Abstract
This chapter builds on the ways in which scholars and artists have considered 9/11 as a kind of apocalyptic event; in response, post-apocalyptic narratives, which had previously been inspired by the Cold War and Y2K, now squarely addressed terrorism and twenty-first-century militarization. Particularly in light of the Islamic State’s rhetoric about the long-foretold caliphate and the end of days, post-apocalyptic narratives offer a mode of examining the contemporary condition of constant war and its roots in ideological, economic, and religious difference. This chapter looks closely at the television series Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009), the film and book series The Hunger Games (2008–2015), and the CW television series The 100 (2014–present), examining the way they frame war and apocalypse as a repetitive cycle.
The apocalyptic event, in order to be properly apocalyptic, must in its destructive moment clarify and illuminate the true nature of what has been brought to an end.
( James Berger , After the End: Representations of the Post-Apocalypse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 5.)
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Notes
- 1.
For a transcript of Bush’s address, see http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/gwbush911jointsessionspeech.htm (accessed 30 Mar 2014).
- 2.
Antoine Bousquet, “Time Zero: Hiroshima, September 11 and Apocalyptic Revelations in Historical Consciousness,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 34.3 (2006), 741.
- 3.
Bousquet 756.
- 4.
Berger 6.
- 5.
Berger 6.
- 6.
Rothenberg’s full answer to my query about the relation between the show and the war on terror was: “[W]e do talk about the War on Terror a lot. In Season 3, when Pike led his people to the massacre of the Grounder peace army, it was an unprovoked, preemptive attack. And 9/11 has been used to justify preemptive attacks: “Are we going to strike before we’re hit?” That’s what Pike was doing in that story. We also used people’s reactions to 9/11 as a template for how Pike could rise to power so quickly in the wake of the destruction at Mount Weather. After 9/11, some people in the US began to look at all Muslims the same, rather than distinguishing between the extremists and the vast majority of Muslims, who are peaceful and should be our biggest allies in the War on Terror. Ultimately, that’s the story we were telling in Season 3 after the Mount Weather attack. There were many people in Arkadia who couldn’t see the difference between Trikru and Ice Nation. They thought all Grounders were bad. Some people even began to see Lincoln—who was a friend of Skaikru—differently. In fact, in Episode 302, Kane says, “Not all Grounders are the same.” And Pike responds, “They are to me.” That story did come from a desire to use science fiction to elucidate a current situation in the world. That’s what’s so great about science fiction: you can tell those kinds of stories without being preachy.” Personal correspondence, 13 June 2016.
- 7.
“UN and Battlestar Galactica host discussion of human rights and armed conflict,” UN News Center http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=30217&Cr=television&Cr1#.U0w7sseT7pE (accessed Nov 11, 2011).
- 8.
Grace Hood, “More Girls Target Archery, Inspired by The Hunger Games,” NPR Nov 27, 2013 http://www.npr.org/2013/11/27/247379498/more-girls-target-archery-inspired-by-the-hunger-games (accessed Apr 14, 2014).
- 9.
Dick Cheney , “Meet the Press,” NBC Mar 16, 2003 https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/bush/cheneymeetthepress.htm (accessed Mar 30, 2014).
- 10.
Susan Dominus, “Suzanne Collins’s War Stories for Kids,” New York Times, 8 Apr 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/10/magazine/mag-10collins-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed 8 Apr 2011).
- 11.
Kelley Wezner, “Perhaps I Am Watching You now: Panem’s Panopticons,” Of Bread, Blood, and the Hunger Games, ed. Mary F. Pharr and Leisa A. Clark (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2012), 148.
- 12.
Paul Patton’s introduction to Jean Baudrillard, The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, trans Paul Patton (Bloomington: Indiana, 19995), 2.
- 13.
For statistics on casualties and civilian deaths during the Iraq War, see https://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/.
- 14.
Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen, “Cylons in Baghdad,” Battlestar Galactica and International Relations, eds. Nicholas J. Kiersey and Iver B. Newman (New York: Routledge, 2013), 168.
- 15.
Stacy Takacs, Terrorism TV: Popular Entertainment in Post-9/11 America (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2012), 198.
- 16.
Spencer Ackerman, “Does Battlestar Galactica Support the Iraqi Insurgency?” Slate, 13 Oct 2006 http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2006/10/battlestar_iraqtica.html (accessed 29 April 2016).
- 17.
Takacs 198.
- 18.
Tami Spry, Body, Paper, Stage: Writing and Performing Autoethnography (New York: Left Coast Press, 2011), 85.
- 19.
Quoted in Spry, 86.
- 20.
Patrick Anderson and Jisha Menon, eds, Violence Performed: Local Roots and Global Routes of Conflict (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 4.
- 21.
“Wanheda, Part One,” The 100 , CW (21 Jan 2016), television.
- 22.
“Watch the Thrones,” The 100, CW (11 Feb 2016), television.
- 23.
Berger 19.
- 24.
Wezner 153.
- 25.
Julianne Moore as Alma Coin in The Hunger Games : Mockingjay Part 2. Directed by Francis Lawrence. Performances by Jennifer Lawrence, Josh Hutcherson, and Liam Hemsworth, Lionsgate, 2015.
- 26.
Ibid.
- 27.
