultural) ­w hite-masculine heroism described in this Introduction appears again in Chapters One and Two, but largely as an object of critical interrogation. Chapter One features two iconic ­21st-century films, Children of Men and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, dir. George Miller), and Chapter Two tracks the evolutions in the cult television show and film franchise, Firefly/Serenity (2002–2003 and 2005, dir. Joss Whedon). In these first two chapters, I close read and critique their allegorical revisions of the hero’s journey and the possibility of apocalyptic redemption in popular culture, at times against the grain of what they want to be doing, to illustrate the persistence of the largely colonial as well as patriarchal presumptions of liberal selfhood. The widely admired 2006 film Children of Men advertises its allegory of global apocalypse and dystopia through its ­quasi-documentary aesthetic that tracks a dystopic elaboration of contemporary political orders. However, the presentation of its main character, Theo (Clive Owen), as a white male character who begins as an ironic apocalypse hero (disaffected and impotent) but evolves into a more familiar, if still critical, version of ­w hite-masculine heroism and agency. The function of irony in race and gender representation in the critical, but also ­audience-pleasing, narratives of Joss Whedon’s retrofuturist ­s ci-fi series Firefly offers some interesting figures and narratives for race and especially gender revisions that are likewise central, and sometimes queered, in Mad Max: Fury Road. However, in both of these chapters, the main argument tracks the ways these works expose but do not (or cannot) fully dislodge that neoliberal ­white-masculine imaginary. The later chapters turn from these examples that largely reproduce neoliberal multiculturalism (i.e., adding a few new faces to tell a familiar story) to explore how other versions of the apocalypse allegory are possibly more effective. Because these examples more explicitly underscore the negative implications of the core figures and plotlines of ­white-masculine leadership—being what I will call “apocalyptic with a vengeance”—they can open the apocalypse allegory to other potential imagined futures, and possibly other genres of the human. Chapter Three examines the ­record-breaking hit series, The Walking Dead (2010–2022), which pushes the generic reiterations of the Hollywood Western, the zombie apocalypse, and even neoliberal horror to such hyperbolic extremes of ­settler-colonial imaginaries and plots that those generic templates are exposed as themselves bankrupt, futile, and ­self-defeating. While The Walking Dead presents itself as largely “about” the main protagonist and hero, Rick Grimes



White Masculinity and the Liberal Apocalypse Allegory 45

(Andrew Lincoln), as a postapocalyptic frontier sheriff figure, I argue the narrativity of the series as a whole works to expose the futility and destructive impacts of Grimes’s generically overdetermined style of individualist white male leadership. In Chapter Four, I suggest that critique and speculation work together in the more radical apocalyptic, dystopic, and postapocalyptic allegories of works such as Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2008) and Bong ­Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer (2013). Both of these films, particularly Sleep Dealer, are perhaps most influential as academic and cult fan favorites and did not have decisive ­b ox-office success. Interestingly, they are among the most transnational and non–Western in their focus and production histories and the most clear about neoliberal globalization being their true frame of reference. Sleep Dealer inhabits a more “dystopic” storyworld, but one that shares with apocalypse its allegories of contemporary world orders and a narrative arc of revolution and redemption. I consider generic returns such as the hero’s journey and heterosexual romance in Rivera’s U.S.–Mexico border ­sci-fi critique of global inequalities and their structuring of relations and psyches to show how the film offers a generative decentering of both white male heroism and individual agency, and does so through an explicit allegory of the global south. More widely known and viewed, Snowpiercer presents an overt allegorical apocalypse drama that combines the hero’s journey template and the preoccupation with non–Western, ­non-white perspectives that we see in Sleep Dealer, but in a way that is intentionally hyperbolic, and transformative. In Chapter Four and the Conclusion, I consider the ways apocalypse as an allegory and genre enables these works to think through the break and reach other generic possibilities, particularly pushing viewers outside liberal Western individualism. Blatantly invoking the apocalypse allegory, as in the zombie apocalypse in The Girl with All the Gifts (2016, dir. Colm McCarthy), enables these later works to blast through a variety of calcified assumptions about individuals, race, gender, and the human and get to another possible understanding of existing social orders and options for “survival.” In particular, their interrogation of the hero’s narrative function and their ironic reframing of viewer identifications and expectations of who and what constitutes heroism enable a reconsideration of the capacities of individual agency in these apocalypse crises plots. This push through the generic templates of apocalypse offers distinct and in many ways “new” visions and stories regarding possible alternatives to neoliberal individualism and its social order. Together, these chapters and the close readings of more speculative and alternative versions of the apocalypse narrative in popular culture indicate that the persistent ground of possessive individualism in the Western cultural tradition—the free white man,

46 Introduction as it were—is apprehended as simultaneously an endangered species and a growing menace. The late liberal crisis of global capitalism and its social order appears oddly acute in the early 21st century and has emerged dramatically in popular culture. This book traces the cultural work of allegories of apocalypse and crisis—particularly of white masculinity in crisis—for what they teach us about both our contemporary moment and the constraints and opportunities of popular genres and the social imaginaries they reflect, and sometimes remake. The structuring of our ideas about gender and sexual difference and race and white supremacy—and the capacities of men, women, whites, ­non-whites, various sexualities, bodies, etc., and their place in society—occurs in narrative. Plots, characters, arcs: all of these become familiar and often beloved through their repetitions and their surprises. The apocalypse is fun, it seems. But its reflections and prognostications about society and history also confirm, challenge, and possibly transform the worlds and futures we find pleasurable, as well as believable.

One

Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and the Status of Critique in Children of Men and Mad Max: Fury Road “Who killed the world?”—Mad Max: Fury Road

If the sentimental masculinity of ­liberal-mainstream depictions of “the end of the world” shows itself often to be a tired repetition of the status quo, other iterations of apocalypse prove to be more tricky to decipher. Two very popular and ostensibly critical ­21st-century examples of apocalyptic cultural production challenge some of the most familiar political norms of late capitalism (particularly around race, class, gender, and civic belonging), but also fail to fully dislodge key precepts and assumptions about the gender and race of heroic leadership. Children of Men (2006, dir. Alfonso Cuarón) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, dir. George Miller) expose the violence and abuse of our familiar forms of governance and social organization, which each suggests are grounded in excessive modes of power and rabid social inequality that create a dystopic world at war for survival. By signaling and inciting these allegorical readings, both films convey how the dystopic environments and apocalyptic crises they portray are the result of social orders and histories that audiences recognize and are, in some sense, “global,” as in Children of Men, or are hyperbolic ­s ci-fi extrapolations of core characteristics of familiar orders (patriarchal, authoritarian, brutal, environmentally devastated), as in Fury Road. However, these popular and insistently political films also illustrate the difficulty of imagining a fully alternative option to the operations of ­white-masculine individualism as leadership, even within critiques that quite effectively expose the destructive and abusive nature of those operations in multiple ways. This chapter explores how these films offer both revelations of something very wrong in Western ­s ettler-colonial society and yet also 47

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recuperations of some of its generic and ideological investments, particularly in various forms of white masculinity and its capacity to lead, if not save, the world in apocalyptic times. When it was released in 2006, Children of Men was a ­b ox-­office disappointment to Universal Pictures, but it has become a staple for streaming and for film and cultural criticism, largely due to its prescient critique of dystopic global world orders. In contrast, Mad Max: Fury Road was an immediate hit in 2015, hailed by both audiences and critics for its feminist revamping of the post apocalypse Mad Max franchise that still offers a terrific ­action-disaster film experience. Invoking allegorical plots and questions of neoliberal capitalist (and ­settler-colonial) governance, both films are also transnational ­co-productions that address and market to audiences globally, as Sophia A. McClennen explains regarding shifts in contemporary cinema and Cuarón’s work in particular.1 Considering this shift away from Hollywood and U.S. dominance of the liberal disaster- and ­superhero-genre films discussed in the Introduction (in both production histories and cinematic aesthetics), one question this chapter asks is to what extent are these more explicitly critical and political films shaped by new, or different, global concerns and possible visions? Do the biases toward white masculinity, individual heroic agency, and an American view of liberal freedom persist, or do these cinematic apocalyptic crises articulate distinct narrative options? In Globalization and Latin American Cinema (2017), McClennen reframes the biases of leftist cultural studies to analyze the material impacts of neoliberal capitalist influence in Latin American cinema and global markets. Her findings raise some interesting questions that are relevant to how we understand the relationship of popular culture to contemporary political imaginaries, especially in this chapter and in Chapter Four. Noting the rise of such transnational ­co-productions in a globalized ­film-production market dominated by large corporate interests, McClennen takes Alfonso Cuarón as a key example of a cinematic auteur whose work does not fit the expected model of the ­co-opted or erased voice of the global south. As one of the most successful and critically acclaimed filmmakers of the 21st century, Cuarón’s status as a hugely successful Mexican filmmaker who has produced both Hollywood blockbusters (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, 2004), as well as critically lauded “arthouse” movies (Gravity, 2013) and overtly “Mexican” independent films with worldwide success: Y Tu Mama También (2001) and Roma (2018)—all of which received much Academy and other award recognition. Cuarón’s global success indicates a shift from national and geographic delineations of who and what counts in contemporary popular culture, with audiences and critics alike. The global reach of the Australian Mad Max film franchise from

One. Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and Critique49 creator, writer, and director George Miller also marks Fury Road in terms of its production and reception history. Hailed as a “masterpiece,” Fury Road remains a touchstone for contemporary action filmmaking. Director Steven Soderbergh commented. “I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film,” he said in a 2017 interview, “and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.”2 Fury Road won six Academy Awards in 2016 and has attracted millions of viewers while also generating ongoing controversies, especially among feminist critics and fans. Miller is best known for the Mad Max films, but he also has won awards for his work in animation (Happy Feet [2006], Babe [1995], and Babe: Pig in the City [1998]) and other popular films including The Witches of Eastwick (1987), as well as for playing a significant role in promoting the Australian film industry and its artists. The question of Australia, like that of Mexico for Cuarón, emerges in largely surreptitious ways in Mad Max: Fury Road. Interestingly, climate change forced the film’s ­long-planned production in the Australian outback to be relocated to Namibia, where a ­guerrilla-style and harrowing filmmaking experience became legendary among the actors and crew.3 Unlike some of McClennen’s examples of “runaway” films, this production history in Africa apparently did not sow the seeds for a flourishing film industry in Namibia and might even signal some of the ­settler-colonial issues the film raises thematically. The apocalypse in Mad Max: Fury Road occurs in an insistently white world; although, one might argue that is part of its allegorical critique of a destroyed world.4 The questions of environment, both natural and ­human-made, and the persistent histories of devastation wrought by late capitalism, clearly occupy these compelling and popular ­action-apocalypse movies, both now considered ­hard-hitting critiques. And yet, I argue that both films also share significant attachments to generic norms of heroism and redemption that rely on many of the ­settler-colonial and patriarchal worldviews that they portray as the cause of their narratives’ apocalyptic crisis.

Children of Men as Neoliberal Critique and Historical Argument In the widely admired Children of Men, Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón offers a searing picture of the imminent catastrophe (already with us or soon arriving) being generated by global state control and militarism, as well as nationalist xenophobia and economic and social inequality, underlining their shared imbrication in the workings of neoliberal governance and ideologies. Children of Men brings audiences into a world that looks familiar, but which signals its science fictionality in multiple ways,

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including the initial announcement that it is literally “dying”: no child has been born in over 18 years due to a catastrophic and unexplained, but completely “global,” epidemic of infertility. This hyberbolic plotline of a dying society with no future—one that cannot reproduce itself and therefore will not continue—is borrowed from the P.D. James novel of the same name, though James’s novel offers a decidedly more conservative diagnosis of the ills of ­20th-century European society and its decadence, one grounded in Christian sexual morality.5 Signaling its allegory so overtly allows Cuarón’s film to cinematically articulate political and philosophical critiques of contemporary social structures and a widespread sense of societal crisis. The extent to which Children of Men encourages an allegorical reading of contemporary social ills is emphasized is the film’s opening sequences and throughout its visual references to major ­20th-century political events and to more recent war, refugee, and financial crises, all embedded into the film’s ­science-fictional setting of the year 2027 in London and other parts of England. Its explicitly allegorical mode forces audiences to approach the film and its story from a vantage point that refuses, or at least stymies, our accustomed expectations for realist narrative development and introduces a narrative exposition quite distinct from the mainstream liberal apocalypses of Emmerich’s films and other movies discussed in the Introduction. Using ­documentary-style imagery and camerawork (such as chaotic panning shots, ­voice-overs, “raw footage,” montage, and crosscuts), Children of Men juxtaposes a ­s ci-fi premise with a familiar urban setting; an effect generated through the saturation of the film world with detailed visual references (and lots of BBC newscasts) and inclusions from contemporary, early ­21st-century life in Western industrialized cities. By adapting ­s cience-fiction generic modes to its allegorical ­documentary-action-film hybrid visual style, the film structures audience attention and emotional involvement in ways that emphasize questions of societal environment and ­world-building and pushes the focus toward the political and historical significance of the setup. To highlight the trope of crisis, Children of Men literally begins with an explosion: a notorious sequence that involves a stunning ­single-shot tracking of a white man (who proves to be the main character, Theo Faron, played by Clive Owen) entering a café before work, getting his coffee, and leaving just as the café is blown up behind him.6 This establishing shot depicts horrific, ostensibly “terrorist,” violence and culminates with the outline of a female figure stumbling out of the café and wandering dazed in the rubble in the streets, as she clutches her own severed arm. As with its other ­stand-alone images of misery and violence, the film presents us with a dystopic environment that takes precedence—at least initially—over the movie’s other emotionally involving plot focused on the

One. Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and Critique51 development and characterization of specific individual characters, particularly Theo.7 This ­w ide-scale documentary strategy is part of Children of Men’s incitement to be read allegorically and dominates its early sections, presenting Theo as a disaffected, cynical, and somewhat ­shell-shocked figure in a panoramic urbanscape of unfolding violence and chaos; the background environment dominates the screen. The first 10 minutes of the movie take viewers from the apparently senseless bombing of the café to Theo’s ironic, and yet vaguely emasculating, interactions with his boss in the vast “Ministry of Energy” (where hundreds of employees sit in rows and stare listlessly at their computer monitors). The generic need to attach viewers to the character of Theo through more “personal” concerns of romance, personal history, and—ultimately—a paternal leadership role plays a larger role as the film progresses and becomes more recognizably an ­action-adventure story. Initially, though, the emphasis is on the historical and the environmental, conveyed through critically praised sequences of ­wide-angle long shots that are interspersed with ­close-up reaction shots of Theo’s face. Cuarón has sometimes claimed that he never read the P.D. James novel, which the film ostensibly used as its source material, and that the plot of a worldwide fertility epidemic was merely a device that he deployed in his effort to capture the “truth” of the current world order as he saw it.8 This preoccupation with a larger documentary representation of “truth” over plot or character links his project to classic allegory. That is, in offering a narrative that ­de-emphasizes the conventions of realism in favor of a ­science-fiction mode that eschews character study or development, Children of Men can be placed into the longer tradition of apocalyptic allegory, where prophetic and pedagogical appeals and revelations are the main purpose of the narrative and its aesthetic. Cuarón has himself described the film as an effort to expose the present as a moment of crisis through its vision of an apocalyptic future, one which he wants to persuade audiences to avoid if at all possible. But within its sweeping picture of a ­slow-moving apocalypse, the film’s focus consistently returns to, and centers on, its white male reluctant hero, Theo, even as other characters and issues enter the narrative to attract viewers’ interest and lead the story in other directions. Again, I argue that the weight placed on images and figurations of white masculinity—largely through a focus on an ­action-hero style protagonist—operates as a key mechanism for maintaining and performing an attachment to the racialized and gendered principles, ideals, and images of liberalism’s ­settler-colonial imaginary. It’s interesting that in its focus on, and characterization of, Theo, Children of Men weaves that colonial imaginary into an exposition, and perhaps a critique, of an emergent contemporary mode of

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what we might call depressive neoliberal capitalist realism: an attitude of defeated acceptance in a world without hope. As I discuss in the Introduction, the role of popular culture in both the embrace and the critique of capitalist realism remains ambiguous. Considering another ­pop-culture apocalypse allegory, the acclaimed 2008 animated film ­Wall-E (dir. Andrew Stanton, produced by Pixar and Disney Studios), Fisher observes that even films and other cultural products that are overtly critical of neoliberal solutions and global corporate capital orders can generate a state of “interpassivity” in which, “the film performs our anticapitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.”9 I will discuss in Chapter Four arguments by Gerry Canavan, who further suggests that much speculative popular culture indulges in a variety of “necrofuturism” that is at once critical and pessimistic, and even nihilistic in that it generates narratives that “anticipate the future as a devastated world of death yet simultaneously insist that this world of death is the only possible future.”10 But other critics note the eruptions of other possibilities and more hopeful alternate futures that inhabit these popular speculative fictions. Alexis Lothian, for instance, shares my focus on Theo’s problematic centrality and ultimately recuperative function in Children of Men, but she notes that the figure of Kee, the central Black female character who is also presented as a sort of “savior” for humanity (played by ­C lare-Hope Ashitey), embodies and is associated with other background images that reflect “uncertainties and excesses to which we should pay attention.”11 Lothian proposes that by attending to the periphery associations and juxtapositions (especially the films’ many ­non-white and subaltern bodies and ­un-narrated social possibilities) made available in a speculative narrative like Children of Men, audiences and readers can better attend to how it “opens up to possibilities beyond the ones it depicts directly, allowing audience members to enter at multiple points.”12 On a related point, McClennen finds that the film’s “fluid camera style … crosses barriers in unexpected ways. At times, the practice creates intimacy and community; at others, it draws attention to their absence.”13 However, Lothian ultimately suggests, and I argue, that Children of Men illustrates how the central plotlines and protagonists of many speculative fictions of futurity encounter the constraints of historically determined narratives and norms that limit narrative alternatives, which apparently also cross borders in the guise of particular generic and political imaginaries and histories. Although Cuarón takes his film into new aesthetic and political territory, the pull toward established versions of what and who matters recenters aspects of the status quo of heroism, race, and gender characteristics and hierarchies, and a version of ­white-masculine individual agency. Nonetheless, Children of Men clearly intends to counter the tendency

One. Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and Critique53 of popular culture to veer toward comforting and less disruptive options and outcomes. Fisher argues, “A moral critique of capitalism, emphasizing the ways in which it leads to suffering, only reinforces capitalist realism.”14 So, rather than protesting the abuses of existing and/or future social regimes, Cuarón chooses to “picture” them, noting—often without plot or commentary—the features of a world and landscape exposing chaos, brutality, degradation, and despair. In translating this vision, he and set designers create a cinematic picture of the future saturated with objects and images chosen for their familiarity and reference, working to provide images full of “a contemporary iconography that is already engraved in human consciousness” according to one set designer.15 In presenting this vision of a ­present-future dystopic, and dying, world, the main point is clearly its ­meta-significance and value as a prophecy of historical truth. Cuarón goes so far as to insist that except for “the human connections” of the film’s narrative plot, “this would be like a documentary.”16 Its manipulation of image and sound, the preference for ­long-shot sequences that are panoramic and atemporal in cataloguing the horrors of contemporary sociality, confirm Cuarón’s documentary aesthetics. Children of Men could be said to use allegory “performatively”—foregrounding and underlining its allegorical status through cinematic techniques that do not allow the audience to “sink into stereotype” or the national fantasies promoted by conventional mainstream apocalyptic blockbusters.17 Among the national fantasies being refused, the film references both current U.S. and U.K. ­anti-immigration attitudes and ­pro-market political ideology, as well as notions of masculine agency and heroism; that is, the sardonic and disaffected Theo is clearly not your typical Hollywood action hero. Some critics, such as E. Ann Kaplan, suggest that as a Mexican filmmaker, Cuarón is understandably attracted to a plotline concerning overpopulation and fertility issues, given how these issues mediate relations between the United States and Mexico. 18 While I agree that Cuarón’s national origin informs the film’s transnational perspective, and production, and shapes its dystopic scenarios, I am most interested in how it leverages its focus on topical questions of immigration, refugees, and global violent state exclusions and expulsions of marked populations in its critique of capitalist biopower on a global scale. The implied intertext of migration policy in the United States targeting “Mexicans” and other mostly Central American refugees combine with related questions in Europe regarding the treatment of migrant and refugee populations and both significantly shape the film’s perspective. As Alicia Schmidt Camacho has noted, the U.S. militarization of the ­Mexico–U.S. border since 2001 has created new legal policies and cultural fictions about the border and migration, narratives that are now overdetermined by the regimes of criminalization and

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militarization in law and policy in the United States—and increasingly worldwide.19 Children of Men confronts its audience, which it positions as largely Western and cosmopolitan, with images that aim to break through the hardened apathy and indifference to the horrors experienced by ­21st-century migrants and refugees on a global scale. Interestingly, the film presciently forecasts not only a series of U.S.–Mexico border crises, but other migration and refugee crackdowns and ­wide-scale governmental and militarized responses now associated with the conditions of perpetual war and the security states of post–9/11 Europe, as well as the United States. 20 Thus, particular scenes and shots in the film directly reference widely circulated media images of violence, chaos, and imprisonment that saturate U.S. and European newspapers and television screens, including large numbers of people held in cages, scenarios of prisoners being hooded and tortured (i.e., the Abu Ghraib photos, circa 2004), hundreds of armed police guards with POLICE emblazoned on their shields as they stand before the cages of “fugees” (slang in the film for “refugees”). Cuarón has noted that he intentionally referenced ­newsreel-style images of bombings and war zones that echo contemporary news media, such as images of Jerusalem and Fallujah, coverage of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and violence in ­Israeli-occupied territories of Palestine. After he leaves his workplace, we see Theo again on a train as he rides through a ­quasi-urban “countryside” riddled with scenes of rioting, rotting livestock, and violent military police repression—even as the train’s video monitor screens deliver an endless stream of ominous, yet chirpy ­public-service announcements spouting alarmist state propaganda: “THE WORLD HAS COLLAPSED” and “ONLY BRITAIN SOLDIERS ON.” An opening ­voice-over that starts the movie also mimics a standard BBC broadcast, announcing headlines from the news over the contrast of a blank screen so that the voice of the commentator is all audiences know in the first 30 seconds. These material performances of the disembodied— and omnipresent—authority of ­nation-state media technologies of control and surveillance, along with the language of “security” and ­anti-immigrant scapegoating, dominates the film’s deployment of these discourses and underscores their hysterical inflection in contemporary U.S. and European politics: “DAY 100 OF THE SIEGE OF SEATTLE” is followed by “Homeland Security Bill is ratified. After eight years, British borders will remain closed. Deportation of illegal immigrants will continue.” This ­meta-reflexive use of media technologies and political discourse is a key trope of the movie’s first sections, conveying information about the plot’s crisis and how this dystopic society structures life through imposing discourses of security, threat, and nationalism in a familiar and yet alarming version of the late capitalist

One. Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and Critique55 grimness and despair audiences already know. While it would seem that the issue of the fertility crisis and what it means for humanity is the cause of that despair, the overall scenario of a corrupt, chaotic, and violent society suggests its causes are multiple, and elsewhere. Children of Men’s combination of a recognizable social landscape and the uncanny ­sci-fi dissonances (often themselves parodic extensions of current societal features) generates cognitive estrangement and an ironic commentary on both the known present and the prophesized futurity. Such associations are made evident in the multiple scenes that feature billboard and television ads for “Quietus,” the ­state-sponsored suicide drug that is energetically advertised on the ubiquitous video screens that broadcast continuously in public transportation, at home, and at the office. As the soothing corporate spokesperson uses sympathetic language to describe this option (“It’s your life. It’s your choice” and “You decide when”), it becomes clear that mass suicides are being promoted as an economic and population control benefit to what is left of a functioning British ­corporate-state system. These scenes establish the background, or setting, for the main story line—one that comes into play fairly belatedly. They also underline the historical link between its extreme, yet “realistic,” ­science-fictional portrayal of an imminent dystopia to a remembered archive of past and recent past atrocities, including the concentration camps and gestapo squads of Nazi Germany. Drawing its “image repertoire” (­Minh-ha) directly from current newspaper front pages and infamous archives of the 20th century allows Children of Men to create a historical concordance between (1) the horrific futurity the film presents, (2) contemporary military invasions of the Middle East and other crises (all of which have generated a worldwide growth industry in detention facilities and brutal policing and jingoistic ‘nationalist’ media, and then (3) back to the slightly more distant history of fascism in Europe and Nazi Germany.21 Here, the film appropriates the prophetic mode of the apocalypse allegory toward one of its foundational purposes, to warn an audience of “where this is headed”: a nightmare vision of where contemporary neoliberal “societies of control” are leading globalized Western modernity. In its montages of historical and contemporary scenarios of state violence, Children of Men weaves together a longer history of neoliberal society and governmentality. The ubiquitous media screens aimed at managing and threatening the population illustrate what theorists such as Cherniavsky and Patricia Clough argue is central to neoliberal biopower. It is depersonalized, deindividualized, and operates through various state and ­non-state apparatuses (media, police and military, medical services, etc.) that manage populations as “bodies of data,” reflecting a world in which the individual political consent of Enlightenment liberal government is no

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longer relevant.22 Taking this Foucauldian discussion even further, Achille Mbembe coins the memorable term “necropolitics” to emphasize a genealogy of capitalist democracies that tracks the governmentality of Nazi Germany to the present, a genealogy that the film references and is also traced in Foucault and Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. However, Mbembe underlines the key function of the slave plantation and other institutions of colonial expansion and oppression, insisting on the roots of modern biopower, and what he calls “necropower,” in these histories of racialized colonial administration and violence. Mbembe argues that current forms of biopower are exemplified by contemporary modes of government that result in “the creation of ­death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence upon which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of the living dead.”23 Shots of both Theo’s face with its deadened emotional affect and the ­large-scale scenes of chaos and despair underline the film’s critique of contemporary social organization and militarized governance as a totalizing landscape populated by such living dead.

Masculinity, Race, and Apocalypse: A “New” Colonial Allegory? This pedagogical project of critique in Cuarón’s film seems to be a good fit with its allegorical plotline, particularly after Children of Men introduces another main character, Kee (Ashitey), a young Black woman on the run as a fugee (possibly African or ­Afro-British, as her national origin is not explicitly stated). Kee is presented as a sullen and uncommunicative young woman, possibly with a sketchy past, who is eventually revealed to be pregnant with the world’s first child in over 18 years, though she has “sod all” idea of who the father might be. Kee’s character and her central plotline are introduced to audiences, and to Theo, about 25 minutes into the film, after he has been recruited by a militant revolutionary migrants’ rights group, the Fishes, to help “rescue” her, though for reasons they do not explain. The Fishes’s leader happens to be Theo’s ­ex-wife, Julian (Julianne Moore), who contacts Theo in a violent sequence that involves kidnapping and terrorizing him before revealing her identity. All of these events happen to Theo just after he returns from a countryside sojourn to visit his buddy Jasper (played by Michael Caine doing a ­full-on John Lennon impersonation) and recover from the shock of the café bombing. Theo’s night with Jasper offers some relief from the chaotic and violent atmosphere that opens the film, allowing Children of Men to elaborate more backstory for Theo and for the general present situation. In the

One. Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and Critique57 process, this ­male-bonding interlude also highlights the film’s complex references to 1960s–style revolutionary idealism, and to political conviction and activism in general. While clearly a sweet man (and occasional marijuana dealer) who cares gently for his ­now-brain-dead wife—a former journalist who sits silently and unresponsively in her wheelchair, the result, the film lets us know, of torture by M15—Jasper is presented as a figure in hiding from the world that is falling apart around him.24 Kaplan usefully places this scene in the temporal category of nostalgia, highlighting the refuge and fantasy created in Jasper’s “time capsule” of a home (Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday” [1967] plays in the background) and what that ­quasi-domestic refuge signifies for both himself and for Theo.25 We learn, for instance, that Theo lost a child, a son named Dylan, and became estranged from Julian in the early days of the epidemic and its social upheaval. These losses suggest some etiology to his current attitude of despair, cynicism, and detachment, which are centrally foregrounded in the film’s first section. But Theo’s actual function as a character becomes interestingly complex as Children of Men moves more fully into the mode of a Hollywood action film, and both Theo and audiences become involved in the central “daring rescue and escape” plot that takes up its final hour. This ­action-genre section of the film operates in an uneasy tension with the political critiques established in the first sections. One of those initial political critiques appears to be aimed at Theo himself, whose detachment and despair make him almost a spectral figure in the film’s early scenes, a kind of walking dead man. And taken with Jasper, these principal “men” of the title constitute a particularly ineffectual pair. In spite of their charm, past histories as activists, and ironically ­s elf-reflective awareness and humor, they are utterly without the ability or interest to stop the social horrors they witness all around them. And yet, Theo is played by the tall, handsome British actor Clive Owen, whose virile body and ­celebrity-styling is an early sign that the film may eventually undercut the suggested impotence and irrelevance of its white male characters. By positing Theo’s alienation and ineffectuality, Children of Men suggests it wants to emphasize his figuring of the allegorical end of white manhood. But that ending becomes more confusing and ambivalent as Theo’s character emerges as increasingly central to world historical events and the focus of the human connections of the plot. This plot tracks Theo’s reluctant involvement in the scheme to rescue Kee and deliver her to a, perhaps mythical, scientific group known as “the Human Project,” which is working on a cure for the fertility epidemic from the relative security of a ship at sea called “the Tomorrow.” In the process of this rescue plot, the film also underlines and celebrates Theo’s evolution from an alienated and cynical government functionary to the vigilant and nurturing caretaker of Kee and

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her baby, and ultimately the film’s ­self-sacrificing hero. This transformation is actually quite conventional and key to the formal structure of Hollywood narrative cinema: Theo is, after all, the protagonist whose “gaze” often controls the camera and mediates the audience’s experience of the apocalyptic world that the film presents. What is crucial and interesting about Theo’s reluctant hero’s journey, though, is the gendered and racialized plot and character baggage that accompanies his ­protagonist-hero role. Theo’s are the eyes through which the audience comes to experience the film—that is, he operates as critic, judge, and arbitrator of this apocalyptic world by virtue of the audience experiencing it through his (somewhat outsider) perspective and identifying through the camera with his figure, his reactions, and what he—and the audience—sees. Such structures of identification in cinema have long been a focus of feminist film theory, as discussed in the Introduction’s summary of the pioneering work of Laura Mulvey and Teresa de Lauretis. Mulvey clarifies how cinema operates an “advanced representation system” that “poses questions of the unconscious (formed by the dominant order) structures [and] ways of seeing and pleasure in looking.”26 While Mulvey and others would later retreat from the rigid and seemingly prescriptive structuralism of what “the dominant order” is said to produce within film audiences, especially women spectators, her foundational insight about cinematic identification remains crucial to understanding the dynamics of narrative cinema and the respective roles of protagonists (and actors) whose figures are projected so on the screen. Critical to discussion of Theo’s role in Children of Men, Mulvey’s work underlines how cinema as a medium encourages a scopophilic pleasure in the act of looking wedded to a narcissistic mechanism that enables a temporary loss, or suspension, of the viewer’s own ego within the fantasy of his/her identification with the human figures ­on-screen. And this concerted and dialectical dynamic of desire (cohering, or suturing, the image/story to the audience/spectator) operates almost inescapably along the lines of gender difference as they are embedded both at the social, political level and at the level of language and other unconscious systems. This means that, as a rule, audiences identify most viscerally with a film’s active protagonist, or whichever character whose perspective is most palpable and dominant through both camerawork and story line. In Children of Men, that character is clearly Theo, even as interesting and sympathetic secondary characters are introduced. The film’s reliance on ­shot-reaction shot pairings that feature a ­close-up of Clive Owen’s face as he registers varying degrees of ironic amusement, fear, apathy, and exhaustion cathect us to Theo. The dialogue and scene sequences oscillate between ­close-ups of a warm and laughing Theo when he is with Jasper to various portrayals of him as exhausted, pathetic, ironic, and at times

One. Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and Critique59 rather emasculated, as he is shown drinking alcohol heavily and responding flippantly to grave situations. Theo bemoans early on to Jasper that at least when he’s hungover, he feels something. This numbness and apathy are contrasted to the male Fishes and Theo’s ­ex-wife, Julian, who are all active, decisive, and purposeful, if a bit strident in their political pronouncements. The scene when the Fishes first contact Theo in London by kidnapping him underscores how he is accustomed to, if not comfortable with, experiences of being weak, overpowered, and fearful and also how he uses his sardonic irony as a mask of ­self-protection. Theo’s implied emotional and physical vulnerability remains ambiguous in the film; often, he is quite endearing, and the value of his type of masculinity is implicitly affirmed, although that impression is undermined by the Fishes’s contempt, such as when they toss coins at his feet “for the bus” to mock Theo’s poverty, as well as his supposed lack of principles. In those interactions, it is made clear that Julian and the other Fishes presume that Theo’s main motivation is a mercenary desire for the money they have offered. Feminist film theory elaborates how the story being told, i.e., the plot of a film, which plays into the narrative production of desire and identification, particularly in conventional Hollywood drama and its generic iterations: suspense thriller, action movie, Western, war story, romantic comedy, etc. The ­common-sense understanding of these dynamics might lead us to conclude that the more conventional, or generically predictable, stories in mainstream cinema will most efficiently reproduce dominant patriarchal and ­white-supremacist norms. Generally, that assumption plays out quite well. However, both ­standard-genre TV and film and seemingly critical, less mainstream versions of those stories have been shown to do all kinds of cultural work, much of it against our generic and ­common-sense expectations. Children of Men provides a useful example of these dynamics, and my reading joins a large number of incisive but admiring analyses of the way it weaves its “salient political critique of globalization and … ­anti-immigrant xenophobia” with manifestations of cultural nostalgia, especially for a redeemed ­w hite-masculine leadership in contemporary societies, even as those societies are understood and depicted as dystopic and terrifying.27 The examples of apocalyptic popular culture I discuss in this chapter, both Children of Men and Mad Max: Fury Road, and throughout the book can be read simultaneously as critiques of neoliberal political realities and ideologies, which still sometimes reify—uphold and confirm— ingrained political and affective hierarchies and ideas around racial and gender differences. In Children of Men, the plot appears to announce that the best hope for humanity is an African woman who emerges from lowest rungs of globalization’s new world order. Reflecting Western allegory’s

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own precise genealogy in Christian biblical traditions of prophecy and apocalyptic thinking, the film places extraordinary, redemptive power and centrality on the character of Kee; particularly, her magical capacity for regeneration (literally, Black female reproductivity). This apparent inversion of who will lead “us” out of the hellscape of apocalyptic violence and chaos likewise reads as biblical allegory, a generic genealogy that is almost parodically emphasized in the film’s later scenes.28 At one ­much-discussed point in the film, a penultimate scene offers a long tracking shot of a mortally wounded Theo supporting Kee, who carries her newborn daughter, as together, they descend the ­b ombed-out stairs of a building under attack. The lighting and music underscore how this vision of the holy couple and the miraculous child manages to stop all the gunfire as the ­awe-struck soldiers and rebels watch reverently as the trio works its way out of the building and ecclesiastical music soars over the soundtrack. But as the protecting male in this chaste couple, as well as the intrepid surrogate midwife and baby coach to Kee, Theo remains arguably the central figure in the film’s narrative.29 The messianic plot features his actions and character transformations much more than Kee’s, highlighting Theo’s evolution from being a defeated, pathetic figure who defends his cynical disillusionment with ironic detachment and gallows humor to the decisive, ­self-sacrificing hero of the second half ’s ­rescue-and-escape plot. This character development and transformation, perhaps the only one in the film, is signaled early on by Theo’s ability to rise to the challenges of the crises that unfold. He identifies dangers and makes decisions, while Kee’s main action is to trust Theo. Sayantani DasGupta suggests how in addition to the widespread white infertility anxiety implicit in the plot, Kee becomes a vehicle for overlapping colonial fantasies, such as the film’s deployment of her as a vulnerable and needy Third World female figure who is quite literally rescued by the white man.30 And I would add that because ­anti-immigrant discourses and public affect in both the United States and Western Europe are closely related to fears of being “outnumbered,” it is significant that the film renders Kee as a safe figure: a new “African” surrogate mother for the mainly European humanity foregrounded in the film.31 In addition to the politics of the film’s reliance on reproductive futurity as embodied in Kee, Theo’s persistent authority and ­decision-making capacities further attest to the gender and race norms being upheld, norms derived from a long history of both Hollywood action films and colonial relations. The fact that both mother and child are female—and racialized as “African”—is simultaneously central and obscured in the film’s portrayal of Theo’s sacrificial and messianic white masculinity. Cuarón, feeding into the readings of many admiring critics, has insisted, “The fact that this child will be the child of an African woman has to do with the fact that humanity

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Theo (Clive Owen, second from left) and Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) leaving with the baby in Children of Men.

started in Africa. We’re putting the future of humanity in the hands of the dispossessed and creating a new humanity to spring out of that.”32 However, Kee is not the only ­non-white central character in the film. Another is Luke, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, the Black British actor known for his Academy Award–nominated role in 12 Years a Slave (2013), as well as one of the main characters (respectively, protagonist and villain) in both 2012 and the film Serenity discussed in the Introduction and Chapter Two. In Children of Men, Luke is part of the Fishes group that abducts Theo in London and brings him to Julian, who explains she needs his help with the transport of Kee. It is not until later—after Julian’s apparently coincidental death in a ­back-roads ambush followed by a narrow escape to the Fishes’s safe house—that Theo learns that Luke was part of an inside plot that intentionally orchestrated Julian’s murder so that Luke could be elected the Fishes’s new leader. Here, the nagging questions about how the film’s critique of neoliberal governmentality relates to its political imaginaries of race and gender become even murkier, since Ejiofor is clearly of African descent, and his character’s fanaticism operates as a synecdoche for a certain kind of revolutionary politics that rails against the authority of established orders “by any means necessary.”33 Such revolutionary fervor is what ostensibly motivates the Fishes’s conspirators in their plan to use Kee and her pregnancy to rouse the people, the fugee masses, in a ­large-scale uprising against the British army and government. Because Luke is portrayed as both the mastermind and the leader of this faction, his adversarial relationship to Theo takes up a central

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function during the film’s action sequences. The contrast between the two men is immediately striking, in terms of racialized masculine styles. Theo is ­non-violent, almost passive throughout the film and dryly ironic in most all of his statements, whereas Luke melodramatically performs both his grief over Julian’s death (later exposed as a lie) and his political outrage. For Luke and his comrades, rage and other exaggerated affects are a litmus tests of their commitment to the cause, as illustrated in scenes at the safe house that show the particularly violent men in the group—more loose cannons among the Fishes—expressing their murderous hatred of Theo. In this way, the film’s implied critique of 1960s–style political activism embodied in the hapless, though honorable, Jasper appears extended into a condemnation of all radical political action, as encompassed by the Fishes, both under Julian and then Luke. The Fishes’s emotional imbalance and vocal proclamations (with the possible exception of Julian, who is very cool, as well as the target of the more violent faction’s coup) combine with bombings and other acts of revolutionary violence the group has supported or enacted to present their ­pro-immigrant political program as part and parcel of a politics that would use Kee ruthlessly (as well as murder Julian) to promote a violent uprising.34 In contrast to Luke, Theo’s passivity and skepticism camouflage his great potential for leadership and for human kindness, especially as they morph into an aura of calm purposefulness and his purported weakness is recast as a radical ethic of ­non-violence. In the final scenes at the Bexhill refugee camp, where Kee and Theo are to meet the Tomorrow, Theo is about the only male person ­on-screen not carrying a gun or military weapon. Instead, he is shown holding Kee and Marichka (Oana Pellea as a Romanian woman who helps them in the refugee camp) protectively around the shoulders and often reaches his hands out, in fear as well as an almost pleading gesture. Furthermore, we learn before they escape the safe house that Julian had told Kee to “only trust Theo.” So when Kee announces her reliance on him, and him alone, it is a turning point in the film’s action plot. The final message of this racialized masculine comparison being that Theo is trustworthy (and genuinely moral) and Luke is not—a symbolic use of character that receives its ultimate confirmation when Luke and the Fishes attack Theo and Kee as they make their way across the Bexhill nightmare of gunfire and violence. Theo calmly admonishes Luke, “Just let her go. You don’t know what you’re doing.” Luke responds by yelling exultantly: “No?! Look around you. It’s the Uprising. And they haven’t even seen the baby.” The characterization of Luke as victim to a delusional, twisted logic of violence is somewhat tempered by his apparent desire to be a true, mature leader and his expressions of genuine human feeling. Once having taken Kee and brought her to another building under attack by the military,

One. Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and Critique63 Luke is shown being torn between that feeling and his politics. When Theo comes to rescue Kee and her baby, Luke is returning gunfire from a window. Luke turns his gun on them, then confesses, “I was carrying the baby up the stairs. I forgot how they are. They’re so tiny,” before shouting, “Leave her, Theo. We need the baby. We need him.” Theo responds wryly, “It’s a girl, Luke.” Luke pauses, “Yeah. I had a sister.” But as Theo continues to lead Kee away, Luke shouts, “Theo, Theo,” shooting Theo in the stomach just before he himself is blown up by military mortar fire.

Allegories of White Masculinity’s Reproductive Futurities Theo proves his value and function through this rather blunt ­compare-and-contrast relationship to Luke, which necessarily racializes the politics of masculine leadership on offer in the film. By foregrounding Theo and establishing the superiority of his white male character as the deciding factor in a global apocalyptic crisis, Children of Men narrativizes a specific, though most likely unintentional, ­white-supremacist position in relation to the political critiques developed in the film’s early sections. One might see this return to dominant conventions of race and gender as a panacea to the comfort zones of Western viewers and their own presumed race and gender biases. However, the limits of the film’s allegory are implied by Cuarón’s various claims for its “true” sociopolitical meaning, which suggest something else is going on that causes the film to veer away from its goals, something perhaps more profound and insidious than simply global mainstream marketing.35 The effort to designate the “future of humanity” in the figure of Kee is clearly driven by ambivalence: perhaps an ambivalence regarding the ­non-white dispossessed and their capacities that exposes a nihilistic, and rather conservative, core at the film’s necrofuturist heart. In the terminology of Neferti Tadiar’s incisive critique of neoliberal global divisions, we might say that although Kee proves herself to be in some ways quite risk capable, she remains fundamentally at risk, requiring the guidance of Theo to not only manage a harrowing and ­near-impossible escape, but even to also give birth and learn to care for her child.36 Through his guardianship of Kee, Theo’s despairing perspective and political attitudes are transformed into an urgent emotional engagement that enables his ultimate function as a martyred leader: the one who must die so that others can live. Cuarón has made statements that indicate the film’s rather surprising adherence to Christian traditions of apocalyptic allegory is not accidental, in that he intended to wed the Catholic influences of his own formation, and perhaps that of P.D. James, into a prophecy

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for contemporary neoliberal global formations. However, Cuarón’s narrativization of apocalypse and revolutionary violence as linked phenomena falls into a number of ­pre-existing plots and narrative ruts. One is the distrust of energetic or “radical” political engagement wedded to a persistent, if surreptitious, faith in the possibility of a benevolent type of white masculine authority, both of which signal Children of Men’s reliance on the tropes and figures of a ­s ettler-colonial liberal imaginary. In her work on 1960s political and temporal imaginaries, Jane Elliott traces the roots of liberalism’s ­common-sense distrust of revolutionary transformation to the “conflation of revolutionary and apocalyptic discourses” grounded in narratives of 1960s political radicalism: “As the positive experience of freedom gives way to its negative incarnation as narrative totalization, radicals likewise appear to be displacing a ‘free,’ neutral and unorganized reality in favor of a univocal and universalizing ‘extreme’ and ‘militant’ discourse.”37 Elliott’s explanation of the logic of totalization in political narratives (in both their historical and fictional incarnations) helps illuminate how the film pivots on the character of Luke, making him the racialized representative of a misguided and fundamentally oppressive and violent political program, and thus a foil for Theo’s superior, ­non-violent, and ­de-politicized white leadership. The impasse of Children of Men might be located in this precise equivocation between its condemnation of totalizing structures of oppression under late capitalism—figured as an ongoing apocalypse—and its refusal of revolutionary politics as a viable mechanism for ushering in what might supersede the catastrophe of that present world. The needling impression that Cuarón doesn’t have an alternative vision for society nor a direction for his searing critiques becomes more legible in light of Elliott’s analysis of the history of liberal political discourse in the 1960s, precisely the era that Cuarón chooses to foreground. In fact, one of the key points of Elliott’s book is that the narrative plots of liberal political thought remain caught in that same time warp, a loop, which can only anticipate radical, i.e., meaningful, social change as a totalizing political narrative. Children of Men illustrates that this narrative enclosure is all the more threatening since it is thus understood as a likewise total destruction of existing forms of social order (and authority), such as those embodied in white male agency and leadership. In sum, revolution can only be forecast as either chaos or fascism, or some dystopic combination of both, like that portrayed in Cuarón’s film. Although Theo’s apparent death at the end of the film could be understood to herald the literal “death” of one form of masculinity (white, hegemonic, official) and the beginning of some new form of ascendant personhood (perhaps female and Black), the structure of the narrative

One. Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and Critique65 attention and arc lead back to Theo and his role. In fact, the film never really strays from it or him. Ironically, the ambivalence about the political possibility of social change that flows underneath Cuarón’s film emerges ­full-blown in the final scene, an ending that ­self-consciously invites contradictory interpretations. As Theo paddles the trio in search of the Tomorrow, he, and Kee, and the ­only-slightly fussy newborn, rock on the waves in their small rowboat (which is clearly not seaworthy, a temporary vehicle). Kee announces to the wincing Theo, obviously in great pain, that she will name her daughter Dylan, after the son whom Theo and Julian lost. Theo smiles, then tips forward, suddenly unconscious and probably dead, as Kee calls out his name. For a moment, Kee is shown holding her baby alone on the rowboat with a ­slumped-over Theo, but then the camera focuses on her face lighting up as she catches sight of “the boat, Theo, the boat.” The camera then shifts to an upward shot of the boat, really a small ship, with “Tomorrow” emblazoned on its hull, and quick glimpses of hearty white men in coats high on the deck as it slides by. The last frame of the movie moves back again to show to the viewer a tableau of Kee and the baby and a silent, slumped Theo, the Tomorrow and its lights approaching from a slight distance in the middle of the screen, and a large and ­well-lit buoy bobbing in the right side of the frame. All are set against a wide gray background of fog and a few ocean waves. By leaving Kee, and the audience, suspended and “waiting” for the crew of scientists who will, audiences hope, rescue mother and child and launch the project of a “renewed humanity,” Lothian argues that the film’s ending “signals something less utopian: the triumph of procreation, in which a nonwhite, noncitizen will be made the best of, assimilated into the human project … in which Kee’s own life experience and knowledge will be subordinated to the scientists who rescue her.”38 Cuarón has asserted that he intentionally opened the possibility for hope, for a future for Kee and thus for “humanity,” in this ending, but also left it ambiguous enough that more pessimistic types would question what happens next. And increasingly, more skeptical analyses have also wondered, what role Key has been assigned? While the arrival of the Tomorrow suggests the possibility of some kind of future that Kee and the child will get to inhabit, I follow critics such as Lothian, DasGupta, and Brown to understand the conditions of her inclusion in the narrative and the futurity to be limited by race and gender and to what Brown characterizes as a “passive reproach to Western capitalism’s exploitative and violent institutions” that relies on “nostalgia for a simpler form” of capitalism and more benevolent white male saviors.39 The film’s clearest story line, then, largely tracks Theo proving himself as a leader and a martyr. This recourse to tropes of conventional ­action-film male heroism in its messianic mode (see The Poseidon Adventure [1972], for

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instance) reifies other engrained imaginaries around white male leadership and collective futurity—and places the character of the male hero back in the driver’s seat, so to speak, even if he might expire there. That the message is mixed does not undo the narrative trajectory by which Theo assumes the position and capacities of the professional or managerial masculinity that Dana Nelson (and others) argue is at the center of capitalist and racist social forms of capitalist modernity. This managerial “national manhood” is a direct legacy of liberal democracy’s colonial history and its gender and race systems.40 Nelson traces explicit historical, as well as cultural, links between the establishment of the nation and the forms of masculinity available to its subjects at a given moment. And it turns out that those foundations, in the United States in any case, can be traced to the era of classical liberalism’s historical and philosophical zenith: the ­19th-century moment of ­nation-state consolidation and industrial capitalist expansion—as well as, not coincidentally, plantation slavery, westward expansion, and Native American genocide.41 This reliance on managerial or authoritative masculinity, and the key role of race in creating it, ­re-emerges across a long cinematic history, especially in Hollywood. And even in a work like Children of Men, which stakes out such a critical position on both whiteness and the necropolitics of state and capital, the centralizing and organizing function of white masculinity is surreptitiously reinforced, rather than challenged. Movies are a particularly effective medium for this confluence of ideological and historical concerns, especially considering that the masculine hero figure has long been a cinematic preoccupation. Cuarón’s explicit foregrounding of both “men” and universalized social catastrophe in Children of Men underlines the current convergence of these simultaneous preoccupations with crises of masculinity and the imaginaries of futurity in popular culture. Scholarly critics of the film have thoroughly exposed how its critical perspectives remain delimited by neocolonial and ­hetero-reproductive logics that involve both “white men saving brown women from brown men” (in Spivak’s memorable phrasing) and the imagined hegemony of reproductive biopower over the bodies of those brown women, even—or especially—when the “fate of humanity” is at stake. However, affirming white supremacy and patriarchal dominance are clearly not the goals of Children of Men, whose alarmed opposition to conventional social and political norms is evident in how it portrays key components of contemporary society as dystopic and ­dead-end. The film relies on a concomitant deployment of ­s cience-fiction generic conventions to generate this dystopic imagined world. Like the apocalyptic, utopic and dystopic science fictions often, almost by definition, propose a sweeping away of a corrupt social order—one that is described in details

One. Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and Critique67 meant to metaphorize, in the case of Children of Men, “the state of things that we’re living in now, the things that are shaping” the present.42 In this interview and others, Cuarón explicitly and ­s elf-consciously articulates the film’s project as an aesthetic warning—a prophecy shaped for its maximum impact on audiences to convey a message of alarm and critique. And yet I have argued that the film evinces a profound ambivalence, even hostility, toward anything that veers too far away from established norms of both conventional liberal politics and ­race-gender hierarchies. What, then, is the status of “critique” in the context of these allegorical world reductions that nevertheless reproduce the colonial logics of race and gender difference through the fundamental work of story? A central question of this book is to consider, how can different stories be told, and told legibly? It is useful here to turn to Mad Max, which also announces its critique of contemporary social orders through an allegory of ­science-fiction futurity, one that again centers on issues raised by gender difference and heteropatriarchal reproduction.

Mad Max: Fury Road: Capitalist Governance, Revolution, and Patriarchy If the final scenes of Children of Men reveal an almost nihilistic skepticism propelling its necrofuturist vision of apocalypse, the ending of the 2015 blockbuster, Mad Max: Fury Road, seems to stake a claim for hope and revolution in the apocalypse, and significantly, “redemption”—a word that dominates the movie’s last half hour. Unlike Children of Men, the main male character, Max (Tom Hardy), is explicitly ­de-centered early in Fury Road, and his hero function shared, or even handed over, to a female lead, Furiosa, played by a carefully stylized Charlize Theron. The path of the film from reboot and extension of the Mad Max franchise, which is all about the lone male hero in the apocalypse, to a blockbuster that has been lauded as a “feminist classic” makes an instructive comparison in understanding the ­pop-culture uses and political fantasies driving narratives of apocalypse and gender in the early 21st century. The importance of the ending to the ultimate meaning of any narrative plot, and most especially one about the apocalypse, is a truism of structural analysis in film and literature. This is particularly the case if we are looking for relations of concordance created in ­popular-culture imaginaries; that is, of a futurity that aims to reflect back (positively or negatively) on how we understand the present and the past, collectively speaking. So a comparison of Children of Men and Mad Max: Fury Road can usefully begin with their final scenes: the lone couple on a boat in an impenetrable

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fog in Children versus the collective, mass triumph of Furiosa being raised on a platform by the formerly enslaved “War Pups” to the roaring cheers of a grateful and adoring populace. Further, she is not alone on the platform, but rather accompanied by the band of female warriors (or what’s left of them) who fought with her to bring down the rule of Immortan Joe (Hugh ­Keays-Byrne), the brutal despot who controls the water, and thus the people. Also with her are numerous members of the beaten masses who’ve been lifted onto the platform by smiling female warriors, forming a collective that physically manifests the new inclusivity and radical democracy this ending heralds. Max, the titular male protagonist and ostensible hero of the movie, is shown slinking away into the crowd, anonymously, after exchanging a significant nod with Furiosa. The inversions here are obvious and powerful: women instead of men, collective instead of individual, triumph instead of ambiguity. The road that leads to this moment of incipient societal transformation begins, however, with Max’s ­voice-over that opens the movie, first against a black screen, then aside a backdrop of dust, machinery, and other ­hyper-masculine emblems: “Once I was a cop, a road warrior searching for a righteous cause.” While both films commence with a ­voice-over set against a ­difficult-to-decipher image that is slowly revealed, Mad Max: Fury Road emphasizes and contains its opening focus to the figure and character of Max himself. A bit of historical context is revealed, again using snippets of slightly ironized “media voices” in the opening that mentions vague references to oil disaster and water contamination and drought, indicating an environmental catastrophe that precipitated the social and political one. But the narrative voice of the film is Max’s. Like other characters, Max speaks in evocative and elliptical phrasings that signal the film’s generic

Max (Tom Hardy) mounted on Nux’s car in Mad Max: Fury Road.

One. Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and Critique69 debt to comics, as in when his ­voice-over explains his haunted character for the viewer: “I told myself they can’t touch me. They’re all dead…. I am the one who runs from both the living and the dead. So I exist in this wasteland. A man reduced to a single instinct: survive.”43 The “I” of the film is clearly announced in this opening shot that foregrounds the lone figure of the male hero and Tom Hardy’s voice. And yet, we never get a good look at Max’s face, just his back in silhouette against a blinding desert sun and then a side view of his whiskers and tangled long hair—showing how Fury Road simultaneously invites, then thwarts the viewer’s identification with Max by making him quite simply difficult to see (and later, to understand, but that is true of much of the mumbled dialogue in this movie). Oddly, in a film that begins with such a bald cinematic statement of his centrality, Max is quickly absorbed into the violent and brutal cacophony of Fury Road’s postapocalyptic social landscape. He is captured and enslaved within two and a half minutes of the start of the movie, and he and the audience are tossed into a sequence of brutal, ­half-decipherable images of tattoos, blood, medical procedures, caves and bloodied hulks and ­chalk-white shirtless men. This narrative emasculating, even erasure, of Max on the screen signals the film’s early shift in focus and demonstrates its refashioning of the mainstream ­apocalypse-action thriller, redefining the genre, as well as the franchise, through key elements. Director George Miller reportedly told his longtime cinematographer, John Seale, to keep the main character in the middle of the screen because they knew that the speed and chaos of the film’s framing, crosscuts, and editing would make it difficult for audiences to keep track (and make sense) of the action. Seale recalls Miller saying, “Put the crosshairs on her nose.”44 The use of “her” is telling, because within minutes in the opening sequences that introduce Immortan Joe and his postapocalyptic kingdom, the Citadel, we get another clear shot of a dominating back: the graceful, ­near-bald head and neck tattoo of Furiosa. Both the authority and the ­gender-blurring conveyed in this initial shot of Furiosa’s unsmiling and imposing figure become central to her role in the film. The clarity with which as Furiosa, Theron’s brooding face, blackened brow, and ­buzz-cut head, as well as her ­black-leather warrior ensemble and tall, erect body, are presented is a stark contrast to the ­rapid-fire glimpses of ­as-yet-unnamed Max. First, as mentioned, audiences see him bearded and shaggy in a fleeting side view. After his capture, Max is chained and shaven by his captors—briefly revealing a surprisingly soft, round face with full lips—and then this face is enclosed in a metal cage that effectively obscures any clear view of that face. The visage of the film’s supposed main character is locked in this face cage for a significant portion of the first half of the movie. During the first scenes of the movie, Max makes one desperate dash

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to escape the stronghold of Immortan Joe, pursued by eerie hoards of the ­chalk-white “War Boys,”—the army of ­cancer-ridden young men who fight for Immortan Joe and who finally drag Max back into the cave and hang him from a chain inside a ­medieval-looking metal ball. Thanks to his blood type being designated as “universal donor,” Max is conscripted as a “blood bag” for a War Boy who needs ­on-the-fly blood transfusions; as in, “I’ve got a War Boy running on empty. Hook up that ­full-life.” While Max’s body has become a captured resource to be harvested, the Imperator Furiosa takes her place of apparent honor and leadership behind the wheel of the largest vehicle in the movie, a fully loaded “war rig,” which she alone drives. The men call her “boss,” but she does not speak. She is an imposing and inscrutable figure, whose muscular but apparently female body and utilitarian outfitting are marked by the detail of a ­powerful-looking prosthetic left hand and lower arm. Introducing Furiosa through a speedy montage informs the viewer about the postapocalyptic microworld of the Citadel and its social and political structures: where such captures and the subsequent mission of armed vehicles are apparently fairly routine, though highly ritualized, events.45 During Max’s attempted escape sequence, those shots cut to a parallel event narrated in images of a thick, whitened and aging male torso riddled with boils and scars that is being sprayed by equally white ­half-naked boys with what appears to be talcum powder. After they apply the powder, a clear, plastic chest and back guard is carefully locked in place around the man’s chest—as a sort of medieval armor, as well as protection for this grotesque older male body. The chest and boils (and body armor and slaves) belong to Immortan Joe, who is escorted to a cave window by more young men, who are bigger and ­stronger-looking but still seem “off ”—with odd details of tubing, dress, and various prosthetics signaling their bodies’ deformations and adaptations. One man is presented as small and severely disabled, sitting high in a sort of wheelchair contraption that looks part throne, part ­life-support system. From the credits, one learns that this character is named Corpus Colossus (and it turns out that the actor, Quentin Kenihan, is a famous Australian television personality whose life with disability is ­well-chronicled on his own reality show). These markings of environmental damage, dehumanizing commodification (Furiosa’s tattoo marks her as Immortan Joe’s “property”) and patriarchal tyranny are linked to disability in significant ways that raise questions about its role in the visual and narrative world of Fury Road. Both Immortan Joe and the “ruined world” of Fury Road are presented as the inherited legacy of the environmental degradation and capitalist exploitation that is underlined in the opening ­voice-over commentary. The film’s visual and plot references to deformation and illness apply most clearly to

One. Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and Critique71 Immortan Joe, his sons, and the War Boys, all of whom denote that this is a disfiguring and “sick” environment: a ruined world made more horrifying by the rule of Immortan Joe. However, some critics have understood Fury Road through the lens of “crip theory” to argue its representations, including the War Boys and the sons, show disabled persons as active and socially incorporated participants in society and counter the conventions of stigmatizing disability, or presenting such persons as objects of pity and healing.46 But considering ableist culture’s problematic history of using “illness as metaphor,” the film’s images of disability and their narrative function also suggest that disability and illness are themselves markers of negative elements, or even evil.47 Falling into this “disability is allegorical” mode of representation that appropriates disability to stand for something else, it is easy to argue that the film’s large number of disfigured male bodies signals a physical corruption reflecting social and environmental causes: whether by the participants and leaders of the Citadel’s brutal authoritarian organization or a sickened postcapitalist natural world, or both. Thus, disability is a ­double-edged figure in Fury Road, one that enables peripheral elements and associations that counter ableist generic and social norms, but also recuperates ableist tropes of disability and illness as the negative consequences of some other, more “inherent” illness—a move that has traditionally been criticized in disability scholarship. However, recent disabilities and ­cultural-studies scholars, such as Sami Schalk, argue for engaging disability’s metaphorical representations, in order to “underscore the mutually constitutive relationship of disability” to the violence done by oppressive systems and histories.48 Furiosa’s prosthetic and missing arm is an interesting fact and symbol in this regard. While indicating that she too has been damaged by—and is a warrior servant to— Immortan Joe, her capacities remain formidable. And in a climactic scene, she wields the prosthetic as a weapon to kill Immortan Joe himself, an act of cosmic irony and retribution. But Furiosa herself is ambivalent about the prosthetic: its capacity for violence and domination (which she uses when she needs to) and the history of abuse that it reveals. The important “scream scene,” when Furiosa faces the loss of her ­dreamed-of maternal utopia, is punctuated by her viciously ripping the machine off her arm and walking with the bare stump to slump down in agonized grief. In these scenes when Furiosa is without (or forcefully removes) her menacing prosthetic, the camera shows her arm as a vulnerable stump. Arguably, both Furiosa’s missing limb and her prosthetic reflect not only the abuse she has suffered systemically at the hands of Immortan Joe and his society, but also the positive value of her ­non-normative capacities. The film suggests that to fully express and experience Furiosa’s moments of vulnerability and helplessness, she feels a need to free herself from the prosthetic, suggesting

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ideas that undermine—and even queer—the film’s otherwise insistent focus on hypermasculinity and military skills in a patriarchal warrior society. To further underline the authoritarian patriarchy that controls this postapocalyptic kingdom, the film showcases Immortan Joe’s leadership style. He arrives to stand with his sons and guards at the mouth of a cave looming high above an immense crowd of waiting people in rags holding bent cups—the mass population of the Citadel known as the Wretched. After he announces, “I salute my ­half-life War Boys,” and, “I salute Imperator Furiosa,” Immortan Joe invokes his sovereignty over the crowd using the language of ritual and religion: “I am your redeemer. It is from my hand you arise from the ashes of this world.” Joe then demonstrates for both the populace and the viewer the source of his power. He instructs his men to lift the large metal gates, and water rushes in a huge (and wasteful) waterfall to the people below. He allows the water to fall to them, though only for a few seconds, before signaling the gates to be closed, announcing ceremoniously, “Do not, my friends, become addicted to water. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence.” The line resonates with the film’s critique of ­settler-colonial capitalism’s ethos of legitimizing the power of a few who monopolize resources (through domination gained by violence and “ownership”) and then lecture the suffering masses with a moralizing rhetoric of dependence and addiction when discussing access to those resources; often, as here, a public good, such as water. This speech and sequence also convey a bundle of narrative information to the viewer, using dramatic visuals to convey the direct linear chronology of the plot and offer succinct character disclosure, indicating the film’s fealty to both the ­action-film and ­comic-book genres that Mad Max: Fury Road draws from.49 We learn that Furiosa is a powerful warrior for Immortan Joe and is leading an expedition to either “Gas Town” or “Bullet Farm” for a supply run. The ­quasi-religious language and ­war-culture rituals all signal the kind of political system or governance wielded by Immortan Joe and his men in the creation and maintenance of this particular ­death-world. We also soon learn how important it is that his minions are all men and the role gender difference plays in this dystopic patriarchal kingdom. Which is to say the fact that the rule of Immortan Joe is profoundly and foundationally patriarchal, as well as ritually authoritarian, is emphasized almost immediately. Soon after they return to their courtly rooms, Immortan Joe and his sons are surprised by a report, announced quickly, that Furiosa has suddenly veered from the main road and embarked on some other, unannounced mission. Corpus Colossus shouts, “Hey, Pa, you know about this?” and another of the imposing henchmen asks plaintively, “Why would she do this, Dad?” These incongruous juxtapositions of the men’s childlike understanding and familial language (and relationship)

One. Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and Critique73 to their physical and government authority underscore the sort of kingdom Joe has made for himself: sons who are supported and empowered, regardless of the physical, mental, and social effects of their sick environment, one that is grotesque both in terms of its literally crippling ecological contamination and the brutality and corruption of their “dad’s” despotic power. Immortan Joe says nothing to his sons; instead, the camera follows behind him as he runs out of the room, rushing through hallways, past a hidden garden, to arrive at a huge vault door that he struggles mightily to open. Inside this vault, where Joe keeps his “prize breeders,” are chambers that appear to be empty, though reasonably luxurious and peaceful compared to what we’ve seen, except for the messages written in red on the cave walls: “OUR BABIES WILL NOT BE WARLORDS” and “WHO KILLED THE WORLD?” An older, haggard woman, Miss Giddy (Jennifer Hagan), is alone in the chambers and defiantly responds to Immortan Joe’s thundering demand, “Where is she taking them?” with, “She’s not taking them. They begged her to go. You can’t own a person.” Although, at this point in Mad Max: Fury Road, women—other than Furiosa—have been shown only peripherally; the story’s plot and representation of gender and power dynamics are already clear. Fury Road’s stark equation of brutal and violent despotism with an almost mythically reductive and hyperbolic version of patriarchy is forcefully underlined in ways that made the movie a fast cult favorite among feminist audiences. Film scholar Taylor Boulware asserts, “Fury Road is a condemnation of toxic masculinity and its complicity in capitalist exploitation of both resources and bodies.”50 While his sons and his army are shown to be violent and rather stupid, Joe embodies the canny awareness and strategizing vigilance of those who wield, and seek to retain, excessive power and control of resources and people. He knows precisely why Furiosa might decide to go rogue. Fury Road continues to hammer home the links among totalitarian governance, capitalist violence, and patriarchal control of women’s and other bodies in scenes that push the plot forward while using parody and ironic humor to underline its critical points. For instance, the War Boys are presented as an army of ­cancer-riddled (hence, “­half-life”), brainwashed youth who desperately worship all the ridiculous ritual and demagoguery Immortan Joe espouses. As apparently willing slaves (in a world with no options) and doomed soldiers, they constitute a kamikaze army. In a world with no viable options for survival nor life purpose other than power and accumulation, Joe has promised them that if they die fighting for him, they will “ride eternal in Valhalla” where they will “McFeast with the heroes of all time.” As Boulware explains, “The essential resources he controls and around which he invents his sycophantic religion bear names that are

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synonymous with expansive market capitalism; even after the apocalypse, water and food, when in the hands of men, remain trademarked, controlled, and used to exploit the weak.”51 Immortan Joe’s regime’s reliance on various forms of militaristic and fundamentalist magical thinking is underlined almost comically, as when Nux (Nicholas Hoult), a War Boy character we eventually come to know well, exclaims exultantly to his lancer, Spit, “He looked at me!” The two argue over whether Joe had really meant to look at him (the camera suggests yes) or was just “scanning the horizon.” Nux persists, “I will die glorious on the Fury Road [and] arrive victorious at Valhalla to walk among the immortals.” The rough comradery and desperate energy of the War Boys are presented in the rush to launch a war party that will chase down Furiosa because, as one yells to Nux, “She took a lot of stuff from Immortan Joe!” Nux yells back, “What stuff?” “Breeders. His prize breeders.” The dehumanization and commodification of women (and other life) is shown to be both linguistically and materially instantiated in this hypermasculine warrior society, with the dialogue signaling an ironic critique of Joe’s ownership of his “prize breeders,” as well as Nux’s more aspirational possession of Max as his “blood bag.” Max is literally mounted onto the front Nux’s car so that Nux, who on his own is too weak to join the war party, can continue the blood transfusions that keep him going. But Fury Road also indulges in stereotypical gender norms and the desires and values attached to hypermasculinity and patriarchal control, including a likewise hyperbolic reproductive femininity that is presented in the form of the “Wives” Furiosa is helping to escape. The limited roles and functions available to women in the Citadel, relegated to a forced and dehumanizing reproductive femininity, are made clear from the first scenes of the film, with shots of heavy ­bare-breasted women hooked up to milking machines while they sit in chairs that look like those in a hair salon (the Milking Mothers), followed by Miss Giddy, who appears as a quintessential “hag” and is the Handmaiden and teacher to the Wives, then later to the first full shot of Immortan Joe’s harem of “prize breeders.” This tableau, criticized by many, occurs after the initial ­car-chase battle scene that releases Max from Nux’s car and brings him into the orbit of Furiosa and her war rig. Max stumbles upon the rig, where the Wives have emerged from their hiding spot in order to, conveniently—and rather incongruously amid the circumstances of a desperate car chase and escape—wash themselves, which they manage by hosing down their scantily clad bodies. Each of the five women is wearing white muslin bandeau bikini tops and loincloths, and the picture of their glittering figures could easily be straight from a glossy ­fashion-magazine shoot, confirming the women’s seemingly normative function as eye candy.

One. Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and Critique75

Furiosa (Charlize Theron, second from left) and utopian collective (from left, Riley Keough, Courtney Eaton, Abbey Lee and Zoe Kravitz) at the end of Mad Max: Fury Road.

However, it becomes clear that the flimsy fabric and dress, along with the iron chastity belts, reflect the women’s conditions of enslavement as ­sex-providing and ­baby-making “property.” The five Wives are played by actresses who are in fact most w ­ ell-known as models. Victoria’s Secret supermodel Rosie H ­ untington-Whiteley is the Splendid Angharad, Immortan Joe’s favorite and visibly pregnant. The others have names that are only briefly revealed, if at all, before the credits; these actresses include models Abbey Lee (the Dag) and Courtney Eaton (Cheedo the Fragile), as well as a­ ctress-models (and famous daughters) Zoë Kravitz (Toast the Knowing) and Riley Keough (Capable). Film scholar and critic Eileen Jones complains that the incongruities of both youth and beauty and aged femininity are so reliant on rigid gender stereotypes that they can be played for laughs, albeit at times inadvertently. Among Furiosa’s goals is to locate her previous “tribe,” now a fugitive group of older women known as the Vuvalini—older women presented almost humorously but who also happen to be cool biker chicks with skills and guns—and get to “the Green Place,” which she remembers as a maternal paradise.52 When Furiosa locates the Vuvalini and is reunited with the community she was stolen from as a young girl, the older women, ragged and sunbaked, grope at the Wives in wonder, “Where did you find such creatures?” and, “This one’s got all her teeth.” And yet for all these h ­ yper-gendering displays, Fury Road does embed some useful details and critiques in its emblematic scenarios. The stereotypical femininity of the Wives has been manufactured by Immortan Joe for his own satisfaction, and the rugged, worn faces and bodies of the desert band of renegade women are likewise produced by the conditions of their brutal environment and its requirements for survival.

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Gendering the Apocalyptic Hero: Questions of Female Masculinity The masculinity is what is foregrounded, though, from the opening shots that highlight the roar of engines and rushing sequences of various kinds of cool muscle cars and military tanks and other repurposed vehicles and machinery that are presented as central to this society and its survival, or at least its lifestyle. The focus on makeshift ­off-road vehicles, “rigs” and tanks, and cyborg warriors utilizes the emblematic power of such objects and visuals and their capacity to generate excitement, both in audiences and also within the Citadel society. However, the importance of cars and machines is illustrated in a complex of images and scenes that suggests both parody and fetishization. The critical parody seems most obvious in the religious discourses attached to the vehicles and the culture of masculinist posturing and warmongering that the War Boys are inculcated into. For example, in the opening invocation before sending out his army, Immortan Joe solemnly promises his War Boys that they “will ride eternal, shiny and chrome.” Nux dreams only of dying “in glory on the Fury Road”—largely because he is already a dead man, as are the other “­half-life War Boys,” thanks to the cancer that sickens their bodies and produces ugly visible tumors. “Half life” signals their foreshortened life expectancy (versus Max, who is designated as “full life” during a brutal medical examination early in the film) and is part of the rationale for their willingness to die for Immortan Joe. From its opening montage sequences to the emerging focus on the humanity of the War Boys, Fury Road suggests that the hypermasculinity of the Citadel society can be understood as part and parcel of the brutal environment and meager resources of this postapocalyptic world, producing an underdeveloped, ritualistic, and anachronistically “­pre-modern” public culture that is easy to mock—with its ­mash-up of 1970s car culture and ­comic-book ­pseudo-mysticism. But it also constitutes a critical commentary on exactly the late capitalist epoch referenced in the Mad Max series. The 1970s were the inaugurating moment of neoliberal globalization—a period marked by the shift away of the ­2 0th-century’s mode of capitalist industrial productivity and the concomitant explosion of financialization and accumulation, all combining to create a new, immense underclass of disposable populations. The malaise of the 1970s and early ’80s global economy and a countercultural pessimism about the promises of ­state-corporate capitalism generated a ­pop-culture mode that Evan Calder Williams calls “salvagepunk”: an aesthetic and political ethos of reuse in a ruined world. Williams posits salvagepunk as an important and subversive subgenre of apocalyptic cultural production that draws from the

One. Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and Critique77 punk and car cultures of those decades. This entire genre, coined by Williams, relies largely on his readings of the earlier Mad Max films, especially Mad Max (1979) and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981). In underlining its own brand of masculinist “­retro-nihilism,” Fury Road picks up the mantle of the Mad Max franchise and again portrays the postapocalypse of late capitalist society as “a train wreck in slow motion, a secret narrative; it has been about oil from the start.”53 Williams does not discuss the function of gender difference in either the “retro” or the “nihilistic” aspects of salvagepunk, but Fury Road makes the gendering of the postapocalypse central to its plot and its potential critique. For Williams, salvagepunk offers a commentary on capitalism’s inherent nihilism and bankruptcy, exposing the truth that “[t]here is no new construction, just the occupation of other architectures … the unwelcome remainder of what won’t go away.”54 Immortan Joe and the Citadel society can be understood as just such an “unwelcome remainder” of late capitalism, “in which the willfully primitive tribes are those who remain committed to the visions of the past: that is, to the advanced state of late capitalism.” Williams highlights how the original Mad Max series, generating its own subgenre of “gasolinepunk,” was preoccupied with showing the results of what he emphasizes is a false choice and a rut, a “standstill of ­post-history” which produces the illusion of postapocalyptic necessity. As he notes, “And all this is bound to the absurd ­self-consumptive core; one needs gasoline in order to drive around and kill others to steal their gasoline, but in doing so, one consumes the gasoline that one had, and so one needs gasoline in order to….”55 The potential creativity of this salvagepunk vision, according to Williams, is in its gleeful adaptations to a more honest acknowledgement of the real predicaments of late capitalist society and what it will leave behind. Like the rest of this postapocalyptic society, the War Boys must make do with the materials for thought, identity, and life that they find, and are given, including their truncated life purpose of “dying in glory on the fury road.” Both Williams and the Mad Max franchise suggest that this “constructive” ­life-scavenging among the ruins of the world is a creative, adaptive act that underlines how that world itself is built on the false premise of brutally competitive scarcity necessitating a Hobbesian war for survival. As Williams comments, “It is patently false that only ‘those mobile enough to scavenge, brutal enough to pillage would survive.’ … It isn’t that they ‘have’ to live this way, but rather that they quite enjoy it.”56 In Mad Max: Fury Road, both the nihilistic enjoyment and false necessity are exposed by the alternative that Furiosa, later joined by Max, decides to pursue in escaping the Citadel and making a break for somewhere else, in this case, “the Green Place.” This new goal, and shift in the mainstream action movie’s

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generically dominant gendered plotline, indicates that while the new Mad Max movie shares an atmosphere of ­retro-nihilism, it also offers a utopic potential for “revolution,” as A.O. Scott named it in his admiring review.57 I argue, however, this incipient revolution relies a bit too much on the narrative inversions of normative gender roles and social norms performed by Furiosa and Immortan Joe’s Wives (and all the male warriors and despots) and leans toward perpetuating the gendered plot and identification options of Western culture: a binary of feminine nurturing and victimhood versus masculine violence and leadership. In this aspect, the narrative of a gendered alternative to Immortan Joe threatens to deliver simply more of the same, at least in terms of gender differences, with their function in social organization and narrative plot development. The elements of ­s cience-fictional exaggeration underwritten by its apocalyptic plot allow Fury Road to elaborate the hyperbolic distortions of Immortan Joe’s governance, recalling similar logics in earlier movies in the Mad Max franchise, and to link this survivalist rebellion fantasy to its critique of a tyranny that is now explicitly masculinist and patriarchal. Such pointed allegory is partly why Scott claims that while seeming to be an entertaining ­mash-up of ­science-fiction action movies and classic Hollywood Westerns, Fury Road actually “is about revolution.” I agree with Scott that this potential revolution rests primarily in the film’s debunking, or decentering, of the male hero figure. However, although Furiosa is shown to be quite likely the true hero and center of the film, her heroism and leadership are defined primarily by her character’s superior capacity to perform to exactly those hypermasculine norms. And yet, these are the norms and stereotypes of heroic behavior that the film simultaneously insists upon but also throws into question. The film not only masculinizes its female hero, but it also “feminizes” Max, most particularly through a critical gap or weakness in his capacities to perform. The undermining of Max’s function as the agential masculine protagonist begins with his admission that he “runs from both the living and the dead” and continues in the subsequent sequence in which he is captured. From the start of Fury Road, Max seems to be struggling with survival: first, in his speedy enslavement, then by his inability to successfully escape the Citadel. This specter of failure is linked in the film’s exposition to Max’s earlier, ­pre-diegetic, “failure” to protect and save his wife and daughter in the early days of societal collapse (indicating the continuity with the first Mad Max film), which now haunts him and the film. Fury Road underlines this failure sporadically through the visual and narrative manifestations of “Glory the Child” (Coco Jack Gillies), a ragged but beautiful little girl, clearly ghostly, who appears as a vision to berate Max at key moments—particularly, when he needs to act. At first, these visions suggest

One. Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and Critique79 she is a harbinger of reprimand and guilt, whose appearances paralyze Max and prevent him from making crucial decisions or actions that might preserve his freedom, as in the initial escape and chase sequence, or help save others, which is partially what happens when Splendid is killed. In her ultrafeminine and childlike countenance and her apparently paralyzing function, Glory the Child operates as the film’s manifestation of what philosopher Bonnie Mann calls the “­shame-to-power conversion,” which she argues is foundational to understanding the toxic roots of national manhood (and national culture) in the mistaken belief in individual “sovereign masculinity.” Mann’s deployment of the term “sovereign masculinity,” the subjective aspiration to be a fully agential and impenetrable male individual and leader, helps articulate a linguistic, psychic, and historical genealogy to the problems of gender difference, agency, and violence that Fury Road puts into play. One early indication of the role played by these conflicts is in the presentation of Nux the War Boy, whose ritualized relationship to the “conversion” promised by Immortan Joe and the Citadel culture illustrates the ­shame-to-power conversion with almost no deviation. In place of an ugly suffering and the anonymous death of their diseased bodies, “dying in glory on the fury road and walking with the heroes” holds out to the War Boys a fantasy of social belonging and redemptive achievement. Two aspects of Mann’s long discussion are key to this film, and much of my argument in the book. First, the social nature of selfhood (drawing from sociologist Charles Taylor) means that the self seeks an “imagined community,” a concept Benedict Anderson developed to understand the cohering of a disparate population of individuals into Western national identities and nation-states, beginning in the 1800s.58 As Mann explains, the individual self seeks and is “seduced into a network of imaginary identifications that manufacture the personal sense of such public sacrifice.”59 Both Mann and Anderson understand the military and its relation to the nation to be a foundational illustration of the dynamics of what each calls the “fraternity” of imagined community and what it offers the individual subject. By emphasizing the implicit and central work of gender within the nationalist discourse analyzed by Anderson, Mann wants to clarify the compensatory, aspirational fantasy behind this fraternity and the gender norms generated through these processes of identification. This compensatory dynamic is the second crucial aspect to Mann’s theory: “Sovereign masculinity ... is characterized by a denial of both physical and intersubjective vulnerability…. Shame always accompanies sovereign masculinity because it plays a central part in its production. This is why we see systematic, relentless, repetitious shaming, wherever sovereign masculinity is an aspirational ideal.”60 It is not surprising that the memory of his past failures, as manifested

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in visions of Glory the Child, paralyzes Max. As psychologist Gershen Kaufman notes, “Shame is an ­impotence-making event” and one that operates through experiences of “excruciating visibility” to which the shamed self responds by trying to hide or escape.61 Thus, in its first half, Fury Road literalizes Max’s condition of shame (of being haunted by shameful memories that appear as Glory the Child) through camerawork and costuming that literally hide his face from view. Similarly, after he fails spectacularly to stop the war rig in a desperate scene involving all of Immortan Joe’s army, Nux is pictured cowering and sobbing in the back seat of compartment. “He saw me. He saw everything,” Nux wails. The gendering of the actual acts of heroism in Fury Road remains, nonetheless, largely within the gender norms of ­action-cinema convention, and probably causes the most problems for a feminist reading of Mad Max: Fury Road. Furiosa may exhibit gruff caretaking capacities or other “feminine” traits, but her overall demeanor and skill set adhere to the masculinist code of frontier manhood: laconic, decisive, ­non-emotive even under extreme duress—as well as brilliant with a gun and in a fistfight. And indeed, the competition for leadership between Max and Furiosa begins in a generically conventional fashion: They fight for it. When Max attempts to take the war rig, the two viciously but wordlessly struggle in the dirt. Max wins this round by taking control of the gun and thus the war rig, but his leadership is soon shown to be tenuous, and even mistaken. The film’s wavering on the question of whether Max is to be trusted (as a man, leader, fellow warrior, etc.) is underlined in this situation in which Max appears to have regained his appropriate position and power, especially in relation to the women. He is no longer enslaved, and he is now in charge. However, although Max has the gun, his dominance of the group of women is quickly shown to be illusory. The war rig has a kill switch controlled by Furiosa; without the rig to escape in, they all are going to be killed or taken prisoner by Immortan Joe and his army of War Boys, who are fast approaching. Agreeing to a tense ­power-sharing agreement, the group sets out across the barren landscape with Furiosa driving and Max holding a gun to them all. Furiosa instructs the Wives to take inventory of their weapons situation, which somewhat surprisingly, they do well. In this scene, the incongruencies and reversals of the genre norms of gendered roles and skills are accentuated by the competence of at least some of the Wives in this emergency situation and signal the film’s interest in complicating both gender and generic assumptions. This middle section of battling Immortan Joe and the other various warrior societies who’ve joined the chase on the “Fury Road” before Max and Furiosa come to truly trust and rely on one another simultaneously illustrates Furiosa’s superior abilities and Max’s compromised relationship

One. Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and Critique81 to those necessary masculine capacities. As mentioned, he is at various times shown to be struggling to save women and children, and too often to be failing. In this same scene in the war rig, Toast the Knowing counts the guns and ammunition and announces that the “big boy” (an SKS rifle) only has four bullets so is “all but useless.” This information is quickly put to use when the Bullet Farmer (Richard Carter), who is among the large group of vehicles in pursuit, begins to catch up to them. Assuming his masculine leadership role, Max authoritatively grabs the powerful rifle and sets himself up to take aim at the approaching vehicles. But he misses. Three times, in fact, which means there is only one bullet left. In a ­much-discussed scene, Furiosa calmly but firmly takes the gun from Max, who nods as she sets the barrel on his shoulder, commanding him, “Don’t breathe.” In a very long shot, Furiosa then hits the oncoming vehicle’s one headlight, which explodes the machine, blinding the Bullet Farmer (though he quickly recovers to continue the chase). This sudden emasculation of Max indicates the film’s critique of ­action-film genre conventions and their assumptions about masculine and feminine performances and capacities. It also underlines some interesting concerns with male heroism, abjection, and politics that will be discussed further in following chapters. And yet, in the context of Fury Road, the scene illustrates the film’s foundational adherence to the equation that “heroism” is tied to traditionally masculine skill sets and capacities, even if it is now Furiosa that most fully owns those capacities and that role.

Frontier White Masculinity: ­Settler-Colonial Apocalyptic Imaginaries Nonetheless, we are led by both generic expectations and the Mad Max franchise to understand Max as an icon, by definition masculine, of the allegory of survival; and Miller himself has insisted that Fury Road is “a very simple allegory.”62 The opening shots of Max’s hunched, muscular back and the ­two-headed gecko he stuffs into his mouth highlight both his “primitive masculinity” and the conditions of privation and necessity that govern the film’s apocalyptic environment. I argue that the template for this environment, and the genre of the postapocalypse in general, is the frontier era of Western expansion of the United States and thus the logics of settler colonialism. Echoing Miller himself, Scott and other film critics have noted the evident influence of the classic Hollywood Western directors in Mad Max: Fury Road.63 This genre genealogy is made even more legible when focusing on the role of gender and racial differences and particular national myths of white masculinity in popular Western genres. Historian

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Gail Bederman has underlined the foundational relationship between the ideals of masculinity that characterized the frontier era, and particularly its mythification in the early 20th century. Among the most influential of these was the ­so-called “frontier thesis” (popularized by Frederick Jackson Turner, 1893) and an idealization of (and nostalgia for) the “natural man” who finds in the frontier an ideal environment for his more “violent and impulsive” temperament.64 Like other cultural historians of these eras, Bederman emphasizes how concerns about a perceived crisis of masculinity at the turn of that century played a key role in the spread of the frontier thesis, which was influentially supported by Theodore Roosevelt and others. In this analysis, the frontier American West of the 19th century offered a more hospitable context for expressions of “primal American masculinity,” a masculinity that was increasingly felt to be endangered by social and historical phantoms that worried at the popular imaginary; particularly, a ­colonialism-inflected preoccupation with Black and indigenous men, who possibly had an edge when it comes to both masculinity and “the natural,” as well as linked anxieties about the emasculating impact of “the effeminizing tendencies of advanced civilization.” 65 Teddy Roosevelt becomes a popular advocate and figure for this concern “for the future of American manhood and the revalorizing of the natural man”—a buried and authentic masculinity that lurks in all (white) men and can be revitalized through education and/ or a specific environment. Not only is this “primitive masculinity” notable for its upholding of concepts of white masculinity grounded in expressions of aggression, power, and violence, but the evolutionary thinking of the era also wedded this masculine figure to a belief that “men of ‘superior races’ naturally wish to exterminate men of ‘inferior races.’”66 Or, as early ­20th-century new manhood and education advocate G. Stanley Hall put it, “From the moment of man’s evolutionary origin, he had a passionate desire to eradicate all lower forms of life, whether animal or human.”67 Roosevelt concurred, writing to Hall, “­over-sentimentality, ­over-softness, in fact washiness and mushiness are the great dangers of this age and of this people. Unless we keep the barbarian virtues, gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail.”68 Bederman and Mann thus highlight the historical roots of the twinned preoccupations with masculine and national identities and their expression in the history of U.S. popular culture of certain anxieties and fantasies rooted in national (and thus racial) supremacy, anxieties that were particularly acute in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As Mann explains, At the turn of the century a wave of evolutionary thinking swept the nation, and concerns arose over the weakening of the white race, concerns that so

One. Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and Critique83 much civilization, supposed ­self-restraint, and reason, was emasculating and ­impotence-making. The evolutionary contest was understood as a contest of masculinities, one that could be lost. The white social imaginary found itself beset with worry that black men and the indigenous men they called “savages” might have an edge when it came to masculinity, and thus might gain the evolutionary edge if white manhood became less virile. In response to this anxiety, white men became enamored of a “new sense of primal manhood.”69

This history of gender styling and fantasies of national and racial dominance help explain how a “very simple allegory of survival” can appear to revolutionarily transform the postapocalyptic action film while still staying so conservatively close to traditional ideals of both masculinity and femininity, ideals grounded in a ­settler-colonial history and imaginary. It also makes audible a relative silence in Fury Road on notions of race and racial hierarchies. The very lack of commentary on the pictured whiteness of the postapocalypse (here, ironically set in a ­sci-fi version of the ­settler-colonial landscape of the Australian outback) suggests that for this film, whiteness and its predominance are assumed—unquestioned and unmarked—and raises the question of what critiques of social organization does Fury Road consider relevant to forging a new world through revolution? Eating the ­still-living lizard in the opening scene establishes that Max is indeed a “natural man”—and yet, he is also quickly enslaved and, literally, emasculated and abjected as a “blood bag” whose body (and car, a key marker of masculine power in the world of Mad Max) is taken over for the use and benefit of others. To recover from this abjection, the film posits a ­two-part sequence that marks a turning point in Max’s role and character in the film. First, his tendency toward failure is underlined in two pivotal moments, both of which occur almost completely without dialogue (like much of the film, and the Mad Max franchise as a whole). The problem Max has performing to expectations when handling the SKS rifle is followed by the death of Joe’s favorite Splendid, right after she successfully manages to save the group herself in an impressive and courageous physical feat. In a ­shot-reverse series that establishes the growing connection between Max and Splendid, he nods his appreciation of her skill and success. But just at that moment, she slips and falls, to be rolled over by an enemy vehicle, driven by Immortan Joe’s driver. While no one in their group explicitly raises the question of who was “responsible” for Splendid’s death, Max as the driver of the rig clearly feels a sense of responsibility and failure. Splendid’s death thus registers on Max’s face and through the immediate flashback images to Glory the Child as yet another failure and loss for Max, despite his character’s concerted efforts to help Furiosa and the women. In a subsequent emergency soon after, Max volunteers to stay back in order to thwart the attack of the Bullet Farmer’s battalion of junk

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cars, though the odds seem impossible. The focalization of these scenes is from the women’s war rig, so that the audience sees only what the Wives see—which means that when Max returns dragging something and covered in blood, they are collectively solicitous and alarmed: “He’s bleeding”; “Are you OK?” Furiosa, however, watches him silently and then announces bluntly, “That’s not his blood,” before walking away. Signaling Furiosa’s (and our) ambivalence toward the blood that covers Max and the violence it registers, this scene nevertheless marks a significant turn in the figuring of Max’s capacities to protect and fight for the women, as well as for himself. One might even suggest that what he’s dragging back to the rig (a piece of his old car) could be said to symbolize Max’s effort to drag back his manly ­self-respect, which is best won through bloody violence. While both Max and Furiosa prove themselves as leaders, notions of masculine skills, agency, and authority persist as the criteria for that leadership so that their character functions remain rooted in somewhat nostalgic assumptions regarding masculine agency, power, and violence. In contrast to Theo, who figures a revised, ­21st-century version of white “managerial masculinity,” Max harkens back to values forged in the frontier in global popular culture, and in ­settler-colonial histories, and embodies a fantasy of primitive masculinity repurposed for a postapocalypse social landscape. And arguably so does Furiosa. The question of how to read Furiosa’s hybrid, or queer, gender presentation has generated much interest and controversy among scholarly critics and fans. Taylor Boulware argues that we can read Furiosa’s gendering through the queer theory concept of “female masculinity” as developed in the work of J. Jack Halberstam. Halberstam has argued that when women “perform” masculinity, they “challenge hegemonic models of gender conformity.” In their seminal work, Female Masculinity, Halberstam acknowledges the social power that accrues to masculinity but insists that transgressive gender appropriations should be read as liberating. Halberstam posits that even though masculinity “conjures up notions of power and legitimacy and privilege” and “symbolically refers to the power of the state and to uneven distributions of wealth,” the function of this embodiment of “social privilege” is transformed into “a unique form of social rebellion” when embodied or performed by a woman. 70 Boulware’s astute reading is less ambivalent than my own on this question of what to make of Furiosa’s gender performance in Fury Road. Her analysis of the masculinities of the film’s most agential figures (the ones whose actions change the course of events)—Furiosa, Max, and Nux—underlines the film’s critical debunking of “toxic masculinity” which enables new gender positions for both male and female characters in its narrative of triumphant social transformation. However, I remain troubled by the film’s narrative reliance on generic invocations of masculine leadership, even

One. Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and Critique85 when embodied by Furiosa, and the general relegation of feminine capacities and characters to what and whom must be saved or protected. So, yes, if Fury Road can be said to track how Max finally accomplishes his own masculine ­shame-to-power conversion and regains a measure of sovereign masculinity, it is ultimately on behalf of the collective, the new social order embodied in the Wives and the Vuvalini as led by Furiosa, which is pictured emblematically in the last scene. And like the Western heroes of yore (Shane, The Searchers, etc.), Max remains necessarily outside the collective he is shown to help save. And his ­self-exiling (like that of Shane and other lone heroes) could be understood as a radical acknowledgment of his anachronistic status as a man in what is now a woman’s world, a better world where he does not fit. Unlike Theo, whose messianic heroism ends with his death at the end of the film, Max shares—even defers—the leadership role with and to Furiosa. Both films’ central white male characters are also portrayed as rejecting the more extreme characteristics of what Boulware calls “toxic masculinity” to indicate a drive for dominance and control through both violence and the expropriation of the bodies and resources of others. Fury Road underlines how this toxic masculinity and its goal of market and social domination as Boulware notes, “occurs through the concomitant creation and maintenance of strict gender binaries that exist precisely to regulate sexual and reproductive behavior for profit and social control.”71 However, part of my argument here, and this book, is that a softening and “feminizing” of the ­white-masculine hero does not necessarily undo or transform his narrative function in significant aspects. Interestingly, compared to Theo in Children of Men, Max’s brutal embodiment of “natural manhood” accompanies Fury Road’s more radical portrayal of Max’s abjection to other men and a more equitable relationship to the female characters he wants to help. And unlike Kee, who does not have the opportunity to do much more than give birth and be saved in Children of Men, both Furiosa and other women characters (Splendid, the Vuvalini, Capable, etc.) in Fury Road are shown not only possessing ­non-normatively feminine skills (with guns, etc.), but also using their femininity toward effective ends. Capable’s ­quasi-romantic tutelage of Nux plays a large role in his own conversion to their cause, the Vuvalini save seeds for a possible future humanity, as well as wield guns and motorcycles, and Splendid’s final act of heroism consists of using her obviously pregnant body as a shield and display that prevents Joe from shooting Furiosa in a perilous moment of opportunity. These scenes indicate a peripheral reading along the lines advocated by Lothian that opens more agential and speculative possibilities for both Kee, as discussed above, and the various women who follow Furiosa, even if I suggest that audiences remain largely focused and cathected

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to the dramas of masculinity (and female masculinity) presented by the central saviors: Theo, Max, and Furiosa. While Fury Road, like Children of Men, seeks to reimagine both the modes and goals of white masculinity, and to make it less “toxic,” only Fury Road offers a clear alternative and is willing to envision a totalizing revolution of both society and gender. Thus, Boulware lauds “the film’s radical assertion that the socialist revolution must first and foremost be a gender revolution,” though I wonder how complete or transformative that gender revolution is, narratively speaking?72 Fury Road invokes, and at times seems to uphold, the ideals of frontier masculinity and the “fatal environment” of the West; i.e., the widespread understanding (in the late 19th century) that the brutality and violence required for survival in the American West— and wiping out the indigenous populations who live there—create a particular class of men who become unfit for society.73 Although the film clearly uses its “very simple allegory” to criticize a particular type of masculinity, within the film’s diegetic narrative, some form of masculinity remains a necessity, with the shift to Furiosa and Max sharing a new sort of masculine leadership role. One way to understand Fury Road is to follow its final gesture beyond the ending that audiences see: the people, including the War Pups and even some of Joe’s sons, welcoming Furiosa and her band of women as the new leaders, the image of the rising platform encapsulating the apparently unanimous desire for a new way. Considering the roles of both gender and disability in its depiction of capitalism run amok and persisting in the postapocalypse, the final image of Fury Road can be understood as utopian speculation and opening toward other modes of both gender and society. Because the scene is so insistently collective and the alternative more clearly close at hand, this ending is arguably more productive and hopeful than that of Children of Men, which seems exhausted by its catalogue of social ills. Both films depict apocalyptic crises that reveal “the break” but waver on specifics of what comes next and how to do it (society, survival, distribution of resources) differently. And that limited vision, too, may reflect a constraint of genre. The apocalypse allegory can generate a plethora of possible meanings and interpretations, but it is inherently speculative—with endings that necessarily lie outside the allegorical frame and narrative—which can only point to a “something else” in the generative gesture of its final image. While the films under discussion in this book include the mainstream, and often generically conventional, versions of apocalypse explained in the Introduction, this chapter illustrates my more central concern with popular culture that works to counter and contest the gender and race hierarchies of contemporary versions of liberal white male supremacy, or

One. Neoliberal Apocalypse, Capitalist Realism, and Critique87 at least attempt to. In Mad Max: Fury Road, the reversals and inversions of these narrative templates move toward reenvisioning social relations in fundamental ways. Interestingly, the move to make the hero a girl—or, less often, an adult woman—is becoming an almost conventional maneuver in Hollywood cinema and cable television. Taken together, Fury Road and Children of Men illustrate that the gendering—and racialization—of the heroic protagonist role preoccupies both mainstream and critical apocalypse allegories, but also that ironically interrogating and even queering those generic and gender conventions may not fully elude the ruts and binaries of racial and gender narrative functions. In the next chapter, I explore the work of Joss Whedon, one of the more reputedly feminist producers of popular culture of the past decades (at least until very recently) whose many commercially and critically successful productions speak to an astute, witty, and seemingly progressive sensibility. Whedon’s many films and television shows repeatedly signal his goal of making mass ­popular-culture products that both relish and critique the presumed norms of popular genres, a goal that is particularly evident in the ­sci-fi postapocalyptic Western in his cult Firefly/Serenity franchise. Yet, this show and its film sequel also further expose the intransigence of normative gender and racial presumptions in even the best meaning efforts to frame an apocalypse that will make possible a real transformation in gender and race imaginaries.

Two

Settler Colonialism, Gender, and Joss Whedon’s Firefly/Serenity The Limits of White Irony “Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity…. Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem—those of you who are men; to those of you who are women this will not apply—you yourselves are the problem.”—Sigmund Freud, “Femininity”1 “What will I find in there, the girl or the weapon?”—Serenity (dir. Joss Whedon, 2005)

Many would claim that no one in mainstream American popular culture uses irony with as much skill and ­pleasure-generating popularity as television and film auteur Joss Whedon, the director of the beloved TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003), as well as global blockbuster action films such as the early Avengers movies and other films and television projects. Whedon’s ­short-lived TV series Firefly (2002, 14 episodes) and its Hollywood film sequel, Serenity (2005), have achieved cult status with a wide audience and offer an opportunity to consider the pleasures offered—as well as the questions raised—by a politics, and aesthetics, of irony. The suspense that irony generates, the reflective pause as the satiric inflection (of a scene, a dialogue, a plot twist) reveals a potential critique, rather than endorsement, of generic conventions, is the bedrock of Whedon’s television and film output and plays a particularly key role in Firefly/Serenity. Continuing Fury Road’s deployment of frontier environments and the Western film genre, Firefly/Serenity explicitly underlines its ­s ettler-colonial critique, often billing itself as a “[postapocalyptic] space [W]estern” for its ­mash-up of the popular genres of science fiction, classic Western, and bromance action flick. It also ironizes these generic conventions in ways that explicitly engage questions of gender and race—and 88



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empire and history—in U.S. popular culture. The whole series depends on both our knowing acceptance of certain stereotypes of gender (and, less explicitly, of race) and our openness to ironic critiques that expose the beliefs and ideas upholding those stereotypes. Building on Chapter One, this chapter further explores how to weigh the balance between critique and complicity, particularly in relation to the intertwined structures of settler colonialism and white masculinity— now with more of a focus on the possibilities of ironic redirection, rather than utopic inversions, such as in Fury Road. Understanding how Firefly/Serenity’s deployment of stereotypes and generic tropes manages the tricky dance of its ironic double meanings allows us to consider the political valences of ­popular-culture media both here and more generally. Like all of Whedon’s work, Firefly/Serenity is a blast to watch, and I suggest that some, if not most, of that pleasure comes from the series’ expert use of irony. In an ongoing exchange with American history and contemporary ­popular-culture genres, irony simultaneously acts as camouflage and stealth weapon. Poet and critical theorist Denise Riley notes, “irony possesses [the] skill of making mention of something by displaying it, holding it aloft to view in a pair of tongs.”2 But irony, like satire, is a slippery beast, and its effectiveness depends on both the audience and the “text,” which in this case is a popular television series and its film sequel. As the authorial voice of this franchise, Joss Whedon signals in various ways that he holds a profoundly critical view of the frontier myth (both of the West and of space) and an interest in upending generic visions that have celebrated those frontiers, including the white male leader or “captain.” But as Whedon has said, he “needs” and loves his genres, and in this chapter, I argue that something like love, or perhaps attachment, ultimately undermines the critical impact of the Firefly/Serenity franchise. Even as the series and film mock and invert notions of ­white-masculine heroism and celebrations of colonial enterprises of expansion and exploration, the story that Firefly/ Serenity tells and the characters that dominate that story reveal it can’t quite shake an attachment to both.3

The Irony of Gender in Firefly Presenting a futuristic ­s cience-fiction fantasy of the year 2517, Firefly follows a group of nine characters who travel in the spaceship known as Serenity, some of whom work together as part of a ­quasi-illegal smuggling operation, while others travel in the ship for their own secretive reasons. It is soon revealed that all share a desire to avoid the controlling gaze and militaristic reach of “the Alliance,” the imperial government controlling

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this galaxy sector. The pilot episode, “Serenity” (Ep. 1, air date: December 20, 2002) opens with Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) and his ­second-in-command, Zoe Washburne (Gina Torres), engaged in a heroic battle scene that concludes with their unexpected and crushing defeat at “the Battle of Serenity Valley.”4 We witness the intrepid white male leader and his trusted “­right-hand man” (pointedly, a Black woman) face impossible odds with ingenuity and fierce will, only to be abandoned precipitously by their Independence leaders and told to retreat.5 We learn later that this catastrophic loss of a key battle “took the heart out” of the rebellion and was the turning point in the war, leading to the ultimate defeat of the Independence fighters, known as “Browncoats.” This nickname, along with other gestures to Civil War history referenced throughout the first episodes, establishes the rebel credentials of Mal and Zoe and shows how both their military bond and their current outlaw enterprise were forged in a shared experience of revolutionary idealism tempered by catastrophic losses and betrayals. These implied Confederacy references also indicate some troubling questions about the role of whiteness and the nature of the “freedom” that propels the series’ narrative arc. The “Serenity” episode then cuts to six years later, the present moment. The opening scene’s vaguely World War II ­war-movie atmosphere is replaced by silent figures in space suits, working diligently in an apparently dangerous situation. The viewer soon learns through dialogue and narrative exposition that Zoe and Mal now work with a ­w ise-cracking pilot called Wash (Alan Tudyk) and a tough guy, ironically named Jayne (Adam Baldwin)—both of whom are also white men. The difficult work ­on-screen turns out to be illegal salvage. These days, the former war heroes are reduced to thieves doing quasi-, or fully, illegal jobs for hire in the Alliance’s imperial outskirts. The Serenity, a rather ­beat-up version of a space “transporter, Firefly class,” enables their smuggling enterprise and helps them avoid Alliance officials and military police. Keeping to the Alliance’s territorial edges, known as “the Rim,” the Serenity mainly travels among neglected or ignored frontier planet settlements rather than to the prosperous and technologically ­hyper-advanced “Core” planets tightly governed by the Alliance. Along with a variety of visual and generic clues, the direct references to frontier settlements and outlaw protagonists underline how Firefly marries ideas about U.S. ­settler-colonial history and the promises of “frontier capitalism” to the genre of the ­sci-fi Western.6 Firefly thus invokes science fiction’s tradition of celebrating ­quasi-colonial scenarios of heroic explorers and ­f reedom-loving rebels, though now with a knowing ironic nod to the audience. Initially, the reasons for this generic ­m ash-up appear to purely ­entertainment-driven. Whedon famously declared at the 2012 ­C omic-Con



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panel, “I wanted to tell an American immigrant story, a Western story, but I need spaceships, or I get cranky.” While the pilot episode confirms the priority of pleasure and entertainment in the ­Whedon-verse (as fans affectionately call Whedon’s whole oeuvre, playing on the slang reference in the show to the “verse” of Firefly/Serenity), “Serenity” also indicates the importance of popular genres to the series, which both relies upon and disrupts their conventions. Introducing the Serenity’s (predominantly white) crew, the early spaceship scenes help bind ­crew-member stories into an origin story for the series and the crew as a whole. Humor plays a key role in these initial scenes and establishes the series’ tone, even when that tone turns somewhat darker. We first see Wash, who is married to Zoe, as he slouches before the ship’s controls literally playing with toys and ­meta-mocking the show’s own generic tropes as, in his boredom, he enacts a frontier battle scene of a settler invasion with plastic dinosaurs: “Yes, yes, this is a fertile land, and we will thrive!” “Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!”— replaying for laughs the tropes of science fiction as colonial expansion. Similarly, the ship’s mechanic, Kaylee (Jewel Staite), a young white woman with a thick country accent, embodies full, lusty femininity while letting us glimpse the show’s ironic deployments of gender stereotypes, as well as generic tropes. Kaylee’s expert mechanical ­know-how is persistently juxtaposed to her girlish charm and “kindheartedness.” As the gruff, violent, and rather dim, white muscleman thug of the crew, Jayne’s character further underlines how the show uses contrasts between femininity and masculinity to create humor and develop characters. When Jayne complains to the captain about Kaylee, “Can’t you stop her from being so goddamn cheerful?” Mal responds, “I don’t think there’s a power in the Verse that can stop her from being cheerful. Sometimes you just want to ­duct-tape her mouth. Drop her in the hole for a couple months.” Kaylee cheerfully rallies with the men’s joking threats, saying, “I love my captain.” In essence, Serenity works like family, or a sitcom workplace, with everyone comfortably, if wryly, embodying ­well-worn stereotypes of popular culture and calcified gender roles. A master of the ensemble dynamic, Whedon creates lines of tension, alliance, and desire while working ironically and playfully on our generic attachments and expectations. Both Mal’s ironic lapses of manly stoicism and authority and the female crew members’ soft subversion of gender norms are played for laughs. For the most part, though, Mal’s position as captain is one that Mal, and the crew, take seriously. In contrast, women characters largely conform to gendered functions in the plots. Kaylee’s feminine foibles dominate her characterization, as when her success in recruiting new passengers depends on her flirtatious charm. Eyeing speculatively an older ­monk-like man in robes, she announces, “You’re going to go with us,” twirling a little

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umbrella and suggesting her character’s vague racialization, as well as her gendering. The ironies of gender intersect throughout the series with the implied ­non-relevance of racial representation. Introducing the character of Shepherd Book (played by Ron Glass, a ­well-known Black actor), this encounter also demonstrates how Kaylee, like all of Firefly’s main characters, “doesn’t see race” (the quintessential ­21st-century liberal claim). Casting Glass and Torres (Zoe) in central roles announces the show’s ­p ost-racial sensibility. Together with the crew’s emphatic exclamations and brief dialogues in Chinese, this nod to multiracial inclusion conveys the version of neoliberal multiculturalism governing this futuristic landscape of frontier settlements and spaceships. Such visual and narrative cues allow the show to gesture knowingly at the presence of Asians, African Americans—and fleetingly, Native Americans—in the historical U.S. frontier, key ­non-white presences usually erased in traditional Hollywood Westerns, as well as official historiography.7 Literally embodying the innocence of whiteness, Kaylee exemplifies Firefly’s surreptitious adherence to the ­post-racial ethos of contemporary Western popular culture, in which race is “reduced … to another descriptor,” as Loza explains, “along the lines of ‘tall’ or ‘brunette’” which “insists that racial and ethnic groups are essentially the same.”8 In ­science-fiction narratives, this insistence might seem plausible, but in Firefly (and predecessors in this regard such as Star Trek), the ­post-racial tableau underscores a coded assertion that factors besides racism are what “cause” unjust social disparities. The fantasy of a ­p ost-racial futurity where whiteness ostensibly carries no special privilege might appear to work within the speculative storyworld of Firefly and its ilk. However, when the series’ main story lines that elaborate this equality culminate with the superiority and primacy of the white characters, one might become suspicious. That suspicion lingers because questions of privilege and social inequality preoccupy the show and are intertwined with its gender dramas. Kaylee also recruits a foppish, if handsome, young man wearing a white suit and dark, round spectacles whom she introduces as Simon Tam (Sean Maher). The question of Simon’s (and later River’s) race remains ambiguous. Their family name is “Tam,” with suggestions of Asian ancestry, which also fits into the implied backstory of a past struggle for dominance and then “Alliance” between a U.S.–like imperial entity and a ­Chinese-like one (although both actors are white). Overdressed and looking out of place in the dusty outpost, Simon appears as a metrosexual foil for the rugged, rundown masculinity of Jayne and Mal. Even more, he signals the show’s preoccupations with social class, as well as gender, differences. Mal greets the effete Simon with barely disguised contempt, while Simon looks worried



