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“Life in the Apocalypse: Projecting Anxiety in Post-9/11 Television Fiction”
Caroline Kovacs
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Gender/Cultural Studies
Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts 1 May 2015
The author grants Simmons College permission to include this thesis in its library and to make it available to the academic community for scholarly purposes.
© 2015 Caroline Kovacs
Advisor: Stephen Ortega
Signature:
Date:
GCS Program Director: Jo Trigilio
Signature:
Date:
Kovacs 2
Introduction
“We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies:
unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.”
—Susan Sontag, “The Imagination of Disaster”
Television programming on the morning of September 11, 2001 was abruptly suspended in order
to broadcast the live catastrophic events happening in New York City. The images of the
hijacked planes crashing through the World Trade Center buildings and the vertical implosion of
each tower repeated on infinite loop on multiple networks. As the events of the day unfolded,
Americans watched their televisions transfixed by this unimaginable violence, and news outlets
reported without a certain narrative of what had happened and how this type of destructive
violence could happen (Doane 253-255; Klein 458). The iteration that the scenes of catastrophe
amidst the iconography of New York were “just like a movie” illustrated that as a televised
spectacle of violence, 9/111 was incomparable to previous cultural and physical traumas
(Redfield 68; Muntean 51).
This paper reads the television shows Lost, Jericho, and Battlestar Galactica2 as
exemplary texts of the apocalyptic genre and discusses how these narratives address post-9/11
1 In his essay “Virtual Trauma: The Idiom of 9/11,” Marc Redfield’s discusses the different ways we refer to the event as “9/11” or “September 11th” and how these phrases represent the catastrophe. The removal of the year from the name situates the moment in the past as a turning point in which all time since that moment has been defined. We are living in the aftermath of the event and cannot be removed from its specter (58-‐59). 2 I have chosen these three television programs for several reasons. These three programs were produced several years after 9/11 and have completed their runs. These programs fall into the science fiction genre, which, even after the adoption of apocalyptic narratives into mainstream popularity, remains somewhat marginalized. Another significant factor in choosing these three programs was their cult status, as they had dedicated fan bases during their original runs and remain a part of the conversation about apocalyptic narratives.
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cultural anxiety and the role of fiction in a society moving toward catastrophe. First, I explain
why I identify 9/11 as the apocalyptic event as opposed to other millennial3 traumas. Next, I
discuss the themes present in these television programs that respond to 9/11 and how in post-
9/11 television fiction, the banal, anxiety, and repetition reveal the state of things in a world
marred by disaster. These programs focus on the disruption of everyday routine and the mundane
over the spectacle of disaster that is the apocalyptic event. In conjunction with this, I talk about
the importance of time and duration and how they create the anxiety of the apocalyptic scenario.
Finally, I explore the ways that the apocalyptic genre after 9/11 questions the tenuousness
between reality and fiction in our changing relationship with television. Fiction and fantasy, in
the post-9/11 apocalyptic genre, do not so much create a space to alleviate contemporary fears
about political, economic, and social collapse as they reveal the perpetual state of anxiety that is
a reality in a world of cyclical cultural trauma.
Identifying 9/11 as the Apocalyptic Catalyst
In the United States, the tumultuous decade around the turn of the millennium was rife
with massive sociocultural traumas4. The lethal combination of technology, politics, and
globalism, which contribute to the expanding social gaps between the advantaged and
disadvantaged, created an era of constant social unrest ("The Imagination of Disaster" 42; 3Nicole Birch-‐Bayley expands the definition of term “millennial” to not only identify the time following the turn of the millennium but also to specifically include the cultural influence of 9/11 (1137). 4 Other moments could certainly be considered candidates for the apocalyptic catalyst. The Y2K scare leading up to the new millennium inaugurated the century of cultural trauma and set us up to be in constant fear of the next disaster. In 1999, the fear of technological collapse bled into daily life causing increasing panic and anxiety. Americans swarmed grocery stores to stock up on water, non-‐perishable food, and batteries to prepare for massive technological failure. In 2005, the environmental disaster caused by Hurricane Katrina marked another massive trauma in the United States. The literal collapse of the levy system in New Orleans and in the American South, uncontrollable flooding, followed by the inadequate government response, turned a regional disaster into a national outrage about race and class in America. The complete failure of FEMA and the horrific spectacle of the Superdome made Hurricane Katrina one of the most significant environmental disasters and government failures in recent history.
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Baudrillard 404-405). Cultural trauma exposes the lacks and fractures in society. In these
moments of rupture, trauma shifts the collective thinking of a society, reorients notions of social
identity and individual identity, and changes material conditions. In coping in the aftermath of
trauma, there is an acknowledgement of the failure and faults in the society that gave way to the
disaster, creating the conditions that made the event possible (Felman 171; Baudrillard 404). A
moment of catastrophe and the subsequent events that spiral into a cultural trauma provide an
opportunity for individuals to reconstruct society from the shambles of what had previously
collapsed in on itself (Klein 8).
Throughout the past fifteen years, cultural traumas, inaugurated with 9/11, have created a
zeitgeist of fear and anxiety that have thus far defined the new millennium. In a society
perpetually teetering on the edge of social, economic, political, and physical collapse, the
looming threat of destruction creates constant anxiety, uncertainty and fear about what the future
of America is destined to look like, as the instability of its systems seem on an inevitable path to
destruction5. This inevitability is a symptom of knowledge that existing economic and social
systems fuel their own destruction, are unsustainable due to lack of resources and centralized
power, and create more inequity and dissatisfaction among the population (Baudrillard 408-410).
9/11 held significance as a moment of economic, political, and social trauma, and its multiple
effects led to large shifts in society than have made the event an undeniable moment of historical
change. After the event6, vulnerability of the nation and its citizens was exposed, and thus, the
threat of such a disaster happening again was accepted as inevitable in the age of technology and
globalization (Norris, Kern, and Just 260; Birch-Bayley 1148).
