Going Medieval Representations of Post-Nuclear Survival in Threads and The Tripods on the BBC (1984) 1 Steffen Hantke Cold War fears about nuclear war were not homogeneously focused on the military engagement that would end in physical annihilation but also included a wide variety of post-apocalyptic scenarios. What happened to the individual, physically and psychologically, and to society as a whole after nuclear war had ended were subjects of intense speculation and anxiety. Although the idea of surviving nuclear war was in itself a gesture of optimism, speculative exploration of the post-nuclear world tended to be predominantly dystopian. The entire subgenre of post-apocalyptic fiction, film, and television abounds with visions of scarcity, the dissolution of social coherence, the imposition of repressive political regimes, the collective abandoning of rationality and science in favor of superstition and magic, and the end of history per se - all of these persistently recurring themes cast as a return of 20 th century technological civilization to the Middle Ages. This nexus of themes comes into focus on British television in 1984, when the BBC broadcast both an adaptation of John Christopher’s trilogy The Tripods in the form of a miniseries, and a mockumentary entitled Threads, directed by Mick Jackson. Both programs conceptualize and visualize post-nuclear survival in terms of medieval imagery, especially in the visual iconographies they mobilize. Read alongside each other, both programs mark divergent positions within the political debate on the Cold War. The Tripods challenges the dystopian nightmare in Threads of a regression to the Middle Ages to the degree that its explicit diegetic content diverges from medieval iconography, subtly transforming the nightmare of historical regression. 1 Work on this essay was supported by a Sogang University Research Grant in 2011. I would also like to express my gratitude to the organizers of “Alien Nation: A Conference on British Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Television” at Northumbria University in July 2011, which provided the opportunity to present and discuss a shorter version of this essay. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 38 (2013) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Steffen Hantke 4 1. Post-Nuclear Survival: The Interpretive Paradigm Within the larger framework of Cold War discourse, fictional representations of nuclear war and survival in its aftermath function within relatively narrow interpretive parameters. “Some works,” as M. Keith Booker (2001: 65) argues, “can be taken as cautionary tales and seem genuinely designed as attempted interventions in contemporary debates concerning the Cold War arms race.” Driven by a clear political and ideological agenda, these texts - Booker cites John Hersey’s book Hiroshima (1946) as an example - draw on a dystopian tradition in which the aftermath of nuclear war is imagined as a nightmarish scenario in which the survivors have reason to envy the dead. Complementary to this tradition, Booker (2001: 65) points to texts which often operate in “a satirical vein” and “[use] their depictions of post-holocaust worlds as devices of cognitive estrangement that add critical force to the author’s commentary on the ills of his or her own contemporary society,” among which “routinization” and “alienation” stand out as the very curse of modernity swept away by a nuclear war that creates the opportunity to start over and get it right this time. Referring to George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949) as an example of this second tradition - a novel with “an upbeat tone that makes the holocaust itself sometimes seem almost like a positive, quasi- Darwinian development” - Booker (2001: 67) makes it clear that there is an odd utopianism to these narratives, a sense that survivors are better off without the clutter and mess of modernity. 2 As accurate and useful as these distinctions between utopian and dystopian traditions within post-nuclear disaster narratives are - I myself will draw on these distinctions in my own analysis - what is striking about them is how literal their approach is to the representation of nuclear war itself. Underneath the interpretive framework is the tacit assumption that, as much as diegetic elements may serve as vehicles of ‘cognitive estrangement’, when these texts are talking about nuclear war, they really are talking about nuclear war. This assumption is perhaps more compelling in the dystopian cautionary tales, in which the taste and feel of the aftermath is ideologically and argumentatively wedded to the direct outcome of nuclear war itself, than in the utopian tradition that posits nucle- 2 This dichotomy controlling post-nuclear survival narrative aligns itself especially well with a broader view of the historical period to which both texts examined in this essay return in their conceptualization of a post-nuclear world - the Middle Ages. Even though the Middle Ages “became, almost from the very moment the Renaissance recognized they were past, synonymous with the barbaric, the violent, and the superstitious - ‘modernity’s common, rejected […] past,’ antithetical to the values of rational, humane, and democratic discourse” (Aronstein 2005: 11), they also inspired “two dominant [and complementary] views: the progressive vision of history, in which the Middle Ages figure as barbaric, and the nostalgic vision, in which the medieval past represents Utopia” (Aronstein 2005: 12). Going Medieval 5 ar war ‘merely’ as a radical historical caesura, a hyperbolic rhetorical gesture necessary to present the