Enough with the Hippie Apocalypse
Posted: April 28th, 2009 | Filed under: The room flickers blue and white |
Science Fiction, my favorite genre, has been wearing on me lately. Somehow the same moral universe keeps popping up, and it’s a tired tale that has no end. I have some suspicions about why this keeps happening.
Here’s the moral playbook I keep seeing:
- There is a God, but God is on nobody’s side.
- God is omniscient and all-powerful, but God’s plan is never finished - history has no end.
- Morality is a wash, but sacrifice is needed. Sacrifice your life, or, even better, sacrifice your desire for morality. The reward is disembodiment.
- If in doubt, talk to Judas. He has has all the answers because he made the ultimate sacrifice already.
I’ll muster up some inter-generational ire and blame the 1960’s for this. The countercultural sixties are where I go for just this combination of individualism and abstract suspicion of hierarchy. (I’m sure it was important at the time, but now we live under its shadow - I doubt if even those who lived through it recognize its contours.)
I could be describing Jesus Christ Superstar here, but actually this rant was triggered by the finale of television’s Battlestar Galactica. As I was watching BSG and then the Watchmen movie, a common predilection for violence and Bob Dylan got me thinking.
War is the context for most popular science fiction - specifically, war augmented by weaponry that allows for destruction at a genocidal scale. Star Wars started this way, and so did BSG. The obvious parallel here is nuclear weaponry, and its advent in the 20th century - Science Fiction as we know it is largely a post-Hiroshima phenomenon. Implication in the instant annihilation of thousands is enough to drive anyone to nightmares, so it’s no surprise to see people working out their fears and moral questions through popular narrative.
I’m increasingly disturbed, however, by how many of these stories adopt a stance of amorality in the context of genocidal violence, especially in light of how a similar approach enabled America to rise to its current state of nuclear dominance.
Nuclear deterrence was invented as an amoral response to the morally questionable practice of nuclear attack. Through deterrence, we refrain from killing one another because we’re all scared of the same thing; thus, we avoid making the explicit moral choice not to kill. The product of nuclear deterrence, among other things, is an increasingly technocratic and militarized state, in which game theory and statistics substitute for democratic debate.
Deterrence depends on the possibility of Mutually Assured Destruction in order to work. The vision of a world-gone-wrong keeps us all in check - or at least in stasis. What if this is where popular Sci-Fi comes in? I don’t suspect an actual co-opting of Hollywood by the Military - but perhaps we create the stories we need to keep us assured about our choices.
What if a chief function of apocalyptic Science Fiction is to allow us to practice the world’s end, so that we can live as if there is no history, no end, no direction? Are these stories of existential doubt before The Button simply propping up our support of never-ending state militarism? Let’s look at some cases in point.
The story of BSG hinges on at least two nuclear holocausts, and arguably three.
The first, on the planet Caprica, results from a sexual indiscretion that leads to treason, and produces a near-total genocide. It spurs the exodus of a remnant who are eventually led by a military leader to discover their racial destiny.
The second (which actually occurred earlier, on a planet called “Earth” that wasn’t really Earth) destroyed all but five citizens of an entire planet. These five refugees eventually find their way into another inter-racial war, and help bring peace through technological innovation.
The third, arguably an accident, takes place in the series denoument, in which humanity’s last enemies are nuked by an errant weapon from a dead ship. This act ends a war, and liberates a people.
In all three of these instances, nuclear destruction and massive murder turn out OK. That is likely the story we need to hear if we’re worried about annihilation, but I don’t think we’re invited to side with the vanquished here - as in much sci-fi, BSG invites us to side with the button-pushers. The storylines of BSG deal more with the trials of owning power than with the trials of suffering under power.
The series’ conclusion could only have come from someone stuck in the sixties. Faced with a choice between capitulation to a militaristic society or no society at all, the last remnant of humanity chooses to dissolve, to forgo the building of cities or assembly at any greater scale than that required for copulation. No worries though, the decision wasn’t really a decision anyway - in a flash-forward we see that these tired loners somehow end up generating yet another technocratic warlike society in the far future. The cycle resumes.
The Watchmen movie (I still haven’t read the comic) plays as an even straighter fable of nuclear deterrence, amorality, and time without end. Dr. Manhattan is a clear manifestation of this - through technological achievement he’s become an amoral being who is indifferent to life or death, but whose power lends dominance. (He also lives outside of history, in every moment of time simultaneously.) America has him on their side, so they win the Vietnam War, the hippies and the commies and the counterculture are proved wrong, Nixon stays in the presidency through multiple terms.