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and rather untrustworthy as the camera lingers on his face. Some of these interpersonal dynamics prove to be narrative misdirection that enhances the tensions needed to launch the plot and character relationships. Nevertheless, they demonstrate how almost all of the relationships and tensions of this episode (and the series as a whole) turn on such issues of gender conflicts and stereotypes: from the mystery of Simon’s true intentions to the introduction of a new, glamorous female character, the mysterious Inara (Morena Baccarin). Viewers first see Inara in a long shot that focuses largely on the young man on top of her in the throes of sexual intercourse, as she strokes his back gently, if a bit absentmindedly. This framing shot and opening scene establishes her character in terms of her “exotic” (and racially ambiguous) beauty and sexual availability as a professional, if very classy, courtesan, all of which remain crucial to Inara’s role throughout the series. Interestingly, Inara’s profession and sexuality are both fetishized and yet at times critically framed. Postcoital, the man is seen gazing adoringly at her and asking to see her again, though he responds peevishly when she kindly avers that their time together “went too quickly”: “Well, your clocks are probably rigged to speed up and cheat us out of our fun.” The markedly younger client’s deflection to a casual, resentful misogyny economically signals the dynamics of social status, exploitation, and humiliation that permeate Inara’s profession and life, even though she is of superior class and education to almost everyone around her—aspects of her character that are consistently emphasized. For the most part, the female characters of the “Serenity” episode and throughout the original run of Firefly are less complicated than the male characters. Inara remains both the captain’s primary ­s exual-love interest and acts in feminine ways: She looks concerned, brushes Kaylee’s hair, takes candlelit sponge baths, and generally offers wise emotional support and commentary. Inara’s capacities are thus bound to class and gender stereotypes combining femininity, refinement, and leisure—spiced with a hint of orientalist geisha stereotyping and prostitution’s moral ambiguity.9 The implication that Zoe’s status as a Lieutenant and Kaylee’s role as a mechanic might complicate their gendered characterization is undermined by their largely cosmetic functions in each episode’s narrative arc. Kaylee is “the heart” of the ship and crew, according to Whedon in various interviews. 10 And while Zoe’s role as a “warrior woman” more complexly situates her inside the ­bromance-inflected ironic repartee she shares with Mal and her husband, Wash, her superior intellect, experience, and physical capacities are never enough for her to be taken seriously as the potential ship captain. Zoe’s character suggests Firefly’s gender, and racial, revisions of the faithful lieutenant role that is usually portrayed as a homosocial, ­power-sharing

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agreement (such as Kirk and Spock), but her character is largely subsumed into the plots of other characters and seldom used dramatically— with the exception of “War Stories” which relates the crew’s backstories (Ep. 9, December 6, 2002). In many ways, Zoe corresponds most clearly to Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson’s character in the Avengers films) as the upholder of a masculine authority that she never aspires to hold herself. This pointed erasure of Zoe’s possibilities stands out because the question of leadership preoccupies the narrative of the series. And yet it is always the white men—the vulgar and violent Jayne or the hapless but skilled Simon— who rise as alternatives to Mal as captain. Invoking gender stereotypes ironically (and altogether erasing racial histories), the subtext of Firefly often oscillates between upholding a given stereotype and working against it through irony. Like ­science-fictional cognitive estrangement, irony can reframe conventional ideas about reality, politics, and people in ways that push viewers to pause and “see” a particular situation or figure differently.11 The show’s humorous, ­fast-paced dialogue together with its male character’s competing styles of masculinity often generate this sort of reflection, particularly when Mal and Wash, as well as Simon and Jayne, are each deployed against one another as possible versions of manhood. What makes Mal “a mystery” (and thus “fascinating,” as Inara says) is his embodiment of a dominating, or hegemonic, masculine authority juxtaposed to a humorous acknowledgment of his many failures to achieve that masculinity. Mal, as captain, also illustrates the equation of masculinity and leadership—a connection that the show’s foregrounding of irony calls into question from the opening scenes in the series. We see the criteria for that position atop the ship’s hierarchy largely defined and elaborated in the question of Jayne, whose ­common-sense brutality appears to be refreshingly honest but possibly a problem. Acting as the macho counterpart to Inara’s normative femininity, Jayne more fully embodies the conventions of normative masculinity than Malcolm Reynolds can, or wishes to. Jayne also articulates the “free market” ethos driving the storyworld of Firefly/Serenity, an ethos that the show never fully disavows even though it is presented ironically in Jayne’s dubious pronouncements. Understanding any human exchange or relation as a contest to be won, Jayne complains often about Mal’s leadership being too soft and compromising. When they have just escaped the Alliance cruiser but are short on money and fuel, Jayne complains, “You can’t get paid if you crawl away like a little bitty bug.” Jayne’s mercenary role and preoccupation with masculine dignity and status make him an ideal spokesperson for capitalism’s individualist ethos of pure ­self-interest and thus for a form of (capitalist) realism that presupposes that necessity. Noting Jayne’s morally dubious character, audiences



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are invited to be suspicious when he announces in “Ariel” (Ep. 8, November 15, 2002), “My pop always said if you can’t find work, you ain’t lookin’ hard enough.” On the one hand, both the rote phrasing and source of this information are presented as objects of humor, if not ridicule. But on the other hand, this truism—like many of Jayne’s pronouncements—remains largely unquestioned by the series narrative. Ultimately, how one interprets Firefly/Serenity depends on whether the show and its audience ultimately concede to Jayne’s libertarian values and his presumption that economic realities determine what constitutes “winning” and “losing” for the Serenity. He’s a throwback, in various ways, to the old liberalism of a frontier, ­settler-colonial moment for white men, but the suspensions of irony do not clearly indicate that he’s not still a reliable voice for the series as a whole. By welding two quintessential “American” issues, masculinity and freedom, Firefly/Serenity opens an uneven ground for its critical articulations regarding gender, race, or nation and community. Although the show highlights its ironic detachment and sarcasm, indicating an interest in launching such a critique, its narrative undermines those critical subversions. Here, then, rests the real hermeneutic problem posed by Whedon’s creation in Firefly/Serenity: The veneer of a critical perspective suggests a wry and ironic sensibility, but both the narrative arc and character development operate along largely conventional lines. For example, the discourse of freedom and how it is negotiated by Mal and Jayne, and other characters, upholds the very ­s ettler-colonial logics that are ostensibly criticized through the ironic framing of this frontier story. Gerry Canavan, in his analysis of the series, claims, “the inevitable defeat of freedom experienced by both the Browncoats and their ­post-war criminal heirs on Serenity, and the ultimate triumph of the Alliance, seems nonetheless assured … authentic freedom is already a lost cause.”12 Despite this predetermined futurity, the drive for an elusive freedom remains the central ethos and propulsion of both character and story in both Firefly and Serenity. At best, one can say the film finale of Serenity (2005) questions what other values might replace a masculine individualist pursuit of freedom and survival. Does Whedon’s franchise actually escapes the old formulas and creates something new with these ironized gender stereotypes, the disavowal of racial ones, and the revamping of the mythic masculine “hero’s quest.” And if Firefly/Serenity achieves this escape, how does the new story free itself of dominant ideologies of gender and race (particularly regarding political authority and agency) embedded in its American historical referents? As we see in Chapter One, just the inversion or critique of conventional gender and race norms does not necessarily change the dominance of those norms in a given narrative or cultural expression. I suggest that although

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the Firefly/Serenity franchise offers a compelling reframing of the frontier myth that critiques histories of the ­settler-colonial enterprise and also biopolitical state control, this effort is ultimately hampered by the narrative’s surreptitious commitment to a primary underlying principle of those same ­settler-colonial logics: the necessity for ­white-masculine intervention and leadership to complete the story.13

The Western as Generic Template for Ironic, and Iconic, Masculinity In the pilot episode, “Serenity,” the centrality of white masculinity (as a necessity for civic governance) becomes apparent when the episode’s crisis is revealed. Among the new passengers on board the Serenity, one is a mole who has exposed the ship to an Alliance patrol, which is demanding to board the ship. Mal assumes that the traitor is Simon and swiftly punches him in the face. After Simon blackmails Mal (offering his services as a doctor to save Kaylee’s life, but only if they try to escape), Mal moves to Simon’s large vaulted trunk, sealed with an elaborate mechanical system. Wondering aloud, “what does a man like you kill for?” When Mal dramatically opens the trunk, he reveals a naked, very pale and elegantly frail feminine body in a fetal position, eyes closed, possibly dead but clearly being preserved in the trunk. When Simon rushes “to check her vitals,” Mal sarcastically replies, “Oh, is that what you call it?” assuming that the female cargo is a smuggled sex slave of some sort. That assumption, now relayed to the viewer, makes all the more dramatic the girl’s sudden awakening, panicked babbling terror, and desperate clinging to Simon, as he reassures her, “They’re gone. They’re gone. We’re safe. We’re safe. I’m here,” and announces to the others, “This is my sister.” In the subsequent scene, Simon Tam tells the story of his precociously brilliant sister River (Summer Glau), who he rescued from a sinister ­Alliance-run special school after she had sent him a secret message that said, “They’re hurting us.” Describing his desperate efforts over two years to get her out, Simon proclaims, “River isn’t just gifted; she’s a gift.” While her gifts remain a mystery, River’s role as a problem to be resolved through debate between the two men is fully established. Her illegal presence also gives Captain Malcolm Reynolds a chance to expose his autocratic side. Infuriated that Simon placed the ship and its crew in danger, Mal announces he will release the brother and sister when they reach Whitefall, “if Kaylee makes it.” Simon responds worriedly, “What if she doesn’t?” “Well, then, you’ll be getting off a mite sooner.” Mal’s pronouncement instigates a flurry of crew protests. While Jayne smirks happily, Wash



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demands plaintively, “Can we maybe vote on the whole ­murdering-people issue?” Mal responds, “We don’t vote on my ship. It is not the town hall.” Although insisting, here and elsewhere, that his authority is unquestionable and necessarily sovereign in the strictest sense, Captain Malcolm Reynold’s position is not really that secure. Throughout the series, Mal is presented as a somewhat dubious incarnation of masculine leadership, a concern often expressed humorously in the raised eyebrows and ironic commentary of his crew—or more seriously as shown here, when Wash requests the group reconsider Mal’s potential judgment against Simon and River. Repeatedly, with jokes and disparaging repartee, Whedon’s show questions Mal’s ethics and capacities as captain.14 But because the alternative to Mal is most often presented to be either Jayne or Simon, the narrative forecloses its query of masculine norms and thereby maintains Mal’s authority and position, a narrative function on which Firefly’s entire storyworld depends. Without the drama of Malcolm Reynolds—a drama of how he does or does not live up to hegemonic masculinity, and the repercussions of those successes and failures—Firefly actually has no narrative center. And if there is no viable alternative to Mal’s leadership, to what extent does the show’s irony undo, or even critique, the norms that it puts into play?15 In addition to the wry dialogue and the eye candy of its lead characters, Firefly/Serenity offer other relatively safe thrills with ongoing references to familiar generic Western tropes, such as the iconically loaded image of a saloon window being crashed through during a bar fight (the window is a hologram, it soon becomes clear) in the episode, “The Train Job” (Ep. 2, September 20, 2002). This image (and the episode) acts as a shorthand for the series as a whole; as Whedon has said, they wanted an image that would “tell you all you need to know in 3 seconds.”16 Among other ideas presented in “The Train Job,” the Western allusion signals that we’re watching a ­masculine-identified group of friends who drink in saloons and get in fights—albeit while also playing Chinese checkers, adding a friendly ­s elf-deprecating touch to the macho setting. Through this exposition, Mal and Zoe’s “Browncoat” history becomes Mal’s excuse for picking a fight with obnoxious and ignorant locals who are Alliance apologists. The exposition also allows Jayne to present his own humorously ­s elf-interested ethics (“Don’t look at me; I didn’t fight in no damn war”). The opening scene’s finale, also quite funny, has Wash arriving ­zenith-like in the Serenity and ordering the terrified bar patrons below him to “stand down, or I will blow a new crater in your tiny little moon.” In a later episode, “Safe” (Ep. 5, November 8, 2002), Mal and Zoe enter a scene with guns drawn to rescue Simon and River from likewise ignorant townsfolk, and Mal announces, “Well, ain’t we here in the nick of time? What does that

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make us, Zoe?” “Big damn heroes, sir.” “Ain’t we just?” The humorous nonchalance of these pronouncements does not undermine the notion of an ethical core guiding these rescue scenes. The message is clearly that these wisecracking ruffians adhere to a code of honor and protection. These team members always have one other’s back, even as they talk fast and witty rings around their opponents. Significantly, Firefly follows the traditional Hollywood Western generic model even, or especially, when it ironically interrogates its central white male character in order to raise questions about the nature of heroism, leadership, and masculinity. Western references and credentials permeate the series: Mal wears a leather duster and speaks with a drawl, landscapes are dusty and desolate, and outpost communities are in need of heroes. Visual references mix ­19th-century American frontier imagery, Confederate nostalgia, and World War II machinery to create a vaguely “steampunk” aesthetic that invokes an imagined ­colonial-imperial past.17 By mashing together disparate historical and cultural references, the show elaborates its favorite and resonant themes: the role of the state and governance, the nature of a team or family, and personal freedom as a guiding ethic. In the course of elaborating these concerns, Firefly reveals its ongoing reliance on stereotypes and tropes grounded in both gender difference and settler colonialism. Although the show signals ironic critiques of these tropes, they are often lost in celebratory imagery of frontier heroes and “the good war” (World Wars I and II). Instead, the visuals convey the value and positive effect associated with their historical references, including Jayne’s vintage leather costumes and the ship itself, made of rusty metal and rounded edges in an early industrial style—authentic and honest, in other words. We see how the series’ investments in a cluster of fantasies and ideas about U.S. history and militarism, comradery, and masculinity shadow its ironic invocations of a genealogy of ­settler-colonial and U.S. military ideologies. Returning to comments Whedon made at the 2012 ­C omic-Con—“I wanted to make something that felt like a piece of history”—we find they take on added significance in view of these dynamics of genre and implied historical referents. The prologue sequence of each episode of Firefly climaxes with a stirring, and rather ludicrous, shot of a herd of stampeding horses on a desert plain over which the spaceship Serenity suddenly rises up and flies toward the viewer. This shot is accompanied by banjo and fiddle music especially written for the series by composer Greg Edmondson, a stirring bit of Americana repeated to mark particular scenes and characters.18 The musical themes rely on nostalgic musical codes and familiar ­p op-culture narratives, lending a “vibe” to the series, what several critics have noted as an important source of its narrative effect. This mix of



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From left: Zoe (Gina Torres), Mal (Nathon Fillion), and Jayne (Adam Baldwin) facing off villagers in Firefly, Ep. 2, “The Train Job.”

atmosphere and pathos signifies as both national and historical, and decidedly white—the “hillbilly” character of many of the Rim planets is a motif that runs through the TV series. The Western’s genre conventions likewise ­co-opt the West’s racialized history, presumptions about national identity, and understanding of the degree to which one is outside, and alienated from, cosmopolitan centers of power as a truer measure of authenticity and honesty (where people are less hypocritical and pretentious). This association of hypocrisy and deception with more developed societies and their unjust social hierarchies runs through ­Euro-American cultural history back to, at least, the 16th century, and Whedon clearly enjoys working both sides of that generic legacy.19 In this vein, Whedon scholar Lorna Jowett has argued that the series articulates a valorization of “authenticity” and personal human embodiment in contrast to the Alliance’s dehumanizing surveillance and technological control.20 Jowett and other ­critic-fans tend to accept and appreciate the nostalgic ethos of what counts as authenticity, integrity, and freedom in the Firefly series. In early episodes, it remains unclear whether this loaded history anticipates a later ironic critique of that history, or if the show’s own “heart” remains tied to the values rooted in U.S. exceptionalist fantasies about the frontier and its mythic status. From its start, Firefly contrasts the Rim planets’ frontier values and ethics against those of the Core’s “civilized” ones. The problems with Alliance civilization are vividly narrativized through flashbacks to the ­hyper-privileged Core childhood of Simon and River Tam that confirm the presumed but subtle corruption of their family’s wealth—a world

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of ­upper-class privilege that proves to be largely venal and from which they flee.

­Space-Western S­ ci-Fi and Other S­ ettler-Colonial Genres In film and television, the visual vocabulary of science fiction has relied on images of desolate landscapes to invoke uninhabited, and/or barely habitable, lands where humans might be able to survive. The makers of Firefly latched onto this exploration of a ­desert-landscape trope for reasons that were both thematic and practical (they cost less). The desert landscapes of the Rim planets also visually refer to the process of imperial expansion practiced by the Alliance in the backstory. That is, in addition to their resonance with iconic Western films by John Ford and Sergio Leone, the barren, arid planets the Serenity visits are a visual reminder of the Alliance’s state and technological practice of “terraforming” planets in order to make them ­quasi-habitable for new settler populations. As the ­voice-over (alternating between Mal and Book) at the start of each episode emphasizes, these are planets “at the edge” of the Alliance’s empire, while wealthier cosmopolitan centers are located on the “Core planets” and surrounded by an expanding circle of new, often ­under-supported, colonies that exist in increasingly precarious conditions the further from the center of government and commerce they are located. In the “Serenity” pilot, Zoe explains conditions on the “border moons” that populate the “outer rim” of Alliance territories: “All those moons— just like the central planets, they’re as close to ­Earth-That-Was as we could make ’em: atmosphere, gravity, and such, but….” And Mal continues, “Once they’re terraformed, they’ll dump settlers on there with nothing but blankets and hatchets and maybe a herd. Some of the make it, some of them….” he trails off meaningfully. The distrust of “governments” in Firefly is thus fortified and justified narratively by the Alliance’s thoughtless and greedy colonial administration, the betrayals at the Battle of Serenity, and the vividly felt social and economic inequalities that punctuate so many relationships and scenes in the show—as Canavan notes, “[in Firefly] the haves and the ­have-nots quite literally inhabit different worlds.”21 In the film Serenity, Whedon returns the Firefly “verse” to more starkly and explicitly address this question of ­settler-colonial governance, revealing it to be the foundation of the series’ ethical project. But even the 2005 film finale of Serenity (after the abrupt cancelation of the series in 2003, fans launched an immense online campaign for a film sequel) never resolves how Firefly/Serenity understands the freedom that Mal prioritizes



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in his fight against the Alliance’s biopolitical “society of control.” Each episode of Firefly makes it a point to illustrate Mal’s resistance to governmental power and his disidentification against the values and mores of what he and his crew view as a suspect and treacherous cosmopolitan culture. At the start of “Ariel,” Zoe disdainfully rejects any idea of sampling the luxurious pleasures of “the Core”: “It’s a Core planet. It’s spotless, there’s sensors everywhere, and where there ain’t sensors, there’s feds. All the central planets are the same.” And Mal agrees, “No one’s setting foot on that fancy rock…. Come to think of it, I don’t want anyone looking out the windows. Or talking loud.” Even with the humor attached to his autocratic announcements, the general narrative arcs and characterizations of Firefly affirm and uphold Mal’s views of the Core, his notions of honor and heroism, and the primacy of freedom. Persistent throughout the series is the associations of Mal and the Serenity’s crew with an authenticity and honesty that is lacking in the Core. Jowett understands the “retrofuture” presented in Firefly/ Serenity to be advocating for “particular sets of values relating to humanity, material authenticity, and physical embodiment,” adding that “the marginal/resistant space inhabited by Serenity’s crew is about intimacy, the natural or homemade, authenticity, and freedom.”22 This discourse of freedom (and other human values) is a thread running through the entire series, a centrality underlined in the opening sequence of each episode and the lyrics of the theme song, “The Ballad of Serenity” (written by Whedon himself), which announce, “Take my love, take my land/Take me where I cannot stand./I don’t care, I’m still free/You can’t take the sky from me./Take me out, to the black/Tell ’em I ain’t coming back./Burn the land and boil the sea/You can’t take the sky from me.” And yet, for all of its postapocalyptic insouciance, the twangy theme song has a negative message—negative in the sense that it is grounded in an experience of defeat and loss and a hope for nothing more than “to go my own way” as Mal will say later. Whedon has commented that he wrote the song “so that it could be sung as a Civil War lament…. It’s basically a way of saying, ‘We’ve lost.’ Which is not usually what you come in humming in most of your shows.”23 However, this “lament” might resonate with other specific discourses of historical defeat, or the myth of one. The song and Whedon’s comments suggest a reference to the “Lost Cause” rhetoric of the defeated Confederacy (also fighting a technologically and militarily superior government power), implying links to that nostalgia for white supremacy, the South, and a lost “freedom” for white men. The Serenity’s version of freedom is embedded in historical discourses of race, and at these moments, it moves away from critique toward a nostalgia for the freedoms white men have lost that resonates with other voices bemoaning that loss in political and cultural contexts. Jowett’s affirmation

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of the “central redemptive values in the primitive” in Firefly/Serenity’s generic ­mash-up of futurist ­sci-fi with nostalgic Western signals how both her reading and the show share troubling complicities with the histories and discourses of settler colonialism and racial hierarchies that the Firefly/Serenity franchise ostensibly criticizes. In spite of its ­post-racial casting and other gestures to a multicultural frontier, the show’s sensibility is often grounded in a mainstream, even aggressive, American exceptionalism— suggested in these references to be specifically “American” (i.e., white and ­settler-colonial) histories and values.24 In fact, the surreptitious whiteness and U.S.–centrism of Firefly/Serenity has become known among fans as “Orientalism without Orientals” when accounting for the odd disconnect between the show’s multicultural production choices and its more conservative narrative arcs.25 The ­post-racial sensibility expressed in the show’s casting and crowd scenes can also work as cover for the narrative’s nostalgic and conventional value system, a gesture toward white innocence as discussed in the Introduction. Jowett notes that much contemporary science fiction “valorizes racially marginalized groups because they preserve ‘authentic’ (ethnic) cultural values and thus stand in for real humanity.”26 Although Jowett gives some lip service to the problematic resonances with the colonial discourse that this idealization of “authenticity” might lead to, her reading of Firefly persistently invokes the frontier as a locale of freedom, implicitly celebrating Manifest Destiny itself as a history of national ­s elf-determination and an antidote for the alienation, consumerist servitude, and antiseptic wealth of life on the Core planets and their cosmopolitan centers. Yoking this authenticity to the historical myths of the Western expansion undermines the franchise’s other, more critical reflection on the process of colonial conquest and Native American genocide, particularly when Serenity exposes that process as driving particular forms of violence and dehumanization, as it does in the Reaver subplot. In Firefly, the Reavers appear briefly as figures of the Rim frontier’s “fatal environment,” using the phrase from cultural historian Richard Slotkin’s ­three-volume study of U.S. Western expansion.27 As discussed in Chapter One, Slotkin details how ­19th-century Americans felt that the earliest settlers encountered environments and peoples both so barbaric and violent, they damaged the humanity of the settlers, potentially turning those settlers into the same sort of “savages” they fought to displace, or destroy. The main function of the Reavers in Firefly appears to be as markers of the dangers that populate the Rim territories in the form of marauding cannibalistic savages of unknown origin—though the film later reveals their more central role in critiquing the Alliance’s colonial enterprise, as I’ll explore in greater detail below. But while the critical ironies attached to the show’s understanding of



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­settler-colonial history and the type of masculinity and masculine leadership it engenders are evident at many levels, Firefly/Serenity persistently demonstrates a visual and narrative nostalgia for those kinds of environments (western, dry, nontechnological, and rough, i.e., more human and connected) and the kinds of protagonists and stories associated with them (such as heists, saloons, country dances, and codes of honor). The role of generic ­mash-ups is therefore central to how viewers will understand the show’s references to both the ­settler-colonial frontier and the Western’s glorification of that imperialist enterprise, associated in the traditional, and conservative, national imaginary as heralding progress, freedom, human advancement, and individualism. The series inevitably promotes an ethos grounded in the valorization of certain kinds of individuals exemplified by both the leading white men who conquered the frontier and the women and men who love them. Loza’s work on steampunk demonstrates how such references to a ­c olonial-imperial past and the deployment of specific generic markers should be read carefully. While steampunk retains the aura of a resistant and subversive generic intervention into the whiteness of both ­science-fiction and ­imperial-historical imaginings, these ostensibly subversive ­mash-ups of science fiction and Anglophile colonial paraphernalia can signify in various ways.28 Loza notes that for some adherents of the steampunk subculture, steampunk can be a way to “imagine a better past, not by ignoring its mistakes or glossing over the stories of the silenced, but by ­re-envisioning [the] past.”29 But as with Jowett’s idealization of the human “authenticity” of experiences and characters on the Serenity, this speculative generic repurposing can also serve to release the genre from its tainted affiliation with white supremacist colonial history and thus can become a denial, and erasure, of that history. That is, that utopia might also be a cover for attachments to U.S. hegemony and white supremacy that remain embedded in a “new” ­sci-fi narrative. This dangerous ­double-edged sword of genre and generic reiteration is precisely where Firefly spends much of its narrative time. In telling “an American story” about the frontier and immigration, Firefly tacks a tricky line among nostalgic celebrations of the national myths of settler colonialism, including their invocation of territorial and political expansion, the supreme tenets of personal and political freedom, and a national history and ideology of American exceptionalism, even as it suggests a possible critique of those very myths. In contrast to Jowett, some critics and fans have argued that the show manages to play on the pleasures of these generic conventions and their nostalgic associations while simultaneously exposing deep links between that history of Westward expansion, U.S. imperial conquest, and genocide, as well as the rise of a highly

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exploitive and unfree industrial and later postindustrial capitalist state in a globalized era—figured here as the rise of the Alliance. Canavan, for instance, understands Whedon’s story as a ­zombie-apocalypse narrative, a reading that draws on the relations between the historical referent of the frontier and the speculative postapocalypse enacted in the series and, especially, its film finale.30 The disjunction in these readings highlights the uneasy resonances that stalk the pleasures of the Firefly/Serenity franchise and its ironic reframing of U.S. history, a reframing that encourages audiences’ belated recognition of the roots of global inequality in the injustices of an ongoing ­settler-colonial society. As these roots necessarily involve the racial history of the frontier, Firefly/Serenity indicates some willingness to expose that historical guilt. But repeatedly, the franchise proves less able or willing to give up the myths of freedom, community, and leadership that the Western relies upon, and usually recuperates. In this sense, Firefly/Serenity draws on the Western genre’s own articulation of an ambivalence lodged in both historical and contemporary incarnations of questions of national identity, political ethics, notions of freedom, and especially the tenets of a “national manhood.”31 Thus, Whedon’s disingenuous joke at ­Comic-Con about needing “spaceships” for his own pleasure camouflages a specific and intentionally speculative mode of interrogating the frontier myth through an ironic fictionalization enabled by ­sci-fi genre conventions. To summarize, two views have dominated academic and fan discussions of Firefly/Serenity: (1) The show advocates for a “return” to the freedoms of the ­frontier-style, outlaw comradery depicted in the series, a return that promotes the race and gender hierarchies likewise embedded in that past. (2) Firefly/Serenity offers a searing exposure of the unacknowledged horrors of Western expansion and the genocidal logics that are its legacy. That is, a legacy that, as Canavan argues, finds its most intense expression in the biopolitical present of state and economic societies of control that are figured in the show by the Alliance and its abuses. In a sense, the contested nature of “freedom” itself becomes the crux for the question of what the ­mash-up of ­sci-fi and Western popular genres is doing in Firefly. This question, in turn, raises a related question: for whom is freedom even an issue, and why?

Rethinking the Gender of Leadership in Firefly/Serenity The freedom from control that Mal pursues is contrasted to the complacency of those in the Core planets inhabitants, who enjoy the luxuries



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of privilege and technology. The Core’s wealth derives from and therefore creates the Rim territories’ deprivations and the Alliance’s dehumanizing colonial administration. The corruption of such luxuries and privileges is exemplified by flashbacks to the Tam family in the episode “Safe” (Ep. 5, November 8, 2002). When Simon’s and River’s ­status-obsessed father refuses to help with Simon’s efforts to rescue River, he tells his son, “you’re not taking us down with you…. You’re on your own.” Simon learns what the Rim planet communities and the Serenity crew already know: Freedom is largely a function of being abandoned and betrayed. These experiences of abandonment (by parents, government authorities, and military commanders) are transformed on the Serenity into a ­hard-won freedom from the interference and control of state authority, or at least, that is the claim made by Mal and his crew. In seeking this freedom, Mal and the crew (and the audience, for that matter) assume that as the captain, Malcolm Reynolds is the indispensable leader whose sacrifice, fierce protectiveness, and superior skills will guarantee their survival.32 These links between strong leadership and the guarantee of freedom in liberal democratic theories of governance are foundational to the generic logics of both the Western and some mainstream science fiction. Together, these ideological and generic legacies render the need for Mal’s white male leadership a natural fact in both the fictional verse of the show and its implied referents in contemporary and historical U.S. society. By relying on the tropes of the Western, Firefly can evasively presume certain associations: authenticity, care, and realness with the poor/lower class, outsider types populating the Rim, while there is corruption, dishonesty, and dehumanization in the wealthy and advanced Core. Unsurprisingly, these divisions into social geographies and associated values allocate the continuum of masculinity styles embodied by Jayne, Mal, and Simon. Each figures a distinct kind of masculinity within varying social echelons, and with varying capacities for leadership. In the ­mid-season episode, “Ariel” (Ep. 9, November 15, 2002), some of these tensions reach a combustion point, helping to clarify what is at stake for both Mal’s masculinity and the freedom he—and the show itself— espouses. “Ariel” begins with an interesting twist in that it turns to Simon, who we learn has both a profitable job for the crew and his own, heretofore untapped, potential for effective leadership. The episode shifts the series’ usual tone and atmosphere from a Hollywood Western to a Hollywood heist caper, a la Ocean’s Eleven (2001). Marking an elevation of Simon from an object of contemptuous ridicule to the mastermind of a difficult job requiring specialized knowledge, the episode revisits the ­de-valorization of cosmopolitan, ­expertise-based masculine leadership that permeates the framing of Simon. River’s growing mental instability, which serves as the

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catalyst for Simon’s organizing the hospital heist, further maintains the thick line of gender difference as the principal engine for its plots: Heroic men save lives, while women are saved. Up until this ­Simon-based episode, that narrative logic of saving the woman has been embodied by Mal, with his skeptical, if not hostile, view of the cosmopolitan values and deceptive men of the Core. Although the episode, “Our Mrs. Reynolds” (Ep. 6, October 4, 2002), pointedly ironizes Mal’s chivalrous code and its presumptions about feminine innocence and helplessness, his earnest persistence at being a true “gentleman” remains central to his characterization. Elsewhere, “Shindig” (Ep. 4, November 1, 2002) uses the setting of a formal, elite social occasion to lightly mock Mal’s rough and inept behavior. We see how out of place and even useless he can be when he tries to help the innocent but unschooled Kaylee negotiate ­upper-class codes of femininity and behavior, which she desperately wants to do, if only for a night. However, Mal’s brutal honesty reveals its true moral superiority, especially once we see the elite women’s cruelty toward Kaylee and Inara’s rich client Atherton Wing (Edward Atterton) and his nonchalant air of privilege, made especially clear when he expects to be able to “buy” her as his permanent mistress. Atherton’s very ease, courtesy, and sophistication become markers of his moral hollowness and cowardice, which are fully revealed when in a moment of rash bravery, Mal challenges Atherton to a duel. Even with the ironic inflections around his macho posturing, Mal emerges as a clearly superior sort of man, demonstrating how the series’ ironic shading allows it to traffic in quite conventional notions of masculine and feminine difference. These narrative arcs also signal that feminine innocence, honor, and beauty exist primarily to be defended and upheld, or disparaged, by the men. In the show’s value scheme, Mal’s roughness remains a sign of his authenticity. In contrast, the “Ariel” episode suggests a new respect and possible role for the ­upper-class professional Simon, although the episode also turns into a contest between Mal and Jayne, sidelining the female characters completely. As their hospital adventure turns dire, Simon and River remain unaware of Jayne’s secret plan to betray them to the Alliance; and Jayne even takes over to lead their escape, which he achieves by brutally and graphically twisting an Alliance agent’s neck, showing his capacity for both horrific violence and impressive strength—hallmarks of “primitive masculinity.” By bringing the story line back to a masculine capacity for violence, this episode makes Jayne both a necessity and a problem. Even as the narrative highlights questions of good leadership, it also centers the narrative back to questions of leadership that are limited to the two most conventionally masculine (and most violent) characters, Mal and Jayne. In the final scene, Mal detains Jayne, slamming the side of his head with a



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wrench, hurling him into the ship’s entry holding bay, and throwing open the ship’s doors. What began with the focus on Simon as a pleasant shifting in the balance of authority and power among the crew’s men, opening new gender and leadership options beyond the militaristic paradigm, returns to a confrontation between Mal and Jayne, who emerges as a threat to both the crew’s safety and the captain’s authority. Admitting his original plan to turn Simon and River over to the Alliance, Jayne cajoles Mal, “Come on, Mal, it’s not personal. It wasn’t like I betrayed you to the Feds.” Mal responds: “You did it to me, and that’s a fact.” This dramatic finale reveals the central logic that governs Mal’s understanding of his relationship to the ship and its crew. As the sovereign power of the Serenity, Mal’s authoritarian tendencies take on a double valence that the series never clearly resolves. On the one hand, he is a benign, even ­self-deprecating paternal figure who leads with “love,” as he insists in the final moments of the film Serenity. On the other hand, Mal’s speedy decisions to dispose of Jayne, as well as his repeated expulsions of River and Simon Tam across multiple episodes, reveal Mal’s questionable leadership ethos, embedded in the full definition of sovereignty as “the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not.”33 Mal’s authority and power to act are usually presented as necessary and right, but at times, the show also illustrates how his actions mimic authoritarian control and tyranny. Despite raising questions about Mal and his leadership, and despite hinting at ways he might mirror the Alliance’s authoritarian rule, I argue that the full narrative of Firefly/Serenity allows Malcolm Reynolds to emerge unscathed by—and perhaps even cleansed of—the sins of abusive sovereign leadership and masculinity.

Codes of Gender and Race Differences in “Objects in Space” The narrative avenue for Mal’s redemption is exactly the same as its potential unraveling: the nexus of leadership, shame, and masculinity and the relation of all three to the feminine difference. The show most often presents its conception of femininity as both archetype and alternative, albeit sometimes with a hint of ­tongue-in-cheek irony. By enacting a hyperbolic conflict of masculinities throughout its story lines—often to the point of parody—Firefly nevertheless upholds the dominance of men and of masculine difference despite drawing attention to the variations and performances of masculine norms across the array of the show’s male characters. In Serenity, the film further emphasizes the series’ suggestion that the very nature of leadership is a question, or function, of gender difference. The

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insistence on gender is made explicit in the film’s framing of River as both a problem for, and the secret weapon of, the Serenity and its crew. That is, River is consistently in situations that provide narrative opportunity for Mal, Simon, or Jayne to rescue her, but she is also finally revealed to be the potential agent of their very survival; River is the difference that will save them. This complex but familiar narrative dynamic around gender difference elaborates River’s odd and paradoxical function as both a catalyst for masculine redemption (especially Mal’s) and as the potential usurper of the function and efficacy of masculine leadership. The television show’s introduction of River did not initially suggest that her character would eventually rise to trouble the show’s central leadership question, yet this is exactly what she does later in the film Serenity. From the first view of her as a lifeless, fetal “exquisite” body, River settles into her role as an enigma—a problem to be solved or a burden to be debated, in ways that other characters are clearly not. Stylized in hyperfeminine flowing skirts, whispery dresses, and camisoles, River most often can be found walking barefoot about the ship, highlighting her Otherness to the ship’s purpose and mission. River is portrayed as pure “girl,” a term that Whedon and the other writers toss around gleefully in both the series episodes and the film. The frightening pursuit of the new character of the Alliance Operative in Serenity (Chiwetel Ejiofor), marked by his early question, “Where are you hiding, little girl?” ironically encapsulates the implications of her complicated femininity: simultaneously a child, a woman with fearsome intuitive powers, and a weapon developed by the Alliance. The TV series elaborates this gendering of River methodically over its many episodes, often to both dramatic and humorous effect. In the big rescue scene in “Safe” (when Mal and Zoe joke about being “big damn heroes”), Mal responds to the superstitious villagers who want to burn River at the stake because “she’s a witch” with the infamous quip, “Yeah, but she’s our witch.” Presented almost allegorically, River’s femininity makes her a witch— one that persistently threatens the Serenity’s crew, i.e., the civic community. In the TV series’ last episode, “Objects in Space” (Ep. 14, December 13, 2002), several characters complain that River “knows things she shouldn’t.” This emphasis on her feminine intuition and unsettling capacities, especially psychic ones, becomes the justification for widespread suspicion and alarm among the crew, even those who claim to care for her. Like Inara, her gender difference is doubly underscored by her hyperfeminine clothing and her physical actions. River begins the episode wandering the ship barefoot, walking elegantly and lightly, as she watches others a bit too intently, “hearing” what no one can say. When she is observing Wash and Zoe in an embrace, the camera and her body movements make it clear she



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experiences their sexual desire directly. The information conveyed in these scenes is that River has no boundaries, psychic or otherwise. The arc of “Objects” makes it equally clear that these gendered powers make River more than just an outsider; they render her dangerous and expellable. Throughout Firefly, the question of gender difference is consistently posed in largely conventional terms: Its female characters generally cleave to a standard of femininity that confirms the ancillary and defining role of the woman and femininity in narrative dynamics. But as a narrative totality, Firefly/Serenity goes further and I think adds an important metacommentary on what work that difference does, both in the narrative and in a categorical, and allegorical, sense. The final episode, “Objects in Space,” offers a provocative foreshadowing of a direction the television series might have gone, and indicates some of the representational grammar that Whedon brings back in Serenity. Not only does River take center stage, but racial difference is also introduced in a weighted and allegorical manner. In the first part of the episode, River’s status on the Serenity is debated at length, and Kaylee informs the others of River’s uncanny and deadly skill with a gun. “Frankly, she scared me,” Kaylee concludes about the time River saved her life in an earlier episode. Aghast at what he hears, Simon is stricken by the apparent consensus that his sister may be too dangerous to keep on board. Kaylee plays a catalyst role, but one whose valence can be difficult to decipher. Her expressed fear about River is genuine, yet her hysterical misreading of River’s capacities and intentions bolsters what might have been Jayne’s more easily dismissed hostility. Later, Kaylee is again alarmed and terrified when a man appears in her quarters. The viewer has been watching this man, a bounty hunter named Jubal Early (Richard Brooks), pursue the ship undetected, making his presence and intentions the object of suspense.34 The dialogue between Early and Kaylee reveals how these various plot functions and characters will be framed. Characterized as menacing and odd (“I like this ship. Serenity. She’s ­good-looking,” he comments), Early’s sudden question, “You ever been raped?” is freighted with historical meaning. Brooks is clearly a Black man, and this casting decision invites the specter of the Black rapist myth that haunts white supremacist histories and imaginaries. As Early continues terrorizing a stunned Kaylee, Firefly exposes the soft underbelly of its narrative direction: “There’s nobody can help you. Say it!” “There’s nobody can help me,” Kaylee obliges, as tears fill her eyes. Not only is the Alliance’s dangerous bounty hunter pictured as a Black man, but he arrives with sex, rape, and murderous violence on his mind.35 The history of racial representation in science fiction is an ambiguous one, perhaps even more so than the history of gender representations. As Adilifu Nama argues, the generic traditions of science fiction have relied

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on a stance of “neutrality” that has had the effect of erasing race in space. From 2001: A Space Odyssey to Star Trek to Star Wars (the last two franchises being important referents for Firefly/Serenity), space has been pictured traditionally as a largely ­race-free, thus ­all-white, zone.36 Nama notes that the very signification of a Black body, character, or actor “was too concentrated, too weighted down by history, geography, and social location, to aesthetically transcend and diffuse into the ethereal imaginative space” of canonical ­sci-fi films, making it difficult (perhaps even impossible) for the audience to enter into the suspension of disbelief and “temporal speculation” that were considered fundamental pillars of the genre.37 Nevertheless, in Firefly/Serenity, Whedon at times deploys and allegorizes this ­hyper-significance of race. Setting aside the figures of Book and Zoe for the moment (who both play primarily supporting roles in the dramas of the Serenity), in two of the most crucial narratives of the series and the film, the figuring of Black masculinity performs a complex mix of complicity and attempted ironic critique that illustrates the franchise’s ambivalence toward racial and gender differences and stereotypes within its main story lines.38 In “Objects in Space,” Jubal Early operates as both a quintessential scary Black man and as an uncanny double to River’s status as a feminine “witch.” This metacommentary on their shared difference and problem status is mirrored in Brooks’ expert portrayal of Jubal’s intelligence and strangeness; he clearly doesn’t belong either (not in a ­s ci-fi story and not on the Serenity). But like the Operative, Early is finally revealed to actually be more suspect and disposable than River. The question of who can be, or should be, “let go” is thematically central to the episode, in part because River soon disappears from view, perceived by the audience and other characters only as a disembodied voice for most of the episode, which adds substantially to her own creepiness factor. “I’m not on the ship,” she announces to Early and the others through the intercom system, “I am the ship.” Although River and Early are paired as outsiders to the ship, the episode affirms that Early is the actually dangerous presence, the threat to be expelled. Significantly, this understanding is conveyed largely through his reflex recourse to violence against women. He later hits Inara across the face, saying, “Man is stronger by far than woman. But only woman can bear children. Does that seem right to you?” His misogyny and expressions of sexualized violence carry with them a long cultural history of characterizing Black men as hypermasculine and prone to unprovoked violence, particularly against women.39 Both Early and the Operative are presented as dangerous hunters, pursuers of River on behalf of the Alliance, although Early’s ­quasi-renegade position as a bounty hunter renders him somewhat more sympathetic in



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the Verse’s value system. Ultimately, both Alliance agents jointly pursue River and the Serenity (and its crew), and the racializing of these enemies suggests implicit lines of affiliation, difference, and disposability. In Early’s case, the racialized element might be subtly ironized, but the episode turns on the question, who really belongs on the Serenity, and who must, quite literally, be expelled? That question is at least partially answered when River tricks Early into leaving the ship, and Malcolm punches him into outer space. If Jubal Early is a belated but powerful signal regarding how Firefly/Serenity wants to handle the speculative retelling of history and the racial content of ­settler-colonial logics, I argue it’s not a pretty picture. This aspect of the narrative is all the more disappointing because the ironic inflection shadowing most of the dialogue and representation in Firefly/Serenity offers ample opportunity for a more complicated, and potentially more benign, interpretation of racialized masculinity in this episode and perhaps the series overall. Both Early and River are inserted into the story as disruptors of the series’ conventional narrative progression of hero, danger, rescue. Mal is sidelined, trapped like the others in their quarters by Early, while River and Early match wits and engage in cryptic dialogues. Visually, however, the white male hero’s centrality is reasserted in the end. The episode’s conclusion turns on River’s plan for rescuing her friends and the ship by tricking Early into thinking she accepts, and the crew endorses, the idea that “she should go” (as Jayne puts it). By leveraging River’s liminal belonging with the Serenity, the trick results in her full acceptance as a member of the crew, and the last shot is of River in a space suit, grinning and floating down into Malcolm Reynolds’s arms.40 Serenity later repeats this visual and narrative return to Mal and his sphere of authority, indicating the limits placed on the disruptive possibilities of River’s feminine difference.

Who’s the Hero? Gender and Race Leadership in Serenity’s Colonial Apocalypse Considering this containment of River’s role, even as she is foregrounded, I argue that in “Objects in Space”—and then in the film sequel/ finale, Serenity—Firefly/Serenity deploys familiar narratives of racialized masculinity that in these key instances adhere to ideological norms of both whiteness and masculinity. Serenity opens inside a framed narrative that is also a trick of cinematic visual and narrative layering that again underlines the doubling of River and a new Black male villain, the Alliance Operative (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Starting in ­voice-over, a woman explains how the Alliance saved “the savage outer planets” from their own barbarism. The

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film reveals that this voice belongs to a teacher telling that official story of the Alliance’s beneficial colonial conquest to River’s younger self and other children in an idyllic Core classroom, and then that this whole scene occurs inside River’s nightmares, which occur as Alliance doctors are surgically turning her into “a weapon” by operating on her brain. We then witness the Alliance project director explaining River’s amazing capabilities— her “extraordinary grace”—as well as the unfortunate “instability” caused by “the neural stripping” involved in their experiments on her. For those familiar with the television series, the fact that this scientist is relating these facets of River’s treatment to an ­official-looking Simon signals that we are witnessing a flashback to his original rescue of River, which took years of planning. Eventually, the film reveals that this entire opening sequence is a hologram video recording being reviewed by the Operative. As embodied by Ejiofor, the Operative is both officious and terrifying, and justifiably confident in his own superiority as he condescendingly admonishes the director that no, it was not “madness” that impelled Simon to plan his rescue, but rather “love, in point of fact, something a good deal more dangerous.” He continues, “Do you know what your sin is, doctor? It’s pride”—before replaying a tape recording of the director’s insistence that “key members of Parliament” had observed River, which turned out to be a bad idea since she is psychic. While this scene clearly demonstrates how dangerous and omniscient the Operative is, it also exposes the logic of how he, and perhaps the movie, understands questions of leadership, masculinity, and honor. As he “helps” the director to literally fall on a sword, the Operative says soothingly, “This is a good death. There’s no shame in this. A man’s death, a man who has done fine works. We’re making a better world. All of them, better worlds.” His pompous emphasis on what constitutes “a good death…. A man’s death” encapsulates the Operative’s, and the Alliance’s, authoritarian certainty.41 Serenity underlines how his officious condescension—like that of River’s old teacher—is a function and a reflection of the Alliance’s paternalistic logic encompassing the how and why of everyone’s life, and death. The Alliance’s ­a ll-knowing, ­a ll-seeing control is simultaneously inescapable and rotten to its core. In the film, Whedon doubles down on exposing the links intrinsic to the Alliance’s underlying horrific corruption and its “better world” biopolitical project, indicating that the Alliance threat to the Serenity and its fiercely independent crew is greater than we may have understood. This threat and its horror are most clearly embodied in the Reavers, a group mentioned in the first episode of Firefly, but only intermittently depicted in the series. The Reavers’ foreboding specter works as the correlate for what is dangerously terrifying about the frontier realm of the Rim planets, where these shadowy but horrifying figures capable of unthinkable



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violence, cannibalistic attacks, and enslavement provide a counterweight to the Alliance’s evildoings in “the Core.” In the television series, the Reavers generally remain an unseen terror, as when the usually bold Jayne insists, “I ain’t goin’ anywhere near Reaver territory” in the first episode. The Reavers allow the show to suggest parallels between white ­s ettler-colonial racial logics (that identified Native Americans as savage monsters) and the Alliance’s biopolitical governance (that identifies populations of the Rim sectors as subhuman).42 In these parallels, the Reavers are both the zombies and the “savages” of its postapocalyptic biopolitical colonial administration. They also figuratively represent the problem of the frontier’s “fatal environment”—the Reavers ostensibly reveal what happens when people venture “to the edge of space” and remain “too long in the black,” that frontier threshold beyond the inhabited Rim planets. The full logic of the Western genre discussed above is clarified in the film’s depiction of the Reavers, which call to mind the “race war” of U.S. Western expansion. In Serenity, the various depictions and references to the Reavers reflect the frontier myth’s understanding of Native American violence, which is generically and ideologically figured as a violence of unimaginable barbarity that cannot be shown or narrated but was used to justify their massacre (historically and in Hollywood, such as John Ford’s iconic Western, The Searchers). And so the Reavers themselves are seldom actually seen nor encountered in the TV series. They exist primarily as a terrifying story that can paralyze even the violent, hypermasculine Jayne. Likewise, they signal a preoccupation with what happens to men in “the black,” i.e., the frontier Rim. Recalling Slotkin’s chronicling of the frontier’s “fatal environment,” Book says of the Reavers, “They aren’t men. Or they forgot how to be. They spent too long looking at the black.” As opposed to the menace of the Operative, two threats to the crew emerge clearly in Serenity that are represented and othered as inhuman in specific ways: River’s feminized and weaponized capacities and the Reavers’ horrifying violence. Significantly, both are ultimately revealed to be literal products of the Alliance and the painful result of its biopolitical dehumanizing projects.43 If the Reavers allegorize the horror of ­settler-colonial histories, River figures the problem of feminine difference within the civic community, as explored in “Objects in Space.” In Serenity, River is understood increasingly to be a “weapon,” as Mal notes apprehensively. At ­C omic-Con, Joss Whedon joked that River’s character can be summarized as, “If you want to live, follow her,” and that her paradoxical position becomes a main focus of the film.44 Once the film’s central narrative begins, we see Malcolm and Simon arguing over whether River will go on a dangerous, illegal new job: a bank heist to steal payroll money from a private security company contracted by the Alliance to police the remote planet.

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The film opens with banjo music, witty dialogue, and posturing with weapons, establishing the crew of the Serenity as newly ambiguous figures, fully converted from soldiers to outlaws. As Jayne says smugly, “Let’s go be bad guys.” During the bank heist, River is shown suddenly overtaken by a vision of horrific scenes of violence, a vision that literally throws her to the ground, twitching as her eyes fly open and she whispers in terror, “Reavers!” Although this quick interjection of ­horror-film generic markers and responses creates a jarring shift in tone and narrative, the abrupt change conveys the Reavers’ unspeakable violence and key role. The following sequence dramatizes the horrifying, unstoppable threat of these cannibal attackers: the terror invoked by their obscured faces, their rampaging dark bodies in ripped rags covered in blood and flayed skin, and their monstrous teeth. This terror is further intensified by the unintelligible zombie attack and scraping metal sound effects that accompany shots of Reavers dropping from spaceships. The terror with which every character responds to that single word, “Reavers,” is somewhat explained by River’s quiet, terrified observation that “they want us alive when they eat us.” Like the television series, the film follows the “problem” of Mal’s leadership and his growing ruthlessness (and possible nihilism) in the singular goal of protecting his crew and “going my own way.” However, much of Serenity’s focus turns to River, and this shift underlines Whedon’s overall preoccupations with her character and what her feminine difference suggests about this new iteration of the postapocalyptic ­sci-fi Western genre. Although with the caveats surrounding the highly gendered question of her sanity, River’s newly central role involves her growing superhuman characteristics, particularly in her first big fight scene, which occurs after the bank heist in a seedy bar where Mal is collecting their pay. We discover that the Operative has used Alliance resources to embed subliminal triggers into media shown across the galaxy, including to this remote Rim planet. An odd commercial playing on the bar’s TV screen clearly captivates River. We see her eyes go blank as she whispers, “Miranda,” and then proceeds to ballet kick everyone in the bar, creating a huge Hong Kong ­action-movie-style ruckus. At this point, one of the bad guys asks Mal, “Do you know her?” and Mal responds dryly, “I really don’t.” The carnage escalates until Mal forces a confrontation to stop River, with both pointing weapons at the other until Simon yells River’s safe word and she falls unconscious to the ground. The scene ends with Mal picking up River’s sagging, now helpless body and carrying her to safety, stepping over the men she has knocked unconscious and perhaps killed. This scene encapsulates the logics that I argue dominate the apparent conflicts of gender and racial difference throughout Serenity. River has



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the capacity for wielding power, particularly through her body, but the film presents that power as chaotic and uncontrolled: a product of secret, feminine capacities that are dangerous and untrustworthy. The scenes that follow River’s bar fight involve parallel vignettes. One shows the Operative watching the scene through a surveillance camera as Mal carries River out of the bar and information about Mal’s military past flashes alongside. The second focuses on Mal’s fury after learning that he has been harboring “a ticking time bomb” who poses a threat to “my ship, my crew.” When Mal confronts Simon about River’s dangerous capacities, he asks, “What am I going to find when I go in there, the girl or the weapon?” His dehumanization of River intersects in interesting ways with both her childlike qualities and her feminine difference. The innocence and especially the vulnerability that gave others the power to make her a weapon are both linked to a gendered lack of ­self-control. Whether or not it is her fault, whether or not it is her will, River is dangerous to others. She carries valuable information and deadly capabilities that can be triggered into action intentionally by the Alliance. Her personhood has been penetrated and breached, and her psyche used and manipulated without her consent. These unethical infringements make River simultaneously an object of sympathy and of horror, raising persistent questions about her humanity and trustworthiness. Both a vessel and a weapon denied ­self-possessive agency, River’s selfhood makes her unique among the Serenity’s crew. After the bar scene, Simon learns that she is terrified of going to sleep because the visions torturing her have been intensified by the subliminal message that reached her and provoked the whispered word, “Miranda.” River mutters in agony as she tearfully pleads with Simon, “It isn’t mine. It isn’t mine, and I shouldn’t have to carry it. Don’t make me sleep again,” as tears run down her face. The slippage from girl to weapon—a tool to be used by others—is underlined in River’s complaint that her body and mind are not her own; they have been penetrated by things “I shouldn’t have to carry.” This question about who or what River has become is reiterated by Mr. Universe (David Krumholtz), a ­c yber-guru, living at the edges of the Rim planets, out of reach of the Alliance and where he can monitor and hack the Verse’s ­media-information network. Explaining how the particular code that subliminally reached River had been “popping up all over the place,” Mr. Universe comments, “Someone has gone to enormous trouble to find your little friend. And found her they have. Do you know what you’re carrying?” The other “weapon” developed by the Alliance is, of course, the Operative, whose superiority against Mal in masculine competition is announced repeatedly, as when Inara desperately pleads with Mal not to challenge him, “Mal, you cannot handle this man.” But as in Firefly, the seemingly overmatched Captain Reynolds ultimately proves his ability to “handle” the

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Operative, a plotline that I argue is central to the overall denouement of the film and that undermines the message of its possibly more radical story line concerning River and the Reavers. The Operative announces their masculine rivalry upon finally meeting Mal, who has come to rescue Inara even though he well knows that her call for help is “a trap.” The Operative unctuously purrs, “I’ve read your war record. I know how you must feel about the Alliance…. But you must know you can’t beat us.” Mal responds, “I got no need to beat you. I just want to go my way,” confirming his sole principle remains survival for himself and his crew. The Operative responds that he prefers to avoid violence, insisting that “I want to resolve this like civilized men”—an ironic word choice, given both the racial significance of the two actors’ bodies and the Operative’s role as a malevolent Alliance agent. This claim to civilization (and by implication, honor) is quickly undermined by the cosmopolitan ease with which the Operative twists words and meanings. In the ensuing fight, Mal is brutally beaten despite his best efforts, which leaves him gasping and writhing as the Operative barely breaks a sweat. The Operative also casually strikes Inara, who is trying to help Mal in the fight, before kicking her in the stomach and across the floor. As with Jubal Early, the Operative’s easy recourse to violence against women juxtaposed to his claim to being counted among “civilized men” is revealing. In one of his most quoted speeches, the Operative then looms over the prostrate couple, saying, “Nothing here is what it seems. He is not the plucky hero. The Alliance is not the evil empire. This is not the grand arena.” Inara delivers her own comeuppance when she replies, “And that is not incense” as a “flash bomb” explodes, allowing Inara and Mal to make their escape. The Operative’s humiliating, if temporary, defeat indicates the scrappy will of the Serenity crew (and Inara’s own capacities) while affirming Mal’s honest ­s elf-interested ethics and his primitive masculinity. Mal is tested, however, by the Operative’s apparently even more ruthless will. As a dying Shepherd Book warns Mal, the Operative “means trouble you’ve not known…. Sorta man they’re like to send [who] believes hard. Kills and never asks why.” This question of belief—the Operative’s powerful one and Mal’s lack of one—further establishes a comparison between the two men. Later in this scene when the Alliance massacres Book and his peaceful mining camp to try to shake out Mal and River, Mal again speaks to the Operative via remote video communication. The Operative mocks Mal’s proclaimed principles: “I don’t murder children.” “I do. If I have to,” the Operative replies. “I believe in something greater than myself. A better world. A world without sin.” The Operative’s response underscores the two men’s narrative mirroring as twinned products of their respectively flawed



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worlds, which have ruined them for the future, a “better” one: “Oh, I won’t live there, Mal. There’s no place for me, any more than there is for you. I’m a monster, Mal.”45 Repeatedly, the film and television series broadcast the tyranny and injustice of Alliance governance, in River Tam’s nightmares and Zoe’s repugnance at all things associated with the Core. And Serenity’s depiction of the Reavers, and revelation about their origins as the product of an Alliance program of social control, conjoins these questions of colonial and biopolitical governance. But casting Ejiofor, a Black British man, as the Operative carries its own racial significance, especially in a story about colonialism and empire. Although the storyworld of the Verse and the Alliance may aspire to being ­post-racial, Firefly/Serenity makes too many references to contemporary dynamics and their relation to imperial and colonial histories to ignore this racialized casting decision. The show’s ambivalence about what race does, in fiction and in history, may account for the oscillating responses of fans: an impassioned mix of critique and adoration that tends to hold the characters and especially their creator above the fray of real historical and social conflict. That ambiguity would hold up more convincingly if the optics and the archetypal story didn’t work together so smoothly and in such ­well-worn ways. The historical correlate of the Alliance’s colonial empire and its uneasy settlement of the Rim planets establishes the Operative as an ironic character: an “Uncle Tom” who has bought into the Alliance ­expert-knowledge biopolitical paradigm of good governance. This irony does not work in the Operative’s favor, and viewers are easily conscripted into an allegory featuring him as an oblivious functionary of the biopolitical state, one who eventually learns important lessons in honor and masculinity from the outlaw rebel Malcolm Reynolds. Serenity further pushes on this pairing when Mal’s last desperate chance for survival requires that he and the crew, and even their ship, “pass” as Reavers—a plan the crew greets with horrified protests. To further underscore his descent into despotism, Mal pulls a gun on his own crew, declaring, “This is how it is.” Adding, “I hear a word out of any of you that ain’t helping me out or taking your leave, I will shoot you down. Get to work.” No one really expects to make it alive to the remote Rim planet Miranda, which holds the secret behind what the Alliance is hiding and which River has located on the other side of “Reaver territory.” While the suicidal nature of Mal’s mission accentuates his own growing nihilism, the scene’s hyperbole is used largely to frame the dramatic conversion that is imminent and that occurs on Miranda. Here, Mal transforms from being a dangerous and desperate leader focused solely on survival, to one with a purpose and, most importantly, a cause, pivoting from the individualist

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pursuit of freedom to a fight for a collective freedom against the Alliance’s ­hyper-controlling “better world.” After a tense but successful crossing of the Reaver territory, the Serenity lands on Miranda, an abandoned planet that has been erased from official records, yet its settlement appears intact and prosperously developed, a vast cityscape of buildings and infrastructure with no perceptible atmospheric issues. The camera follows the perplexed and uneasy crew as they walk together on empty futuristic sidewalks and along corridors between looming building until it becomes clear that the place is littered with decayed bodies. The odd absence of signs of violence anywhere intensifies the horror of the silent dead strewn about in buildings, at desks, in cars, where it seems, “They just lay down,” as Inara observes. River becomes increasingly agitated, until the camera swirls around her as she keens, dropping to her knees, crying out in a mix of English and Chinese (which is not a language River has used before): “[M]ake them stop, they’re everywhere, every city, every house, every room. They’re all inside me. I can hear them all, and they’re saying … nothing … please, God, make me a stone….” Jayne lurches toward River threateningly, “She’s right! Everybody’s dead! This whole world is dead for no reason.” The passivity of these deaths turns out to be their true horror, as the hologram report of Alliance investigator Dr. Caron (Sarah Paulson) will confirm, It’s the Pax, the ­G-32 Paxilon Hydroclorate, that we added to the air processors … well, it works … it was supposed to calm the population, weed out aggression. Make it peaceful … it worked. The people here stopped fighting. And then they stopped everything else. They stopped going to work, stopped breeding … talking … eating…. There’s 30 million people here, and they all just let themselves die…. They didn’t even kill themselves … they just … most starved.

