Episode 53: Transcript
Episode: 53: F*ck Your Nihilism!
Transcription by Keffy
Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction and society. I’m Annalee Newitz. I’m a science journalist who writes science fiction.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:10] I’m Charlie Jane Anders. I’m a science fiction writer who obsesses rather a lot about science.
Annalee: [00:00:16] And in this episode, we’re going to say, “Fuck your nihilism.”
Charlie Jane: [00:00:19] Fuck your nihilism!
Annalee: [00:00:21] Charlie’s like, really enthusiastic about that.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:22] Fuck it.
Annalee: [00:00:24] Which, actually is kind of a nihilistic thing to say so we’re just giving you some meta here, but there’s a lot of sense right now, I think, generally, floating around many parts of the world that civilization is collapsing. World is ending. There’s a scary pandemic. Governments seem to be becoming even more unstable. Economies are becoming unstable. Climate change has finally made its presence known in the form of super storms and super fires. So, basically what I’m saying is, things are really scary.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:59] Things are scary.
Annalee: [00:00:59] And one of the responses to that, I think, in fiction and in storytelling more generally is to write nihilistic stories and today we’re going to talk about what that looks like and why it can go fuck off.
[00:01:14] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Charlie Jane: [00:01:41] So, Annalee, what kind of stories are people telling about the end of everything?
Annalee: [00:01:45] So, I want to place the origins of what I’m calling nihilistic storytelling with Dr. Strangelove. So I’m not going too far back. I’m sure there’s plenty of nihilism before that, too. But, I’m thinking of a specifically late-20th century kind of storytelling that’s very satirical and dark and that focuses really closely on issues around war and money and technology. So, for those of you who are not familiar with Stanley Kubrick’s amazing 1960s film Dr. Strangelove, it’s about, basically, the warmongers who want to end the world with nukes. And the premise is there’s a guy who is a thinly disguised version of Edward Teller named Dr. Strangelove, played very memorably by Peter Sellers who plays, like five other roles in the film. He’s so amazing. God.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:43] He’s… yeah.
Annalee: [00:02:43] I love him so much. Anyway. So he’s invented this kind of nuclear device. It’s the doomsday device which the great innovation, as he will explain in a clip that we have coming up is that once you set it off, you can’t take it back. And it’s actually designed so that no human can choose to set it off. And here he is talking about it.
Dr. Strangelove: [00:03:11] Mr. President, the technology required is easily within the means of even the smallest nuclear power. It requires only the will to do so.
But how is it possible for this thing to be triggered automatically and at the same time impossible to untrigger?
Mr. President, it is not only possible, it is essential. That is the whole idea of this machine, you know. Deterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the fear to attack. And so, because of the automated and irrevocable decision-making process which rules out human meddling, the doomsday machine is terrifying and simple to understand, and completely credible and convincing.
Gee, I wish we had one of them doomsday machines, Stainsey.
But this is fantastic, Strangelove. How can it be triggered automatically?
Well, it’s remarkably simple to do that. When you merely wish to bury bombs, there’s no limit to the size. After that, they are connected to a gigantic complex of computers. Now then, a specific and clearly defined set of circumstances under which the bombs are to be exploded is programmed into a tape memory bank.
Annalee: [00:04:47] The thing I love about this, and actually I had forgotten until I rewatched the film is that the idea here is that, first of all, it’s this notion of a bomb you can’t take back. It’s like, this is a doomsday device and the whole point of it is is that if it’s launched, that’s it. You’re done.
Charlie Jane: [00:05:08] It’s an automated deterrent, and it basically goes off if you’re attacked.
Annalee: [00:05:12] Right. And the thing I had forgotten was how much it’s connected to technology and it has that little moment where one of the other people in the war room, or the situation room says, how can this work? And he says, Well, it is connected to a room of computers. And this is something that has been a real fantasy of the Military Industrial Complex since it’s inception, really, in the 1950s, where you’d have basically an AI deciding when to launch nukes. So this is kind of the satirical high art version of the fantasy in Terminator, because—
Charlie Jane: [00:05:45] Right, or War Games.
Annalee: [00:05:46] Or War Games. Exactly. In fact, War Games is definitely revisiting Dr. Strangelove, and I think it’s important to place Dr. Strangelove at the heart of this kind of nihilistic fantasy because it has inspired so many subsequent science fiction films and films about high tech warfare.