5 The problematic War on Terror, the bank failures of 2008, and the growth and increased visibility of radical groups such as ISIS reveal the vulnerability of American political and economic systems. See Klein and Cerulo for more. 6 Baudrillard refers to 9/11 as “the mother event” (405).
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A number of factors determine 9/11 as a unique trauma and the apocalyptic event that
defines the present culture. One of the most important considerations is the symbolic significance
of 9/11 that contributed to its meanings as an economic, political, and social trauma. Some
reporters likened this to the attack on Pearl Harbor that incited US involvement in World War II,
but this comparison failed to consider the political context and the complex motivations and ends
of the terrorist attacks (“Tuesday, And After”; Faludi 12-13). September 11th stands out as an
attack on United States because of the visibility of the damage to the iconic New York City
skyline and the scene of horror at Ground Zero7. The destruction to the Twin Towers and
damage to the surrounding buildings was made doubly catastrophic by the permanent alteration
to the New York City skyline (Baudrillard 413). Evidence demonstrates that the choice of the
World Trade Center as a point of attack was completely intentional and more significant that the
attacks on the Pentagon or the crash of the hijacked plane in Pennsylvania, as the height of the
Towers and their location in downtown New York City contributed to the spectacle of the event
(Baudrillard 404; Sánchez-Escalonilla 11). In the media, 9/11 was framed as an attack on the
nation, with the World Trade Center a synecdoche of the United States as a global capitalist
nation (Redfield 65-69). The symbolism became more important than the physical damage itself,
as the spectacle of the attack superseded the material reality (Baudrillard 413-414).
In his essay “The Spirit of Terrorism,” philosopher Jean Baudrillard discusses the
significance of the death as it played out in the symbolism of the event. “The irruption of a ‘more
than real’ death: the symbolic and sacrificial death. This is the absolute event that does not
tolerate any appeal. Such is the spirit of terrorism”, he writes of the absolute, definitive nature of
death (408). Death as the ultimate power lends itself to the unique catastrophe of 9/11 and its
creation of “disorientation, extreme fear and anxiety, and collective regression” (Klein 42). 7 For more about the significance of Ground Zero as a space of trauma, see Redfield.
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Death as a tool of power changes the rules traditionally abided in a capitalist system and forces
society to reckon with the changing rules of society at this moment (Baudrillard 411). To
transform death into a productive power by intending suicide in this event questions the value of
life and death in the system. The symbolic power of death and its replication in the media
following the event makes this moment not only obscene but the moment in which death is
recategorized (Doane 263). Without a means of understanding this type of symbolic death, the
intentional and complete death of the nineteen hijackers on 9/11 ignites the long catastrophic
process (Baudrillard 405). The inability of the United States to respond to this “more than real”
death turns 9/11 into something else, an idea rather than event that cracks the foundations of the
nation as they struggle to formulate a counteraction (Baudrillard 408; Faludi 12).
Another important factor in determining 9/11 at the apocalyptic catalyst is the
inextricability of the event from its transmission through television. The technological effects of
the moment are the most important reason of why I identify 9/11 as the apocalyptic catalyst.
Conversations about how to filter the obscenely violent content on the day of the event had been
neglected in favor of transmitting the immediate visual information to an audience (Doane 251-
253). From September 11th forward, a “society of spectacle” showed the images of violence
craved by the television audience, without censoring the society from violence or protecting the
sanctity of death (“Regarding the Pain of Others” 108-109). The twenty-four hour news cycle,
the exponentially expanding Internet, and globalization of news and culture are significant
factors in sustaining overstimulation that numbs society to violence. The spectacle of violence
reminded Americans of their own vulnerability, the constant threat around them, and the lack of
control over their own safety (Norris, Kern and Just 3-4).
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Since 9/11, America has become “shock resistant” and more adept at absorbing economic
and social traumas as a regular occurrence (Klein 459). No longer are instances of mass violence
considered anomalies, but rather disasters have become an integral part of the banality of life in
post-9/11 America. Catastrophic events are less exceptional as the news media transmits more
images of violence and destruction, inuring viewers to the uniqueness and individual effect of
each event (Regarding the Pain of Others” 105). However, even as violence and trauma become
less exceptional, events since 9/11 manages to chip at the existing fractures, leaving less time for
society to repair damages to its systems. Continuous catastrophic violence is part of a routine
moving toward ultimate destruction and social rupture, a real apocalyptic event.
The Renaissance of the Apocalyptic Genre
Following 9/11, the apocalyptic genre in fiction experienced a renaissance8 that echoed
the contemporary “crisis culture” (Birch-Bayley 1137-1138). Apocalyptic fiction developed in
response to the social condition following 9/11, an era where the vulnerability of the nation and
the individual were under constant threat of violence. The restless anxiety about what disaster
would befall us next, after the unimaginable had become real, manifested in fiction
(“Imagination of Disaster” 48). Concerns about violence and disease, issues of population
growth and health, failing governments struggling for power, and the imminence of danger were
presented in science fiction and less explicitly discussed in nonfiction sources (Birch-Bayley
1148). The inability of society to cope with changing material conditions was answered in these
apocalyptic narratives that accessed our concerns about the problems of the present and the too-
near future (Norris, Kern and Just 10). Themes of reality appeared in fiction as a means of
8 Susan Faludi calls it a “Menaissance,” as the earliest narratives of this genre, produced in the tow years following 9/11, primarily focused on male heroism and the threat of the foreign, nonwhite other (139).
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showing the worst-case scenario of fears, with the intent to alleviate and expose anxieties, closer
to reality than in historical memory ("The Imagination of Disaster" 42-47). With terror and
catastrophe seeming imminent, the line between fiction and reality blurred (Sánchez-Escalonilla
11). Apocalyptic science fiction resembled real life—or rather, real life uncannily resembled
apocalyptic science fiction—more closely than ever before.
