Podcast 22 looks at a few, linked texts including the film, I am Legend, released in late 2007 and starring Will Smith.
Podcast
20 discussed the film and novel
Children of Men
and was recommended for use in the theme area of ‘The
Shape of Things to Come’. Podcast 22 also fits within this theme area
and is more clearly identified with Science Fiction catastrophe films, set
in deserted cities post-Apocalypse, with or without vampires, zombies and
pale mutants with religious zeal.
In 1932 authors of
When Worlds
Collide Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie wrote "It is a new intoxication -
annihilation. It multiplies every emotion." Perhaps the compounding of
emotions accounts for the large sum of catastrophe texts in Science Fiction.
This podcast only glances at a handful of these, in this case looking at a
post-Apocalyptic
setting where humans have been all but dispossessed of the Earth.
The recent DVD version of
I am Legend
with its cover design of Will Smith in army gear toting a rifle and
accompanied by a sleek German Shepherd dog amidst a ruined New York may well
be known to many secondary students but it is only one part of the
discussion. This podcast covers some antecedents to this memorable film
together with short stories for comparison and contrast to ask students to
respond to major themes in these vast, Apocalyptic scenarios.
Novel, I am Legend by Richard Matheson
Also boasting a memorable cover is the short novel I am Legend by Richard Matheson, reprinted as number 2 in the SF Masterworks series. The original copyright was for 1954 but this latest reprint is from Gollancz in 2001 and its cover depicts ghostly faces and a foreground skull with pearly-white vampire teeth reaching out of the image to grab the reader in its talons. The quote on the cover says I am Legend is a major vampire novel, but it is in the SF Masterworks series.
Many claim that the scientific explanation for vampires
found in I am Legend
was a successful melding of the horror and SF genres and perhaps this also
explains why there have been so many imitators. But before pointing at
imitators it might be worth looking at some influences on the novel
I am Legend.
The novel begins with the protagonist Robert Neville in a
fortified house at dusk and he is more than worried about the creatures that
surround his house in the dark, baying for his blood. More importantly,
Robert Neville has good reason to believe he is the last human alive, the
Last Man on Earth.
Many academics point to the influence of the little-known
three volume text of Mary Shelley’s
The Last Man,
published in 1832, as the progenitor for
I am Legend. This
large and unwieldy tale does indeed depict the ‘Elect’, a small group of
extraordinary individuals as the survivors of a global plague. Various
academics believe Shelley’s Elect are no other than her husband
Percy Shelley,
Lord Byron and
Mary Shelley herself
as a couple of main characters. Shelley’s The Last Man is available as a
free e-text online but it is not recommended for use with secondary
students. For this reader the text was long, dense and dull but Shelley
certainly set up the tropes associated with the future catastrophe, Science
Fiction disaster story.
For instance, the Last Man realises the whole, empty
world is available to him. The narrator muses, “If I turned my steps from
the near barren scene, and entered any of the earth's million cities, I
should find their wealth stored up for my accommodation - clothes, food,
books, and a choice of dwelling beyond the command of the princes of former
times”.
Also familiar are the wild animals that now roam the
cities. Shelley’s
Last Man sees sheep grazing on the Palatine in Rome and buffalo
wander around the Capitol.
The only companion for the Last Man is a shepherd’s dog
and all humanity’s culture towers over a tiny boat used on a fruitless quest
to find another living soul while “around the shores of deserted earth,
while the sun is high, and the moon waxes or wanes, angels, the spirits of
the dead, and the ever-open eye of the Supreme” watch and wait.
Critic Hugh Luke noted that the ending of
Shelley’s The Last
Man with a single, solitary human walking all of the Earth stressed
the idea that the individual is by nature both isolated and tragic, as also
seen in the poetry of other Elect members such as Lord Byron and William
Wordsworth.
Believe it or not,
Mary Shelley’s The
Last Man in three large volumes has been compressed down to one
movie story made in 2008 and set in Arizona. Notably, the Plague of
Shelley’s text has become a customised version of smallpox designed to be
used as a weapon.
Shelley’s
The Last Man
is said to borrow from a French text of 1805 of the same name.
There is no end to precursors of the disaster that leaves
just a few humans alive, perhaps known most famously in Western culture
through the story of Noah and his family’s survival after the God-given
flood to cleanse the Earth.