[00:06:04] Now the other thing about Dr. Strangelove is that it plays with the idea of conspiracy theories fueling a lot of these men. And they’re all men, they’re all white men, who are running this war. And there’s a famous scene where one of them talks about how the communists are invading our precious bodily fluids and how women are stealing his essence, in other words, his sperm. And it’s an amazing scene.
Charlie Jane: [00:06:30] So fucking weird.
Annalee: [00:06:33] There’s a lot of repressed homosexuality kind of lurking at the edges of the story, so these are people who are kind of sexually frustrated and really just want to be fucking each other and instead they’re fucking the world with a bomb. And it’s a very, it’s super dark, it’s super satirical. It’s about the men who rejoice in destroying everything.
[00:06:56] And I think that the next interesting example of this kind of nihilism comes in the contemporary show, Mr. Robot. And in the very first episode of that show, which is also about technology and destroying the world and sort of celebrating the end of the world, we hear from Elliot, our main character, who, spoiler alert, is also Mr. Robot, which if you’ve been watching the show, you’ve already figured that out about three seasons ago. He is talking in this clip to his shrink about what it is that he hates about the world. Well, actually, he’s imagining talking to her, he doesn’t actually tell her this. This is what he’s thinking.
Mr. Robot [00:07:34] Is it that we collectively thought Steve Jobs was a great man even when we knew he made billions off the backs of children? Or maybe it’s that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit? The world itself’s just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our burning commentary bullshit, masquerading as insight. Our social media faking as intimacy. Or is it that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money? I’m not saying anything new. We all know why we do this. Not because Hunger Games books makes us happy, but because we want to be sedated. Because it’s painful not to pretend. Because we’re cowards.
Annalee: [00:08:23] So, what I think is interesting here, to think about in terms of our contemporary nihilistic storytelling is that Elliot, like Dr. Strangelove, is full of rage. He has a technological solution to end the world. Technosolutionism for total mass destruction, and the problems of the world are not associated with communism for him but with consumer capitalism and with how our technoGods like Steve Jobs turned out to be actually corrupt bastards.
[00:08:59] The other thing I think that’s really important that’s changed about the nihilism story between Dr. Strangelove in the 1960s and Mr. Robot in the 2020s is now we identify with the character who is the nihilist, who wants to destroy the world. In Dr. Strangelove, the men who want to destroy the world are people who we are supposed to hate and laugh at. It’s a story about the men who we reject. They are toxic masculinity. They are horrible warmongers and we hate them. And the only sympathetic character is this poor European guy who keeps saying, like, can we please not? Not?
Charlie Jane: [00:09:37] He’s also played by Peter Sellers.
Annalee: [00:09:38] Yeah, and just this amazing role. And in Mr. Robot, yes, we understand that Elliot has all kinds of problems, but we also strongly identify with him. The show wants us to be in his head, to sympathize with him and to kind of cheer him on even though we also acknowledge that what he’s doing is destructive. So I think that’s a really interesting turn to keep in mind as we think about this kind of genre.
[00:10:05] And I think some other stories in the genre are things like Fight Club, clear example of identifiying with the nihilist who wants to destroy everything. Obviously, this year’s Joker film. Or last year’s Joker film.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:18] Right.
Annalee: [00:10:20] This year’s Oscar winner.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:20] The Joker is actually previously described in The Dark Knight as being like, some men want to watch the world burn, and that’s basically his whole thing. Is that, yeah, he wants to burn it all down because the world is fucked, basically.
Annalee: [00:10:32] And just as we identify with Elliot in Mr. Robot, in the new Joker film, we are identifying with Joker. We definitely, again, we understand that Joker is fucked up, but he is a character who is supposed to elicit our sympathy and elicit our identification. And we also see it in, on a funnier vein, a movie like Cabin in the Woods where at the end, spoiler, the characters are like, yeah, whatever. Let the world be destroyed, who cares. Let’s have a cigarette.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:02] It’s basically, let the world be destroyed rather than capitulate to Sigourney Weaver who turns out to basically offer them this kind of evil bargain. And they’re like, no. We’re just going to destroy the world, instead.
