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Dividing Marital Property Fairly Takes Experience
One of the most critical matters to address in a divorce is the division of property between the divorcing spouses. If you are facing divorce, it is important to have one of our experienced family law attorneys on your side. Without the best representation, your interests will not be protected.
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The most accurate way of predicting attorneys' performance in the future is to examine the results they have achieved in the past.
Our client came to us after a Sexual Assault of a Child allegation came out from his wife in the middle of a child custody fight. We not only got those false charges dismissed without an indictment, we got his minor son back that his ex-wife had kidnapped after the false allegations were dropped. -B.D.R.
Our client ceased payments of agreed spousal support upon remarriage of his ex-spouse. Following another argument, the ex-spouse filed a Motion for Enforcement. At trial, the Court requested briefs that both parties provided to the Court. The Court ruled that the spousal support was unenforceable. The ex-spouse appealed, and that Court requested additional briefs. The appeals court ruled in favor of our client and ordered the ex-wife to reimburse our client for costs and expenses.-R.P.
This was an Attorney General Child support case where the father, a disabled veteran, owed in excess of $25,000 plus penalties and interest in back child support. At the hearing, delinquent support was reduced by over $12,000 and all penalties and interest were vacated. Reasonable payments toward the delinquency within the father's budget were set.- J.O.
From a Mother & Father - Chip, Thank you for taking care of our son in court. He was visibly shaking when the other side showed up today. Until that point he was doing just fine. You took him under your wing and protected him and his son. There are no words to express our gratitude.- C.K. & S. K.
A former spouse tried to have our client arrested by falsely claiming he molested their daughter during the marriage in order to gain full custody of their child and to prevent him from having access to the child. We not only avoided the criminal prosecution, but also gained the father possession and access to his minor daughter through the family law court.- A.V.
Note from a Divorce Client -- "Again, I want to thank you so much for your time and work you've put into my case. I have full confidence in Mr. Pelley and want you to know how thankful I am to have put my trust in you."- R.S.
In this Attorney General Child Support Case, our client (the father) owed a ton of back child support payments as well as penalties and interest. At the hearing, Mr. Pelley got the delinquent support reduced by more than 50% and all penalties and interest were vacated. Our client was placed on a reasonable payment plan to get caught up.- A.N.
From a Mother & Father – Chip Thank you for taking care of our son in court. He was visibly shaking when the other side showed up today. Until that point he was doing just fine. You took him under your wing and protected him and his son. There are no words to express our gratitude. - C.K. & S. K
We saved this client a bunch of money and property after he failed to timely act after finding out his wife filed for divorce. Prior to hiring us, our client failed to file an answer after being served with a Petition for Divorce. The Court entered a default judgment awarding his ex-wife large portions of his share of the community property and 50% of our client's separate property. Additionally, the Court ordered exorbitant amounts for child support and spousal support. Our Motion for New Trial was granted and the Court vacated all prior orders.- B.M.
We got our client (the father) awarded possession of two minor females. He came to us seeking primary custody of his two minor female children. The mother filed unfounded criminal charges against the father, reported abuse to CPS, claimed that he threatened physical harm to the kids and also that he threatened to kill her. She actually filed felony aggravated assault charges against him. After hiring us, the false criminal charges were dropped, he prevailed with sole custody and the Court granted his every request about property.-S.P.
This was an incredible case where we won custody for a minor child for a brother over his biological father. The mother of minor female child died leaving the father as the only living conservator. The child wanted to live with his older brother rather than the father. We intervened and requested the Court for primary custody of the child. The father contested and the case was set for trial. Our client (the brother) was appointed sole managing conservator of the child with father's rights and privileges subject to approval of brother and the child.- R.W.
Our client owed in excess of $80K in back child support and a lot of credit card debt. We filed a Chapter 7 bankruptcy for him and the Attorney General's Office failed to file a proof of claim for the child support listed in the bankruptcy. The bankruptcy was completed and the child support claim was discharged. The Attorney General's office filed multiple motions with the Federal Bankruptcy Court to allow them to proceed with collection efforts against our client. We contested their motions and the Federal Court denied all of their motions. The Attorney General then demanded a trial in State Court. We proceeded to trial in State Court and the Court confirmed that the child support was discharged and our client walked away free and clear of any child support.- D.W.
Divorce Client's Letter to our Divorce Paralegal-- Mary Jones, Thank you for all your help and support. I am blessed that God placed you in my path, along with the Pelley's. You are all amazing. Thank you.- M.S.
I would highly recommend the Pelley Law Firm to anyone in need of Legal Representation. Mr. Pelley's paralegal, Mary has many years of experience and shows it in her performance. Having Chip Pelley represent me put me at ease in dealing with a very anxious situation.Never did I feel intimidated by the opposing counsel's threats or actions. I believe that Chip Pelley brought my legal situation to a quick conclusion while protecting my rights and keeping me on track for a quick resolution while both minimizing my legal cost and legal exposure. I will use this firm again in the future. Thank you Chip and Mary I appreciate the first class service that you provided!! -D.S.
[I] also wanted to thank you from the bottom of my heart for ALL your help through this terrible nightmare. God bless and have a nice day. - B.L.R.
Prior to this custody case, our client was charged with endangering her children by driving drunk with them in the car. The ex-husband pressed hard to gain custody of the kids. However, Mr. Pelley was able to win the case and help M.K. keep custody of her children. - M.K.
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Remembering J. Hillis Miller (1928–2021)
February 9, 2021 May 30, 2021 / Bradley J. Fest / 1 Comment
Screenshot of Skype interview on July 17, 2013. Bradley J. Fest, Pittsburgh, PA; J. Hillis Miller, Deer Isle, ME.
I was deeply saddened yesterday to learn that J. Hillis Miller, at the age of 92, has died.[1] Though I was never his student and only corresponded with him electronically via Skype and email, Hillis had been a powerful presence in my life since 2013 and over the years showed me unflagging (at time flabbergasting) generosity and support. I owe a great deal of my post-PhD intellectual and professional development to his influence, as I probably learned more about late twentieth-century literary criticism and theory from researching his work and conducting and collaboratively editing an interview with him than anything else I did in graduate school or since. Perhaps most importantly, however, in every exchange, Hillis was simply a model of grace and kindness. He represents for me a way of being gently in the world that I still look to as an aspirational ideal. He was not only an intellectual giant and an unparalleled reader and critic, J. Hillis Miller was a torch-bearer for what our profession—and the life of letters—could be at its best. His passing may very well mark the end of an era in United States intellectual culture and is a huge loss for the uncountable number of people he touched with his life and work.
When I think back to what should have been one of the most important memories of my career—my dissertation defense in April 2013—my primary recollection of that day is how it marked the beginning of my correspondence with Hillis. During the defense, in a discussion of my chapter on William Carlos Williams and its engagement with Hillis's important 1966 edited collection on Williams's work, along with that book's recovery of the prose sections of Spring and All (1923), my dissertation chair, Jonathan Arac, suggested, "Why don't you interview Miller? Would you be interested in doing that?"[2] My mind on many other things, understandably, I think I stammered out a, "Sure, yeah, um, that'd be great," but I figured it was just an idea that burst briefly into the air during a public conversation, a possibility never to seriously be pursued, something that would fade imperceptibly away. I didn't really give the possibility much more thought as I then spent the rest of the day celebrating my successful defense with my partner and brother, who had flown in for the occasion. So, it was with some surprise when, later that day, at a talk by Priscilla Wald in advance of her faculty seminar at the University of Pittsburgh's Humanities Center, Jonathan came up to me and said, "I emailed Hillis and he already got back to me. He's up for it. I'll forward you the email and you can go from there." (So: thank you Jonathan. See Robert T. Tally Jr.'s recent post on Jonathan Arac's mentorship on the occasion of his retirement.)