Now let’s jump back to Richard Matheson’s novel
I am Legend,
written in 1954. We left the protagonist as the last man alive in Los
Angeles. Like Shelley’s text, it is set in the future and a terrible
pandemic has wiped out humanity. Unlike Shelley’s Apocalyptic vision,
Matheson’s novel isolates the cause of the disaster as a disease most
probably caused by mutation of germ cells after nuclear weapons have been
exchanged.
The novel falls within the
Science Fiction genre
as a good deal of focus is given to the spread of the disease and its
mutation. The sole survivor, Robert Neville, teaches himself chemistry and
biology to make sense of his ruined world, even accounting for the terrible
effects of the pandemic that are manifested as vampirism. The novel strives
to make it plausible that the dead can be reanimated by the germ and the
living can adapt to it.
Matheson has added the vampirism to Shelley’s tale and
taken out the long speeches of her Elect survivors. Matheson almost makes
this end of the world believable, reducing the stage to one house and one
neurotic man’s perceptions.
Matheson’s
I am Legend
novel does share with Shelley some colossal Gothic verbosity and a good deal
of repetition where the protagonist insists on spilling whiskey or smashing
a whiskey glass at times of great emotional turmoil. Overall, it is a useful
short novel that may be of interest to secondary students also interested in
the current run of teenage vampire romance films and novels. By the end of
the novel Matheson has introduced some living vampires rather than
reanimated corpses that are slow and dumb and mere animals. The reader even
starts to like and respect the living vampires.
So what are abiding ideas from Matheson’s
I am Legend?
Firstly, the protagonist is a white male with considerable technological
savvy. He arms himself with a powerful rifle and various handguns and builds
a fortress home. The fortress home becomes the last bastion of human culture
where frescoes adorn the walls and Classical music is played nightly, while
the protagonist drinks good whiskey. The Last Man rejoices in free
consumerism, simply taking what he needs from supermarkets and driving a
Willy’s station wagon with a back large enough to accommodate plenty of
vampire corpses.
As in so many later post-Apocalyptic stories where
deranged or deformed survivors attack the remnants of humanity and their
artifacts, Matheson’s
I am Legend records the bestial attack on human’s most
cherished goods, as at page forty-one, "He ran to the peephole and looked
out. His teeth grated together and a burst of rage filled him as he saw the
station wagon lying on its side and saw them smashing in the windshield with
bricks and stones, tearing open the hood and smashing at the engine with
insane club strokes”.
Shelley’s shepherd dog from
The Last Man
survives into Matheson’s
I am Legend, used perhaps to show the best of human nature
amidst the ruins, at page forty-one, "It was incredible, the feeling of
warmth and normality it gave him to see the dog slurping up the milk and
eating the hamburger, its jaws snapping and popping with relish. He sat
there with a gentle smile on his face, a smile he wasn't conscious of. It
was such a nice dog."
Then at page eighty-nine and one hundred and three,
"He sat down on the bed and held the blanket-covered dog in his lap. He sat
there for hours holding the dog, patting and stroking and talking. The dog
lay immobile in his lap, breathing easier.…” The protagonist can stake a
score of vampires a day without compunction but feels true empathy for a
fellow mammal.
As in Shelley’s story there are religious zealots under
the control of an unnamed, false Messiah in the Last Days and the disease is
seen as a punishment. In a torrid flash-back Noah’s Flood is acknowledged as
a primal catastrophe, now with the addition of demons stalking the Earth, as
seen at page one hundred and six, "God has punished us for our great
transgressions! God has unleashed the terrible force of His almighty wrath!
God has let loose the second deluge upon us - a deluge, a flood, a world
consuming torrent of creatures from hell! He has opened the grave, He has
unsealed the crypt, He has turned the dead back from their black tombs - and
set them upon us!"
Matheson’s
I am Legend
deserves to be in the
SF Masterworks series not for using Shelley’s ideas and images in a new
fashion or for fusing vampires into SciFi but because he introduces
complications that shift the reader’s allegiance from the lonely, neurotic
protagonist to the vampires inheriting the new, unpeopled world.