Annalee: [00:11:11] Yeah. But, I mean, the point is that, yeah. They just choose to destroy everyone. There’s things like The Walking Dead series, which I think its’ a little bit of a more complicated sell to talk about that as a nihilism story, but I think it’s a story that’s about kind of rejoicing in the collapse of everything. It’s—I think it’s often characterized as a post-apocalyptic story and I would argue that it’s actually an apocalyptic story. It’s taking place right in the middle of the apocalypse. Nobody is rebuilding shit. Except like, okay, they go live on a farm or something like that. But they’re not rebuilding civilization. They’re still hunkered down, enduring the death of their civilization.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:48] Right, and in fact, the apocalyptic genre is a lot of wish fulfillment. I mean, this is a thing that we’ve talked about before, I know. But, the apocalyptic genre is a lot of, basically wallowing in the kind of pleasure of not having to be part of a society anymore, in the way that we are now. You don’t have to go to work. You don’t have to be nice to your shitty neighbors. You don’t have to pick up after yourself. You don’t have to wipe your butt after your poop. You can just do whatever you want. And there’s a lot of wish fulfillment in being one of the people who is a survivor who gets to kind of be a king in the wasteland, I think.
[00:12:25] And the roots of the post-apocalyptic genre are in a kind of absurdism that celebrates that through the absence of all these civilized structures it kind of shows that the civilized structures were ridiculous and arbitrary and pointless to begin with. And we never really needed them.
[00:12:40] I’ve been thinking a lot lately, for some reason, about this classic apocalyptic film, I guess. It’s sort of during the apocalypse. That came out around the same time as Dr. Strangelove, called The Bed Sitting Room, which is kind of like an extended Monty Python episode set in an apocalyptic world where everything is just weird and messed up and people are just kind of wandering around the wasteland being bizarre. And it’s just… I think it’s a lot of the same actors from Monty Python and other British comedy of the time, and it’s just a giant fucking weird-fest that kind of revels in everything being fucked. And I think that that is part of the impulse behind these kinds of apocalyptic stories is the kind of freedom of no longer having to worry about whether your hair looks nice or not. But also the freedom of not having to deal with other people and to have to watch what you say to your coworkers and all this other shit. People feel very constrained in both reasonable and unreasonable ways in our current society.
[00:13:41] And so there is a certain amount of wish fulfillment in just like, I get to be on my own in the wasteland and do whatever the fuck I want.
Annalee: [00:13:49] I definitely think that’s a big part of it. The do whatever you want aspect. But I also think we should honor part of what Elliot says in his speech in Mr. Robot. Because, there are actually things that are genuinely fucked up about the world.
Charlie Jane: [00:14:02] Oh, yeah.
Annalee: [00:14:02] And so, his response is to totally destroy everything and it’s understandable because how do you tackle something like white settler colonialism, global capitalism, all these things that have just wrecked humanity and wrecked the planet. It feels like the only option, sometimes, is to burn it all down. And there’s actually a whole strand of what I would call nihilistic storytelling that comes out of environmentalism because humans in these scenarios are kind of just garbage. They’ve trashed the planet, they’ve created the smog monster, in Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster, a very important film in this genre. But they’ve done so many horrible—we’ve done so many horrible things that, for example, a nonfiction book like Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us which became—I think it was a miniseries, but there was definitely a television version of it. And it’s about what the planet would look like if all of humanity just disappeared tomorrow.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:07] Right. And it was kind of a fantasy.
Annalee: [00:15:11] It was a fantasy based on science and it inspired the kind of worldbuilding for the Will Smith movie, I Am Legend where we see New York having kind of renaturalized and there’s deer running in the street and things like that. Which is straight out of Alan Weisman’s book, because he kind of focuses on New York and what would happen to New York. And I think that’s the kind of fantasy that you see in a lot of stories that are not so much about being king of the wasteland, but just saying, humanity itself sucks, it’s kind of coming from a species-level self-loathing. A feeling that we had our chance, we could have done something good but we’ve permanently screwed it up. There’s no redemption, there’s no form of reformation that we can have. We should just all die. And I think there’s that strand of nihilism.
[00:16:07] And then I think there’s also stories that are about trying to build a better humanity, like in Margaret Atwood’s series that starts with Oryx and Crake, where—which is very much a nihilism—especially the first novel is like total nihilism porn where it’s all about these people who create a super virus to wipe out all of humanity and then they’re going to replace humanity with these creatures they call Crakers who are better designed to be peaceful or so they believe. They’re basically humans but they are designed to be vegetarians and they go into heat instead of having—sort of being sexually ready all the time and somehow the scientists have decided that if people go into heat they won’t fetishize sex as much, or something. I’m not really sure.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:57] Sounds true.
Annalee: [00:16:57] It doesn’t make—
Charlie Jane: [00:16:59] If you’ve ever had a cat that hadn’t been spayed yet, you know, you know that they don’t think about sex at all. It’s totally fine.