severing of historical continuity as a blessing (which, conversely, appears to be a curse in the dystopian tradition). If I have placed inverted commas around the word ‘merely’ in the previous sentence, it is to suggest that, as a device for ‘cognitive estrangement’, nuclear war would appear as too gravely serious to provide the metaphor enabling the representation and discussion of other issues closer to any given text’s heart; its literal reality should be serious enough to prevent its transformation into a rhetorical device. And yet, this is precisely its function, even in texts belonging to the dystopian tradition. To the extent that nuclear war figures as a multivalent metaphor, postnuclear narratives are merely a subcategory of post-apocalyptic discourse, in which all disasters are functionally alike: viral epidemics (Stephen King’s The Stand [1978]), uncontrollable plunges into alternative universes (Geoff Murphy’s film The Quiet Earth [1985]), alien invasion (H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds [1898]), climate change (Kevin Reynold’s Waterworld [1995]), Malthusian population explosions and famine (Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green [1973]), the zombie wars (Max Brooks’ World War Z [2006]), or simply unexplained catastrophic events that ring in the end of the world as we know it. Taken to its furthest extent, this means that, especially within the confines of the Cold War, any fictional catastrophe enabling the construction of a post-catastrophic world always represents nuclear war, and yet no such fictional catastrophic event is ever fully or exclusively a representation of nuclear war alone. Moreover, every post-nuclear survival decides, deliberately or simply by default, to which historical period post-apocalyptic humanity is going to ratchet back. Whether we bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age (Luc Besson’s The Last Battle [1983]), the 19 th century American Frontier (Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow [1955]), or the period with which this essay will be primarily concerned, the Middle Ages (Robert Altman’s Quintet [1979], Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz [1960], or Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker [1980]), the narrative always mobilizes a specific iconography of historical periodization. 3 The tool of cognitive estrangement, as Keith Booker puts it, is ultimately an eclectic historical 3 Choices within these scenarios are determined, among other things, by cultural predispositions. As Susan Aronstein (2005: 18f.) points out, “medievalism in general […] seems incompatible with the American myth and spirit. Not only does America have no medieval past, but also it sees itself as a forward-looking nation, committed to technology and progress; in addition, it is the very remnants of the medieval past, with its hierarchical social structures, that the early Americans saw themselves as having fled upon leaving Europe.” John Christopher agrees: “unfortunately the USA doesn’t have a past in the European sense. There’s no mediaeval background to relate to: transferring the Tripods across the Atlantic would be like setting Robin Hood in New England” (Brockhurst 2009a). Steffen Hantke 6 (and, to the extent that it is always in quotation marks, bracketed, or cited, and thus inevitably draws attention to itself, meta-historical) narrative that poses an uncanny historical other. In its contemplation, we confront neither the historical past, nor the extrapolated future, but an aesthetically and ideologically hyperbolic version of the present. Following exactly this idea of the assimilation of other contemporary concerns into the post-nuclear survival narrative, I would like to pinpoint such a present moment - in this case the year 1984 - by considering an issue articulated through, and existing independently of, the nuclear catastrophe and its aftermath depicted in two texts: Mick Jackson’s madefor-TV movie about a nuclear attack on Sheffield and its aftermath, Threads, and the miniseries based on a trilogy of novels by John Christopher about post-invasion Britain under alien rule, The Tripods. Beyond their common theme of post-nuclear survival, The Tripods and Threads appeal to different audiences (Threads is decidedly adult in its grimness, The Tripods is for an audience of teenagers and young adults), deploy different aesthetics (Threads is a mockumentary, The Tripods an adventure narrative), and progress at different speed (Threads is a tightly constructed 110 minutes feature film, The Tripods unfolds over two meandering, digressive seasons, with a total of 25 half-hour episodes). I hope that from these considerable differences, the sense of topical urgency both programs share with each other will emerge all the more clearly as the overriding issue of their day. Since both texts were made for and broadcast by the BBC in 1984, and since this urgent underlying issue shared by both Threads and The Tripods is economic austerity, the historical reference point of Thatcherism is unavoidable. 4 Less obvious, however, is the ideological interplay that emerges from both texts’ dialogue with each other, a dialogue which, on the one hand, illustrates the difficulty of mainstream entertainment to position itself in relationship to Thatcherite economic and social policies, and, on the other hand, complicates the dichotomy of dystopian and utopian traditions that constrains the critical discourse on post-nuclear survival narratives. 