Oh my. I had thought I was done with this huge task—writing a dissertation—and all of a sudden, I had what I felt was an even more daunting one: doing justice to the work of J. Hillis Miller. But I was up for it. Hillis and I corresponded and he, knowingly or not, immediately made me feel like interviewing him was something I could actually, like, do. And then I got to work. I read and read. I went on vacation to Rocky Point in Mexico with my brother and his family and spent the majority of the time reading. During my one day on the beach, I forgot to put sunscreen on my feet and they got very badly burned, which rendered me basically supine inside for the remainder of the trip. Which wasn't so bad, as I spent it reading Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (1966) and The J. Hillis Miller Reader (ed. Julian Wolfreys, 2005) and Theory Now and Then (1991) and a lot of things surrounding his famous essay "The Critic as Host" (1977).[3] I read more, as much as I could, so much, but, as he had authored well over thirty books at the time, I also realized that I wasn't going to be able to be exhaustive (as I have strived to be in subsequent interviews) if I had any hope of conducting the interview by July. And then I wrote some questions and figured out how to record a Skype call and Hillis and I talked and then I sat down to do the work of transcription and editing. And then he gave me his real gift: I got to see, just a little bit, what it was like for him to write, as we exchanged a couple drafts back and forth, editing the piece collaboratively. That interview, "Isn't It a Beautiful Day? An Interview with J. Hillis Miller," published in 2014 in boundary 2, is probably the publication of which I am the proudest and it's the one I feel might have the most lasting import. It gives a glimpse on an entire intellectual world and speaks directly to many of the present concerns of that summer (the Snowden revelations, the ongoing crisis in the humanities, et cetera). (The interview was also reprinted in a collection of interviews with Hillis edited by Jonathan Y. Bayot, Reading Inside Out: Interviews and Conversations [2017].)
But that wasn't the end of our correspondence. Year in and out, he supported me on my seemingly interminable quest to find a tenure-track job and also kept me in the collaborative loop, suggesting me as a respondent for a special two issues of the journal CounterText devoted to his book with Ranjan Ghosh, Thinking Literature across Continents (2016). That essay, "Reading Now and Again: Hyperarchivalism and Democracy in Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller's Thinking Literature across Continents," was published in 2018, and it represents for me an opportunity to think through his body of work (somewhat obliquely, admittedly) while also trying to respond directly and specifically to a small moment in that corpus.
And let me be clear: I was not a student, not a colleague at Johns Hopkins or Yale or the University of California Irvine, not a Victorianist nor a modernist; I was just a kind of random person he didn't really know or have any connection with whom he graciously invited into his working world and kept supporting after the immediate work of the interview was over (and whom he could have reasonably told, at any point, "Alright, thanks, that was great, goodbye," or even, "Go jump in a lake!"). I can only imagine the impact he has had on so many students, critics, scholars, and writers over the past sixty plus years if he was able to play such a large role in my life. And, as I'm writing this, I am also realizing that I'm in the midst of finalizing my spring 2021 syllabi (the semester is starting a few weeks later than normal because of the global pandemic) and just remembered that I had already, of course, put one of his essays on a draft of my ENGL 190 Introduction to Textual Analysis syllabus. I know that, for as long as I'm writing and reading, I will continue to think with him.[4] COVID-19 has taken so much from so many. I look forward to a time when I can again be in a classroom (without masks) sharing Hillis's work with a new generation of readers. And I sincerely hope that one day I can look back on this particular moment as another turning point, when life went off in a new, unexpected, positive direction, a direction that, once again, changed everything.
[1] Eric Hayot, in a moving memory of Miller from Hayot's first year at Yale, reports the cause of death. There has also already been an outpouring of grief, memory, and gratitude on Twitter: see Merve Emre, Harris Feinsod, @V21collective, and many others.
[2] See J. Hillis Miller, ed., William Carlos Williams: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966).
[3] I still feel a burning, aching pain on the tops of my feet when I think about Hillis's discussion of Wallace Stevens in Poets of Reality. See J. Hillis Miler, Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966), 217–84.
[4] There are so many of his books that should be required reading, but I have definitely thought on multiple occasions that Reading Narrative (1998) is perhaps criminally under-read.
"2014.07," "2014.08," "2015.03," "2015.07," and "2015.08" in The Airgonaut
February 3, 2018 February 3, 2018 / Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment
"2014.07," "2014.08," "2015.03," "2015.07," and "2015.08," five more sonnets from my ongoing sequence, are in the February issue of the online journal, The Airgonaut. (The poems were posted as a .pdf to preserve the formatting of the poems' footnotes; a link here.)
Review of David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing"
December 15, 2017 December 27, 2017 / Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment
I just found a review by Mathias Nilges, published earlier this year, of David Foster Wallace and "The Long Thing": New Essays on the Novels (Bloomsbury, 2014), edited by Marshall Boswell. Nilges discusses at some length my contribution to the volume, "'Then Out of the Rubble': David Foster Wallace's Early Fiction." The review was published in the American Literary History Online Review, series ix, January 2017.
June 19, 2015 July 29, 2016 / Bradley J. Fest / 1 Comment
Apocalyptexts 5: Notes on Avengers: Age of Ultron, Mad Max: Fury Road, San Andreas, Tomorrowland, and Other Gleefully Thanatical Films
After brewing throughout the late twentieth century and 2000s, over the last five years (2010–15) we have seen the full emergence of a new cinematic cultural dominant: the summer blockbuster megadisaster film. Certainly there is a wonderfully long list of antecedent disaster films, but the summer blockbuster of the second decade of the twenty-first century has significantly raised the size, scale, and frequency of spectacular destruction while simultaneously swelling box office profits. The summer blockbuster of the 2010s—one of the most visible and profitable forms of contemporary popular culture—frequently displays what I, loosely following McKenzie Wark, would call "thanaticism": "a gleeful, overly enthusiastic will to death."[1] 2015's summer blockbusters are exemplary: Avengers: Age of Ultron, Mad Max: Fury Road, San Andreas, and Tomorrowland (and others I am surely leaving out, such as Jurassic World), are terribly thanatic films. Each film, to a different degree, embraces or exploits spectacular representations of destruction (San Andreas). Each is clearly thinking about what disaster means in the age of observable climate change, global risk, and hyperobjects (Avengers). And in their better moments, these films ask their viewers what it means to look at and consume megadeath represented with a glorious abandon.[2] Even more rarely, they also dare to ask what it means that people are making money off such images (Tomorrowland, sort of) and maybe even how to talk about changing things (Mad Max, again, sort of). Concerning these latter two points, 2015 might also be a watershed for the summer megadisaster film in that Mad Max and Tomorrowland are critically self-aware of inhabiting this genre, something at this point not frequently seen outside of parody and satire.