Annalee: [00:17:07] The thing that I hadn’t fully appreciated about Margaret Atwood until I read that series is how she’s kind of a goofball and she’s really a satirist so a lot of the stuff in this book is very satirical as you were, I think, rightly pointing out. There’s a strong strand of kind of over the top satire in a lot of these stories. And obviously Dr. Strangelove has that too. This kind of nihilism is about fully destroying humanity and enjoying it and it’s a dark pleasure. It’s a satirical pleasure, it’s not a ho ho ho! Happy workplace comedy pleasure. It’s not a good place type laughter.
[00:17:46] But I think that at times of great panic and anxiety in real life, that these kinds of stories really appeal to us because, as I said, I think there’s that sense that humans are garbage and either you respond to it by saying, let’s wipe us all out, or just wipe out almost everyone so I can be king of the garbage.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:08] Right. And there’s often an undercurrent of what we talked about in the rugged individualism episode. Those some of the most rugged individualist stories are often post-apocalyptic and they do kind of have that thing of fetishizing the lone person, who’s often a white dude who is a prepper or survives in the wilderness and is just more prepared and that’s a major thing in pop culture now.
[00:18:34] This also makes me think about what we talked about before in the hope episode and the idea that we need hopeful stories and the thing about hopeful stories is that you have to imagine ways to improve the world that we’re living in now or ways to build a better world that aren’t based on fetishizing mass death or destruction. And that’s really hard. It’s hard to come up with plausible, hopeful scenarios right now that don’t feel like pure candy wish fulfillment and that include the hard work of actually building something better. And it’s much easier to just imagine a blank slate caused by some sort of disaster or plague or whatever than it is to imagine us actually rolling up our sleeves and fixing the mess that we’re in at the moment.
Annalee: [00:19:22] So the thing that makes a nihilistic story different from just your standard apocalypse or post-apocalypse is I think these are stories about characters who bring on the apocalypse. Who bring on the doom, who take an active role in destroying the world, like Dr. Strangelove. Like Elliot in Mr. Robot, like the characters in Oryx in Crake, for example, or the Joker. These are people who have agency, so they’re not just sort of the victims, the passive victims of a zombie plague or of an atomic war. And so, I think the other place that you see this cropping up a lot, and this goes back to your point about hope, is that certain stories that seem like they’re hopeful solutions wind up turning into these stories of embracing doom. And I’m thinking specifically of the whole strand of wish fulfillment around AI and how AI will come along and save us.
[00:20:18] I think this can be traced back to Dr. Strangelove where they have a computer or a set of computers that are going to make the decision about nuclear deterrent. This goes right into The Terminator-type story, where they’ve given an AI control over nuclear launches and it decides to wipe out humanity. It kind of reminds me of Ex Machina, which of course is a much smaller, more personal story, but it’s still about a guy who is basically an AI zealot who believes he is going to replace humanity with this superior creature. But of course the superior creature winds up killing him and escaping into the world hopefully to kill everyone else.
[00:21:01] And I think there’s a whole strand of science fiction which can be summed up with the meme of, “We welcome our new robot overlords.” Because when you welcome your new robot overlords what you’re saying is, death to humanity.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:16] Right.
Annalee: [00:21:16] You’re saying, you know, fuck humans. Let the robots take over and usually when the robots take over, it’s a Cyberman situation. It’s a Terminator situation. It’s not a benevolent, happy, oh, now everybody has a nice park to sit in while the robots do all the work.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:35] Right.
Annalee: [00:21:35] That’s not ever the outcome.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:39] And a lot of our most toxic fantasies about the singularity are kind of apocalyptic. They’re like a nice apocalypse in which, oh, but everybody’s going to be happy and we’re all going to live forever and we’re going to live how to fly and blah blah blah. But the undercurrent of it is always that we’re going to sweep away the old order and there’s going to be some eggs broken in making that omelet, but we’re not going to focus on that part. We’re going to focus on the part where certain people get to live forever and have their brains be the size of a billion planets and a million other things, and like—
Annalee: [00:22:09] Do not focus on all the slaves that we had to destroy in order to do that.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:13] Yeah, and you know, I’m sure that advocates of the singularity would so, no no no, everybody gets to be happy. But I feel like oftentimes there’s an unspoken thing in the singularity fantasy that kind of does include a measure of, what we’ll call creative destruction, kind of.