2. Onward to the Past: Britain in the New Dark Ages The Tripods imagines an England in 2089 AD that has been under the rule of alien invaders for longer than any of its inhabitants can remember. The original invasion was a cataclysmic event that, in effect, ended history. 4 The Tripods began airing on September 15, 1984, and concluded on November 16, 1985 (without having completed the narrative arc prescribed by its literary source material, John Christopher’s trilogy The White Mountains [1967], The City of Gold and Lead [1968], and The Pool of Fire [1968]), while Threads aired originally on September 23, 1984. Going Medieval 7 Though nuclear war is not explicitly a theme, the fact that the invasion has receded in collective memory frames it as an event with similar longterm effects. 5 Clearly, the invasion is a singular trauma; the fact that “an entire technologically advanced civilization […] has since been replaced by a reactionary feudal one” (Walsh 2003: 237) is something that figures as the central ontological and cosmological enigma of the fictional universe, which, as it escapes all attempts at describing, understanding, and coping with it, organizes the entire fictional universe around itself. Nobody in the series remembers the invasion clearly, no authoritative sources seem to exist, and yet all conversations inevitably return to it. As long-term effects of the invasion, the erasure of historical awareness and mental control are far more striking features of domination than the actual presence of the aliens themselves. Incompatible with Earth’s atmosphere, they remain encased in Wellsian war machines bestriding the landscape, or secluded within a handful of giant domed cities accessible only to them and an army of human slaves destined to end their lives in service. Most importantly, the invaders have ensured human collaboration by means of a device, the so-called cap, which, grafted onto the skull in a universal and compulsory coming-of-age ceremony conducted by the aliens with some help from the candidate’s family, robs every sixteenyear old of individuality, adventurousness, and rebelliousness. Capping, as this rite of passage is called, recapitulates on a personal level the collective global disaster of alien invasion. In its aftermath, young adults are possessed by the same docility and complacency that renders all human progress literally un-‘think’-able. 6 In strange contradiction to what may sound like a grim Orwellian nightmare, the BBC miniseries visualizes England in 2089 AD like a Breughel painting: a medieval pastoral of fields and woods, dotted with small villages and, every once in a while, a mid-size town devoted to trade or shipping; ox-carts and horse-drawn carriages, and wateror windpowered mills. As in the rest of Europe, across which the main characters 5 As a contextual consideration, it is interesting to note that Christopher, beyond the scope of the Tripods trilogy, rehearsed post-apocalyptic survival narrative in a series of novels for adults, most notably with The Death of Grass [1956], The World in Winter [1962], and A Wrinkle in the Skin [1965], placing him in the tradition of writers indulging in scenarios of ‘cosy catastrophe’, a term coined somewhat dismissively by Brian Aldiss in The Billion Year Spree (1973) in reference, specifically, to John Wyndham. Despite the dismissal of ‘cosy catastrophe’, Aldiss nonetheless acknowledges Christopher as an important British science fiction writer (Brockhurst 2009b). 6 Examining the etymological implications of the word ‘cap’, Clare Walsh (2003: 238) also discovers one that relates directly to the economic concept of austerity by way of imposed limitations: “It is a contraption which nonetheless renders the mind of the wearer ‘soft’, and malleable to the wishes of the Masters. This links it to another one of its senses as ‘setting a limit on expenditure’, in this case the limit being imposed on the expenditure of independent thought.” Steffen Hantke 8 will eventually travel as they search for organized resistance to alien occupation, society has settled down into a stable feudal order. The occasional anachronism - a clock, a steam-powered ship’s engine, or even the ruins of a destroyed metropolis like Paris - serves as a reminder that this is not literally the Middle Ages but a historically idiosyncratic and eclectic fictional space marking the decline of industrial modernity as a result of a catastrophic historical caesura. Threads, at first glance, could not be more different. Instead of John Christopher’s adventure story for young adults, Mick Jackson’s gritty mockumentary tells the story of a nuclear attack against the British Midlands. Unlike the more panoramic, distanced, and thus more properly ‘documentary’ approach to character and plot in Peter Watkins’ The War Game (1965), from which Jackson nonetheless takes his aesthetic and formal cues, Threads goes the way of The Tripods and narrativizes postnuclear survival by providing individualized protagonists, a young couple, Ruth and Jimmy, and their daughter Jane, born after the attack. 