To listen to Thomas Allbaugh talk about writing Apocalypse TV, go here for his talk on Parker J. Cole’s The Write Stuff Radio Show. (To begin, I should just say up front that this is not one of those end of the world dystopian novels. It is “pre-apocalyptic,” not “post.”)
How I got here. This past spring, I had the pleasure of teaching a fiction writing course. Because some of my students were working all semester on post-apocalyptic stories, and also because many of the world stories we were reading as a class were set in places of poverty, it hit me rather hard: There are parts of the world right now–Syria, Afghanistan, South Sudan, to name only a few–where the fabric of culture, economy, and infrastructure have been destroyed by war and political corruption. The people in these countries are already, in many ways, living out what we in America, if the same conditions were happening here, would call post-apocalyptic. I found myself suggesting to my students that instead of projecting their stories into some future vision of apocalypse, their stories could be set in the present day, if they got to know parts of the world where these realities are already present.
This brought some strange looks, of course. After all, that’s the sort of thing my father used to say to me to get me to watch more news shows. And as an American, I admit that I find it easy enough to dismiss all of this. I have seen little threat to my way of life.
Yet despite this relative political stability, every season brings movies and books projecting post-apocalyptic scenarios, where characters face zombies, marauders, Marvel heroes, or apes. At a panel on post-apocalyptic films at PCA this year, it occurred to me that most of the films being discussed by the panel presented these scenarios that were centered on American catastrophe, with the one exception being World War Z. For the most part, it appears that we aren’t thinking about the rest of the world when we watch these films. We are fearful for ourselves.
Where Have All the Movies Come From?
I tried to think about possible explanations for the appearance of these stories.
The 2008 economic collapse brought on by bank and real estate deregulation made things horrible for millions, yet there seemed to be little reflection of this in film. The first Hunger Games movies (I understand the books are different) did have their 1930s depression era look in those regions where young contestants for the games were taken. But no one else, no critics or commentators I was aware of, said anything about how the movies, at least, might be evoking memories or images of economic collapse. Rather, both the books and the movies provided a radically reduced environment in which adolescents with special abilities could enact the hero’s journey. These stories, then, seem to be about mythic backgrounds for adolescent fears.
In my own reflections on the novel I was then beginning to write, I didn’t want to add to this genre. Nor did I really want to do something with reality TV. This part of the one Hunger Games movie I saw was not my inspiration. Rather, the reality show format provided a way for me to stage some common religious and American ideas and include most of the America I had visited as a backdrop. Some ideas came out about how we think about the end–a preoccupation that cuts across secular and religious markets, I should add. And so I gave my novel the working title, as a joke, Apocalypse Anytime Now.
Later, on publication, I changed the title to Apocalypse TV. And I have discovered that this title is misleading. The truth is that I was more interested in our national obsession with the end. At one point in my novel, Walter, the main character observes that for most people the word “apocalypse” suggests a final war or catastrophe. In Greek, the word actually means to pull away a veil or curtain. This is where the title of the concluding book to the New Testament comes from: St. John’s Revelation.
As for war or catastrophe, I think the word we mean to use is “Armageddon.” We should recognize that our movies and stories we are calling post-apocalyptic should really be called post-Armageddonic (a bit more clumsy term, I admit).
I confess that I had some fun with that idea of Armageddon in the last act of my novel, a section which does play with many of our images, starting with some ideas that were extremely popular in the 1970s. It also tries to have fun with some American popular culture: an Elvis impersonator of Iranian descent helps with the fight. At another point in the novel, a geometric Jesus appears with his cult to tell people to live in the moment–a cliche espoused on Facebook all the time now. Despite the title, the novel moves not toward catastrophe but parody. This is what I decided to do with concerns that are perhaps too large for any of us to face alone.
The Matter of Empathy
Today, we can read the papers and watch our politicians act as the world as we’ve known it shifts and changes. When these things happen, in the face of world tensions, many people question the value of art, though recent studies have suggested that literary fiction, in particular, can help us to grow our empathy for others.
Aside from the jokes, then, there is also this hope that we can think seriously about our neighbors around the world. Before any war comes, there are always those conflicting tensions between empathy and division, between recognition of ourselves in those we call the “other,” and cartoonish and ridiculing depictions of those we fear. Before we bomb people, we have to get mad at them and pretend that they really almost aren’t people. But again, some fiction, the studies suggest–not necessarily genre fiction, but literary fiction, where people are given complexity and not treated as stereotypes–can lead to empathy.
I hope you enjoy some good, empathetic, summer reading. My book is available also.