Every Post-Apocalyptic Fiction Is a Futuristic Western

This piece is a preview of Cine y Futuros Posibles, the latest book from Revista 24 Cuadros, which gathers critical essays analyzing the different ways cinema ("an invention without a future," according to Louis Lumière, one of the inventors of the cinematograph) has imagined (and still imagines) the future. You can find the book here or have it mailed to you here.

A lone gunslinger crosses a desert that could be any desert, in an era that could be any era. Silent, he aims and fires, kills with skill; then he jots inscrutable words in a little notebook. He crosses wastelands of hostile, shifting weather, faces off against a cult and a pale cowboy who seems to have stepped out of an Alejandro Jodorowsky film; he fights desert bandits, endures biblical plagues and pestilences, suffers epiphanies and visions of cosmic horror. The gunslinger moves on, barely stopping. The wasteland is his home.

This is the setting of Dios duerme en la piedra (2023), a novel by the American-Argentine writer Mike Wilson, and as a reader it sets off a few questions for me: does it take place in the past or in a post-apocalyptic future? Is it our world the gunslinger is crossing, or an alternate universe? Is this the American Old West or the ruins of a broken planet? These are all questions the author doesn't seem particularly interested in clearing up, perhaps because Dios duerme en la piedra is a metaphysical-apocalyptic western and, as film and pulp literature have been teaching us for more than a hundred years, the desert is the favorite stage for genres like the western and subgenres like post-apocalyptic science fiction. So the natural habitat of a gunslinger on horseback crossing spaces indistinguishable from a post-apocalyptic landscape (arid, inhospitable and desolate) is the desert. Wilson plays with this ambiguity by letting the reader's imagination decide the genre and the space-time in which his novel takes place.

Let me cut to the chase: my hypothesis is that every post-apocalyptic fiction is, deep down, a futuristic western. The difference is that one tells the beginning and the other the end of a civilization: the western narrates the conquest of the precapitalist "wild" West by the "civilized" East, the expansion of capitalism and the birth of a modern civilization; desert post-apocalyptic science fiction, on the other hand, describes the collapse of civilization after some catastrophe and the return to a postcapitalist state of savagery. These images (the American desert populated by cowboys, outlaws and wild Indians, and the post-nuclear or post-collapse desert inhabited by scavengers) were branded into the popular imagination.

Every post-apocalyptic fiction is, deep down, a futuristic western. The difference is that one tells the beginning and the other the end of a civilization.

Until the late '80s, post-apocalyptic movies needed opening images showing the exact moment of the nuclear explosion in order to give more context to viewers who weren't used to this kind of cinema. A Boy and His Dog (L. Q. Jones, 1975), The Road Warrior (G. Miller, 1981), Hokuto no Ken (T. Ashida, 1986), Hell Comes to Frogtown (D. Jackson, R. Kizer, 1988), Akira (K. Ōtomo, 1988), Cyborg (A. Pyun, 1989) (to take a few examples) all open with variations on this kind of imagery to contextualize their fictional universe from the start. But over time, this over-explanatory device became dispensable. Today, generally speaking, only bad post-apocalyptic movies open with the obligatory nuclear blast.

If we set aside these images on their way to extinction, we'll see that the opening of the vast majority of post-apocalyptic films is indistinguishable from the opening of any classic western: wide establishing shots that lay out the space; characters flattened by the hypnotic (and inhospitable) landscape that dwarfs them; bodies and faces you can't make out because they're too far from the lens, with their backs to the camera or backlit; human beings utterly devoured by the sun and the suffocating heat. Because the landscape—generally an arid natural setting—and the extreme climate are key elements both in Old West stories and in post-apocalyptic fictions: the desert plain, the dust, the blazing sun and the heat are as much protagonists as the human beings, to the point that the first appearance of the (anti)hero or the gang of outlaws is often preceded by a shot of the desert or of the sun at its zenith. In this sense, the openings of post-apocalyptic films like A Boy and His Dog, Beyond Thunderdome (G. Miller, 1985) and The Book of Eli (the Hughes brothers, 2010) are no different from the openings of Stagecoach (1939) and The Searchers (1956) by John Ford, or Per un pugno di dollari (1964) by Sergio Leone, to name three classic examples.

