Coupland, D (2010) 2011 Player One. In: Patrides, C A and Wittreich, J (Eds. WebSee 15 photos and 3 tips from 556 visitors to 7-Eleven. 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. In this altered world, there is a traveling Shakespearean theater company and symphony orchestra touring the small and fairly isolated communities in the Midwest.". She has no expectation that anybody else will ever see her work. I loved Station Eleven because it is the first post-apocalyptic show that revolves around its own holy text, in this case the hypnotic, possibly prophetic, graphic novel Station Eleven. We see its origins as, in flashback, Miranda (with Deadwyler in an equally devastating performance), turns her own experience with trauma and loss into a sort of universal language that connects the past with the future and literally helps save civilization. Station Elevens critique of traditional apocalyptic logic is most evident in the figure of the prophet Tyler through whom Mandel self-reflexively appropriates religious apocalyptic tropes to subvert them from within.6 Tyler, the son of Arthur Leander, the character who links the texts pre-apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narrative strands, is only a child when the pandemic hits the world, but grows up to be the charismatic leader of a violent doomsday cult. 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. 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. Similarly, Bertis, a fanatic sniper in Player Ones peak oil post-apocalyptic scenario, believes that the pre-apocalyptic world is dying and corrupt and about to be renewed through divine intervention (Coupland, [2010] 2011: 129). In addition to the texts discussed in my article, other examples of this growing body of twenty-first-century writings include: Louise Erdrichs, Despite the genre turn, Hoberek points out a persistent prejudice against genre fiction central to what Mark McGurl has dubbed the program era of post-World War II fiction (2011: 484). Even the Georgia Flu, Jeevan notes, has a disarmingly pretty name (Mandel, 2014: 17). In a way, Station Eleven is an interesting Rorschach test of apocalyptcisms appeal. Get Screen Gab for everything about the TV shows and streaming movies everyones talking about. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. But book awards and paperback releases are a thing of the past in the world Mandel has created. Martin Carr We Got This Covered. 2 De Cristofaro: Critical Temporalities Published in 2014 to critical and popular success, Emily St. John Mandels Station Eleven is part of a widely-discussed, growing corpus of post-apocalyptic novels written by authors who do not typically write science fiction.1 In what Andrew Hoberek (2011) identifies as the genre turn of The Museum soon becomes a sanctuary where people go to pray, for Station Elevens post-apocalyptic characters clin[g] to the hope that the world they remembered could be restored (Mandel, 2014: 213), just like the people of the Undersea in the comic Station Eleven, penned by Miranda, the title of which signals its status as a mise-en-abyme text.9 Thus, children at school are taught about the way things were, although these are just abstractions and essentially science fiction to them (Mandel, 2014: 269, 262, 270). 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? A Pulitzer Prize winner in 2015 and finalist for criticism in 2013 and 2014, she has won various awards for criticism and feature writing. For me, its what Ive taken to calling the series present the You had to be impressed by that at least. Brennan: Look, Im not calling Station Eleven a failure, or a disaster, or even a half-assed genre entry. This utopian narrative about the pre-apocalyptic past obscures the material labour that props up the hyper-connected globalised world and the inequalities between the global North and South that lie beneath its seemingly seamless unity. The survivors are the elect who, as he puts it, were saved not only to bring the light, to spread the light, but to be the light. The final season of Game of Thrones notwithstanding, I remain a big fan of the epic quest, so I chose surrender. Station Eleven happened to be on a break in March 2020 when COVID hit, and by the time production started up again in February 2021, the world had changed. The silence (McCarthy, [2006] 2007: 274), an irrecoverable ecosystem that indicates the lack of a utopian renewal after the end indeed, the lack of post-apocalyptic futurity tout court and the collapsing of the sense-making order the traditional apocalyptic paradigm projects onto history through teleology. In a way, Station Eleven is an interesting Rorschach test of apocalyptcisms appeal. 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. Thus, after a paragraph foreshadowing Mirandas divorce from Arthur and ensuing life a future that in Station Eleven is, literally, already written at the start of the novel, when we are informed of Arthurs many ex-wives (Mandel, 2014: 134) Mandel pauses to remind the readers that first theres this moment (Mandel, 2014: 107), a moment in which, in life unlike narratives, we take decisions that shape an unwritten future. By Richard Adult Kirsten is, per the Katniss Everdeen amendment to the Geneva Convention, a skilled knife thrower and general badass, but she is also the companys go-to Hamlet, surrounded by a group of people who survived without surrendering their belief in the power of making beautiful things. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/books/station-eleven-joins-falls-crop-of-dystopian-novels.html [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. Through their content and narrative structure, contemporary post-apocalyptic novels take issue with the apocalyptic delirium of destination of Western modernity (Derrida, 1992: 53), that is, with the closed and deterministic conception of time at the core of apocalyptic logic and its equally closed and normative utopian visions, which leave no space for agency and for alternative visions of the future. Heffernan, T 2008 Post-Apocalyptic Culture. There is no emotion and it is not greatly 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. Goldman, M 2005 Rewriting Apocalypse in Contemporary Canadian Fiction. Season 1 Review: Station Eleven takes Mandels book and amps up its sense of a cozy post-apocalypse, where humanity comes together, rather than drifting Yes, there were dangers there, but no doubt there was also a lot of food and, potentially, fellow nonmurderous survivors. Mousoutzanis, A 2014 Fin-de-Sicle Fictions, 1890s1990s: Apocalypse, Technoscience, Empire. 