Annalee: [00:22:31] Yeah, and I think, again, that’s why, for me, Dr. Strangelove and Mr. Robots are such key texts in this genre, because they’re both so focused on the destructive power of technology. And I think there’s that—especially now, a lot of our nihilism focuses on that and how can we use our technology to wreck everything. Or how is our technology wrecking everything. And that can be an environmental form of destruction as all of our ewaste and our bitcoin farms and all that crap is destroying the environment. We also have the privacy apocalypse and the anonymity apocalypse and the surveillance apocalypse—
Charlie Jane: [00:23:11] Yay.
Annalee: [00:23:11] And all of that stuff. So our minds are being destroyed, our environment is being destroyed and we can kind of track it all back to this kind of warmongery, technofetishism.
[00:23:23] All right, that was uplifting.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:24] Yay.
Annalee: [00:23:24] And when we—we’re going to take a quick break and when we come back we’re going to talk about ruin porn.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:30] Yay!
Annalee: [00:23:31] Yay!
[00:23:31] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Annalee: [00:23:47] So, ruin porn. Charlie Jane, tell us what that is and where it gets started.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:52] I mean, ruin porn is largely encapsulated by The World Without Us, which we already talked about. It’s kind of glorying in wreckage of civilization and what remains of a once great empire and often there’s that thing of renaturing where the plants are coming back, the animals are coming back, but also it’s just like the glimpses of what was once a great thing and is now just kind of crumbled.
Annalee: [00:24:20] So, I also think ruin porn, also, is kind of embodied by, if you’ve ever seen big collections of photographs of collapsing buildings in Detroit, or—
Charlie Jane: [00:24:30] Oh, yeah.
Annalee: [00:24:31] Or old missle silos in the former Soviet Union that are now collapsing. Those are the total apotheosis of ruin porn.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:42] They really are. And it’s sort of like the flip side of house porn, where it’s like, this is this nice beautiful new house, and look at this kitchenette, look at this amazing deck that they’ve got. It’s like, look at this thing that was amazing and is now totally fucked. Look at how fucked it was.
Annalee: [00:24:59] Look at the rust. Look at the—
Charlie Jane: [00:25:02] Yeah, exactly.
Annalee: [00:25:01] —amusement park that’s now collapsing into the mud.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:05] It’s like the—it’s like fetish porn versus some kind of really degraded porn that’s like—
Annalee: [00:25:11] Humiliation porn?
Charlie Jane: [00:25:11] Humiliation porn. It’s like fetish porn versus humiliation porn. It kind of is, actually.
Annalee: [00:25:16] Okay, yeah. Just go ahead and use that next rubric in your next K-12 class.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:22] For sure, for sure. And I feel like, for me, one of the earliest pieces of ruin porn. I mean, there’s been ruin porn forever but one of the earliests great examples of ruin porn is the poem “Ozymandias” where it’s like, look upon my works, ye mighty and despair. It’s this statue that’s basically completely fucked and everything is destroyed. I feel like the Romantic poets really loved that shit. They loved—and it was this time when obviously Europeans were exploring or “exploring.”
Annalee: [00:25:50] Exploiting.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:50] They were exploiting the rest of the world and in the process coming upon all of these former citadels and temples and things all over the place. And so there was this obsession among Europeans with ruin porn for the first time. And they wrote a ton of poetry about the romanticism of buildings that were now trashed. But where do we see a lot of ruin porn in more recent pop culture, and in science fiction and fantasy?
Annalee: [00:26:16] Well, I think you’re right to sort of start with the Romantics, I think that that’s, especially in Europe, this idea of an ancient civilization that was super great, that we can never fully return to its greatness. It’s kind of like, we are living in the trashed remains of that civilization a little bit. For sure, I think, in the United States, H.P. Lovecraft’s work draws on that idea a lot. He was very influenced by romantic literature and of course he had an obsession with this idea of a great Western Civilization, the Romans and that sort of thing that we’d fallen away from, especially in America. Now it’s well-known that H.P. Lovecraft was a white supremacist and a big theme of his work was how whiteness had been kind of once a great form of identity because I guess he kind of misunderstand Roman racial identity and decided that the Romans were white. Not unlike a lot of white supremacists today.
