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May 1, 2012 Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, American Dystopia, Fiction or Reality?
In my childhood years of the 1950s,
apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic landscapes were a dime a dozen. In the
Arctic, the first radioactivated monster, Ray Bradbury’s famed
Rhedosaurus, awakened in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
and began its long slouch toward New York City; in the Southwestern
desert, near the Trinity testing grounds for the first atomic bomb, a
giant mutated queen ant in Them!
prepared for her flight to the sewers of Los Angeles to spawn; in
space, the planet Metaluna displayed “the consequences of a weak defense
system” by suffering nuclear-style incineration in This Island Earth; and in 1954, the irrepressible returned big time when Godzilla,
awakened by atomic tests, stomped out of Japan’s Toho studios and later
barnstormed through American movie theaters. (All those “family”
films, by the way, were successes.)
And if you were in the mood in those days, you could even pile into your car and do it in real life. In the mid-1950s, after all, the Atomic Energy Commission was promoting “atom bomb watching” as a tourist attraction for vacationers in Nevada. There were even bleachers on a hill (“News Nob”) 10 miles from ground zero for reporters checking out atomic tests. In some ways, none of us have ever left that hill. In 1957 alone, the Black Scorpion, the Incredible Shrinking and the Amazing Colossal Man, the Invisible Boy, the Cyclops, the Deadly Mantis, the Giant Claw, and “an enlarged radiated sump” from the grave of a South Pacific islander -- atomic mutants all -- were sent careening toward teenagers in drive-ins across America. And don’t forget the last survivors of Level 7, the last Australians in On the Beach, and the scattered monks and mutants facing a devastated post-atomic world (and preparing to do it all over again) in A Canticle for Liebowitz, not to speak of those flesh-eating plants, the Triffids (nuclear mutants, even if the author, John Wyndham, didn’t know it). It was a time when novels were regularly turned into wastelands. Of course, today, when it comes to post-apocalyptic wastelands -- a measure of our embattled planet -- nuclear weapons have had to join a jostling crowd of world-devastating possibilities, as in the most recent hit, The Hunger Games trilogy. Its first volume hints that its dystopian, bread-and-circuses North American world was the creation of climate catastrophe (think: global warning). That volume is a riveting read, as dystopian fiction tends to be. Imagine The Lord of the Flies with girls, or a lead character that melds that girl with the dragon tattoo with Spartacus, and you’ll have the idea. TomDispatch regular Rebecca Solnit read it recently, recognizing both its unnerving thrills and its limits. As is her wont, she would like to take us off that tourist’s hill of apocalyptic viewing and up another hill entirely, one where we might see possibilities on an increasingly ravaged planet. As always, she has a way of sending us to places we should really have been heading for anyway. Tom Welcome to the 2012 Hunger Games |