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. In the new miniseries "Station Eleven," it's two decades after a deadly flu pandemic, and global civilization has nearly collapsed. I found it hopeful. Every individual experiences what she or he experiences and deals with it in a different way. WebThe book Station Eleven, by Emily Mandel, started when a famous actor dies on stage while performing the play King Lear. 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]. Time, Paul Ricoeur contends, becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative (1984: 3). However, on the one hand, the novel is far from adhering to the radical utopian renewal of traditional apocalyptic discourse. You know, I think I'd want to save a globe. 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. 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). You know, it's interesting to think about what survives. We were saved because we are the light. That episode, which straddles the before and the after, was totally crazy and completely glorious; of course some female doctor would create a maternity ward in a place that once sold beds. Station Eleven. But I fear the social future Station Eleven imagines is implausible, if not disingenuous. Among the 1% left Himesh Patel and Matilda Lawler in Station Eleven. 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. Events unfurl like a They angered Him (Coupland, [2010] 2011: 134) although, it turns out, he is also motivated by a much more mundane reason: he wants to kill his father, who ran off with his wife. Station Eleven and The Last of Us share one more very specific similarity: juxtaposing destruction with art. Station Elevens structure similarly articulates a critical temporality that complicates the sense of an ending. The first concerns the early days and years of the pandemic. Ah, you say no. 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. 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. The Georgia Flu, the prophet claims, was our flood. DOI: http://doi.org/10.2307/827840. 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). 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 Kermode, F [1966] 2000 The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Both Tyler and Bertis exhibit traits of what Catherine Keller identifies as the apocalypse pattern (1996: 11): the faith in historical determinism, the inclination to think in terms of clear-cut polarities of good versus evil and the identification with the good that purges the evil from the old world and is worthy of the imminent utopian renewal of the new world. Convenience Store in Sterling, VA. Open Library of Humanities, 4(1): 7, 126. The primary example of this is Shakespeare, specifically King 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. Available at: http://www.publicbooks.org/the-post-apocalyptic-present/ [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. Aptly described as an elegy for the hyper-globalised present by Andrew M. Butler of the Arthur C. Clarke Award committee (ACCA, 2015: n.pag. Traditional apocalyptic narratives reveal a utopian teleology to history, a conception of time that deeply informs western modernity and its metanarratives. In the very early days, for example, Jeevan and Kirsten go round a supermarket that is full of produce but empty of people. I dont [sic] think so. As children learn in, The critical appropriation of apocalyptic tropes to foreground their complicity with oppressive power dynamics is typical of contemporary post-apocalyptic novels. Events unfurl like a runaway train: Jeevan (Himesh Patel), an anxiety-ridden mess, is attending a performance of King Lear when an onstage tragedy prompts him to intervene. Goods travelled in ships and airplanes across the world. Public Books, 15 June. On the Traveling Symphony's motto, "survival is insufficient"It is not from Shakespeare. She had ample experience to draw from. Rather than reading for the end, Mitchell invites us to read Cloud Atlas looking for parallels and connections, from the comet-shaped birthmark that links the protagonists of the various stories to their acts of defiance against the predatory logic that brings humanity to the apocalyptic demise.11 Finally, the chronological ending of the novel the post-apocalyptic future is effaced through the actual ending of Cloud Atlas the nineteenth-century narrative which suggest that the future is not already written. Mary McNamara: Given the spiritual undertones of the series, and the repetition of the sentence I remember damage. At first, Station Eleven is bewildering, all discombobulating cuts between the present and what seems to be a desolate, sparsely populated future. | Privacy Policy |, Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/books/station-eleven-joins-falls-crop-of-dystopian-novels.html, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/station-eleven-offers-suspense-and-science-fiction-but-it-is-undoubtedly-a-literary-work/article20577909/, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2014/10/15/sorry-emily-st-john-mandel-resistance-is-futile/, http://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2017.1369386, https://tetheredbyletters.com/when-the-dust-settles-an-interview-with-emily-st-john-mandel/, http://www.publicbooks.org/the-post-apocalyptic-present/, https://www.booklistonline.com/Station-Eleven-Emily-St-John-Mandel/pid=6862248, https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/38e15y/hi_im_emily_st_john_mandel_author_of_station/, http://www.tor.com/2014/09/12/a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel/, Special Collection: Station Eleven and Twenty-First-Century Writing, For the sake of simplicity, in what follows contemporary post-apocalyptic novel refers to the subject of this article, post-apocalyptic fictions written by non-SF authors. Its one of the most profound meditations on love, loss, grief, and community Ive ever seen. 