Louis Malancon, “Starting Fires Can Get Your Burned: The Just War Tradition and the Rebellion Against the Capitol,” The Hunger Games and Philosophy: A Critique of Pure Treason, eds. George A. Dunn and Nicholas Michaud (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 233.
- 28.
Wezner 151.
- 29.
Sharon D. King, “(Im)Mutable Natures: Animal, Human, and Hybrid Horror,” Of Bread, Blood, and the Hunger Games, ed. Mary F. Pharr and Leisa A. Clark (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2012), 116.
- 30.
Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay (New York: Scholastic Press, 2010), 378–379.
- 31.
Collins Mockingjay 388.
- 32.
It’s infinitely fascinating to me that in post-apocalyptic societies, we often see systems of government involving an executive branch and a legislative, but rarely a judicial. BSG stands as one of the exceptions to this norm.
- 33.
Personal correspondence with Jason Rothenberg, 13 June 2016.
- 34.
Salina Wilken, “19 Things We Learned about The 100 Season Five at SCDD 2017,” Hypable 25 July 2017 https://www.hypable.com/the-100-season-5-spoilers-comic-con-2017/ (accessed 25 July 2017).
- 35.
Berger 135.
- 36.
Personal communication with Jason Rothenberg, June 13, 2016.
- 37.
Berger 19.
- 38.
Brian Willems, “When the Non-human Knows Its Own Death,” Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Knowledge Here Begins Out There, ed. Jason T. Eberl (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 87.
- 39.
Given what happens on New Caprica between Model One and Ellen Tigh, Cylons clearly also have the Oedipal impulse to have sex with their mother.
- 40.
Berger 22–23.
- 41.
“Daybreak: Parts 2 & 3.” Battlestar Galactica , written by Ronald D. Moore, 2009.
- 42.
Catherine M. Cole, Performing South Africa’s Truth Commission: Stages of Transition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), ix.
- 43.
Brady 47.
- 44.
Brady 38–39.
- 45.
Collins Games 135.
- 46.
Jerome Taylor, “Outrage at CIA’s Deadly ‘Double Tap’ Drone Attacks,” The Independent 25 Sept 2012 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/outrage-at-cias-deadly-double-tap-drone-attacks-8174771.html (accessed 25 Sept 2012).
- 47.
My thanks to Caroline Becker, a student in my Film and War course, for pointing out that the Gamemakers seem to fit the model of post-heroic warfare.
- 48.
Suzanne Collins , Hunger Games (New York: Scholastic Press, 2008), 173.
- 49.
Collins Games 175.
- 50.
See my essay, “No Easy Mission: Bin Laden , Exceptionalism, and Gendered Heroism in the Post-Heroic Age,” in Performance in a Militarized Culture, Sara Brady and Lindsey Mantoan, eds. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).
- 51.
“Wanheda, Part Two,” The 100 , CW (21 Jan 2016), television.
- 52.
For a fantastic rendering of the credits sequence with the drone’s metadata enlarged, see the fan site here: http://the100discussion.tumblr.com/post/115642940523/whos-watching-the-100 (accessed 16 May 2016).
- 53.
Brady 35.
- 54.
Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone (New York: The New Press, 2015), 11.
- 55.
Brady 35.
- 56.
Talal Asad, On Suicide Bombing (New York: Columbia, 2007), 1.
- 57.
King 113.
- 58.
Andrew Smyth, “Splicing Genes with Postmodern Teens: The Hunger Games and the Hybrid Imagination ,” Representing the Animal in Modern Culture, eds. Jeanne Dubino, Ziba Rashidian, and Andrew Smyth (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 178.
- 59.
King 114.
- 60.
Elaine Scarry , the Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 29.
- 61.
Personal communication.
- 62.
Personal communication.
- 63.
See, for example, my chapter “Wanheda, Healer and Commander of Death: Hybrid Identities in the Post-Apocalyptic Wars of The 100, in The Science Fiction Western: Representation of Female Characters in the Late Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Media, ed. Melanie A. Marotta. Forthcoming.
- 64.
Elaine L. Graham, Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 20.
- 65.
Mark E. Wildermuth, Gender, Science Fiction Television, and the American Security State: 1958-Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 181.
- 66.
Lauren Wilcox, “Machines that Matter: The Politics and Ethics of ‘Unnatural’ Bodies,” Battlestar Galactia and International Relations, eds Nicholas J. Kiersey and Iver B. Neumann (New York: Routledge, 2013), 78.
- 67.
Shana Heinricy, “I, Cyborg ,” Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked Up? Eds. Josef Steiff and Tristan D. Tamplin (Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court Press, 2008), 96.
- 68.
Heinricy 100–101.
- 69.
Wilcox 80.
- 70.
“Occupation/Precipice.” Battlestar Galactica, Written by Ronald D. Moore, 2006.
- 71.
Asad 2.
- 72.
Qtd in Asad, 65–66.
- 73.
Jerold J. Abrams, “How to Prevent the Next Cylon War,” Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Knowledge Here Begins Out There, ed. Jason T. Eberl (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 84.
- 74.
Wezner 153.
- 75.
Personal communication.
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Mantoan, L. (2018). War After the End: Post-apocalyptic Narratives After 9/11. In: War as Performance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94367-1_6
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