[00:27:24] And Lovecraft kind of reimagined the history of Western Civilization but mapped onto the whole history of earth, which he was really interested in. He was actually quite interested in geology and paleontology. And so, in Lovecraft’s mythos, I’ll just tell you because I know you’re excited to learn this, Charlie Jane. He has a novella, which I think is actually his most interesting work, called At the Mountains of Madness where some explorers go down to Antarctica and discover the remains of an ancient alien civilization run by what are called the Old Ones. Sometimes they’re called the Ancient Ones. They’re little starfish-headed melon people, I guess? They kind of look like melons with starfish heads and they have this amazing underground world that’s full of Roman architecture. And then there are these sort of artistic records on the walls of their tombs and of their ancient cities showing how their civilization was degraded by the infiltration of other kinds of aliens. By their greed. And they kind of invent a bunch of alien slaves called Shoggoths, and then the Shoggoths kind of rise up against them and so there’s kind of this slave rebellion. And anyway, of course, slave rebellions for H.P. Lovecraft would have been the beginning of the end of civilization, since he was a white supremacist.
[00:28:44] His characters in the present day are kind of grappling with this history where there was this once-great alien civilization that’s gone. There’s also Cthulhu’s civilization, and Cthulhu’s kind of the ancient threat. Cthulhu and Cthulhu’s spawn are from kind of a Caribbean region. They’re super into miscegenation. They’re always coming up on land and trying to hump white people. And often pretty successfully.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:09] Uggghh.
Annalee: [00:29:10] And… yeah. So, nothing is more scary than miscegenation for Lovecraft. And for him, miscegenation is a sign of civilizational collapse. And so his horror really continues to influence a lot of other writers in fantasy and science fiction. But the other strand, I think, we can see really clearly in a lot of fantasy epics. And I want to play a clip from Game of Thrones the TV show where Tyrion and Jorah are in a little boat and they’re floating through the anciet city of Valeria. It’s the Valerian Empire, I guess.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:48] I believe. It’s High Valeria, I don’t know, yeah.
Annalee: [00:29:50] High Valeria. They’re getting high.
Charlie Jane: [00:29:52] A lot of edibles. A lot of edibles in Valeria.
Annalee: [00:29:55] And so, Valeria’s supposed to kind of be the Ancient Rome of the world of Westeros. So here’s what they have to say.
GoT clip: [00:30:02] How many centuries before we learn how to build cities like this again?
For thousands of years the Valerians were the best in the world at almost everything. Then…
And then they weren’t.
And then they weren’t.
They held each other close and turned their backs upon the end. The hills that split asunder and the black that ate the skies. The flames that shot so high and hot that even dragons burned, would never be the final sights that fell upon their eyes. A fly upon a wall, the waves the sea wind whipped and churned.
A city of a thousand years and all that men had learned. The doom consumed it all alike and neither of them turned.
Annalee: [00:30:58] So what happens in that clip, which I think is so interesting, especially in light of the poem “Ozymandias” is that Tyrion starts talking about, like, oh, wow, great ancient civilization. They had these amazing cities, blibedy bleh. And then he starts quoting from a poem about the end of Valeria, and then Jorah chimes in and kind of finishes off the poem. So it’s supposed to be that they both read this great ancient epic. And the epic is actually not about how groovy the Valerians were but actually how awesome it was when they died out.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:33] How metal.
Annalee: [00:31:33] How metal it was. But also, just like, the kind of, the ruin porn of it. The fire and the flame and how it was so hot that even dragons burned and now they’re just still dead, and that’s kind of the point of the whole poem, is just like, yeah, they died. And it’s kind of the flip side of Lovecraft. Because Lovecraft is all about like, dude remember when there were these awesome, amazing starfish people who were somehow like white people and were really great. And what a bummer it is that we can’t go back and hang out with the ancient starfish-headed white people.
[00:32:16] I still, like, I just think it’s funny that Lovecraft was all about being Mr. Whiteness but his ultimate white heroes were starfish-headed creatures. But anyway. For people in Westeros who’ve written that poem that Tyrion is quoting, actually it doesn’t sound like they’re that nostalgic. It sounds like they’re saying, like, you know, maybe it was kinda good that the Valerian Empire got trashed.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:41] Right.
Annalee: [00:32:41] And there’s a lot of talk about how, you know, maybe when dragons were destroying everything and burning shit down, that was kind of bad.
Charlie Jane: [00:32:53] Right, and part of what happened to Valeria is that there was the Doom of Valeria, which was caused by, basically overloading on magic. They were experimenting with magic too much, they went too far. And they kind of triggered some kind of disaster upon themselves. So it’s literally, if I’m remembering the books correctly, it’s a thing that they brought on themselves.
Annalee: [00:33:12] It’s kind of like the doomsday device in Dr. Strangelove.
