In bleak times, there is a boom in doom.Americans have long been fascinated by disaster scenarios, from the population explosion to the cold war to global warming. These days the doomers, as Mrs. Wilkerson jokingly calls herself and likeminded others, have a new focus: peak oil...
- Imagining Life Without Oil, and Being Ready (New York Times, June 5, 2010)
The Collapsitarian narrative has been with us for a long time and is unlikely to disappear anytime soon.
In modern memory its memetic lineage can be traced back to The Great Futurism Bifurcation of `68* when, in the spring of that year, two divergent visions of what may lie ahead began an epic battle to dominate the cognitive space of the West's cultural (and celluloid) spiritus mundi.
For the next 40 years these two narrative storylines would continue to develop along their separate paths; each memetic line evolving into its own distinct and specialized species, with its own framing patterns and expressions.
What would eventually develop into the Collapsitarian Narrative gained its toehold quickly, producing four more sequels over the following five years and even a Saturday morning cartoon series.
It has become a mythic arch well established and easily adapted to the particularities of whatever crisis currently dominates the anxieties of our modern time. The current Collapsitarian Narrative is just the latest in a long line of these manifestations.
*Previously these competing visions of the future had existed as part of a single narrative. As can be seen in Menzies 1939 adaptation of H.G.Wells "Things to Come" the collapse narrative is quite evident, but exists within the storyline as a precursor period only; a dark age that must inevitably be passed through before the eventual rise of humanity into the promised Utopian future.
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2 comments:
Ah, I had forgotten about the Planet of the Apes Saturday morning cartoon.
I would also point out that Star Trek: The Original Series debuted in 1966, and like Wells' vision, its future history featured a period of chaos and decline before humanity got it's collective stuff together and got on with the crisp and clean future of practically limitless free energy from dilithium crystals.
The Collapse narrative and the techno-transcendent narrative can easily co-exist on the same timeline, but simple narratives seem to have an enjoyed a propagative advantage over more complex narratives for most of the 20th century, but I think a comparison of a random episode of Gunsmoke with a random episode of Lost would support the idea that our appetite for complex narrative is growing.
Yes, but I don't think it's as much a question of simplicity v. complexity as one of an innovation in narrative form introduced in `68.
What was new wasn't so much the use of Collapse as an part of the storyline in itself, but rather the role of that particular structure within the story arc.
Previously a Collapse had always taken the form of a transitional element, a bridge played to add narrative weight before introducing of the futurist chorus.
The innovation, the novel element PotA introduced, was in moving Collapse into the role of narrative destination itself. Now the Collapse is no longer the bridge, but becomes the actual chorus.
From this innocuous memetic mutation -- Collapse as it own unique narrative locale -- we can trace the descent of an entire genre of post-apocalyptic stories characterized by projections forward into a uncivilized, dread-filled non-future.
(A narrative that has now become so pervasive, familiar and commonplace as to almost be a cliche.)
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