The Last Man does eventually meet a young woman and of
course she is beautiful and seems to both need his support and to be immune
to the dreadful disease. However, she is a living vampire seeking to avenge
the staking of her husband. She needs no help at all. In fact she clubs the
Last Man into delirium and then decides to attempt to save his life by
warning him that the other living vampires will come to take him, try him
and execute him for crimes against their new race. In the end, the Last Man
is seen as a dangerous pariah by the new vampire nation. They treat him with
some compassion and justice. The Last Man looks out from his prison window
and sees a multitude of pale vampires staring back. They fear him. He is the
last of the Old Ones.
"They all stood looking up at him with their white faces.
He stared back. And suddenly he thought, I'm the abnormal one now. Normalcy
was a majority concept …" The last line of the novel on page one hundred and
sixty is the ironic title for a powerful novel flawed by some patchy
writing.
The novel
I am Legend
of has been seen as a critique of 1950s America with a powerful
message against racism. Secondary students may enjoy comparing the
extraordinary conclusion of the novel with later Last Man films that have
simply concluded with finding a woman and starting over in a brave new
world. The reprint of the novel sells in Australia for under twenty dollars
so this text may be useful for schools, but is not strongly recommended
except for a specialist study.
Matheson’s novel has been the basis of three direct film
treatments but none of these has attempted the shift of allegiance from
human to vampire.
The first film treatment was called
The
Last Man on Earth and filmed around Rome by Italian director Ubaldo
Ragona, released in 1964. This film, starring Vincent Price, was closest to
the novel and partly written by Matheson but he is not credited as he was
unhappy with the movie. He may well have been unhappy because the conclusion
is changed and the woman found by the Last Man can be cured and there is
hope for humanity, after all.
The 1964 film version is available online and is out of
copyright so can be shown or given as a digital file to students. It is a
black-and-white, grainy movie with much to commend it. For students reading
the novel a comparison of the texts would be worthwhile. It is a very mild
horror SciFi where the cause of the pandemic is not discussed. The dog, the
woman, the big car, the guns and the fortress home are kept and a tiring
narration in Price’s doleful voice is included. The Art on the walls of the
fortress home is lost and the music has become jazz, but largely the first
parts of the novel are kept with a happier conclusion tacked on.
The second adaptation of the novel was made in 1971 by
Boris Sagal and called
The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston. Unfortunately, the
silliest elements of the narrative from I am Legend were kept without any of
the social commentary and there is a great deal more gunplay. In this
version the Last Man is an Army Colonel and he knows that the global
pandemic was caused by biological warfare between China and Russia. He is
immune to the plague as he has worked out a sort of limited antidote.
In
The Omega Man the vampires have become tribal albinos who hate
technology. They are called ‘The Family’ and the plague has made them
psychotic, at times, but still able to use weapons, even though they aspire
to a technology-free world.
The Last Man here has a machine gun and many weapons in
his fortress home and he likes to use these on ‘The Family’ but there is no
sense here that he is doing anything immoral. After all, the Family burns
books, wear Medieval robes and smash up priceless artworks.
As in the novel the Last Man is eventually captured but
just as he is about to be tortured to death in a baseball stadium he is
saved by a woman. It turns out there are a few survivors of the plague
including a young woman who the Last Man thinks suitable to restart the
world. The Last Man creates a working antidote but through complications the
Family tracks down the survivors. The Last Man battles heroically but ends
up speared and crucified just after he was able to give the antidote to the
other survivors, who escape and start a new, human world, presumably,
leaving Charlton Heston as a Legend because he has saved humanity, paying
with his life in Christian fashion.
The Omega Man is not recommended for secondary students as a part
of a serious study in SciFi. There are major problems with the story and the
best elements of the novel are lost. There is no sense of any theme other
than the eventual triumph of the white male and technology, perhaps most
obviously relating to a silly song of praise for guns, true love and a
martyr’s death against sub-humans who may be Communists, Luddites or poorly
dressed crazies … or all three.
The most recent version of
I am Legend
is recommended for use by secondary students. In Australia the film’s rating
of MA would require a parental permission to show the DVD, or the showing of
only sections of the film. Another way forward would be the use of stills
captured from the film to illustrate points within a web page or PowerPoint
on the text. Of course, the film’s popularity guarantees that most secondary
students have already watched the film, at home.
I am Legend
was directed by Francis Lawrence with Will Smith as the Last Man. As with
the The Omega Man, the protagonist is a military officer with talents in
many areas. The cause of the pandemic is science as the virus was developed
to cure cancer but then mutations caused the catastrophe that left the world
unpeopled.