The antihero—survivor of a hostile world, hardened warrior crossing an immense arid valley alone or accompanied by some animal (a horse or, failing that, a dog)—is an iconic character for both the western and post-apocalyptic science fiction, the archetype that joins two fictional eras, two imaginary cycles (one of opening and one of closing) that form an endless circle: the birth and the collapse of American civilization as we know it. Just as cosmologists keen on the cyclic model and the Big Bounce theory speculate that after a certain amount of time the expansion of the universe will stop and a reversal process will begin, contracting all matter and space-time down to an infinitely dense and hot point of singularity that will culminate in a Big Crunch, which will give way to a Big Bounce that will generate another Big Bang from which a new universe will be born (and so on), we cinephiles could think of the western and post-apocalyptic science fiction as a continuous cycle of expansion, contraction and infinite collapse.

Let's say this cyclical origin myth begins on the wild frontier of the Far West and ends in a post-nuclear wasteland:

• Expansion: in the beginning everything is chaos, violence, territorial conflicts, civil wars, raiding parties, gangs of killers and looters. Out of that primordial chaos, the storytellers of the western tell us, the American nation will be born, with capitalism as its main civilizing drive—a political and economic philosophy that sacralizes private property while stealing Native Americans' ancestral land and seeking its own expansion through the modern railroad.
• Contraction: but if capitalism, as Marx warned 150 years ago, being an unstable system, full of internal contradictions and with a clear tendency to produce ever deeper crises, carries within it the seed of its own destruction, then the apocalypse must arrive at some point, inevitably. Perhaps capitalism's greatest contradiction and ultimate trigger is that greedy attempt to achieve infinite growth on a planet of finite resources. In other words: capital's logic of constant expansion and accumulation encourages the overexploitation of natural resources, which brings on ecological crises, environmental catastrophes, resource wars, persistent pollution and a climate change that moves us closer to extinction.
• Collapse: given this self-destructive bomb that capitalism carries in its belly, the post-western collapse (that is, a climate/nuclear apocalypse) is impossible not to imagine, just as it also seems impossible to imagine an alternative to the fall of the prevailing system—a kind of "paralysis of the imagination" that leads the vast majority of post-apocalyptic fictions to agree that, if capitalism falls, all that's left for us is barbarism, Hobbesian war, uncivilized savagery.

Capitalist realism, or why we can't imagine alternatives

The Uruguayan artist Fernando López Lage reminds us in his book Madmaxismo (2021) that in our imagination there is no image, still or moving, of the end of capitalism; there is, however, a glut of images of the apocalypse, of the end of the world, of a world colonized by zombies, by hostile aliens that, conveniently, have humanoid features—images that only point to the end of life on the planet. This idea suggests that, in a way, we are subordinated to the destructive, apocalyptic imaginary that always leads us toward the end of the world and not toward the end of capitalism as a system. It's what Mark Fisher called capitalist realism: that idea, deeply rooted in the collective imagination, that capitalism is not only the only viable economic system but that it's impossible even to imagine an alternative. This translates into a generalized impotence when it comes to thinking up futures that differ from our present (which is already pretty dystopian in itself), a kind of paralysis of the imagination. So: there are no fictions imagining alternatives because (and let's hope that repeating this phrase so often hasn't drained it of meaning) it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. This impotence is especially evident in desert apocalyptic fictions, whose authors seem incapable of thinking about the end of capitalism without imagining the end of the world as a direct consequence, or at least the end of the world as we know it: desertification of the planet, wars in which man becomes a wolf to man, survival not of the fittest but of the most violent and bloodthirsty, extreme pollution and a completely hostile climate.

We are subordinated to the destructive, apocalyptic imaginary that always leads us toward the end of the world and not toward the end of capitalism as a system.

In his essay Un desierto para la nación (2010), Fermín Rodríguez defines the desert as a sedimentary deposit of geological, biological, social and linguistic materials crystallized and organized by history. For Rodríguez, the desert has always been something like a dreamlike laboratory of virtual images that produces all kinds of manifestos, and he asks: “Where does that virtual potency come from, this imaginary agitation that contrasts with the bareness, the monotony, the sobriety of a land that resists being translated into landscape?”. In post-apocalyptic fictions, that virtual potency and that imaginary agitation are justified by the desert's own attributes: its bare aridity, its monotony, the scarce forms of life that inhabit it and its highly hostile climate make it the favorite setting for the dystopias that emerge after the apocalypse. “Perhaps that stripping bare, that <<absence of landscape>> that put the imagination to the test”, says Rodríguez, “is the condition or the support that allows a proliferation of images to ripple across the horizon”. And it is precisely the absence of landscape that turns the desert into an eerie space, even when it is a natural desert that, for obvious reasons, lacks the ruins of capitalism which, by contrast, artificial deserts or post-nuclear territories have in abundance. Mark Fisher wrote that the sensation of the eerie does not usually emanate from enclosed, inhabited or domestic spaces, but rather from landscapes partially emptied of the human. The eerie is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence; that is, the sensation of the eerie arises if there is a presence where there should be nothing, or if there is no presence where there should be something. As an example of the second type of the eerie (the failure of presence) Fisher uses the feeling that surrounds ruins or other abandoned structures. “Post-apocalyptic science fiction, while not always an eerie genre in itself, is riddled with eerie scenes”, he writes in The Weird and the Eerie (2016). An abandoned town, much like a stone circle, provokes an eerie sensation and triggers questions such as: What had to happen to cause those ruins, that disappearance? What kind of entity had something to do with it? The question “Why is there no landscape when there should be one?” directly links the desert with the eerie, and the question “Why is there nothing when there should be something?” turns post-apocalyptic deserts (with their ruins partially emptied of humans) into doubly eerie spaces. So what is it that attracts us so much about these territories that give off such a strong eerie sensation? Why do we like imagining these post-apocalyptic deserts as the settings of so many contemporary fictions? Why does the idea of the end of the world fascinate us so much?