Dr. Caron then explains she too is about to die because for “about a 10th a percent of the population,” the Pax had the opposite effect: “Their aggressor response increased … beyond madness.” As she desperately tries to finish her report, “they’ve killed most of us. … not just killed, they’ve done … things,” the crew realizes what the government scientist is telling them: “Reavers … they made them,” Wash announces. They helplessly watch the recording of Dr. Caron’s obviously horrible and painful death when the Reavers do break in, a death that is recorded in the hologram report but unseen by the film audience, who can only hear her screams. So, the frontier terror of a “fatal environment” and “savage war” both turn out to be a direct result of the colonial power of the Alliance revealing its horrific necropolitical governance. This neat reconciliation of the frontier myth with the film’s critique of the biopolitical state’s paternalistic and arrogant regime of control draws a logical circle that puts Mal and his version of



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freedom clearly on the side of all that is good and defensible. He is simultaneously against the genocide of the ­settler-colonial state, but also an independent frontier hero. In the following scene, Mal is again speaking as the crew’s captain and leader, but this time with a strong, clarifying belief and cause. The world has to see the report that they just saw and know the extent of the Alliance’s genocidal abuse of power. He explains that he has come to a decision and that “I am asking more of you than I have. Maybe all. I aim to misbehave.” Having found his cause, Mal now leads a crew equally determined to follow him—asserting a narrative of both white male leadership and white innocence. The captain is not the only person who is transformed by Miranda’s death tableau. River’s desperate outburst at seeing all the dead and vicariously experiencing their deaths in a psychic trance signals how profoundly Miranda has figured in what was done to River at the Alliance’s school and medical facilities. As the whole crew watches Dr. Caron’s grisly death, River lurches a few steps and then falls to her knees and explosively vomits onto the floor. Her brother rushes to her side, and she reassures him, “I’m all right.” Then, she pauses and looks up at him meaningfully. “I’m all right,” River says with confidence and relief, suggesting that the experience of actually seeing what had been haunting her dreams has cathartically expunged the damage to her psyche. The conversion narrative that shapes Mal’s trajectory as the masculine hero thus has a parallel course for River’s character though her path has a shaky start and unclear trajectory. From Mal’s galvanizing speech in the messroom of the Serenity until the end of the movie, the narrative largely splits between the two trajectories of leadership embodied by Mal and River, with a tangential focus on the Operative’s handling of this final showdown. These three figures reflect the narrative options for futurity and governance in the movie, making the technical juggling of focus and characterization particularly significant. The mess hall scene visually conveys the affective resonances of how Whedon has organized these questions of collectivity and leadership. The Serenity crew, gathered around a table, listens to Mal’s exhortations that they fight to the death for a good cause. The scene’s mix of domestic and military registers reiterates how the crew functions as both a family and an army unit.46 As he speaks and the others listen, Mal is at the front of the room, backlit by the sunlight from Miranda’s ­horror-show of a colonial catastrophe. But along with Mal in this tableau, we see River, pictured from the side as she rests in a seated lotus position on the table. As Mal makes his final point about the Alliance—“As sure as I know anything, I know this: They will try again … to make people … better”—he pauses to look directly at

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River, conveying that she herself is a product of the Alliance’s propensity for authoritarian overreach and its goal of creating utopia by trying to control human nature, a goal that the film exposes as horrifying, as well as unfree. River’s position in this scene and in the film is ambiguously hanging between that of follower and outsider. Moreover, her difference and unreliability as a “girl” likewise remains a question the film revisits, visually and through the plot machinations. The magical connotations of a possible new savior role resonate with how River’s position and capacities have wavered between being an asset and a threat to the crew, thus neatly allegorizing how the feminine operates as a necessary but destabilizing and ambivalent supplement to civic community. After the Serenity lands on Mr. Universe’s outpost, where they hope he will broadcast Dr. Caron’s recording for all to see, and they must face the marauding Reavers who have followed them, the crew’s situation appears hopeless. Although the crew (and audience) has invested a level of hope in River, she seems to be losing her grip, yet again, possibly due to the psychic impact of the Reavers’ proximity or possibly because she is simply unstable. As Jayne complains, “She picked a great time to go cuckoo on us.” While Mal goes to find Mr. Universe, the rest of the crew tries to fortify a stand against the Reavers, with Zoe and Jayne organizing the efforts. Outgunned and outmanned, as they say, their desperate situation is communicated by the Reavers’ bloodcurdling screams heard in the background.47 The scene gains further emotional force, when after Simon is shot, he and River exchange probably the most affecting dialogue of the film. Every crew member is lying injured, and Simon has a grave wound in his abdomen. He calls out, “River,” and then says, “I’m sorry. I hate to say goodbye”; she smiles bravely through her tears. “You won’t,” she says. “You take care of me. You’ve always taken care of me.” River stands, and the lights come back on, illuminating a halo around her bare white shoulders, as she says with finality, “My turn.” In a breathtaking sequence that is infamous among fans and movie critics, River turns and is tracked running with immense speed and grace through the steel doors that must be closed to save her friends—a suicide mission, as Zoe has just pointed out, because “no one’s coming back from there.” Hurling headfirst into the antechamber filled with marauding Reavers, River flips into the room, retrieves and throws to Simon his medical bag, secures the door, and is last seen being dragged back into the antechamber by bloody Reaver arms, an emblematic image of River’s own sacrifice for her brother and the crew. In underlining both her distress and her courage, and then her superhuman capacity to save everyone, this scene highlights the possibility that River Tam might be the central figure in the film, the actual agent of futurity.



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While the questions of gender and leadership are held open, the potential challenge of racialized masculinity is more fully resolved. The Operative is clearly a foil for revealing Mal’s superiority, a comparison signaled early on. In their final battle, the Operative revels with misplaced arrogance and complacent confidence—signaled by the condescending smirk on his face—in his inevitable victory over Mal: “We should have done this as men. Not with fire.” Reiterating his desire to engage with Mal “as [civilized] men” and to win without “fire” (i.e., violence), the Operative again exposes his own hypocrisy and myopic ­s elf-deception. But Malcolm Reynolds does “beat” the Operative, forcing him to see to the truth of the Alliance by literally watching Dr. Caron’s hologram recording as it broadcasts to the galaxy. This is the true ending of the movie: Mal’s renegade ­f reedom-fighter teaches the Operative, an Alliance lackey, the necessary truths about society and the promised “better world.” Given the racial casting and histories implied in their respective characters’ accents and styling, I argue this narrative ending has undeniable racial connotations grounded in the very history of settler colonialism, with its echoes of plantation slavery, which have been a correlate for the entire series. Mal’s ethical and physical superiority to the Operative, who comes to better understand and appreciate Mal and his worldview, is fully established in their last fight scene. The Operative smugly sticks to his standard script as he prepares to run his sword through Mal’s supposedly paralyzed body: “You should know there’s no shame in this. You’ve done remarkable things. But you’re fighting a war you’ve already lost.” Mal, however, is not as defeated as he appears, and this resilience allows him to again, and finally, turn the tables on the Operative. The scene provides a final ironic twist to the notion of belief, as Mal informs the brutally beaten (and quite nearly ­hog-tied) Operative: “I’m not going to kill you. Hell, I’m going to grant you your greatest wish. I’m gonna show you a world without sin.”48 At this moment, the film cuts from the Operative as he watches Dr. Caron’s report with shattered, wide eyes and returns to River, who is surprisingly winning her battle against the Reavers. Splendid cinematography and choreography emphasize River’s grace as a newly superpowered killer, balletically wielding a sword as she massacres all the Reavers. When Mal returns to his hopeless crew, who are prone with their injuries and despairing at River’s presumed fate, the doors slide open, and the camera shows a ­blood-soaked River standing in the door, dramatically backlit. This time, though, bodies lie on the ground around her, and she holds two ­medieval-style ­long-blade weapons in her hand, fully transformed into a superhero, simultaneously a Reaver and a ­Reaver-avenger. And yet, when Mal recaptures his place as captain of the Serenity, the film affirms the superiority of his ­white-masculine leadership.49 The final

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Triumphant River (Summer Glau) in Serenity.

scenes dwell on the Operative’s defeat and the lessons he learns, illustrating that plotline’s significance to the narrative. First, just as River appears, the Alliance troops break in and point dozens of weapons at her and the crew. One asks for “a kill order” and after a suspenseful pause, in which River’s hands are shown tightening their grip on her weapons, still dripping with the Reavers’ blood, the Operative says with resignation, “Stand down. It’s finished. We’re finished.” This admission of defeat suggests that the Operative understands and acquiesces to the wisdom of Mal’s view of the Alliance, and of the Operative himself. To further highlight his defeat, the manly pair are shown together one last time, during a final sequence that affirms the resolution achieved by Serenity. Mal concedes that the Operative helped, even saved, the crew by ordering their release and “helping our hurt.” But he adds that he won’t “shed tears” if he learns that the Alliance catches up with the Operative: “I’m like[ly] to kill you myself, [if] I see you again.” The Operative responds, “You won’t,” and adds, with a catch in his voice, “There is nothing left to see.” With the Operative’s total defeat and abjection established, the film turns to its last scene, which restores Mal’s position as captain and unquestioned leader of the Serenity, with the addendum that now River will be at his side, his literal and figurative copilot.50 This information is conveyed as part of a domestic tableau that ends the film: Everyone is happily in their place. Serenity affirms the sweetness and perks of benevolent patriarchal care while allowing for hints of River’s disruptive capacities. Mal ­s elf-consciously acknowledges that River “already knows” both how to fly the ship and what Mal is about to say. But as River tucks her bare legs under her ubiquitous thin shift dress and smiles up at her captain, she avows sweetly, “Yes, but I like to hear you say it.” Positioning River as a subordinate helpmate to the captain affirms expected gender stereotypes and



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hierarchies while gesturing toward a possible future shift, deferring for the moment any change to the mission or the place of its masculine leader.

Conclusion The best one can say is that Malcolm Reynolds proves himself by being man enough, as it were, to recognize and appreciate River’s capacities. Such an interpretation follows along with Whedon’s ­career-long insistence that the futurity of transformational change will be actualized by adolescent girls with astounding, inhuman, and magical capacities. But by featuring “girls,” these series avoid a confrontation of equals or adults, of full ­self-possessive human agents, suggesting an ambivalent reluctance to entertain a significant transformation of gender imaginaries. Both the story line and significance of Whedon’s subsequent television project Dollhouse (2009, Fox) and the growing controversies around his avowed feminism versus his personal behavior indicate that Whedon, along with his fan base, continue to grapple with his work’s masculinist (and possibly misogynist) imaginary. However, considering the plot of Serenity and Whedon’s ­C omic-Con characterization of River, “If you want to live, follow her,” one might argue that her presence and function in Serenity critically exposes gender bias and the lack, and inadequacy, lodged in Mal’s pretensions to leadership. In that case, River dwells in that gap between overturning gender norms and an ongoing desire to inhabit and take pleasure from them as ironic stereotypes, acknowledged with a wink to be failed performances. Positing that the ultimate expression of heroic action is embodied in an adolescent (white) girl conquering her own mortal terror, Whedon returns to one of his ­long-standing tropes (familiar to fans of his iconic series Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and underlines a key question, what mythical function does Serenity ascribe to River in its ­re-envisioning of femininity and masculinity? And to what extent does that revision transform the narrative arc and gendering of the hero’s journey? Likewise, it is possible to see the uneasy resolution between the Operative and Malcolm Reynolds against the Alliance as a parallel recognition of possible transformations in both racial imaginaries and relations to the state. “I think they know I am no longer their man,” says the Operative wryly. In both the gender and racial aspects, though, these readings underline the partial and ­half-hearted move toward any clearly legible revision of white patriarchal logics, and capitalist ones, too. The ethos of a family unit working independently and without asking for help, or even inclusion in the larger collective, remains the apparent guiding principle of the Firefly/ Serenity franchise. Mal and the crew are willing to risk “all” for “the people”

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who “have a right to know” and thus perhaps form a foundation for future revolutionary action, but Mal isn’t holding his breath, and neither should we. In a sense, the problem irony poses to an ethic of representation is the problem of distinguishing when the line between verbal irony and existential irony is crossed, when irony becomes a permanent attitude that remains caught within capitalist realism. While Whedon gives many indications over the course of the series and film that indicate ­progressive-minded targets for the show’s redeployments of generic markers and expectations, the show relies on affective registers of authenticity that camouflage any such goal for audiences less inclined to note or accept the implications of their cognitive dissonances. The ideological weight of this rhetoric of authenticity is figured through visual and narrative cues (leather pouches, Western slang, family units, white male leadership, etc.) that arguably overwhelm the franchise’s use of ironic dissonance as critique. That is, Firefly/Serenity most often seems to embrace a liberatory, ­self-conscious mode of irony as a “negative freedom”–type skepticism toward various versions of social order and control. But in its attempt to make the leap from irony to a positive or new vision, the film relies on a matrix of referents that remain caught in the racial and gender logics of the imperial history and collective futurity it proposes to critique. The battle with the Reavers largely reinstalls Mal as the good leader, and River’s feminine difference becomes a potential power, but one that is at his side. As in other recent speculative or ­science-fiction television discussed in this book, Firefly foregrounds a liberal progressive political fantasy of ­c ommunity-building under the legitimating rubrics of what is still an essentially traditional white patriarchal community. While there is certainly some room for debate, I contend that neither Firefly nor Serenity significantly undermines or throws into real doubt for its audience the solid foundation that Mal’s leadership relies upon—a normalized understanding of race and gender generated in a long U.S. ­s ettler-colonial civilizational history and logics. Whedon has said his work is always about “building family,” and like other frontier/apocalyptic fictions, Firefly takes advantage of the relative isolation and mutual dependence that make community formation such a necessity when the supports of consumer culture (and quotidian, complacent, and secure existence) are taken away. In this postapocalyptic survivalist landscape, the collective remains, as it ever was, a family affair in terms of the rhetoric and imagined relations within community—and suggests the role of “love” and the sentimental scripts of white settler imaginaries that have constrained visions of how to imagine collectivities and relations that are worth dying for in times of crisis (such as apocalypse). The questions of narrative imagination and speculative



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options are given a fuller treatment in Serenity, particularly around gender and River Tam’s suggestive role. But ultimately, the liberal and colonial foundations of ­white-masculine agency are largely upheld, even with the seemingly progressive gender and race stereotypes and relations the franchise puts into play.

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Crises of Masculine and Neoliberal Subjection in The Walking Dead “A ­post-apocalyptic genre can’t exist without the possibility of hope.”—Colson Whitehead1

No television show of recent memory placed the questions of who can lead and what is presumed by the idea of leadership more centrally than the spectacularly successful ­zombie-apocalypse survival tale, The Walking Dead (2010–2022, AMC). Reflecting ideas and character arcs from its source in the comic series of the same name (written by Robert Kirkland and illustrated by Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard, Image Comics, 2003–2019), the imagined requirements of leadership in The Walking Dead are familiar. The leader is a man who “does what has to be done” and thus has the fortitude, bravery, and integrity to make unpopular or even harsh decisions in the interest of the greater good, or of what is right. The leader’s willingness to use violence is a measure of this fortitude and bravery and remains central to the zombie apocalypse, and takes on particular importance in the series, both the comic book and TV versions, underlined in their notorious depictions of carnage and horror.2 Recalling the questions of frontier masculinity, the show indicates that regardless of who assumes the role, the virtues of leadership are traditionally and hyperbolically masculine. But what is interesting about The Walking Dead is the extent to which it raises doubts and confirms suspicions about this macho mode of survivalist ­kill-or-be-killed leadership, which is clearly favored by the main protagonist, former police officer Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), and most everyone else in the show. The Walking Dead ultimately underlines the human “blowback”—ethically, but also even in terms of survival—that results from Rick and his group’s relentless understanding of their condition as one of “fighting the fight”; that is, of permanent war.3 However, the 126



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show’s Hobbesian allegory of survival becomes almost Kafkaesque in its circularity and futility, suggesting that this understanding of collective governance, and its reliance on a hegemonically masculine conception of leadership, is not all that effective (neither for survival nor other stated goals, such as order); so I argue that it persists for other reasons.

Masculinity and Neoliberal Crisis: Genre and Governance in The Walking Dead In the episode, “18 Miles Out,” during Season 2 of The Walking Dead (Ep. 10, February 26, 2012), we find the ostensible hero of the series, a haggard Rick Grimes, agonizing that his best friend, Shane Walsh (Jon Bernthal), thinks he is “too soft” and that because he wants to be “the good guy,” Rick won’t be able to do what is necessary to keep their group alive amid the horrors of the zombie apocalypse. By this point, viewers are familiar with Rick and his group’s plight and their struggle to find ways to survive while also avoiding being bitten and infected by the zombies, i.e., “the walking dead.” About five months before this episode, in narrative time, the “walkers” (as they’re called) appeared in all their ambling glory and caused a total breakdown of society, including the apparent destruction of any government or technology infrastructure. Apart from Shane, Rick’s group includes his ­10-year-old son, Carl Grimes (Chandler Riggs), and his wife, Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies). Through flashbacks, viewers learn that before the zombie apocalypse, in addition to being close friends, Rick and Shane were partners as deputy sheriffs in a small town in rural Georgia. Ostensibly, his “natural” authority and previous career as a cop explain why so many characters, including Lori in this episode, insist, “We need Rick.” The narrative begins with Rick waking from a coma and rather miraculously locating his wife, son, and Shane, who joined a small group of survivors in the early days of the zombie event. From these first episodes, Rick’s fitness to lead this group is presented as both a foregone conclusion and an ongoing question. As in Firefly/Serenity, the persistent question of who should lead suggests the show’s specific assumptions about the requirements of collective survival, as well as its preoccupation with problems of governance. Familiar from a long history of disaster and ­end-of-the world movies, these assumptions depend on conventional and deeply embedded notions about what enables a society to function, what makes a strong, effective leader, and why that leader is necessary. As discussed above, the notion of the sovereign from Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) established leadership as the foundational prerequisite for human society; otherwise, social life will consist of

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“ continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”4 Understanding government and political community as the only means of lifting individuals out of humanity’s natural condition of a “war of all against all,” Hobbes claimed that any viable collectivity must concede all of its power and “interest” to a leader who will make the decisions on their behalf. Characters and plotlines in The Walking Dead’s early seasons appear to follow this precept of governance in Western thought, but the show also tracks concerns about whether such leadership is either too weak or too authoritarian to be both legitimate and effective. Rick’s realist uses of violence as a defense and precaution appear to be better for group survival, for example, than the ­ill-fated mercy shown by kind farmer Hershel Greene (Scott Wilson), though Rick’s leadership is later tested in encounters with increasingly brutal, authoritarian uses of violence by rival leaders: the Governor (David Morrissey) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) over seasons 3–9 (2012–2019). In addition to its role in constituting the show’s narrative path through the zombie apocalypse, the focus on Rick as the assumed, or natural, leader of the group also reflects The Walking Dead’s largely stereotypical conceptualization of gender and race roles and their characteristics. Lori expresses her nurturing and protective nature, while Rick is shown to be levelheaded, ­quick-acting, and good at perceiving and planning for dangers. How and why the group naturally turns to Rick for guidance and ­decision-making occupy the main plotline of the first episodes and seasons. The show’s stereotyping extends to its racial coding as well: In the first three seasons, ­non-white characters largely play disposable supporting roles. For example, the early season’s main Black character, Tyreese Williams (Chad L. Coleman), is shown to be energetic and moral (perhaps overly so), but he is not considered to be a rival leader to Rick, who views him with some suspicion until Tyreese’s ­s elf-sacrificing death (in Season 4). A plethora of memes using images from The Walking Dead mockingly observe, circa Seasons 2–4, that “whether the Civil War or a zombie apocalypse, Mammy gonna take care of Miss Scarlett” and “Black guy living in a world with no police or government…. Still dies in prison.”5 Later seasons allow some of the female characters to develop into key players, particularly Michonne (Danai Gurira), Maggie Greene (Lauren Cohan), and Carol Peletier (Melissa McBride). As discussed below, Michonne—a Black woman, imposing former lawyer, and awesome and independent fighter—is absorbed into the drama of Rick’s leadership, eventually becoming his girlfriend and a surrogate motherly figure to Carl. Other options for different styles of leadership and community are presented at intervals throughout the series, but they are usually exposed as weak, corrupt, and/or ineffective. The regressive discourses undergirding The Walking Dead, particularly



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Theodore “T Dog” Douglas (Iron E. Singleton), “Still Dies in Prison” meme, 2014.

in its initial seasons, indicates how—in a move familiar from other postapocalypse movies, TV shows, and video games—the apocalypse plot provides a narrative return to what are described as the basic conditions of existence as indicated by social life, technological resources, and skills needed. These are conditions that ­not-coincidentally seem to require a parallel return to social norms of gender and racial difference that are critical to the dominance of white men in collective life. These norms are grounded in foundational conceptions of individual agency and responsibility, as well as settler colonialism’s history of conquest, settlement, and racial dominance, as I argue in previous chapters. In essence, the show’s survival plot and its nostalgic return to ­pre-modern conditions offer settings and plot elements that are central to both the zombie apocalypse of The Walking Dead and one of its key generic forbearers, the Hollywood Western. Returning again to the ­s ettler-colonial discourses of the frontier myth, The Walking Dead suggests—especially in its early seasons—that its preoccupations reflect that nostalgic framing of its apocalyptic crisis plot. However, these generic recuperations also raise useful questions about this link between zombie horror and the Western, suggesting another

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implication of the show’s pairing of apocalyptic futures and ­settler-colonial histories. In contrast to the ­backward-looking settings and plots of classic Westerns—or even the ­sci-fi apocalyptic frontier of Firefly—The Walking Dead takes place in a contemporary ­near-future setting that clearly mirrors the actual present, albeit with the radical transformation of the social and material landscape caused by the zombie virus. Underlined in episode titles such as “Cherokee Rose,” ““Nebraska,” and “Triggerfinger” (Eps. 4, 8, and 9 of Season 2, ­2011-2012), this transformation is presented through a series of explicitly Western generic tropes and plotlines. The clean slate of the show’s postapocalypse renders vividly, and with explicit visual and narrative clues, a frontier setting in which individuals and groups must learn to make their own rules, as well as act to defend and preserve a fledgling and isolated community located in a hostile landscape. The group moves from its initial urban precarity toward increasingly protected rural enclaves across its vision of a postapocalyptic United States: from the campsites along abandoned country roads, to Hershel Greene’s farm, to the false hope of Terminus, then the abandoned prison, and on into the retrofitted suburban enclave of Alexandria, around which they make various stands against walkers and other human groups in seasons 6–8 (2015–2018). But while things at times do seem to get better for Rick and his group, their halting and unclear progression toward an idea of security reveal multiple, perhaps contradictory, messages about where they are going and how they got there. This double valence in the show’s representation of a ­horror-fantasy version of contemporary reality has at least two significant aspects. The first is that this mimesis underlines the relevance of ­s ettler-colonial history to the drama of ­near-future problems of governance that unfold in the show, signaling its resonances to contemporary life and the viewers’ own reality and experience. Referencing a frontier past underlines (sometimes explicitly) the economic and social histories that have led to contemporary neoliberal experiences of an individual agency that is both limited and yet extremely consequential. Anna McCarthy defines neoliberalism as an economic and political regime “in which state policies synchronize with cultural practices to apply ­market-based individualism as a governmental rationale across the institutions and practices of everyday life.”6 Likewise, as discussed in the Introduction, Eva Cherniavksy emphasizes the impact of neoliberalism on evolving ideas about the responsibilities of citizens and the state, in which the neoliberal state abdicates its collective function in favor of the expanding imperative to secure private property.7 In the zombie apocalypse, as Rick Grimes notes in the comic book series about any hope of the army or the government, “They’re not coming!”8 The second significance is that by centering its story on Rick Grimes,



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“They’re Not Coming,” The Walking Dead 4, no. 24, Nov. 24, 2005.

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the show hyperbolically announces its foregrounding of white masculinity in both the television show and comic series and, implicitly, in society’s liberal legacy. Sociologist Nikolas Rose coins the term “responsibilization” to mark the neoliberal shift of both public life and subjective states to individual control and responsibility.9 Framed in relation to my earlier discussions of both capitalist realism and the neoliberal transformation of personal and collective ethics of the 21st century, the conditions depicted in The Walking Dead can be understood as a fantasy template for social and individual action after neoliberalism’s endgame is played out—the destruction of the welfare state, presented here as the work of the zombie virus. The Western genre’s frontier conditions in which the mettle of individual men is tested by the crucible of wilderness environments and a necessary war against “hostile savages” are redeployed in The Walking Dead’s vision of people without any recourse to government or other outside forms of help. Oddly, this resonance between the two scenarios indicates how discourses of individual agency and responsibility in both generic worlds rely on a shared conception of moral and political virtues that are best illustrated in situations requiring extreme individual agency, i.e., the capacity to maintain oneself as an individual who acts and makes their own free choices, with relevant and justified consequences. But while emphasizing the success (and superiority) of entrepreneurial, ­self-managing individuals, the present ­21st-century moment is also one in which the naturalized dominance of white men is increasingly in question—or in crisis, as discussed above. Although the confluence of feminist and multicultural challenges to ­w hite-masculine supremacy and neoliberal transformations may have undermined the privileges (and many of the benefits) associated with normative white masculinity, the expectation of ­white-masculine agency prevails. As implied in media terms such as “mancession” and “­he-cession,” the economic decline of 2008 was widely characterized by its particular hardship for men, who held more than 80 percent of the jobs lost in the United States between 2008 and 2010.10 What others have called the “proletarianization” of the U.S. middle class, and of society as a whole, to describe ­wide-scale demotion of relatively autonomous professionals to underpaid and ­over-supervised wage labor, points to a general experience of impotence whose logics may be economic but that is experienced as affective malaise and psychic pain.11 Such humiliations and losses confirm the sense that, subject to increasingly powerful apparatuses of dehumanizing control, individuals don’t “matter” like they used to. Or at least, that is a conclusion shared by both ­right-wing media commentators and leftist political and cultural theorists of late capitalism, together echoing a ­long-standing fear in U.S. popular culture that literary and cultural critic Timothy Melley encapsulates in the term “agency panic.”



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Tracing popular expressions of anxiety about liberal subjectivity and individual sovereignty (i.e., the “­self-directed individual”) from World War II to the present, Melley defines agency panic as “an attempt to conserve the integrity of the liberal, rational self ”—often in the face of “new ideas about subjectivity,” including theories from consumer research, social psychology, science fiction, cybernetics, and ­post-structural theory.12 The literary narratives (and sociological studies and policy discourses) that Melley analyzes mark a ­long-standing crisis of liberal individualism and indicate a key sociocultural genealogy for the narrative preoccupations of The Walking Dead and the fantasies it feeds, particularly when it presents a world transformed by the zombies into a place with “no government, no grocery stores, no mail delivery, no cable TV.”13 These challenging conditions offer a dramatic antidote to the passivity and alienation of the everyday life that is familiar to viewers of The Walking Dead—especially the ­real-life men who populate the work of contemporary masculinities researchers such as Michael Kimmel. In Angry White Men (2013), Kimmel describes one of his representative informants as a man who “considered himself a victim of the impersonal forces that wreak havoc with the lives and the futures of America’s middle and working classes—the labyrinthine impersonal governmental bureaucracies and the impenetrable corporations whose CEOs and shareholders were lavishly compensated.”14 This emphasis on the specific impact on men and notions of masculinity as a key casualty of ­21st-century economic and social decline surreptitiously reflects and participates in widespread presumptions and public discourses that privilege the destabilization of certain kinds of male hegemony as a key marker of what is being lost and/or transformed in the neoliberal present. This emasculation, and crisis, of white masculinity becomes emblematic of the tenuousness and doubt also surrounding other forms of agency in collective life, which helps explain why masculinity and the general belief in effective individual agency it symbolizes are both “problems” that The Walking Dead places at the center of the drama of Rick and his group and the conditions they face. The Walking Dead initially presents audiences with a scenario in which this endangered individual agency, embodied largely in white men, is reinvigorated by the zombie apocalypse; or, as the back cover of each volume from the comic series admonishes the reader, How many hours are in a day when you don’t spend half of them watching television? When is the last time any of us REALLY worked to get something we wanted? The world we knew is gone. The world of commerce and frivolous necessity has been replaced by a world of survival and responsibility…. In a matter of months, society has crumbled, no government, no grocery stores, no mail delivery, no cable TV. In a world ruled by the dead, we are forced to finally start living.15

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Opposing a world of “frivolous necessity” in “our” consumerist society to its replacement by a “world of survival and responsibility” underlines the promise of these new conditions: They can give “you” a life worth living. How this worth is ascertained relies on a gesture that pairs individual responsibility with modes of necessity that are assumed to be more rewarding, even if involuntary. Choices are now a matter life and death, and actions have individual and collective consequences. The Walking Dead codes our life in consumer society as a kind of living death of passivity, which is transformed by apocalypse into a compulsory opportunity to “finally start living.” This survivalist scenario confirms the axiom of neoliberal governmentality, as described by McCarthy, “that individuals are sovereign beings best ruled under circumstances in which they are encouraged to ­self-manage, taking on responsibilities for their welfare, growth, and security that might otherwise be assumed by the state.”16 And thus, the opportunity for individual subjects offered by The Walking Dead involves a stark ideological complicity with the dictates of neoliberal capitalism. Both the author’s promise on the back cover of the comic and the show’s premise seem to affirm a strong version of liberal sovereign individuality in that this story teaches the benefits of responsibilization. Likewise, the development of its ­self-reliant survivor characters further demonstrates how television genres can provide templates and an arena for the development of subjectivities that, as media critic Laurie Ouellette notes, “complement the privatization of public life.”17 And yet, the forcing of these conditions indexes a less celebratory affective response and a more critical understanding of what it means to have to “REALLY” work to get something you want (or, in the case of this show, actually need to survive). This undercurrent of despair and negation reveals itself fully in the later seasons, especially season 7 (2016– 17), when Rick’s leadership is fully subsumed and humiliated by that of the vicious rival leader, Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Exploring these narrative trajectories and their implications, I eventually consider what these episodes of humiliation and experiences of abjection (a state of having no sense of agency or ­self-control) reveal about The Walking Dead’s vision of masculinity, individualism, and collective governance as exposed and elaborated in apocalyptic conditions.

The Possibilities of White Male Leadership in the Zombie Apocalypse The first seasons of The Walking Dead oscillate between two versions of what their new life means for Rick Grimes and his family and friends. On



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the one hand, every single day and action are now loaded with significance and importance. But on the other hand, these experiences are often horrific in every sense, and the characters’ “life or death” decisions and their repercussions are usually brutal and grotesque, as well as deadly. From the earliest episodes, Rick establishes his leadership by anticipating and preparing for violent attacks by the zombies and other human groups and responding fiercely with equal violence. Rick’s brutality can appear purposeful and even merciful, as when he cuts off the leg of a young man his patrol finds impaled on a fence, rather than leave him for the walkers to get (Eps. 9–11, Season 2, 2012). In some sense, his ruthless capacity for such acts serves as the clearest sign of Rick’s natural capacity for leadership—even though we also see how that capacity is at times in question, undermined by his desire to preserve community norms of justice, ethics, and sentimental attachments. For instance, although Rick did not want to abandon him to the zombies, the young man, Randall (Michael Zegen), had just attacked Rick and his friends. The rescued Randall, now lame, becomes a prisoner and is kept blindfolded, then tortured for information, and ultimately murdered by Shane—indicating that Rick’s efforts only elongated the young man’s suffering. However, Rick largely embraces both his “natural” white male leadership role and its requirements for decisive and violent action. Media scholar Dan ­Hassler-Forest notes that in the comic series, Rick’s capacity for extreme violence becomes a key point of interrogation early on. When he unveils the identity of the psychopathic murderer of two young girls in the prison compound that is the community’s safe enclave in Issue 17, Rick mercilessly and enthusiastically beats the offender’s face to a bloody pulp (this event was not included in the TV show). ­Hassler-Forest explains that in The Walking Dead ­comic-series depiction, “the violence here is not dehumanized. Instead, the foregrounded humanity of both victim and perpetrator emphasizes the monstrosity of the ‘punishment’ meted out by Rick,” as the comics panel shows “the rest of the group arranged behind him as they gaze in apparent horror at what he has done.” Ultimately, ­Hassler-Forest argues, “Rick’s actions have only increased his power over the group,” and becomes part of the pattern in which Rick’s leadership is presented as simultaneously necessary, patriarchal, horrific, and questionable.18 In both the TV and comic series, this power, along with the exhilaration that Rick exhibits in the midst of some new zombie attack or violent struggle with another human group, visually and affectively conveys his embrace of this agential leadership role and the intensified existence of the zombie apocalypse. But his pictured image also often displays anguish at the brutality of his decisions and actions, especially when they go wrong. These images from both the TV and comic series show how Rick’s face and

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character are marked by the extreme suffering and moral questioning that accompany his leadership and the limiting experiences of the apocalyptic crisis. This uncanny intensity, familiar to battle stories and war testimony, renders the zombie crisis both awful and awesome for Rick and many of the other characters. For instance, the TV show’s central and popular character of Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus) is a telling example of a particular kind of man finding the “world” he is meant for. In the television zombie apocalypse (Daryl is not a character the comic series), Daryl is presented as a stereotypical white redneck whose silent watchfulness, violent temperament, and rural life experience and skills are transformed into powerful assets for anyone on his side. Daryl’s promotion in stature and leadership (albeit as Rick’s ­right-hand man) indicates that he now thrives in ways that weren’t possible before the apocalypse. Daryl is a person who would be largely dismissed in today’s normative visions of success, one based on a managerial meritocracy that privileges certain kinds of education and expertise, as well as cultural capital and affluence. As Daryl tells some kids in season 4, before the apocalypse, he was “nobody” (Ep. 4, “Indifference,” November 3, 2013). Likewise, the main character Glenn Rhee (Steven Yeun) had been a pizza delivery boy before the zombie outbreak but becomes both a leader and a moral compass in the drama of postapocalypse existence. Glenn, one of the original members of Rick’s group and the show’s only ­Asian-American character for many seasons, is notable in many ways. Although one of the longest surviving ­non-white central characters until his death is revealed in season 7 (Ep. 1, “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be,” October 23, 2016), Glenn is portrayed as both clever and resourceful, but also somewhat emasculated—he’s not tough and macho like Rick or Daryl, even though his romance and marriage to Maggie Greene (Lauren Cohan) is one of the show’s most successful heterosexual couplings. This shadow of Asian stereotyping extends to the depiction of Glenn’s death in a gory and brutal beating that generated an outcry among viewers and fans.19 In distinct ways that underline the respective racial and gender coding of their characters, Glenn and Daryl suggest the new, largely masculine, opportunities presented by the zombie apocalypse as described on the ­comic-book cover. But as with the suffering that inflects Rick’s leadership and preeminence in apocalyptic times, these opportunities come at a cost. The special intensity of the survivalist plot has been explored by Jane Elliott, whose term “suffering agency” articulates the shift in subjectivity generated by the work of “­self-preservation” under neoliberalism.20 Elliott analyzes the significance of story lines in which the imperative of ­self-interest leads characters in popular narratives to take increasingly drastic, often abhorrent,



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action in order to survive under conditions that are imposed by distant, unseen forces: a plot scenario that describes both horror franchises such as the Saw films (2003–2021, dir. James Wan) and survivalist stories (based in fact) such as Alive (1993, dir. Frank Marshall) and 127 Hours (2010, dir. Danny Boyle). By their very nature, Elliott suggests, survivalist narratives conscript characters into situations that register the real problem and horror of individual responsibility and agency under neoliberalism. Elliott suggests, “As we witness the frenzied, desperate, and at times appalling actions humans undertake to preserve themselves in survival tales, we see behavior so driven that it seems on the boundary of the voluntary and involuntary.”21 For Elliott, the question raised by survival narratives indexes a ­large-scale perception that might also be usefully applied to The Walking Dead and its popularity: Viewers’ compelling if unpleasant fascination with the show’s horrific ­no-win situations reflects “something of the inescapable, obligatory cast of interest under neoliberalism.”22 Wiping out ­large-scale markers of contemporary modernity in The Walking Dead accomplishes two things. First, it recreates scenarios that mimic ­l arge-scale experiences of neoliberal governmentality, which are presented in the show as a series of crises that force subjects, in this case the characters, into ­s elf-directed, highly consequential action. Second, the destruction of our perceived civilization in the zombie apocalypse enables the show to dramatize processes of community formation and to highlight aspects of individual psychic and physical adaptation that have to take place under these conditions of survival. The tasks of forming human groups into functioning defensive communities with the capacity for ­self-preservation compel a recourse to what seem to be ­pre-modern ways of life requiring skills that include scavenging, living off the land, and defending oneself against aggressors, who include both the hordes of the undead and other humans competing for power and survival. Confirming its deployment of the Hobbesian trope of collectivity formation as a “war of all against all,” the most dangerous threat in this difficult environment often proves to come from the living humans, who, like the zombies, attack the strongholds won by Rick and his group at regular intervals. The problem of predatory individuals and groups plays an increasingly important role in later seasons of the television show, as it does in the main narrative arc of the comic series. The Walking Dead thus appears to present audiences with an explicitly ­white-masculinist survival narrative whose goal seems to be upholding the mythologies of liberal ideology and individualism, or is simply a fictional representation of terrible “realities.” In the first seasons, Rick and the others function best—winning against their enemies—when they appropriate military language and tactics and maintain a soldierly affective ethos

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of stoicism and capacity for violence. However, in The Walking Dead, there is no end to the zombie virus, and life in the postapocalypse is remarkably unpleasant; and through this framing, the show obliquely exposes the ­dead-end implications of both the classical and neoliberal logics of collective and individual agency. In its nihilistic set pieces and doomed, serial narrative arc, the thwarted options available to the main characters and the horrors of its ­post-frontier setting problematize The Walking Dead’s surface narrative of a nostalgic recreation of ­settler-colonial and patriarchal social norms of race and gender, and the necessary leadership function of manly (usually white) heroes. These contradictions and ambivalences constitute a useful ­pop-culture index of responses and expectations regarding liberal individualism and neoliberal governance that are more complex and critical than they might first appear. ­Never-ending and hopeless, the crisis of the zombie apocalypse of The Walking Dead is therefore an odd narrative vehicle for working through problems of agency, governance, and collectivity. By the end of season 1, viewers learn that everyone is infected and, regardless of whether they are bitten by a walker or not, will ­re-animate upon death unless their brains are smashed, shot, or otherwise destroyed. Each later episode and TV season (and volume in the comic series) since has continued to emphasize how the zombies and/or marauding humans always return to bite, maim, or dismember someone, often a main character, reflecting the franchise’s infamous use of the “Anyone Can Die” ­p op-culture trope.23 Indeed, up to the end of the television series’ season 10, every newly formed, functioning human collective and safe haven that is established (or joined) by Rick’s group is subsequently destroyed—at first by the walkers, but increasingly, the destruction comes from other humans in the “All Out War” that characterizes the core group’s relations with other human collectives.24 Even more than fighting the zombies, this perpetual battle with other human groups is a struggle for dominance that shapes and determines the forces that doom the various strongholds established by Rick and his friends. As ­Hassler-Forest notes, “the narrative reveals repeatedly that the communities that develop under his leadership are ultimately unsustainable.”25 In a cycle of newly established communities and safe enclaves, the pattern recurs: Hershel Greene’s farm (season 2, 2011–12), the prison and the group’s conflicts with Woodbury and its leader, the Governor, in season 3–4 (2012–14), defeating the Terminus cannibals and being welcomed into Alexandria in season 5 (2014–15), defeating the Wolves as they grow in power at Alexandria, but then falling to Negan and the Saviors in seasons 6 and 7 and then beating them in season 8 (2015–18), and facing the growing threat of the Whisperers and their leader, Alpha (Samantha Morton), even after Rick is apparently killed in seasons 9–10 (2018–21).



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In its careful, and seemingly sympathetic, elaboration of exactly what kind of terrible enemies Rick and his group encounter and what acts they commit in order to prevail, The Walking Dead offers a detailed origin story for liberal governance—one that is exacting in its verisimilitude regarding the conditions and repercussions of the fight to survive. As Hobbes wrote centuries prior, “the wickedness of bad men also compels good men to have recourse, for their own protection, to the virtues of war, which are violence and fraud.”26 Rick and his followers in the zombie apocalypse hew to these foundational logics of competitive survival and “winning” that assume that the ­short-term use of violence and vicious behavior is both necessary and directly beneficial—even for “good men.” In that process of representation, the narrative and its use of specific generic conventions, visual cues, and plot twists expose the true costs of this conception of governance, agency, and masculine leadership. The first five seasons position Rick and his group as the top “badasses” of the zombie apocalypse (per fan descriptions), but also as the key players in the defeat and destruction of any enclave or refuge they join. Many viewers complained about the monotony and repetition of the season 7 plot concerning the Saviors and their brutal psychopathic leader, Negan, which shapes seasons 6–8 and which many fans as well as professional critics blamed for a dramatic drop in TV ratings and audience share that starts in season 7 and largely has persisted.27 Paul Tassi, writing for Forbes in 2016, complained, “Compare Rick’s reaction when facing off against overwhelming odds at Terminus (‘They don’t know who they’re f***ing with’) to now, where he’s practically licking Negan’s boots…. To see characters like Rick, Daryl, and Carol totally losing their edge is just demoralizing, and some may not be motivated enough to stick around.”28 However, I suggest that this looping narrative trajectory is not a commercial miscalculation but a core element in the vision for The Walking Dead that is elaborated in both Kirkman’s comic series and the TV show. The endless cycle of painful effort followed by the destruction and loss of all that the characters have worked for creates a serial narrative in the shape of a static holding pattern. In effect, the seriality ensures a cyclical return to the same place and condition, bringing little or no change nor movement forward. This is a pattern that literalizes what Lauren Berlant describes as “the impasse” of contemporary life under neoliberalism. Berlant characterizes a widely shared sense of stasis and “exhaustion” that reflects dwindling political, social, and psychic—as well as economic—expectations in neoliberalism’s current “time of dithering” and “wandering.”29 Coinciding with the zombie apocalypse’s narrative temporality of crisis (of apocalypse, emergency, etc.) that registers contemporary worries about the end of capitalism, our present way of life, and the collapse of faith in any path forward,

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The Walking Dead installs a temporality of “impasse” in which the impotence and stasis of neoliberal subjectivity are built into its narrative structure and its figuring of masculine heroism as always ambivalent and largely illusory. As a critique on the aspirational agency of the contemporary individual subjects (both white men and everyone else) caught in the neoliberal chronotope of wandering, Berlant’s interrogation of our habits of optimism and attachment to social norms underlines “the subject’s grasping toward stabilizing form … in the face of dissolution.”30 This threatened dissolution of both the self and social identities reflects the “agency panic” installed in The Walking Dead and raises the question of what the series is really saying about individual agency and its relation to leadership and governance. Discussing Rick’s leadership position in terms of patriarchal power, ­Hassler-Forest explains the dynamics of his symbolic authority using psychoanalytic theories of subjectivity in which the claim to the patriarch’s position and authority is maintained through a threat of violence (understood as a “threat of castration”). But this authority and threat continually “must be exercised in order to reassure the male figure of authority that his phallic power is intact.”31 The key point for ­Hassler-Forest, and Freud and Lacan, is that such phallic power is always imaginary: “neither man nor woman can ever in fact achieve this … [it] will always elude one’s direct grasp.”32 As Chapter Four will explore in more detail, this aspirational masculine authority mirrors all individuals’ efforts to stabilize and secure a self with full ­self-possessive control and agency, i.e., an ego or self in the Western individual sense. Another psychoanalytic concept, that of abjection, denotes this loss of self through an experience of having one’s personal sovereignty and/ or bodily boundaries breached or rendered impotent. The “abject” figures most often considered in popular culture include both the zombie and racialized bodies and populations. Abjection in these contexts names the condition of being perceived as a ­non-human other and a threat to the self and the human community. Jessica Baker Kee explains abjection’s racialized and gendered dehumanization of the other through the example of photographs of lynching victims, which positioned Black male corpses as abject and terrorized objects of fetishistic white consumption.33 To be abjected is thus to lose, or be expelled from, the status of full humanity and community, to be killable and pushed into an “unlivable” zone of social life.34 Psychoanalytic theory insists on the pivotal function of sexual difference in the logic of abjection: Its collapsing of the distinction between self and other is theoretically gendered exclusively as female, or feminine. 35 This foundational and historical gendering and racializing of concepts of agency and ­self-possession in both psychoanalytic and political theories of modernity indicate one reason The Walking Dead, like



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other examples in this book, represents problems of agency and forms of authority through the crisis of a ­white-masculine hero or leader. That form of agency and authority feels threatened, but is also presumed to be the sole form of human selfhood available, or at least desirable. I argue, as others have, that The Walking Dead exposes how such agency is both socially and psychically unsustainable by depicting it through both a hopeless serial temporality and the show’s ambivalent narrative and visual treatment of Rick and his leadership. It also offers some indications of other meanings and possibilities for a new version of agency and selfhood that understands, and even embraces, the productive elements and lessons of an abjection that is both psychic and material, created by the very forms of governance and identity that purport to protect at least some subjects and communities from its operations. And yet, the temporality of wandering and impasses works in a tense coordination with the show’s surface plots that feature particular characters, and which appeal to viewers’ conventional forms of affect and attention, and especially their identification with, and loyalty toward, its ostensible protagonists. Daryl’s popularity among viewers, for example, illustrates The Walking Dead’s astute use of a vicarious mode of narrative development and spectatorship, which the show both mobilizes and then pushes against as the narrative unfurls in unexpected directions. Like Rick’s, Daryl’s aggression and survival instincts are both his most notable assets and most questionable tendencies. In season 5, both Rick and Daryl are shown killing people unwisely, and arguably unjustly (such as in the midst of negotiating an exchange of hostages), often with disastrous results. After Rick lies to cover up his impulsive murder of Bob Lamsom (Maximiliano Hernández), his group is slipping into open warfare with another one occupying a hospital (“Coda,” Ep. 8). Even with the stakes being quite high, the men kill first and ask questions later. The other group’s leader, Dawn Lerner (Christine Woods), accidentally kills Beth Greene (Emily Kinney), who is one of the hostages being exchanged. Daryl is overcome with rage at his friend’s death—which Beth largely brings on herself by attacking and stabbing Dawn—and he immediately pulls out his pistol and shoots Dawn dead. Although viewers remain on Daryl’s (and Rick’s) side, the men’s decisions are presented as highly questionable and increasingly murderous.36 Through various plot and filming devices—and the pull of the archetypal narratives and characters at play—viewers participate in the surfeit of intensity and meaningful experiences brought into play by the show’s evolution of the ­zombie-apocalypse crisis. The various fan sites and venues, the popular “Talking Dead” interview ­spin-off, for example, all illustrate the extent to which the enterprise of The Walking Dead consciously

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invites and courts the emotional involvement and identification of its viewers, an identification both feeding and responding to its hyperbolic popularity. However, these viewers also share in the disgust, gore, and terror that dominate the show, particularly in its early seasons—these haptic (nonlinguistic, visceral) elements from the horror genre operate in a tension with the conventional realist modes of characterization and plot development. The resulting oscillations of effect consist of both an identification with the story represented in the plots and characterization of heroic main figures, but also a participation in the storyworld of the apocalypse that is performatively experienced by viewers. The audience is thus interpellated into The Walking Dead through both character development and the show’s reliance on horror’s immersive genre conventions such as sound and visual effects that mimetically produce a specific, compelling experience—albeit one that is often intensely unpleasant. In his influential reading of the iconic zombie films of George Romero, Steven Shaviro emphasizes that identification with the films’ protagonists is often interrupted by the zombies themselves, whose “peculiar fascination” and charisma come to dominate audiences’ affective responses to what happens on screen.37 I suggest that the narrative temporality of wandering, failure, and deferred hope likewise can be understood as an element “that undermines our nominal involvement with the films’ active protagonists” and thwarts audiences’ complacent internalization of the characters as templates for responsibilization or ­self-directed agency. Nonetheless, in The Walking Dead’s updating of the zombie narrative, the ­character-driven plots and development of specific story lines are what critics and audiences most emphasize when accounting for the show’s immense audience share. Notwithstanding the contradiction between its nostalgic, even regressive, characterizations and plotlines in the early seasons within an overarching narrative structure that refuses progress, resolution, or heroism, it is Rick and his family and core group, along with other mostly male key individual characters, that are the main focus of discussion. In fan chatter and reviews across the web, viewers attest to this focus, but also to the tension that emerges. On the review website Rotten Tomatoes, a critic writes, “The second season of The Walking Dead fleshes out the characters while maintaining the grueling tension and gore that made the show a hit,” which underlines that precisely this combination of “gore” and a “deeper sense of the people” constitutes the show’s winning formula.38 These audiences persisted as The Walking Dead’s drama of embattled white masculinity relentlessly twisted back on itself, particularly in season 4 when Rick abdicates his role as an increasingly dictatorial (and brutal) leader and attempts to live peacefully and democratically among his fellow survivors; that is, as a member of the community, not its leader.



