I started watching a sci fi dystopia movie the other day called The Kitchen, which so far isn’t very good. I suspect I’m in withdrawal. For the past year and a half, I’ve been yearning for Season 2 of The Last Of Us, which was delayed by the writers strike. In the meantime, I’ve tried a few other end-of-the-world shows and movies of varying quality: Fallout (excellent), A Quiet Place: Day One (forgettable), Silo (boring).
There are a lot to choose from. For the last few decades, dystopian sci fi has been one of the defining popular cultural genres of the new century. It began in the last days of the prior millennium. As the momentous date approached, a millenarian mood took hold, lampooned in movies like Independence Day and Mars Attacks. In 1999, as the world held its breath for the Y2K meltdown, The Matrix floated the idea that the fall of humankind was already here, we just didn’t know it yet. A couple of years later, as the U.S. declared war on half the planet in response to 9/11, Resident Evil resurrected the zombie apocalypse formula of the 1970s, which soon became nearly as ubiquitous as Avengers spinoffs are today. In 2010, The Walking Dead debuted. It went on to become one of the most popular cable TV shows ever made. Then The Last Of Us turned the formula into prestige TV, with me as precisely the target audience.
I’ve been reading a pretty good new book on the age of westward expansion, and I find it curious that people didn’t seem to be obsessed with the end of the world back then. It was a bloody time, after all, and not just for blacks, Indians, and Chinese laborers. There was the Civil War in the east, of course, but low-level guerrilla warfare was also a fixed condition on the other half of the continent. The conflicts were overwhelmingly with the natives, but not entirely so. In the 1850s, the U.S. army nearly went to war with the Mormon settlers of Utah, who had tried to establish an autonomous theocratic state encompassing a territory of the West larger than the entire Deep South. In the process, the Mormons, with some Indian allies, murdered 135 emigrants from Arkansas en route to California, including women and children over the age of six. The episode is notable because of the Mormons’ participation in it, but massacres of this sort were almost prosaic in the West, both white-on-Indian and Indian-on-white.
But the mood of the age was optimism. Among the most popular novels of the 1870s were The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Around the World in Eighty Days, and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. These were stories of journeys into the unknown — thrilling escapades that ended in triumph. In a self-confident age, this was the romantic understanding of what it meant to be human. The physical brutality of the Oregon Trail, the Gold Rush, and the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad are legendary, but these were projects of empire. The young republic had been tested by southern secession and had prevailed with the victory of the Union. It was now on a march of conquest to the Pacific. This was the backdrop of life as a late nineteenth-century American.
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