It is hardly surprising, however, that these massively expensive films that gleefully embrace pornographic orgies of destruction were released in 2015 and that they are (for the most part) grossing gobs of money. Over the past few years, the big screen has been inundated by ecstatic thanoptic fury during the summer months. 2012 solidified this trend with The Avengers, Battleship, The Dark Knight Rises, Iron Sky, and Total Recall. 2013: Elysium, Iron Man 3, Man of Steel, Pacific Rim, Star Trek Into Darkness, This Is the End, White House Down, The World's End, and World War Z. 2014: Aftermath, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Edge of Tomorrow, The Giver, Godzilla, Lucy, The Purge: Anarchy, Snowpiercer, SuperMegaDestructionofEveryingEver, Transformers 4: Age of Extinction, and X-Men: Days of Future Past.[3] Such films, diverse as they may be, in varying degrees signal that there has fully emerged a mass-destruction genre unique to contemporaneity, and that, by and large, twenty-first-century disaster films have departed from the twentieth-century postmodern national fantasy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).[4]
I would like to propose a theoretical grab bag of tentative explanations for the extremely successful emergence of what I am calling here the "capitalist megadisaster film."
First, extending Wark's discussion of thanaticism, each of these films inhabits—critically, unintentionally, or otherwise—one of the central paradoxes of life in the twenty-first century: that unchecked capitalist production will consume all the carbon resources on the planet, burn them into the atmosphere, and thereby make the planet unlivable. More than merely an update of Sigmund Freud's death drive,[5] Wark intends thanaticism as an explanatory term that better captures such global economic, environmental, and biological realities than terms such as neoliberalism, postfordism, or late capitalism. Thanaticism is "a social order which subordinates the production of use values to the production of exchange value, to the point that the production of exchange value threatens to extinguish the conditions of existence of use value. . . . Exchange value has to unreel its own inner logic to the end: to mass extinction."[6] Thanaticism underlies the capitalist megadisaster film. All of these films, knowingly or not, are responses to the despair of contemporaneity: the world is sliding slowly, constantly, and irrevocably toward (a) disaster (that is already occurring), and we appear to be gleefully celebrating this fact. We cannot look away nor can we imagine changing the disaster's trajectory (with anything less than the intervention of fantasmatic posthuman supergods). Thanaticism is what makes the narratives of Mad Max: Fury Road and Tomorrowland even conceivable as products to be sold to large audiences in the first place.[7] The capitalist megadisaster film is part of the global cultural logic of thanaticism.
Closely related to this, the summer megadisaster blockbuster is also a great example of what Mark Fisher calls "capitalist realism": "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it."[8] Following Fredric Jameson's famous quip that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,[9] Fisher locates in such exemplary texts like Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006) "the suspicion that the end has already come."[10] The megadisaster film is one of the principle vehicles for capitalist realism, and the blockbusters of 2015 are exemplary expressions of it.
Third, in a variety of ways these films are all (inherently futile) attempts at totalization, attempts to think the impossible totality of contemporaneity. In this, the capitalist megadisaster film grapples with what Timothy Morton calls "hyperobjects . . . things massively distributed in time and space relative to humans."[11] Hyperobjects in their size and scale far exceed an individual human's capacity for knowing or comprehending them. Global warming, the Milky Way Galaxy, the totality of the capitalist system, the internet, plastic, all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere—these are all hyperobjects. They are massive in physical scale and extend into deep time, and can be both the result of human activity and/or radically nonhuman. The effects of global warming will still be around one million years from now. In tens of thousands of years one of the clearest indicators of previous human existence will be a thin layer of plastic in the geologic record. Objects that exist at these kinds of scales dwarf our ability to concretely know them in anything except the abstract.
Morton suggests that "all those apocalyptic narratives of doom about the 'end of the world' are, from [the] point of view [of hyperobjects], part of the problem, not part of the solution. By postponing doom into some hypothetical future, these narratives inoculate us against the very real object that has intruded into ecological, social, and psychic space. . . . The hyperobject spells doom now, not as some future date."[12] Though I think that Morton is correct—both about what Jacques Derrida would call the to come of apocalyptic futurity, especially as it pertains to cold war nuclear narratives,[13] and about late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century environmental catastrophe narratives set close to the present as insufficient engagements with contemporary global risk[14]—I would like to suggest that the megadisaster films of the 2010s are beginning to perceive doom not at some point in the future, but in our present, all around us. As Steven Shaviro has written about our attempts to understand hyperobjects: "We may model [a hyperobject] mathematically and computationally; or else we may encapsulate it in the form of a story. One of the great virtues of science fiction in particular is that it works as a kind of focusing device, allowing us to feel the effects of these hyperobjects—of digital technology, or capitalism, or climate change—intimately and viscerally, on a human and personal scale, contained within the boundaries of a finite narrative."[15]
Take, for instance, Joss Whedon's (intolerably boring) Avengers: Age of Ultron. The film is populated by attempts to grasp hyperobjects on a human scale through narrative.[16] We may not be able to completely grasp the awesome power of all the hydrogen bombs in the world, but The Hulk as an indestructible violent force of nature captured by human technological abilities (or accidents) makes a certain kind of sense. A transcendent posthuman singularity may be so far beyond human knowing that it exceeds the combined brainpower of all the seven billion people on Earth, but The Vision walking around, talking, and fighting bad guys is eminently graspable. All the Avengers arguably stand for, allegorize, and allow us to feel the effects of hyperobjects. Captain America, well, is the United States (in all of its exceptionalist, imperialist glory, while still trying to look like a really nice guy who can, like, "lead"). Hawkeye is humanity just trying to get by without any superpowers in a world that has quickly outpaced him (yes, the species is also a hyperobject). Quicksilver is something like duration, or speed, or the fabric of space-time itself. The Black Widow might be said to stand in for the combined intelligence forces of the US and the Soviet Union during the cold war, now divested of their previous ties and operating black sites without any oversight, obliquely hidden from the world stage—such as Blackwater. The Scarlet Witch has unique access to interiority: emotion, memory, et cetera, so she might be a nice analogue for the immense surveillance powers of the contemporary internet, whether the NSA or Amazon, and its ability to understand and track affect through consumerism. I've never been clear on Thor. He is, what, like a god? So he acts like one of the new gods, the emergent posthuman beings of the present (like capitalism [recently] becoming artificially intelligent). And, of course, bankrolling the whole thing is Iron Man, a thinly veiled, walking allegory for neoliberalism and its ideological fantasy of the mythical genius inventor-entrepreneur as the ideal subject of the twenty-first century. And who are they all fighting? Ultron, who takes control of the totality of contemporary digital technology, becoming nothing less than the technological or postmodern sublime. With Avengers we are in the orbit of Northrop Frye's archetypes.[17] But we are also in the thoroughly un-, post-, or superhuman; we are in the realm of hyperobjects.