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The Aspirations and Failures of Masculinity, Agency, and Heroism in Bad Times But Rick remains at the center of the TV show’s narrative and audience attachment, along with the ­sometimes-unpopular character of Carl, who evolves from a troubled and sometimes violent boy to the ostensible heir to his father’s leadership role (until he is controversially killed in the television series in season 7).39 Lori is killed off early on—dying in childbirth—toward the end of season 3 in a significant plot move. Considering the deaths of both Lori and her baby daughter in the comic series, Gerry Canavan observes that this “is the moment that basically all hope is lost in The Walking Dead.” Canavan criticizes the comic and television series’ “uncritical relationship” to a seemingly retrograde view of women’s roles: “to code the ending as ‘happy’ or ‘sad’ based on their continued availability to bear the male protagonist’s children.”40 What is also remarkable, though, is how explicit the function of gender difference and sexual reproduction becomes in this moment of losing hope and killing off a key female character. As Canavan notes, the loss of reproductive futurity signifies the loss of what the other characters and the readers of the comic series understand to be hope for any kind of meaningful futurity. I wonder, however, to what extent this early evacuation of hope and futurity in The Walking Dead’s ­zombie-induced Hobbesian crisis constitutes another shading on its commentary on neoliberal agency and suffering? In any case, even without hope, readers and television audiences remain absorbed in the dramas of Rick and his group, following their increasingly grim and painful track through the show’s postapocalyptic, ­zombie-filled landscape. Although the katana ­sword-wielding warrior Michonne becomes a possible exception, most female characters in The Walking Dead’s first five seasons adhere to this gendered division of narrative grammar in which identification and agency are largely investments in male characters, while female characters are there to expand, comment, or inform on the success or failure of the men. And in fact, the role of Michonne goes through its own ambiguous development—from fiercely independent warrior woman to becoming, in season 7, the “apocalypse spouse” of Rick himself (and creating the couple fans call “Richonne”). Through this domesticating heterosexual romance, Michonne’s amazing capacities as a ­sword-wielding killer—and originally one of the few nonaligned individual survivors (she has no “group” until she joins Rick’s)—are now harnessed to Rick’s story, and pulled back into the familiar and gendered plot of family. Folding Michonne into the persistent motif of family and heterosexual romantic relations underlines the function of heteropatriarchal relations as the engines of ­in-group formation and reinforces her

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gendered functions as nurturing support to Rick and Carl. Here, the heteropatriarchal logics of both capitalism and liberal governance are ­re-enacted as foundational to the group’s cohesion and loyalty, which seems to affirm the show’s focus on—and implicit approval of—Rick as the narrative center of the zombie apocalypse. This reinvigoration of the family as the core unit of society and collective order reflects its resurging importance in neoliberalism, while also harkening back to its early function in the Enlightenment concept of ­s elf-possessive individualism. The protection and possession of wife and children are foundational attributes of this individual subject, proof of his earned status and capacity.41 Political economist David Harvey notes that under neoliberalism, “all forms of social solidarity were to be dissolved in favor of individualism, private property, personal responsibility, and family values.”42 As media scholars Kathryn A. Cady and Thomas Oates argue, “The zombie apocalypse narrative echoes familiar themes from our contemporary context by elevating the heteronormative family, while also highlighting the demotion of the public.” They continue that in The Walking Dead, “the heteronormative family becomes the sole locus of trust and the only source of stability” in a world rendered critically competitive and hostile.43 Various story arcs and characters in The Walking Dead offer some alternative notions of affiliation and trust outside of both family and community group, notably the friendships between Carol and some of the other men (Daryl, Morgan Jones [Lennie James], and “King” Ezekiel [Khary Payton]) that become central subplots in later seasons. However, bringing the unique and powerful figure of Michonne, a powerful Black woman, into the fold of Rick’s family underlines what Cady and Oates criticize as the “almost irresistible salve” of “sexual traditionalism” and indicates the show’s own investment in maintaining Rick’s gendered position—also, implicitly at least, his racial one.44 But aligning with Rick is not always a great choice, especially for the various communities they encounter. The mutual destruction that almost always ensues indicates a fallacy in the “war of all against all” and its ­no-win paradigm. Likewise, The Walking Dead places its central white male characters in an increasingly untenable narrative position. While audiences are set up to root for Rick, Carl, and Daryl, these are men who are also often shown to be questionable, if not awful, people who make horrific, if not stupid, decisions. Given the stasis and despair of the plot and the ­often-repellant nature of its main characters, the popularity of the show actually contravenes traditional dynamics of narrative identification—which may be a key point for understanding both its popularity and its power. While audiences claim, or believe, that their identification with particular protagonists and main characters is what accounts for their attachment to the series, these



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same male characters prove to be ambivalent objects of audience identification. In this way, the figure of the leader that purports to embody the audience’s nostalgic and persistent investment in liberal individualism’s myths of agency, authority, and authenticity is revealed to be a problematic, ambivalent figure. Rick’s leadership repeatedly becomes a serious community liability, often bringing the destruction of all that it is supposed to save. However, these catastrophic results are not always, or at least not clearly, Rick’s fault, i.e., the result of his actions and decisions. And alternatives to Rick’s mode of leadership are considered in The Walking Dead, particularly in its later seasons and through the characters of Carol and also, for some, Maggie. Starting as a meek and traumatized, battered wife, Carol’s role expands in the series, becoming increasingly central. Both her femininity and her nurturing, reflective personality offer an alternative option and focus in comparison to the overt masculinity and aggression of Rick and Daryl, and their enemies. In fact, Carol becomes considered a main “badass” in the series and, like Michonne, her ability to acquire and wield the violent survival skills required by the zombie apocalypse—normatively considered masculine and militaristic attributes (using weapons skillfully and fighting and killing successfully)—suggests a disruption of the gender traditionalism most often associated with the show. During a lone encounter with a Savior at the start of season 7 (2016– 17), Carol is shot multiple times, but Morgan, a recurring Black male character, rescues her, breaking his own vow of not killing people, and brings her to the Kingdom, a previously unknown community (Ep. 2, “The Well,” October 30, 2016). This refuge appears to be a prosperous and peaceful oasis as led by Ezekiel, a flamboyant Black man with a sonorous voice and flowing gray dreadlocks. Carol is reluctantly charmed by Ezekiel and his adoring followers, but she is also sure they are courting disaster and complains about the peaceful ethos and silly rituals that maintain the Kingdom’s order: “This place is a damn circus.” In a sense, Carol is correct. Ezekiel confesses that he learned to perform this role of “king” and its Shakespearean tones and archaic phrasings from his experiences as a community theatre actor, and that he’d acquired his Bengal tiger companion, Shiva, through his ­pre-apocalypse job as a zookeeper (he had saved Shiva once, and she has never left his side). When Ezekiel confronts Carol about her own “act” of feminine, housewifely confusion and meekness, she acknowledges her deception but accuses him, “You’re selling these people a fairy tale,” which the show ultimately confirms. Although suggesting a disruption of both racial and masculine ideals of leadership in his calm benevolence and confidence, Ezekiel is secretly submitting to the Saviors and will eventually join Rick, Carol, and others in another “­all-out war” against

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their enemies—he, too, “needs Rick.” So, although alternative options to the “kill or be killed” savage collective sometimes emerge in The Walking Dead, those alternatives evaporate when the “reality” of inevitable attack or invasion makes itself fully understood. What The Walking Dead clearly does do, though, is offer a television template for the “suffering agency” described by Elliott in which neoliberal models of agency are taken to their logical conclusion, with the result that “the usually invisible suffering that accompanies the unfolding of this logic” is exposed and dramatized.45 In addition, the tensions undermining narrative identification demonstrate that although some sort of “nominal investment” in specific characters remains key to the progression of the television and ­comic-book narratives of The Walking Dead, something else is also going on, something that emerges from the very ambivalence of the audience’s identification with the show’s protagonists. Rick’s character, for example, articulates the paradox of liberal individualism: The masculine hero, whose leadership is required to form a viable collective, exposes that the promises of his leadership are inherently broken. His decisions and total authority over the community ultimately bring destruction and threat, not protection and security. The later seasons’ rivalry between Rick’s group and Negan’s Saviors illustrates how the series stages this doubling of sovereign leadership as totalitarian authority, which is judged by its capacity for brutal violence. Initially, Negan (discussed below) vanquishes Rick and his group, essentially enslaving them and reducing Rick to a shell of his heroic self. Later, the reversal of these roles of winner and loser, with Negan being held in abject isolation underground in season 9 (where he becomes obsessed with winning Rick’s approval), illustrates both the logic at play and the nuances of how The Walking Dead understands notions of masculine leadership and what it produces. Interestingly, a similar thwarting of identification that undermines the ­white-masculine hero are important elements in the generic history of the Hollywood Western, particularly during its more critically ­s elf-reflective phase in the 1950s and ’60s and exemplified in the films of John Ford, Sam Peckinpah, and John Sturges, among others. The long history of the problem of male heroism in classic Westerns suggests that the narrative structure of The Walking Dead draws on more than just nostalgia when it references the genre of the Western and the history of settler colonialism. Western tropes characterize the show’s early seasons and are emphasized in the brutality and violence of Rick Grimes and others in the struggle for survival in the zombie apocalypse and articulate a vivid critique of ­settler-colonial histories of genocide and conquest. Such tropes are manifested in the brutality and violence of Rick Grimes and the others in their struggle for survival in the postapocalypse.



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­Settler-Colonial “Savage War” and Zombie Apocalypse Leadership Binding the Hollywood Western’s liberal individualist drama of white male leadership to the zombie apocalypse was never an accident. The Walking Dead morphed after its first three seasons into a visual and narrative manifestation of the precise line from ­settler-colonial violence to the contemporary political regimes of the prison, the concentration camp, the detention center, and endless war.46 And its critical interrogation of white male leadership echoes the dramas of masculinity that predominate Hollywood Westerns and that genre’s preoccupation with questions of both masculinity and governance. Film scholar Patrick McGee has suggested that the Western’s conservative reputation rests on two key pillars: its stress on “extreme versions of masculinity and individualism” and its status as “one of the principle narratives in the discourse of mass culture on the right to wealth and the legitimacy of class.”47 Interestingly, both of these pillars are what are at stake in the show, though in the zombie apocalypse’s state of nature, the “right to wealth” is translated into the right of the more powerful to dominate, destroy, or exploit the less powerful. As Rick announces at the end of season 6, “This is how we eat.” And “Those who rape and beat and kill, we end them.”48 Later in the series, after viewers and fellow survivors alike witness how the group is wiped out again and again, Rick’s leadership reveals itself to be increasingly costly and ambiguous in the overarching narratives of both the television and comic series, though conditions are clearly quite difficult and overwhelming. Centering each season and its depiction of this plot of community and survival, the series highlights connections between Rick’s style of leadership and the group’s perception of the ethical problems presented by other human survivors and groups.49 From the TV and comic series’ inceptions, the intensity of the pressure to make difficult decisions is both a problem and an opportunity for Rick Grimes. Although he appears to be an exemplary figure for leadership and resistance to experiences of impotence and irrelevance within neoliberal systems of corporate and state control, Rick arguably comes to embody a critique of that same liberal individual agency and masculine leadership. This agency and its notions of leadership are surreptitiously presented as a trap and an illusion for both Rick and his followers. As viewers and fellow survivors alike witness the futility of the group’s actions and efforts to create a safe haven, the ­f rontier-myth framing of Rick’s role underlines links between his very mode of leadership and the horrific consequences of the group’s “savage war” against both the undead and other humans.50 Similarly, Rick and most of his group assume that

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­full-out eradication is the only viable solution to both the zombie and the human problems. Other communities they encounter, and a few characters such as Hershel Greene, explore alternative and less violent options for community coherence and defense, but these paths are eventually exposed as foolhardy, even weak, fantasies. In its elaboration of a Hobbesian variety of realism, which is genealogically linked to the capitalist realism discussed in the Introduction, The Walking Dead stages what seems to be clear defeat of speculative possibilities that might be less ruthless and violent. Other modes of governance are exposed as either misguided attachments to mercy and tenderness (Hershel Greene’s farm in season 2 and Deanna Monroe’s [Tovah Feldshuh] in Alexandria in seasons 5–6), or those alternatives are revealed as cover stories for authoritarian power and terrible agendas, as with the Governor (David Morrissey) in Woodbury (seasons 3–4, 2012–14). However, the ­self-fulfilling ethos of “kill or be killed” is also exposed in the unraveling of this ­race-war logic (“you’re either the wolf or the prey,” as the Wolves who terrorize Alexandria in season 6 like to say). Despite much evidence to the contrary, Rick and his group persist in seeing themselves as the true saviors of the zombie apocalypse—such as when they regard the foolish complacency and peaceful existence of the community in Alexandria and Rick observes, “they’re lucky we’re here”—though the devastating destruction that inevitably follows their arrival might seem to put that “luck” into question. That Rick and his group presume that the reality of this postapocalypse is a savage war and are confident that any other conceptualization of how to survive is a delusional weakness of will indicates how the Hobbesian conceptions of liberal governance as a survivalist “covenant” undergird the zombie apocalypse in its rigorous adherence to its mode of capitalist realism. The understanding of their conditions as a contest between “us” or “them” necessarily entails perpetual war, which is precisely how the zombie apocalypse plays out. Rick and his group’s attitude toward the zombies echoes the ­19th-century consensus that Native Americans should be understood as ­non-human others whose behaviors and interior subjectivities were understood as “simply the rage of a wild beast against the cage: visceral, unreasoning, an expression of a nature innately incapable of civilization.”51 The inhuman other as horrific and thus as justifiably killable is reiterated in The Walking Dead’s portrayal of Rick’s ­c ommon-sense approach to the zombies: He assumes both sovereignty and a mandate to kill or be killed, expressing a total lack of concern for the former humanity of the ­now-undead. Both the comic and TV series contrast Rick’s attitude toward various other characters’ more humane (though often feminized as “weak”) attitudes toward the zombies. In seasons 1 and 2, Carl befriends



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Carol’s daughter Sophia (Madison Lintz), who perceives the humanity (former and perhaps continued) of the zombies, but she doesn’t survive, and like Hershel Greene’s barn filled with his former loved ones who finally attack and destroy the farm’s refuge, these alternatives are consistently dismissed and disproven. This should not be a surprise. Even historically and in the genre of the Western, there is a precedence for understanding that the notion of war with the other as a crisis and “state of exception” that justifies using any means for survival is dangerous and ultimately unsustainable in terms of both human life and community political norms.52 Most famously elaborated by Giorgio Agamben in the wake of 9/11, the idea that the state has installed a permanent “exception” to the requirements of law and democratic process haunts both contemporary political life and possibly Western political life in its origins and has been enormously influential in critical theory. Here, I underline the links between that familiar contextualization of a crisis of political and social norms to the frontier and its own suspensions of law and juridical process. Not only was the ­19th-century rhetoric of “savage war” utilized as a justification for ­settler-colonial expansion and violence, but it was also sounded as an alarm for a wary cosmopolitan public. As mentioned in Chapter Two, the discourse of the frontier as a “fatal environment” producing “dangerous classes” of people, a “peculiar race” whose own extreme act of savagery makes them unfit to function in civic society. Returning to the Hollywood Western, some of its most acclaimed films, including The Searchers, Shane, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (dir. John Ford, 1962), reflect profound ambivalence about the white male hero and end with his departure—when he is thrust back into the wilderness from which he came. In these classic films, the iconic frontier ­anti-hero—also known as the gunfighter or “Indian killer” figure— indicates how the masculine subjectivities produced by classical liberalism have always been a problem. In John Ford’s The Searchers, the discourse of race war against Native Americans unravels in the character of Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) to expose the ambivalent trajectories of savagery and dangerous classes in the frontier. On the one hand, the film shows Ethan to be a man who has the capacity to do things that would cause others to shrink away in horror and impotence, such as in the famous scene in which Ethan alone can confront the unspeakable violence the Comanche have wrought on their women but then insists, when pressed to share details, “Don’t ever ask me. Long as you live, don’t you ever ask me.” Such scenes that establish Native Americans as enemies capable of inhuman barbarity, of acts that can neither be shown nor spoken (see the Chapter Two discussion of the Reavers in Firefly/Serenity). Though The Searchers is sometimes considered to be a racist apology

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for settler colonialism’s genocidal war on Native Americans, McGee and others have argued that its actual argument and critique occurs near the end of the film, when in an act of vicious and gratuitous violence, Ethan scalps his enemy, the ­already-dead Comanche chief, Scar (Henry Brandon). By showing Ethan “becoming the savage” through violent acts, McGee suggests the film justifies Ethan’s exclusion from the domestic and civil society he has helped establish. Ethan is necessarily placed among the dangerous classes, having sacrificed himself to the “fatal environment” of the frontier so that others may come to live together in relative peace and prosperity, cleared by disavowed ­settler-colonial violence.53 Particularly in its first seasons, as Rick’s group moves to increasingly rural settings, The Walking Dead’s own rhetorics of survival, savage war, and ­white-masculine leadership pointedly recreate Western generic scenarios through scenes of saloon ­shoot-outs, armed confrontations on deserted roads, sheriffs, savages, and mercenary gunfighters. In the television show’s second episode, Rick literally rides a horse, wearing his sheriff ’s uniform and a ­wide-brimmed cowboy hat, into a crowd of zombies, shooting his rifle indiscriminately, and uselessly, at the hoard of rotting bodies enclosing him on the deserted city streets. Such iconic images of masculine heroism as a thing associated with frontier settings are presented in a ­double-voiced narration that both emphasizes their echo of the remembered history of the West—including the figure of the lone, heroic sheriff—and yet also indicates an irony that undercuts those associations and their meaning.54 Rick’s horse is quickly overcome by zombies and then eaten ­on-screen with emphatic sound effects of gnawing, tearing, and chewing flesh, while Rick barely escapes. Even in its earliest episodes, The Walking Dead undermines the very capacities that its survivalist story would seem to promote: The main characters’ actions sometimes do save the lives of their companions. But just as often, those actions are pointless or even counterproductive. And in this sense, the violent acts and dubious motivations of the ostensible hero call into question the liberal individual version of masculinity and leadership seemingly espoused, while simultaneously uncovering a history of imagining hegemonic white masculinity that is much more ambivalent and potentially horrific than is traditionally appreciated.

The Horror: Genres of Neoliberal Agency in The Walking Dead Tracking this shift in The Walking Dead from frontier myth to horror story highlights the generic weight, and freight, of each of those genres. As Canavan argues, the comic series narrativizes the bankruptcy and



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catastrophe of the explicitly ­settler-colonial logics that govern the group’s race war with the zombies.55 Both the comic series and the television show illustrate how these colonial logics are embedded in the conception of free collectivities as a war of all against all, so that the freedom pursued in Firefly here takes a clearly sinister turn, becoming a closed loop of violence and death. In order to elude this inevitable death, the collective group led by Rick, like other groups in the series, concedes to further and further steps toward authoritarian dictatorship and monstrous brutality. This chapter has been tracking the trajectory of the ­f rontier-myth narrative of survival as it reveals within itself another trajectory of apocalypse and disaster, because not only does this generic coincidence indicate a haunting within ­liberal-capitalist imaginaries, but it also underlines a foundational question that asks us to look back and acknowledge what these two trajectories—a genocidal ­settler-colonial history and a hopeless and horrific zombie futurity—articulate when brought together. In so doing, one of the things The Walking Dead asks us to consider is whether the racial and patriarchal logics of capitalist national expansion have in fact always contained within themselves the specter of this very horror and abjection, an endless futurity of wandering and grotesque violence. Following the comic series, the television show uses the story of the rival community of the Saviors, led by the homicidal Negan, to explore this question more deeply. While fans have complained about the monotony of the Negan episodes and their overly elongated narrative thread, the producers of The Walking Dead stuck with Kirkman’s story line.56 Among the allegorical arguments broadcast in the portrayal of Negan is that he is not that different from Rick in his understanding of how “the world is now” (as Rick proclaims in season 6) and what that means for governance and order. Another key point is that Negan’s sociopathic version of totalitarian leadership of the Saviors fully realizes the internal logics of dominance and permanent war that undergird neoliberal governance and its notions of choice. A ­heavy-handed allegory of politics and sovereign leadership, the Negan story line in both the comic series and the TV show becomes almost a parody of liberal governance and its basis in contractual logics. Season 7 spends significant screen time illustrating the precise rhetoric that Negan uses to justify his covenant with the people, albeit often with a dose of campy irony. There is no irony, however, in the absoluteness of the covenant: Negan likes to repeat, “I am everywhere.” To demonstrate to Rick just what he means, he asks one of his henchman, “Who is Negan?” and their reply, as always, is, “We are Negan.” The farce of contractual choice among the governed is further highlighted in the season’s shift in focus to the Saviors and various key characters among Negan’s henchmen.57 The first episode opens with a graphic visual depiction of Negan

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beating to death first Abraham Ford (Michael Cudlitz), then Glenn—whose death is in effect caused by Daryl. After watching Negan beat his friend Abraham to death with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire (a weapon that Negan affectionately calls “Lucille”), Daryl foolishly—and against their contractual deal—charges Negan. The agreement negotiated between the two groups, under some duress, was that Negan would take one life, chosen “randomly,” in recompense for those recently killed by Rick and his people in an unprovoked attack on a Savior outpost; that person turns out to be Abraham. Daryl’s attack on Negan pushes him to announce he will kill another person from Rick’s group as payment for this breach of their deal. Negan chooses Glenn. Daryl’s implicit responsibility for Glenn’s death (by not adhering to the contractual deal between the two groups) is not emphasized much in the show, but fans debated it online and expressed horrified outrage for Glenn’s loss and the show’s graphic depiction of Negan crushing his head with the bat until an eyeball pops out—though both these events and their visuals adhere to the show’s ­comic-book source. To underline the continuity between Rick’s leadership and Negan’s of the Saviors, various episodes in season 6 emphasize the growing ­self-righteous arrogance and disregard for human life that characterize the ­lead-up to Rick and his group’s ­pre-emptive strike on Negan. As part of another “deal” with the Hilltop colony and its treacherous and cowardly leader, Gregory (Xander Berkeley), Rick promises that in exchange for cooperation and supplies, they will “take care of Negan.” The show thus highlights the repercussions of its own logics and rhetoric of collective ­s elf-preservation as a competitive enterprise in which the ends of group survival justify the means of unprovoked violence and deception wielded for power. In many of these episodes, it also amplifies the underlying inflections generated in Rick and Daryl’s increasingly grandiose boasting: “This is how we eat” and so on. In the comic and television series, the zombie apocalypse is shown turning even its most favored protagonists into murderous monsters, particularly Rick and those who follow his creed. As he famously announces in Kirkman’s comic series: “We are the walking dead.”58 In the aftermath of Glenn and Abraham’s deaths, Rick hands over all power and control to Negan and the Saviors, explicitly of his own group, but also therefore that of Hilltop and others he has presumed to protect. Much of season 7 emphasizes both Rick’s horrified and guilty abjection and his sense of defeat, further conveyed in the details of the Saviors’ own collective subjection to Negan. Relying on the Saviors’ superior numbers, their group cohesion and loyalty, and their shared, albeit imposed, willingness to commit horrific acts of violence, Negan struts and gloats mockingly in his power and in Rick’s humiliation. In episode 4 of season 7 (“Service,”



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“We Are the Walking Dead,” The Walking Dead 4, no. 4, 2005.

November 13, 2016), Rick tries to control both his anger and humiliation and abide by the new contractual deal with Negan, who has arrived at Alexandria to collect his payment (as both a tribute and for the “protection” the Saviors demand, primarily against their own violence). When Rick protests that this unannounced invasion breaks their “agreement,” Negan reminds him: “No, Rick. You don’t decide. I do.” Negan constantly underlines this defeat as an issue of masculinity, as when he admires Carl’s moment of rebellion against the Saviors’ ransacking their community supplies, saying: “I like you. And your giant, ­man-sized balls.” As Rosita’s work partner Spencer (Austin Nichols) says when they go to retrieve Daryl’s bike for Negan, “This is how it is. This our life now. This is where Rick got us.” To a large extent, the belabored allegory of Negan and the Saviors appears to be a calculated narrative unraveling of the question of leadership and governance as shaped by presumptions about both collectivity and humanity. Negan’s rising importance during season 7 is detailed through minute presentations of how the logic of “no choice” dovetails neatly with the logic of “free choice.” Negan and many of the Saviors, such as the character Dwight (Austin Amelio), argue that the Saviors is a community that operates and thrives because it functions on the basis of each member’s calculated and rational ­risk-benefit analysis. A taciturn and cruel lieutenant

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for Negan, Dwight feeds the imprisoned Daryl meals of dog food and plays horrifyingly cheery pop music as part of a campaign to break Daryl’s spirit so that he will serve Negan, willingly as it were.59 This episode of season 7 (Ep. 3, “The Cell” November 6, 2016) gives Dwight’s character significant attention in order to explicate the rationale of Negan’s dominance. Dwight explains to Gordon (Michael Scialabba), who is trying to escape the Saviors, “There’s nowhere to go. Everything’s his or will be.” Gordon responds with the democratic question raised throughout history: “There’s only one of him and all of us, so why are we living like this?” Dwight answers, “Because look where we are. We were losing. Now we’re not.” While this particular “deal” is shown to be mostly awful, we do learn of the personal exigencies and histories that lead Dwight and others to join or comply with Negan, even as the costs of such decisions are illustrated when Gordon chooses “freely” to just die. Overall, season 7 doubles down on these questions of leadership and sovereignty, so that when Negan asks Daryl and others his signature question, “Who are you?” everyone (except Daryl) answers, “Negan.” But the season 7 emphasis on Rick’s submission to Negan’s rule grated on viewers and critics alike for its nagging portrayal of defeat of the very characteristics that had made Rick and his group so popular, and badass. This loss of standing in the world of the show is cited repeatedly as the factor that threatens to stall and derail the entire enterprise, especially for its previously loyal viewers.60 These viewers apparently share in, and affirm, the show’s drama of survival as a ­settler-colonial drama of good guys and bad guys, which it also implicitly indicates is a process of territorial and military expansion by Rick’s group. The Walking Dead traces that trajectory by illustrating how the models for governance move from Rick to Negan, who treats the whole leadership enterprise as basically making people slaves through the ­capitalist-realist joke of, “It’s your choice” (Negan’s refrain when speaking to his terrorized Saviors and other groups he controls). This trajectory seems to explain why seasons 7 and 8 spend so much time recounting the details of Negan’s seemingly horrific form of governance, a form that The Walking Dead suggests is surreptitiously shared by every group that survives by adhering to a logics of competitive survival and dominance. The Walking Dead repeatedly emphasizes its generic debt to the frontier chronotopes and characters of the Western, the genre that operates as both backstory and preview to the show’s zombie apocalypse. However, the futurity of the frontier is quite distinct from that of the apocalypse. The triumph and expulsion of the frontiersman, or “Indian killer,” pave a path through the violence of native genocide toward a future society wiped clean of this violence, i.e., the sincere fiction of ­settler-colonial whiteness



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rendered innocent. The zombie apocalypse, however, has no discernible or viable end point. It persists, like the zombies themselves, and survivors face wave after wave of new attackers, both living and undead. So while The Walking Dead, like other film and TV examples I discuss, relies on the Western as a dominant intertextual reference for its apocalyptic landscape, the show also deploys another key genre of capitalism, horror, to introduce a specifically neoliberal twist on its reimagining of the frontier myth and its futurity. In his chapter on zombie cinema, Evan Calder Williams describes the central effect of horror films as one of anxiety. Williams adds that in the zombie apocalypse, this “anxiety is never about the radically new but rather about the horrible possibility of the same persisting.”61 Resonating with the critiques of Shaviro and Canavan, Williams insists that the double edge of the zombie narrative is located in the zombies themselves, who figure the condition (and threat) of labor in capitalism, particularly given the zombie myth’s generic and genealogical origins in Haitian plantation slave society.62 Reflecting these folktales’ terrible vision of an existence of eternal slave labor, Williams notes that the horror of the best modern zombie films begins with their stripping of “everyday relations” to expose “the brutality beneath.” But this horror is shadowed by impotent rage: “the seething anger at the prospect of not having a choice. The true underbelly of ‘freely selling one’s labor,’ the realization that it has been a ­non-choice from the start.”63 Williams’s characterization offers another pathway, which connects the established critical understanding of zombies as uncanny mirrors for human beings, figures for a simultaneously abject and resistant state that constitutes an alternative response to questions of agency and white masculinity.64 The Walking Dead is known for its spectacularly grotesque special effects and the use of visual and aural technology to convey the disgust and horror, and gore, that punctuate the experiences in this transformed landscape. The TV show consistently uses intense sound effects, as well as visuals, to make the bodily experiences of being bitten, chewed, and ripped apart inescapable and visceral for audiences. After the first three seasons, the horror of the zombie chronotope becomes familiar in ways that The Walking Dead thematizes as a version of late capitalist horror, one grounded in banality and routine—not unlike the consumerist numbness the zombie apocalypse was supposed to disrupt. The premier episode of season 4 opens with various characters doing their perimeter patrol along the ­chain-link fence that encloses the community (in a former prison). They use knives and sharpened sticks to loudly and grotesquely, but quite easily, “­re-kill” the walkers that push and huddle against the enclosure.65 The newly stable community remains enclosed behind the prison’s ­chain-link fencing, with

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Rick having relinquished both leadership and guns after his wife, Lori’s, death in childbirth (and showing his concern about modeling brutal violence and dehumanization to his son). The group’s newly organized management of the undead that gather at the prison fence is rendered in explicit camera ­close-ups and accompanied by sound effects that emphasize the repetitive experience of blade going through the skin, bone, soft organs, etc., of the zombie faces. As others go along the prison fence, Tyreese (Chad L. Coleman) explains to his new girlfriend that he’s decided to join a supply run in order to avoid this job of regularly scheduled maintenance violence (saying, “I don’t like killin’ ’em on the fence.”). His understatement ironically emphasizes that his character chooses to risk his life in a direct and exposed situation rather than participate in the management of the walkers (another character on the supply run, Zach [Kyle Gallner], dies horribly). Although Rick and the others maintain the rhetoric of necessary war to justify and explain their violence, the actual war with the undead is presented here as a relentlessly awful and routine form of labor. Problems of choice and difficult decisions in The Walking Dead reoccur so insistently as to feel almost like a parody of survivalist rhetoric, but this insistence also makes clear how the show’s preoccupation with the reality of ­non-choice is foregrounded from the start. The awful necessities imposed by the zombie apocalypse are dramatized as early as the second episode of season 1, when Rick and Glenn must escape from a building in downtown Atlanta that is being overrun by zombies (“Guts,” Ep. 2, season 1). Glenn’s own occasional crises of masculinity in the first two seasons are presented as a counterpoint to Rick’s capacities for action and ­self-sacrifice. From the opening shots, the viewpoint of the camera alternates between panoptic images of zombie hordes and ­close-ups of the frantic efforts of Rick and Glenn to devise some sort of escape. In this scene, the porous line between living survivors and zombies is made material when Rick and Glenn smear themselves with zombie body gore, taken off bodies they’ve recently ­re-killed, in order to camouflage their humanity by trying to smell and look like zombies. In order to survive, the characters must adapt and become something abhorrent to themselves, a transformation that is against their will. In The Walking Dead, even actions that appear autonomously chosen are forced by the logic of survival and ­self-interest, to the extent that the horrific and otherwise indefensible act of cutting off your new girlfriend’s arm and leaving her to die is a reasonable thing to do in order to save your son, as Rick does in both the comic and TV series.66 Rick’s agency, like that of ­Indian-killer Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, is thus constrained and locked within the field of relations, affective modes, and political imagination produced in the conditions of his experience, i.e., through his subjection as a



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Glenn (Steven Yeun, left foreground) and Rick (Andrew Lincoln, right foreground) passing as zombies in “Guts,” Ep. 2, Season 1, The Walking Dead.

neoliberal survivor, albeit within a ­zombie-apocalypse narrative. The role of ­w hite-masculine hero is shown to be a trap within a realist logic that the protagonist cannot escape—showing how agency is structured by the individualist “responsibilization” imposed by this new world in ways that reflect the old neoliberal one. Tortured and isolated by those logics, the hero is always in the process of becoming a savage or a corpse (or both), collapsing the distance between the individual self and some expelled, inhuman other. In a sense, the loss of self that is threatened by abjection is precisely a loss of perceived agency, of the capacity to act separately and autonomously, which is lodged in ­long-standing conceptions of both agency and masculinity and their role in defining what it is to be human. While the survivalist narrative of The Walking Dead recuperates familiar notions of agency in dramas of individual capacity and responsibility, that narrative is often interrupted and at times derailed by the show’s relentless spectacles of suffering that undercut its nostalgia for liberal individualism and neoliberal responsibilization. This double movement is one of the elements that helps explain how The Walking Dead can dramatize both sides of neoliberal agency as manifested in the divide between the zombies as threat and the survivors as unwilling avatars for the futurity of an imagined collective modernity. In that drama, The Walking Dead encompasses simultaneously

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the conflicts between the myth of the liberal subject and the visceral, affective experience of the neoliberal subject. In this sense, abjection reveals itself to be both the ground and the mundane real of subjectivity and activity in a world that is not so much transformed as stripped of its illusions and myths by the apocalypse. Agency is no longer what it was—or, more precisely, individual agency is revealed to have never worked as promised. I argue that the narrative temporality of impasse and its trajectory of futility articulate a long genealogy of a specific mode of capitalist abjection that is figured in the anguish and ambivalence of the putatively white masculinity that is portrayed in The Walking Dead. Anna McCarthy asserts, “suffering is essentially an instructive public effect—it demarcates the limits of liberal and neoliberal rationality and exposes the forms of socioeconomic inequality and disenfranchisement that reside within the democratic experience.”67 Confronting liberalism’s impossible demands for individual agency through ­p op-culture fantasy, The Walking Dead could be said to impose a critical form of suffering on viewers who are propelled into the story by their interest in either the characters or the thought experiment of how one would survive in an apocalypse situation—and find themselves entrapped much as the characters are. Viewers’ relation to the deterioration of the protagonists—and especially the hero Rick Grimes and the seemingly necessary atrocities he commits and horrific losses he experiences—reflects an ambivalence installed in these character functions, and elaborated in the show’s paradoxical temporality. Perhaps, though, what looks like futility, an endless circling around the edges of previous towns and suburban enclaves, is also an instructive form of suffering? In its distinct narrativity, one that is abject and vicarious, but also forceful in the intensity of its anxiety, disgust, and boredom, The Walking Dead confronts the viewer with their anxiety of the same, as well as a seething anger, as explained by Williams. These affective remainders reflect experiences of individual agency as a trap and an illusion, particularly under neoliberal conditions of social abandonment and endless competition.68 Even further, The Walking Dead underlines the affective genealogies of contemporary capitalist realism by revealing what happens in the afterward of the frontier. The ­settler-colonial logic that had seemed to promise and provide for “civilization” is exposed as leading to a state of perpetual war and abjected forms of agency, to forms of suffering. In this speculative fiction, the survival narrative has fully turned on the characters, trapped in a serial experience of crisis and loss that cannot be interrupted, even after the belief in either hope or choice is gone. In the comic, Andrea (the love interest who Michonne largely replaces in the television show) says to Rick, “We don’t die. You and me. That’s the rule. We don’t die.”69 But



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what seems to be a cause for optimism can easily turn into a curse. For Rick and the others who follow him, their undead state persists no matter what atrocities they commit, what horrors they experience. In this narrativization and picturing of the traps of “living on” in both contemporary and apocalyptic times, The Walking Dead presents the frontier’s foundational war of all against all as the permanent landscape of liberal modernity, and it will never end.

Four

Futurities and Speculative Fictions in ­Sci-Fi Cinema Sleep Dealer and Snowpiercer “I realized how easy it is to make a slave.”—Octavia E. Butler, Kindred “A veces tu controla a la maquina, y a veces, la maquina controla a tí. (Sometimes you control the machine, sometimes it controls you.)”—Sleep Dealer

In much science fiction, the “depressive position” is reflected in speculative and apocalyptic genres and indicates a tendency toward pessimism about capitalist realism and its offshoot, necrofuturism: “The world that it projects seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it,” says Mark Fisher, speaking of Children of Men.1 Both of the ­science-fiction films I discuss in this chapter depict a similar extrapolation of contemporary social, economic, environmental, and political conditions that are understood as terribly grim and inescapable. Bong ­Joon-ho’s 2013 ­sci-fi classic, Snowpiercer, asserts and, rather gleefully, elaborates a deadly link between the manufactured crises of global inequality, cycles of neoliberal “disaster capitalism,” and its depiction of an already accomplished destruction of both the planet and of peoples’ lived humanity.2 And yet, Snowpiercer shares a distinctly utopian register with 2008’s ­low-budget ­sci-fi drama, Sleep Dealer (dir. Alex Rivera, 2008), and both ultimately promise a possible leap out of their respectively harsh depictions of the anticipated futures wrought by neoliberal capitalism, its institutions, and the kind of people it has produced. These films begin with a depressing focus on questions of global inequality, environmental disaster, corporate control of all the resources and personal opportunities, and the ­beaten-down individual subjects these conditions produce. Each, in its way, predicts a desolate futurity for the known world and its sizable portion of abjected populations. 160



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In the case of Sleep Dealer, this abjection is geopolitical—nationally and economically structured, foregrounding concerns of the global south, in this case rural indigenous Mexico and the ­Mexico–U.S. border and their structured relationship to the powers of global capital, largely located in the United States. Snowpiercer is a more widely global apocalyptic narrativization of a similar allegory of “revolution from below” that is less explicit in its setting but still clearly implicates the hegemony of U.S. capital, neoliberal (and necropolitical) governance, and their shaping of the conditions that have led to the apocalyptic crisis. In both films, the oppressed revolt and take action, and a protagonist offers himself as the man who will save the day—although in Snowpiercer, the actions that change things are not exactly what the hero intends or plans for. Although in Sleep Dealer, the hero is not a white or even fully “Western” individual; both protagonists are masculine heroes who occupy the center of the films’ narratives and images. In their respective critiques and allegories, both Snowpiercer and Sleep Dealer wed a ­sci-fi dystopian extension of the ­capitalist-realist present to an ultimately revolutionary and utopic message. This generic melding of familiar elements and plots toward a progressive vision of futurities, both threatened and possible, helps account for their popularity and positive critical reception. Political commentator Van Jones enthused, “Sleep Dealer blew me away. I thought this movie could seed a whole new category of film—social justice ­s ci-fi.” 3 Although never widely released or viewed, ­Peruvian-American director Alex Rivera credits “the pirates and the professors” with keeping his film alive via bootlegs and illegal screenings that made it accessible to audiences after the film’s distributor went out of business. 4 Similarly, after the enormous success of South Korean auteur ­Joon-ho’s 2019 ­Oscar-winning Parasite, renewed attention to the cult apocalypse favorite Snowpiercer cemented the earlier film’s reputation as an exciting and astute allegory of capitalism and revolution, although its ­b ox-office returns were initially disappointing.5 Both Snowpiercer and Sleep Dealer, along with a slew of other popular dystopic ­s ci-fi (and horror) films of the early 21st century, illustrate that Jones’s anticipated genre (­sci-fi political allegory) has in fact arrived. These two films also demonstrate that the creative, production, and financial origins for such visions are often outside mainstream ­pop-culture avenues. Both films share both a somewhat renegade non–Western, ­non-mainstream production history and thematic perspective on U.S. or European capitalist globalization.6 As ­independent-minded works of global cinema, these are films that engage the established genres of apocalypse, dystopia, and ­action-adventure in ways that feel and look quite different from the blockbusters and productions of more mainstream and ­mainstream-adjacent projects.

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In comparison to the major ­b ox-office apocalypse films of the 1990s and early 2000s discussed in the Introduction, recent speculative apocalypse and dystopia media penetrate more critically into the fabric of the social, economic, and political structures of contemporary societies. In both Sleep Dealer and Snowpiercer, their most obvious critiques indicate how these structures inexorably generate, and lead to, imagined dystopias that hover just beyond the horizon. Nevertheless, these specific films also reveal, again, the mix of critique and complicity that might encumber even inspired efforts to undo the imaginary constraints of capitalist realism. Although I argue that these films are, each in their own way, very successful in their respective goals, their narrativizations of masculine heroism and collective futurity underline both the generic opportunities and familiar returns that mark allegories of crisis and apocalypse in contemporary popular culture.

Necrofuturist Allegories of Neoliberal Dystopia and Apocalypse Toward the middle of the postapocalyptic ­sci-fi action thriller, Snowpiercer, the lead character, Curtis (Marvel’s Captain America star, Chris Evans), asks despairingly of his mentor, the bent, crippled rebel leader Gilliam (John Hurt), “But how can I lead if I have two good arms?” This question remains cryptically unanswered until Curtis finally, in a key analepsis (flashback) toward the film’s ending, tells the “whole” story of the early days on the Snowpiercer, a train that blasts through a frozen catastrophically destroyed earth, carrying the last humans alive. The train blatantly allegorizes both a ­human-caused environmental apocalypse that destroys the Earth in a single act of desperate hubris and a vivid structure of social inequality, which is hyperbolized in the hermetically sealed world of the Snowpiercer—as the train travels, implausibly and symbolically, on a track that circles a destroyed and frozen planet Earth.7 The late, climactic moment of confession in Snowpiercer that explains the reason for Curtis’s question also unexpectedly transforms the postapocalypse survival narrative by reversing the direction of the generic and political story the audience is being told. Until now, the film has seemed to constitute a blunt, if entertaining, Marxist allegory of survival and revolution against the “owners” and oppressors that now control the film’s neoliberal postapocalypse. Among the transformations wrought by this crux of a scene is the revelation that the preceding narrative is not the heroic ­survival-of-the-fittest story it appears to be. Curtis relates a tale of radical collective ­self-sacrifice that makes it clear that the ­so-called “fittest” and



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strongest are actually simply the most vicious and murderous, and that this is true in both the front and the back of the train. The willingness to commit horrifying violent acts that has characterized my previous examples of both white men’s leadership and the accompanying discourses of “primitive masculinity” are here fully exposed as the traits and elements most likely to wreak total destruction. As the apparent hero of the film posing his earlier question, “How can I lead?” Curtis seems to be expressing a stoic, “natural leader” sort of reticence familiar from all kinds of popular political fictions, including mainstream electoral politics, Hollywood Westerns, and ­disaster-action movies. In this later retelling, however, we realize that lurking behind Curtis’s stoic reticence is not heroic masculinity, but rather shame and horror at acts he himself has committed. Curtis reveals that in the beginning of the apocalyptic crisis, and when the survivors who could not pay for the expensive “tickets” were placed in the Snowpiercer’s “Tail section” and locked away from the rest of the train, things degenerated quickly into a ­survival-of-the-fittest situation. In this period of crisis, Curtis established himself as a dominant member of the most powerful group in the back of the train, which he describes as essentially rampaging through and terrorizing, killing, and even eating the weak to survive. When such survival logics are installed and pursued to their inexorable end, as we learn from The Walking Dead, they inevitably lead to a brutal and ugly implosion. The story Curtis tells seems headed toward that same end, until one day, he recalls he was about to murder an infant for food, but “an old man, no relation to the baby,” intervenes. The old man, who turns out to be his beloved mentor, Gilliam, grabs the machete from Curtis, shockingly cuts off his own arm just below the elbow, and holds out the limb to Curtis, proclaiming, “If you must eat, eat this. But let the baby live.” So, Snowpiercer asks, how can a man [sic] lead with both his arms when that intact body tells the story of his cowardice and greed, not his superiority? As with The Walking Dead, Snowpiercer’s apocalyptic survival plot puts into play key figures of liberal individualism and human survival as a struggle for dominance that have together long upheld Western liberal concepts collectivity and governance. By pushing the presumptions of survivalist individualism to their logical extreme and then leaping out of that plot of ­self-interest and ­self-preservation, Snowpiercer introduces another logic and an alternative vision of both individual psychic subjection and collective survival. Like Rick, Curtis’s heroic journey leads both his character and his followers into experiences of loss, humiliation, and devastating violence and death. But although the expected forms of individual heroism are shown to be ineffective and even complicit in the narrative’s dystopic conditions, Snowpiercer uses these abjections to arrive at a new possibility

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for both collectivity and futurity. Echoing a ­well-known Buddhist parable, Curtis relates how Gilliam’s ­near-unimaginable ­self-sacrifice transformed “the Tail” end of the Snowpiercer, where the poor have been contained and abandoned to “let die” (or to eat one another). But Gilliam’s example opens an alternative and a possibly more sustainable version of survival in which the abandoned masses begin to organize and collaborate for the collective good.8 Gilliam’s sacrificial act, which predates the film’s beginning, and then its retelling toward the end of the movie, signals the film’s utopic leap out of the survival plot and confirms its intention to transform the expected storyworld toward a distinct generic mode—one that is explicitly political and philosophical, though not at all realistic. As discussed in the Introduction, the political valence that adheres to genre in both cinematic and literary representation is conventionally divided between realism’s complicities with existing models of understanding and options and the utopic imaginings of apocalyptic science fiction and other speculative, ­non-realist genres. According to Jameson, the enclosures of realism are best countered by the utopian form, which “insists that its radical difference is possible and that a break is necessary…. But it asserts this by forcing us to think the break itself.”9 Some other theorists are less sanguine about utopian narratives, especially the apocalypse allegory’s evasion of “what things will be like after the break,” such as Peter Paik, who argues that the “academic Left has proven incapable of providing a credible or compelling alternative to liberal capitalist status quo, as its vision of justice and reform are largely variations on the [sociopolitical] order that currently exists.”10 For Paik and some others, utopia and dystopia constitute a mistaken opposition because both remain constrained linguistically, generically, and politically by the imaginaries of their geohistorical context, and thus perpetuate dominant language, narratives, and thought systems. However, more recent scholars eschew the totalizing logic of this version of allegorical thinking to emphasize the provisional, partial, and potential visions of what José Muñoz explains as “quotidian utopianism.”11 For theorists like Muñoz, Lothian, and Jayna Brown, the ­so-called logical inconsistencies of utopian modes and narratives work through a distinct narrativity that shifts audiences into new directions, even if elements and bits of old stories still cling to them. However, Snowpiercer is an insistently totalizing allegorical apocalypse vision, one which Canavan has argued should be linked to a longer history of apocalyptic cinema that he names “necrofuturism” for its use of the apocalypse allegory to articulate a ­dead-end for both the political and imaginative options generated in capitalist realism and liberal modernity: “even though capitalism ultimately destroys the conditions for its own existence (as we knew it would, as we all saw it doing), the structural



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deprivations it produces nonetheless survive in the future to be reproduced in an unhappy ­post-capitalist context, human misery taking on the force of a law of nature.”12 Tracking the debates that have swirled around ­Joon-ho’s popular cult film, Canavan highlights Snowpiercer’s debt to a previous generation of political ­sci-fi films from the 1970s, exemplified by the dystopian classic, Soylent Green (dir. Richard Fleischer, 1973). In this genealogy, the political valence of necrofuturist media is critical, but largely nihilistic— the catastrophes of global capitalism (overpopulation in Soylent Green, global warming, social inequality, and a disastrous geotechnology fix that froze the planet in Snowpiercer) are shown to be rooted in contemporary political and economic realities, and are portrayed as inescapable even if catastrophic. Canavan defines the category of necrofuturism as encompassing narratives that “anticipate the future as a devastated world of death, and yet simultaneously insist that this world of death is the only possible future.”13 What is the impact of such a necrofuturist narrative on the speculative imagination? In the case of Soylent Green, the closing off of any alterative futurity in its notoriously bleak ending produces an ­apocalypse-as-futility subgenre that can be understood as a variant of capitalist realism. Also discussed in previous chapters, Fisher’s Capitalist Realism (2012) details the failure of contemporary aesthetic culture and its political imagination to effectively counter the persistence of capitalist logics. As Fisher puts it, “Poverty, famine, and war can be presented as an inevitable part of reality, while the hope that these forms of suffering could be eliminated is easily painted as naive utopianism. Capitalist realism can only be threatened if it is shown to be in some way inconsistent or untenable; if, that it is to say, capitalism’s ostensible ‘realism’ turns out to be nothing of the sort.”14 While I suggest that Snowpiercer makes a key leap out of its ­dead-end dystopia through a final utopian apocalyptic ending, I follow Canavan in appreciating the work the film does to establish a critical necrofuturist allegory of a terrible and utterly ­man-made catastrophe that leans heavily on its primary allegorical referent: global neoliberal regimes and logics. Rivera’s Sleep Dealer presents a related but distinct version of necrofuturist allegory, one that adheres to this narrative ­world-building in which conditions that might appear to be “a curse or a doom handed down by nature” are exposed as “a built and constructed thing, a horror that has been deliberately designed for us and which is actively being managed by the powerful.”15 These conditions are also explicitly neoliberal and capitalist, but Rivera’s film also underlines its concern with globalization’s extensions of neoliberal control into places and lives that are never even offered a ruse of choice or benefit. With the U.S.–Mexico border and the environmental and economic devastation of transnational corporate and state power as its

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referent, Sleep Dealer’s allegory alludes to a distinct and important archive of knowledge and dynamics that here take an unusually central role. As a cultural producer, Rivera is known for his embrace of the democratizing of access provided by the internet and its alternative platforms for artistic and cultural work. Film and cultural theory scholar Amy Sara Carroll notes that Rivera is a “­self-proclaimed ‘dot.comic’ and ‘dot.commie.’”16 Rivera also explains his work overall as participating in “rasquache” practice of filmmaking, highlighting his ethical attention to both the aesthetics and production of cultural media. Discussed further below, rasquache is a term from Chicano art and politics that conveys the life and aesthetic practices of those outside and excluded from mainstream cultural production and its resources, a ­do-it-yourself (DIY) approach to both survival and art. Rivera comments: “sampling, whether it’s in ­hip-hop or the recycled imagery of POCHO Magazine … somebody fixing up an old car with pieces from three other cars; a collage aesthetic of the street…. It’s ingrained in our spirit of survival, resistance, and innovation.”17 Both Rivera and ­Joon-ho bring an outsider’s sensibility and approach to their films in these efforts to create alternative, albeit entertaining, visions of the crises of global neoliberal conditions and futurities. While reading Rivera’s film as “apocalyptic” is a bit of a reach, one can say that it depicts both the ­world-ending work already accomplished by neoliberal capitalism and offers a vision—and even a practical blueprint—of successful, if partial and provisional, revolution in both its fictional imaginary and material production. In addition, the experiences and conditions that define Sleep Dealer’s protagonist, Memo Cruz (Luis Fernando Peña), present a new incarnation of the masculine hero in apocalyptic times that offers useful commentary on racialization and heroism, even as he also illustrates some of the undertow of other generic conventions, particularly around gender and heterosexual romance. Both Sleep Dealer and Snowpiercer foreground the question of what options and limits shape speculative critiques of neoliberal regimes, as well as their figuring of a ­still-masculine hero, both of which help illustrate aspects of my central argument about the limitations of white male heroism, but also indicate emerging and generative directions in contemporary allegories of apocalypse and crisis.