In response to the cultural trauma of 9/11, Hollywood and the media approached the
subject matter on 9/11 through science fiction more easily than in biography or narratives
directly conscious of 9/11 as a moment. The event of 9/11 did not need to exist in fiction as a
referent, as it permeated the culture and hung over the collective cultural conscious as an
inescapable specter. This deliberate silence of the referent gave more power to the event as a
point of rupture (Sánchez-Escalonilla 11). The apocalyptic genre thematically expressed post-
9/11 anxieties with science fiction acting as a buffer to the real cultural trauma. Science fiction in
the case of post-9/11 apocalyptic fiction did not provide a fantasy escape from the potential
terror of everyday life. Instead, apocalyptic science fiction affirmed the fears of living in
contemporary society. The world of apocalyptic science fiction was our own (Muntean 52).
Fiction merely provided a space to examine anxiety and the human condition without focusing
on the limitations imposed by social capitalist hierarchies (“Imagination of Disaster” 45).
Capitalizing on post-9/11 anxieties, innumerable narratives about living in apocalyptic
conditions emerged in the years following the attacks. The popularity of the apocalyptic genre
produced after 9/11 suggests that these stories addressed anxiety about the perpetual threat of
catastrophe. Films, television, comic books, and video games built universes where society had
collapsed due to combined environmental, social, biological, and technological problems gone
unsolved or neglected by political institutions. The continuous production of this type of
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narrative pinpoints our understanding of the inevitability of collapse. Narratives about the
apocalypse are repeated not to alleviate fear but to understand catastrophe as the inevitable end
that we must contend with. These stories on television shows, however, tell narratives of survival
and endurance. These apocalyptic stories fixate on the trauma of the event and its long events; an
apocalypse is less a singular event of massive violence, but rather a game-changing development
that forces societies and individuals to restructure what they know about society, citizenship, and
time.
The apocalyptic genre in media existed prior to 9/11 in various cultural forms. Not since
the Cold War, the perpetual threat of nuclear war, communism, and other futuristic anxieties, had
apocalyptic science fiction become so widespread and dominated fiction storytelling. The threat
of nuclear warfare following World War II brought about the growing threat of technology that
revealed the vulnerability of humanity, of political systems, and the real possibility of the end of
the world at the hands of humanity. Fueled by nuclear anxieties and government paranoia,
dystopian Cold War narratives, as seen in works of writers Kurt Vonnegut and Richard
Matheson, proliferated and expressed this cultural anxiety. Science fiction as a genre expressed
worries about the fear of communism and loss of the individual, the looming threat of nuclear
war, possibility of invasion, and the space race with the Soviet Union (Sánchez-Escalonilla 17).
Roughly around the fall of the Berlin Wall and the symbolic end of the communist threat, the
disaster movie and zombie film9 transformed into parodies of themselves instead of indicators of
cultural unrest and anxiety (Birch-Bayley 1143).
In identifying this genre, I consciously identify “apocalyptic” as opposed to “post-
apocalyptic.” The prefix “post-” indicates a time after the apocalypse, but as I see the apocalyptic
9 Birch-‐Bayley cites the figure of the zombie as a barometer of cultural anxiety, entering mainstream culture during times of economic and political uncertainty (1137-‐1151).
Kovacs 10
event, particularly in relation to 9/11, the trauma is ongoing, and the ripples of the catastrophe
felt even years after the initial shock. Narratives in the apocalyptic genre on television, as
discussed in this paper, begin with the event rather than end with it (Di Tommaso 223-224). This
quality of reaction means that the characters in the genre are continuously engaging with the
apocalyptic event, just as Americans are coping with the contingency created by 9/11. Thus, I
categorize this genre as “apocalyptic,” referring to the ongoing struggle caused by an initial
violent trauma that reshapes the cultural landscape and forces characters to continuously engage
with the material and social effects of the event.
What identifies apocalyptic fiction produced after 9/11 is the focus on the event as initial
disruption and the long narrative that follow the event. The event is not the climax but initiates
the action of the television series. In this way, apocalyptic fiction is made of narratives of
endurance and survival. The initial trauma, while a consistent presence, is less significant than
the evolution of society and individuals in its aftermath. Apocalyptic fiction on television
embodies this idea, as the duration of the series depends on the narrative of continuous
rebuilding. Survival in these fictions is less about starting with a clean start but focuses on
rebuilding and reconstructing with the remnants of the established conditions before the event
(Klein 8). The struggles to continue with life, the inability to go on, and the ambiguity about the
future while knowing the potential threat of another catastrophe is imminent, now that it has
already been a reality, make these narratives legible to post-9/11 Americans.
Along with the theme of duration and endurance, repetition is a key factor in apocalyptic
narratives produced after 9/11. Fiction provides a space to contend with the fact that we are
living in a moment wherein we are still living with the anxieties and fears produced by that
moment. The repetition of the trauma through fiction reminds us of the constant effects of a
Kovacs 11
trauma. Repetition is a means of accessing the real fears that manifest in response to the trauma.
Living these vicarious situations over and over in apocalyptic narratives does less to assuage our
fears than to confirm them and let us understand the inevitability of future collapse and trauma.
In this way, fiction addresses the need for the event to be revisited over and over again through
media and reproduction of trauma in a way that news programming and documentary forms
cannot.
As a genre of film and television, the fascination with the apocalyptic narrative reveals
the depth of the fear of catastrophe and the need to exercise control over the worst-case scenario.