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. But apocalypse, from the Greek apocalyptein, etymologically means to unveil or to reveal, and the revelations of the traditional apocalyptic paradigm are intertwined with time and utopia. ), entropy reigns. From Station Eleven to Atlanta, GLOW and more, Christian Sprenger has shot some of TVs most beautiful images. (2018) Critical Temporalities: Station Eleven and the Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel, The apocalypse is such a gap: we do not know what happened, just as in The Road, and this in itself challenges the sense-making function of the end in both apocalyptic history and traditional narratives. Nor did I want the kind of Theres Got to Be a Morning After survival celebration disaster stories so often rely on. Drawn from Emily St. John Mandels novel, the seriess speculative future edges up, in its most ill-conceived moments, to a kind of Walking Dead-meets-Terrence Malick self-indulgence, and it rarely convinced me, or held me by the throat, the way its speculative present did; I even weighed whether to skip the episodes set along the Wheel, the Great Lakes circle the Symphony traced. 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 her study of contemporary Canadian apocalyptic narratives, Marlene Goldman writes that: Canadian authors introduce particular twists to the familiar myth of the end by challenging rather than embracing apocalypses key features, specifically, the purgation of the non-elect and the violent destruction of the earthly world in preparation for the creation of a divine one (2005: 6). Drawing attention to the dystopian aspects of traditional apocalyptic discourse, contemporary post-apocalyptic novels suggest that its totalising historical teleology is a narrative construct which serves oppressive ideological agendas, for those who posit an end to history, no matter how utopian this end is, also conceive of themselves as the only rightful interpreters and agents of this telos. The beauty of it (Mandel, 2014: 247, 135). As I have argued, the critical temporalities of the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel debunk the apocalyptic conception of history at the core of western modernity as a narrative construct. Ricoeur, P 1984 Time and Narrative, 1. The mere existence of a character like the Conductor, played with bug-eyed, Emmy-worthy brilliance by Petty, made my heart sing. The apocalyptic distinction between the elect and the non-elect fuels the ruthless actions of the prophet and his followers from killing to raping and enslaving which they commit [A]ll the time smiling, so peaceful, like theyve done nothing wrong (Mandel, 2014: 273), because they see themselves as the only rightful interpreters and agents of the apocalyptic goal of history, the utopian renewal of the new world. The series creator explains why, Station Eleven, like the Shakespeare that sustains it, is something of a miracle, Unlike Andor, Mandalorian is going all in on Star Wars lore. Are you supposed to be? Station Eleven is a slow burn. Yet beyond this cursory reference to the economic crisis, the novel remains curiously silent on the issues of the neoliberal order, including anthropogenic climate change, which represents the flip side of, and a significant threat to, capitalisms fundamental premise. It began to read to me as a tacit acknowledgement that its vision of the future is not as immersive as its vision of the present or past. 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. but mainly because it quickly became obvious, from the running references to Shakespeare and the (fictional) graphic novel Station Eleven, that this story was not about how to survive a pandemic. It received critical acclaim and was nominated for seven Primetime 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. Both texts expose how apocalyptic discourse is fabricated to push ideological agendas. For her, the important thing is the work itself, not whether or not it's ever published. Firstly, Times Arrow bec[o]me[s] Times Boomerang (Mitchell, 2004: 149), that is, the linear and teleological development of traditional plots and apocalyptic history the arrow of the novels first half is complicated by the boomerang of the second half. Station Eleven manages to find something different: beauty and meaning, most of it wrapped up in the pandemic's survivors, our main characters, and the way they manage to connect to others and find some joy even in a grim time and place. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.235. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 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. Station Elevens plot itself consists of fragments from before and after the apocalypse, which challenges the teleological linearity of apocalyptic temporality. Station Eleven is a massive collaborative effort, but much of the series warmth is shaped by three key visual choices in its first episode. Download PDF. Available at: https://www.booklistonline.com/Station-Eleven-Emily-St-John-Mandel/pid=6862248 [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. Since its debut last month, Station Eleven has drawn both acclaim (from critics including our own Robert Lloyd) and criticism (from fans of the novel on which its based, which it changes in key ways). The prophets image of the pandemic as an avenging angel (Mandel, 2014: 60, 286) echoes Revelation 1516, where the seven bowls of gods wrath are unleashed on the Earth by seven angels. I was very deliberate in the timing of the narrative: its set mostly fifteen and twenty years after the collapse, not during or in the immediate aftermath (Mandel, 2015: n.pag.). 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. The final minutes of the Station Eleven finale reunite Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) and Jeevan (Himesh Patel) after 19 years apart. The author has no competing interests to declare. 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. ), The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents, and Repercussions, pp. To take refuge in the art, dammit. I remember watching that episode and I remember being absolutely struck by that line. Mackenzie Davis, left, leads the sprawling cast of HBO Maxs (post-)apocalyptic series Station Eleven.. To believe that the series is guilty of doubtful creative choices is not to spurn art its to know what its capable of and to expect more of it. Post-apocalyptic ravaged aftermaths implicitly subvert the central element of apocalyptic discourse, that is, a sense-making utopian historical teleology. Station Eleven replicates what Gomel identifies as the plague pattern, where there is no place for millenarian rebirth.