Sleep Dealer: Allegories of Global Capital at the Border Near the beginning of Sleep Dealer, viewers are treated to a powerful sequence that resonates with any number of popular ­sci-fi dystopic action



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films of recent years. We see the satirically presented future TV show, DRONES!, a ­sci-fi militarized version of Cops (the popular ­police-centered ­reality-TV series on Fox, 1989–2020) that is broadcasting the ­real-life, and ­real-time, targeting of suspected “aqua terrorists” who attack the “Southern Sector water supply,” which they say is “constantly in crisis,” according to the TV personality narrating the action. Recalling Children of Men’s ­near-future setting and political critique, this ­voice-over also ironically reveals the rhetoric of crisis to be a ­state-sponsored media ploy manufacturing consent to global militaristic domination and terror. As the film’s viewers, we watch as Memo and his brother David (Tenoch Huerta) take a break from a backyard family gathering in rural Mexico, casually switch the TV channel to a broadcast of DRONES!, and start arguing about its quality. This episode’s heroic pilot/­cop-of-the-day is Rodolfo “Rudy” Ramirez (Jacob Vargas), a drone pilot working from a ­corporate-run military installation in San Diego. But soon the brothers, and the film audience, realize with shock and horror that the DRONES! target is Memo’s family home on their small farm, or milpa. The night before, Memo’s innocent DIY hacking activities on a device he ­jerry-rigs out of their satellite dish are intercepted, which has landed his home “first” on the DRONES’ hit list. The fictional TV camera follows Rudy’s point of view as he pilots his drone and sets loose a series of missiles that obliterate their tiny house (casita) and then closes in as Rudy reluctantly shoots down and murders their aging farmer father on live television. Within this early sequence, which is presented as a flashback from Memo’s point of view, Sleep Dealer offers what is in some ways a familiar picture of the dystopic future: a bleak, dry, environmentally destroyed landscape (which is precisely the reality of both arid regions of Mexico and the effects of climate change), a satirical portrait of militarized corporate power, and the sad lives of the helpless individuals trapped under the thumb of said powers. From Soylent Green to ­Wall-E (2008, Pixar Studios) and Minority Report (2002, dir. Steven Spielberg), the picture of future society has often underlined the destructive impacts of global corporate power on both human life and the planet. The most apparent innovation in Sleep Dealer involves the setting and situation: a ­near-empty rural homestead in the pueblo of “Santa Ana del Rio, Oaxaca, Mexico,” which sits near a large dam and lake, the former water source for the region’s agricultural communities that is now incongruously and heavily guarded by soldiers, ­drone-operated military artillery, and weaponized surveillance cameras (“the talking gun,” as Memo calls it). The water is owned by a distant U.S.– based corporation that shakes down the peasants who must go there to buy water that once belonged to them.18 Sleep Dealer’s emphasis on Mexico and Tijuana at the U.S. border as locales that encapsulate the inequality

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and exploitation that shape U.S.–Mexico relations signals its participation in a distinct strain of contemporary speculative fictions and popular culture coming out of Latin American and U.S. Latinx cultural production and perspectives. The interrogation of global economic and environmental dynamics in Sleep Dealer occurs through the trope of the U.S.–Mexico border and the understanding of that region as a microcosm of global late capitalist relations and dynamics. The critical significance of that trope emerges from the actual racial and national histories of inequality and conflict, ­settler-colonial versions of domination and juridical rights, and systems of labor exploitation in the history of national relations since 1848. By collapsing the ­space-time separations of its remote, rural Mexican setting and the centers of global, militarized corporate domination to the north, Sleep Dealer allegorically reframes the long history of war and violence at the border. This history together with the dire, and ­well-publicized, contemporary conditions of immigration, drug wars, femicides, extreme poverty, and environmental degradation at the border help account for the surge in it depictions in popular culture and media.19 The ­Mexico–U.S. border has expanded its significance beyond the region, and even the Americas, to work as a metonymy for processes of globalization and the anxieties and critiques that the current sense of crisis and epochal transition has generated.20 As some have noted, for example, the drug trade (narcotrafficking) can be increasingly understood as an encapsulation of the operations of neoliberal global capitalism: a selective application of rule of law, the banalization of horrific and systemic violence, bodies of workers and other geographically and economically unfortunate bystanders as disposable and replaceable parts, and transnational operations involving more money than many single ­nation-state gross domestic products. Furthermore, the narrative tropes in news media and cultural production featuring drug cartels and drug smuggling often cohere with images and plotlines that join established ideas and previous images about Mexico and its relation to the United States (the outsourcing of cheap labor to maquiladoras (factories), a relative weakening of the rule of law, a chaotic, ­poverty-riddled social fabric, and a concomitant violence and underlying disregard for human life) to constitute iconic elements that are simultaneously representative of “the border” and of late capitalist globalization. The ­long-held “­image-repertoire” of Mexico as a place known for the outsourcing of cheap labor to maquiladoras, a chaotic, ­poverty-riddled social fabric, and concomitant violence and underlying disregard for human life finds its convenient, and plausible, expression in ­drug-cartel dramas and crime and corruption stories.21 Such notions are particularly explicit in the growth of what we might call dystopic border ­s ci-fi, which includes Sleep Dealer and speculative



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literary fiction such as The Water Knife by Paolo Bacigalupi (2015) and Summer of Hate by Chris Kraus (2012). Along with more realist dramas in media such as the Mexican film Miss Bala (2011, dir. Gerardo Naranjo), and Breaking Bad (2008–13) and The Bridge (2013–14) on TV, these are works that illustrate the ­large-scale role occupied by Mexico and the border in ­g lobal-political and aesthetic imaginaries. This looming image of dystopic borderlands participates in, and sometimes critiques, antecedents in notions of Mexico as a “cauldron of chaos” and a basurero (garbage dump) in racialized U.S.–dominated histories and media discourses going back at least to the 19th century.22 And yet, popular culture and speculative works in both Mexico and the United States can often reflect alternative, critical understandings of those stereotypes and histories. Sleep Dealer extends a powerful critique of the brutality of neocolonial regimes in contemporary global capitalism and their roots in histories of settler colonialism, U.S. expansionism, the Mexican state’s own internal colonial expropriations, and corporate global divisions of labor and wealth. Rivera further underlines the links between these histories and the questions of migration and labor that continue to shape ­Mexico–U.S. relations. Both Sleep Dealer and his earlier satirical mockumentary short, Why Cybraceros? (1997), focus on his ­sci-fi neologisms, “coyoteks” and “cybraceros.” Rivera’s terms are drawn from U.S.–Mexico border history and contemporary realities. “Coyote” is the bilingual and binational slang term for the ­guides-for-hire (and often human traffickers) who smuggle migrants across the U.S.–Mexico border, and the “bracero” originated in the U.S. official policy, the Bracero Program (1942–1964), which promoted and managed the migration of Mexican labor to work in U.S. agribusiness. Rivera plays on these transnational histories and labor regimes that create exploitation and risk, as well as salaries and opportunities, for Mexican workers willing to endure the conditions of migration to obtain ­subsistence-level wages by migrating to the United States as cheap labor, sometimes with the blessing of U.S. law and official economic policy, and sometimes not. Cybracero indicates what is both futuristic and yet also very ­long-standing about the film’s satirical presentation of its updated version of the American Dream. Infomaquila likewise mashes together the virtual age and the maquiladoras. Factories were built, starting in 1961 by Mexico as part of the national Border Industrialization Program initiative to encourage foreign investment and stimulate domestic markets, and later became part of a U.S. neoliberal strategy of outsourcing, in transnational juridically designated “export processing zones” (EPZs) around Mexican border cities such as Ciudad Juárez and Tijuana. Offering a dystopic extension of this neoliberal history and present era—an era that explicitly eschews ­domestic-policy regimes, labor laws, and environmental regulation—the portmanteau cybraceros in Sleep

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Dealer cast future workers employed as virtual laborers in a transnational regime of labor, containment, and economic inequality. As Memo’s foreman and boss at the infomaquila says dryly, “We give the United States what they always wanted: all the work and none of the workers.” Before Memo’s father is murdered and his home is blown up, Sleep Dealer underscores its science fictionality by picturing this ­neo-maquiladora in an ­opening-credit sequence that uses blue- and ­green-lit images showing human workers hooked up with tubes and performing “virtual work” (aka the “sleep dealers”) in a large, scary ­laboratory-like room that we later learn is the factory floor of the infomaquila where Memo works. The name for the factories conveys their labor and social conditions, where better wages for the cybraceros come with endless work hours (to exhausted collapse) and the risk of being blinded by the occasional power surges. This sequence is actually a prolepsis, a jumping forward in narrative time, and features a ­close-up of Memo’s own ­wide-open eyes, shot in an alarming, disembodied crop. The dystopic technological wizardry and economic exploitation of the infomaquilas of Tijuana are presented as part of Memo’s memory and an introduction to the world of the film. Then, that memory shifts to warmer toned flashback images of his past, visually invoking a recognizable, and explicitly nostalgic, tradition of “lo Mexicano.”23 The audience sees Memo’s memories of his family’s traditional dinners: fresh tortillas cooked and served by his mother and grandmother to the father and two sons in a dusty and bare, ­open-air kitchen/dining area. These scenes and the juxtaposition of visual tones and vocabularies (cryptic, ­blue-lit ­science-fiction horror and the bleached, pastoral poor, but loving, family life of his past) encapsulate much about the central tension and argument of Sleep Dealer. Melding classical, and fairly conventional, narrative tropes with a ­science-fiction atmosphere conveys the bildungsroman traditional individualist plot of a young man from the provinces who sets off to find his fortune, although in Memo’s case, his decision is forced by both his sense of guilt over his father’s death and the need to find money so that the family can survive—which he can only do by migrating north, as is now the case in much of the global south. And yet, the film’s speculative context and tone promise something new, something else. Memo says early on, in ­voice-over and to his father, that he sees Santa Ana del Rio as “a trap” (una trampa) on the family’s milpa, or farm, which offers no outlets for his youthful energy, ambition, and desire to be in the world: a place that is “dry, dusty, disconnected.” Other critical aspects of the movie’s argument are established in these early scenes, such as when Memo goes reluctantly with his father to the dam to get the water for the family. In ­voice-over, Memo explains how his father had been a modestly successful farmer with many employees, and how he was happy as el patrón del pueblo (the head of the village).



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But all that had “changed”—and was destroyed—when “they” built the dam. The film’s overarching ironic critique of this legal but unjust expropriation of natural resources and livelihood from rural Mexicans is conveyed in the scene when the older man speaks to the “talking gun,” which mechanically translates its demands from ­American-accented English into ­computer-generated Spanish (a la internet ­s earch-engine translator) and arbitrarily announces the cost of 35 liters of water will be “85 dollars. Pause. The price went up.” “Since when?” Memo’s father asks. “Since today.” Memo shakes his head in disgust and complains as they collect water from the lake into their skin sacks, “This is nuts.” The conventional fight between tradition and change is framed in the ­father-son generational tension, and their mutual incomprehension gets a particular twist when the father asks Memo, “Is our future a thing of the past?” His father’s seemingly illogical question underlines the film’s interest in the “price” of global capitalist modernity and its destruction of entire ways of life and other possible futures, figured here as a dehumanizing monetization and expropriation of their local water supply. The temporalities of past, present, and future within its ­science-fiction narration are blurred. Or as one reviewer puts it, this dystopia could be taking place “40 years or 40 days in the future.”24 The opening sequence of Memo as a cybracero, hooked up with tubes to the machines that transport his labor cybernetically, i.e., immaterially, to the United States, signals the other main ­s cience-fiction element that is significant to the story: that the market and new ­c yber-technologies are

Memo (Luis Fernando Peña) working in Sleep Dealer.

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working together as an exploitive force and dominating mediator of not simply labor, but also all lived experiences and psyches. Picturing Memo’s own memories of his family in Santa Ana del Rio in a distinct yellow lighting and antiqued edging (suggesting a warm, nostalgic filter), the film injects visual markers of pathos and poignancy that rely on shared codes about family, rural tradition, and photography. But the antiqued edging also encodes the more cynical, or perhaps just ­low-budget, sensibility at work here, because Sleep Dealer uses this edging to indicate when we are watching various characters’ memories through the filter of a ­social-media platform known as “TruNode.” From both the romance that finds Memo later in the film and the TV commercials he and his brother watch from the village, we learn that this ubiquitous media platform is the “world’s number one memory market” that promotes itself with ads claiming, “your memories are too precious to waste. Sell them at TruNode.” At once satirical parody and prescient ­near-future scenario, TruNode’s business model requires content providers to upload their memories into a database where they are put up for sale to anonymous online bidders who consume them. The commodification of an individual’s “life” is now manifested in this market of dreams, of personal memories. When Memo meets Luz Martínez (Leonor Varela), the eventual love interest that Memo first encounters on the bus to Tijuana, she identifies herself as a “writer,” but actually what she does is sell her own ­computer-authenticated memories to make a living. And it turns out that she’s been failing at this enterprise of hyperbolic ­s elf-branding and commodification. Luz’s memories aren’t selling, possibly because they are rather boring. Luz enters the film as a woman of the world (originally from Mexico City, now also chasing her own dreams in Tijuana) and appears to be independent and savvy, smiling warmly at Memo on the bus as she takes the seat beside him. However, Luz’s bohemian and ­street-smart persona is both an attractive asset and an obfuscation of her own subjugation within ­c yber-networks that structures this dystopic future, a subjugation the viewer glimpses when she is shown at home in her apartment, drinking tea as her computer relays a video call from a student debt collector. Luz then decides to upload a new “story” about Memo, “un migrante del Santa Ana del Rio” (a migrant from Santa Ana del Rio). As the audience watches, Luz relates her memory of Memo by starting the story of their encounter: “Al principio, no me impresionó mucho. Se veía como todos los demás” (“At first, I didn’t think much of him. He looked … like all of the others”).25 Critic Michael ­Martinez-Raguso has remarked on the tension in Sleep Dealer between a “horizontal” level of meaning of assemblages and affective alliances—which is evidenced in both its transnational themes and general underworld/outskirts setting and plotline—and the “vertical” relations of



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economic subsumption and hierarchy that reflect both ­science-fiction conventions and capitalist logics of exploitation.26 TruNode is an apt illustration of the ambiguity lodged in Sleep Dealer’s representation of the worker as occupying the “border between the configurations of the ­factory-based age of the industrial revolution and the increasingly immaterial postmodern world of images and cybernetic networks.”27 Some media critics have praised the gesture toward individual agency suggested by TruNode’s reliance on, and archiving of, human memory and thus a valorizing of the individual. However, I agree with ­Martinez-Raguso that the film exposes how the commodification that structures this relation between “the network” and individuals ultimately depicts the displacement of the human body and its capacities within unregulated privatized and exploitive markets. The potential for liberatory possibilities seems limited, trapped even, in the film’s dystopia—at least until the finale, when Memo, Luz, and Rudy appropriate the network for themselves.28 Memo’s disgraced and melancholy departure from Santa Ana del Rio after his father’s death (for which his family blames him) bluntly invokes a hero’­s-journey mythic plotline, and underlines Sleep Dealer’s reliance on the heroic monomyth in its generic ­mash-up of ­s ci-fi dystopia, romance, and classic ­19th-century bildungsroman genres. The film’s recourse to a fairly conventional quest plotline within its satirical ­sci-fi critiques indicate its collage of ­standard-issue generic markers and story lines. As discussed above, Rivera has described his method as part of a “rasquache aesthetics,” after the Chicano art movement’s reappropriation of the Nahuatl word rasquache, to which this collage of genres might also pertain. Chicano activists and artists starting in the 1970s inverted and revalorized the word to signify a countercultural politics and aesthetics that grew in popularity and visibility in Chicano art and cultural studies in the 1990s. With roots in “­low-rider” car culture and in activist art at the height of the Chicano movement’s cultural influence in the 1970s, rasquachismo adopts the imposed necessity of repurposing found and available objects, often discarded or considered useless, and revalorizes such practices for both life and art—becoming an important element and discussion in Chicano art and culture that has been theorized and promoted for decades.29 Rivera links his use of rasquache to other minority aesthetic practices such as sampling in ­hip-hop and recycling imagery in poster art, which Debra Castillo explains “becomes a conscious and conscientious cultural practice”—one that she further links to the ­web-based political activism that Rivera also draws on for key elements in both Sleep Dealer and projects such as Why Cybraceros?30 The satirical thrust of both TruNode in Sleep Dealer and Rivera’s other media and film projects reflects ­long-standing elements in Rivera’s work,

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particularly, as Castillo notes, “how to think together [about] issues related to morality, globalization, and the invisibilized peoples of the global south, who bear the brunt of globalization’s noxious effects.”31 In addition to the geopolitical problems of the U.S.–Mexico border and drawing from rasquachismo as a political aesthetic and life practice, Rivera has been greatly influenced by artists advocating for ­web-based political activism.32 Rivera and other artists working across new media raise questions that link the impact of new technologies on our forms of selfhood and community (down to the level of the body and its experiences and capacities), as well as to these technologies’ perpetuation of—or opposition to—problems of social injustice and persistent ideologies such as race, ethnicity, and global inequality. Here, we begin to see how the material realities of ­art-making and culture and the philosophical preoccupations with new subjectivities become entwined at this intersection of traditional popular form and new media in Sleep Dealer. ­Martinez-Raguso and Castillo, along with several film critics, have pointed out that the ­low-budget effects and cinematic technologies used in Sleep Dealer reflect its own marginal funding and transnational production history, illustrating how Rivera uses these constraints productively as part of a rasquache political aesthetics of “making the most out of the minimum.”33 Likewise, Castillo notes that Rivera’s ­web-based documentaries and other projects on his “Invisible Cinema” website participate in larger scale ­new-media concerns about what sort of people are being generated by the powerful combination of new technologies and late capitalism. N. Katherine Hayles famously coined the term “posthuman” to signal this “new kind of subjectivity characterized by distributed cognition, networked agency that includes human and ­non-human actors, and fluid boundaries dispersed over actual and virtual locations.”34 The intersection of the emergent discourse of the posthuman and the speculative satires of Sleep Dealer brings my discussion back to the film’s organization, a pastiche of genre conventions and political and aesthetic strategies that articulates a powerful allegory of revolution, even as it also relies on the ­somewhat-worn tropes of heterosexual romance and the ­history-changing capacities of an individual heroic protagonist.

Border Futurities of Heroism and Heterosexual Romance: Revisioning and Racializing Masculine Agency “From Below” As the protagonist, Memo’s hero’­s-quest trajectory (on his way to the big city and the riskier opportunities of Tijuana) signals a shift to a more



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conventional story arc within the film. Critics and reviewers have remarked on the contrast between the film’s, at best, “serviceable” plot and its sophisticated critique and satire of U.S., Mexican, and global economic realities and media cultures. This mix of modes and tones is underlined in Sleep Dealer’s appropriation of the familiar ­boy-from-the-provinces story that is at the heart of the classic bourgeois novel and many ­science-fiction franchises, including Star Wars (which Rivera names as an influence). In both Rivera’s film and such stalwarts of the ­sci-fi genre, the emphasis is on the masculine hero’s journey at the story’s center. While Sleep Dealer introduces realist issues of historical racial, economic, and geopolitical differences into a genre sometimes criticized for erasing them, gender is notably not listed among its preoccupations. I agree with Carroll that the film’s narrative positioning of Luz as a “traitorous Woman” should give admiring critics some pause and indicates some key ways that “Sleep Dealer falls short in its imaginings of the politics and erotics of interconnectivity.”35 This elision of gender as key to analyses of structures of domination and social transformations resonates with the discussion of Children of Men in Chapter One. In Sleep Dealer, too, the recourse to a hero’­s-journeyplot template suggests the film’s underlying reliance on generic conventions and hierarchies of gender and heterosexual romance that are indeed serviceable—or dare I say, convenient? This pragmatic genre compromise speaks to both the generative capacities and constraints of generic models when it comes to reimagining political and social orders. Sleep Dealer confirms the argument from previous chapters that gender, like race, is allegorical, and we see how the function of gender difference—depicted here in the romance between Luz and Memo—maintains a familiar story, even as the work as a whole launches a powerful critique of social and political systems that challenges conceptions of both individual and collective agency. In Sleep Dealer, that heterosexual romance does necessary work in binding the viewer to Memo and developing his character into a new sort of hero, but I suggest that this recourse to the romance plot raises a key question: What does this “need for narrative” produce in the viewer, and how does it serve, or undermine, the critique that these speculative allegories clearly intend? In many ways, Memo’s situation reflects the double nature of Rivera’s narrative project: to represent the migrant worker as hero—and even better, a ­co-hero in a new “­homo-social bonding of a Mexican and a Chicano” (i.e., Rudy)—within an overarching project of visibilization, of making narratively legible and significant the experiences and lives of Mexican migrant workers and the neoliberal global conditions that shape them.36 Sleep Dealer exposes the social and economic structures that have produced these workers as seemingly abject. When Luz describes Memo as being “just like all the others,” she signals both the stereotype—the

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nameless, endless wave of rural poor heading north to find work in its dystopic world—and the film’s project of recasting that migrant as protagonist and person of interest. Early in the film, an anonymous buyer, later revealed to be drone pilot Rudy Ramirez, promises to purchase “all” the memories Luz can produce about Memo, so she pursues Memo through the alleys of Tijuana. Luz then offers crucial help in navigating Tijuana and its dangers and opportunities, even though Memo is clearly beneath her socially, and thus romantically. In these scenes, Luz is established as simultaneously an untrustworthy femme fatale with her own ulterior agenda and the emblematic proof of Memo’s specialness. Her interest in Memo (initially, secretly transactional) and their emerging romantic relationship are what make his journey into the world of the sleep dealers a success. Luz arguably fulfills several ­mythic-narrative functions from the standard heroic monomyth: hero’s mentor, the female temptress, and the goddess who bestows “the secret.” For instance, while she is solidifying a trust relationship with Memo, Luz helps him get his nodes—by doing the procedure herself—and finds him a job with the sleep dealers. Luz’s attention, and eventually desire, confirms that Memo is unique and worthy of the viewers’ attention, though the film itself has already shaped our identification with him through the structures of ­close-up and reverse shots and ­voice-over narration. But it is the romance that fully pulls Memo’s existence out of the incipient mass anonymity of “impoverished Mexican villager” and into the singularity of the plot’s drama.37 Deploying a collage of generic tropes and narrative conventions allows Sleep Dealer to both render Memo as a central object of narrative focus and identification and to use his predicament allegorically in order to stage a critique of particular sets of circumstances and discourses that would otherwise erase him as a subject and his story as one of note. Recalling Castillo’s summary of Rivera’s overall preoccupation with the “invisibilized peoples of the global south,” this “making visible” work of narrative representation and plot in contemporary speculative fiction of the border centers and foregrounds experiences of persons otherwise dismissed or erased, or as Mbembe calls them, the “living dead.” This generic pairing of romance and dystopia also indicates the knot of representational challenges engaged in the film and, I think, in speculative popular culture more generally. If Van Jones is correct that Sleep Dealer could be seen as the harbinger of a cool, “new” subgenre of “social justice ­s ci-fi,” the film also raises thorny questions about how to make this genre appealing and productive. That is, how to depict and account accurately for the sort of personhood and human capacities that are produced by the machine of late capital’s transnational abjected labor and



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migration depicted in the film—and do so without alienating audiences? Rivera launches a tricky dance with necrofuturist futility and the possibility of hope and change—perhaps because if the film does not signal that hope and potential agency for Memo, it risks peddling a variety of “poverty porn” that participates in that familiar fetishizing of the suffering of various Third World others and bemoaning their inevitable lack of options. This ­well-worn trope leans toward depicting migrant labor as the ­already-living-dead, in terms of narrative position and political inclusion. The images of Memo searching the streets for someone to help him “conseguir los nodos (get some nodes)” emphasize his being “lost” in the city among crowds of equally desperate and poor fellow migrants (many are ­ex-workers blind from having to wear the ­steel-blue eye contacts that “connect” their bodies into the network that enables their virtual jobs) until Luz finds him again. “Qué milagro (what a miracle),” she says a bit ironically, acknowledging she had been looking for him, though not saying why. For his part, Memo has to admit he’d been tricked and robbed by a ­would-be coyotek the night before, an experience of humiliation and failure. While sympathetic, the narrativization of the suffering of others who remain anonymous and inevitably beaten threatens to reenact their erasure and a fetishistic invocation of anonymous “living dead” for whom nothing can change—casualties of global capitalist realism. And yet, for Memo to become a protagonist, a hero even, affirms a familiar humanist logic of agency and personhood—especially masculine agency and leadership— that promises ­large-scale transformation and change through the actions of a single, special actor. Sleep Dealer oscillates between showing how Memo belongs among these people and in these streets, but also that he quickly, very quickly, rises above and is “picked” by Luz and later “found” by Rudy. Recalling Rick Grimes at the end of Chapter Three, I suggest that the ironic repetition of Rick’s heroic leader function in that narrative segues into an abjection of his agency and his capacities that ultimately repudiates that heroism and its usefulness to the community. By pivoting from the genre’s expectations of male heroism as being what “saves” to showing that it is what destroys the collective, The Walking Dead helps us track the productive uses of abjection and how its speculative apocalypse disrupts conventional ideas about both masculinity and individual agency (which, in the Western tradition, are essentially the same thing). In Sleep Dealer, that masculine heroism—though importantly, no longer racialized as white— and its place in generic conventions operates differently and raises questions regarding what the film’s heterosexual romance plot is doing in a revolutionary allegory and to what extent that romance helps or hinders the project of articulating a difficult referent and providing a new alternative. Overall, Sleep Dealer signals that its main argument is aimed primarily

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at global regimes of capital and ­state-sponsored violence that maintain geographic and cultural domination of the “South” by the “North.” Interestingly, Memo feels he has made a choice to participate in this global regime and sees himself as a having agency in pursuing the opportunity provided by the infomaquilas to make money to send to his family. When Luz “gives” him his nodes in a special room behind a seedy bar (depicted as a kind of ­high-tech, filthy tattoo parlor/border brothel), Memo’s ­voice-over commentary is telling: “Por fin, podría conectar mi sistema nervioso al otro sistema, la economia globale (finally, I could connect my nervous system to the other system, the global economy).” In the next scene, the foreman at Memo’s new workplace, a multiservice infomaquila on the outskirts of the city, makes the apocryphal American Dream comment about “all of the work with none of the workers” and impatiently tells Memo to get to work: “Tu futura empeza hoy (your future begins today).” But this future is incredibly grim. The ­wide-panning shots that show a ­smog-clogged cityscape in San Diego—on the supposedly “better” side of the border—highlight how dystopic and gray and relentlessly inhuman this potential future world is. And the work Memo does as a sleep dealer laborer, as a remote construction worker on a skyscraper in San Diego, is both deadly and alienating, as illustrated when another node worker is electrocuted by what seems to be a blown fuse that sends the power of the network streaming directly into his body. The “power” that symbolically courses through the sleep dealer factory and the bodies of its workers becomes a metaphor for what this form of labor really is and does. As Memo muses after sending more money to his grateful mother, “¿Cómo la iba a decir la verdad? … Me estaba robando la energia, mandándola lejos (How can I tell her the truth? … They were stealing my energy, sending it far away.)” In the unregulated world of the infomaquilas, as in ­real-life maquiladoras, factories are run on the cheap, and workers are left (free) to survive as they can, or not. Memo gets no instruction on how to do the skilled job of welding steel beams thousands of feet in the air, and through ­shot-reverse shots from these eerie work sites to his clouded blue eyes, wide open with a combination of terror and concentration, we see how precarious his position, literal and figural, actually is. Memo realizes that along with the hours of his days and nights and the exhausting labor demanded of him, the sleep dealers were literally robbing him of his body’s own proper energy and life force—a sale that he did not sign on for. Up to this point, the main thrust of Sleep Dealer remains predominantly necrofuturist—the options for Memo are limited, and he has little comprehension of there even being a problem with his options. But two things happen in the denouement of the film’s various threads. First, Rudy comes to Tijuana, crossing the U.S.–Mexico border from the north,



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disappearing into its nameless hordes, and (naturally) locating Memo with little trouble. Meanwhile, the love story between Memo and Luz reaches its generically required obstacle when Memo discovers her TruNode account and realizes that she has been selling her memories of him. But Luz’s technical knowledge, useful to Memo throughout the film, brings them back together for the final plot sequence. The issue of what Luz does in the story underlines some of the problems presented by the romance element and its regressive implications—her function as support and witness highlights the gender logics of traditional cinematic narrative. Luz’s role is one of exposition, ancillary support, and elaboration of the drama of Memo— she can herself give Memo his nodes, and during the procedure, she offers both Memo and the audience helpful information on the process, and she is the means through which Rudy can find him as well as provide tech support for their plan. But although Luz plays a crucial role, her actions reflect gendered narrative conventions and further the requisite centering of the masculine protagonist, which indicate that gender difference and the presumption that human agency is necessarily masculine are not central to the film’s critiques. Recalling that the instantiation of the concepts of individualism and agency emerges from liberalism colonial heritage, its racialized and gendered definitions of who counts as a capable individual, this untroubled core of concepts in Sleep Dealer signals that the film’s visionary speculations on global inequality and ­population-level abjection will only go so far. In the end of the film, with Luz’s help, Memo and Rudy break back into Memo’s factory, use Rudy’s military and pilot credentials, steal a drone, and blow up the dam. The collaboration between Rudy and Memo, and a reluctant Luz, belabors one of the film’s many controlling metaphors, that of “crossing to the other side.” Luz had used this phrase to describe her own experience of going to rural Mexico with a new friend and her desire to write about it. Now, it is Rudy who crosses into Tijuana and offers to help Memo, though the audience is not told of the plan until it unfolds in the penultimate sequence. With Luz’s technical knowledge and Memo’s access to the infomaquila, Rudy hacks into his own employer, the militarized arm of Del Rio Water Company, where he commandeers a weaponized drone and uses it to blow up the dam Del Rio built near Memo’s family home in Santa Ana del Rio. In the film’s clever twist, Rudy himself is now an “aqua terrorist.” This collective and ­cross-border “revolution from below” realizes Sleep Dealer’s larger allegorical project and demonstrates its utopic leap: Perhaps significant transformation of the means of production and creating a futurity for its disposable leftovers is possible after all. With U.S. missiles and Mexican knowledge and labor (a rasquache revolution), Rudy and Memo destroy at least one small piece of the machinery of control,

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expropriation, and economic and military violence aimed at Memo’s family and village, and at Mexico and the global south. This act also bestows on Memo full heroic status, as illustrated in the vibrant coloring and ecstatic face of his mother on their next video call, when she and her brother show him the immense water flow cascading through the broken dam. ­Close-ups of a ­t ime-lapse image of emerging seedlings symbolize the rebirth of Memo’s home and indicate that the village, family, and region are saved— for the moment, at least—rescued by Memo and Rudy from their consignment to the abandoned living dead. Memo’s heroism is both political and narrative, i.e., mythic, in character. The destruction of the dam with Rudy marks his emergence as the hero who has full “mastery of two worlds,” in the phrasing of Campbell. The allegorical significance of the collaboration between Rudy and Memo is given further ironic emphasis when Rudy disappears into the depths of rural Mexico because he can never return to the United States and must go on the run, moving further south on the bus he boards at the end. This crossing over again underlines the revolutionary porosity and mobility that Rivera’s film posits as key to the futurity of the border—a downward, ­s outh-facing mobility, emphasized through Luz and Rudy, as well as the more conventional upward or northward directions embodied in Memo’s journey. For his part, Memo is seemingly trapped at the border: Like Rudy, he can ever go home again. And yet, Memo is hopeful, and the message of the film is too. Memo asks, “Tal vez hay un futuro para mí aquí? Al lado de todo. Un futuro con un pasado (Maybe there is a future for me here. At the edge of everything. A future with a past).” The film’s penultimate shot, done in a ­special-effect palimpsest that suggests both their presence and their shadowy status, shows Memo walking with Luz off into a literal sunset, shining off the water of an irrigation canal. With Luz by his side, Memo’s final ­voice-over contemplates the possibility of his, and their, future, “si me connecto … y lucho (if I can connect … and fight).” Sleep Dealer upholds the heterosexual romance, and the implications of that genre’s concept of a progressive plot of reconciliation and reproductive futurity, as a sort of ballast to its generic collage of speculative fiction, critique, and utopic leap. The question of what will come if Memo continues to “connect and fight” is left open at the end. But while its utopic leap is provisional, voiced as a conditional “if,” the film affirms its potentiality in both narrative thrust and images that tie Memo’s personal trajectory to another summary image of the border wall, pictured as it is in the present moment in the early 21st century. To what extent do the romance and ­s cience-fiction genres that dominate Sleep Dealer work together toward a familiar allegory of romantic love, and thus traditional humanist conceptions of a heteronormative subjectivity and agency? Or if each genre



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Luz (Leonor Varela, left) and Memo (Luis Fernando Peña) walking along the canal in final shot of Sleep Dealer.

constitutes a distinct narrative vehicle within the film, does that generic bricolage, its rasquache aesthetic and vision of sociality, enable Sleep Dealer to articulate a genuinely new and critical vision for both the dystopic present and an imagined future for the border and its populations, as well as its heroes?

Snowpiercer: Revisioning Utopia, Heroism, and the Work of Abjection In the dramatic finale of Snowpiercer, audiences are shown another picture of both dystopic and revolutionary futurity, largely, I argue, because of how it treats its heroic protagonist and the position it puts him in. Unlike Sleep Dealer, Snowpiercer insists on a speculative, fully science fictional and largely ­non-referential, storyworld, so its particular allegory works almost completely at the level of political and cinematic imagination. As in Mad Max, the apocalypse has in fact happened. In a concerted and international effort in 2014 to reverse global warming, a grand geoengineering fix was attempted. A chemical called “C47” was dispersed into to the atmosphere on a huge scale to “cool the earth,” but the result was catastrophic: “The world froze, and all life became extinct,” the opening screen narrative informs viewers. Here, the cautionary view of what revolution might entail and actually

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change—that is, what will the “something else” offered by utopia end up looking like?—is also invoked as a question from the very start of the film. In the first spoken dialogue, Edgar (Jamie Bell), a younger man who shadows Curtis’s every move with eager energy, complains to Curtis about social stratification and oppression of their situation as they wait for their “protein bars.” This topic apparently occupies most of their conversations. Edgar: “Those bastards in the front think they own us. Eating steak and listening to string quartets.” Curtis: “We’ll be different when we get there.” Edgar: “I want steak.” That’s always the trouble, as Paik and philosophers like Nietzsche have argued for centuries: The oppressed often want most simply to take the place of their oppressors, to enjoy their luxuries, which inevitably installs the same unjust system with different actors and new victims. Yet, Snowpiercer offers a narrative that ultimately operates against the political evacuation and defeat offered by the pessimism of necrofuturistapocalypse cinema. At the same time, the film is also resistant to the sentimental liberal recuperations of contemporary mainstream apocalypse films such as 2012 (and the whole Emmerich oeuvre as discussed in the Introduction). For one thing, there is no heterosexual romantic partnering in this story; and though there are children, the mechanisms of reproductive futurity are presented in a distinct and odd fashion. In terms of the necrofuturist trend of speculative popular film, some critics, including Canavan, argue that the satire of Snowpiercer’s preposterous scenarios and its overt allegorical plotting and symbolism push it toward politically productive critique, particularly its climatic final scene. I agree that the work done by these hyperbolic allegorical incitements—which include the vulgar Marxism of the train’s hierarchies and spatial organization, the cycles of failed revolution and return to hegemony indicated in the plot, as well as the film’s explosive ending. In addition, though, this ending reveals a crucial role for Snowpiercer’s engagement with questions of gender and racial difference, an engagement that launches the plot out of a closed capitalist realism, and even necrofuturism, while hyperbolically announcing the end of classical liberal narratives of individual agency and collective survival. Snowpiercer opens with an overtly allegorical, and even melodramatic, invocation of the dominant visual and narrative figuration of the masculine ­protagonist-as-hero. This invocation indicates the film’s critical use of cinematic identification by focusing the camera, and the audience, almost solely on Curtis, the hero played by Chris Evans. Curtis is pictured as a classical reluctant hero; first, through a series of ­close-up shots of his face, emphasizing the play of emotion across his handsome visage, as well as his being practically the only human figure decipherable for much of the first parts of the film as it rushes through emphatically dark and chaotic action



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sequences. Curtis’s character is developed through the opening sequences that highlight his leadership role, as well as his ambivalence about occupying that role. Regarding his apparent mentee Edgar, Curtis says with irritation to Gilliam, “He shouldn’t worship me the way he does. I’m not who he thinks I am.” As Curtis tours purposefully through the back end of the train, checking on the people crammed into their bunks, the only available living spaces, he is greeted with deference and respect, and some affection—especially by Tanya (Octavia Spencer), whose ­5-year-old son Timmy has possession of the protein bar carrying an important secret message regarding the planned revolution. Much of Curtis’s leadership appears to be grounded on his physical magnificence and dominance and the status he clearly holds among the others in the train’s Tail section (Front and Tail take on overt and even ­heavy-handed significance throughout the film). He seems to be in charge of both the haphazard community and the rebellion. “We must act,” insists Edgar. “Not now,” replies Curtis. “When?” “Soon.” But once the generic conventions are satisfied and we have cathected to the handsome, caring, and touchingly humble but determined man whom Curtis is presented as being, the film shifts into another sequence, the uprising itself, in scenes and narrative twists that ultimately suggest some of the problems with those generic conventions, and the plots and political logics that adhere to them. Curtis and Gilliam are planning to fight their way to rescue Namgoong Minsoo (Song ­Kang-ho, a ­well-known South Korean ­action-film star who also stars in Parasite), a security expert imprisoned in the “prison section” for reasons we never learn. The figure of Nam raises questions from the start, as Edgar gripes, “If he’s a security expert, why didn’t he break himself out?” Gilliam, though, avers his importance: “Our fate depends on this man.” And Curtis agrees, “If we can get him out, he can take us all the way to the front of the train.” Gilliam pauses and asks, “The very Front section?” “Yeah.” This brief dialogue, like the discussion of who will lead mentioned at the start of the chapter, conveys surreptitious foreshadowing whose significance is not revealed until much later. In this case, it is Gilliam’s thoughtful pause that indicates that he too may not be who his adoring sidekick thinks he is. The uprising scenes also make explicit how a brutal bureaucratic regime of violence manages the train’s “Tail section” and guarantees the misery of its inhabitants. In a key early moment before the planned uprising, the military guards invade the bunk section, calling for a midnight assembly and demanding “all the children” to come forward. The terror on everyone’s faces is juxtaposed to Curtis’s watchful attention as a clean, plump, ­red-haired woman in a ­bright-yellow 1980s–style power suit enters the room silently and imperiously. Claude (Emma Levie), as she is called, wordlessly proceeds to measure the height and arm lengths of several

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children and then notices, with uncanny attention, a faint sound. Tanya stands silent, miserably looking down as the woman lifts Tanya’s skirt with the tape measure. An imperceptible crisis seems to have passed, but then Tanya yells, “Run, Timmy! Run,” as her small boy streaks away. Nevertheless, Timmy is captured by the guards. Claude measures him and indicates that the guards should take Timmy and another boy away, as their parents scream. The father of the other boy, Andrew (Ewen Bremner), rushes at the guards in agonized fury and throws his shoe at Claude, causing her to bleed (she then creepily and without expression tastes the blood on her fingers—as if it were a novelty in her experience to bleed). The next scene has more guards, with a coterie of new faces, military and bureaucratic officials, performing an elaborate juridical ritual, as the camera focuses on ­antique-looking surgical tools, in which they apply a mechanical device to the abjectly filthy and grunting Andrew, ­now-desolate father of the other boy taken, and announce, “At this altitude, seven minutes are all that’s needed.” As an awkwardly large, antique stopwatch is hung around his neck and his arm is put in a hole to hang in the freezing air, the man commences to scream in agony as his arm is frozen, then shattered in a baroque and grotesquely “official” amputation.38 While Andrew’s arm is hanging outside the train, another immaculately dressed woman, this time in bright purple, enters. A ­high-ranking military official informs her, “Seven minutes allotted for your speech, sir.” The woman (Tilda Swinton, with false teeth to make her appear remarkably ugly, as well as ludicrously officious), holds up the shoe and begins her speech: “Passengers. This is not a shoe. This is disorder. This … is size 10 chaos. This. See this? This is death. In this locomotive we call home, there is one thing between our warm hearts and the bitter cold: Clothing? Shields? No! Order! Order is the barrier that holds back the frozen death. Order. We—all of us Passengers on this Train of Life—must remain in our allotted station. We must each of us occupy our particular, ­pre-ordained position…. In the beginning, you were each issued a ticket: First Class, Economy, and freeloaders like you. Eternal order is prescribed by the sacred engine. All things flow from the sacred engine, and all things in their place, all passengers in their Section, all water flowing, all heat rising pay homage to the sacred engine. [Pause]. Now, as in the beginning, I belong to the Front. You belong to the Tail.”

Here, Minister Mason, Swinton’s character, baldly and with an utter lack of ironic awareness or compunction names and explains both the hierarchies of the Snowpiercer and the discourses that have developed to justify and perpetuate them. The grotesque resonances with contemporary justifications for power, oppression, and the interests of the privileged are clearly being presented with an ironic salute to the current global social order and



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the role of state policing and government pronouncements in upholding it. Mason does this while also throwing in chewy bits of mystical obfuscations about the “sacred engine,” along with the bureaucratic farce. The “sacred” adjective likewise does double duty in the scene’s unholy melding of the operations of a brutal new form of sovereignty that is riven, however, with archaic interpellations of religious and state apparatuses, long after anyone even pretends to believe in them. With Gilliam continuing to advise “patience” and to find alternatives for going to the front of the train, the uprising appears to begin successfully. The rebels get to the prison section and meet Nam, the security expert who designed all the locks in the door that lead to the Front section. He agrees to go with them, but only if his daughter Yona (Go ­Ah-sung) joins them and the two are given two blocks of “uncut Kronole” for every lock he opens. Kronole is industrial waste valuable for its use as an addictive narcotic, one that is also “highly flammable,” Gilliam explains. Yona is 17 and, recalling River in Firefly, quickly revealed to have clairvoyant abilities to see or sense what is on the other side of each door. After getting through two sections, the rebel group learns that the protein bars that are their only food, fed to them daily as we’ve seen, are in fact made from cockroaches. In this car, they see a demented man doing the “cooking,” whom they call Paul (Paul Lazar) and has apparently been left alone in this horrifying industrial “kitchen” for years after being taken from the Tail section. The real trouble arrives at the next car. While Nam struggles with a lock, Yona approaches the closed door and warns in terror, “Lock the gate!” But it’s too late. That opened door reveals a car full of enormous ­medieval-looking soldiers in ­full-face black stocking masks, wielding axes and hatches and chains; clearly, deadly violence is in store. The strongest men push back the women (notably, Tanya) and others deemed old and vulnerable, while Curtis leads his band of men directly into car. With full awareness of what’s in store, the men begin to fight the soldiers as the splattering blood and sounds of ripping flesh vividly represent the cost of the rebellion. The scene also involves a gorgeous, ­slow-motion tracking shot that features Curtis, backlit, as he elegantly and efficiently slaughters enemy soldiers—revealing here his physical strength, bravery, and capacity for horrific violence to a backdrop of mournful chamber music. This battle is interrupted, however, by “the sacred engine” and its rituals of control. When another odd official enters the car to announce that the train is passing through the Yekaterina Bridge, all the combatants stop their deadly swinging of hatches and swords, many in ­mid-swing, and are silent before yelling, “Happy New Year!” Even Edgar mutters, “I hate getting older,” as if that were the main thing on his mind in the midst of the rebellion. The interplay of the “order” of the governance of the train with

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Curtis (Chris Evans, center) in battle in Snowpiercer.

the chaos of the “revolution” reaches absurd intensity in this sequence. After the Yekaterina Bridge and the pause for a ­two-second New Year’s celebration, the fighting continues, only to be interrupted again. Both the beefy soldiers and the filthy rebels from the Tail again pause to listen to Mason, who now lectures furiously at “you people” who are “ingrates” “sucking on the titties of Wilford”; then, she announces, reading from a paper, “Precisely 74% of you will die.” The impassive faces of the rebels are mirrored by the soldiers, who seem to be as bovinely hostile to Mason as the rebels are—and we realize in the following scenes that all of this slaughter, which kills many of the soldiers, too, is being managed and controlled by an unseen authority in the Front of the train. In this way, the film slyly indicates how the soldiers have much in common with the rebels, even as they are locked in the necessary task of fighting and killing them. After her harangue, Mason puts up odd binoculars and says with glee, “This is going to be good.” It turns out they are headed into a long tunnel, and the soldiers don ­night-vision goggles while the rebels realize they are, as Nam puts, “fucked.” The battle reveals the ­no-win logic of the train as both rebels and soldiers die bloody deaths that are relentlessly pictured, though at this point, it is a massacre of the blinded rebels. The soldiers lose their technological advantage, however, when Curtis remembers a match in the hands of a small child and calls for fire—now, Mason is terrified, and the fighting



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reignites with new stakes. In the crux of this ­long-violent sequence in the darkened train, we also see the logic of ­masculine-survivalist leadership. Curtis has been dramatically saved by Edgar during the fight, and Edgar proves willing to do anything for him. And yet, Curtis makes the painful decision to abandon him to be butchered when faced with the opportunity to pursue an advantage: Mason has been seriously injured by a knife thrown by Grey (Luke Pasqualino)—who is featured throughout the uprising as a balletic human weapon, a beautiful, silent assistant and son figure (and/or lover) to Gilliam.39 A ­slow-motion sequence features Curtis’s agonized grimace to show us the emotional pain caused by this difficult, but swift, choice to betray his friend—which also reveals the survivalist (and leaderly) constraints and priorities that govern Curtis’s actions. We then see him running toward Mason at the next door, where the “sacred water car” is located, and taking her hostage, as Edgar is killed. With a knife to her throat, Mason calls for the fighting to “STOP” even as one of the largest, clearly most important henchmen is murdered by Yona. Mason then confirms the ethos behind the train and its rhetoric of both survival and Wilford’s authority (i.e.,she caves cravenly to Curtis’s new power over her). Once captured and weakened, she blabbers that “Wilford” will help them (“Wilford is kind. Wilford is merciful”), then promises to take them to the Front section, which Wilford does not leave—but once there, they must kill Wilford (“I will help you”). Curtis asks, “Why the fuck would we trust you?” and Mason responds, “Because I want to live.” It’s here that the conversation mentioned at the start of this chapter unfolds. In a quiet ­p ost-battle moment, Curtis and Gilliam fully articulate the questions at stake regarding Curtis’s leadership and the backstory behind Gilliam and the history of the train, even though, as I mention, some of its significance is not revealed until the end of the film. As they rest, Gilliam questions Curtis on the need to push to the Front section, suggesting that taking the water section might be “enough” and “farther than any other revolution had gone.” However, Mason has exposed that the water flows from the Front section backward, so they would actually control nothing. Curtis says he will go forward while Gilliam guards the injured, and then when he succeeds in taking the Front section, “I will call for you to lead us.” Here, Gilliam sighs and says, “Stop it, Curtis. Why are you doing that? You know very well that you are already our leader. You have to accept that now.” And Curtis replies, “How can I lead when I have two good arms?” Gilliam nods in full understanding of Gilliam’s reference, which viewers do not understand, while saying something vaguely encouraging about how much better two arms are for “holding a woman,” and the exchange ends with their unspoken acknowledgment of realities viewers do not understand. This exchange also underlines how important Gillian is

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to Curtis and what he believes he is doing with the rebellion. It also echoes with a previous scene of quiet pause with Yona, when she and Curtis discuss their ages. Yona is a “train baby,” that is, born on the train and after the C47 event. Curtis reveals he was 17 when the apocalypse happened (“Seventeen years on Earth. Seventeen on the train”), but when she asks about life on Earth “before,” he replies, “I don’t want to remember anything before I met Gilliam.” Curtis’s character references a long, cinematic history and the generic conventions of heroic characterization that are also, and not coincidentally, foundational to the imagining of the liberal democratic capitalist society and subjectivity that the film both invokes and then slowly and brutally satirizes. The centrality of dominant masculinity to both the hero and the leader functions in popular culture recalls previous discussions of both apocalypse narrative and the frontier myth, which Sleep Dealer manages to largely avoid. Unlike Memo, for example, Curtis embodies notions about masculine strength and ­self-control—generically dominant conceptions of both the frontier and the action hero. As in previous examples, the film invokes a key legacy of this myth of modern gender ideologies, specifically one of masculine power and agency. These legacies include a foundational ambivalence on the question of violence: When is it for good, and when is it destructive? As historian Gail Bederman notes, these “modern gender ideologies … depicted the capacity for rape and violence as an admirable and definitive part of masculine identity.”40 Curtis’s reactions in the midst of the first scenes of the uprising signal the film’s participation in this U.S. history of gender conceptualization and ideology, even given Curtis’s ambivalence—and the audience’s—regarding his capacity for murderous violence as a prerequisite for leadership. The film oscillates between scenes that depict Curtis’s emotional and caring connections to the people in the back of the train, his doubts and anxieties about his capacity to lead, and then his psychological and physical capacity for murderous violence and cruel but necessary ­decision-making. This progression structurally foregrounds the foundational ambivalence toward the physical dominance that both sovereign manhood and hero status require and which Curtis clearly embodies throughout the film—where he is shown to be taller, stronger, thicker (seemingly even better fed), and, yes, whiter than the other downtrodden and ­half-starving characters who scrape a living in the Tail.41 The use of dirty and maimed bodies and ragged versus stylized clothing further intensifies the class and, largely though not fully, racial coding of the train—the occupants of the front cars are shown to be likewise cleaner, elegantly—even ludicrously—clothed, and largely whiter. In her 2014 book, Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War



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on Terror, philosopher Bonnie Mann explicates what she calls the “I Can” body and its function in the system of sexual difference and gendered experience. Following Judith Butler, among others, Mann emphasizes how our conception of the sovereign self, with its basis in sovereign masculinity, is foundationally both defensive and aspirational. It is grounded in a material performance or embodiment of a compensatory fantasy of ­s elf-mastery, dominance, and body integrity—the very capacities that Curtis embodies, too. This imagined or fantasized sovereign self is traditionally produced cinematically through images and scenes that disavow the physical injurability of the self. Which is to say, the impervious male body acts as a token or talisman that defends against violation, prostration, and humiliation as signaled by any loss of ­self-control or breaking of the body’s boundaries—i.e., any injury to the image of individual ­self-directed agency as that which will logically win or dominate every scene or circumstance. Curtis’s oscillations from painful questioning to silent ­s elf-control to violent and powerful attack and leadership (albeit leadership into a massacre) narrativize Snowpiercer’s engagement with gendered conceptions of power and authority, but they also foreshadow an ambivalence that plays a key role in the film’s controversial and dramatically allegorical ending. That is, by the end of the film, questions are raised about what the true function, and cultural work, of leadership is, and who Curtis is and what his character really does. Is his role in the film to uphold not just dominant masculinity, but also the aspirational fantasies of both individual subjection and collective survival that his hero function would indicate? Or does something else happen? After a series of narrow escapes and the awful massacres of a large majority of those following him into battle, many of whom are his friends, Curtis and the seemingly ­drug-addled Nam and Yona are the last of their group to reach the front of the train. Nam has quietly been talking in Korean to his daughter Yona, showing her things about the outside environment through the train’s windows: features of its earth, and ice and snow. He also relates previous attempts to escape Wilford’s train, which had ended in apparent defeat and death. Watchful and sardonically grim, Nam proves himself as Curtis’s equal in his ability to survive and reign superior in his knowledge of the train—knowledge that has been crucial to the uprising. And yet, he and Yona are treated with disdain by Curtis and others for their apparent addiction to Kronole, watching with irritated contempt as they grab handfuls of it while these last three make the final march through the most decadent cars of the Front section. Both Nam and Yona express a critical and ironic distance from Curtis’s earnest and violent revolution, although they attach themselves to it as the only means of escaping their confinement. When they get to the door of Wilford’s car, the home of “the sacred

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engine,” Curtis is crazed with rage, yelling at Nam to “open the goddamn door” as he kicks it violently, and uselessly. After scuffling with Curtis, Nam gives him the last of his two cigarettes, saying through the handy ­voice-box interpreter he’s carried, “Shouldn’t you be grateful? Smoking the world’s last cigarette, you ­Tail-section pig.” This odd break from violence spurs Curtis to tell Nam the story of the Tail section in the first days of the train: “10,000 people in an iron box with no food, no water.” [Pause, as Curtis looks haunted and about to cry.] “We didn’t have time to be thankful. After a month, we ate the weak. You know what I hate about myself? I know what people taste like. I know that babies taste best.” Curtis then relates the story of “men with knives” who killed a woman with a baby and “the old man, no relation, just an old man” who cuts off his arm so they will leave the baby. “I had never seen anything like that,” Curtis says with a catch. Then he reveals, “That baby was Edgar. And I was the man with the knife.” After pausing through his tears, Curtis continues that after Gilliam’s revelatory act, “Men and women in the Tail section came forward and cut off their arms and legs. It was like a miracle.” He also reveals that while he “wanted to,” he could not do it; hence, his two arms. With a plea for how long he’s hated Wilford and waited for this moment, Curtis finally says, “Open the gate. Please.” After shaking his head subtly during the ending, Nam thanks Curtis “for your story,” in Korean as he has throughout, “but I don’t want to open the gate. You know what I really want? I want to open gates. But not this gate. That one.” Nam points to the door of the train. It turns out that Nam collects the highly flammable Kronole not only for intoxication, but also for the express purpose of blowing up the train. Explaining to Curtis his plan to use the Kronole to break through the train door, Nam calls it “the gate to the outside world. It’s been frozen shut for 18 years. You might as well call it a wall. But it’s a fucking gate. Let’s open it and just get the hell out.” Curtis cannot take seriously this call to imagine an alternative to life on the train, insisting it’s “fucking crazy.” Nam details his close observation of signs of melting in the landscape, and thus possible survival “outside,” but Curtis dismisses him—as an addict, as unreasonable, as “crazy”—and in the process reveals his own limited, but realist view of what constitutes “revolution.” At this moment, the ­child-snatching Claude opens Wilford’s door, calmly shoots and wounds Nam, then announces, “Curtis Everett, Wilford extends you a formal invitation to join him for dinner.” Wilford, the train’s “supreme leader” and, apparently, its inventor and a former corporate magnate (played with relish by Ed Harris), is dressed in a bathrobe and cooking over a small stove when he invites Curtis into his compact but glittering quarters and begins a long, horrifying, and yet hilariously satirical disquisition on the logic of the Snowpiercer’s social stratification. From Wilford, we learn with Curtis that the vulgar Marxism of



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these social divisions is entirely by design—a design Wilford claims is both his and Gilliam’s, a revelation that shocks Curtis to his core. Interestingly, Wilford uses the language of ecosystems to justify his governance, which, it turns out, extrapolates the Darwinian logics of liberal individualism into an elaborate “scientific” regime of control, a hyperbolic allegory of both neoliberal capitalism and biopolitics. To maintain “balance in the ecosystem,” Wilford explains, there has to be a way to eliminate excess human baggage/ weight/burden on the fragile and limited supplies of the train. Wilford continues, “The best solution is to have individual units kill other individual units.” And then he asks Curtis, “Medium rare?” as he finishes panfrying their steaks. Explaining the rationale for the uprisings, which he recounts as an official history—including “the great Curtis revolution, an exciting blockbuster production with an ironic twist”—Wilford embodies the jovial brutality of necropolitical leadership and the train’s systemic inequalities. His easy switch from the casual and deadly exercise of his sovereign power to “let die and make live” to mundane matters of sensual pleasure (food, sexual intercourse with a woman, intelligent conversation) further underscores the rhetorical uses of dehumanizing ­capitalist-realist logic, particularly overt when Wilford casually interrupts his explanations, and their dinner, to say, “all that’s left now is to tally up the numbers.” Then, Wilford uses his black ­mid-century rotary phone to call the creepy functionary who identifies himself as “me. I’m at Gilliam’s place,” where he then is shown to be in a small room with soldiers holding guns on dozens of Tail people huddled on the floor. Checking that the number “is still 74%,” Willard holds the phone for Curtis (and viewers) to listen to the gunshots and screams. Wilford easily, and possibly inadvertently, confirms the truth of his close relationship to Gilliam when he starts teasing the increasingly agitated Curtis, seething across the table, by saying: “Calm down. I can see what Gilliam meant. He told me you were brilliant and clever, but always so tense. When was the last time you got laid? Like Gilliam always said, holding a woman is better with two arms.” As the shock of their intimacy sinks in with Curtis, Wilford explains that he and Gilliam working together was part of a larger strategy for ensuring “order” in both the front and the back of the train: “We need to maintain a certain level of anxiety and fear, chaos and horror, in order to keep life going. And if we don’t have that, we have to invent it.” Wilford then ushers Curtis into the engine room, where “the sacred engine” is awesome and alone in its work. In this room, as if at an altar, Curtis falls to his knees. Sobbing into his hands, his body now communicates his abjection—his undoing as a leader and his imminent submission to the apparently unassailable logic of Wilford’s justification for