There have been a variety of explanations for the rise of the superhero genre in the twenty-first century. Most clearly, CGI has made possible the representation of acts of superhumanity, images impossible before CGI's digitally rendered dreamscapes. Hollywood has capitalized on these new mimetic capacities in the form of serialized meganarratives like Avengers. Grant Morrison, important writer of superhero comics in his own right, has speculated that superheroes have taken the place of myth in modernity, these myths mirroring those of the Greeks but updated for the needs of the present. Batman can be a dark crime fighter against corruption in the 1930s (or really whenever), a campy psychedelic ironic knowing-smile in the television show of the 1960s, a reflection of cinematic excess in the 1990s, and neoliberal crusader in the 2000s.[18] And Dan Hassler-Forest has convincingly argued that the rise of the superhero genre should be understood as reflecting the post-9/11 policies of the Bush administration.[19]
Tying these three explanations together and extending them, Avengers is a failed attempt to think life in the age of hyperobjects, but one that we should nonetheless take seriously, especially because of its failures. It is easy to read superheroes allegorically, as I just have above, but the emergence of a cinematic form that is so thoroughly allegorical and archetypal should be cause for reflection. As Alexander R. Galloway has suggested recently, there is an "unrepresentability lurking within information aesthetics,"[20] and indeed, we can and should say that there is an unrepresentability lurking within hyperobjects; they are difficult to visualize. But the superhero film allows us to construct allegories for them, which is one way of confronting this kind of unrepresentability. Iron Man is not a hyperobject in himself.[21] Avengers does not represent hyperobjects because it cannot. As Shaviro suggests, the speculative nature of science fiction (SF) allows us to see and feel the effects of hyperobjects. And this is what Avengers does. Some of the effects of hyperobjects, at least in Avengers 1 and 2, are massive battles, destruction, catastrophe, alien invasion, wormholes, nukes, an out-of-control Hulk, an imminent galaxial threat, et cetera. The effects are astounding and beyond any individual's understanding of the world. So more than anything, what Avengers allegorically makes clear is how the rest of us confront hyperobjects: with huge difficulty. The effect of hyperobjects, at least for this SF text, is dumbfounded awe and paralysis.
Avengers presents a world in which the normal human has little to no ability to affect the world. The struggles and conflicts of contemporaneity take place at a level far above and beyond everyday humanity. Humans are just potential victims; buildings are just potential rubble. Avengers imagines a world of warring hyperobjects, beings so far above and beyond human capacities that the human becomes displaced entirely. The scene where the Avengers "escape" and regroup back to Hawkeye's family farm makes this clear. Humans (and Hawkeye) have no place here, no capacity to understand or converse with hyperobjects. Hawkeye's contributions to the film demonstrate that humans can participate within the realm of hyperobjects, they can influence, create, and destroy them. They can even be them. But no matter what, humans are in some fashion ontologically displaced by the presence of these new nonhuman superbeings. Giving these transcendent heroes a safe haven is a cruel joke. They do not need any such succor, for humans, at the end of the day, are left standing in awe of these demigods, dumbfounded, waiting to be saved or destroyed, with no capacity for imagining any other response or way of being. (Hawkeye also displays such a reaction at times.[22])
In many ways, too, this is what the film is explicitly about. Avengers lays bare the despair of humanity in the age of global climate change. In the twenty-first century we are all extras in a superhero blockbuster but with very little say in the matter. Further, Morton suggests that the brute reality of hyperobjects is becoming more and more apparent. Recent books like Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (2014), like Avengers, dramatize that our understanding of the world and experience of reality is increasingly one intimately tied to our attempts to narrate hyperobjects. But we need to tell stories not only about capitalism v. the climate (which we certainly do!), but capitalism v. the climate v. hydrocarbons v. energy v. drought v. terrorism v. DNA v. infectious diseases v. the internet v. the NSA, Google, and Amazon v. the US government v. globalism v. radiation v. inevitable human extinction along the scale of deep time v. corporate speech v. et cetera v. et cetera. With its panoply of inconceivable, nonhuman forces, Avengers is evidence of the desperate need to dramatize some of the complicated conflicts and immense objects that define global modernity.[23] That the film cannot imagine any place for humans except as spectators or cliché cinematic heroes going "above and beyond the call of duty" (like Hawkeye or Black Widow) is only further evidence of the foreclosure of the contemporary utopian imagination.
Given that the totality of Avengers is fifty years of comics and a whole lot else, this is even more cause for alarm. What is being called the Marvel Cinematic Universe is (so far) twelve films, two major television network series, five Netflix series, and another ten films that have been announced! Avengers is a cinematic megatext without equal. It is a narrative world that seems to be exponentially accumulating, almost as if it is an organism of its own, and it has absolutely absorbed the popular imagination of the over-developed world during the past few years, more than any other single text (if its box office success is a measure of such things). If SF can help us to feel the effects of hyperobjects through finite narrative, Avengers also reveals the incapacity for infinitely accumulating serial meganarratives to coherently confront anything except the brute, overwhelming reality of hyperobjects. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, twenty-first-century thanaticism is merely met with an outpouring of more thanaticism, which is why it is all so profitable. Within the heterogeneity, hybridity, and difference that some see as defining features of contemporaneity,[24] capitalist megadisasters speak a single global language that it seems like most anyone can understand. In the face of the massive global popularity of both the superhero and megadisaster films, the inability for these forms to do anything except politically, psychically, ideologically, conceptually, and economically proliferate thanaticism should give their audiences significant pause.[25]
The failure of Avengers to do anything but highlight the brute facts of contemporaneity are even more apparent in San Andreas. An awful film that uses megadeath as mere window dressing for an overwrought, boring, and cliché family melodrama, director Brad Peyton's San Andreas is the capitalist megadisaster at its most insidious and ideologically dangerous. Like Roland Emmerich's films before it, San Andreas abandons any coherent engagement with contemporary geology or climate science for cheap crisis and peripeteia. Yes, California is due for another major earthquake, and certainly there are real fears about a major quake that has fascinated the US imaginary at least since Earthquake (1974). But for San Andreas to project such hyperbolic levels of destruction only serves to utterly distract from the concrete realities of contemporary global risk. San Andreas does not even need to shrilly deny climate change by screaming on the floor of the House of Representatives about global warming being a liberal hoax. San Andreas just calmly points toward a different, utterly unrelated disaster, which still bears all the markings of spectacular environmental destruction.[26] By doing so, the realities of global warming are sublimated into a fantasmatic image. And because it still looks like an ecological disaster film, we can ignore that it does not address climate change once.
In this fashion, San Andreas could be considered a baseline norm for how capitalist megadisasters channel the thanaticism of contemporaneity. The film brutally destroys most of metropolitan Los Angeles and San Francisco for the sheer spectacle of doing so rather than for making any point about the need to address the realities of the Anthropocene. Its narrative could be told just as effectively with, like, an-almost-but-not-quite-fatal small house fire or some other real but minor crisis. Nothing in the story it is trying to tell needs a massive earthquake for the narrative's realization. One might suggest, like Roland Emmerich's films before it, that the film's real and only goal is to show destruction, and thus this hackneyed narrative is just a loose vehicle for getting as many falling buildings on-screen as possible. But the intolerable amount of time it spends on the narrative and not on falling buildings suggests the opposite. What if, rather than the actual subject of the film, its massive destruction is just the only way we can understand and represent the banal crises of upper-to-middle class life in the contemporary US? Massive destruction, in this, merely becomes the norm, the constant background radiation of the over-developed world. All activities, no matter how trite or insignificant, can be made meaningful only in terms of the slow violence of the present. How does one address the complexities of dealing with separation, the threat of divorce, and marital reconciliation in 2015? Through billions in property damage and the deaths of hundreds of thousands.[27]
It is the final scene of San Andreas, however, that captures the audacity of the film's despair best.[28] The final shots show Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and family, having all survived and lovingly reunited, standing on a hill overlooking a collapsed Golden Gate Bridge, a flooded San Francisco, massive rubble from toppled skyscrapers, and a fleet of ships (and an aircraft carrier!) spearheading the relief effort. The Rock's wife asks him, "What do we do now?" There is a brief pause here. A pause long enough for me to have thought to myself while watching the movie, "Please don't say 'rebuild.' That would be ludicrous! Did you not see and experience what just happened? That was clearly awful and could have been avoided if, say, one didn't build massive cities upon fault lines!" But that is precisely what The Rock says: "Rebuild." I have not seen a cinematic moment that so perfectly captures thanaticism better than this one word uttered by The Rock. Rebuild!