7 The film then traces Jane’s biography until, thirteen years after the attack, she gives birth to a stillborn infant daughter, which is where, abruptly, the film ends. Long before that, we witness the collapse of the social order, the introduction of repressive political measures, the loss of historical memory, literacy, and national identity. It is in the later phase of this historical trajectory that post-nuclear Britain begins to take on medieval features. If Breughel comes to mind again, it is not the rural utopianism of the “Wheat Harvest” (1568) or the “Peasant Wedding” (1565) paintings, but the apocalyptic chaos of “The Triumph of Death” (1562). The scene evoked by the painting begins with an intertitle that announces that the “darkness and cold” of nuclear winter weeks after the blast “reduces plant activity to very low levels.” Jackson illustrates the collection of this “diminished first harvest” with little available technology and under severe climatic conditions in a sequence that opens with a horizon shot, lining up the silhouettes of anonymous human shapes bent over against the wind, shuffling listlessly back and forth around a single primitive tractor. The sequence remains drained of all color, dialed down to muted grays and blues, when the film cuts from the long shot to a series of medium close-ups showing either the same figures in their tattered, dirty clothing moving forward with their eyes cast down, or point-of-view shots of the drab, wilted shrubs they are collecting from the muddy, ashen ground. Aside from the sound of the wind, we hear the panting and wheezing of individual figures, underlining the imagery of bloodencrusted mouths and mottled complexions as one character drops lifelessly to the ground from exhaustion and radiation poisoning. 7 A more direct influence may have been Nicholas Meyer’s The Day After (1983), produced for U.S. television, since The War Game, despite its notoriety, had been rendered virtually invisible by British censorship. Going Medieval 9 In reference to Booker’s earlier distinction between the utopian and dystopian traditions within post-nuclear survival narrative, it is clear that Threads and The Tripods represent diametrically opposed versions of the Middle Ages - the noble, bucolic Middle Ages of Arthurian legend on the one hand; the grotesque Rabelaisian Middle Ages, courtesy of Mikhail Bakhtin, on the other. Despite their differences, both operate alongside each other within the same cultural and historical paradigm: opposite connotations, same iconographic reservoir. And yet, what makes the comparison of these two versions so interesting is that their relationship is not exactly symmetrical. That is to say, Threads is obviously working from a dystopian tradition that sees the Middle Ages as a “dark age” in which human lives are, to paraphrase John Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Leviathan, Chapter 13). Meanwhile, The Tripods envisions a medieval Britain of pastoral tranquility, with Nature largely intact and a functioning social order. Nonetheless, upon closer inspection, this latter vision is not exactly utopian either, which would make it the polar opposite of the dystopian hellscape in Threads. To see it as utopian, one would have to ignore alien panoptic surveillance, both on the level of British, or even global geography, and on that of the individual body. In trying to make sense of this notable departure from Booker’s neat utopian/ dystopian model, I would like to follow the observation that both texts propose opposite readings of human agency preand post-catastrophe. Like all adventure narratives, The Tripods rewrites geographic and social spaces to create opportunities for the enactment of a personal and political agency which, within industrial modernity, has been largely curtailed. 8 This is the same agency which Threads, in its own rewriting of the landscape and social relationships, increasingly denies its characters, not as a result of surveillance and repression but of hardship and scarcity. While agency in The Tripods is a matter of stepping outside the social order - i.e. evading the capping ritual and retreating to liminal or interstitial spaces (on the road, in the woods, in the mountains) - agency in Threads is an option rendered altogether unavailable by external conditions that leave no room for such individual choice. In other words, while The Tripods imagines agency as a product or condition of politics, Threads imagines it as a product or condition of economics. Hence, The Tripods is a political dystopia, while Threads is an economic one. And yet economics plays a central role in both texts. Threads imagines the regression to medieval conditions as a dramatic decline in the individual’s quality of life. Twentieth century industrial capitalism disintegrates almost instantly as a result of the nuclear attack, and immediate practical demands dictate that the production of food become an absolute 8 The concept I have in mind here is what Timothy Melley (2001) has called “agency panic,” against which 20 th century adventure narratives posit a fully empowered subject. For more detail, see Melley 2001. Steffen Hantke 10 priority. Exacerbated by external conditions - from climate change to loss of advanced agricultural technology like fertilizers and machinery - the film imagines agrarian society operating at the edge of subsistence. Economic scarcity is a universal condition for as long as a tenuous social stability can be achieved. Beyond that, the film chronicles a steady decline, an entropic winding down, toward complete human extinction; not by coincidence does the film end with a stillborn infant. The Tripods, meanwhile, visualizes a medieval Europe capable of maintaining an agrarian society which, albeit primitive by contemporary standards, operates reliably and produces sufficient food to sustain its numerically thinned-out but stable population. The process presupposes a historical period immediately succeeding the invasion which probably resembled post-attack conditions in Threads, but that period has long passed. The first novel in Christopher’s trilogy, The While Mountains, makes it clear that economics and politics are inseparable, explicitly affirming the political credo that “in the end we shall destroy the Tripods,” but, more importantly, “free men will enjoy the goodness of the earth” (214, italics added) - a concept radically alien to the post-apocalyptic scenario in Threads where the ‘goodness of the earth’ has been permanently despoiled. 