Pop culture explodes

Before I wax all philosophical, let me get this out of the way: If you understand the term “dysfunctional” as sociologists use it, see Mr. Burns, a post-electric play immediately. For the right sort of social science—or, for that matter, sci-fi—geek, it is an amazing couple of hours, top to bottom: script, acting, direction, set design, lighting, sound. All excellent. Can’t heap enough praise on it. Go. Have fun. The Guthrie did a fab job and I want to be BFFs with playwright Anne Washburn. Go, Big Blue!

I am something of a connoisseur of pop culture apocalypse stories. I own an entire library of films, documentaries and pseudo-documentaries that depict human extinction or at least skirting the edges of it. Not just zombie flicks, mind you, but creations concerned—at varying levels of quality, certainly—with how life as we know it might end.

I maintain that this is an interesting puzzle to create: How could a species as successful as ours suddenly disappear? What terrible thing could have the power to unravel the last thousand years of technological progress? What would come after us?

When artists ponder these questions, the documents they produce are frequently garbage. They are a pack of fun, pretty falsehoods. It is well known—at least among the dwindling minority of Americans who enjoy and believe in facts—how implausible most apocalypse scenarios are. The writers and directors who produce catastrophic sci-fi dreck have zero ethical or intellectual qualms about bending the realities of physics, geology and astronomy to make a nice story.

But God knows it is not scientific plausibility that draws us to these stories, but their social dimension. Apocalypse is a tantalizing a subject, especially during periods of widespread anxiety and discontent. Like the first few decades of the 21st century, say, which has produced a bumper crop of these tales.

Rich people fantasies

Therein lies the problem for most stories of social collapse and survival. The genre debases the social sciences as much as it falsifies the natural sciences. To a large degree, apocalypse movies are thought experiments undertaken by rich people about what happens when dumb, gross, regular jackoffs find themselves in stressful situations. That is, they’re deeply insulting when you think about them. (The gold standard of this, in my view, is the Tom Cruise-Steven Spielberg 2005 adaptation of War of the Worlds. I defy anyone to watch it without thinking, “Wow, these guys have no goddamn clue.”)

Uniformly in apocalypse dramas, the protagonists’ first and often only activity is to reunite with spouses and offspring. This epitomizes two myths about the human condition that rich people tell themselves to feel less terrible about being dead inside: First, that there are no barriers to success in life, not even poverty, violence, disease and hunger. And, second, that love conquers everything, even poverty, violence, disease and hunger. These are lies.

This is where Mr. Burns absolutely shines. It gets so very, very much right about both human impulses and the response to a shattering of established order.

The protagonists cannot search for—and do not find—loved ones because they are simply gone. They seem to long for material comforts more than they long for dead family and friends. New friends can be made and new families can be formed, after all, but shared experiences and common interests cannot make a Diet Coke in a glass with ice appear. Panic is never far below the surface; they know they face continual dangers but are unable to examine or alleviate them. This takes its toll and manifests in sudden outbursts that are terrifying for everyone. No one lives in denial. Everyone makes space for the others to reach reality.

These, I suspect, are truths.

This is what would happen

In biology, the best conditions for periods of rapid, explosive evolution are found in the aftermath of events which cause an abrupt mass extinction. The survivors and their descendants have many new niches to fill, niches once jealously occupied by someone else. Mammals, for example, were happy to move into the space dinosaurs left behind. The same is true for culture. If an historical record is obliterated, if an organized, structured, published, formal culture is demolished—or, as is perhaps more likely for us, irretrievably trapped within unusable machines—a new culture must take its place.

Whether that culture forms organically or if it is designed by a central totalitarian authority (Nazis, Maoists, the Taliban all destroyed historically significant objects and places in an effort to displace the traditions they represented) is immaterial. The moment a people lose their past, history no longer provides any competition to define the future. Whoever is left has a blank slate to fill.

This is the situation of the protagonists in Mr. Burns. Everything “before” has permanently vanished and nothing mitigates the loss. So we see the evolution of what comes “after” from three perspectives: A group of survivors, relatively soon after the initial cataclysm, reconstructing an old episode of The Simpsons in fits and starts, bit by bit, as an exercise in comfort. The same group, seven years into the future, as they begin to perform the episodes as a professional theater company—even bargaining for the rights to perform episodes from other troops (!)—as an exercise in distraction. And, finally, a group of performers seventy-five years into the future, who have elevated the echo of a long-lost, never-seen television relic into a moral fable told as an exercise in meaning.

The progression from Act One to Act Three is a magnificent demonstration of a truth few people care to concede: History is unavoidably a game of telephone. Messages are distorted as part of the process of transmission—but this is perhaps a vital part of the transmission. The imperfection is a sign of life. This is how Mr. Burns doesn’t simply provide insight into these people and this story. It is far too ambitious an experiment for that.

This is the most challenging aspect of Mr. Burns, then: the third act, the one that takes place seventy-five years after a catastrophe that has yet to happen. The act is entertaining, I suppose, but the only possible way it could make sense is to imagine yourself as part of the audience it was meant for. That is, you have to imagine yourself as the grandchild of a survivor of this apocalypse. So if you’re up for the task of watching a song-and-dance routine deliberately written for people who have not yet been born and who will likely never exist at all, Mr. Burns is going to rock your face off. Ka-boom.

Stray observations

1. The discussion of consumer capitalism is perhaps the most astute part of a script crawling with astuteness. Seven years after the apocalypse, when our characters form a company that performs episodes of The Simpsons, their show includes commercials. Yet the company has nothing to sell. The selling isn’t what’s important in ads, though, and they know it. So their post-apocalyptic commercials have the same cultural function as ours do: to create a desire, nurture the desire until it becomes a problem, and then exhibit how gratifying relieving that problem is. Selling is beside the point. The sequence of this in Mr. Burns—“people are ready for status again”—is a moment of absolute fucking genius. Fuck. Ing. Ge. Nius.
2. Wednesday matinees at the Guthrie may be my new favorite place to go eavesdropping. So awesome.
3. Jim Lichtscheidl’s reading of “Yessss!” to the question “Do you want a beer?” should earn him an Ivey or something. I don’t know who decides these things. Not me, certainly.
4. I’m not entirely sure that 75 years is enough time to jump from Act Two to Three, but whatever, I’ll save that complaint for, like, CONvergence or something.
5. “Go join one of the Dramas. I heard the blonde from The West Wing is sick.”
6. Actually, maybe 75 years is the right amount of time for Act Three’s contents. It was ritualized without being religious. Give it another century, I guess, for it to become a part of a society’s full-blown sacred realm.
7. I will always love how the Guthrie’s ticket-scanning machines sound like ray guns.