As Mike Davis and many others have made clear at some length, Los Angeles has long been a site of frequent and diverse disaster; geographically, it is a particularly poor place to build a megalopolis.[29] San Francisco, though not as singular a point of potential disaster as the City of Angels, has been hit by major earthquakes multiple times and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Further, as should be apparent in 2015 with the historic droughts ravaging California, The Golden State will be particularly susceptible to climate change in a variety of ways. At a structural, economic, and civic level, rebuilding hardly seems the answer. Rather than a ringing pronouncement of human fortitude and courage in the face of adversity, the Rock's incongruous final words signal a radical despair.
San Andreas is capitalist realism through and through because the film cannot possibly imagine any other response to disaster on this scale. Obviously the earthquake is an analogue for the natural disasters that have occurred around the world over the past decade.[30] This kind of film cannot imagine any alternative to this endless series of present and future disasters except the endless reproduction of an order that will produce more disasters ad nauseam. This is thanaticism. This is the audacious despair at the heart of contemporaneity. As Klein points out about what she calls "disaster capitalism," neoliberalism particularly thrives on crisis, and in this sense, "rebuild" might be considered disaster capitalism's mantra.[31] Faced with massive destruction, destruction intimately tied to geography and locality, to places that are not all that optimal for building massive cities, the contemporary imagination can do nothing except produce more catastrophe. Not only does it not occur to The Rock that they could rebuild somewhere else, but it certainly does not cross his mind that they might not rebuild but rethink, or even unbuild. Rebuilding guarantees more disaster, which will be profitably put on screen, which will serve to perpetuate the logic of disaster capitalism, which will be put on screen, which will lead to more and more rebuilding. This is the logic of the capitalist megadisaster film in a nutshell. The genre's thanaticism is unmistakable.
But if Avengers and San Andreas could be said to represent a kind of apotheosis of despair in the capitalist megadisaster genre, I would like to spend the rest of these brief and experimental notes suggesting that Mad Max: Fury Road and Tomorrowland gesture toward the beginning of a filmic imaginary capable of coherently (and even profoundly) confronting the thanaticism of contemporaneity.
I was honestly shocked by how much I liked and how moved I was by Tomorrowland. The thesis of the film is simple: the beautiful, utopian vision of the future that characterized certain strains of the 1950s imaginary, and which gave birth to the section of theme park at Disneyland that is the film's namesake, is over. We no longer have any vision of a better future. Utopia is nostalgic, retro, base, naïve, gone. One of the theses underlying much of Jameson's work, especially on SF—that the utopian imagination has been foreclosed by late capitalism—is the thesis of Tomorrowland![32] Further, the film explicitly says that the waning of utopia, the disappearance of a bright and hopeful future, is because of all the capitalist megadisaster films. The massive proliferation and popularity of the spectacle of disaster in the early twenty-first century is the very thing that forecloses the future because these kind of projections shut down our ability to imagine anything else.[33] The film's answer to this situation is also straightforward. We need to massively reinvest in an anti-eschatological imagination, in humanistic activity, in art.[34] And all that is not even the most uplifting part: Tomorrowland is a children's film. Who would not want their children being exposed to such a seemingly necessary and (gasp!) hopeful message?
But we should also be skeptical of something that may just ostensibly be a vehicle to increase attendance to a waning section of Disney's theme parks, which has, for sixty years, been nostalgically profiting off of representing a mythical 1950s moment of American exceptionalism that never existed. For we should not mistake Tomorrowland's primary purpose: to make sure that whatever sense of the future we have, it will be a Disney® future. The imagination and the future have always been among The Walt Disney Company's principal products. And a movie about (i.e., promoting) an area of a theme park is baldly selling us this particular mode of utopian imagination. (This is something that Jean Baudrillard warned us of a long time ago about Disneyland.[35]) In Tomorrowland, imagining the future and imagining capitalism are inseparable. Further, a true cynic would suggest that Disney is playing the long game with Tomorrowland. They want people to look back upon the persistence of an area of a theme park devoted to thinking about the future even though we are already in it. Fifty years from now, having an old vision of a positive future to look nostalgically back upon will, I imagine, be quite profitable. That we (perhaps, depending on how bleak the future is) don't have such a vision of the future right now means that it must be manufactured so that there will be something to be nostalgic for—i.e., 2015, a time when the world had not yet descended into water wars and madness and could still imagine a better world (more on this in a moment).[36]
So, with this mind, it is telling that the movie has proved to be a notably expensive box office flop.[37] Neither utopia nor Disneytopia appears to be very profitable, especially within the regime of the sensible created by thanaticism. Perhaps this signals the utter foreclosure of the imagination: not even Disney can make utopia profitable anymore. But this also means that it is perhaps all the more remarkable that Tomorrowland exists. The film refuses to spectacularly display and profit off of the spectacle of mass destruction (and its violence is fairly kid friendly). Tomorrowland's rather striking commitment to an anti-eschatological imagination asks us economically, formally, and explicitly to think about a different world, one where utopia rather than apocalypse would be profitable. Few films accomplish such a thing, and it seems like a long time since any film has. For no other reason, Tomorrowland is a notable accomplishment.
Mad Max: Fury Road takes a decidedly different, and less rhetorically obvious approach to both inhabiting and critiquing the capitalist megadisaster film, while pointing a way beyond (and through) its form. To be clear, I think Fury Road is brilliant. I am hard pressed to think of a recent major film that have I enjoyed more and that inspired in me such serious reflection on a variety of things.[38] That such reflection was produced primarily through action sequences with astoundingly kinesthetic, violent, fast, and visceral images—rather than dialogue or exposition—I found absolutely remarkable.[39]
From the moment Fury Road begins, there is something about it that seems inevitable. This is a film that was simply waiting to be made given the aesthetic regime of contemporaneity and the emergence of the capitalist megadisaster film. Spending scant seconds reflecting on the legacy of the first three films, how its world became a postapocalyptic wasteland, and the narrative loosely stretched between Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2 (1981; The Road Warrior in the US), and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985), we are thrust into a chase scene that never truly ends until the film's teleological, orgasmic finish, punctuated by a flaming guitar ballooning out of the 3D screen in one of the most satisfying conclusions to a chase in the history of its form. Unlike Avengers, with its truly staggering amount of "character development," or San Andreas, with its family melodrama, Fury Road has stripped away everything inessential. George Miller's masterpiece has dispensed with any need for a dramatic architecture that develops in a traditional fashion. Long conversations between characters have been replaced by Max (Tom Hardy) barely grunting words while clambering over the remains of mid-century Detroit, speeding toward the blasted horizon. Flashbacks last for mere seconds, and instead we get Imperator Furiosa's (Charlize Theron's) foot on the gas.[40] Sinister monologues explaining the villain's aims and motivations have been replaced by singular images of tyrannical despotism.
Mad Max: Fury Road is what a capitalist megadisaster film looks like that no longer even bothers to try to hide its thanaticism.[41] Its cinematic accomplishment rests on the fact that, in the absence of heart-felt embraces and middle-class affect, San Andreas and Avengers would be relatively short films, and probably pretty unwatchable.[42] Fury Road can barely contain itself. Its runtime speeds by with nary a desire for the pace to be slowed, for a moment of respite from its relentless barrage of action. In this, Fury Road wonderfully captures the temporality of the present. Relentless, pounding speed fueled by hydrocarbons, ideology, enframing, and heavy metal, human life is willingly accelerating toward its purposeless, unquestioned telos and demise, and it is doing so ecstatically. It seems practically beside the point to say that such a vision of contemporaneity is a logical apotheosis of the form given the current trajectory of megadisaster cinema.