Charlie Jane: [00:33:16] Yeah, and of course, that kind of hangs over Game of Thrones in general because magic is coming back and we’re starting to experiment with it more and meanwhile there’s these zombies and all this other shit going on. The threat of destruction and the threat that we might implicitly cause our destruction through trying to make cool shit happen with magic is a thing that’s kind of batted around, I feel like.
Annalee: [00:33:39] And I guess this is sort of the, again, the flip side of the nihilist story because instead of it being about, let’s welcome the demise of our civilization, I feel like the message in something like Game of Thrones, at least in that scene is, especially because Tyrion is very ant-war. It’s sort of saying, you know, maybe it’s kind of better that this civilization stays dead. And maybe the fact that it’s in ruins is kind of what it deserved because it was a really warlike, screwed up civilization. And from that angle, ruin porn is less about sort of seeking out a previous glory and more like saying, “Ding, dong, the wicked witch is dead.”
Charlie Jane: [00:34:30] Right. And I think that there’s also a thing where when we’re afraid of something for long enough. When we’re sort of living in the middle of an era, which I feel like my entire life I’ve been aware in the back of my mind that I’m living in a civilization that is not going to last forever. And that the signs of impending collapse have always been around. Definitely I can remember being a little kid and watching Ronald Reagan become president and being like, yeah, this is not going to—
Annalee: [00:34:56] This ain’t gonna work out.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:56] This is not going to gonna end well. This amount of concentrating power in the hands of the wealthy, which was a thing that I heard grown-ups talking about a lot. This amount of not giving a shit about the environment, this amount of building unsustainable systems. You know that when something is unsustainable, ipso facto, it’s not going to last forever. So you start to fantasize about how it’s going to end in a way that’s almost kind of protective. It’s like trying to prepare yourself for something that you know is coming. And you don’t know how and you don’t know when. But you know at some point this is all going to fall apart. And maybe it’ll happen during our lifetime, maybe it won’t. But it’s inevitable that this is not going to last forever.
[00:35:34] And so, trying to imagine that as a way of kind of almost inoculating yourself. But then, there is a kind of weird pleasure in it. There’s a weird pleasure in just sort of imagining the end of all this complicated stuff. It’s like when you build a really fancy thing out of Lego and then you smash it. Or you take it apart or whatever, and it’s like, wooo, you know. You get to watch all the Lego people falling down and it’s kind of exciting. It’s like Roland Emmerich. There was that period when we just were like being bombarded with disaster movies again, and it was kind of exciting to watch Roland Emmerich destroy the world five different ways.
Annalee: [00:36:09] I still feel like I’ve learned a lot about how you played with Legos. So that’s good to know.
[00:36:17] There’s another movie I want to bring up in the context of ruin porn which is the early ‘90s film by Rusty Cundieff called Tales From the Hood, which, if you haven’t seen it, you have to go back and check this movie out. It’s amazing. Long before Jordan Peele was doing his amazing horror noir films, Rusty Cundieff did this great set of short stories. It’s like, four stories in the film, and they’re all about the horror being Black in a white supremacist world.
[00:36:47] And one of the stories is about a white politician who is clearly supposed to be David Duke and he’s running on a racist ticket in a southern state and he’s moved into an old plantation house. And ultimately what happens, because he so richly deserves it, is that the ghosts of the slaves who were killed on the plantation come back in the form of little dolls who just murder the fuck out of him. And you’re so excited. It’s very cathartic because he’s just spouting the worst, most racist crap. So you’re like, okay, good. This guy’s gonna die.
[00:37:25] The thing that’s interesting about that in the context of ruin porn is that there’s so much activity around preserving plantations in the South and tourism around looking at the ruins of plantations. But also visiting recreated plantations and a lot of Black people have kind of spoken out about how problematic this is to be turning this into a tourism industry because it’s basically, these were slave houses. These were places where people were murdered and abused for decades, or in some cases for centuries. Now there’s kind of a movement toward having a little section of the plantation tour acknowledge that slavery was actually kind of bad maybe.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:09] Uh, slavery *cough cough*.
Annalee: [00:38:10] Yeah, apparently some of the plantations are really kind of going all-in on it and are really kind of focusing on, this is what the reality of what slave life was like. But a lot of them aren’t. And I think that in the United States, these slave plantations kind of occupy the same place as Valeria does in Game of Thrones. Not to blithely compare fantasy with reality, but I think that this idea that seeing a plantation in ruins, the pleasure we get from those ruins. It isn’t about saying, oh gosh, there was this great time in the South and here’s this beautiful remains. Actually, it’s for many of us, about saying, yeah. I’m glad that’s in ruins. I want to see that only as a ruin. And let’s preserve it as a ruin, as something that’s dead and remember why it fell into ruin and how it was a form of ruination even when it was a going concern.