In repeatedly visualizing fear, the probability of the event becomes more inevitable as the only
solution to the present political, technological, and environmental traumas. The obsession with
reliving the spectacle of a massive cultural trauma reminds us of the initial shock and the state of
potential disaster we live in (Doane 257). Catastrophe once had been unique, but in a “society of
spectacle”, its exceptionalism was no longer the reality (Regarding the Pain of Others 109). The
event inevitable and living in a constant moment of potential threat paradoxically creates a need
for repetition; the repetition allows for hope and possibility of what happens in the wake of the
event (Doane 264).
Television and Temporality
Television as a medium changed dramatically after the broadcast of 9/11. Prior to the
event, television was categorized by its regulation of time, production of routine, and
legitimization of information. The unanticipated event led to a lack of information on the day of
the event and created a vacuum of information. Information on 9/11 turned into a feat of
representation instead of knowledge, challenging the form of its medium (Cerulo 17; Doane
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253). Routine shattered as images of New York were broadcast live on dozens of channel. The
television broadcast of 9/11 and the repeated image of catastrophe disrupted the routine of daily
life as rendered through this medium. The live event unfolding captured the spectacle and
awaited the next uncanny moment of violence. This disruption to the scheduling and reminding
the viewer of the capability of television to live in the present moment, and this allowed
television to exist as a continuous, measurable stream of information. Its limitations of time and
adherence to a schedule were revealed after the catastrophe, mediating the present for its
viewers. Interruption to this routine and discontinuity revealed the capability of television and its
unique ability to create routine and presentness (Doane 253-264).
On 9/11, these defining characteristics of television were challenged exponentially.
Routine, information, and decontextualization categorized television news media, and following
9/11, these ideas shifted exponentially and transformed television into something else. The
constant reporting and reproduction of images through 24-hour news cycle created a paradox of
overstimulation and numbness. The repetition of the image decontextualized the moment and
forgot its moment in time. Continuous representing the present moment removed 9/11 from time
and context as television was challenged to meet the height of its capabilities (Muntean 51;
Doane 255). The image itself preserved the moment in time, the spectacular violence of the
moment dissociated from context with each repetition. The more scenes were repeated in
broadcast, the less real they became, moved away from the moment in time but simultaneously
beholden to that one moment of spectacle.
Television as the medium of the event helped create the anxiety. Where the medium has
once scheduled daily lives and regimented time, it was now beholden to the present and creating
anticipation for what would happen after the event. The temporal rupture caused by 9/11
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removed the television audience from time and situated them in a perpetual present that created
new anxiety (Muntean 52; Doane 255). In the apocalyptic genre, time and anxiety created by the
threat of the end of time and the routine are a common motif. These programs focus on the
disruption of everyday routine and the mundane over the spectacle of disaster that is the
apocalyptic event. Time and duration that form the television medium aid in constructing the
anxiety of the apocalyptic scenario in these narratives10.
Apocalyptic television is an exercise of duration or repetition after a trauma, the plot
initiated by an unexpected catastrophe and the continuing struggle of restructuring after the
event. On the critically acclaimed television series Lost, Oceanic Airlines Flight 815 crashes
midway between Sydney and Los Angeles, stranding its passengers on an unknown island
hundreds of miles off of the plane’s charted course. In the opening scene, the protagonist Jack
Shepard clamors through the lush green jungle and onto the beach, where he rescues survivors
from the flaming wreckage. In one grotesque moment, a survivor of the crash is sucked up into
the spurring engine on the broken wing of the plane. This sequence of chaotic violence lasts for
less than five minutes, and for the next six seasons, the survivors and other struggle to survive
life on the Island and cope with their haunting pasts. The instant of catastrophe—the plane
crash—is followed by the quiet adjustment to circumstances as the survivors make a basic camp
and await rescue. Repeated yet sporadic instances of violence between long periods of waiting
allow Lost the space to explore how community changes and is reconstructed in response to
catastrophes.
On Lost, time is constructed through daily life on the Island. When the survivors arrive
on the Island and believe that rescue may take longer than expected, they must find food, water,
10 The television series 24 is undoubtedly the epitome of this fixation on time. There are twenty-‐four episodes in a season, each representing one hour of the day, setting the events in real time (Takacs 87-‐90).
Kovacs 14
and explore the terrain, and make plans to escape. It takes episodes upon episodes before they
give up on being rescued entire and find more permanent shelter by moving inland and into the
jungle. Carnivorous monsters inhabit the Island and attack the survivors at every turn, and the
mysterious of the landscape constantly reveal new human antagonists. A security system set up
in the jungle brutally attacks anyone who comes too close, boars and polar bears run wild, and
other human inhabitants of the Island perform scientific experiments on anyone they can kidnap.
All of this potential danger constructs a world full of anxiety about what danger will befall the
survivors next, but this recreates our own fears of continued trauma after a massive attack. Once
the worst has happened, such as a plane crash, what is the next unimaginable terror we will
experience? As we have continued to live our lives after 9/11, so do the survivors living on the
violent Island.
Even with the unknown and known dangers of the jungle, life stranded on an island is
boring most of the time, and Lost seldom neglects this. In the season one episode “Solitary”,
while Jack is helping create a water filtration system in one of the caves on the Island, the comic
relief characters Hurley and Charlie construct a golf course on the idyllic Island in order to
alleviate their boredom. When Charlie invites the rest of the group to see the results of his and
Hurley’s labor, everyone is upset until Hurley states the facts for the group to consider:
Rich idiots fly to tropical islands all the time to whack balls around…if we're stuck here,
then just surviving's not going to cut it. We need some kind of relief, you know. We need
some way that we can, you know, have fun. That's right, fun. Or else we're just going to
go crazy waiting for the next bad thing to happen.
The temporary golf course, set up on the top of one of the mountains, away from the danger of
the jungle and the vulnerability of the beach, provides a haven for the survivors so they are no
Kovacs 15
longer waiting for the next small horror to break their routine. The mundane events on the Island
juxtapose the repetitive violence. In post-9/11 America, this is how we pass our time in reality,
anxious for the next disaster spectacle and accepting the banality of routine and distraction until
violence disrupts.