The vampires of this film have become unsightly
Nightseekers and there are no walking dead. Instead the changed humans have
extraordinary speed and strength and can organise to a limited extent, even
using a guttural language to bark orders.
As with the earlier interpretations the Last Man is very
well armed, lives in a smart fortress-house, steals powerful cars and
witnesses wild animals stalking deserted streets, including an overgrown
Times Square where a pride of lions pull down a deer.
The Last Man has a show-stealing German Shepherd called
Samantha and the man and his dog live a regimented life of attempting to
find a cure, watching videos, hunting fresh food, checking for any other
survivors and avoiding the Nightseekers. We join the story with the Last Man
believing he is the sole survivor of the catastrophe. He uses the daylight
hours in spectacular style dwarfed by the scale of man-made technologies of
Manhattan such as a Brooklyn Bridge crammed with cars. The narrative is
assisted by flash-backs and video tapes.
Unlike the other film treatments the production values of
the latest I am Legend are very high and the narrative is internally
consistent, even if the semi-organised Nightseekers in all their animalistic
glory are a bit too nightmarish at times. The film has kept the blend of
horror and Science Fiction of Matheson’s novel whilst keeping the audience
ambivalent about the Last Man’s testing of antidotes on living Nightseekers.
Unfortunately, the conclusion of the film avoids
Matheson’s reversal and instead the young woman and attendant child who
rescue the Last Man at the last moment survive the final clash with the
Nightseekers and carry with them the antidote in a phial to a fortified town
of remnant humans in Vermont. The title of the film is used because the
self-sacrifice of the Last Man in his Manhattan basement makes him a legend
to humans rebuilding their world. Religious themes are used explicitly
Of note in the recent I am Legend was the use of a black
male as the protagonist. What’s more, the Last Man of this film has flaws,
he is tender to his dog (as in the novel) and his loneliness is both
sensitive and dignified. Again his fortress house is laden with masterpieces
and music plays a major part of his life, even though it is changed again to
Bob Marley’s Reggae to
suit the near future setting.
It would be easy for teachers to make useful worksheets
for older secondary students based on the film I am Legend. The film is
successful, engaging and suspenseful. Many discussion points arise naturally
from the film but these may not expose more than the superficial themes of
the movie. To engage more fully with the film it is proposed to use a short
story that opposes itself to the whole Last Man sub-genre, to display the
presumptions and the cultural context of the film rather than just the
memorable events. For this purpose this podcast will return to Lawrence’s I
am Legend after a brief look at two other films that take on the theme of
race and racism in this familiar SciFi scenario.
For teachers interested in the depiction of identity and
race in the SF genre the recent film version of I am Legend is not of much
use. There is no reference to race for the Last Man and Woman of the film
and it does not seem to play any role in the flash-backs establishing the
narrative. There is a side-note about Bob Marley but this does not seem
important. The Darkseekers do not seem to refer to the black underclass of
New York, even though they are found in beaten up apartment blocks in the
less salubrious areas. Like the lions roaming the city they seem only to
represent themselves as exotic, almost intelligent and sometimes well
organised to hunt in packs.
Of much more use to teachers interested in race and
identity is the film
The World, the Flesh and the Devil, another SF doomsday film,
directed by Ranald MacDougall and released in 1959. The film is not well
known but is available cheaply online, also running late at nights in off
season.
With a link to Bob Marley in the film I am Legend, the
main star and Last Man of
The World, the Flesh and the Devil is Calypso singer
Harry Belafonte.
The Last Man in
The World, the Flesh and the Devil is working deep in a mine
when it collapses and he is trapped. He clambers out eventually to find a
deserted world and he learns from newspaper headlines blowing about as scrap
and from taped radio broadcasts that poisonous radioactive dust is
responsible, used as a weapon. The poison only lasts for five days so the
protagonist is safe. He learns that the authorities tried to save people by
telling them to leave the cities and consequently the Last Man has inherited
an empty New York with no bodies. The Last Man in this film is also quite
handy and he rigs a power generator and finds an apartment to live in though
in this interpretation the Last Man sees no need for weapons.
The World, the Flesh and the Devil is a text without vampires,
mutant monsters or wild animals. Instead, the real problem comes from human
nature, or perhaps from the nature of the male human.