Cómo el apocalipsis bíblico modela la imaginación política

¿Ateo, nihilista o devoto de Gilda? No importa: tu mente política está moldeada por el apocalipsis bíblico. Cómo las ficciones y el deseo de un final “con sentido” estructuran nuestra realidad. ¿Vivís esperando que se venga el fin? Descubrí por qué.

421 | Medio digital Cultura, tecnología, juegos y vida realMariano Busch

Is there no alternative?

The philosopher Timothy Morton defines hyperobjects as viscous entities (they stick to the things they come into contact with) and nonlocal ones (none of their local manifestations represents the totality of the hyperobject, only a small part of it) that are massively distributed in time and space with a temporality entirely different from the human scale. In other words: they are phenomena so vast that they defy our ability to grasp their true scope, and they will outlive us because they exist beyond our measurements and statistics. A black hole, the biosphere, polystyrene or the solar system are hyperobjects. In his book Hyperobjects (2013), Morton uses, as a didactic example, a conversation about the weather between two people in a supermarket to arrive at the conclusion that you can no longer have a routine chat about the weather because the presence of global warming darkens the conversation like a shadow, introducing strange gaps. A hyperobject (in this case global warming) has ruined the casual conversation that usually begins with the phrase “crazy weather, huh?”, because in any conversation about the weather someone will probably mention global warming at some point. And if nobody mentions it, it will hang over the conversation anyway “like a dark cloud”. These glitches in everyday rhetoric and casual conversation, Morton argues, are symptoms of a very deep ontological shift in human consciousness, a kind of upgrade of our ontological tools. Climate change has stopped being invisible to the majority and is no longer a danger stalking us from the future; it is all around us: we can feel it both physically and psychologically, and although we can't point at it and say “there it is”, we all understand that it is among us when we suffer the effects of extreme heat (barely one of the facets of its totality) because it is viscous, it surrounds us and sticks to us, like any other hyperobject. Climate change is the Lovecraftian entity that was asleep but has just woken from its slumber and threatens to alter the planet's conditions forever. Pandemic, a hyperobject from the past that we had agreed to forget forever, was back on everyone's lips when the coronavirus claimed thousands of human lives in a matter of months. It shouldn't surprise us, then, that today's dystopian-apocalyptic narratives center on environmental catastrophes and ecological collapse caused by ecocide rather than on the fear of nuclear catastrophe of the atomic age or the terror of the MAD doctrine (Mutual Assured Destruction) stemming from the nuclear-military potential of the rival powers of the Cold War.

Climate change is the Lovecraftian entity that was asleep but has just woken from its slumber and threatens to alter the planet's conditions forever.

Whether it's an apocalypse caused by a nuclear explosion or by ecological collapse, what remains after the disaster is a wasteland, a post-apocalyptic desert. The fundamental difference between one apocalypse and the other lies in its speed: an atomic bomb can turn a large portion of the planet into a barren waste in a matter of minutes; the destruction of the ozone layer or the lack of rain can be a very long agony. Desertification is consummated in both cases, only at a different pace. For example, the post-apocalyptic science fiction films A Boy and His Dog and Hokuto no Ken begin with a nuclear explosion due to a war that immediately turns the Earth into an artificial desert, thereby explaining the state of the new world in which bands of marauders and savage warriors fight over the broken remains of the planet. We, that is, the real world, are being dealt, for now, a languid apocalypse, like the one in J. G. Ballard's novel The Drought (1965) or Alfonso Cuarón's film Children of Men (2006). The Drought narrates the gradual desertification of the planet due to the absence of rain caused by a film of saturated polymers, the product of industrial waste covering the oceans and preventing water from evaporating. The English writer describes the unhurried agony and the processes of change and adaptation of a group of people facing extreme heat and water scarcity while civilization slowly begins to crumble and violence intensifies. And the desert, as we said before, is always the ideal setting for imagining this kind of fantasy. Children of Men takes place in a dystopian 2027 in which a pandemic of infertility confronts humanity with its inevitable extinction (after the collapse of society), a slow apocalypse that actually began 18 years earlier when the last child on the planet was born.