Season two of Lost revolves around the construction of anxiety through literal time and
constructed routine. The survivors on the Island discover a hatch underneath the ground, a shelter
stocked with food and supplies that had been built in the 1970s as part of a massive scientific
research project. Currently inhabiting the hatch is the mysterious Desmond, who became
stranded on the Island during a boating race around the world and recruited into the project.
After their initial meeting, Desmond reveals to the survivors that every one hundred and eight
minutes, he must enter a series of numbers into a computer and press a button, but he does not
know what will happen if he does not complete the task in time. The debate over what may
happen if the numbers are not entered lasts for nearly two seasons and leads the survivors into an
intense argument about letting the numbers hit zero to see what happens. The debate over
whether this is an elaborate experiment to see if they will do the menial task or if something bad
will actually happen to them if the numbers hit zero. Routine is constructed around the notion
that a catastrophic event is inevitable and all time before the event is waiting for it to happen. On
Lost, the survivors seem to have some control over this, but the question remains of the reality of
the threat. While debating what might happen if the button is not pressed, Desmond realizes that
the last time he missed hitting the button was the day the Oceanic Flight 815 crashed on the
Island, stranding the survivors there with him. With the understanding of the worst-case scenario,
the survivors have realized that the threat of danger is real, similar to post 9/11 sensibilities.
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Jericho, a short-running series produced from 2006 to 200811, takes place in a small
Midwestern town. Multiple nuclear bomb detonations destroy major cities across the United
States, in Denver, Atlanta, and elsewhere, and the town of Jericho is cut off from
communication, energy, and supplies from the outside. In episode two “Fallout,” the residents of
the town prepare for an incoming storm that threatens to soak the town in radiation. As winds
blow the storm towards the town of Jericho from the remains of nearby Denver, the townspeople
race to secure their homes and the public nuclear fallout shelters to protect themselves from the
radiation in the rain. Jake Green, the show’s protagonist and son of the mayor, and his friends
and family must hurry to secure the residents of the hospital from exposure, and, in a moment of
desperation, seek refuge from the storm in the local mine to protect themselves. With the storm
an imminent threat to the town, each character must race against the clock and contend with
setbacks as they come in order to secure the safety of the overall population. Once the rain
finally hits, all anyone can do is wait. In that waiting, more than one person starts to go mad,
uncertain what will even be left of the town once the radiation and rain hit their crops.
Jericho asks the question, how do we as individuals digest a massive cultural trauma, and
how does it impact our individual lives and daily existence? Jericho is not concerned with
patriotism and heroism but with the human condition in response to cultural trauma. For most
Americans, 9/11 was removed by distance from where they lived, the physical threat of an attack
far away. Major targets were on the east coast of the United States or assumed to target national
landmarks. Although the threat created a cultural anxiety palpable around the nation, the
immediate threat was not everywhere. This is what makes Jericho stand out as a program. It
addresses the way most Americans understand cultural anxiety following the trauma of 9/11.
11 A third season of Jericho was released as a limited comic book series, titled Jericho Season 3: Civil War and published from Novermber 25, 2009 through June 8, 2011.
Kovacs 17
There is an uncertainty of the scope of the initial attack and questions about how real the threat is
and who is the real enemy. Jericho relocates the trauma to show the ripples of anxiety created by
a trauma (Takacs 190).
Representing a similar genre, the premise of Battlestar Galactica is based on humanity’s
need to leave the home planet and the threat of a dwindling population as the remaining people
struggle to find a place to resettle. In the narrative of Battlestar Galactica, humanity has been
forced to flee from their planet after a brutal takeover by the robot race of Cylons, who were
originally developed to help humankind but developed sentience and identity that surpassed
human control. The pilot episode12 charts the struggle of the remaining survivors to stay alive
aboard a small fleet of space ships and outrun the enemy for as long as possible as they develop a
plan to find a safe place in the galaxy. In the pilot episode “33,” the crew aboard the Galactica
suffers after enduring five days without sleep. Every thirty-three minutes like clockwork, the
Cylons catch up to the fleet of ships and force them to run, torturing humans near insanity by
keeping them perpetually awake and in fear. The initial catastrophic event, the invasion of the
planet by Cylons, is followed by periods of waiting and reacting to another attack, exemplified in
the plot of “33.” The potential threat of attack is a constant, and society is organized around
moments of waiting and moments of spectacle, creating anxiety for the entire population as their
life is constantly moves toward the moment of attack.
The idea that “the medium is the message” rings true for post-9/11 apocalyptic fiction.
Television is a medium of duration and predictability for both news and fiction. The duration and
understanding that there will be another episode of the television series next week reminds the
viewer that there is a hope, even if the hope is nothing more than survival. What identifies
12 The reboot of Battlestar Galactica began with a two-‐part miniseries, but the first episode “33,” which takes place immediately after the events of the miniseries, is identified as the pilot.
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apocalyptic fiction after 9/11 is the focus on the event as initial disruption and the long narrative
that follows the event that is not the climax but rather initiates the ongoing struggle that
transpires. The trauma of the event looms of the series as a specter, influencing the motivations
of the characters and creating an apocalyptic landscape. Through the repetition of the event of
9/11 through fiction, the audience recognizes the inevitability of trauma in reality.
Cowboys, Criminals, Citizens
The following day on September 12th, the initial shock of the event was spun by the
mainstream media into a story of hope, nationalism, and patriotism, harkening back to historic
cultural metanarratives of American rebuilding and reinvention based in the mythologized West.
