How Station Eleven pulled off the impossible, ALeague of Their Own review feelgood baseball drama still knocks it out the park, Point Break: Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze face off in surf-crime bromance, Orange is the New Black: season four will take over your life, without parole, ThePoint Break remake: Five rules to keep it young, dumb and you know, Emily St John Mandels bestselling Station Eleven. The mere existence of a character like the Conductor, played with bug-eyed, Emmy-worthy brilliance by Petty, made my heart sing. Log In; Among the 1% left Himesh Patel and Matilda Lawler in Station Eleven. Station Eleven is a slow burn. By Richard Atwood, M 2004 Writing Oryx and Crake. The concluding discovery of a town with a functioning electrical grid (Mandel, 2014: 311) suggests not the advent of a radical new world and the revelation of a sense-making pattern to history, but, rather, that civilisation might slowly revert to its pre-apocalyptic state and given the positive and optimistic tone of the conclusion, reinforced by the way in which electricity and lights are repeatedly described as beautiful, this, too, indicates the novels problematic celebration of the current system. She had ample experience to draw from. For me, its what Ive taken to calling the series present the Mitchell, D 2004 Cloud Atlas. DOI: http://doi.org/10.13130/2035-7680/2987, De Cristofaro, D 2018 Time, no arrow, no boomerang, but a concertina: Cloud Atlas and the Anti-Apocalyptic Critical Temporalities of the Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel. Station Eleven self-reflexively emphasises this difference between traditional and contemporary apocalyptic imagination. Watching it from the perspective of our own existential crisis a devastating pandemic and a climate apocalypse, each worsened by the twilight of democracy I was struck by the notion that only those who come of age in a time of optimism can draw the conclusion that progress is our natural state; for others (hello, fellow millennials! I have seen many, and characters are almost exclusively categorized as hero, villain, victim but never bard, never artist. In part because the partnership of Jeevan and Kirsten was so odd and hypnotic that Goneril dress! Just like McCarthys father and son, Jeevan and [A]lmost everyone was moving south in a silent landscape. 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. Heres what to know, From Chris Rock to the SAG Awards. Traditional apocalyptic narratives reveal a utopian teleology to history, a conception of time that deeply informs western modernity and its metanarratives. The great modern revolutions, from the American, to the French, to the Russian, rely on the apocalyptic faith in radical renewal after violent cleansing (Abrams, 1984). The first concerns the early days and years of the pandemic. As Jeevan describes it, this night, was going to be the divide between a before and an after, a line drawn through his life (Mandel, 2014: 20; emphasis in original). As she puts it, I assume that there would be a period of utter chaos immediately after an apocalyptic event, but I dont find it credible that that period would last forever (Griffith, 2015: n.pag.). 21:1), frames the apocalyptic origin of the distinction between the elect and the non-elect at the core of the cults credo when fervently claiming that the survivors names are recorded in the book of life (Mandel, 2014: 286). WebThe book Station Eleven, by Emily Mandel, started when a famous actor dies on stage while performing the play King Lear. Goods travelled in ships and airplanes across the world. Station Elevens plot itself consists of fragments from before and after the apocalypse, which challenges the teleological linearity of apocalyptic temporality. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.235. If you can stick with it, you will be rewarded. Station Eleven. (Not to worry, I slogged through.). 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. But it wasnt part of his plan. Buell, F 2013 Post-Apocalypse: A New U.S. The spectre of the 2008 economic crisis and ensuing recession does haunt the novel, in which 12 percent of the worlds shipping fleet lay at anchor off the coast of Malaysia, container ships laid dormant by an economic collapse (Mandel, 2014: 28). In: Atwood, M (Eds. Get Screen Gab for everything about the TV shows and streaming movies everyones talking about. Martin Carr We Got This Covered. Toronto: Anansi. Of course you hope in a scenario like this, what would survive would be the Beethoven symphonies, the Shakespeare plays, the things that we think of as the highest and most exalted expressions of our culture. The second timeline takes us 20 years in the future, when Kirsten (now played by Mackenzie Davis) is part of a troupe of actors known as the Traveling Symphony, who tour the midwest putting on Shakespeare plays Hamlet, when we meet them to the scattered plague survivors. [18] WebA pandemic show based on a pandemic novel airing two years into a global pandemic, "Station Eleven" may seem fatigue-inducing. Station Eleven is so good, you can buy it outright on Amazon, which sells it for between $28 (DVD) (opens in new tab) and $40 (4K Blu-ray) (opens in new tab). At first, Station Eleven is bewildering, all discombobulating cuts between the present and what seems to be a desolate, sparsely populated future. In a way, Station Eleven is an interesting Rorschach test of apocalyptcisms appeal. Similarly to Player One, which features sections foreshadowing what happens in the next hour of the story narrated by the post-human Player One (the implication being that, when it comes to history, the apocalyptic perspective from after the end of time is manifestly impossible in human terms), sentences like The Georgia Flu would arrive in a year, Civilization wont collapse for another fourteen years, A year before the Georgia Flu, Two weeks till the apocalypse, just before the old world ended, the Georgia Flu so close now (Mandel, 2014: 40, 71, 110, 201, 217, 328) punctuate Mandels narrative. Station Eleven, a ten-part limited series from HBO, is adapted from Emily St. John Mandels bestselling 2014 novel of the same name, which won the Arthur C. Clarke award and has sold more than 1.5 million copies. 32830. Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/38e15y/hi_im_emily_st_john_mandel_author_of_station/ [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. Mary McNamara is a culture columnist and critic for the Los Angeles Times. 