9 To illustrate ‘the goodness of the earth’, the makers of the BBC miniseries provide frequent scenes of communal feasts and festivals, each of which comes with images of agricultural abundance. One critic, Lincoln Geraghty (2011: 112), compares the depictions of “the details of the English landscape seen in The Tripods” with “the rural poor and countryside [as painted] by such artists as George Morland,” who did not paint “an idealized version of rural life, like most of his contemporaries, but instead pictured life as hard and unsentimental.” However, I would disagree with Geraghty on this point. The geographical space mapped out in scenes that take place in British villages and towns, and scenes taking place during the travels of the characters from Britain to the Swiss Alps, may be a dystopian nightmare of surveillance and repression due to the omnipresent “threat of capping or arrest for noncompliance” (Geraghty 2011: 112). However, “the village scenes,” - unlike “life on the open road” - are hardly “unforgiving” (Geraghty 2011: 112). In fact, Europe under alien domination may have relapsed to medieval conditions, but it is a medieval Europe of agricultural plenitude, except for those who place themselves outside the social order by, for example, going on “the open 9 In the final instance, The Tripods is not altogether free of environmental anxieties, but the miniseries, following the novels, projects environmental disaster both onto the domed cities, where the aliens have created environmental enclosures containing their own poisonous atmosphere, and onto a none-too-distant yet indeterminate future in which the aliens will begin transforming Earth’s atmosphere to suit their own biological needs. In effect, this narrative projection brackets the environmental aspects of post-nuclear survival that plays such a central role in Threads. Going Medieval 11 road.” 10 In fact, The White Mountains revels in “the smell of roast beef mixing with the smells of beer and cider and lemonade, and all kinds of cakes and puddings” (17), reminding us that “the midday meal on a Saturday was always lavish” (10, italics added). The only exceptions from such abundance come when characters step outside the bounds of organized society, i.e. when they avoid capping and join the resistance movement, (a less crucial scenario is when the capping procedure does not ‘take’ properly), which is where Geraghty is exactly right. Outsider status, throughout the series, is associated with immediate physical discomfort, deprivation, and, most importantly, with hunger. Scarcity only enters the picture by way of a marginalized existence, which, in turn, means going hungry or scavenging for food. Translating the Tripods’ economic imagination back into the register of its political dystopia, we can see that it is, in fact, this abundance that poses the fundamental problem to humanity under alien domination. It is not the hardship and scarcity that alien domination is imposing upon humanity against which human resistance is forming - because there is no such hardship. It is against the state of mindless complacency produced by capping by which rebellion defines itself (to which the miniseries adds a police apparatus of human collaborators that, in its complexity and dimensions, is missing from the novels). Comfort is the enemy, choosing hardship is inherently ennobling. The makers of the BBC series understand that, if the threat to the protagonists is to be essentially an internal one - that, in other words, the alien threat is one of both domination and seduction - there must be the promise of economic security and stability that serves as the carrot to which capping and arrest are the complementary stick. This, of course, makes perfect sense considering the fact that Christopher’s original novels function within the genre of adventure - a form of cultural discourse that posits exactly that which bourgeois society tries to contain or even erase: unpredictability, physical exertion, danger, and risk. In this regard, The Tripods promises, like all adventure stories, either an escape to its audience from the strictures and monotony of bourgeois life, or a critique of bourgeois life as too safe, too smug, too contained, all the while encouraging and confirming ‘adventure’ as the aggressive expansionist spirit required by competitive capitalism inextricably intertwined with European imperialism. 10 The reason for this disagreement may stem from the fact that Geraghty (2011: 112) describes The Tripods “as a retrovision - not of the industrial Britain of the nineteenth and twentieth century but of the more pastoral eighteenth century when the English countryside was the living and breathing heart of the British economy,”, identifying pieces of technology like a watch or a steam-engine not as signifiers of deliberate ahistoricity but as germane to pinpointing the post-nuclear period. Steffen Hantke 12 Considering that Christopher’s trilogy, as well as the BBC miniseries, were specifically aimed at a young adult audience, this anti-bourgeois dynamic also functions more specifically as a generational theme. The metaphor of the cap forced upon all 16-year olds to turn them into carbon copies of their conformist parents is hardly a subtle one - an objective correlative, if you will, of Althusserian interpellation. It marks the estrangement of teenagers from each other on opposite sides of the divide of puberty, and, more dramatically, the absolute difference between adults and children, with all positive validation on the children’s side. Clearly, teenage rebellion against adult complacency and conformity has lost none of its urgency from Christopher’s late 1960s novels to the 1984 miniseries. 