The film's vision is captured in the War Boys' mantra: "May you ride eternal, shiny, and chrome!" An automobile death cult devoted to the tyrant, Immortan Joe, the War Boys are thanatics unquestionably loyal to the regime of blood, oil, milk, and water—the fluids that define the society of Fury Road.[43] Afflicted with lymphoma, anemia, and other cancers, using human "blood bags" to stay alive, and motivated by an afterlife in Valhalla, Miller brilliantly fuses together myth and capital with his creation of the War Boys. In recent years, faced with capitalist realism's inability to imagine any other world than our own, thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek have suggested that "the solution resides in an eschatological apocalypticism which does not involve the fantasy of the symbolic Last Judgment. . . . This is what a proper political act would be today: not so much to unleash a new movement, as to interrupt the present predominant movement."[44] Žižek's point is that only a radical, apocalyptic rupture can change the thanatical trajectory of the present. The War Boys' "eternal, shiny, and chrome," however, speaks to thanaticism's potential ability to traverse apocalypse. Even after the end of the world, Miller shows us the persistence of "a gleeful, overly enthusiastic will to death."
One of the most important fictions that underlies our present neoliberalism is the idea that resources are rather infinite, that capitalism can keep consuming oil without having to regulate its use, without having to change or question itself. The free market will respond to global realities and create the best of all possible worlds. In the Mad Max universe, however, the apocalypse has come and gone but it has not dislodged the inhuman forces of capital, of thanaticism "eternal, shiny, and chrome." The shiny, gooey interfaces of contemporaneity, the chrome of automotive infrastructure, the eternity of capitalist accumulation, these all persist after the end. The mythological force of "eternal, shiny, and chrome" in Fury Road, its power to shape the imagination of the War Boys, seems hardly ideologically different than the same mythological treatment of the automobile in something like The Fast and the Furious series (2001–15). Consequently, what Fury Road suggests is something even more bleak than Žižek's thinking: even a revolutionary eschatology, even an apocalypse that disrupts and destroys the structures of our world, even a blasted wasteland without life, water, hope, or resources, even the reversion to violently oppressive feudal patriarchy, even in the face of all this, the thanatical logic of "eternal, shiny, and chrome" persists. Even after the fulfillment and realization of catastrophe, there will be more fantasmatic images of the same.
Part of Fury Road's brilliance can be located in how it refuses to shy away from such a doomy, deeply cynical vision of human life. Tomorrowland ethically refuses to dwell on spectacular destruction; spectacle is Fury Road's raison d'être. It takes the fantasmatic logic of disaster film and pushes it (and without too much CGI!) as far as it can go. It does not resist the genre. Fury Road fully inhabits it, celebrating its excess and hyperbole, its fabulous aestheticism and crass (if wildly complex) kinematics,[45] so that it can push through the genre to something else. For at the end of the day, the mantra "eternal, shiny, and chrome" is everywhere contradicted by Fury Road. Nothing is shiny. The automobiles are all mid-twentieth-century cars running on spit and hope, jerry-rigged for Armageddon.[46] Nothing is chrome. The only chrome available comes in a spray-can that poisons as it beautifies. And eternity? Death is everywhere, human society is barely hanging on to a post-biological planet that is about to enter a deep lifeless geologic nonhuman time.
Even more to the point, Fury Road, like Snowpiercer last summer, offers a rather significant vision of democratic, collective, societal transformation precisely because it pushes through (rather than against) its genre. There is no moment of revolutionary rupture, just a slow movement toward a transformation of the dominant regime by devoted revolutionaries capable of imagining a better world. Fury Road, like Tomorrowland, suggests that eschatology, in whatever form it takes, cannot create the conditions for a sustainable, livable future, nor can apocalypse serve as a way of envisioning significant social change.[47] Evan Calder Williams has powerfully suggested that "what we need, then, is an apocalypse."[48] Fury Road suggests that apocalypse is part and parcel with contemporaneity, that there is no difference between its own radical "salvage punk" ethic and the continual repurposing of the past, aesthetically and otherwise, that defines contemporary culture. By embracing thanaticism, while coherently critiquing it, exposing it for what it is, Fury Road through the capitalist megadisaster quite astoundingly arrives at something new, emergent, unseen, unheralded.
I left Tomorrowland with the profound realization that the crisis of the imagination has now become so widely acknowledged that even Disney is attempting to suggest the need to reinvest in poetics. I left Fury Road with the realization that, no matter how bleak our present and no matter how widespread the cultural logic of thanaticism and its aesthetic regime may be, there is still the possibility for aesthetic emergence, for the imagination, for new ways of thinking about and understanding our world. That a film that is nothing more than a glorified two-and-a-half-hour chase scene was able to accomplish this I find absolutely remarkable. Thus the important word in my title that might distinguish Tomorrowland and Mad Max from Avengers and San Andreas: fabulous. Mad Max is fabulous because it wholly, complexly, and critically embraces the present in all its dumb stupidity and excess, and it does so by never for a moment shying away from the aesthetic.[49] We are hearing on all sides that the humanities are over and done with, that art has no role to play other than as a commodity, that we need reconceive of, say, the English major as job preparation. In such discussions, the importance of what art is and does can often be radically obscured. Mad Max: Fury Road is a testament to the power of the aesthetic to build worlds and to present the possibility of other worlds; it puts the imagination on violent, spectacular, hyperbolic, ridiculous display. Hopefully there are many more fabulous films to come.
[1] McKenzie Wark, "Birth of Thanaticism," Public Seminar Commons 1, no. 2 (Summer 2014): http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/04/birth-of-thanaticism/.
[2] Not all the films have such better moments.
[3] N.b. that these are not exhaustive lists, merely the quickest I could generate skimming through summer releases from the past few years. This is also to note that 1) the trend of violent, spectacular, apocalyptic or postapocalyptic film is in no way a new phenomenon in United States or global cinema—i.e., the trend did not "begin" in 2012—only that it seems to have ramped up during the summer months in the past few years, and that 2012 seems as good a place to start as any (2010 or 2011 would be just as good candidates for beginning such a list, but many of those years' truly postapocalyptic films did not appear during the summer months); and 2) not all of these films might be as spectacularly violent as others, and indeed, some are satires of such violence, but they all, in some fashion or another, revolve in megadisastrous orbit. (In other words, Iron Sky was not seen by many, and it is clearly a spoof on a whole bunch of things and kind of dumb, but it is still participating in the mass-destruction genre.) Also, one of the above films was made up.
[4] By my count, though nukes frequently appear in such films, when they do appear they are thoroughly removed from their historical context as weapons potentially employed in mass quantities by sovereign states. In The Dark Knight Rises a nuclear weapon (which is not even really a nuke) is used for terrorism; in the first Avengers film, Iron Man redirects a nuclear missile aimed for New York (to kill aliens) through a wormhole to kill aliens (saving New York).
The national fantasies involved with such representations of nuclear weapons differ significantly from the nuclear texts of the cold war. For more on the transforming national fantasies of the post-cold war period, see Donald E. Pease, The New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). For some of my own further discussion of the ways the post-cold war disaster imaginary has transformed, see Bradley J. Fest, "Apocalypse Networks: Representing the Nuclear Archive," in The Silence of Fallout: Nuclear Criticism in a Post-Cold War World, ed. Michael Blouin, Morgan Shipley, and Jack Taylor (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 81–103.