However, these aggrandized patriotic narratives of heroism ignored the reality, the grittiness, and
the complexities of 9/11 as an event. The return to this fantasy of cultural identity provided an
understanding of how to rebuild after a disaster and reinforced the shared American dream and
identity (Faludi 289). Apocalyptic reality allows for the freedom and possibility of reconstruction
that is not possible in absence of a crisis (Klein 20). Returning to these narratives brought back
tropes of cowboys, the frontier, citizenship and patriotism, and the threat of the violent other in
our territory. In apocalyptic fiction, these narratives were embodied and then refuted, understood
as means of coping with the initial trauma but seen as a superficial solution to complex problems
of citizenship and the myth of the duality of good and evil.
In its post-9/11 renaissance, the apocalyptic genre of television was far more critical of
the present and less optimistic about the future of American society in the wake of such a
massive cultural trauma. Apocalyptic fiction created moral grey areas and scenarios where there
were no winners or morals. The question on everyone’s mind was not how do we survive but
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why do we survive. Apocalyptic television shows acknowledged the return of the narrative of the
American West and confronted and complicated the related tropes as a reaction to a cultural
trauma. The heroic cowboy, a lone male protagonist settled with the burden of caring for a
community, was embodied in post-9/11 narratives, but his motivations and past made him even
more of an anti-hero than his original incarnation. Criminals and others in apocalyptic fiction
were no longer reduced to simple enemies; their motivations were complicated and forced the
audience to reckon with the violence and motivations of the protagonists. At the center of these
narratives were questions of citizenship, of who is a citizen and who is not, of who is the leader
of a population and why.
The apocalyptic cowboy is thrust into a barren or unexplored territory and burdened with
a position of reluctant leadership as his community faces the threat of the other (Faludi 46-63).
On Jericho, Jake Green assumes the role of leader, despite his ominous past and outsider status.
Jake returns to his hometown to collect his inheritance after the death of his grandfather dies and
must face his family after a mysterious absence. His father and brother, the mayor and deputy
mayor respectively, are angry about Jake’s disappearance, but his mother understands what led
her son to remove himself from his family and the town. As Jake prepares to leave again, a
disaster forces him to stay put and help the townspeople of Jericho. He returns home to the
family farm, reluctantly takes on a leadership role to help his family in a time of crisis, and faces
the mistakes of his past.
In constructing its narrative and main characters, Lost remains aware of normalized
narratives in media and subverts narrative expectation by playing with the cowboy character
trope (Faludi 139). Using its flashback techniques, Lost is able to show characters reinvented on
the islands and reveal who each character was before arriving. For example, the character
Kovacs 20
Sawyer, a survivor of the crash, is initially seen as an antagonist and a thief, hoarding medical
supplies and spending all day reading novels on the beach instead of helping with daily tasks.
With his thick Southern drawl, rugged physique, and penchant for assigning offensive
nicknames, Sawyer is unlikable and isolated. In the flashback, it is revealed that his real name is
James Ford, and his past as a con man is a product of an especially traumatic childhood, wherein
he witness his father murdering his mother after discovering she had an affair. As an adult,
Sawyer tracked down the man his mother had an affair with only to accidentally murder the
wrong man. Once on the Island, he adopted the identity of Sawyer, wanting to reinvent himself
and forget his past crimes.
The characters of Jericho also face the issues of the other among them, but the show
itself is centered on ideas of governance, citizenship, and corruptibility (Takacs 198-199).
Isolated and without information, the people of Jericho slowly begin to turn on one another,
uncertain of what started the attack, who the enemy is, and if their town will be a future target of
an attack. The town has difficulty uniting in the disaster, with individuals hesitant to turn to their
elected leadership, the Green family dynasty, as they blame those in charge for not preparing for
these circumstances. The breakdown of national government hierarchies leads to questions of
authority in the town. In this fictional universe, Jericho is already a town living in post-9/11
America, and the townspeople believe that the mayor should have better prepared for this nuclear
disaster. At first, the town makes multiple efforts to find out what caused the initial attack, but
this rapidly becomes secondary to their attempts to keep the people of Jericho from turning on
each other and descending into chaos. 9/11 narratives tend to make heroic stories out of firemen,
police officers, but this is not the case in Jericho. This small town hosts virtually no heroes. Even
the government officials and police must use power and violence to earn authority. In “Four
Kovacs 21
Horsemen”, the police chief argues with Mayor Green about his response to the disaster and says
that following September 11th, the mayor should have better prepared the town to face this
situation. Mayor Green invites the sheriff into his office, shuts the door, and physically beats the
sheriff down to assert his authority. Authority cannot be affirmed through election or governing
bodies; violence is what creates hierarchical structure (Takacs 195).
In apocalyptic scenarios, the lines between criminals and citizens become tenuous, a
result of the collapse of governmental structure. Without the power and authority of an existing
and historic structure to regulate citizens, questions of good and evil, of citizens and criminals,
become impossible to divide into separate categories. This developing grey area responds to the
dramatic patriotism produced in rhetoric in post-9/11 America and represents the difficulty of
understanding the complex loyalties and motivations of individuals in a global society.
Following 9/11, the reaction to the foreign terrorist threat was patriotism and a prescribed
performance of citizenship. Constructing citizenship as unifying in the aftermath of a national
tragedy and rhetoric of strength blamed the event on the failure of citizenship. Politics and social
practice regressed (Faludi 295-296). However, in creating the ideal citizen, the threatening other
also became identifiable. Foreign, nonwhite criminality became the norm. The largest part of this
threat was the idea that the other lived among the masses and pretended to be a citizen
(Baudrillard 410; Faludi 12). This problem of identification again blamed social liberalism for
the vulnerability that allowed 9/11 to happen and put the nation at risk.