11 In contrast to the novels, however, the BBC miniseries foregrounds an anxiety that is not so much generational in nature as it is, at its root, economic. The miniseries is rife with the anxiety that rebellion against the social order means cutting yourself off from the economic abundance produced by that social order. The ethos of 1960s generational rebellion might consider it a matter of idealistic sacrifice to trade in the alienating comforts of the parents’ generation for higher, more ‘authentic’ spiritual ideals. But then, removed from the memories of post-war austerity measures by more than one generation, the BBC miniseries accepts British affluence by the early 1980s as a stable, permanent condition. There is little, if anything, in the series that suggests a questioning of the sources of this abundance. The fact that human labor should profit the alien oppressors more than humanity itself is clearly objectionable, but then nobody in the entire series ever seems to perform such labor under intolerable dystopian conditions. We see people work, just as we hear our characters fantasize about the labor-saving technologies of their lost forefather’s civilization, but except for the slave labor performed by humans inside the alien city in the second season of the series, labor itself appears to be neither exploitive nor destructive to the individual, the collective, or even the environment. The sacrifice to one’s comfort as a result of joining the political underground is thus uncoupled yet again from external conditions and relegated more strongly to the realm of abstract ideals. In fact, it seems as if The Tripods has difficulties imagining a world in which material conditions are anything but tolerable. The idyllic pastoral landscapes that dominate the series are the visual equivalent of this attitude. Threads, meanwhile, returns its audience to a much harsher emotional landscape evoking for it audience, which is comprised of a different generational cohort than the young adults expected to follow The Tripods, memories of the immediate post-war years. Not only is the visual and narrative immediacy of the nuclear attack on Sheffield a vivid reminder 11 For a full discussion of how generational experience shapes audience response in Threads, see Karen Anijar 2004. Going Medieval 13 of the blitz, as are the images of tattered survivors sifting through the rubble. The medieval economy establishing itself a decade after the attack might serve as a short-hand for the economic scarcity of the post-war years - what historian Tony Judt (2010: 162), among others, has called “the age of austerity.” 12 Focusing on main characters whose working-class background already places them in a rather precarious position regarding post-war British affluence, Jackson’s film illustrates a dramatic, though perhaps subliminal, insecurity when it comes to accepting this new affluence as a permanent condition. In the blink of an eye - the film suggests - we could all be back to the bad old days! 3. “There’s no such thing as society”: Responding to Creative Destruction My earlier reference to the release date of both Threads and The Tripods by the BBC as ‘Orwellian’ may have been misleading in the sense that it suggests an underlying theme of political repression common to both programs. Though this is not the case in Threads, where, ultimately, the catastrophic historical caesura produces not too much social coherence, or too much government, but too little, repression does play a role in The Tripods. Conversely, another Orwellian theme - the entropic state of persistent economic scarcity - does appear in Threads but not in The Tripods. Here it is again, that strange thematic asymmetry, as if both texts are trying to work through a problem which is all the more puzzling not because opposing critical approaches remain grounded in political partisanship, but because the problem itself is inherently oxymoronic. One and the same historical situation generates a response that insists, simultaneously, that there is both too much and too little social coherence, both economic abundance and economic scarcity. Without delving into the deep implications of economic theory, one might be able to find a thematically analogous oxymoron in the term which, coined by “Iain MacLeod, [a] British Tory MP, [and used] in a speech to Parliament in 1965,” haunts the debate about the economic slump Britain was undergoing during the late 1960s and 1970s - ‘stagflation’ (for a full discussion see MIA: Encyclopedia of Marxism n.d.). The neologism, suggesting a grim combination of the worst of two economic 12 Judt (2010: 163) points out that, beyond the more abstract expressions of economic depression, it was particularly the rationing of food, “never imposed during the war” yet “introduced in 1946 and not abandoned until July 1948 […], long after the rest of Western Europe,” which was to become the central emblematic aspect of future representations and artistic evocations of the period. Not surprisingly, much of the economic argument in Threads and The Tripods is articulated in exactly this register, argumentatively simplified and politically reductionist, yet charged with enormous historical significance. Steffen Hantke 14 worlds - i.e. high unemployment and rising prices, instead of one or the other - marks a shift away from the principles of the welfare state that had guided