Dromomania

When Fermín Rodríguez defines the Argentine desert as “a disaggregated but not solitary territory, a solitude paradoxically populated by wandering tribes and bands of nomadic horsemen racing across a space subjected to the terror of the caudillo”, he seems to be describing the narrative space of post-apocalyptic fictions such as the Mad Max film saga or The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009), based on Cormac McCarthy's 2006 novel. Their eerie deserts are the setting for a story in which culture has been wiped out and only the strongest survive, small groups of dromomaniacs moving continuously in search of a promised land that no one has ever seen but everyone hopes to find. A constant in this kind of fiction, as we've already said, is the idea that if the dominant system (that is, capitalism) falls, all that's left for us is to turn into our own predators, literally devouring each other, or using each other to satisfy our most perverse desires. Everything seems to indicate that there is no alternative. Another recurring element in these fictions is displacement, a double movement that pushes the characters forward in space while simultaneously driving the plot. In The Drought as well as in The Road and Mad Max, the survivors live in constant diaspora, uprooted, in perpetual motion, hauling their few belongings here and there and defending them with their lives. The house, in these post-apocalyptic futures, is no longer a refuge or a cosmos, nor “our artificial paradise, our corner of the world, our first universe”, as Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space (1957).

A constant in this kind of fiction is the idea that if the dominant system (that is, capitalism) falls, all that's left for us is to turn into our own predators.

If, as Bachelard says, the most precious benefit of the ideal house is that it shelters our rest, lets us dream in peace and protects the dreamer, in post-apocalyptic fictions sleep is cut short (people sleep little and badly, always frightened, alert to any strange noise, that is, the exact opposite of “dreaming in peace”) because the house is no longer our artificial paradise but quite the opposite: the few who choose to live inside dwellings are besieged, brutalized, as if the concept of “home”, which in those fictional universes is already part of an extinct or endangered culture, brought back memories of a social order they would rather forget because it is unlikely ever to return. So people push on in search of the lost paradise, they keep moving, using utopia as an excuse to walk, because in these futures it is safer to move from one place to another, even to live out in the open, as happens in some of the films mentioned above. The real danger lies in stagnating, in settling into some building. For this reason many of the protagonists of this kind of fiction adopt roads and highways as their true home. In McCarthy's novel as well as in Joan Hillcoat's film adaptation, the road is the only recurring, continuous space: the characters travel along it and return to it after brief detours. Highways, routes, roads, which have always been considered spaces of transience, of anonymity, sites without memory (what Marc Augé calls “non-places”, spaces of anonymity), in these fictions are home, cosmos, road-worlds. If supermodernity and late capitalism are producers of non-places, the apocalypse reformulates the concept and reverses the equation: in this future it is houses that become non-places, spaces without memory, of transit, of anonymity.

The world is an infinite, deserted highway

The Mad Max saga is the most paradigmatic post-apocalyptic fictional universe in the history of cinema. The first film in the saga (Mad Max, 1979) is a pre-apocalyptic origin myth; that is, it narrates how and why its protagonist Max Rockatansky becomes Mad Max, but it also recounts the moments before the apocalypse, the slow fall of a society sinking into decadence and tribal violence where, despite the existence of guardians of a few laws, the road is a universe unto itself that contains all the latent violence, fertile ground for horror and murder. No one in the entire film dies in any space other than the road and its shoulders.

Starting with the saga's second installment (The Road Warrior, 1981), violence no longer has borders or limits: wherever the characters go there will be accidents and death, because the division between the highway and the rest of the landscape no longer exists — the entire planet is an infinite road, a highway-world. The characters move constantly along the road, which is at the same time their home. Anyone who tries to live in a building (in the case of The Road Warrior, for example, a makeshift refinery) will be besieged and brutalized. In the saga's second film, the idea of capitalist realism intensifies: the oil shortage leads companies to stop producing, the machines shut down and the economy grinds to a halt. "Without fuel they were nothing," says a voice-over in the introduction. The film suggests that, if the prevailing system falls, there is no option other than the end of the world as we know it: "their world crumbled, the cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men. The roads became a white line nightmare." Hobbesian war reigns, the protagonist is an individualistic, selfish antihero, only the strongest survive. The post-apocalypse is a spectacle, George Miller seems to be telling us, full of stunts, feats of violence and outlandish characters. From The Road Warrior onward, every installment features a master of ceremonies who announces war as spectacle, with the same pomp and flair as any TV host or circus ringmaster: The Toadie, who shouts the villain's virtues through a megaphone in Mad Max 2; Dr. Dealgood, who announces the fights to the death in the dome in Beyond Thunderdome (1985); the Coma-Doof Warrior, a blind, deformed guitarist who plays desert doom metal on a flamethrowing guitar to rally the troops in Fury Road (2015); Smeg, the herald who announces Dementus, leader of the biker horde, in Furiosa (2024).