Just when the Last Man seems to give up all hope a young
woman turns up. She is a fragile platinum blonde while he is a strong black
man prone to wear overalls and carry a spanner.
The Last Man and Woman do very well but the Last Man
refers constantly to the difference in their social positions. When a third
human turns up, a world-weary and sophisticated white male, the drama of the
film escalates steadily to culminate in a shoot-out scene between the two
men in the deserted streets of New York.
Completely against the trend of the Last Man SF film
The World, the Flesh and the Devil ends peacefully. What’s
more, the final scene shows the platinum blonde walking hand in hand down an
empty Manhattan boulevard with both Harry Belafonte and the white
businessman type. This final scene leaves the repopulation of the world in
considerable doubt but does point out that a future world can be a better
world, without racism and even without male battles for conquest of the
fertile female.
While The World, the Flesh and the Devil would be very
useful for a discussion of race and identity it will not please many
secondary students for the very reasons it is valuable: it is about
pacifism, compromise and equality. Even more damaging for the enjoyment of
the film for young adults is Harry Belafonte’s propensity to break into song
now and then. The cheery songs with guitar are again opposed to the gritty
despair and violence seen in most Last Man SF dramas.
For several years this speaker has used another unusual
SF doomsday film with students to look at both racism and gender wars and
this is the New Zealand film
The Quiet
Earth, directed by Geoff Murphy and released in 1985. This film has
more depth than
The World, the Flesh and the Devil and it has proven popular
with later secondary students. It is available as a DVD from several sources
for a small cost.
As with
The World, the Flesh and the Devil, the Last Man finds himself
alone in a deserted world. In this case the Last Man has been complicit in
the catastrophe as the film explains an experiment with solar radiation that
has gone awry and nearly all people suddenly vanish from the planet.
The Last Man in
The Quiet
Earth explores his pleasant surroundings and then in the true style
of the genre heads to a capital city, in this case Auckland. Also following
the tropes of this sub-genre the Last Man finds a wonderful house, populates
it with cut-out cardboard figures as also seen with Will Smith in
I am Legend.
He takes the best cars, the best clothes and generally becomes deranged on
his own, finally using a shotgun to attack a statue of Christ in a church,
again introducing this important theme of lonely despair that echoes
Christ’s despair on the Cross at being forsaken.
The Last Man in
The Quiet
Earth is an obsessive and seemingly depressed white scientist and
when he finds another male he is easily trapped. The other Last Man is a
burly Maori with a military background and while there is immediate tension
between the men they are much happier together, stressing the social needs
of humans.
When the attractive, blond Last Woman turns up the same
triangle of tension and building suspense as in The World, the Flesh and the
Devil occurs. This film certainly explores race and identity as well as the
role of women in modern culture but this is not the only concern.
The Quiet
Earth is also distinguished by the repeat of the effect that has
depopulated the world as well as a willingness to worry the audience about
the exact nature of the effect. The film breaks the rules of the sub-genre
by finally reducing the Last Man down to a single, mystified individual with
his two companions vanished, but now he is alone in what may be a different
universe.
The Quiet
Earth is satisfying for students both through its more challenging
narrative where not all questions are answered as well as the suspense found
in the relationships of the protagonists. Extending the usual themes, the
film focuses on race, gender and even the nature of human consciousness all
within the framework of a catastrophic scientific mishap beginning in rural
New Zealand. Weird and quite cool.
Jumping back to the film I am Legend, it is recommended
that this text is used with two short stories, both available online. Both
relate to the Post-Apocalyptic scenario and the first, ‘The End of the World
as we Know It’ by Dale Bailey, will be most useful when discussing I am
Legend and many other catastrophe texts, with or without vampires.
Dale Bailey’s story is an award winner and is the first
in the annual collection of Hugo and Nebula recommendations published from
2007. The story is also available online through the Wastelands website at
www.johnjosephadams.com
The story is as much a critique of the ‘cosy catastrophe’
stories of SciFi as another offering in the sub-genre. There are no vampires
or Darkseekers in the short story, just a sudden virulent destruction that
kills all but the Last Man.
‘The End of the World as we Know It’ is a sardonic
response to “Those stories in which some mysterious outside force kills off
the vast majority of human beings, leaving a handful of hardy survivors to
rebuild civilization”, as Dale Bailey notes. Bailey tells his own story but
also comments on how end-of-the-world stories work.