British post-war reconstruction, and toward neoliberal reforms that were to be implemented, with a vengeance, with the election in May of 1979 of Margaret Thatcher. Given how strongly both Threads and The Tripods are concerned with economics as a theme that runs through their historical, social, and visual imagination, we can align the narrative logic of both texts - i.e. the catastrophe followed by a radically altered/ historically regressed social and economic environment - with their immediate historical context. But working out this historical context is not as easy as it looks. What exactly constitutes the “catastrophic event” in Threads and The Tripods: was it, to quote David Harvey (2005: 57), the “serious crisis of capital accumulation” dragging down the British economy during the 1970s to which Thatcher’s neoliberal measures were to be the remedy? Or was it exactly those draconian neoliberal measures with which the Thatcher government responded to this crisis in the 1980s (Harvey [2005: 71] himself uses the term “shock therapy” as a side of effect of neoliberalization, anticipating rhetoric popularized by Naomi Klein in response to the same phenomena two decades later)? 13 Was Thatcher regressing Britain back - past the years of the postwar welfare state - to a neo-feudal society aggressively “attacking all forms of social solidarity that hindered competitive flexibility” (Harvey 2005: 23), a threat encapsulated in Thatcher’s much quoted dictum that there is “no such thing as society,” turning Britain from a Gemeinschaft into a Gesellschaft that was difficult to disagree with considering the economic abundance it so demonstrably produced? Or was it the bleak 1970s that constituted the regression, a bleak landscape of scarcity that required a decisive authoritarian intervention if slow decline toward ultimate extinction was to be halted and reversed? 14 13 One of the critics writing about The Tripods points out that the BBC itself was the target of austerity measures, insinuating that perhaps some of the series’ underlying anxiety about who was to participate in recent affluence and at what political price could have been a concern for the makers of the series. See Geraghty 2011: 105-107. 14 Judging by the standards of the immediate post-war years, 1970s stagflation may not have looked or felt like austerity. And yet the imperative of economic growth driving the discourse of stagflation may have caused a sense of uneasiness with what, on the level of felt affluence, could have been experienced as relative comfort and stability (the economic equivalent of a moral of social panic, raising the question of who exactly was driving, and profiting from, the rhetoric of crisis at the time). Hence, we see that same sense of unease about relative economic stability in The Tripods: stability without the growth imperative is the economic equivalent of personal contentment without full individual autonomy, of happiness without ambition. Economic unease switches registers and is, instead, expressed as a political issue (i.e. personal agency). Going Medieval 15 This ambiguity, which accounts not only for politically divergent readings of the Thatcher years but also for disagreement within the camps of her supporters and her detractors, respectively, is in itself significant enough to be factored into a reading of popular entertainment from the mid-1980s. Harvey (2005: 23), in his discussion of Thatcher’s neoliberal policies, has pointed out that, despite their controversial reception, her measures changed Britain “in ways that were in no way comprehensive and complete, let alone free of political cost”; and if Thatcherism’s incomplete, inconclusive effects were not enough, Harvey (2005: 3) reminds us, yet again somewhat oxymoronically, that the “process of neoliberalization [in general has always] entailed much ‘creative destruction’.” Just as the economic, social, and political changes from the 1970s to the 1980s remain difficult to assess, so the cultural responses to those changes in texts like Threads and The Tripods vacillate between clear-cut positions. Television series are, after all, not political pamphlets, and even if they were politically partisan, would have had a hard time resolving all troubling complexities of 1970s stagflation and 1980s neoliberalization. What they do provide, however, is a critical reflection on the larger paradigm within which a wide variety of possible responses are constrained. In this case, that narrative paradigm is defined by a discourse of catastrophic rupture followed by historical regression and, most of all, intense anxieties about sustained economic austerity and the permanence and the political price of economic recovery and efficiency. 4. Permanent Austerity or Crisis: The Afterlife of Post-Nuclear Survival Narratives Even though the end of the Cold War has relegated the actual threat of nuclear war and its aftermath to the fringes of popular consciousness - where it persists primarily as the specter of atomic weapons falling into the hand of terrorists, and, less urgently, as the faint awareness that little of the nuclear arsenal of the U.S. and the former Soviet Union has actually been taken off its rusty hair-triggers - the post-nuclear survival narrative has continued to thrive. From highbrow fiction (Cormac McCarthy’s The Road [2006], Colson Whitehead’s Zone One [2011]) to popular television (Jericho [CBS 2006-08], The Walking Dead [AMC 2010-]), its essential metaphoric conceit has proven sufficiently flexible to accommodate a variety of topical anxieties, proving my earlier point that no such fictional catastrophe is never fully or