station eleven criticism

Author Emily St. John Mandel was not involved in the adaptation of her hit novel. It is almost more discomfiting, however, to be able to point now to moments the creators get wrong. By opening with the apocalyptic end that is foreshadowed by these sentences, Station Eleven highlights not only how the temporal order of the sense of an ending can be imposed on the randomness of time solely retrospectively, but also how this order ultimately implies a future that is already written. I mean, extra points for level of difficulty, no? How? Yet, she explains, it was important to me to not write that book [The Road]. Station Eleven. In: Patrides, C A and Wittreich, J (Eds. I read, If you want the girl next door, go next door: Lori Petty on Station Eleven and surviving Hollywood, Anuplifting pandemic drama? The Traveling Symphony is a troupe of actors and musicians dedicated to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. The narrative continuously moves between the pre- and the post-apocalypse without any regular pattern, and, what is more, even in these two distinct periods, the narrative keeps shifting between different times, from the night Arthur dies and the pandemic begins, to various moments in his life and that of people that are connected to him, from the catastrophes immediate aftermath, to fifteen and twenty years after it.12 Just as in Cloud Atlas, Station Elevens structure encourages us to read for connections between pre- and post- apocalyptic fragments, rather than for an end that integrates the various moments. How deeply strange it is, how deeply unsettling, to be able to compare and contrast a fictional pandemic with the real thing. Mary McNamara: Given the spiritual undertones of the series, and the repetition of the sentence I remember damage. Station Eleven. 1. While it is my argument that this challenge to traditional apocalyptic discourse and its model of history is key to contemporary post-apocalyptic fiction, in this section I focus on Mandels novel in conjunction with another Canadian text, Couplands Player One, which takes place in a Toronto cocktail lounge over five hours while the price of oil quickly escalates and a violent post-apocalyptic scenario ensues.5 Both novels subvert the distinction between the elect and the non-elect, bringing to the fore the self-righteous violence of apocalyptic discourse and how this distinction, as well as the apocalyptic historical teleology it founds, are narrative constructs which serve the interests of those who articulate them. Are you ever surprised? And the reason for that is that I feel that most dystopian fiction tends to dwell on that immediate aftermath of horror and mayhem. Still, my sense that the series is too Pollyanna-ish for its own good that its conclusions about the uses of art in the world are ultimately unearned stems from the fact that these sections are often dramatically inert to begin with. Buell, F 2013 Post-Apocalypse: A New U.S. Id long since grown skeptical of most topical art, often so calculated in its conclusions, but as Omicron surged and 2022 plans were suddenly canceled, Station Eleven began to feel like the first great screen fiction about the pandemic. The bulk of the series is set twenty years after a flu pandemic brought human civilization as we know it to an end. Huntley, K 2014 Station Eleven: Booklist Review, August. In this podcast, PSR Versus podcast hosts Josh Wigler ( @roundhoward) and LaTonya Starks ( @lkstarks) compare episode 7 of The Last of Us and Station Eleven. As West writes, Station Eleven excuses a mindset in which problematic, even apocalyptic, systemic structures are minimized, rather than critiqued (2018: 20). (Not to worry, I slogged through.). Though their plague is much more devastating than ours (it has a 99% fatality rate), it is still quite something to see people coughing in enclosed spaces while those nearby bristle, and others wonder about masks or gather supplies so they can hunker in apartments until the virus has burned itself out. From Station Eleven to Atlanta, GLOW and more, Christian Sprenger has shot some of TVs most beautiful images. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. This staunch rebuttal of apocalyptic determinism through the emphasis on the role that chance plays during the pandemic is echoed when Clark describes the period of contagion as a choreography of luck, the hours of near misses, of coincidence[s] (Mandel, 2014: 223, 224). Goes Out newsletter, with the week's best events, to help you explore and experience our city. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a grey-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers (Mandel, 2014: 255). Even when the man contemplates the possibility of ships out there, these are deathships, and the hypothetical father and son on the other side are similarly hopeless, living among the bitter ashes of the world st[anding] in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun (McCarthy, [2006] 2007: 219). Cameron, C 2014 Station Eleven Offers Suspense and Science Fiction, but It Is Undoubtedly a Literary Work. I focus on three elements: one, Station Elevens critical appropriation of religious apocalyptic logic, which I discuss in parallel with Douglas Couplands Player One (2010); two, the depiction of the aftermath of the Georgia Flu and Station Elevens critique of utopian teleology, which I discuss in parallel with Cormac McCarthys The Road (2006); and, three, Station Elevens non-linear narrative structure, which I discuss in parallel with David Mitchells Cloud Atlas (2004). Chaudhary, it finally clicked: Station Eleven soars when it rejects the mantra There is no before when it acknowledges that the future is a science fiction. Station Elevens appropriation of biblical apocalyptic serves to foreground the violence inherent in apocalyptic logic.7 As Kirsten, a child actor with Arthur in the pre-apocalypse and a member of the Travelling Symphony in the post-apocalypse, muses, [I]f you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then theres nothing that you cannot justify. This reaction, of course, is a reflection of our own present, in which art seems to swim ceaselessly against the tide. The dystopias of contemporary post-apocalyptic scenarios become all the more significant if one considers that they are set when the traditional apocalyptic paradigm posits the utopian resolution which makes sense of everything that happened before. Unlike with The Leftovers, Station Eleven was billed as a mini-series from the beginning, and Somerville doesn't seem interested in continuing the story. Or more nuancedly, as Clark, a good friend of Arthurs, comments to Tyler: its not a question of having been bad or the people [who died] were just in the wrong place at the wrong time (Mandel, 2014: 260; ellipsis in original). I confess I came to Station Eleven reluctantly. Last year, as we all scrambled to create some sort of context for the COVID-19 pandemic, Mandel got all sorts of what does it feel to have predicted the future? questions, which seemed very unfair. As Lee Quinby sums up, the apocalyptic metanarrative is a quintessential technology of power/knowledge, since its tenet of preordained history disavows questionings of received truth, discredits skepticism, and disarms challengers of the status quo (1994: xiii). Open Library of Humanities If nothing else, its pleasant to consider the possibility. Instead of examining all the light/dark political dynamics of rebuilding a post-catastrophe society, it concedes that capturing mass trauma is impossible and potentially unhelpful. These fictions also target the nexus between narrativity and apocalyptic logic captured by Kermode through the notion of the sense of an ending. It was about how art and culture can help people, and civilization, survive complete catastrophe. Albeit more attentive to the materiality of labour, his tracing of the production process of this object conceals, and indeed, aestheticises, workers exploitation and alienation, as well as the inequalities of the global free market: Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms of snow, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. As she puts it, I assume that there would be a period of utter chaos immediately after an apocalyptic event, but I dont find it credible that that period would last forever (Griffith, 2015: n.pag.). In her study of contemporary Canadian apocalyptic narratives, Marlene Goldman writes that: Canadian authors introduce particular twists to the familiar myth of the end by challenging rather than embracing apocalypses key features, specifically, the purgation of the non-elect and the violent destruction of the earthly world in preparation for the creation of a divine one (2005: 6). 2010 Future Ethics: Climate Change and Apocalyptic Imagination. McCarry, S 2014 I want It All: A Conversation with Emily St. John Mandel, 12 September. Alter, A 2014 The World is Ending, and Readers Couldnt Be Happier: Station Eleven Joins Falls Crop of Dystopian Novels. The narrative moves literally and metaphorically away from the road the actual road of the first post-pandemic years as well as McCarthys The Road. Station Eleven replicates what Gomel identifies as the plague pattern, where there is no place for millenarian rebirth. DOI: http://doi.org/10.4159/9780674495647. While the novels prophet holds on to a religious understanding of apocalypse in which the end is followed by utopian rebirth, the Georgia Flu, the pandemic that kills 99% of the worlds population, is termed apocalypse by the television newscasters in the sense of dystopian catastrophe rather than utopian revelation, and the apocalyptic narratives referred to in the text are disaster movies, with the dangerous stragglers fighting out for the last few scraps (Mandel, 2014: 243, 256). Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 59(2): 24357. [18] Berger, J 1999 After the End: Representations of Post-Apocalypse. Season 1 Review: Station Eleven is brilliant television. Backstories are filled in notably of Miranda (Danielle Deadwyler), Arthurs lover and the author of the graphic novel (called Station Eleven, but dont let the meta-ness put you off) that has been Kirstens lifeline over her 20 years of post-apocalyptic wandering. Nothing (McCarthy, [2006] 2007: 216). I confess I came to Station Eleven reluctantly. There are holes in the story, but that didnt bother me because Station Eleven felt almost immediately like an antidote to every other post-apocalyptic tale I have ever seen. He likes the thought of ships moving over the water, towards another world just out of sight (Mandel, 2014: 33233; emphasis mine). Instead we got a department store turned into a maternity ward and an Oreo used to demonstrate a cervix dilated to five centimeters. Available at: http://www.tor.com/2014/09/12/a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel/ [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. The silence (McCarthy, [2006] 2007: 274), an irrecoverable ecosystem that indicates the lack of a utopian renewal after the end indeed, the lack of post-apocalyptic futurity tout court and the collapsing of the sense-making order the traditional apocalyptic paradigm projects onto history through teleology. On the recent popularity of post-apocalyptic fictionA suggestion that I hear quite often is that our interest in post-apocalyptic fiction is a natural expression of the anxiety we feel. Chute, H L 2016 Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Miranda, Arthurs ex-wife, was unprepared for [the fleets] beauty. As Jeevan describes it, this night, was going to be the divide between a before and an after, a line drawn through his life (Mandel, 2014: 20; emphasis in original). But series creator Patrick Somerville had her blessing to change it. Martin Carr We Got This Covered. There are as is starting to feel mandatory with small-screen dramas two timelines. The following contains spoilers from the season finale of Station Eleven.. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Mystery The peculiarity of the novel is that all the stories with the exception of the sixth, the post-apocalyptic one, situated in the middle are interrupted in order to give way to the following one in a chronological order, and are then resumed in reverse order in the second half of the book. Because in stretches the first comes achingly close to being a masterpiece. Keller, C 1996 Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times. You had to be impressed by that at least. Having established its In this sense, it is interesting to note that, just like another winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, Margaret Atwood (, On the essentially temporal nature of traditional apocalyptic logic see also Kermode (, See also the prototype of the Western concept that history has an intelligible and end-determined order, whether fideistic or naturalistic, is the scheme of the course of earthly affairs from genesis to apocalypse which is underwritten by a sacred text (, Indeed, it is my contention that, in its critique of the apocalyptic understanding of history, the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel addresses aspects of Western modernity that transcend national borders, which in any case become irrelevant after the catastrophes depicted by the texts. She has no expectation that anybody else will ever see her work. How Station Eleven pulled off the impossible, Original reporting and incisive analysis, direct from the Guardian every morning. Even the guy who auditions by reciting Bill Pullmans speech from Independence Day believes. Indeed, the passages beautiful writing and imagery sublimates and glosses over a production process that relies on the exploitation of cheap labour from the global South, something Mandel merely hints at through the mention of workers somewhere in China and the cadences of a half dozen languages. Ah, you say no. (2018) Critical Temporalities: Station Eleven and the Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel, The scene in which a dozen women give birth was the before giving way to the future, just as all the scenes in which Miranda struggles to write Station Eleven were. The Station Eleven soundtrack song accompanies a flashback sequence. Download PDF. Last year, as we all scrambled to create some sort of context for the COVID-19 pandemic, Mandel got all sorts of what does it feel to have predicted the future? questions, which seemed very unfair. It's some sort of combination of pessimism or narcissism that it's almost as though we want to believe or living at the climax of the story. I remember describing the premise of the novel to my husband, and he said, "People would want what was best about the world. What you call the present showcases people who are neither hero nor villain, except perhaps in their own minds, but they are artists. Maybe, though people appear to be living in small, mostly primitive communities and the fact that the story confines itself to the shoreline of Lake Michigan (at least I think its Michigan) serves the narrative both spiritually and logistically. Tom's Guide's latest streaming news. One of the things that drove me away from The Walking Dead was the core characters lack of expertise and inability to problem-solve. Obviously, it is a narrative cheat to just slide on by all the work and infighting that went into creating those communities, but that isnt what Station Eleven is about. Washington Post, 15 October. 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