This story demonstrates the complicity of sixties countercultural morality in the doctrine of nuclear deterrence. Author Allen Moore produces a hippie nightmare, the dystopia of an America ruled without check by Nixon, by throwing the nuclear balance out of whack. In this alternate history, America is morally retrograde because of its technological superiority. The accidental invention of Dr. Manhattan threw off history, and now the future of the world hangs in the balance.
The movie version of the Watchmen ends this dystopia through the re-staging of Dr. Manhattan as an enemy to all mankind. This is a lie of course, Dr. Manhattan wants peace, but in this case peace is restored through rendering the nuclear capabilities of two sides equal in the face of a common, technologically superior threat. Dr. Manhattan himself, and his moralistic friend Rorschach, who are at first appalled by this solution. But Dr. Manhattan comes around to seeing the light - he sacrifices his desire for humanity to make a clear moral choice by killing his friend, rather than letting Rorschach ruin things by spilling the beans.
So in story after story, we see characters sacrifice their personal moralities in the interest of letting history resume a cyclical, rudderless path that well suits the military-nuclear State. We need some new master narratives here! At the very best, this moral playbook makes for flat, predictable storytelling. At worst, it may be helping us settle in to a state built around the human capability for genocide.
The irony here is that at the small scale - episode by episode, and especially at the beginning of a new series - the genre of Science Fiction serves as a rich site for exploration of all these implications. Plenty of earlier episodes in the Battlestar series took us through some true and messy moral plays, reflective of the complex allegiances and motivations of a classed, racialized, technology-dependent society. The same could be said for some of the original Outer Limits episodes, some of the X-Files pieces, and of even several Joss Whedon episodes (Buffy, Angel, Firefly). But there seem to be problems at the master narrative scale - when these episodes start to add up to a larger plan.
I wonder if the struggle so many of these series face, the struggle to end their master stories well, doesn’t stem from the dominant moral universe from which they draw. What kind of compelling master narrative can really result from a modern, amoral space in which technology is inevitable, history cyclical, and apocalypse necessary? There’s so little at stake here, so little to ultimately question - like weightlifting in zero-gravity. The fact that rising media forms and distribution models (DVD, RSS, niche-branding) are fertile ground for the master-narrative serial doesn’t bode well. Perhaps producers should assign some of our more morally complex storytellers to the problem of designing the long arcs - imagine if the master narrative behind the next long-form series was written by Atom Egoyan, or Mike Leigh, or Spike Lee.
Or for starters, just take the dominant logic and pervert it. Take that moral playbook and turn it upside-down. What if history did have an end? What if God was on the side of the weak, against the strong? What if there were only one, final apocalypse? The moral possibilities are no more or less limited than the technological possibilities. Science Fiction should be all about the “what-if,” let’s hold it to the task.
the need for arc control is a good criticism, especially in light of TV serial success.
But I cant help but think your analysis of nuclear issues in sci fi should be framed as a psychoanalytic report. I’m not sure the film was aware of what you are talking about.
Ps. I love your new web site
miss you all,Dave
Fair enough, it’s buried way in there I think. And I bring my own baggage to my work without a doubt. But I keep wondering when we’re gonna get some different sets of psychoses, anxieties, fantasies in our collective entertainment. Enough of the same morals to the story, and it adds up to a new dogma.
Oh, and thanks for reading Dave! Glad to know you’re out there.
How about Octavia Butler (RIP) as a voice that already exists in terms of the apocalyptic master narrative (esp Parable of the Sower)? There is no less an inevitability presented, but actors are also presented as moral agents irreducible to an immanent history. Harder to turn into a blockbuster movie (or series), maybe…
Wow, there are quite a few assumptions here to unpack. First, you seem to be speaking as though the cyclical histories of modern science fiction stories have their inception with the post-nuclear conditions of the 1960s. This could not be further from the truth, as cyclical histories dominate virtually every human mythological system from the Paleolithic on down. The cosmology you describe was not invented by those loathsome hippies, of course, but appropriated from Buddhism, Hinduism, and other religious systems that refuse to assume the primacy the individual human ego as the basis for morality.
In his Masks of God series, Joseph Campbell draws an arc from the emergence of self-awareness through the Twentieth century, and it is his contention that it is the idiosyncratic invention of the (illusory?) notion of separation of the Self from Other (and God) that is what sets apart “Occidental” mythology and creates the possibility of such things as a self-destructing civilizing impulse (and its mythological counterpart, the linear history and Apocalypse.)
Like you, Campbell did not have any romantic illusions about the 1960s counterculture. In Myths to Live By, he decries what he sees as a regressive, infantile desire to return to more “primitive” systems of spirituality as being a particularly florid eddy of the idiosyncratic, self-indulgent possibilities of the ego-driven West. While some of his hierarchies are a little presumptive for my taste (as Wade Davis quips, other cultures are not just steps in a “pyramid that conveniently places Victorian England at the apex”), Campbell’s commitment to examining the WHOLE history of human storytelling is precisely what makes his insights relevant and useful half a century later.