George Miller's tendency to narrate capitalist realism, however, seems to start shifting toward the end of Beyond Thunderdome. At the beginning of the film we see the first attempts to rebuild civilization through a primitive capitalism: Bartertown, the trading town, the non-place of passage where products, services and people are sold, bought and exchanged, with a leader who controls everything from her panopticon-style tower, with private security, bosses and exploited workers laboring in unsanitary conditions. But there is also, on the other hand, a group of children living in community, cooperating with one another, and the ending shows us that, after the obligatory highway battle, that resurgent proto-capitalist society collapses again: Bartertown is destroyed and the future, the hope, rests on a community of children led by a young woman. That alternative, which Miller timidly sketches in Beyond Thunderdome, would finally take full shape thirty years later in Fury Road, when the war is no longer over oil but over water, and although Max remains an individualistic antihero in perpetual motion, the ending makes clear the alternative Miller proposes: a feminist and class revolution, a revolution led by a warrior who rips half the villain-monarch's head off, returns to the people in a car flying a red flag and a black one (the colors of anarcho-syndicalism) and displays the dead king before a crowd celebrating his fall, while letting people of every social class, without distinction, rise to the top of the fortress and releasing the water so that anyone can access it. The alternative to the old system, the Australian director seems to be telling us, can be communal, feminist and might even give rise to a society without social classes.

The alternative to the old system, the Australian director seems to be telling us, can be communal, feminist and might even give rise to a society without social classes.

Then Miller makes a decision that will be confirmed in the saga's next film: he chooses to tell a dystopia and abandon the story right at the moment of rupture, that is, when the utopia is about to begin; a utopia that, in any case, can only be realized in the viewer's imagination, should they so wish. This lost utopia could have been narrated in Furiosa, the (so far) latest film in the saga, but Miller chose to look to the past rather than venture into the future, and shot a prequel instead of a sequel to Fury Road. Argentine writer Roberto Chuit Roganovich, in his academic article "Notes for the study of contemporary science fiction cinema (2008-2022)," calls this move a "flight forward": faced with the impossibility of imagining and narrating a utopia, the story ends abruptly before that utopia begins. Backed by a corpus of hundreds of films, Roganovich concludes that the vast majority of contemporary dystopian science fiction cinema closes its narrative arc with the destruction of the previously prevailing order or with the victory of the revolutionary movement: acephaly (political, economic, exploitative) or the end of the crisis (environmental, military, biological). What comes after the reversal of the order is rather vague and brief:

(…) after the death of the antagonist leader, after the dismantling of the dominant repressive apparatuses, after the suspension of the one-sided rules, the films close abruptly under the sign of hope and confidence in a new world yet to be built. Thus, we find that the final state of the new science fiction narrative is an updated version of "and they lived happily ever after."

Perhaps the most productive thing we can do as cinephiles and cultural actors is not to demand that narrative art imagine and develop alternatives to a possible collapse of the prevailing system, but rather to aspire to understand why (almost) no one dares to narrate the post-revolutionary aftermath and, somehow, to try to work out whether this current paralysis of the imagination is an omen of an apocalypse yet to come, or merely the memory of a future that never arrived. A lost future.

Recommended filmography

-A Boy and His Dog (L. Q. Jones, 1975)

-Mad Max (George Miller, 1979), The Road Warrior (1981), Beyond Thunderdome (1985), Fury Road (2015), Furiosa (2024)

-Hokuto no Ken (T. Ashida, 1986)

-Hell Comes to Frogtown (D. Jackson, R. Kizer, 1988)

-Cyborg (A. Pyun, 1989)

-The Road (John Hillcoat, 2009)

-The Book of Eli (Hughes Brothers, 2010)

-The Rover (David Michôd, 2014)

-Turbo Kid (François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell, 2015)

-The Bad Batch (Ana Lily Amirpour, 2016)

-Future World (James Franco and Bruce Thierry Cheung, 2018).