Bailey points out that the real dilemma for the Last Man is how to
find meaning in a universe that is utterly indifferent to humanity’s
survival. With others, Bailey sees the attraction of the Last Man scenario
as a “wiping clean of human failure” and the reader’s assumption they would
be amongst the survivors, one of May Shelley’s ‘Elect’. Bailey’s story ‘The
End of the World as we Know It’ challenges this notion.
The Last Woman is found by the Last Man in Bailey’s
story. She is younger and pretty and apparently wants to continue humanity
right there and then but the conclusion of the story makes it clear that
this can not happen. A discussion of this story compared with the film I am
Legend or any other of the countless Last Man stories is most productive
with secondary students and may lead to a rethinking of not only the film
itself but the whole sub-genre. This could even lead to a research task that
compares different uses of the Last Man story and Bailey himself offers
examples to start with, including
Damon Knight’s ‘Not
with a Bang’.
The second story recommended for use with I am Legend is
the very well known ‘The Smile’ written by
Ray Bradbury and
published in 1963. This is a Post-Apocalyptic story where small remnants of
society live amidst the future ruins, after a nuclear war.
The survivors hate technology and hate the old ways of
thinking that brought about the world’s destruction. They take turns to
defile art works, in this case Leonardo’s ‘Mona Lisa’, expressing their
hatred of the past world. One of the spectators, a young boy, manages to
save just the smile of the woman in the painting and he takes it home after
the whole canvas is torn to shreds. The story is very simple and appeals to
students less able in English. It does not comment on the sub-genre of the
Post-Apocalypse in SciFi but instead tells a touching story.
The saving of the painted smile can be linked back to
what should be saved from our culture, asking students what should be
preserved and what should be abandoned. If they were the Last Man or Woman,
what would they put in their house, and why?
In the recent film of
I am Legend
with Will Smith his walls show a collection of modern art works including a
Rousseau and a Van Gogh. Apparently, the Last Man has taken these from the
Metropolitan Museum in New York. Are these the art works that the students
would save and live with? This conversation and even perhaps a research
assignment can link to the true value of things in our modern world and what
artefacts represent humanity.
Of course, the anti-technology stance of the survivors
post-Apocalypse is understandable and one major element of most of these
stories is the danger of science and its manifest technologies, from
biological weapons to the nuclear arsenals. If Humanity meddles with Nature
and takes on God-like powers, is the result annihilation of humanity?
This approach to
I am Legend
can be a natural segue into direct commentaries on contemporary society from
the future survivors of our follies. Some of the best examples of this
writing are Walter M Miller Jnr's
A Canticle
for Leibowitz and Russell Hoban’s
Ridley Walker, let
alone Octavia Butler’s
bleak Earthseed visions, that will be discussed in a later podcast and in
the
The Shape of Things to Come’ theme area of the mySF Project.
In
A Canticle
for Leibowitz the abbot of a future monastery post-Apocalypse
comments to the survivor monks on our current culture, "Or perhaps they did
know. But could not quite believe it until they tried it - like a child who
knows what a loaded pistol will do, but who never pulled a trigger before.
They had not yet seen a billion corpses. They had not seen the still-born,
the monstrous, the dehumanized, the blind. They had not yet seen the madness
and the murder and the blotting out of reason."
While the threat of a nuclear holocaust is not as
palpable for current secondary students, they will understand completely the
degradation of the environment and the sort of post-Apocalypse scenarios
seen in films like
The Day After
Tomorrow directed by Roland Emmerich or Costner’s
The Postman and
Waterworld. Are these
bleak visions of catastrophes simple moral tales, telling the reader and
viewer to change his ways, or else? Do they serve this purpose, or just
titillate through an amplification of emotions after global annihilation?
In an article from SciFi in the Mind’s Eye
Andrew Pavelich writes about critiques of technology in post-Apocalypse
literature and points out these narratives “involve people living in a world
that has lost scientific and technological knowledge” as a result, “it
offers a unique vantage point from which to question the nature and value of
technology”. Pavelich also notes that Isaac Asimov claimed that this
sub-genre of SF assisted in preventing the Cold War from escalating into a
world war.
In other words, the post-Apocalypse text teaches the
dangers of technology. This seems valid and true for the recommended texts
studied here such as
I am Legend,
The World, the Flesh and the Devil as well as
The Quiet
Earth, so it is ironic to see that most film texts based on this
sub-genre see eventual human survival linked directly to the use of weapons.