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the regime of “shock and awe” perpetrated against the people in the Tail. At this point, audience members might recall Gilliam’s final warning to Curtis in their midnight conversation that “Wilford will talk. Don’t listen. Cut out his tongue.” But Curtis does listen, and the shot (visual and aural) of him sobbing in despair and his body bent and collapsed in defeat on the floor undoes the physical and narrative styling of Curtis as hero, at least in relation to the sovereign subject’s conventional characteristics of strength, ­s elf-control, and dominance. Mann’s analysis of the signifying weight of gender foregrounds the question of the ­s o-called “I Can” body and its stylization as agential and masculine. In this scene, that moment of extreme vulnerability, grief, and loss of self appears to decisively hand control of the situation and Curtis’s very being over to Wilford, who looms behind Curtis, then over him, then helping him up. He hands Curtis a final “secret” message, “I just wrote it,” on which Curtis reads “Train.” Now, Wilford reveals that he wants Curtis to “take my station. It’s what you’ve always wanted. It’s what Gilliam wanted, too.” The paternal lineage implied between Wilford’s (and Gilliam’s) anointment of Curtis as the next leader—and the alluring power and corruption of both the deal and the role he is offered—recalls similar styling of other ­villain-father and heroic son encounters, such as Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. It becomes apparent that Wilford’s elaborate explanation of the train’s ­capitalist-realist logic, and the performative display of his sovereign control of all aspects of life, has been to convince Curtis to accept his fate as the next engineer of the train: “Look, Curtis. Section after section, each where they have always been and will always be. The train…. Each in their proper place, humanity. The train is the world. We, the humanity.” The doubling of Wilford and Curtis is pushed to its logical end point when Wilford makes his final appeal to the younger man, “You’ve seen what people do without leadership. They devour one another. You can save them from that.” Curtis’s aspirations to heroic leadership are converted into a full expression of individual agency as total authority: He can save everyone, but it won’t be a revolution. Early in their conversation, Willard notes to Curtis that “you are the only man who has walked the entire length of the train, tip to tail,” underlining and foreshadowing Curtis’s specialness, his inside and outside position—and thus embodying precisely the excess of knowledge and power required for a true sovereign, as well as a mythic hero: both inside and “of ” the train and yet also the exception to its regime of governance and laws of order. But Curtis’s body turns out to be vulnerable, and more radically outside Willard’s control, in ways that transform Willard’s plan and the system of the train, as well as the story being told. Curtis has stood up by this point, and to show that the awful but seductive logic of Wilford’s arguments



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has succeeded, Yona rushes into the room. Curtis holds a hand up to figuratively, and literally, push her away—a rejection of his alliance with her and the Tail section. Yona’s eyes widen in understanding, and she retreats, but only to run into Willard’s quarters and desperately (soon with Curtis’s help) work to pull up a secret compartment door in the floor to reveal the young boy Timmy, who was taken by Claude and is now crammed inside a morass of gears as he swiftly and efficiently, and with a horrible unresponsive automatic motion, works within the wheels of steel that keep the train moving. Wilford exclaims in ­self-defense, “The train is eternal. Alas, some of its parts are not. That piece went extinct a few years ago. Luckily, the Tail section produces an endless supply of children.” While Wilford has been talking to Curtis, like the biblical serpent, Nam and Yona have been fighting an enraged but ­d rug-addled Frontsection mob, though Nam is gravely injured by Claude’s bullet and Yona is having difficulty with the elaborate wiring. Nam already had the Kronole bomb stuck to the outside door and just needs a match, which is why Yona runs to Curtis for help when he is in Wilford’s car. Then, the fact of Timmy and his place in the train—another regrettable necessity, according to Wilford—wakes Curtis to the bargain with power he is about to make. In the film’s final action sequence, Curtis makes two crucial decisions: to give Yona the matches so that Nam can fulfill his plan, and to risk his own body, his arm, by reaching into the gears to pull Timmy out of the train’s machinery. The sequence involves both Nam and Curtis engaged in heroic actions that are intended to save others. However, this conventional ­action-hero narrative is, literally, blown up—along with the train. Running out of time, Nam cannot devise protection for Yona and runs to where she is standing with Curtis and the ­now-rescued Timmy. In a ­shot-reverse shot that features the exchanged gazes of the two men, Nam and Curtis together enfold Yona and Timmy in a tight, shared embrace just as the bomb explodes. When the train is fully derailed and destroyed, the film shows Yona waking alone in a ­burnt-out shell, finding Timmy, and climbing up to the door (the train has overturned, struck by an avalanche set off by the explosion); there are no signs of any other living souls. Curtis and Nam have been bombed out of the film altogether, leaving no trace. A radical overturning of the film’s apparent heroic leader story is revealed in Wilford’s “undoing” of Curtis and confirmed in its allegorical and apocalyptic ending. Both Curtis and Nam, the other figure of potential masculine leadership, are erased—atomized in the train’s explosive destruction. Even before the ­world-ending of the train, Curtis has been sidelined and evacuated as an agent or causal force. He does not make the decision that blows up the train, and he does not conventionally save anyone— except in the sacrifice of his physical body, the very act he had not been

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Timmy (Marcanthonee Reis, left) and Yona (Go Ah-sung) in final scene of Snowpiercer.

able to make previously. It is Yona and Timmy who emerge out of the train, clothed in heavy animal skins and boots stolen from the Front section, as two small, ­non-white, and utterly outsider figures: young, unschooled, and helpless; these are humanity’s survivors. This dramatic and controversial ending indicates that Curtis’s heroic function is radically displaced, even when the film might seem to support it on some surface level. Curtis’s death, as well as Nam’s, can be read as a messianic masculine ­self-sacrifice (a la Children of Men) that still maintains his heroic masculinity (which is largely Canavan’s reading).42 But the visual representation of how Curtis dies—in a collaborative, shared effort and sacrifice in the face of an overwhelming event; an effort or agency that is protecting and nurturing rather than fighting and winning—becomes part of a tableau that reveals the film ultimately has turned its interest away from Curtis and his struggles. With his arms wrapped around the other man, their bodies become fodder in the train wreck of the Snowpiercer and the destruction of all its systems and justifications. Instead, the Korean teenage girl and the tiny Black boy emerge from the wreckage, to face the ambiguous figure of a living polar bear in the distance. Ultimately, Curtis’s death and its representation in the final scenes make an argument for a particular kind of masculine failure—one that is bound in racialized gender ideologies, as well as the political and cultural discourses of “leadership.” This cinematic twist on the conventions of



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the popular ­action-apocalypse movie genre exposes a discourse of difference and political organization that the film ultimately deconstructs and even shatters, revealing alternative ways that the narrative conventions of disaster and apocalypse genre films can be reworked toward political ends. Canavan argues that the wrecking of the train—the literal embodiment of the necrocapitalist regime—offers the most significant allegory of the possibility of ­non-white, non–European, ­non-capitalist futurity: “Snowpiercer’s vivid, explosive confrontation insists [it] is absolutely unthinkable—the upending of the system, the derailing of the train—and its demonstration of continued life beyond that maximum catastrophe interrupts capitalist realism to show that the necrocapitalist regime is the barrier to a living future rather than the guarantor of it.”43 However, I suggest this ending contains an even more (or equally) significant allegory through its careful orchestration and visual portrayal of the deaths of Curtis and Nam. This penultimate scenario depicting the destruction of the train offers a silent, emblematic visual for the film’s allegory of the destruction of the totality of liberal individualist logic, i.e., the fantasized agency of the Enlightenment self that upholds the ruses of capitalist democracy and its relation to individual agency. That is to say, to destroy the train, you have to destroy the hero, and with it, the claim, “You’ve seen what people do without leadership. They devour one another.” In fact, the charismatic leaders are shown to be corrupt or fatally destructive, and usually both. In their place, Snowpiercer offers a demasculinized, vulnerable, and ­non-white possibility, albeit remote, for nonexploitive survival and life. This allegory of revolutionary transformation is explicitly apocalyptic and notoriously posthuman, capturing what Rob Wilson calls a “­trans-species affinity of sympoiesis with the return of the polar bear who bonds with the two multicultural survivors.”44 Although the film’s critical vision is radical, and almost didactically legible, many viewers find it difficult to attach to its pessimistic utopianism of bare survival, a vision of “glorious posthuman ruination” and “postpolitical giddiness,” because “the global system has already gone too far.”45 Snowpiercer suggests that its apocalypse’s true redemptive leap requires the ­near-total obliteration of a humanity the film has made sure we won’t miss. Sleep Dealer’s more humanist vision and ­pre-globalization nostalgia offer other appealing options, but also limit them in its own generic, largely gendered, attachments. Sleep Dealer depicts exciting horizontal affiliations across borders and social sectors (Chicano/U.S.–Mexicano/global south) that make the trope of becoming cybernetically and socially “connected” a potential avenue for changes that are partial, but significant. As Memo’s brother Tenoch says after their village finds the dam destroyed and water again plentiful, “No one knows what’s going to happen … but the people

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are celebrating.” But the romance plot that grounds much of the story, and especially our attention to Memo, relies on familiar gendered tropes of who “counts” to anchor the story in its own “real”: a somewhat nostalgic (culturally specific, vaguely indigenous, authentic, and agricultural) understanding of what sort of agencies could lead to transformative futurities. I agree with Carroll that the movie’s “reinscription of the allegorical figuration of [the] traitorous Woman” indicates how Sleep Dealer “extends and retracts the possibility of a global nodal consciousness.”46 But bringing its specifically global and racialized notions of affiliation and networking as revolutionary agency remains a significant speculative imaginative achievement. And likewise, Snowpiercer offers viewers the message that real transformation demands the total destruction of both the endless “wake” of global capitalist existence and the logics of gender and racialized difference and agency to show that in the loss of boundaries, and in the opening of gates and the piercing of walls, other possibilities can emerge.

Conclusion: Allegory with a Vengeance in The Girl with All the Gifts “Who misses what they have never, ever even imagined? That would not be human nature. How fortunate, then, that there are more people in this world than just humankind.”—N.K. Jemisin. The Fifth Season1

Blasting through the impasse of capitalist realism and being always already too late to create a better world, the ending of Snowpiercer presents the option of an alternative futurity in at least two ways. One is the overt move of derailing the train, which has been criticized by detractors for allegorical overkill (the destruction of the train as the deserved end to neoliberal capitalism and its social orders) and the ostensibly “obvious” realistic impossibility of the remaining two characters’ survival in the frozen landscape. The other, though, is the narrative of coalitional and revolutionary action by various characters who, like Timmy, have been designated as slaves—a small Black boy rendered mute and blank by his dehumanization. In an ending that sidelines the central focus and individual hero of the film, Snowpiercer allegorizes a posthuman, postcapitalist vision encapsulated in the final image of Yona and Timmy locking eyes with the polar bear. This “­post-species” survival and futurity based in a, at best, tenuous affiliation may seem meager to audiences primed for ­large-scale redemption, or at least retribution (though arguably, Snowpiercer offers the latter) and the plausibility problems facing any realistic hope for the characters to go on to build a new and better world are, as mentioned, often bemoaned. But realism is not the rationale of Snowpiercer, which loudly announces its allegorical mode that extends to the final emblematic vision of a ­non-white and ­non-individualist futurity. Like Sleep Dealer and other speculative films and TV shows I discuss, these allegories of systemic and totalizing crisis and transformation notably fall short of offering systemic 197

198 Conclusion solutions to our future problems, or the present ones. However, they do, as Alexis Lothian, Jayna Brown, and other critics likewise explore, offer images and figures that suggest possible ways of negotiating given realities and open spaces for new thought through aesthetic and emotional attachments that index a real potential—because their reorganization of our generic and imaginative priorities and expectations is itself transformative. Working through viewers’ narrative identification and cathexis to the figure of the hero has been the established route of cinema, TV, and narrative—but we also attach and “see” other figures, other narratives, and the spectacles of some versions of apocalyptic allegory tap into the way popular culture has historically primed audiences to read the new—unfamiliar images, characters, and narratives that pull on our attention and desire—as associations and meanings we can’t help but allegorize, and turn into stories that can introduce new figures, stories, and possibilities. Along with other significant speculative fictions of recent years, some featured in this study, Snowpiercer and Sleep Dealer illustrate how the apocalypse allegory has become a dominant political, as well as aesthetic, mode that increasingly resonates with audiences struggling to make sense of (that is, to narrativize) a bewildering and ­crisis-laden ­21st-century reality that has itself become ­non-realist. To underline some of the lessons learned in these readings and explain what I argue is most productive and resonant in current ­p op-culture apocalypse allegories, I return to the zombie apocalypse, the story that often allegorically shapes and dooms apocalypse imaginaries, as explored in Chapter Three and The Walking Dead. The 2016 British postapocalyptic ­s ci-fi horror film, The Girl with All the Gifts (dir. Colm McCarthy), provides a speculative vision of both social orders and human being that helps me signal some of the exciting directions being taken by the apocalypse allegory in popular culture. Although its own ­b ox-office success pales in comparison to some of my case studies, the film version of The Girl with All the Gifts was widely anticipated thanks to the success of the 2014 novel of the same name, both written by British ­comic-book, novel, and screenplay writer M.R. Carey. Both versions tell the story of Melanie (Sennia Nanua), a child we meet while she is confined in a grim, ­prison-like institution for initially unclear reasons. The film version reproduces the novel’s narrative perspective, dominated by Melanie’s voice and point of view, which was considered particularly radical since we eventually realize that she is essentially a zombie child, albeit one who is a very sweet and obedient student, and also a very smart one. The film also makes the weighted casting decision to have Nanua, a wonderful young Black British actress, take the role of Melanie (who is a blond white girl in the novel)—but this is no ­p ost-racial liberal apologia. Ascribing the allegorical significance of race and gender to the main



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character is always a ­meaning-making aesthetic maneuver, but in The Girl with All the Gifts, that change enables a truly new narrative and vision. Sami Schalk understands The Girl with All the Gifts film to be an important example of what she calls “bodyminds” to foreground how questions of disability interact with representations of race and gender to challenge both ableist and racialized constructions of the human. Schalk’s work helps illustrate the significance of the ­oft-repeated term “posthumanism” in relation to our projects’ shared interrogation of liberalism’s ­white-colonial version of who and what counts as valuable humans and human capacities. No longer simply a terrifying other threatening the story’s protagonists, Melanie’s zombie condition is figured through a discourse of disease that the film fully elaborates as an interrogation of agency, individualism, and futurity. Schalk explains, “Melanie’s brain—what we would consider the home of the mind—is covered with this fungus, which causes her to crave flesh, and when hungry, temporarily lose ­self-awareness and ­self-control.”2 As discussed in Chapter Three, the zombie often operates as both the other, a horrifying and repulsive threat to humanity, and as an instantiation of capitalist neoliberal abjection, a being without agency or choice, a slave. Melanie’s environment is slowly revealed to be a precarious military bunker installation trying to hang on after the fungal disease has turned most of humanity into “hungries.” Melanie and her fellow “classmates” are a new hybrid. They were born with the disease but did not become totally overtaken by it, while the other hungries are shown standing ­stock-still in a state of blank suspension until the scent of animal life (including, of course, humans) propels them into a ravenous pursuit of food—they are unthinking and unseeing creatures, with little vestige of even animals’ cunning or agency; they have no goal except to feed. Melanie and the other children have “a more symbiotic relationship” to the invasive fungus and are being held in the facility to enable Dr. Caldwell (Glenn Close) to conduct medical experiments on their bodies in the hopes of finding a cure for the fungal disease.3 The film conveys the abjection that defines the children’s condition at several levels. They are treated as abhorrent but useful objects (even though they speak and go to school), they are killed and used for state experimentation, their brains are literally invaded and are becoming something ostensibly ­non-human, and most everyone around them, who all seem to be military personnel and/or teachers, views them as “friggin abortions” and “dirty little fuckers,” as various characters announce emphatically. Melanie has responded to this cruelly dehumanizing treatment by submitting and consenting fully to the necropolitical system that surrounds her. She helps the guards fasten her into her immobilizing wheelchair and greets them eagerly and politely. The film underscores both Melanie’s

200 Conclusion submission, her kindness and intelligence, and her need for love—particularly through her attachment to one teacher, Miss Justineau (Gemma Arterton), who seems to return the girl’s affection. When an overwhelming mass of hungries invades and destroys the base, which turns out to be probably the last remaining human enclave, a small group of characters escapes in a military vehicle: Melanie, Miss Justineau, Dr. Caldwell, and three soldiers, including the hostile Sergeant Eddie Parks (Paddy Considine), who has been terrible to Melanie, fearing and loathing the childlike hybrids, and also seems to compete with her for Miss Justineau’s affections. After the vehicle breaks down and the group tries to work its way through a ­zombie-swarmed postapocalyptic London, the film’s focus seems to be on the growing alliance and collaboration between Melanie and the others. Now that her skills and capacities make her valuable, Sergeant Parks’s ability to see Melanie as human and respect her closeness to Miss Justineau implies a warm survival tale about an emerging multispecies/ multicultural collective—an improved version of collective collaboration and civility compared to the military base’s necropolitical prison scenario, with many of the main characters going forward. Melanie’s submission to her monstrous abject status—albeit with the perks of attention, respect, and affection that her talents win her—appears to be nearing narrative completion when she indicates that yes, she will allow the desperate and dying Dr. Caldwell to kill her and use her body in a deranged ­last-ditch effort to discover a cure. Such a progression would confirm the expected uplifting story of human survival and Black martyrdom, cementing Melanie’s allegorical racialization as both zombie and other. As Schalk notes, “characters of color regularly act as martyrs, dying valiantly to save the white protagonists.”4 But the film goes in a much more radical and interesting, and more allegorical, direction that explains why I use it here as my final, if truncated, case study. Viewers have also watched as Melanie discovers that there are more children like herself—thinking and agential but still “hungries”—who are living in the city. In scenes that emphasize both their zombie difference and their cohesive community, she interacts with them and recognizes a new option for life and belonging, and an understanding of her own value. Ultimately, in a stunning sequence, Melanie realizes the key question, “why should it be us that dies for you?” and releases the fungus into the world, inadvertently but unrepentantly killing her new friend Sergeant Parks and leaving a safe, but utterly alone and doomed, Miss Justineau to teach these new kind of children some of her human ways. As Miss Justineau looks out on this new world with stunned, ­tear-stained eyes through her enclosure in a sealed container, necessary for her safety (i.e., her difference), Melanie assures her happily, “There’ll be lots of time.” This pivot to Melanie’s side



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of the story, shaped by the film’s depiction of both Melanie and the growing attachment to her that viewers experience through Miss Justineau and Sergeant Parks, is why I call this sort of popular culture “allegorical with a vengeance.”5 When she finds the infected Sergeant Parks, who had gone out to try to save her, Melanie assures him, “It’s going to be all right. It’s just not yours anymore.” Jessica Baker Kee writes, “Rather than merely representing the racialization and gendering of abjected identities within a [white] patriarchal social framework,” the zombie allegories of popular culture sometimes “ask what new forms of life might exist outside and beyond this framework?”6 Like the work of ­award-winning Afrofuturist speculative fiction writer N.K. Jemisin, The Girl with All the Gifts poses this question allegorically and provides a compelling, even uplifting, response. The impossibility of imagining a “world without us” is evoked in posthuman environmental theory to critique the presumed absolute priority of “humankind” as the only meaningful definition of life. The Girl with All the Gifts embraces an apocalyptic vision and allegorical mode to portray this option as something other than a tragedy or a failure. Often, people think a “true” apocalypse must mean the complete “end of the world,” even though the genre’s history indicates more attenuated and complex uses for its crises. I suggest that The Girl with All the Gifts gives us both stories: Humanity does in fact get wiped out, swept away in an implied, but ­off-screen, totalizing retribution for its sins (figured in the film through the British and American militarized remnants of Western modernity’s “civilization”). These straggling humans are portrayed as a complex mix and, with the exception of Dr. Caldwell, appear to have long ago accepted their own abjection to overwhelming, unknown forces. In that sense, The Girl with All the Gifts shares with The Walking Dead and other examples in this book a contemporary apocalypse allegory of modern life as populated by largely suffering agents trudging along a painful holding pattern, whether before or after the apocalypse crisis. This critique of neoliberal society and the limited options it provides has clearly been an animating feature of much apocalyptic allegory in recent popular culture and one that I expect will continue to define, explore, and confirm possibilities for cultural imaginaries. Likewise, although Melanie’s gendering and racialization, and centrality, indicate a new allegorical narrative, there is still the implication that she is special and a leader. In this way, allegoresis can gesture toward unexplored options, but often will still remain embedded in familiar genres of liberal humanism and their articulations of crisis and its opportunities, as well as its costs. Other books, by other devoted viewers and close readers of these permutations, will hopefully dissect and illuminate what these

202 Conclusion coming imaginative reworkings of our known narratives can make tangible and legible about what persists and what changes in narrative and in society—of the subtle and ­not-so-subtle transformations of our visions and expectations about alternative forms of agency, personhood, and collective attachments. For me, The Girl with All the Gifts is special for the way it embraces the apocalypse allegory as a means to rework the operations of narrative identification and shift viewers’ sense of what and who counts, and what might be a world worth saving or dying for.

Chapter Notes Preface

Introduction

1.  Bonnie Honig, “The Trump Doctrine and the Gender Politics of Power,” Boston Review, July 17, 2018, http://bostonreview. net/politics/bonnie-honig-trump-doc trine-and-gender-politics-power. 2.  See Tom Digby, Bonnie Mann, Dana Nelson, and Hamilton Carroll, among other academic scholars on these phenomena and their roots. Although ostensibly anti–Semitic, the rallying cry of “Jews will not replace us” heard at the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2018 encapsulates the fears and anger this threat to ­w hite-masculine authority and privilege has generated in some public sectors in the U.S. This violent reaction is also evident in the rising of the Proud Boys and Boogaloos (largely white) ­f ar-right men’s movements. See Blanche McCrary Boyd, “Who the F*** are the Boogaloos?” Journal of the Plague Year, June 6, 2020, https://www.journaloftheplagueyear.ink/ blog/­who-the-f-are-the-boogaloos. 3.  This film also introduces the Black Panther T’Challa (Boseman), who in 2018 becomes an international phenomena in the blockbuster film Black Panther, challenging particularly the racial logics of ­superhero-action films and offering in many ways a counterexample to some dynamics discussed throughout this book, though the gendering of agency and the function of sexual difference in that film— as well as its notoriously ­reform-minded vision for revolution and social change— arguably remain generically conventional.

1.  José Esteban Muñoz, The Sense of Brown, ed. Joshua ­C hambers-Letson and Tava Nyong’o (Duke University Press, 2020), 10. 2.  Will Kymlicka, “Neoliberal Multiculturalism?” in Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era, ed. Peter A. Hall and Michèle Lamont (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 99–125. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139542425.007. 3.  E. Ann Kaplan, Climate Trauma: Foreseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction (Rutgers University Press, 2016). 4.  Such presumptions and the characterization of human societies as a “war for Survival” are often traced back to British Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Hobbes and his theory of the sovereign. Leviathan, 1651. 5.  John Patrick Leary, “The Cult of Presidential ‘Leadership,’” The New Republic, Sept. 18, 2020, https://newrepublic.com/ article/159278/­t rump-biden-media-cultpresidential-leadership. 6.  Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Cornell University Press, 1964), 4. 7. ­Shu-Mei Shih, “Global Literatures and the Technologies of Recognition,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 119.1 (2004): 21. Shih critiques allegorical reading as it emerged in literary studies and publishing after Jameson’s widely discussed essay on “national Allegory”: “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 65–88. 8.  Katherine Sugg, Gender and Allegory in Transamerican Fiction and Performance (Macmillan, 2008).

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204 Notes—Introduction 9. “28 Weeks Later: Zombie film with a taste for satire,” New York Times, May 11, 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/ 05/11/arts/11iht-flik12.1.5665305.html. 10.  Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (Verso, 2019), 51. 11.  Paik asserts that because they essentially are limited to plots illustrating “the nature of authority and depict[ing] the terrifying exigencies whereby political order takes root,” apocalypse fictions tend “to be subversive of both the goal of utopia and the desire to secure the continuance of the established order.” The ambivalence within utopic, as well as dystopic, imaginaries that Paik tracks recurs in many of the chapters that follow and is particularly relevant in my linking of the liberal legacies of settler colonialism to ­s cience-fictional postapocalypse narratives in popular culture. Peter Paik, From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe, 22. 12.  In the ­lead-up to the January 6, 2021, events, including an attack on the Capitol, then–U.S. President Donald Trump reportedly told then–Vice President Mike Pence that morning in a phone call, “You can either go down in history as a patriot, or you can go down in history as a pussy.” Peter Baer, Maggie Haberman, Annie Karni, “Pence Reached His Limit with Trump. It Wasn’t Pretty,” New York Times, January 12, 2021, https://www.nytimes. com/2021/01/12/us/politics/­m ike-pencetrump.html. 13.  Jameson, Allegory and Ideology, 59, 65. 14.  Chu, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sheep? 76. Quoting Gordon Tesky on how allegory “elicits continual interpretation.” Allegory and Violence (Cornell University Press, 1996), 4. 15.  For a fuller discussion of the connections among allegory, apocalypse, and genre in these literary and cultural histories, see Sugg, Gender and Allegory in Transamerican Fiction and Performance (Macmillan, 2008), Ch. 1 and Ch. 3. 16.  On “epochal transformation” and allegory, see Latin American scholar and literary theorist Idelbar Avelar, The Untimely Present Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning (Duke University Press, 1999). 17.  The term “modernity” in Western historiography, including that of literature

and culture, generally refers to the period inaugurated by the Renaissance and continuing to the present, with origins in ­14th-century Italy and spreading through Europe over the 15th and 16th centuries. I subscribe to the contention by colonial studies and Renaissance scholar Walter Mignolo that this Western modernity also emerges through the rise of European colonialism and its shaping of global markets systems. See The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Latin America Otherwise) (Duke University Press, 2011). 18.  Evan Calder Williams, Even and Uneven Apocalypse. 19.  Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009). 20.  Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism take an ­Afro-diasporic cultural lens to decenter and challenge established Western liberal epistemes in speculative projects that include writers Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delaney, N.K. Jemisin, Ndeki Okorafor, and Larissa Lai. Speculative aesthetics have also moved to forefront of Latinx and queer studies, many influenced by José Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York University Press, 2009), although Muñoz’s work on queer futurity does not focus on speculative genres. 21.  Ursula K. Le Guin, “Foreword,” Tales from Earthsead (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2001), xii–xiii. 22.  Jayna Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Duke University Press, 2021), 17. 23.  Amazon Prime synopsis of Avengers: Endgame. https://w w w.amazon. com/­Marvel-Studios-Avengers-EndgameBonus/dp/B07QXMVMKC/ref=sr_1_2?c rid=2TSV0TJ4DAHOG&dchild=1&keyw ords=avengers+endgame&qid=16066246 76&s=­i nstant-video&sprefix=Avengers%­ 2Cinstant-video%2C169&sr=1-2. 24.  A.O. Scott, “‘Avengers: Infinity War’: It’s Marvel’s Universe. We Just Live in It,” New York Times, April 24, 2018, https:// www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/movies/­ avengers-infinity-war-review.html. 25.  Joshua Gamson, Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity (University of Chicago Press, 1999), 214. Important critical discussion of the roles played by “colorblind” representation



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in maintaining white supremacist and ­s ettler-colonial imaginaries include Eduardo ­B onilla-Silva on the “new” racism, Jodi Melamud on neoliberal multiculturalism, and Susana Loza’s analysis of “multiracial white supremacy” in Speculative Imperialisms (2018): 94–95. 26.  Susana Loza, Speculative Imperialisms: Monstrosity and Masquerade in Postracial Times (2018), 8, 11. 27.  Ibid.,12. 28.  “Moore on Jerusalem, Eternalism, Anarchy and Herbie!” (interview with Raphael Sassaki translated into English), Alan Moore World, November 18, 2019, https://alanmooreworld.blogspot.com/ 2019/11/­moore-on-jerusalem-eternalism-a narchy.html. 29.  Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, 4. 30.  Ibid., 5. 31.  Murrin, Cohn, Kermode, etc. 32.  Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, 7. 33.  At $187.4 million worldwide, Independence Day was the highest grossing film of 1996, and inaugurated Emmerich’s reputation as possibly the most ­pre-eminent (or at least most ­well-known) among the ­m arket-savvy filmmakers envisioning the end of the world as we know it—a list that includes Danny Boyle, Joss Whedon, Alfonso Cuarón, and George Miller, among others (Box Office Mojo, https://www. boxofficemojo.com/release/rl2656798209/). 34.  While I use the term “sentimental masculinity” to signal issues in contemporary culture, it echoes work in 18th- and ­1 9th-century literary and cultural studies on related questions. See Rainer Emig, “Sentimental Masculinity: Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771),” Configuring Masculinity in Theory and Literary Practice (Brill Press, 2020). Mike Goode, Sentimental Masculinity and the Rise of History, 1790–1890 (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Andrew Nash, “‘Trying to be a Man’: J.M. Barrie and Sentimental Masculinity,” Forum for Modern Language Studies XXXV, Issue 2 (April 1999): 113–125. 35.  Sylvia Wynter underlines a related history of the emergence of the Man of Reason as grounding the “we” of Western modernity. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittreck (Duke University Press, 2015), 23–24.

36.  Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) originated the notion of the “social contract” to argue that the legitimate grounds for the relationship between individuals and their collective governance should be consensual (contractual) and support the status of individuals as essentially ­self-directed and free. For Hobbes and those who followed (John Locke, ­Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant—and modern thinkers such as Isiah Berlin, John Rawls, and Milton Freedman), the individual’s capacity to act freely and without unnecessary interference from other humans (negative freedom in “classical liberalism”) is the priority of collective governance. 37.  Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 257–337. Wynter uses the term “les Damnés” (the wretched) from Franz Fanon’s famous ­anti-colonial work, The Wretched of the Earth (trans. Constance Farrington, Grove Press, 1963), to indicate the foundational exclusions of ­non-men and the postcolonial/neocolonial persistence of that exclusion in an ongoing global category of dispossessed and abjected populations, such as “refugee/economic migrants,” “the homeless/the jobless, the ­s emi-jobless, the criminalized” (261). 38.  Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being,” 260. As Alexander Weheliye explains, Wynter’s project, along with the Black feminist thought of Hortense Spillers and others, offer “systems of thought … that tackle notions of the human as it interfaces with gender, coloniality, slavery, racialization, and political violence without mapping these questions into a mutually exclusive struggle.” Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Duke University Press, 2014), 24. 39.  See Jane Elliott, The Microeconomic Mode: Political Subjectivity in Contemporary Popular Aesthetics (Columbia University Press, 2018). 40.  Eva Cherniavsky interrogates the shifting role and meaning of citizenship after neoliberalism has worked to “disabuse a people of the notion that the institutions of government maintain any obligation to their collective welfare, which

206 Notes—Introduction is now asserted as a fully private, disaggregated good.” Cherniavsky’s ­macro-political inquiry pushes the reconfigurations of political imaginaries of collective “good” back to questions of democracy and political agency and what both might look like moving forward. Neocitizenship Political Culture After Democracy (New York University Press, 2017), 3. 41.  Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (Columbia University Press, 2019), 15–16. Like Brown and others, I argue that gender hierarchies are central to this cocktail of public feelings. 42.  Amy Taubin, “Playing it Straight: R.E.M. Meets a ­Post-Rodney King World in Independence Day,” Sight and Sound 6.8 (1996): 6–8. 43.  Despina Kakoudaki, “Spectacles of History: Race Relations, Melodrama, and the Science Fiction/Disaster Film,” Camera Obscura 17, no. 2 (2002): 112. 44.  Hamilton Carroll, Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity, 47. 45.  Ibid., 43. 46.  Brooks continues that melodrama inserts emotional clarity and resonance in the otherwise cool and cynical ironies of modern consciousness and constitutes “a search for a new plenitude, an ethical recentering” that offers an alternative, and antidote, to the dominant “ironic, antimetaphorical mode” of modern consciousness. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (Yale University Press, 1995), 200. 47.  Loza, 27–28. 48.  Audra Simpson, “Settlement’s Secret,” Cultural Anthropology 26.2 (2011): 205–17. 49.  Annalee Newitz, “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like Avatar?” io9, April 7, 2010, http://io9.com/542266/­ when-will-white-people-stop-makingmovies-like-avatar. 50.  Katherine Sugg, Gender and Allegory, 3. In “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature” (1985) Abdul R. JanMohamed influentially argued that the Manichean binary of good and evil shaped colonial relations and their representation of raced positions.

51.  Recent work by theorists of speculative genres such as Andre Carrington, Alexis Lothian, and Jayna Brown show popular how culture can shift the lens through which we see and represent the world. 52.  Kermode explains that this imaginative operation’s goal is “modifying the past and allowing for the future without falsifying our own present moment of crisis.” The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1967), 59, 46. 53.  Ibid., 14. 54.  Ibid., 124. 55.  Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1961). 56.  Jane Elliott, Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory: Representing National Time (Macmillan, 2008), 36. 57.  Some examples include the novels of N.K. Jemisen, the television series The Watchmen and Lovecraft Country, and scholarship by Sami Schalk, Alexis Lothian, Jayna Brown, and Tavia N’yongo, among many others. Jameson notes, “the Utopian form itself is the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system. But it asserts this by forcing us to think the break itself, and not by offering a more traditional picture of what things will be like after the break.” Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (Verso, 2005), 232. 58.  Jayna Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Duke University Press, 2021), 8. 59.  Ibid., 10. 60.  Attributed variously to philosopher Slavov Žižek and literary theorist/critic Frederic Jameson. Quoted and discussed in, among many other publications, Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2009), 2. 61.  Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 2, 5. 62.  In their introduction’s overview of the relations between aesthetics and social and economic realities, Shonkwiler and La Berge review the other two key concepts that have ventured to illuminate those dynamics, postmodernism and neoliberalism, to underline their imbrication in the concept of capitalist realism as well as highlight the critical potential of Fisher’s term and related critiques. Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge, Reading



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Capitalist Realism (University of Iowa Press, 2014). 63.  Discussing biopolitical governmentality and its “uncoupling of the state’s historically twinned aspirations to administer human life and individual consciousness,” Eva Cherniavsky poses the reverberating question, “how [do] we imagine resistance to the intentions of a neoliberal state no longer invested in (or dependent on) the production of conviction or consent[?]” Neocitizenship Political Culture After Democracy, 16. For more on biopolitics, see Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975–1976 (Editions de Seuil/Gallimard, 1997). 64.  Mark Fisher and Jodi Dean, “We Can’t Afford to Be Realists: A Conversation,” Reading Capitalist Realism, 27. 65.  Wahneema Lubiano, “But Compared to What? Reading Realism, Representation, and Essentialism in School Daze, Do the Right Thing, and the Spike Lee Discourse,” Black American Literature Forum 25.2 (1991): 253–82, 262–63. 66.  See Sami Schalk’s discussion of Lubiano and other Black feminist scholars who have “critiqued this faith in realistic representations” as the best means for “the advancement of marginalized groups” for more on this intervention. Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Genre in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Duke University Press, 2018), 20. 67.  Madhu Dubey, Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic (Indiana University Press, 1994), 4. 68.  Caren Irr, “Toward the World Novel: Genre Shifts in ­2 1st-Century Expatriate Fiction,” American Literary History 23.3 (2011): 660–679. 69.  Alexis Lothian, Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility (New York University Press, 2018), 18. 70.  Tavia Nyong’o, ­Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life (New York University Press, 2019), 7. 71.  “Introduction,” Reading Capitalist Realism (loc. 137). 72.  Mark Fisher and Jodi Dean, “We Can’t Afford to Be Realists: A Conversation,” Reading Capitalist Realism, 26–38, 30. 73.  Ibid., 29. As they go back and forth on that perennial question “what is to be done?” Fisher and Dean articulate a

useful overview of the question. They differ slightly in their understanding of the best response to this problem of subjects whose desires and psyches are always already captured by capitalist, liberal ideologies and logics. Dean counsels that we “discipline” ourselves away from the pleasures, “the goodies,” that late capitalism entices us with, while Fisher argues for a more plausible redirecting of desire and political possibility toward a “­post-capitalist” future, one that actually works—i.e., is not entrapped in an eternal “crisis” of stasis (and violence and brutal inequality) nor marching toward an inevitable apocalypse. 74.  Carl Freedman, Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 16–17. The definition of science fiction as an art form that achieves the effect of “cognitive estrangement” originates with Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: The Poetics and History of a Literary Genre (Yale University Press, 1979), 8. 75.  ­S eo-Young Chu, Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sheep? a Science Fiction Theory of Representation (Harvard University Press, 2010), 4–5. 76.  Lothian, Old Futures, 15. 77.  Jameson, Allegory and Ideology, 59. 78.  Cherniavsky, Neocitizenship, 14 (emphases in the original). 79.  In literary studies, “critique” has generated some recent controversies among academic scholars of literature, some of it being, frankly, a tempest in a teapot. For more, see Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (2015) and special journal issue “What Is and Isn’t Changing: Critique After Postcritique,” Modern Language Quarterly 81.4 (December 2020). And yet, Cherniavsky’s definition of critique as a way of thinking (an epistemology) that may also be at an impasse, even as it continues to shape contemporary subjectivities, suggests that the question of critique remains an important one. 80.  Cherniavsky, Neocitizenship, 15 (emphases in the original). 81.  Lothian, Old Futures, 94. 82.  Jameson, Allegory and Ideology, 58. 83.  Chu, Do Metaphors Dream, 5. Quoting Philip Fisher, Wonder, the Rainbow, and the Aesthetics of Rare Experience. 84.  Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Duke University Press, 1998), 3.

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85.  Constance Penley, “Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia” in Penley et al., eds., Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 63–81. Quoted in Thomas Byers, “Terminating the Postmodern: Masculinity and Pomophobia,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 41.1 (Spring 1995): 35–73. 86.  Claire Johnston, “Women’s Cinema as ­Counter-Cinema,” 137. 87.  Ibid., 131. 88.  Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesn’t, 136. 89.  Lothian, Old Futures, 12–13. 90.  Ketterer, New Worlds for Old: The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature (Anchor Books, 1974), quoting D.H. Lawrence 8, 10.

Chapter One 1.  Sophia A. McClennen, Globalization and Latin American Cinema: Toward a New Critical Paradigm (Macmillan, 2018), 42. 2.  Gavin J. Blair, “Stephen Soderbergh on Refining His Lucky Logan Experiment, Quieting the Ego,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 9, 2019, https://www. hollywoodreporter.com/news/­s tevensoderbergh-refining-his-logan-luckyexperiment-quieting-ego-105650. 3.  Producer Doug Mitchell explains, “During preproduction, the weather pattern changed in Australia and it rained and rained in Queensland, the sort of weather that happens once in a century.” Mitchell, Miller, and others involved give a full report on the experience in Kyle Buchanan, “‘Mad Max: Fury Road’: The Oral History of a Modern Action Classic,” New York Times, May 20, 2020, https://www.nytimes. com/2020/05/12/movies/­m ad-max-furyroad-oral-history.html. 4.  Miller interview. 5.  P.D. James, Children of Men (Knopf, 199) 2. Lothian discusses eugenic and heteroreproductive messages in James’s novel’s “redemptive logic of procreation” deployed to correct the errors of Western culture’s “excessive sex and desire,” which James portrays as the problems of pornography and sexual violence that lead to a “quiet apocalypse.” Old Futures, 90. 6.  Cuarón has acknowledged that

many of these virtuosic feats of cinematography were woven together using ­computer-assisted editing techniques that create a precise and carefully orchestrated impression of a single take but are actually the result of multiple takes. In terms of the visual style, Cuarón cites the 1966 ­Italian-Algerian classic of colonial rebellion and suppression, Battle of Algiers (dir. Gillo Pontecorvo). “‘Children of Men’ feature. Interview with Alfonso Cuarón,” Time Out, September 21, 2006, https://web.archive. org/web/20070216220635/http://www. timeout.com/film/news/1418.html. 7.  McClennen underlines the marriage of form and function in this shot’s presentation of both the environment and Theo as a protagonist: “As the opening sequence, this long tracking shot establishes the problem of space and social barriers as one of the central concerns of the film. The entire landscape of the film is broken down into segregated populations.” Globalization and Latin American Cinema, 402. 8.  DVD commentary and interview material, which includes a short documentary “The Possibility of Hope,” which Alexis Lothian discusses in Old Futures. 89. 9. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 12. 10.  Canavan, “If the Train Ever Stops,” 8. 11.  Lothian, Old Futures, 94. 12.  Ibid., 95. 13.  McClennen, Globalization and Latin American Cinema, 402. 14.  Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 16. 15.  DVD commentary. 16.  Cuarón and set designers discuss these aspects of the film’s production in the DVD extras. 17.  Kermode; also see Introduction. “Performative allegory” is a term that Amy Sara Carroll borrows from film and TV critic Bill Nichols, who uses it to discuss documentary aesthetics and “performative allegory.” Carroll, “‘Accidental Allegories’ Meet ‘The Performative Documentary’: Boystown, Señorita Extraviada, and the ­B order-Brothel-Maquiladora Paradigm,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31.2 (2006): 358–396. 18.  Kaplan, Climate Trauma, 68. 19.  Alicia Schmidt Camacho, “Ciudadana X: Gender Violence and the Denationalization of Women’s Rights in Ciudad Juárez, México,” The New Centennial Review 5.1 (Spring 2005): 255–92.



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20.  “The Vulture Transcript: Alfonso Cuarón on Children of Men,” Vulture, January 6, 2017, https://www.vulture. com/2017/01/­alfonso-cuaron-children-ofmen-transcript.html. 21.  As discussed in the Introduction, Kermode argues that fictions of apocalypse provide “concordance” to help make a collective perception of contemporary historicity “concordant” with remembered versions of the historical past. A Sense of the Ending, 59. 22.  Patricia Clough explains this Foucauldian concept of a shift in late modernity from “discipline societies” to “control societies” as a shift from a “regime of representation” that operates through the ideological apparatuses of identity (family, nation, etc.) to a biopolitics that operates through the confluent power of the state and of capital to modulate and control populations, manifested as “bodies of data and information (including the human body as information and data)” (The Affective Turn, 2007, 19). 23.  Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11–40, 40, italics in the original. 24.  Disability in these two films is largely used to indicate damage wrought by the violence and torture revealed as endemic to the social orders they portray. This figuring of disability becomes central in Mad Max: Fury Road and will be discussed in more detail below. 25.  Kaplan, Climate Trauma, 71. 26.  Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 834. 27.  Jayna Brown, “The Human Project: Utopia, Dystopia, and the Black Heroine in Children of Men and 28 Days Later,” Transition 110 (2013): 120–135. Brown underlines how “despite its good intentions … the film reinforces the ways black women have been defined by their physiological function, evaluated according to the usefulness of their sexual reproductive bodies” (126–27). 28.  Much has been made of the Christian iconography of this scene and the music that accompanies it, both signally an allegory of reproductive futurity and the “couple” as emblematic figures recalling Mary and Joseph with the baby Jesus. See Kaplan. 29.  There is an actual midwife character,

Miriam (Pam Ferris), who accompanies Kee and Theo in their escape for a number of scenes but who is killed before the final section of the film that takes place in the ­B exhill-on-Sea Refugee Camp. This plot turn isolates Theo and Kee narratively as a figurative couple, albeit ­n on-sexual, and makes even more room for Theo to take on important roles and prove his capabilities. This plot event (killing the woman midwife) also uncannily echoes the history of childbirth assistance and medicine in which male “physicians” become a profession through their appropriation of the functions and privileges of midwives in the 17th through the 19 centuries in Europe and the United States, a process that involved numerous medical experiments on enslaved African American women in the U.S. South, as well as the witch burnings of early modern Europe. 30.  Sayantani DasGupta, “(Re)conceiving the Surrogate: Maternity, Race, and reproductive Technologies in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men,” Gender Scripts in Medicine and Narrative, eds. Marcelline Block and Angela Laflen (Cambridge Scholars, 2010), 14. DasGupta reading emphasizes the familiar trope of “white men saving brown women” most famously analyzed in Gayatri Spivak. 31.  See Brown, also Heather Latimer, “­Bio-Reproductive Futurism: Bare Life and the Pregnant Refugee in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men,” Social Text 29.3 108 (2011): 51–72. Lothian speculates further on the figure of Kee in relation to the film’s allegory of ­h etero-reproductive futurity and a potential queer reading. Old Futures, 94–95. 32.  Children of Men DVD, interview with Cuarón. Jayna Brown notes, “Kee operates within a familiar primitivist notion of black femininity, as the link to both the past and the rejuvenated future. She is, by tired cliché, ‘Africa, mother of civilization.’” Brown, “The Human Project: Utopia, Dystopia, and the Black Heroine in Children of Men and 28 Days Later,” Transition 110 (2013): 120–135, 125. 33.  On June 28, 1964, Malcolm X gave the speech that brought this phrase into popular culture via the U.S. Civil Rights Movement (also used in African decolonial revolutionary movement by Franz Fanon in a 1960 address to the Accra

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Positive Action Conference, “Why We Use Violence,” as well as by ­Jean-Paul Sartre in 1948, speaking of class society). Malcolm X was speaking at the founding rally for the Organization of ­Afro-American Unity in New York City. Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary (Malcolm X Speeches & Writings) (Pathfinder Press, 1992). 34.  On notions of normative affect (white, ­middle-class, restrained) and ethnic or racial excess, see José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (University of Minnesota Press, 1999), and “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down: Latina Affect, the Performativity of Race and the Depressive Position,” Signs 31.3 (2006): 675–688. Critics and artists such as Alexandra T. Vazquez, Carmelita Tropicana (Ela Troyano), and others further interrogate the racialization of emotionality and strong, especially angry, affect as irrational (versus logical, etc.) and proof of social and/or intellectual inferiority. 35.  The Introduction notes a distinction between allegory and allegoresis, as the mode and process of making allegories, rather than the final, ­pre-existing product. This distinction allows for a focus on the process of generating new potential directions for revolutionary allegories in the 21st century while marking the generic and linguistic (thought) constraints of the mode and the form. Detailed more in Jameson, Allegory and Ideology (Verso, 2019). 36.  Neferti X.M. Tadiar, “­L ife-Times of Disposability in Global Neoliberalism,” Genres of Neoliberalism 115 (Summer 2013): 19–48, special issue of Social Text edited by Jane Elliott and Gillian Harkin. 37.  Jane Elliott, American Allegory, 35. As discussed in the Introduction, Elliot draws on the tradition of apocalypse criticism in the 1960s, exemplified by Frank Kermode and Norman Cohn, to expose their presumption of a necessary opposition between “freedom” and narrative totality, a presumption that dominated Cold War critical imaginaries and is itself a symptom of U.S. historical narrative imaginaries. 38.  Lothian, Old Futures, 94. 39.  Brown, “The Human Project,” 130. 40.  In National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Duke University Press, 1998), Nelson situates the figure and ideological trope of “national manhood” in a

U.S. cultural and political history, one that she traces to a 19th century experience of a “republican” subjectivity. Bonnie Mann’s Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror, discussed below, will pick up the term “national manhood” to discuss more recent iterations and styles of dominant masculinity in the 21st century. 41.  Nelson, National Manhood, 3. 42.  Cuarón, DVD interview (2006). 43.  See Scott McCloud on comics as a medium and its narrative strategies; the marriage of image with language, using minimal language and “universal” icons. A.O. Scott’s review notes the influence of Chuck Jones and “Roadrunner” TV comics on Fury Road. This ­voice-over opening is the film’s single, though significant, break with the conceit that Max barely ever speaks, as established in the series’ first three films (all directed by Miller) with Mel Gibson as Max: Mad Max (1979), The Road Warrior (1981) and Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985). As actress Zoe Kravitz notes in 2020, “It was one of the strangest scripts I’d ever seen, because it was like a really long comic book.” Kyle Buchanan, “‘Mad Max: Fury Road’: The Oral History of a Modern Action Classic,” New York Times, May 12, 2020. 44.  Brad Brevet, “Watch: Shooting ‘Mad Max: Fury Road,’ Keep It in the Crosshairs,” comingsoon.net, June 1, 2015, https://www. comingsoon.net/movies/news/­6 08683watch-shooting-mad-max-fury-road-keepit-in-the-crosshairs. 45.  The name of this postapocalypse desert fortress suggests a variety of references: The Citadel was the name of the iconic fortress of ­Henri-Christophe, leader of Haiti’s 1812 slave rebellion, but it also suggests military institutions and those connotations and rituals. 46.  In “Driving Toward Disability Rhetorics: Narrative, Crip Theory, and EcoAbility in Mad Max: Fury Road,” Fletcher and Primack argue for a positive reading of these figurations: “The film’s postapocalypse seems to reject the ablenormativity that McRuer describes and constructs a world that embraces the differences in disabled bodies without the stigmatization typically inscribed upon the disabled” (345). Brandon Fletcher and Alvin J. Primack, Critical Studies in Media Communication 34.4 (2017): 344–357.



Notes—Chapter Two211

47.  See Aimee Pozorski, ­AIDS-Trauma and Politics: American Literature and the Search for a Witness (Lexington Books, 2019). 48.  Sami Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined, 42. 49.  ­C o-written with Brendan McCarthy, the film’s infamous “shooting script,” as discussed above, consisted of an immense storyboard drawn as hundreds of comics panels, one per shot frame, with no other written script. Miller and McCarthy also published various ­comics-print versions of the story, highlighting the influence of the medium and genre of comics—often considered a highly allegorical mode of narrative representation. 50.  Taylor Boulware, “‘Who Killed the World?’ Building a Feminist Utopia from the Ashes of Toxic Masculinity in Mad Max: Fury Road,” ­Mise-en-Scène: The Journal of Film & Visual Narration 1.1 (2016): 1–17, 3. 51.  Ibid., 5. 52.  In her commentary on the film’s ostensibly “feminist” quest plot, Eileen Jones sardonically quips, “I dreaded getting to the ‘Green Place.’ Would everyone be doing yoga when we got there? And communicating softly and understandingly with each other? Or perhaps tending gardens all day, then doing fertility dances by the light of the moon?” (“Actually, Mad Max: Fury Road Isn’t That Feminist; And It Isn’t That Good, Either,” In These Times, May 18, 2015, http://inthesetimes.com/ article/17960/­a ctually-mad-max-furyroad-isnt-that-feminist). 53.  William, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, 24. 54.  Ibid., 15. 55.  Ibid., 26. Author’s ellipses. 56.  Ibid., 25. 57.  A.O. Scott, “Review: ‘Mad Max: Fury Road,’ Still Angry After All These Years,” New York Times, May 14, 2015, https:// www.nytimes.com/2015/05/15/movies/­ review-mad-max-fury-road-still-angryafter-all-these-years.html. 58.  See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (Verso, 1983). 59.  Bonnie Mann, Sovereign Masculinity: Gender Lessons from the War on Terror (Oxford University Press, 2014), 106. 60.  Ibid., 108–9.

61.  Gershen Kauffman, The Psychology of Shame: Theory and Treatment of ­S hame-Based Syndromes, 2nd edition (Springer, 2004), xx. 62.  Ben Child, “­C omic-Con 2014: Mad Max Fury Road roars into view,” The Guardian, July 28, 2014, https://www.theguardian. com/film/filmblog/2014/jul/28/­comic-con2014-mad-max-fury-road-trailer-releasetom-hardy. 63.  Scott identifies John Ford and other Hollywood directors of the 1950s and ’60s, including Chuck Jones, creator of the Road Runner comic series, as influences in the film’s homage to the Western as both generic template and iconic environment. 64.  Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (University of Chicago Press, 1995), 73. 65.  Bederman, 79. Both late Victorian educational and social reformers shared this preoccupation with the problematic domestication of manhood in both the home and the office—highlighting the role of shifting notions of “work” and success that destabilized gender identities and hierarchies. 66.  Mann, 63. 67.  Cited in Bederman. 114. 68.  Cited in Ibid., 100–101. 69.  Mann, 62. 70.  J. Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Duke University Press, 1998), 11, 9. 71.  Boulware, “Who Killed the World,” 3. 72.  Ibid., 17. 73.  Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (New York: Atheneum, 1985), 135.

Chapter Two 1.  Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on ­Pyscho-Analysis XXII, ed. James Strachey (Hogarth Press, 1933), 113. 2.  Denise Riley, The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (Stanford University Press, 2000), 106. The notion that irony is a contemporary mode particularly suited to the “meta” awareness of postmodern popular culture—always in on the joke it is telling and the cultural histories behind that joke—is a ­well-known

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characterization of much contemporary culture, and Whedon has notoriously mined that vein. 3.  Until recent accusations for maintaining an abusive work environment and severe mistreatment of persons under his authority, particularly with younger female actresses, Whedon was best known for his astute ironic sensibility and support for feminist causes, as well as the purveyor of wildly successful and feminist popular culture, particularly in television (Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Dollhouse [2009]). In 2016, he also launched scathing critiques of ­r ight-wing political discourse, as in the Zombie Apocalypse ad for the Democratic Party before the 2016 Presidential election. For more information, see Claire Lampen, “A Brief Tour of Joss Whedon’s Many Controversies,” The Cut, April 6, 2021, https:// www.thecut.com/2021/04/­j oss-whedonscontroversies-and-alleged-bad-behavior-aguide.html. 4.  Other scholars have noted that Whedon overuses the title “Serenity” in this franchise, and I will follow the convention throughout the chapter where Serenity (no quotes) refers to the spaceship, “Serenity” refers to the pilot episode (which was first aired late in the season, a controversial network decision), and Serenity to indicate the 2005 film sequel to the television series. 5.  This pilot episode “Serenity” was the last to be aired on FX (December 20, 2002) when the show was first broadcast—one of many network decisions that fans believe to have hampered the show and contributed to its lack of traction with audiences, though it later became known as a “cult” blockbuster. 6.  Anna Tsing’s Friction coins the term “frontier capitalism” to track how late capitalist exploitations of unregulated environments and populations reenact and perpetuate settler colonialism and ideas about law and government as hindering free lives, and free markets—underscoring how colonialist structures and mindsets shape the dynamics of contemporary global capitalism: its opportunities as well as its practices of resource extraction, labor exploitation, etc. 7.  Popular culture’s belated recognition of a multiracial frontier in the Western genre is also a feature in HBO’s acclaimed series Deadwood (2004–2006, HBO). More recently, ­p opular-culture and academic

historians have emphasized the leading roles of African Americans and Asians in Westward expansion, including the transcontinental railroad, California, and the large numbers of “Black cowboys” who comprised up to 25 percent of ­range-cattle industry workers from the 1860s to 1880s. Kenneth Porter, “African Americans in the Cattle Industry, ­1860s–1880s,” Peoples of Color in the American West, ed. Nachdr (Lexington Press, 1994), 158–167. 8. Loza, Speculative Imperialisms, 11. 9.  Baccarin is a ­B razilian-American actress of Italian descent, so her casting, like that of Summer Glau and others, signals racial ambiguity, as well as conventional media feminine beauty standards, and falls in with the multicultural and ­p ost-racial implications of the Firefly/ Serenity franchise. 10.  Firefly: A Celebration (Titan Books, 2012). 11.  See Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (Routledge, 1994), 37. 12.  Canavan, “Fighting a War You’ve Already Lost: Zombies and Zombies in Firefly/Serenity and Dollhouse,” Science Fiction Film and Television 4.2 (2011): 184. 13.  Canavan, in contrast, argues that the value of Firefly’s challenge to its Western generic foundations is precisely in its nihilism, by acknowledging that a future of persistent disruption is the best the Serenity’s crew can hope for in the face of a necropolitical regime that has “already” won. Canavan, “Fighting a War You’ve Already Lost,” 184. 14.  Among Hollywood Western film characters that Firefly echoes in this characterization are the James Stewart character in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (1962) or the father played by Van Heflin in Shane—or Shane himself, for that matter (1953, dir. George Stevens). 15.  In Gender and Allegory, I note that ironic meaning “is largely dependent on a shared comprehension of the norms and the deviations being invoked” which makes irony a ­double-edged sword dependent on audience/reader and their affective responses to negative or positive emotional responses—especially if the interpreters remain attached to the target of the ironic communication. Sugg, Gender and Allegory, 15–16.



