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jakebe
There's a scene in Six Feet Under's fourth season that's alternately thrilling and terrifying. George, Ruth's new husband, is having this dream where he's asleep and there's this bright, blinding flash outside of his window. They're woken up as the outside wall buckles in. George goes downstairs to see what's going on, and the house is devastated. Car alarms are going off, the air raid sirens are sounding far too late to warn people about what's going on, and there's a woman standing in the ruins of Ruth's kitchen. "What have you done?" he asks her. Before she can answer, Ruth's shaking him awake. You were whimpering and paddling your feet, she tells him.
The scene is terrifying to me because it lays bare one of my most basic fears, that of nuclear annihilation. It's thrilling because it does this so perfectly. It was like finding a local chapter of Apocaholics Anonymous or something. Somebody gets me, I'm thinking. I'm not alone.
I grew up in the 1980s, with Reagan and Gorbachev and their 1200 nuclear warheads pointed at each other. This was the decade that brought us Threads and The Day After, When the Wind Blows and The Fate of the Earth and War Day. All of the dystopian sci-fi had ravaged antagonists wandering a broken US, scavenging the nuclear wasteland for whatever materials were left. Looking back, it felt like we were just waking up from our naivete about this stuff in the 1950s. If there were a war, even a limited one, the world would not recover for hundreds of years. Our ideas were beaten into shape by alarmists and environmentalists and politicians. Mutually assured destruction. Enough warheads to kill every man, woman and child 12 times over. We finally had the power to crack the world in half. Nuclear annihilation was as much a part of the eighties for me as Twisted Sister, neon-colored accessories and greedy Wall Street executives.
This idea, this perverse fascination with our destruction, isn't something that you shake very easily. When I was a kid it manifested itself as a fervent belief that I would see Armageddon and a resulting devoutness to my parent's religion. Now, it manifests itself with a limitless thirst for apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction. And, occasionally, the desire to stock up on bottled water and canned food. Just in case. But now, with Ryan seeing how poor Ruth had to watch her George fall apart under the weight of an imagined holocaust right before her eyes, I think I'll never be able to express a desire for a preparedness kit again. :)
These days I tell myself that my love of post-apocalyptic (dubbed "PA" by the good folks over at the Quiet Earth website) stuff is all due to the way you can use it as an extreme setting to explore the depths of human strengths and weaknesses. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a very touching meditation on the impossible strength of love between a father and a son. Lucifer's Hammer is an interesting thought on how it's possible to structure a better, more rational civilization on the rubble of an old one. It's lovely and stirring and inspiring to read about these people who have retreated to their purest selves, whether that's depraved sickos or the leaders of a new and freer world. That's what I tell myself. Deep down I know, though, that I'm still the little kid who freaks out at the weekly air raid siren test. That, for better or for worse, that my fascination with the end of the world is a strange kind of nostalgia, a bridge I use to join the gap between today and yesterday.
I can't be alone here, with the strange nostalgia trigger, so I thought I would ask you folks this: What's the oddest thing you can think of that reminds you of your childhood? And what's your favorite apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic story? It can be a book, comic, television show or movie. I'm genuinely interested -- I could always use a new story for the next time I go on a PA bender.
The scene is terrifying to me because it lays bare one of my most basic fears, that of nuclear annihilation. It's thrilling because it does this so perfectly. It was like finding a local chapter of Apocaholics Anonymous or something. Somebody gets me, I'm thinking. I'm not alone.
I grew up in the 1980s, with Reagan and Gorbachev and their 1200 nuclear warheads pointed at each other. This was the decade that brought us Threads and The Day After, When the Wind Blows and The Fate of the Earth and War Day. All of the dystopian sci-fi had ravaged antagonists wandering a broken US, scavenging the nuclear wasteland for whatever materials were left. Looking back, it felt like we were just waking up from our naivete about this stuff in the 1950s. If there were a war, even a limited one, the world would not recover for hundreds of years. Our ideas were beaten into shape by alarmists and environmentalists and politicians. Mutually assured destruction. Enough warheads to kill every man, woman and child 12 times over. We finally had the power to crack the world in half. Nuclear annihilation was as much a part of the eighties for me as Twisted Sister, neon-colored accessories and greedy Wall Street executives.
This idea, this perverse fascination with our destruction, isn't something that you shake very easily. When I was a kid it manifested itself as a fervent belief that I would see Armageddon and a resulting devoutness to my parent's religion. Now, it manifests itself with a limitless thirst for apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction. And, occasionally, the desire to stock up on bottled water and canned food. Just in case. But now, with Ryan seeing how poor Ruth had to watch her George fall apart under the weight of an imagined holocaust right before her eyes, I think I'll never be able to express a desire for a preparedness kit again. :)
These days I tell myself that my love of post-apocalyptic (dubbed "PA" by the good folks over at the Quiet Earth website) stuff is all due to the way you can use it as an extreme setting to explore the depths of human strengths and weaknesses. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a very touching meditation on the impossible strength of love between a father and a son. Lucifer's Hammer is an interesting thought on how it's possible to structure a better, more rational civilization on the rubble of an old one. It's lovely and stirring and inspiring to read about these people who have retreated to their purest selves, whether that's depraved sickos or the leaders of a new and freer world. That's what I tell myself. Deep down I know, though, that I'm still the little kid who freaks out at the weekly air raid siren test. That, for better or for worse, that my fascination with the end of the world is a strange kind of nostalgia, a bridge I use to join the gap between today and yesterday.
I can't be alone here, with the strange nostalgia trigger, so I thought I would ask you folks this: What's the oddest thing you can think of that reminds you of your childhood? And what's your favorite apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic story? It can be a book, comic, television show or movie. I'm genuinely interested -- I could always use a new story for the next time I go on a PA bender.