Other SciFi critics see the use of post-Apocalyptic texts
to test human nature, asking in these situations of amplified emotion and
utter destruction whether humanity is basically good or evil. Mike Alsford
in What If?: religious themes in science fiction says that the
different texts show that, “human beings are clearly capable of monstrous
evil as well as petty selfishness, nevertheless the human capacity for
magnanimity and self-sacrifice is equally arresting”.
In The Philosopher at the End of the Universe
written by Mark Rowlands in 2003 the background setting of complete
devastation and species death is “the ultimate horizon against which the
things in our life that make us what we are stand out”. Post-Apocalypse and
Last Man texts show all facets of human nature, as if for final judgment -
not just for the Last Survivors, but standing for the whole, long human
experiment.
For secondary students, a task relating to the
recommended texts might then be to look at the traits of the protagonists
and make a list of the best and worst seen in their very human characters.
What are the devices of the narratives designed to persuade the viewer or
reader that humanity deserves to continue? Of course, this discussion and
question can not be used for the short story by Bailey, ‘The End of the
World as we Know It’ as the Last Man seems to have decided the matter for
himself, in favour of a quiet sunset and another drink on the verandah.
For schools with a strong focus on religion this
discussion about the last things for humanity and final judgement is
eschatology, concerning life after death and the final stage of the world.
Eschatology is not
reserved for Last Man stories as it is also found in other examinations of
the post-human condition as, for instance, when the mind can be preserved in
computer storage systems beyond physical death and the inevitable engulfing
of the Earth by the Sun, according to current science.
If religious themes are pursued, students might be given
the task of charting SciFi texts that use scriptural catastrophes brought
about by human agency or divine intervention, such as Noah’s flood,
earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
As has been pointed out in an interview with Susan Napier
and others found in Science Fiction Studies in 2002, the
apocalyptic SciFi story that is found so frequently in Japanese texts
including anime might have a definite socio-cultural basis. It is argued
that “it is easy to imagine why ideas and imagery related to the apocalypse
would circulate in an artistic genre produced in Japan in the latter half of
the twentieth century: they represent a collective exploration of various
ways to think about the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and to
understand its meanings for contemporary Japanese”. In this way the
reduction of Last Man narratives involving nuclear annihilation in the last
twenty years (with the exception of the Terminator texts and its TV serial
version) might measure the relaxation of worries about this cause for
Apocalypse while the environmental and viral catastrophe has flourished as a
device to create the amplified disaster backdrop against which current human
nature is seen most clearly.
In a 1977 essay ‘Cataclysms and Dooms’ Science Fiction
author and commentator JG
Ballard applauds the catastrophe story. He sees the creation of the
story as a “constructive and positive act by the imagination rather than a
negative one, an attempt to confront the terrifying void of a patently
meaningless universe by challenging it at its own game …. Each one of these
fantasies represents an arraignment of the finite, an attempt to dismantle
the formal structure of time and space which the universe imposes around us
at the moment we first achieve consciousness. "
Leaving the final comment to a well known disaster movie, 28 Days Later, where a man-made virus creates hateful zombies quite similar to the Darkseekers in the recent I am Legend film, the end of humanity might not be a big deal, "If you look at the whole life of the planet, we - you know, Man - has only been around for a few blinks of an eye. So if the infection wipes us all out, that is a return to normality."
Human extinction might even be a blessing to the Earth,
it is implied. This might then be a final question to students completing
their studies of the post-Apocalypse and Last Man texts in SciFi – would
this planet be better off without people?
Alsford, M. (2000). What If?: religious themes in Science Fiction. Dartman, Longman and Todd: London.
Napier, S., Takayuki, T., Mari, K. & Junko, O. (2002). 'An Interview with Komatsu Sakyo'. Science Fiction Studies. Number 88, Volume 29, Part 3. November 2002.
Pavelich, A. (2007). 'After the end of the world: critiques of technology in post-apocalypse literature'. In SciFi in the Mind's Eye:reading science through Science Fiction. Edited by Margret Grebowicz, Open Source: Chicago, USA.
Rowlands, M. (2003). The Philosopher at the End of the Universe: philosophy explained through Science Fiction films. Ebury Press: London.
ends
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