[5] See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), trans. and ed. James Strachey (1961; repr., New York: W. W. Norton, 1989).
[6] Wark, "Birth of Thanaticism."
[7] There is evidence that George Miller was developing Mad Max: Fury Road since at least 2002, which makes it all the more telling that it took roughly a decade to get made. Perhaps depicting the despair of the world risk society had not yet registered as a potentially profitable situation for studio executives willing to finance such a film until recently. See Adrian Martin, The "Mad Max" Movies (Sydney: Currency Press and ScreenSound Australia, 2003), 7.
[8] Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester, UK: Zero, 2009), 2.
[9] "It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations. I have come to think that the word postmodern ought to be reserved for thoughts of this kind" (Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time [New York: Columbia University Press, 1994], xii).
[10] Fisher, 3.
[11] Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 1.
[12] Morton, 104. I also cannot help quoting Morton on the doominess of contemporaneity: "Just to go hog-wild Heidegger-style for a moment, doom comes from doom and dooms doom; this doom marks a decisive moment in which humans doom the nonhuman and thus doom the doom of Earth with greater doom" (148).
[13] See Jacques Derrida, "No Apocalypse, Not Now: Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives" (1984), trans. Catherine Porter and Philip Lewis, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, vol. 1, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 387–409.
[14] I am think especially of the work of Roland Emmerich: Independence Day (1996), Godzilla (1998), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), and 2012 (2009). Though all of these films are ostensibly set in the present, their reliance on massive, unbelievable, unscientific, fantasmatic crises occurring and then destroying massive portions of the globe puts them nearer to the tales of MAD than they are stories that dwell on the disaster of the present. For instance, 2012 does not even posit climate change as the catalyst for global destruction. Rather, it explains its global catastrophe through changes in the sun. One might even go so far as to suggest that the fantasmatic nature of Emmerich's disaster oeuvre represents a willful obfuscation of the realities of contemporary environmental issues for purely financial gain predicated on spectacular fear-mongering.
[15] Steven Shaviro, "Hyperbolic Futures: Speculative Finance and Speculative Fiction," Cascadia Subduction Zone 1, no. 2 (April 2011): 4.
[16] I owe thinking about superheroes as hyperobjects to Gerry Canavan's comments on Pacific Rim in, "Vile Offspring of the Long Postmodern: Capital as Artificial Intelligence," at the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts Conference, Notre Dame University, October 2013.
[17] See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957; repr. with a new foreword, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
[18] See Grant Morrison, Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us about Being Human (New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2011). On Batman as a stand-in for neoliberalism, see Aaron Bady, "Do Not Go Gentle Into that Dark Knight: Occupy Batman," New Inquiry (25 July 2012), http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/zunguzungu/do-not-go-gentle-into-that-dark-knight/. (Also, I wonder what the action figure for "Neoliberal Batman" would look like.)
[19] See Dan Hassler-Forest, Capitalist Superheroes: Caped Crusaders in the Neoliberal Age (Winchester, UK: Zero, 2012).
[20] Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (Malden, MA: Polity, 2012), 86.
[21] Even if my language above depends upon just such metaphor. It is really quite difficult to discuss hyperobjects without recourse to figurative language.
[22] For a take on Hawkeye that furthers the reading of him as dumbfounded sideline witness to hyperobjects, see Matt Fraction's recent run on Hawkeye, nos. 1–21 (August 2012-February 2015).
[23] I take this phrase from Arif Dirlik, "Global Modernity? Modernity in the Age of Global Capitalism," The European Journal of Social Theory 6, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 275–92.
[24] See, for example, Terry Smith, What is Contemporary Art? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
[25] After watching the finale to Season 5 of Game of Thrones (2011–15), one might be tempted to suggest this about contemporary television as well.
[26] The destruction of Los Angeles and San Francisco in San Andreas is indiscernibly different than 2012.
[27] And is this not exceptionalist US individualism at its most absurd?
[28] I owe the phrase "audacity of despair" to a couple different plays upon the title of Barack Obama's autobiography, The Audacity of Hope (New York: Crown and Three Rivers, 2006). See Donald E. Pease in "Black Orpheus, Barack Obama's Governmentality," in "9/11/2011," special issue, Other Modernities, special no. (2011): 1-28, esp. 28, where he shifts "audacity of hope" to "radical despair"; and David Simon's blog, The Audacity of Despair.
[29] See Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Vintage, 1999).
[30] E.g., Hurricane Katrina (2005), the earthquake in Haiti (2010), the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (2010), the Fukushima meltdown (2011), and Hurricane Sandy (2012).
[31] See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007).
[32] See Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (New York: Verso, 2005). This book is the final chapter in Jameson's (projected) six volume Poetics of Social Forms.
[33] As Jameson revised his famous quip: "Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world" (Fredric Jameson, "Future City" [2003], in The Ideologies of Theory [New York: Verso, 2008], 573).
[34] For my further discussion of anti-eschatology, see Bradley J. Fest, "The Inverted Nuke in the Garden: Archival Emergence and Anti-Eschatology in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest," boundary 2 39, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 125–49. (This is another way of saying Tomorrowland feels like [the end of] my elevator speech: "In order to have a better future we need an anti-eschatological imagination; literature is one mode of articulating such an imaginary.")
[35] See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (1981), trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), and America (1986), 2nd ed., trans. Chris Turner (1988; repr., New York: Verso, 2010).
[36] Or rather, in the spirit of the film's hope, remember back in 2015 when we saved the world with Tomorrowland's simple message about the imagination?
[37] See Pamela McClintock, "Disney Could Lose $140 Million on Tomorrowland Flop," Hollywood Reporter, June 10, 2015, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/disney-could-lose-140-million-801244.
[38] And as this particular essay has ballooned far past my initial plans, I will reserve many of these reflections for a later date.
[39] Fury Road, in this, is very much in line with what Steven Shaviro calls "post-cinema" in Post-Cinematic Affect (Winchester, UK: Zero, 2010).
[40] This is to say, of course, that there are a few brief interludes where we get Furiosa's backstory, but I would like to suggest that her character is developed more powerfully through action than in these brief moments of narrative exposition.
[41] As McKenzie Wark says, "All cinema is anthropocene cinema, but not all cinema knows it. George Miller, it turns out, knew all along" ("Fury Road," Public Seminar Commons, May 22, 2015, http://www.publicseminar.org/2015/05/fury-road/).
[42] Though I do think it is also inevitable that someone makes a Roland Emmerich film without any of the narrative: just two hours of disaster porn.
[43] On this point, see Wark, "Fury Road."
[44] Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (New York: Verso, 2009), 148–49. Žižek develops these points further in Living in the End Times (New York: Verso, 2010).
[45] Cinema plus kinetics.
[46] The film significantly does not have any later model cars, as they would be impossible to keep running without digital computers.
[47] Recall that radical inequality persists in Snowpiercer's vision of postapocalypse.
[48] Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (Winchester, UK: Zero, 2011), 5.
[49] I owe this point about the aesthetic dimension of Fury Road to a conversation with Racheal Forlow.
Tomaž Šalamun (1941-2014) and Other Links
January 2, 2015 December 6, 2018 / Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment
I am sad to say that Tomaž Šalamun (1941-2014), one of my most important teachers, has passed away. I have written a short remembrance of him that either will appear here or in some other form.