The bottom line: I wouldn’t worry. From where I’m standing, there appear to be no shortage of those who would read the apocalypse as a literal, ego-gratifying event that has the entire world ceasing to exist precisely when they do.
I realize I am making some assumptions of my own that may have resulted in a lack of clarity in my earlier comment.
(1) Joseph Campbell’s disdain for “counterculture” values applies specifically to the perceived preference for chaos over order (exhibited by the dismantling of traditional social structures with little apparent care for what was to be erected in their place) and not the investigation of non-Western philosophical systems (which he of course welcomed.)
(2) By ego-gratifying, I mean something that might require some clarification. I mean that which asserts the primacy of the identity, biography, experience, preferences, etc. of THIS “I,” (this life, this history) over identification with the universal Self.
It is what is illustrated in the episode of “Indra and the Ants” from the Brahmavaivarta Purana. Emboldened by his defeat of Vritra and elevated to the rank of King of the Gods, Indra orders a grand palace erected in his own honor. Vishnu visits Indra’s palace in the form of a brahmin boy; Indra welcomes him in. Vishnu praises Indra’s palace, casually adding that no former Indra had succeeded in building such a palace. At first, Indra is amused by the brahmin boy’s claim to know of former Indras. But the amusement turns to horror as the boy tells about Indra’s ancestors, about the great cycles of creation and destruction, and even about the infinite number of worlds scattered through the void, each with its own Indra. The boy claims to have seen them all. During the boy’s speech, a procession of ants enters the hall. The boy sees the ants and laughs. Finally humbled, Indra asks the boy why he is laughing. The boy reveals that the ants are all former Indras.
Even the most rudimentary grasp of contemporary physics reveals a glimpse of untold billions of galaxies, stars, and planets constantly coming into and out of existence, uncannily mirroring the cosmology set forth by Vishnu in this story. This insight is, of course, also deeply embedded in the core myth of Christianity, but it requires an understanding of the notion of “death and resurrection” that goes beyond the literal.
Thanks for taking the time to visit my site Emily, and thanks especially for indulging this poor piece of writing. I’ll respond soon.
Emily, I should clarify some of my interests here, which I admittedly shot past in a hurry. My worry is not with cyclical storylines themselves - they are beautiful, reflect our bodies and our world - but with their marriage to technological determinism. It’s probably a safer bet to explain the nuclear-sci-fi genre in terms of the long history you describe, and people are just picking whatever form of current destruction they can find. My risky and perhaps unfounded suspicion is that renewed interest in the old stories to which you allude came at just the wrong time in America, considering its rise to nuclear dominance. The Nuclear Age saw plenty of concentrated efforts by the U.S. government to naturalize the bomb, but once we started including the threat of nuclear destruction in our Hollywood plots, the government hardly needed to do this propaganda anymore.
I don’t find anything inherently better about either the cyclical or linear storyline, but where stories play the role of moral education, I take notice of the relation between structure and content. I don’t want to see a cyclical storyline about genocide, especially as a genre. I want to see linear storylines about such evil things.
The countercultural legacy I’m frustrated with is the one where the re-invention of the self and freedom from constraints ends up reifying the modern Enlightenment subject. There are plenty of people who followed that party off into much less autocratic ends, embracing anti-ego philosophies and religions. But to my eyes the dominant story of America at that time, the one told and re-told through cinema, music, documentary, is one in which one should free the mind not toward a humbler state, but toward an exhilaration that requires repetition through consumption. The “hippie” to my eyes is a mythological figure, a symbol of self-liberation, that is so decontextualized as to be portable as an instrument of creating consumptive desire. (Thomas Frank’s The Conquest of Cool tells some great stories about the ‘invention’ of popular counterculture by advertising executives.)
Another example of this would be to look at the application of Campbell’s work in popular cinema. I can’t judge Campbell, I only ever read the Power of Myth, but it’s amazing to me how a desire to tell universal stories so easily ends up all about juvenile male fantasy in the Star Wars series.
I may hit you up later with some questions about non-Western religious narratives, especially cyclical ones. As I move forward with some work on the nuclear narrative, I may be looking for some more counter-examples to the stories that get told.
Octavia Butler and Ursula LeGuin would both be worth reading. I will have to read thru all these posts again (great stuff), and maybe again, to have anything else to contribute. I snagged on the universal idea — I think that Butler and LeGuin were/are particularly aware of the usual hegemony of the white,western,well-heeled male as rep of the universal, and the resulting narrowness (but unfortunately sometime lack of particularity) of that universal.