What would make life still worth living after the collapse of civilisation? Gomel, E 2000 The Plague of Utopias: Pestilence and the Apocalyptic Body. With the grown Kirsten serving, when necessary, as something like a one-woman militia, Station Eleven is not without its effective, if sometimes tonally jarring, genre thrills. Post-apocalyptic ravaged aftermaths implicitly subvert the central element of apocalyptic discourse, that is, a sense-making utopian historical teleology. Importantly, these hours of miracles [are] visible as such only in hindsight (Mandel, 2014: 223), that is, the deterministic teleological pattern of apocalyptic logic, with its distinction between the elect and the non-elect, is always constructed retrospectively, after the end, be this a future projection or a past event that is perceived as an end of something, as is the case of the Flu with the survivors. Albeit more attentive to the materiality of labour, his tracing of the production process of this object conceals, and indeed, aestheticises, workers exploitation and alienation, as well as the inequalities of the global free market: Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms of snow, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. In this podcast, PSR Versus podcast hosts Josh Wigler ( @roundhoward) and LaTonya Starks ( @lkstarks) compare episode 7 of The Last of Us and Station Eleven. Jeevan avoided it, stayed mostly in the woods. Clarks optimistic musings on the possibility of ships and life in the countries on the other side of the ocean stand in stark contrast to the fathers answers to his son: Do you think there could be ships out there? Audience member Jeevan (Himesh Patel) tries to take her home, but they are overtaken by the collapse of civilisation and begin their new life navigating the disaster together. Station Eleven replicates what Gomel (2000: 408) identifies as the plague pattern, where there is no place for millenarian rebirth. If I lived in Philadelphia, I would have no idea what was going on. Despite the tidy conclusion, I can only hope creator Patrick Somerville and HBO Max are in negotiations for a second season. New York Times, 5 September. NATIONAL BESTSELLER NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FINALIST Set in the eerie days of civilizations collapse - the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking If nothing else, its pleasant to consider the possibility. This refusal to paint the old world as worthy of a destruction that paves the way for a utopian renewal articulates the novels critical temporality but is not devoid of issues, as Station Eleven ends up unquestioningly celebrating the current system. And during the montage of embraces between Jeevan and Kirsten near the end of Dr. The red bandanas turn up and disappear in one fell swoop to provide a cliffhanger between episodes; ditto the strained mystery of the the Prophet. In: Patrides, C A and Wittreich, J (Eds. His co-stars can't remember if he had a family to notify. She has no expectation that anybody else will ever see her work. The Book of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament and the central text of religious apocalypticism, is ultimately not about the catastrophic end of the material world, but rather the revelation of a utopian new world, the New Jerusalem, the divine kingdom which awaits the faithful at the end of history.3 This utopian teleology is central to the Western understanding of time, indeed, [the apocalyptic] vision of history gives rise to history as a theoretical production (Keller, 1996: 89) and the traditional apocalyptic paradigm lies at the very core of secular Western modernity.4 The age of discovery and colonialism is informed by apocalyptic beliefs, as suggested by the trope of the new world (Keller, 1996). London: Routledge. I admit that it probably says something about where I am at right now that I wanted more of the disaster and less of the hope. Station Elevens ending is key to the texts deconstruction of utopian teleology. Maybe, though people appear to be living in small, mostly primitive communities and the fact that the story confines itself to the shoreline of Lake Michigan (at least I think its Michigan) serves the narrative both spiritually and logistically. Author Emily St. John Mandel was not involved in the adaptation of her hit novel. Zamora, L P 1989 Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American Fiction. This is, of course, how apocalyptic logic works, with the end ushering in a perfect new world which makes sense of everything that happened before. Frankly I was grateful to skip all the store-looting and scavenging we are inevitably treated to in these kinds of tales. And, looking back to his past towards the end of his life, a retrospection that by definition should allow the sense of an ending to emerge, Clark does not see any meaningful order but only a series of photographs and disconnected short films (Mandel, 2014: 279). Previously she was assistant managing editor for arts and entertainment following a 12-year stint as television critic and senior culture editor. I certainly did not quite understand why Jeevan chose to take Kirsten out into the Chicago winter rather than do a bit more exploring in that very large apartment building. By opening with the apocalyptic end that is foreshadowed by these sentences, Station Eleven highlights not only how the temporal order of the sense of an ending can be imposed on the randomness of time solely retrospectively, but also how this order ultimately implies a future that is already written. (2018) Critical Temporalities: Station Eleven and the Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel, The concluding chapter seemingly adheres to the apocalyptic pattern of end and rebirth, for the depiction of Arthurs and Mirandas last hours is followed by Clarks musings on another world just out of sight (Mandel, 2014: 333). Still, my sense that the series is too Pollyanna-ish for its own good that its conclusions about the uses of art in the world are ultimately unearned stems from the fact that these sections are often dramatically inert to begin with. She had ample experience to draw from. who dies of a heart attack onstage as he plays King Lear in Toronto. The dazzling power of electricity floodlights, porch lights, candy-coloured halogens, screens shining, the points of glimmering light that are towns glimpsed from the sky through airplane windows populates Mandels incomplete list of what is lost in the catastrophe (Mandel, 2014: 312). Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/books/station-eleven-joins-falls-crop-of-dystopian-novels.html [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. I hadnt read the book, so I had no idea what I was in for, but I certainly was not prepared for a very young Shakespearean actress trotting around snowy Chicago in her young Goneril costume as the world collapsed. Thus, one might suggest that Mandels book describes an apocalypse that already happened in 20082009: it is a novel not about a post-apocalyptic future but a post-apocalyptic present, for the ships embody the breakdown of capitalisms fundamental premise of eternal growth (Hoberek, 2015: n.pag.). A Pulitzer Prize winner in 2015 and finalist for criticism in 2013 and 2014, she has won various awards for criticism and feature writing. We put on plays in warzones. 32830. You are right about how the timeframe jumps from immediate crisis to a relatively established recovery. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. You seem to get reborn almost every time you leave the house, says Arthurs best friend, Clark (David Wilmot, another mesmerising turn), after listening to a California female actor be an excessively California female actor over dinner for too long. As the season unfurled, though, I found myself frustrated by a structure that, roughly speaking, toggled between the pandemics onset and a time, 20 years on, in which Kirsten and her Traveling Symphony have forged a new society through the cyclical performance of plays. But I fear the social future Station Eleven imagines is implausible, if not disingenuous. The scene in which a dozen women give birth was the before giving way to the future, just as all the scenes in which Miranda struggles to write Station Eleven were. In both traditional fictional plots and apocalyptic history, Kermode writes, the end confer[s] organization and form on the temporal structure ([1966] 2000: 45), transforming the mere succession of events into a meaningful sequence. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. In Player One, Bertis justifies his murders through a similar self-righteous moral dualism and teleology. Brennan: Look, Im not calling Station Eleven a failure, or a disaster, or even a half-assed genre entry. Even the guy who auditions by reciting Bill Pullmans speech from Independence Day believes. How Station Eleven pulled off the impossible, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. Los Angeles, Whats on Khlo Kardashians face? Martin Carr We Got This Covered. They were shown maps and globes, the lines of the borders that the Internet had transcended (Mandel, 2014: 262). Emily St. John Mandels fourth novel Station Eleven recently made the National Book Awards shortlist for fiction. This ambitious story tackles a post-apocalyptic world in which a super flu has wiped out the majority of the population. So I would want a globe, just to remember that there was a world out there. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2014/10/15/sorry-emily-st-john-mandel-resistance-is-futile/ [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. Log In; He likes the thought of ships moving over the water, towards another world just out of sight (Mandel, 2014: 33233; emphasis mine). Because in the now, the before is all we have. While the novels prophet holds on to a religious understanding of apocalypse in which the end is followed by utopian rebirth, the Georgia Flu, the pandemic that kills 99% of the worlds population, is termed apocalypse by the television newscasters in the sense of dystopian catastrophe rather than utopian revelation, and the apocalyptic narratives referred to in the text are disaster movies, with the dangerous stragglers fighting out for the last few scraps (Mandel, 2014: 243, 256). The series creator explains why. At first, Station Eleven is bewildering, all discombobulating cuts between the present and what seems to be a desolate, sparsely populated future. By the same token, Station Elevens prophet terrorises the population of the region, assembles a cult, and gains power thanks to a combination of charisma, violence, and cherry-picked verses from the Book of Revelation (Mandel, 2014: 280), where cherry-picked underlines the constructedness of Tylers prophecy. Rosen, E K 2008 Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination. Download PDF. Why Netflix is dabbling in livestreaming, Stranger Things play that may hold key to the end taking 1959 Hawkins to West End, NBCs Chicago series have strong showings but CBS wins weekly TV ratings race, Before and after photos from space show storms effect on California reservoirs, Dramatic before and after photos from space show epic snow blanketing SoCal mountains, The chance of a lifetime: Five friends ski the tallest mountain in Los Angeles, Best coffee city in the world? The ships were lit up to prevent collisions in the dark, and when she looked out at them she felt stranded, the blaze of light on the horizon both filled with mystery and impossibly distant, a fairy-tale kingdom (Mandel, 2014: 28). The Road is a recurrent point of comparison for Station Eleven in academic analyses and reviews alike (Tate, 2017: 13233; Alter, 2014; Huntley, 2014). Cloud Atlas consists of six narratives set between the nineteenth century and a distant post-apocalyptic future. I confess I came to Station Eleven reluctantly. Last year, as we all scrambled to create some sort of context for the COVID-19 pandemic, Mandel got all sorts of what does it feel to have predicted the future? questions, which seemed very unfair. To take refuge in the art, dammit. Furthermore, teleology entails determinism, which compromises the possibility of choices and ethics. In the new miniseries "Station Eleven," it's two decades after a deadly flu pandemic, and global civilization has nearly collapsed. Chute, H L 2016 Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. However, on the one hand, the novel is far from adhering to the radical utopian renewal of traditional apocalyptic discourse. The Traveling Symphony is a troupe of actors and musicians dedicated to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. Unlike with The Leftovers, Station Eleven was billed as a mini-series from the beginning, and Somerville doesn't seem interested in continuing the story. In the very early days, for example, Jeevan and Kirsten go round a supermarket that is full of produce but empty of people. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.256. We start to plumb the depths of Kirstens soul, forged by suffering, saved by the Symphony and ready to save it, too, by any means necessary. 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