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16.  Notoriously among fans, the Fox network refused to use the pilot “Serenity” saying it was too grim and complicated, so Whedon and his team had to produce a substitute opening for the series under tremendous time constraints, which was “The Train Job” (Ep. 2, September 20, 2002). 17.  Steampunk is further discussed below using Loza. Speculative Imperialisms. Also see Williams, who compares salvagepunk’s adaptive nihilism to steampunk’s “false” and “kinder” “romanticized ­d o-over” (Even and Uneven Apocalypse, 18–19). 18.  Neil Lerner, “Music, Race, and Paradoxes of Representation: Jubal Early’s Musical Motif of Barbarism in ‘Objects in Space,’” Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier, eds. Rhonda V. Wilcox and Tanya R. Cochran (I.B. Tauris, 2008), 185. 19.  Going back to, at least, Michel de Montaigne’s “Of Cannibals” (c. 1580), following through Voltaire’s Candide (1759), and into the Romantic Era trope of “the noble savage” in 18th and 19th centuries. 20.  Lorna Jowett, “Back to the Future: Retrofuturism, Cyberpunk, and Humanity in Firefly and Serenity,” Investigating Firefly and Serenity: Science Fiction on the Frontier, eds. Rhonda V. Wilcox and Tanya R. Cochran (I.B. Tauris, 2008). 21.  Canavan, “Fighting a War You’ve Already Lost,” 181. 22.  Lorna Jowett, 102, 103. 23.  Firefly: A Celebration, 213. 24.  Used in both political and cultural theory, the term “American exceptionalism” has roots in precisely the ethos of Western expansion, articulated by John. L. O’Sullivan’s “The Great Nation of Futurity” where the term “Manifest Destiny” originated in 1839: as a ­w orld-historical event, the United States’s democratic and revolutionary foundations, the nation is founded on democracy, not monarchy, and the Declaration of Independence expresses its superior and uniquely high moral grounding; so God or “Providence” declares it should expand and have dominion over as much as possible. 25.  Both fans and critics note that the use of Mandarin Chinese throughout the series, most often in dialogue (curse words, apparently) among the main crew characters (which native speakers consistently

complain is incomprehensible as Chinese), gestures at a ­p ost-racial and multicultural universe that contains no clearly Asian characters. See Alison Willmore, “Orientalism Is Alive and Well in American Cinema,” BuzzFeed News, April 4, 2018, https://www. buzzfeednews.com/article/alisonwillmore/­ isle-of-dogs-jared-leto-orientalism. 26.  Jowett, 106. 27.  Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment, 137. 28.  Susana Loza, Speculative Imperialisms, 47–79. 29.  ­Ay-Leen the Peacemaker, “‘From the Wilds of America’—Analyzing the Idea of ‘British Colonial America’ in Steampunk,” Racialicious (July 1, 2009) in Loza. 51. Loza delineates the distinction between the imperialist nostalgia of “Nostalgic Steampunk” and the speculative fictions of “Melancholic Steampunk” that “dreams of alternative realities, more progressive and liberatory realities ‘that might emerge if we could only reboot history’ to mark the difference between the colonial recuperation and utopic speculation in steampunk. 30.  Canavan, “Fighting a War You’ve Already Lost,” 175. 31.  See Dana Nelson, National Manhood, and Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (University of Chicago Press, 1991). On the historical foundations of ­white-masculine authority as a marker and emblem of national identity and success. 32.  The episode “Out of Gas” (uses flashbacks to detail the history of the crew and how Mal comes to bring each character on board the Serenity. These ­mini-narratives each turns on their relationship to Mal and demonstrates why he is now heroically sacrificing himself in order to possibly save the others. 33.  Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” 21, 27. Also discussed in Canavan, “Fighting a War You’ve Already Lost,” 176. 34.  The racial and cultural connotations of moving from calling himself “Abe” (apparently a nickname) to becoming “Jubal” with its Muslim ring are also noteworthy. 35.  Neil Lerner analyzes the “rather old—and traditionally racist—musical codes” that are inscribed onto Early’s character in Greg Edmondson’s “ominous and frightening” musical theme that

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accompanies the character (“Music, Race, and Paradoxes of Representation,” 184–85). 36.  Adilifu Nama, Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film (University of Texas Press, 2008). 37.  Ibid., 11. 38.  Rey Chow on stereotypes briefly. For more on the interplay of stereotypes as a “­cross-cultural communicative mode” that can work ironically, see Katherine Sugg, Allegory and Gender in Transamerican Fiction and Performance (Palgrave, 2008, pp. 14–18) and Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Columbia University Press, 2002). 39.  See, for example, Ann Arnett Ferguson, Bad Boys: Public Schools and the Making of Black Masculinity (University of Michigan Press, 2009, 2020), and Susanne Marie ­Enck-Wazner, “All Is Fair in Love and Sport: Black Masculinity and Domestic Violence in the News.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6.1 (March 2009): 1–18. 40.  Whedon’s DVD commentary announces that this is the episode in which River is finally accepted as one of the crew. 41.  Also in Children of Men as discussed in Chapter Two, Ejiofor’s British diction in a world of flat American accents—a performance that emphasizes the character’s superior education, vocabulary, and intelligence while relying on the cognitive estrangement of precisely his actual Black body. One might venture that Ejiofor’s entire career can be articulated as a function of this very cognitive estrangement in U.S.–dominated global cinema. 42.  Canavan writes that the “zombie fantasy should be primarily read as a hyperbolic reenactment of the imaginary racial demarcation into life and ­anti-life that is crucial to the construction of the contemporary biopolitical state.” Canavan, “Fighting a War You’ve Already Lost,” 173. 43.  Whedon has explained in commentary to the film that if the show Firefly had not been canceled, the revelations of the origin of the Reavers would have concluded season 2. 44.  2012 ­C omic-Con San Diego, Serenity panel. 2012 ­Comic-Con San Diego, Firefly ­10-Year Reunion: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=ZUNpuKd6kOc. 45.  In explaining the logic of violence and race war in the frontier and its myths, Richard Slotkin notes that the “vigilante”

or “Indian hater” shares (and becomes like) “the savage” through sanctioned violence; “the vigilante fulfills a social and civilizing mission by exercising a privilege of violence that goes beyond legal or conventional prohibitions. He thus shares some of the ‘dangerous’ character of the criminals he pursues—just as the Indian hater shares the traits of the savage.” The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 135. 46.  Earlier in the film, this ­family-unit figuration is underlined when Kaylee complains that Mal is kicking River and Tam off the ship (letting them disembark after the failed bank job at the movie’s start), and Mal says, “It’s not like they’re part of the crew.” And Kaylee responds, “They could’ve been, if you’d let them. Could’ve been family.” 47.  The group is ironically pictured as literally unmanly, comprised of only a few actual experienced fighters and many women. In fact, a fair amount of attention is given in the Serenity Official Visual Companion and digital film commentary to discrepancies and concerns about the sort of weapon Inara should carry. She is clearly barely expected to “fight” and likewise, Kaylee’s and Simon’s heartwarming exchange about their feelings undermines any impression of ­b attle-readiness. Serenity Official Visual Companion (Titan Books, 2005), 90–96. 48.  The ironic resonances of this question of “sin” recalls the Operative’s earlier question during their fight, in which the Operative always seems to have the upper hand: “Do you know what your sin is, Mal?” Mal responds with a burst of violence and taunts, “Oh, hell, I’m a fan of all of them. But for now, I’ll go with vengeance.” 49.  Recent controversies over ­non-white casting in the Star Wars enterprise highlights the presumptions of popular culture generally and ­s ci-fi in particular. As one author wryly notes, it seems likely, and is apparently preferred by fans, that Lando Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) might be the only Black man alive in the future. See Andre Seewood, “­Hyper-Tokenism: ‘The Force Awakens’ While the Black Man Sleep,” IndieWire, December 23, 2015, https://w w w.indiewire.com/2015/12/­ hyper-tokenism-the-force-awakens-whilethe-black-man-sleeps-162287/.



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50.  Upon landing on Mr. Universe’s moon, Wash, the former pilot, is killed by Reaver spikes (the other main character besides Book to die), so the question of who will fly the ship is also opened by plot developments.

Chapter Three 1.  Nick Romeo, “Colson Whitehead: I had zombie anxiety dreams for years,” Salon. com, May 31, 2014, https://www.salon. com/2014/05/31/colson_whitehead_i_ had_zombie_anxiety_dreams_for_years/. 2.  This chapter focuses primarily on the television show with some discussion and references to the comic series, whose plot and characters the television series tracks to a large extent. Unless noted, The Walking Dead indicates the television show. 3.  This motto of “fighting the fight” emerges in season 7 when after being thoroughly defeated by the brutal rival leader Negan and his Saviors community, Rick rediscovers his rebellious and independent spirit to survive, and he and Michonne use this phrase repeatedly. 4.  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651, Chapter XIII. 5.  These critical memes appeared across social media and internet sites in 2013–15, though the only current information available is their citation by Katherine Sugg, “The Walking Dead: Late Liberalism and Masculine Subjection in Apocalypse Fictions,” Journal of American Studies 49.4 (2015): 1–19. 6.  Anna McCarthy explains governmentality as a key concept in Foucault’s understanding of “the technique of dispersed government” which “provides a powerful model for understanding the cultural and political manifestations of neoliberalism.” McCarthy, “Reality Television: A Neoliberal Theatre of Suffering,” Social Text 93 25.4 (Winter 2007): 20–21. 7.  Eva Cherniavsky, “Neocitizenship and Critique,” Social Text 99, 27.2 (Summer 2009), 4. In her 2017 work, Neocitizenship: Political Culture After Democracy, Cherniavsky expands this discussion of what neoliberal shifts in capitalism and governmentality have meant for the “citizen” and other subjects of collective political identities.

8.  Kirkman, Moore, Adlard, The Walking Dead 4.24 (November 20, 2005): 18. 9.  Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 1999). 10.  Among many of the pieces in 2009 and later, see Derek Thompson, “It’s Not Just a Recession. It’s a Mancession!” The Atlantic, July 9, 2009, https://www.theatlantic. com/business/archive/2009/07/­i ts-notjust-a-recession-its-a-mancession/20991/; Howard J. Wall, “The ‘­Man-Cession’ of 2008–2009: It’s Big, but It’s Not Great,” Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. October 1, 2009, https://www.stlouisfed.org/ publications/­regional-economist/­o ctober2009/­t he-mancession-of-20082009-itsbig-but-its-not-great; and Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, eds., Gendering the Recession: Media and Culture in an Age of Austerity (Duke University Press, 2014). 11.  Jodi Dean calls for an expansion of Marx’s definition of proletarianization beyond economic and labor issues to better account for the psychic and social impacts of neoliberalism. Particularly considering employment trends and their gender aspects over the past 30 years: decreasing jobs in mining, assembling, operating, and transporting and substantially increasing (53 percent between 1980 and 2005) jobs in childcare, hair dressing, food service, home health care, cleaning, and gardening. Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon (Verso, 2012),106, 108. 12.  Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Cornell University Press, 2000), 37. 13.  Robert Kirkman, Tony Moore, Charlie Adlard, Cliff Rathburn, and Rus Wooton, The Walking Dead: Compendium One (Berkeley: Image Comics, 2010), back cover (also of each issue of the comic series). 14.  Michael Kimmel, Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (Nation Books, 2013). Kimmel’s focus on men who feel particularly victimized by neoliberal, or global, capitalism echoes this sympathetic gendering of ­21st-century economic crises as a white masculinity crisis in Susan Faludi’s Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (William Morrow, 2000), and, much more critically, in Hamilton Carroll’s Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity (Duke University Press, 2011).

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15.  Kirkman, et al., The Walking Dead, back cover. 16.  McCarthy, “Reality Television,” 25. 17.  Laurie Ouellette, “Take Responsibility for Yourself: Judge Judy and the Neoliberal Citizen,” Reality TV: Remaking TV Culture, eds. Laurie Ouellette and Susan Murray (New York University Press, 2004), 231. 18.  Dan ­Hassler-Forest, “Cowboys and Zombies: Destabilizing Patriarchal Discourse in The Walking Dead,” Studies in Comics 3.2 (2011): 349. 19.  Although it followed the comic series, Glenn’s death remained an issue for many, such as critic Nina Sharma, who meditates on the resonances between the gory beating of Glenn and the death of Vincent Chin by a gang of white men, angry that “it’s because of you little motherfuckers we are out of work” (“Not Dead,” The Margins, Asian American Writer’s Workshop blog, July 20, 2017, http://aaww.org/­n otdead/, accessed February 24, 2018). 20.  Jane Elliott, “Suffering Agency: Imagining Neoliberal Personhood in North America and Britain,” Social Text 115, 32.1 (Summer 2013). 21.  Ibid., 92. 22.  Ibid. 2 3 .   ht t p : / / T Vt ro p e s . o r g / p mw i k i / pmwiki.php/Series/TheWalkingDead. See also Steven Shaviro’s influential work on how zombie film narratives emphasize the ­wish-fulfillment aspect of such scenes depicting the brutal, grotesque deaths of loved ones and neighbors. Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body (Minnesota University Press, 1993), 120. 24.  “All Out War” pt. 1 and 2 is the title of vol. 20–21 of The Walking Dead (Image Comics, 2014). 25.  ­Hassler-Forest, “Cowboys and Zombies,” 348. 26.  Hobbes, De Cive, Epistle Dedicatory. 1642. 27.  Although the show remained the audience winner in its time slot through Season 10, especially with the 18–49 adult demographic, its ninth season premiered in October 2018 with its lowest season premier viewership to date (6.08 million)— down 50 percent from the Season 8 premiere. Alex Welch, “Sunday cable ratings: ‘Doctor Who’ returns up, ‘The Walking Dead’ falls to premier low,” TV by the

Numbers.  https://tvbythenumbers.zap2it. com/­d aily-ratings/­s unday-cable-ratingsoct-7-2018/ 28.  Paul Tassi, “Five Reasons Why the Walking Dead’s Ratings Are Crashing to Season 3 Levels,” Forbes, November 27, 2016, https://www.forbes.com/sites/ insertcoin/2016/11/27/­f ive-reasons-whythe-walking-deads-ratings-are-crashingto-season-3-levels/?sh=4f3d07d28240. 29.  Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, 2011), 4. 30.  Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 44. 31.  ­Hassler-Forest, “Cowboys and Zombies,” 352. 32.  Ibid. 33.  Baker Kee notes, “The U.S. historical prevalence of castration and sexualized torture/humiliation of Black male victims, in particular positions lynching not only as anti–Black terror but also a form of gendered sexual violence” (“Black Masculinities and Postmodern Horror: Race, Gender, and Abjection,” Visual Culture and Gender 10 [2015]: 48). 34.  Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (Routledge, 1993), 3. 35.  Julia Kristeva cautions that abjection is the source of jouissance (passion, pleasure, art, beauty, etc.), but is also “psychotic” and threatening to all subjective experience of oneself as a “bounded” subject. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (Columbia University Press, 1982). 36.  When aired on November 30, 2014, “Coda” helped The Walking Dead reach 14.807 million U.S. viewers, the highest viewership that week. Over the course of its run through 2019, The Walking Dead viewership peaks in season 5 at an average 17.30 million per episode, dropping to 6.08 million viewers in season 9, 2018, and 4.00 million in season 10, 2019. https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walking_ Dead_(TV_series)#­cite_note-Kirsch-173. 37.  Shaviro explains that this fascination pushes viewers toward an “affective ambivalence by displacing, exceeding, and intensifying the conventional mechanisms of spectatorial identification, inflecting them in the direction of a dangerous, tactile, mimetic participation” (Shaviro, The Cinematic Body 96.6). 38.  The premiere episode of The Walking



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Dead broke records for AMC viewership (over 5 million), while that of season 2 had 11 million views, and the seasons 3 and 4 premiers each had more than 15 million. Glowing. 39.  When the TV series producers indicated that the show was going to kill off Carl, an online effort protested this move— citing in particular that many fans (and including the actor Chandler Riggs) have been “assuming” that, as in the comic series, “the entire show has been a [­lead-up] to showing Carl become the leader that his father is, maybe one day taking on the mantle himself.” http://comicbook.com/ thewalkingdead/2017/12/15/­t he-walkingdead-fire-scott-gimple-petition-carl-/. 40.  Gerry Canavan, “‘We Are the Walking Dead’: Race, Time, and Survival in Zombie Narrative,” Extrapolation 51.3 (2010): 444. 41.  See Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Polity Press, 1988). 42.  David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2005), 19. See also Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Zone Books, 2017). 43.  Kathryn A. Cady and Thomas Oates, “Family Splatters: Rescuing Heteronormativity from the Zombie Apocalypse,” Women’s Studies in Communication 29.3 (2016): 308–325, 322, DOI: 10.1080/074914 09.2016.1194935. 44.  Ibid. 45.  Elliott, “Suffering Agency,” 94. 46.  In this trajectory, the series follows the historiography of the colony and postcolony in Achille Mbembe and is suggesting the usefulness of necropolitics as a paradigm for the forms of government and their evolution as presented in the series. 47.  McGee notes that the social tensions and logical contradictions that uphold the Western’s mythical bundle of liberal individualism and masculine agency are often the very target of its later, more critical cinematic elaborations. Patrick McGee, From Shane to Kill Bill: Rethinking the Western (Blackwell, 2007), xiv, xvii. 48.  “Not Tomorrow Yet,” Ep. 12, season 6, March 12, 2016. 49.  In the above episode, for example, Carol is shown increasingly haunted by the lives she has taken. 50.  The phrases “savage war” and “race

war” are used by Slotkin, drawing from ­19th-century historical documents, to illustrate the rhetoric justifying Native American genocide in the Western Expansion. See Chapter Two. 51.  Slotkin, The Fatal Environment, 128. 52.  Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press, 1998) and State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (University of Chicago Press, 2005). 53.  McGee, From Shane to Kill Bill, 99. 54.  See Mikail Bakhtin on ­double-voiced narration as key narrative technique for having indicated a temporal shift or ideological shifts and also on the uses of irony in speech utterances that convey the coexistence of generic discourses in a parodic or dialogic relationship. M.M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (University of Texas Press, 1981), 279, 284. 55.  Canavan, “‘We Are the Walking Dead’: Race, Time, and Survival in Zombie Narrative,” Extrapolation 51.3 (2010): 431–453. 56.  Tassi, Paul. “Five Reasons Why.” 57.  Ep. 1, season 7, “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be” (dir. Greg Nicotero), Oct. 23, 2016. 58.  Robert Kirkland, Charlie Adelard, David McCaig, The Walking Dead, Image Comics 4, no. 24 (2005): 18. 59.  The song “Easy Street” by Collapsible Hearts Club became a hit after the episode aired. Xander Zellner (November 22, 2016). “How ‘The Walking Dead’ Found Its Cheerful Torture Tune ‘Easy Street’—And Scored a Chart Hit,” Billboard, retrieved November 22, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ The_Cell_(The_Walking_Dead). 60.  See Tassi, “Five Reasons Why.” 61.  Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, 101. 62.  See Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry, “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism,” Boundary 2, 35.1 (2008): 85–108. And Canavan, “We Are the Walking Dead.” 63.  Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse, 115. 64.  Lauro and Embry largely focus on the revolutionary potential for a posthuman reading of the zombies as figures for

218

Notes—Chapter Four

reconceptualizing self and agency, one without “ego.” The Walking Dead seldom considers the zombies themselves as anything other than a threat to that self, but this discussion is explored in the conclusion and Ch. 4. “Zombie Manifesto.” 93. 65.  “30 Days Without an Accident,” Ep. 1, season 4, November 2013. 66.  Ep. 9, “No Way Out,” season 6, February 14, 2016. Image Comics, Vol. 14, Issue 83, 2011. 67.  McCarthy, 37–38. 68.  One of the more interesting fan phenomena is how many devoted viewers of the show insist that Rick and the others are “stupid” and use the show to contrast their ineffectual or disastrous decisions to the ones they, the viewers, would make in their place—a kind of antagonistic narrative identification? 69.  The Walking Dead. Vol. 19: March to War (Image Comics, 2013).

Chapter Four 1. Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 2. 2.  Naomi Klein explains her influential term: “Call it disaster capitalism. Every time a new crisis hits—even when the crisis itself is the direct ­by-product of ­free-market ideology—the fear and disorientation that follow are harnessed for radical social and economic ­re-engineering.” “Disaster Capitalism: The New Economy of Catastrophe,” Harpers (September/October 2007): 47–58, 49. See also Klein, The Shock Doctrine (Metropolitan Books, 2014). 3.  Rivera quoted in David Montgomery, “Alex Rivera’s lost cult hit ‘Sleep Dealer’ about immigration and drones is back,” Washington Post, July 7, 2014, accessed April 13, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost. c o m / n e w s /­a r t s - a n d - e nt e r t a i n m e nt / wp/2014/07/07/­a lex-riveras-lost-culthit-sleep-dealer-about-immigration-anddrones-is-back/?utm_term=.d3b7052c69e3. 4. Ibid. 5.  Between its South Korean opening on June 27, 2014, and October 23, 2014, Snowpiercer earned $86.7 million worldwide. Although among the highest grossing films in South Korean history, it also remains one of the most expensive with a budget of $40 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Snowpiercer#­cite_note-107.

6. ­Joon-ho planned to film Snowpiercer exclusively in South Korea but couldn’t find a studio large enough to build the facsimile of the train he needed, so production relocated to Barandav Studios in the Czech Republic. Cine Tirol Film Commission, http://www.cinetirol.com/en/home/­ snowpiercer-in-tirol-1664477.html/. Rivera filmed Sleep Dealer in Tijuana, and Sophia MeClennen considers Sleep Dealer an emblematic example for both its more ethical “runaway” production history (establishing film industry infrastructure outside Hollywood and other centers) and Rivera’s recourse to alternative distribution options for Latin American cinema. McClennen, Globalization and Latin American Cinema: Toward a New Critical Paradigm (Macmillan, 2018), 232, 456. 7.  Canavan describes how the train and its circular track are presented in the comic serial (the basis for ­Joon-Ho’s film): “The train gives the illusion of forward movement while actually being limited to prebuilt rails, the illusion of progress while actually simply circling the same dead loop forever, the illusion of participation and ‘choice’ whereas in fact all outcomes have already been chosen in advance.” “‘If the Train Ever Stops, We’d All Die’: Snowpiercer and Necrofuturism,” Paradoxa 26 (2014): 23. 8.  In a 2014 interview, Bong ­Joon-ho notes that “a Korean Buddhist scholar” compared Gilliam’s sacrifice to the Buddha. Anna-Katrin Titze, “Piercing vision: The unpredictable engines of Bong ­Joon-ho,” Eye for Film, June 27, 2014. https://www. eyeforfilm.co.uk/feature/­2 014-06-27i nt e r v i e w - w it h - b ong - j o o - h o - ab out snowpiercer-feature-story-by-anne-katrintitze. 9. Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 23. 10.  Peter Paik, 75. 11.  Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 22. 12.  Canavan, “‘If the train ever stops,’” 14. 13.  Ibid., 8. 14.  Fisher, Capitalist Realism, 16. 15.  Canavan, “‘If the train ever stops,’” 23. 16.  Amy Sara Carroll, “From Papapapá to Sleep Dealer: Alex Rivera’s undocumentary poetics,” Social Identities 19.3–4 (2013): 485–500, 486.



Notes—Chapter Four219

17.  Michael Guillen, “Q & A: Alex Rivera, ‘Sleep Dealer,’” SF360, 18 January 2010. 18.  Michael ­M artinez-Raguso notes, “this extreme neoliberal environment of privatization … directly evokes the Cochabamba Water War that took place in Bolivia in 2000” and is documented in Iclíar Bollain’s También La Lluvia (Even the Rain). “All of the work, with none of the workers: The Technology of Consumption in Sleep Dealer,” 117. 19.  See Jason Ruiz, “Dark Matters in Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad, Suburban Crime Dramas, and Latinidad in the Golden Age of Cable Television,” Aztlan: Journal of Chicano Studies 40.1 (Spring 2015): 37–62, and Amy Sara Carroll, “‘Accidental Allegories’ Meet ‘The Performative Documentary’: Boystown, Señorita Extraviada, and the ­B order-Brothel-Maquiladora Paradigm,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31.2 (2006): 358–396. 20.  For a statistical and social science articulation of this emblematic function, see Fernando Romero/LAR, HyperBorder: the Contemporary U.S.–Mexico Border and Its Future (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008). 21.  Trinh T. ­Minh-ha coined the term “­i mage-repertoire” in Woman, Native, Other to articulate the reifying effects of such “stock” images that confirm and reproduce stereotypes of difference. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism (Indiana University Press, 1989). 22.  On the rhetoric of basurero, see Cathy Fourez, “La construcción literaría del basurero en el norte de México: el lugar de la ‘­ex-pulsión’ de la barbarie,” in Fronteras, Violencía, Justicía: Nuevos Discursos, eds. Marisa Belaustequigoitia and Lucia Melgar (UNAM Press, 2007), 67–92. For an example use of “cauldron of chaos,” see Daniel C. Levy and Kathleen Bruhn, Mexico: The Struggle for Democratic Development (University of California Press, 2006). Important critical work by Amy Sara Carroll, Jason Ruiz, and Maria Josephina Saldaña de Portillo, among others, speaks to these dynamics and their reverberations in history, art, and popular culture. 23.  Terms like “lo Mexicano” and “Mexico profundo” refer to a ­l ong-standing national discourse of identity and tradition specific to Mexico. Like Carroll, I am interested in Sleep Dealer’s implied nostalgia and

figuring of a past rural tradition of mexicanismo that is presented as an alternative to contemporary neoliberal exploitation and alienation, though as Carroll notes, Memo “longs to escape the provincialism of Santa Ana” and his migration to Tijuana indicates his character’s ambivalence about that patrilineal heritage. “From Papapapá to Sleep Dealer,” 493. 24.  Kenneth Turan, “A Nightmare That Looks All Too Real,” Los Angeles Times, April 17, 2009, https://www.latimes.com/ archives/­l a-xpm-2009-apr-17-et-sleep17story.htm. 25.  The nature of TruNode’s biopolitical control is illustrated when the computer stops Luz and says, “Go back ten seconds. And please tell the truth.” So, Luz admits that “at first,” she wasn’t impressed by Memo. 26.  ­Martinez-Raguso, “‘All of the work, with none of the workers’: The Technology of Consumption in Sleep Dealer,” Future Humans in Fiction and Film, eds. Karen F. Stein and Louisa MacKay Demerjian (Cambridge Scholars, 2018), 12, 116–129. 27.  Ibid., 11. 28.  ­Martinez-Raguso uses work by digital theorist Tiziana Terranova on “horizontal addition” (of the network) and “vertical subsumption” (of labor) as the two paradigms for how digital networks operate and expand to suggest that the node network suggests “extensive possibilities,” their placement within “vertical, ­p ower-based relations with corporations such as Cybracero or U.S. military/security forces” limits that “additive potential.” “‘All of the work, with none of the workers,’” 11. 29.  Performance artists such as Guillermo ­G ómez-Peña and Coco Fusco made rasquache a key term for their influential work, and feminist critic and theorists Laura Pérez highlights both the term and its art in her critical work. See Debra Castillo, “Rasquache aesthetics in Alex Rivera’s Why Cybraceros?” Nordlit 31 (2014): 9. 30.  Castillo, “Rasquache aesthetics.” 9. Rivera’s most recent project, The Infiltrators (Rivera and Christina Ibarra, 2020), is a critically acclaimed ­docu-thriller that depicts the true story of young immigrants who get themselves arrested by the Border Patrol in order to organize refugees in detention and possibly pull off a “prison break” in reverse. Because some of the film’s

220 Notes—Conclusion participants have since been targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the filmmakers have launched a campaign to publicize their plight and change U.S. government policy. http:// www.infiltratorsfilm.com. 31.  Castillo, “Rasquache aesthetics,” 10. 32.  Castillo notes, “‘hacktivist’ is a mashup of ‘hacker’ and ‘activist’ and refers to individuals who promote political and social change through internet activity, including cyberterrorism” (footnotes 4, 9). She cites influences on Rivera projects such as Ricardo Dominguez’s Hactivist projects, the Electronic Disturbance Theater and the Zapatista Floodnet (10). 33.  ­R amirez-Raguso, 9. 34.  Hayles, Electronic Literature 37, quoted in Castillo, 10. 35.  Carroll, “From Papapapá to Sleep Dealer,” 496. 36.  Ibid. 37. Acclaimed L atinx (Guatemalan–U.S.) author Francisco Goldman does this with the heterosexual romance plot in The Ordinary Seaman (1997), also about the transnational abjection of Latinx migrant labor. The capacity for romantic love is one of Western modernity’s most used markers for human depth and individual worth—a precept grounded in the Romantic era’s movement toward interiority and feeling as the true hallmarks of humanity and of “specialness.” So, the heterosexual love story has done work to humanize the abject other, particularly since the early 19th century and the dawn of colonial encounters and logics (see ­1 9th-century classics such as Chateaubriand’s Atala, 1801, Helen Hunt Jackson, Ramona, 1884, and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Sab, 1841). Also, Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (University of California Press, 1991). 38.  The insertion of “antique”-looking technology highlights the film’s production attention to the histories of colonial and industrial capitalism that plays a decidedly ­anti-nostalgic function in Snowpiercer. As in Firefly, aspects of the setting suggest a World War II context, but in this case, it’s more the Nazi version, rather than the “good war” version. 39.  ­Joon-ho has added subsequent commentary through interviews to indicate that in his backstory for the film, both Gilliam

and Wilford and many other characters are bisexual. When Gilliam sends Grey to help Curtis, the implication is thus apparently doubled. See “Director Bong ­Joon-Ho on Gilliam and Grey’s relationship in Snowpiercer (and More),” https://saezutte. tumblr.com/post/94244798605/­d irectorbong-joon-ho-on-gilliam-and-greys. 40.  Bederman, 227. 41.  In interviews, ­Joon-ho discusses the difficulty of trying to camouflage Chris Evans’s powerful, MCU–ready physique in a film portraying characters who are ostensibly starving. See Christina Radish, “Bong ­Jooh-Ho Talks Snowpiercer, Casting Chris Evans, being a ‘Control Freak,’ His Desire to Return to Smaller Budget Movies, and More,” Collider, June 24, 2014, https:// collider.com/­b ong-joon-ho-snowpiercerinterview/. 42.  Canavan suggests that Curtis’s “shame” is nothing more than an element of his “hero’s journey” narrative and is therefore a fairly conventional mechanism that allows Curtis to prove his worth as the leader precisely because he is able to overcome his own guilt and ­self-doubt. 43.  Canavan, “Snowpiercer,” 21. 44.  Rob Wilson, “Snowpiercer as Anthropoetics: Killer Capitalism, the Anthropocene, ­Korean-Global Film,” Boundary 2, 46.3 (2019): 199–218, 207. 45.  Wilson, “Snowpiercer as Anthropoetics,” 210. 46.  Carroll, “From Papapapá to Sleep Dealer,” 496.

Conclusion 1.  N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season: Every Age Must Come to an End (Orbit/Hachette Group, 2015), 151. 2. Schalk, Bodyminds, 13. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 16. 5.  This phrasing is a play on Teresa de Lauretis’s 1984 call for feminist narrative practices to be “Oedipal with a vengeance”; to describe how the cinematic text engages the very mechanisms of narrative identification “in which each relation is inscribed” (142). By deploying “the spectator’s identification” in an engagement with images and figures that help them “work through the codes” of culture’s normative positions



Notes—Conclusion221

(femininity for de Lauretis, more generally the abjected position of feminine/racialized ­n on-human other for me), the film “sets in play the terms” of our received cultural positions and their attachments/desires (153). “The most exciting work in cinema and in feminism today is not ­anti-narrative

or anti–Oedipal; quite the opposite. It is narrative and Oedipal with a vengeance, for it seeks to stress the duplicity of that scenario and the specific contradiction of the … subject in it” (Alice Doesn’t [157]). 6.  Baker Kee, Jessica. “Black Masculinities and Postmodern Horror.” 52.

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Index Numbers in bold italics indicate pages with illustrations abjection ​81, 83, 105, 122, 134, 140–​41, 151, 152, 157–​58, 163, 177, 181, 191, 199, 201, 216n33, geopolitical abjection 161,175, 179, 220n37; see also agency; individualism; masculinity Agamben, Giorgio ​56, 149, 217n52 agency ​3, 5, 11, 13, 15–​16, 19, 22, 24–​29, 34, 39–​40, 43–​44, 45, 52, 53, 84, 95, 115, 129–​34, 136–​38, 140–​43, 147, 155–​58, 173, 177–​79, 182, 188, 189, 192, 194–​95, 196, 199, 203n3, 205n40; “agency panic” 132–​33, 140; “suffering agency” 136–​37, 143, 146, 175, 189; collective 174, 175, 218n64; see also abjection; individualism; liberalism; masculinity Ah-sung, Go ​185, 194 allegory ​14, 17, 18, 20, 31, 50, 51, 81, 117; apocalypse allegory 3, 5, 10, 13, 15, 20, 22, 26, 27, 31–​32, 34, 36, 39, 42, 44, 45, 52, 55, 63, 67, 78, 86, 164, 198, 201–​2, 204n15, 209n21; American exceptionalism 102, 103, 213n24; Biblical allegory 12, 14, 59–​60, 63; definitions of 14–​16, 36–​38, 78; of leadership 151, 153; Marxist 162; performative 53, 208n17; political 161, 165–​ 66, 181, 191; of revolution 78, 161, 174, 177, 195; of romantic love 180; of survival 81, 83, 127, 162; see also colonialism; nationalism apocalypse ​5, 11–​12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20–​21, 22, 24, 27, 29, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42–​43, 45, 46, 47, 51, 64, 67, 86, 124, 151, 158, 161, 162, 182, 195, 198, 201, 204n11, 210n37; and capitalism 74, 77, 165, 207n73; as critique 49,181; and heroism 5, 10, 26, 30; and leadership 25; liberal 11, 18, 23, 27, 28, 31, 69; and masculinity 84, 143, 145, 146–​47; speculative 177, 198, 199–​202; and Western Expansion 81, 83, 103–​4, 111, 147–​48, 154, 188; zombie 104, 126, 142, 144, 145, 147–​48, 152, 154–​55, 156, 157; see also allegory Ashitey, Claire Hope ​52, 56, 61

Bederman, Gail ​82, 188, 211n65 Benjamin, Walter ​13, 16 Berlant, Lauren ​139–​40, 213n31 biopolitics ​34, 101, 104, 112–13, 117–​18, 191, 207n63, 209n22, 214n42; see also Foucault, Michel; Mbembe, Achille; necropolitics; neoliberalism Boulware, Taylor ​73, 84–​85, 86 Brooks, Peter ​29, 206n46; see also melodrama Brooks, Richard ​109, 110 Brown, Jayna ​17, 18, 32–​33, 37, 65, 164, 198; see also speculative fiction Brown, Wendy ​26, 33 Caine, Michael ​56–​57 Camacho, Alicia Schmidt ​53 Campbell, Joseph ​11, 18, 180; see also hero’s journey Canavan, Gerry ​52, 95, 100, 104, 143, 150, 164–​65, 182, 194, 195, 208n10, 212n12, 212n13, 213n21, 213n30, 213n33, 214n42, 217n40, 217n55, 217n62, 218n7, 218n12, 218n15, 220n42, 220n43 capitalist realism ​17, 22, 33–​35, 37, 52, 53, 94, 124, 132, 148, 158, 160, 162, 164–​65, 177, 197, 182, 195, 197; see also Fisher, Mark Carey, M.R. ​197 Carroll, Amy Sara ​175, 196, 208n17, 219n19, 219n23 Carroll, Hamilton ​7, 28, 29, 20 n2, 215n14; see also masculinity Castillo, Debra ​173–​74, 219n29, 219n30; see also rasquache CGI (computer-generated imagery) ​9, 19, 29, 30 Chervniavsky, Eva ​6, 37, 205n40, 207n63, 215n7; see also critique; neoliberalism Children of Men ​5, 7, 38, 44, 47–​68, 85–​87, 160, 167, 175, 194, 208n5, 214n41 Chu, Seo-Young ​16, 36, 204n14, 207n75 climate crisis ​3, 11, 49, 162, 167 Close, Glenn ​199 Clough, Patricia ​55, 209n22

Baccarin, Morena ​93, 212n9 Bakhtin, Mikail ​217n54 Baldwin, Alec ​90, 99

229

230 Index cognitive estrangement ​36, 37, 39, 55, 207n74, 214n41 colonialism ​16, 24–​25, 44, 56, 60, 66–​67, 82, 102, 199, 205n37; settler-colonial 20, 26, 29–​ 31, 37, 39, 43, 47, 49, 51, 64, 72, 81, 83–​84, 88–​89, 90, 95–​96, 98, 100, 102–​4, 113, 117, 121, 124, 129–​30, 146, 149, 150–​51, 154, 158, 168–​69, 179; see also modernity, Western; Western Expansion concordance in narrative ​31, 55, 67, 209n21; see also Kermode, Frank critique (as mode) ​5, 14, 17, 33, 36–​38, 39, 43, 47, 52, 59, 62, 74, 77, 81, 83, 101, 146–​47, 167–​69, 207n79, 215n7; and allegory 45, 47–​49, 50, 53, 56–​57, 64, 67, 161–​62, 166, 171, 175, 182, 201; and irony 88–​89, 95, 96, 97–​99, 110, 124, 173, 176 Cuarón, Alfonso ​5, 47, 48, 49, 51–​54, 58, 60, 63, 64, 65, 67; see also Children of Men DasGupta, Sayantani ​60, 66, 209n30 Dean, Jodi ​35, 36, 215n11 DeLauretis, Teresa ​40, 58, 220n5; see also identification disability ​70–​71, 86, 199, 209n24, 210n46; see also Schalk, Sami documentary ​44, 50, 51, 53, 219n19 dystopia ​5, 36, 55, 161–​62, 164–​65, 171, 173, 176 see also apocalypse; necrofuturism; utopia Eaton, Courtney ​75 Ejiofor, Chiwetel ​9, 61, 111 Elliott, Jane ​64, 136–​37, 146, 205n39 Emmerich, Roland ​10, 11, 12, 18, 50, 182; 2012 9, 27; Independence Day 22, 23, 28 eschatology ​32, 35 Evans, Chris ​4, 19, 162, 182, 186, 220n41 Faludi, Susan ​215n14 feminist film theory ​18, 39–41, 58, 59 Fillion, Nathan ​90, 99 Firefly/Serenity ​30, 44, 87, 88–​125, 127, 130, 149, 185, 220n38 Fisher, Mark ​17, 22, 33, 35–​36, 37, 52, 53, 160, 165, 206n60, 206n62; see also capitalist realism Ford, John ​100, 146, 212n14; The Searchers 113, 149–​50 Foucault, Michel ​34, 56, 207n63, 215n6; see also biopolitics Freedman, Carl ​36, 207n74; see also cognitive estrangement freedom ​4, 11, 12, 24–​25, 32, 48, 64, 90, 95, 98, 100–​1, 104–​5, 118, 124, 151, 205n16, 210n37; see also agency; individualism; liberalism frontier myth ​79, 82, 89, 96, 99, 102–​4, 113, 118, 147, 151, 155, 158, 188; see also Slotkin, Richard; Turner, Frederick Jackson; Western Expansion Fukuyama, Francis ​35; “end of history” 16

genre ​12, 16–​18, 36–​38, 44–​45, 103, 142, 204n15, 204n20, 207n66, 207n67; conventions and reiterations 22–​24, 27, 30–​31, 34, 40–​43, 69, 80, 86–​87, 98, 103–​4, 160, 164–​65, 173–​76, 177, 180, 201; and liberalism 25; popular genres 1–​5, 14–​15, 20, 27–​29, 39, 46, 48, 57, 59, 72, 76–​78, 81, 88–​91, 99, 110, 113–​14, 128, 132,134, 142, 146–​47, 149, 154–​55, 175–​76, 195, ​206n51, 211n49, 212n7; see also allegory; apocalypse; documentary; capitalist realism; horror; melodrama; realism; science fiction; speculative fiction; Western The Girl with All the Gifts ​5, 45, 197–​202 Glass, Ron ​92 Glau, Summer ​96, 122, 212n9 Hall, G. Stanley ​82 Hardy, Tom ​67, 68, 69 Harris, Ed ​190 Hassler-Forrest, Dan ​135, 138, 140 Hayles, N. Katherine ​174; see also posthuman hero, heroism ​2, 5, 10, 12–​13, 19, 101, 127; in apocalypse 17–​18, 27; gender in 67, 78, 80–​81, 87, 111, 119–​21, 123 ; genre and 24–​25, 30, 38–​39, 49, 58, 65, 85, 89, 95, 149–​50, 174, 177, 180–​81, 192, 194–​95, 198; and liberalism 22–​23, 26, 30, 44, 45, 52, 163, 166, 188 masculinity and 17, 28–​29, 34, 41, 51–​53, 58, 66, 68–​69, 85, 98, 106, 138, 140–​41, 146, 162–​ 63, 177, 192; neoliberalism and 157–​58, 197; racialization and 39, 47, 161, 166; superhero 4, 19–​20, 28, 42, 48, 121, 203n3; see also hero’s journey; leadership hero’s journey ​18, 22, 44, 45, 58, 95, 123, 163, 173, 175, 180, 220n42; monomyth 18, 176; see also Campbell, Joseph; heroism Hobbes, Thomas ​127–​28, 139, 143, 148, 203n4, 205n36, 215n4, 216n26; Hobbesian “war for survival” 77, 126–​27, 137, 144, 148 horror genre ​34, 44, 113–​14, 118, 126, 129–​30, 137, 142, 150, 155, 170, 198; see also Shaviro, Steven; zombie apocalypse Hoult, Nicholas ​74 identification ​5, 78, 79; in cinema 41, 45, 58–​ 59, 69, 141–​42, 176, 182, 216n37; in narrative 18, 38, 40, 143, 144–​46, 198, 202 immigration ​53, 103, 168 individualism ​1, 5, 10–​11, 12, 22, 23, 25–​26, 39, 45, 103, 130, 133–​34, 137, 163, 191, 199; and leadership 13, 19, 138, 145–​46, 157, 163, 195; and masculinity 23, 47, 144, 147 irony ​44, 88–​89, 94, 95, 97, 107, 124, 150, 211n2 James, P.D. ​50, 51, 208n5 Jameson, Frederic ​15–​16, 17, 32, 36, 37, 38, 164, 203n7; Allegory and Ideology 204n13, 206 n57, 207n77, 207n82, 210n35; Archaeologies of the Future 218n9



Index231

Jemisin, N.K. ​197, 201, 204n20 Johansson, Scarlett ​4, 94 Joon-ho, Bong ​5, 45, 160, 161, 165, 166, 218n6, 220n39; see also Snowpiercer Kaplan, E. Ann ​11, 53, 57, 203n3, 208n18, 209n25, 209n28 Kee, Jessica Baker ​140, 201, 216n33 Keough, Riley ​75 Kermode, Frank ​16, 31, 32, 206n52, 208n17, 209n21, 210n37 Kimmel, Michael ​133, 215n14 Kirkland, Robert ​126 Klein, Naomi ​218n2 Kravitz, Zoe ​75 Latimer, Heather ​209n31 leadership ​1, 5, 12–​13, 19, 23, 25, 39, 47, 80, 85, 94, 119–​122, 123–​24, 125, 126, 135–​36, 145, 183; and gender 80–​81, 85–​86, 121; and masculinity 41, 44–​45, 51, 59, 63, 66, 72, 84, 86, 97, 105–​7, 138–​40, 146–​47, 188, 193; and race 62, 64; sovereign leadership 95, 97, 107, 119, 127–​28, 146, 151, 154, 177, 187, 191–​92, 194; and violence 78, 188–​89 Lee, Abbey ​75 LeGuin, Ursula ​18, 204n21 liberalism ​11–​12, 24–​25, 30–​31, 43, 51, 64, 66, 95, 149, 158, 179, 199, 205n36; see also individualism; neoliberalism Lincoln, Andrew ​45, 126, 157 Lothian, Alexis ​35, 38, 41, 52, 65, 85, 164, 198, 206n51, 207n69, 207n76, 207n81 Loza, Susana ​6, 20, 29, 30, 92, 103, 205n25, 205n26, 213n17 Lubiano, Wahneema ​34, 207n66 Mad Max: Fury Road ​44, 47–​49, 59, 67–​89, 181, 208n3, 209n24, 210n43, 210n44, 210n46; Mad Max (franchise) 77–​78 Mann, Bonnie ​82–​83, 189, 192, 203n2, 210n40; shame-to-power conversion 79, 84, 85; see also masculinity Martinez-Raguso, Michael ​172–​73, 174, 219n28 Marvel Comic Universe (MCU) ​4, 5, 28, 29, 220n41; Avengers films 30, 88, 94; Avengers: Endgame 20; Avengers: Infinity War 19, 29; Black Panther 20; Captain America: Civil War 4, 42 masculinity ​23, 39, 41, 43, 76; and agency 155, 157–​58, 177; female 84, 86; hegemonic 72, 97, 188; heroic 163, 194; and leadership 98, 103, 107, 142, 147, 153; managerial 39, 66; militaristic 107, 145; and neoliberalism 215n14; patriarchal 73–​74; primitive 81–​83, 84, 106, 116, 163; racialization of 13, 62, 110–​11, 115–​16, 121–​22; sentimental 23, 47, 205n34; sovereign 79, 85, 89, 189, 210n40; styles of 59–​60, 64, 72, 73, 91, 92–​93,

105, 156; and violence 145, 150, 188; and whiteness 2, 25, 27, 29, 31, 46, 48, 96, 132–​ 33, 215n14 Mbembe, Achille ​56, 176, 213n33, 217n46; see also necrofuturism; necropolitics McCarthy, Anna ​130, 134, 158–​59, 215n6 McClennan, Sophia ​48, 52, 218n6; “runaway film” 49 McCloud, Scott ​210n43 McGee, Patrick ​147, 150, 217n47 Melley, Timothy ​132–​33 see also agency; “agency panic” melodrama ​28–​29, 31; see also masculinity, sentimental Mexico ​49, 53, 161, 167, 179–​80, 219n22; U.S.Mexico border 45, 53, 54, 161, 165, 168–​69, 174, 178 migration, refugees ​53–​54, 62, 169, 177, 205n37, 219n30 militarism, militarization ​23, 54–​54, 55, 56, 72, 74, 76, 79, 89–​90, 98, 107, 119, 137, 145, 154, 167–​68, 180, 183, 199, 200, 201,210n45, 219n28; see also leadership Miller, George ​44, 49, 69, 81, 208n3, 208n4, 210n43, 211n49 Minh-ha, Trinh T. ​55; “image repertoire” 55, 168, 219n21 modernity, Western modernity ​3, 17, 25, 33, 39, 42–​43, 55, 66, 137, 140, 159, 171, 204n17, 205n35, 220n37; see also individualism; liberalism Mulvey, Laura ​40–​41, 58 Muñoz, José Esteban ​9, 164, 203n1, 204n20, 210n34, 213n31 Nanua, Sennia ​198 “national manhood” ​39, 66, 79, 82, 104, 210n40; see also masculinity; Nelson, Dana nationalism ​23, 54, 211n58; see also American Exceptionalism necrofuturism ​52, 67, 160, 162, 164–​65, 177, 178, 182, 195, 218n7; see also Canavan, Gerry; necropolitics; speculative fiction necropolitics ​52, 66, 118, 161, 191, 199, 200, 212n13, 213n33, 217n46; see also Agamben, Giorgio; biopolitics; Mbembe, Achille; Nelson, Dana ​39, 66, 203n2, 203n40; see also masculinity, “national manhood” neoliberalism ​14, 24, 25–​26, 34, 37, 39, 45, 52, 55, 61, 130, 132, 136–​37, 138, 139–​40, 144, 151, 158, 166, 205n40, 207n63, 215n6, 234; agency 137, 146, 157, 199; global 63–​64, 76, 163, 165, 168, 169, 175; multicultural 5, 20, 23, 26–​27, 28, 29–​30, 44, 92, 204n25; see also Berlant, Lauren; Brown, Wendy; Cherniavsky, Eva; Elliott, Jane; liberalism; McCarthy, Anna; post-racial; Rose, Nikolas news media ​1, 17, 50, 54, 55, 168, 214n39 non-realism ​32, 35; see also speculative fiction Nyong’o Tavia ​17, 35, 203n1

232 Index Owen, Clive ​44, 50, 57, 58, 61 Paik, Peter ​15, 164, 182, 204n11,218n10 Peña, Luis Fernando ​166, 171, 181 The Poseidon Adventure ​65 posthuman ​174, 195, 197, 199, 201; see also Hayles, N. Katherine; Sami Schalk post-racial ​10, 20, 27, 92, 102, 117, 198, 212n9, 213n25 queer ​17, 35, 38, 41, 44, 72, 84, 87, 204n20, 209n31; see also Brown, Jayna; Lothian, Alexis; Muñoz, José Esteban; Nyong’o, Tavia; Schalk, Sami rasquache ​166, 173, 174, 179, 181, 219n29, 219n30 realism ​33–​37, 148, 164; see also capitalist realism; non-realism; speculative fiction Reedus, Norman ​136 Reis, Marcanthonee ​194 revolution ​15, 32, 45, 56, 57, 61–​62, 64, 78, 83, 86, 90, 161, 166, 173, 174, 177, 179, 180–​81, 183, 186, 187, 190, 192, 195, 197, 209n33, 210n35, 217n64 Rivera, Alex ​3, 45, 160–​61, 165–​66, 169, 173–​ 76, 218n3, 219n30 Roosevelt, Teddy ​82 Rose, Nikolas ​132 Schalk, Sami ​17, 71, 199–​200, 206n57, 207n66; see also disability; queer; speculative fiction science fiction (sci-fi) ​16, 17, 22, 32, 34, 49–​ 50, 51, 55, 66–​67, 78, 88, 92, 94, 124, 160, 164, 170–​71, 173, 175, 180, 181, 207n74; and colonialism 89–​91, 100, 103, 105, 204n11; and race 102, 109–​111; see also apocalypse; Chu, Seo-Young; cognitive estrangement; non-realism; speculative fiction Scott, A.O. ​15 Shaviro, Steven ​142, 155, 216n23, 216n37; see also horror Shih, Shu-Mei ​14, 16, 203n7 shot-reverse shot ​178, 193 sincere fictions ​29–​31, 154 see also colonialism; Loza, Susana; neoliberalism, multicultural Sleep Dealer ​3, 5, 45, 160–​62, 165–​88, 195–​96, 197–​98 Slotkin, Richard ​102, 214n45; “fatal environment” 113, 149–​50; see also frontier myth; Turner, Frederick Jackson; Western Expansion Snowpiercer ​5, 9, 30, 33, 34, 45, 160–​66, 181–​ 196, 197–​98, 218n5–​8, 220n38 sovereignty ​12, 72, 107, 127, 133–​34, 148, 154, 185, 191–​92, 203n4; see also abjection; Hobbes, Thomas; individualism; leadership; masculinity; Mbembe, Achille

Soylent Green ​165, 166 speculative fiction ​17–​18, 24, 43, 45, 52, 85, 86, 104, 111, 124, 158, 162, 164–​65, 166, 168–​ 69, 174, 176, 177, 180, 182, 196, 197–​98, 201, 207n66, 213n29; as aesthetics 31, 32–​36, 37–​38; Afrofuturism 17, 32, 201, 204n20; see also allegory; apocalypse; dystopia; genre; Lothian, Alexis; Loza, Susana; Nyong’o, Tavia; Schalk, Sami; steampunk; utopia Spencer, Octavia ​183 Spivak, Gayatri ​66 Staite, Jewel ​91 steampunk ​98, 103, 213n29 Sugg, Katherine ​204n15, 206n50, 215n5 surveillance ​54, 99, 115, 167; see also biopolitics Swinton, Tilda ​184 Tadiar, Neferti X.M. ​63 Theron, Charlize ​67, 69, 75 Torres, Gina ​90, 92, 99 Turner, Frederick Jackson ​82; see also frontier myth utopia ​15, 18, 32–​33, 35, 36, 37, 43, 65, 71, 86, 103, 120, 160, 164, 165, 181–​82, 195, 204n11, 206n57; see also apocalypse; Brown, Jayna; Jameson, Frederic; Muñoz, José Esteban; revolution; speculative fiction Varela, Leonor ​172, 181 The Walking Dead ​5, 7, 34, 44, 126–​59, 163, 177, 198, 201 Wall-E ​52 Weheliye, Alexander  205n38 Western (genre) ​104, 113–​14, 132, 154–​55; in Hollywood film 39, 81, 98–​100, 105, 129–​30, 146–​7, 149 Western expansion ​91, 102, 113 Whedon, Joss ​87, 88–​91, 93, 97, 98, 101, 104, 108, 113, 123–​24; see also Firefly/Serenity Whitley, Rosie Huntington ​75 Williams, Evan Calder ​17, 21, 76–​77, 155, 158, 213n17; gasoline punk 77; salvage punk 76 Wilson, Rob ​195 Wynter, Sylvia ​25, 205n35, 205n37, 205n38 Yeun, Steven ​136, 157 zombie apocalypse ​3, 11, 44, 45, 104, 126–​29, 132–​33, 136–​39, 141, 143, 144–​49,151–​ 52, 154–​55, 157, 198, 214n42; see also apocalypse; Canavan, Gerry; genre zombies ​113–​14, 140–​42, 150, 155–​56, 199–​201, 217n64; see also abjection; posthuman; Schalk, Sami; Shaviro, Steven; Williams, Evan Calder