Now is a good time to consider the new series Station Eleven. It’s based on a novel of the same name by the Obama-approved Canadian novelist Emily St. John Mandel. The book concerns a post-apocalyptic world that finds the human population reduced to something terrifyingly minuscule, around 7 million, and human entertainment reversed to Shakespeare’s olde times. Patrick Somerville and Hiro Murai developed the show for HBO Max. It stars Himesh Patel, Gael García Bernal, and, above all, Mackenzie Davis, who also starred in what many considered to be the best episode of Black Mirror, the Gen X lesbian fairy-tale “San Junipero.”
After watching its first two episodes, I had no idea where this beautifully shot series would go. There did not seem to be much of a story because, in the realm of popular entertainment, the end of the world always tells us nothing about the future after capitalism but how we confuse capitalist realism with reality. And so we find in The Book of Eli this confused idea that the thing that matters most to post-capitalist humans is the consumption of meat. It means everything. Life or death. Or, in Mad Max, a film inspired by the 1973 oil crisis, it’s gasoline. You are going nowhere in life without it. Or, as in the case with Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf, the result of capital’s collapse is a social world that makes more sense to gorillas than humans. We are the physically weak ape. We have nothing like silverbacks to anchor a family or group in nature; but in Time of the Wolves, it’s either clumping with human silverbacks or death.