Apocalyptic fiction is often concerned with questions of this other and of citizenship, of
who belongs and does not belong, and who is on what side. These programs often determine that
such motivations are not as simplistic as we want to believe. On Lost, the other is quite literal,
the group identified as “the Others” by the survivors of the front section of Flight 815. They are a
Kovacs 22
primarily unseen antagonist but their presence as a threat becomes known as survivors go
missing and are threatened. Throughout the narrative of the show, the loyalties and identities of
the others are unknown. In the season two episode “The Other 48 Days,” the audience is
introduced to the survivors of the crash seated in the tail section of the plane, and through this
group, the antagonism of the real others slowly is revealed. A group of scientists living on the
Island, the Others are associated with the Dharama Initiative, an organization of scientists
dedicated to study of the human condition, and perform social and medical experiments on those
the manage to capture on the Island.
Individuals on the Island are corrupted by circumstances, and as time passes, the
survivors of the plane crash become increasingly questionable in their actions, betray one
another, and less loyal to the group. Michael is initially the one who spearheads the projects to
leave the Island and to find help by building a raft, doing everything he can to get the group
rescued. After the Others capture his son Walt, Michael makes a deal with the Others by handing
over Jack, Sawyer, Kate, and Hurley, the de facto leaders of the survivors, and in exchange, he is
able to sail to freedom with his son. Locke, one of those most inspired by the Island, eventually
becomes a leader to the others, invested in the magical properties of the Island and taking a place
in control. The motivations and alliances of individuals become very complicated over the course
of the series, and Lost shows that circumstances lead individuals to act in their self-interests and
that citizenship is based on how governance helps the individual.
On Battlestar Galactica, the western genre is reimagined as a space western, with the
crew aboard the Galactica leading exiled humanity across space in hopes of resettling the
mythical planet Earth. In this universe, the enemy is a literal creation of humankind. The Cylon
army, created to make life of the planet easier for humans, eventually developed their own
Kovacs 23
communities and went to war with humankind. Although they were robotic beings, their
sentience and transcendence of corporeal form made them a huge threat to humans. However,
this trope returns to a key theme of even the earliest science fiction, which is that men are often
the makers of this own enemy. In the Battlestar Galactica miniseries, as the spaceship is being
decommissioned, Commander Adama addresses the crew with the following speech:
When we fought the Cylons, we did it to save ourselves from extinction. But we never
answered the question, why? Why are we as a people worth saving? We still commit
murder because of greed, spite, jealousy. And we still visit all of our sins upon our
children. We refuse to accept the responsibility for anything that we've done…You
cannot play God then wash your hands of the things that you've created. Sooner or later,
the day comes when you can't hide from the things that you've done anymore.
This theme is even apparent in Jericho and Lost and echoes the motif of inevitability that
pervades post-9/11 thought. Although the settings of science fiction construct these worlds as
separate from our own, they are a key means of commenting on the corruptibility and
vulnerability of human nature ("The Imagination of Disaster" 48).
Fantasy and Reality
Discussing 9/11 in terms of fictionalized violence complicates the relationship between
fiction and reality as they are mediated by television. The event of 9/11 was more like a work of
science fiction than a reality, simultaneously unimaginable and imagined into being, collapsing
lines separating fiction and reality. Without the existing visual language to talk about this
massive catastrophe, fiction contextualized the event and made it real and understandable.
Disaster films produced before the event seemed to indicate that the event had been imagined
Kovacs 24
into existence, an identifying anxiety present in the American cultural conscious (Baudrillard
405). The fragility of the United States, globalism, and capitalism had been threatened and
fractured in a public spectacle and forced the world to understand the tenuous moment that
violent collapse was an imminent threat. Philosophers ask whether we dreamed this moment into
existence, and science fiction and disaster films produced before this event support the idea that
not only had the fear on 9/11 already existed, but catastrophe of this cultural magnitude had long
been acknowledged as an inevitability (Baudrillard 405). Not only this, but the question remains
if this event had been a need of a modern society, wherein capitalism and modernity had reached
beyond the control of humanity; the only means of regaining control is through the destruction
and reconstruction (Klein 20-21).
Apocalyptic fiction cannot exist without the reality of the event to invoke our anxieties,
but the real trauma of 9/11 as negotiated through news footage and aired across the networks ad
infinitum replicates the disaster seen in films and television before the event. Philosophical
considerations see 9/11 as a moment of convergence, where the fantasy of disaster became real.
The popularity of the apocalyptic narratives and anxiety about the apocalypse as an inevitability
reveals not only the worst nightmares of an over-stimulated visual culture, but it reveals a wish
fulfillment and fantasy of rupture. The climate of catastrophe manifests in simultaneous fear of
the apocalypse and the inevitability of the apocalyptic world. Fantasy lets us live our scenarios
that are seemingly inevitable the more we depend on failing governance and technology.
Regardless of which came first, the chicken or the egg, 9/11 was more like a work of science
fiction than a reality, and thus, reality and fiction had become intertwined both in medium and
spectacle (Baudrillard 413).
Kovacs 25
A key component of apocalyptic fiction is its ability to represent the human condition, as
disasters have an ability to strip humans down to their most essential selves, unmitigated by
social and economic constraints. As the apocalyptic genre addresses human nature and desire
without the restrictions of society as we live in it, these apocalyptic narratives are conscious of
where they exist in relation to reality. Apocalyptic fiction on television opposes the notion of
dissociating the viewer with fiction, and instead, engages the audience in the narrative. Within
this genre, there is a metatextual motif of the relationship between science fiction and reality as
they are in dialogue with one another about possibility and the perpetual threat of technology and
modernity. Apocalyptic narratives respond to this by situating themselves in our reality, placing
themselves in location and time, as television does, to help us place ourselves in relation to the
probability of this future.