exclusively a representation of nuclear war alone. If one were to go in search of historical experiences beyond the pale of the Cold War alarming enough to sustain the surprising survival, or even revival, of this narrative, one might be well advised to remember the economic subtext in Threads and The Tripods, which suggests that, to one Steffen Hantke 16 degree or another, all post-apocalyptic survival narratives are about the experience - as memory or as projected anxiety of things to come - of economic austerity. As global capitalism moves its current downturn in the cycle of boom and bust around the planet, a process that began with the U.S. banking crisis in the fall of 2008 and, at the time of writing, is manifesting itself in a variety of European economies (with no immediate end in sight), the dominant accompanying rhetoric - which is that of a unique, unexpected, and unprecedented crisis - serves to obscure the predictably recurring nature of not so singular a ‘crisis’. With the imposition of austerity measures upon large segments of the affected national populations, coupled with an awareness that ‘austerity’ in industrialized nations looks different from one social class to another (not to mention when compared to that in what used to be called the ‘Third World’), postnuclear survival narratives may have become a major form of expressing a sustained historical experience of economic austerity rather than the short, sharp shock of a ‘crisis’. With their emphasis on the interminable ‘post-crisis’ period, they are perfectly poised to capture a sense that economic austerity may be a permanent fixture of what touts itself as the best economic system ever devised. In a May 21, 2011 article in Variety, Kathy Dunkley reports that “Australian-born director Gregor Jordan has signed on to rewrite and direct the adaptation of John Christopher's ‘The Tripods Trilogy’ for Walt Disney's Touchstone Pictures label.” Given that recent political discourse in the U.S. has revolved around Republican demands for austerity measures, especially from the so-called Tea Party on its extreme right wing, Disney’s adaptation comes across as well attuned to the urgent matters of the time. For those who remember its lineage, from Christopher’s novels to the BBC miniseries, as well as that series’ original historical context, the Disney release might even serve as a reminder that economic busts - like Hollywood remakes - are not unique crises but predictably and inevitably recurring periods in capitalism’s cyclical development. Whatever the political tenor of Disney’s adaptation might turn out to be, however - that is, if the project does not itself become a casualty of austerity measures within the film industry and ends up cancelled - it is important to remember that in order to grasp the complexities of 1970s British stagflation and Tory economic policy in the 1980s, The Tripods required the complementary representational labour performed by Threads, and vice versa. Unable to capture the economic historical experience in its entirety, each text considered in isolation from the other must appear either lopsided or internally inconsistent. Considering the sustained viability of the post-nuclear survival narrative, and Hollwood’s penchant for remakes, however, there is reason to hope that Disney’s version of The Tripods, just as its 1985 BBC precursor, will be in good textual company when it finally arrives. Going Medieval 17 References Anijar, Karen (2004). “The World Connected on a Tenuous String: Looking at the Movie Threads.” Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy 1/ 2. 125-149. Aronstein, Susan (2005). Hollywood Knights: Arthurian Cinema and the Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Palgrave/ Macmillan. Booker, Keith M. (2001). Monsters, Mushroom Clouds, and the Cold War: American Science Fiction and the Roots of Postmodernism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Brockhurst, Colin (2009a). “Interview with Tripods author Sam Youd (aka John Christopher).” April 10, 2009. [Online] http: / / www.colinbrockhurst.co.uk/ interview-with-tripods-author-sam-youd-aka-john-christopher/ 380 (May 2013). Brockhurst, Colin (2009b). “The shattered worlds of John Christopher.” April 11, 2009. [Online] http: / / www.colinbrockhurst.co.uk/ the-shattered-worlds-ofjohn-christopher/ 422/ (May 2013). Dunkley, Cathy (2005). “Jordan to control ‘Tripods Trilogy’.” Variety. January 4, 2005. [Online] http: / / variety.com/ 2005/ film/ news/ jordan-to-control-tripodstrilogy-1117915772/ (May 2013) Geraghty, Lincoln (2011). “Visions of an English Dystopia: History, Technology and the Rural Landscape in The Tripods.” In: Tobias Hochscherf/ James Leggott (eds.). British Science Fiction Film and Television: Critical Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. 104-17. Harvey, David (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: OUP. Judt, Tony (2010). Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. London: Vintage. Melley, Timothy (2001). “Agency Panic and the Culture of Conspiracy.” In: Peter Knight (ed.). Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Post-war America. New York & London: New York University Press. 57-81. MIA: Encyclopedia of Marxism. Glossary of Terms (n.d.). “Stagflation.” [Online] http: / / www.marxists.org/ glossary/ terms/ s/ t.htm (May 2013). Walsh, Clare (2003). “From 'Capping' to Intercision: Metaphors/ Metonyms of Mind Control in the Young Adult Fiction of John Christopher and Philip Pullman.” Language and Literature: Journal of the Poetics and Linguistics Association 12/ 3. 233-251. Steffen Hantke Sogang University, Seoul South Korea