[00:39:07] And so, if there is any kind of, I don’t know, utopian or socially constructive element that we can pull out of these nihilistic stories it’s that that kind of feeling. That feeling of say, actually, there was this civilization that was thriving and wealthy and prosperous and it was horrible. And it was based on oppression and slavery and it deserves to be a ruin, and hopefully, today’s civilization won’t be based on it. Even if it kind of is.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:43] Yeah, and I think that that’s really the central question of this stuff, is, is there a way to battle against oppression and exploitation that doesn’t just involve ruins. That doesn’t just involve tearing everything down and then maybe we’ll build something slightly better in the ashes. Maybe we’ll just have a few hundred years of people in the wilderness being rugged individualists and fucking each other over. And I feel like that’s part of where our imaginations need to work harder is to imagine ways to fix it without just destroying everything and causing untold misery in the process.
Annalee: [00:40:18] That’s right, and I think, to me, that’s why this episode is, “Fuck your nihilism” because nihilism always ends with ruin and it never imagines, like you said, either getting to a better future by circumventing ruin, like, maybe we could just not have ruin. Maybe we could just improve things or build them better. Or, if we have to destroy, how do we stop the destruction and reach a point where we’re rebuilding in a way that won’t replicate these problems.
[00:40:53] All right, we’re going to take a little break and when we come back, we’re going to have our segment that you always wish to have but we don’t do very often, called, what we’re obsessed with.
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Annalee: [00:41:16] Charlie Jane, what are you obsessed with?
Charlie Jane: [00:41:18] I’m finally catching up on the reboot, or it’s not a reboot, but a continuation of Runaways, the Marvel comic about a group of teenagers who run away from home after they find out that their parents are secretly evil super villians, but Rainbow Rowell and a few different artists. But I think Kris Anka is the main one. And as you know, I am a huge Rainbow Rowell fan. I’ve been reading all of her YA novels. I’m obsessed with the Carry On books.
Annalee: [00:41:44] She’s amazing.
Charlie Jane: [00:41:45] But her Runaways is so freaking good, and it’s reminding me of why I really loved that series back when Brian K. Vaughn and various artists were doing it back in the day. It’s just such a great kind of teen adventure story and she just makes these characters sing for me. And I’m just, I’m in love with Gerty and Molly and the rest of them, all over again. And I’m just so happy that it’s back.
Annalee: [00:42:08] Yeah, that’s great. I love the original series, too. It’s so good.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:13] What are you obsessed with, Annalee?
Annalee: [00:42:15] I am obsessed with Sarah Gailey’s new novella called Upright Women Wanted.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:19] Yeah!
Annalee: [00:42:19] Which is a post-apocalyptic western and it’s all about rebuilding after there’s been some kind of terrible collapse of the United States and the heroes are a group of queer librarians who defeat bad guys literally from horseback with guns and they have a caravan where they bring books around to different tiny towns on the frontier and rescue queer people who are being abused. And it’s like basically everything your heart needs to be soothed in troubled times. When you’re feeling like no one’s gonna come and help you, just imagine badass librarian gunslingers coming to rescue you with knowledge and queer sexuality and nonbinary gender and it’s just. It’s a book that will soothe your soul. So definitely check it out.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:16] That’s awesome.
Annalee: [00:43:18] All right. You have been listening to Our Opinions Are Correct. We love you so much.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:23] We really do.
Annalee: [00:43:24] If you would like to support us, we have a Patreon and you can find it at patreon.com/OurOpinionsAreCorrect. If you sign up, you’ll get audio extras, you’ll get a chance to read Charlie Jane’s and my works in progress. We also post little writing prompts and weird scientific facts every week and you will get to know that you’re warming our hearts by helping to support this show. You can also find us on anywhere your podcasts are distributed electronically. We really appreciate it if you can leave a review for us on Apple Podcasts, it helps people find us. You can find us on Twitter at @OOACpod. And many thanks to our incredible producer Veronica Simonetti here at Women’s Audio Mission in San Francisco, and thanks to Chris Palmer for the music. And thanks to you for listening.
[00:44:19] And we will talk to you later on the interwebs.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:22] Bye!
Annalee: [00:44:23] Bye!
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