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? I did find it hilarious that, during the winter flashback, the roads were plowed, a sleight of hand Somerville admits was necessary for production to continue. Princeton: Princeton University Press. The question of class distinctions (resource hoarding) is left mostly to an episodes worth of country-club symbolism and a ruinously miscast David Cross. Yeah, I was interested in the randomness of what survives and what doesn't. Traditional apocalyptic narratives are fictions of historical order (Zamora, 1989: 4) that flourish in times of crisis and, through his apocalyptic narrative, the prophet seeks to restore order in the chaotic post-pandemic world. While Station Eleven does not fall into the traps of the utopian teleology of traditional apocalyptic logic, which risks, in its determinism, legitimising oppressive power dynamics, the novel is too complicit with the current system and its exploitations. A scar strip, Thank you for asking, she says, Hoda Kotbs enigmatic Today absence finally explained on air: Hodas OK, Blake Shelton embarks on last season of The Voice before doing a little bit of nothing, Chris Rocks live Netflix special taps several comedy greats, from Sykes to Seinfeld, Savannah Guthrie exits Today mid-broadcast and tests positive for COVID-19 again. Derrida, J 1992 Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy. Herein lies its critical distance from the utopian teleology of the traditional apocalyptic paradigm. Mackenzie Davis, left, with Caitlin FitzGerald in Station Eleven., Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information, Meet the cinematographer whose controlled naturalism is changing the face of TV, Station Eleven made major changes from the book. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. In Player One, Bertis justifies his murders through a similar self-righteous moral dualism and teleology. You know, it's interesting. A Pulitzer Prize winner in 2015 and finalist for criticism in 2013 and 2014, she has won various awards for criticism and feature writing. It seemed at least plausible to me that there would eventually be some kind of hope. Tate, A 2017 Apocalyptic Fiction. There was no place on Earth that was too far away to get to. The sense of an ending and the deterministic foreshadowing it allows should pertain to the closure of time in traditional plots, not to the openness of time as lived, where the future is unwritten. But then why did the One Ring choose Frodo? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Globe and Mail, 12 September. Or more nuancedly, as Clark, a good friend of Arthurs, comments to Tyler: its not a question of having been bad or the people [who died] were just in the wrong place at the wrong time (Mandel, 2014: 260; ellipsis in original). If nothing else, its pleasant to consider the possibility. Even the Georgia Flu, Jeevan notes, has a disarmingly pretty name (Mandel, 2014: 17). "No cities," she tells NPR's Scott Simon. If one of the precepts of the series own holy text, a graphic novel, is show, dont tell, it seems to me indicative of the series strengths that its most moving moments feature spliced-in images, memories, of the characters former selves. And, as a sniper, he believes he is clearing the way for gods new utopian order, for [T]he people [he] shot bothered God. Yet, significantly, [T]he road seemed dangerous. Set in the days of civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells the story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the Now I am more so, but beyond the practical, the questions posed by the book and the show about how much of a refuge art can provide, what we should work to preserve, what makes a civilisation and what, ultimately, makes life worth living, remain interesting ones. These are elevated by the catastrophe to the status of artworks, beautiful objects which move Clark because of the human enterprise each object had required (Mandel, 2014: 255). ), Moving Targets. Montral: McGill-Queens University Press. Indeed, both Station Eleven and Player One emphasise how the teleological determinism and moral dualism of apocalyptic logic are self-referential narrative constructs which legitimise the oppressions and violence of those who articulate these narratives. Chute, H L 2016 Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Rather, during the first traumatic months spent walking on the road after the catastrophe, Jeevans litany of biographical facts unravels and is replaced by strange fragments (Mandel, 2014: 194). After all, McCarthys text which depicts a father and sons journey in a post-apocalyptic US where, after an unspecified catastrophe, everything [is] dead to the root (McCarthy, [2006] 2007: 21) is one of the most famous examples of the contemporary body of post-apocalyptic novels as it won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. | ISSN: 2056-6700 | A life, and therefore actual, rather than fictional time, is made up of a number of loose ends (Mandel, 2014: 27) that resist the retrospective patterning of the sense of an ending. 2nd ed. They were shown maps and globes, the lines of the borders that the Internet had transcended (Mandel, 2014: 262). London: Windmill. London: Routledge. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. After a discussion of traditional apocalyptic temporality as it informs modernity and a theorisation of the notion of critical temporality, my article turns to Station Eleven, drawing comparisons with other contemporary post-apocalyptic novels to illuminate key features of this body of writings and the critical temporalities they articulate. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans. Villainry arrives (via the most frightening performance Ive ever seen, from Daniel Zovatto as the stranger who insists on joining the Traveling Symphony otherwise your friends are going to start to disappear), along with the secret community known as the Museum of Civilisation. 2010 Future Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination. There are holes in the story, but that didnt bother me because Station Eleven felt almost immediately like an antidote to every other post-apocalyptic tale I have ever seen. But I also know that if any survivor owned a snowplow, he or she would use it because snowplowing is a calling and an art form in itself. Even the moments of transcendent beauty and joy created by the Travelling Symphonys performances consist in conjuring, through Shakespeare, what was best about the [pre-apocalyptic] world (Mandel, 2014: 47, 38). We are the pure, working towards the advent of a new world, the divine plans for which were revealed to him in dreams (Mandel, 2014: 60; emphases in original). The beauty of it (Mandel, 2014: 247, 135). On the recent popularity of post-apocalyptic fictionA suggestion that I hear quite often is that our interest in post-apocalyptic fiction is a natural expression of the anxiety we feel. Now that that's all mapped and charted out and there are no more frontiers that's left us with a certain restlessness, that I suppose gets channeled into our interest in this futuristic, speculative fiction. 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