As the relationship with the news media and television new broadcasts had changed, so
did the relationship with fiction television. The spectacle of violence aired live on 9/11 and
repeated for days following the event did more than epitomize the desire to watch images of
catastrophic spectacle. What had once seemed like pornographic violence in fiction had become
reality as transmitted by news television, legitimized by the medium’s presentness and
information production (Redfield 69). Science fiction had provided an existing visual language
for the real event and gave way to narrativizing what could not be articulated in the immediate
moment (Norris, Kern and Just 13). A dialectic between television shows and the news formed in
the aftermath of 9/11, as the reality of American life began to take the shape of science fiction.
Jericho is unique in how it locates itself on the map of the United States. The attack on
New York City and drastic changes to its iconography after 9/11 made cities and urban spaces
the locus for apocalyptic anxieties. Jericho subverts this trope and places the action in a small
Kovacs 26
town American, removed from the cities, and the problem of location becomes a part of their
struggle to keep the town together. Though the event does not destroy their town physically, the
town decays due to its lack of access to information and supplies to sustain them. Isolated by
physical distance that hinders communication, Jericho avoids the narrative of exceptional
violence and grounds itself in the broader, lasting implications of cultural and physical trauma
every day and everywhere. At the end of episode two “Fallout,” Robert Hawkins receives a
message in Morse code, detailing the exact detonation sites spread across the Unites States. In
the final moments of the episode, he is seen pushing tacks into a map over and over again as he
identifies what cities have been destroyed in the nuclear attacks, starting to mark the places of
each attack. By episode eighteen “A.K.A.”, the citizens of Jericho have assembled a map of
targets. Assigning a physical, known location and time in apocalyptic fiction unravels the
exceptionalism of mainstream news narratives 9/11.
A poignant episode of Lost situates itself in reality, an uncanny moment where news
events that happened in real time are told on the Island, and disrupt the new established routine
crafted by the Island’s isolation. In episode two of season three “The Glass Ballerina,” the de
facto leader of the survivors Jack is captured by the mysterious Others. While hoping to convince
Jack to join their team, the leader Ben taunts Jack with contact with the outside world. Ben
reveals to Jack that in the sixty-odd days after arriving on the Island, in October and November
of 2004, George Bush was reelected President, actor Christopher Reeve passed away, and the
Boston Red Sox won the World Series. This bizarre moment locates Lost in our reality and time,
and in this moment of reality inserted in fiction, the science fiction and fantasy of Lost become
more grounded to the television audience. The sudden popularity of apocalyptic fiction following
9/11 is not about escapism but the realization that reality looks more like science fiction than
Kovacs 27
ever before. Programs such as Lost and other apocalyptic fiction are aware that although it is
fiction, it must be situated in a way that the viewer recognizes as his or her own world. The
separation of science fiction was not as far away, and the awareness of the liminality of science
fiction aided these programs in addressing real concerns about contemporary society.
The finale of Battlestar Galactica does much the same as Lost in creating a moment of
the uncanny, ending the series with the population settling planet Earth and thus having the
events of the television show lead up to the creation of our modern society. The questions about
technology and morals, about ethics in science are issues we contend with in post-9/11 society,
and Battlestar Galactica places itself in our own reality so this notion is unavoidable. It grapples
with post-9/11 society, with how we contend with massive violence and with the future and
tenuous present of social relations and governing bodies. This subverts the expectation of
Battlestar Galactica and of science fiction as a genre; it is not a warning about what the future
could look like but rather a commentary on what is already happening and taking shape in
contemporary society.
The work of science fiction is somehow better at addressing human fear and anxiety than
nonfiction and the news media. The focus of science fiction, particularly apocalyptic fiction, is
related to contemporary humanity. These worlds create new rules that allow characters to face
moral questions that are removed enough from the plagues and social constraints of our own
society. Fiction has created a space where the exploration of motivation and fear can be
complicated and innate, a part of the human condition. These fictions show what the end looks
like and the continuous struggle to survive and endure. They imagine how society looks in the
wake of collapse, but more importantly, they reflect the present fragility of our society and the
inevitability of collapsing systems.
Kovacs 28
Conclusion
Fifteen years removed from the immediate aftershocks of the even, the ghostly presence
of 9/11 still looms over reality and science fiction alike; we are living in a society built around
fear of the inevitable collapse of what modernity has built and started to fracture on that day.
Since that time, apocalyptic fiction has only become darker, gorier, and bleaker13. Apocalyptic
fiction could not exist in its present incarnation without the reality of the event to invoke our
anxieties, but the real trauma of 9/11 as negotiated through news footage and aired across the
networks ad infinitum replicates the disaster seen in films and television before it. Susan Sontag
explains the phenomena of how we collectively dream trauma and disaster into existence, but
9/11 is the point at which fiction and reality converge to produce the uncanny. These fictions and
the repetition of apocalyptic narratives expresses the paradox of fear of the inevitable collapse
and the potential hope of what may be rebuilt and reconstructed in the collapse of corrupted
institutions and systems (Klein 21). The unimaginable on the news and the mundane in fiction
create a dialogue about fiction and reality, and ultimately remind us that even in the present,
perhaps especially in the present, we are still living in the aftershocks of an apocalyptic trauma.
13 The current television series The 100 and The Walking Dead illustrate this thematic shift. The 100, based on a series of young adult books, has a bleak depiction of human nature and the continuous failure of society. After spending three generations living aboard a space station called the Ark, humanity returns to Earth to recolonize, only to go to war with the factions of humans who survived nuclear war. As war rages and alliances are made and broke, the people of the Ark are forced to kill their enemies, including innocent children, in order to survive. The Walking Dead takes place in the American South in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. This programs features the moral relativism of The 100 and echoes motifs of the American West to show the isolation and aimlessness of society. Former sheriff Rick Grimes, his family, and band of followers look for refugee from the attack and a place to settle. At the end of the fourth season, the refugees make their way to a camp called Terminus, which they believe is a haven for survivors where they may rebuild their lives. Shortly after arriving, they realized that the people of Terminus are cannibals.
Kovacs 29
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