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THE LAST SHIP:
After a global pandemic kills or sickens over 80% of the world's population,
the crew (consisting of 217 men and women) of a lone unaffected U.S. Navy guided missile destroyer,
the fictional USS Nathan James (DDG-151),
must try to find a cure and stop the virus in order to save humanity.
THE STRAIN:
The Strain is an American vampire horror–drama television series that premiered on FX on July 13, 2014.
It was created by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan,
based on their novel trilogy of the same name.
Del Toro and Hogan wrote the pilot episode, "Night Zero", which del Toro directed.
Both shows are well-done. And the popularity of these shows and post-Apocalyptic books and films got to me wondering
WHY?
The ghost of Carl Jung tells me the answer springs from Man's Collective Unconscious --
We know on some deeply unconscious (or maybe even conscious) level that we’re screwing things up.
We know that all our pollution and over-consumption is driving the planet to ruin.
We might not accept the science of climate change,
but we can’t ignore all the droughts, floods, super storms, forest fires, heat waves and other signs of a world spinning out of balance.
Nor can we ignore the many signs of social inequality and religious zealotry leading to civil unrest.
Teens are very conscious of this and of the gilding of the poltical speech from the world's leaders.
Teens usually have heard it all their lives from one or both parents.
Something is slowly going deeply wrong all around teens.
Like the children they once were, they have little or no power to take control of the madness they see in the nightly news.
So of course. post-apocalyptic novels where teens save the day in a world gone mad become popular.
It is wish-fulfilment and the refuting of adult denial at one and the same time.
Children in alcoholic families learn at a young age to pretend that there isn’t a problem
and act like everything is fine.
And the "easiest" way to do this is to deny your own experiences and emotions.
This takes a terrible emotional toll.
Post-apocalyptic books and films offer us a vision of the world gone wrong in a symbolic way
so that the problems that must not be mentioned in our real lives can finally be confronted ...
And the tension and angst of the pain can be sublimated in conscious form as Freud said our dreams did in our unconscious.
Teens can sense when adults and our society are being insincere. Post-apocalyptic books and films are a way of calling us out on this.
Or maybe not.
I’d love to hear other people’s thoughts on this.
If you enjoy post-apocalyptic books,
why?
What is it about them that makes them
appealing to you?