Tomaž Šalamun
Christopher Merrill, "Remembering Tomaž Šalamun."
Andrew Epstein, "Tomaž Šalamun (1941-2014) and the New York School."
Dalkey Archive Press on Šalamun.
And though I can't read Slovenian, there is much here, including video of a television report.
Some End of 2014 Links
December 23, 2014 December 6, 2018 / Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment
Matthew L.Wald, "Betting on the Need, Scientists Work on Lighter, Cleaner Nuclear Energy."
US National and International
Patrick L. Smith, "We Are Fucking Sadists: We Are Not Decent, and We Are Not a Democracy."
Moisés Naím, "The Cuba Deal: Why Now?"
Dan Froomkin, "Billion Dollar Surveillance Blimp to Launch over Maryland."
End of August Links
Environment and Apocalypse
Hamilton Nolan, "Doom Draws Nearer."
Daniel Cech, "How the Apocalypse Would Happen if Heaven Were a Small Nonprofit."
Robert O. Self, "Cataclysm in Suburbia: The Dark, Twisted History of America's Oil-Addicted Middle Class."
Emma Hansen, "From Nuclear Bombs to Killer Robots: How Amoral Technologies Become Immoral Weapons."
August Links
August 2, 2014 December 6, 2018 / Bradley J. Fest / 1 Comment
Its been a couple weeks since I've posted any links, so there's a bunch of stuff here.
Disaster, Nuclear, Environment, and Deep Futures
John Oliver on America's Insecure Nuclear Arsenal.
Willie Osterweil, "The End of the World as We Know It." On the reactionary politics in ancient apocalypse films.
Josh Marshall, "Disaster Porn, For Once for Real."
Ross Andersen, "When We Peer Into the Fog of the Deep Future What Do We See–Human Extinction or a Future Among the Stars?"
Radical eco-nihilism. Wen Stephenson, "'I Withdraw': A Talk with Climate Defeatist Paul Kingsnorth."
Paul Kingsnorth, "Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist."
Mark Strauss, "Space Junk Is Becoming a Serious Security Threat."
Robert T. Gonzalez, "Bad News: Scientists Have Measured 16-Foot Waves in the Arctic Ocean."
Nadia Prupis, "'There Will Be No Water' by 2040? Researchers Urge Global Energy Paradigm Shift."
Abstract: Apoclaypse on Repeat: William Carlos Williams's Spring and All and the Nuclear Imagination
May 14, 2014 June 22, 2014 / Bradley J. Fest / Leave a comment
Below is an abstract for a paper I will be presenting at the 2014 American Literature Association Conference, taking place May 22-25. I will be presenting this paper on a panel organized by the William Carlos Williams society, titled, "William Carlos Williams: The Poet-Doctor as Environmentalist." The panel will be taking place 11:10-12:30 on May 23.
Apocalypse on Repeat: William Carlos Williams's Spring and All and the Nuclear Imagination
Long out of print after their initial publication in 1923, the prose sections of Spring and All offer remarkable critical avenues for discussing William Carlos Williams's environmentalism. Serving as both a frame for some of his more well-known poetry and a theoretical engagement with the volume's central concern—the imagination—the prose of Spring and All cannot help but strike a contemporary reader with its anticipation of the post-apocalyptic and eco-disaster narratives of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. To begin the aesthetic work of poetic composition, Spring and All enacts total destruction followed by material repetition in order to allow Williams to formulate an imagination distinct from a romantic apocalyptic, a formulation essential for the development of his ecopoetics. The imagination in Spring and All is a material force. It is vibrant, organic, and radioactive. It is scientific and geological, and it is concerned with atomic physics well before the atom was split. This paper will argue that Spring and All articulates what I have called elsewhere a nuclear imagination. Drawing upon current reconsiderations of modernism's relationship to atomic technology and my own conversations with J. Hillis Miller about Williams's poetry and romanticism, I will suggest that Williams, through embracing this destructive, recursive, ironic, nuclear imagination, abandons an eschatology that could in any way be positive, even as something to be gone "beyond." In this way, reconsidering Spring and All opens up a space for the contemporary environmental imagination that is neither apocalyptic nor post-apocalyptic, but rather thoroughly material and ecological.

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C.J. Cron batted .253 with 28 doubles, 30 home runs, 74 RBIs and an .816 on-base-plus-slugging percentage in a career-best 2018 season for the Rays, who designated the 28-year-old for assignment last week.
MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The Minnesota Twins have claimed first baseman C.J. Cron off waivers from Tampa Bay, adding an accomplished replacement for the retired Joe Mauer.
With the end of Mauer's career, the only other primary first baseman on Minnesota's roster is Tyler Austin, who was acquired in a trade with the New York Yankees last summer.


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Home / Gun Ownership / Glock Around the Clock in Oregon
Glock Around the Clock in Oregon
Written by Gary North on June 19, 2013
A small town in Oregon has received a lot of media attention because local citizens have taken things into their own hands: specifically, handguns. Some of them wear T-shirts: This Is a Glock Block: We Don't Call 911.
The residents are tired of petty crime. They are tired of the local sheriff's department that can't get to the scene of a crime fast enough.
In short, they are tired of government-funded law-enforcement.
They have decided that self-defense begins closer to home: in their homes.
Gun control advocates are outraged. The local tax-funded cops aren't happy with the competition, either. A news report from citizen gun-free England says this: "Police make a note of cautioning anyone from pursuing vigilante justice, though armed citizens have become more common deterrents to crime."
"Vigilante justice" is a code phrase in cop-speak meaning "invading licensed turf."
Citizens in the United States have constitutional protection for gun ownership. Around the world, this is regarded as a peculiarity of the United States. As a matter of fact, it is. Fortunately.
Continue Reading on
12 thoughts on "Glock Around the Clock in Oregon"
Rabelrouser says:
It seems that citizens are realizing that the criminal injustice system just propagates more crime. How many times do we read of those who have committed numerious crimes again commiting another crime? Only to be back on the streets to ply their trade. It almost seems as if this is done intentionally; and when you think about the cash cow that it has become for the local system, well, it is a perfect "make work" system.
The more that individuals come together , the stronger that community becomes. People become more aware of their neighbors and work to assist and help eachother in many aspects. This is what communities were years ago, but now it is being brought back by the common goal of personal safety.
The term "Vigilante" is bantered about to promote an image of a "lawless nature"; but self protection is not being a "Vigilante". Self protection ,and the awareness of it being utilized in this manner, serves as a warning to those who would commit a crime; which will actually make the use of a firearm less likely because of its possible use against those who break the law.
The facts prove that in those states where citizens can carry concealed weapons, that crime has gone down by as much as 50%, sence the laws inception. All the political hype and fear mongering can not change that fact. The opposite is true where firearm ownership is more restricted, crime has risen and so have the associated costs perpitrated by the rise.
Bringing people together and forming community only serves to create a greater enviroment of safety, understanding and personal responsibility. It makes the people care more for their neighbors and the situations of their lives. There becomes a sense of helping eachother in all areas, not just protection.
Sounds like a win / win for the people, and lessens the burden to the criminal injustice system by detering crime; but then they dont make as much money, nor can they use statistics to demand more tax dollars, and federal grants ( tax dollars) to fight "rising crime"
I see a pattern forming.
The police (and by extension the government itself) would rather have a dead crime victim to pose next to and promise the family they will not rest until the killer is found, than to interview a still living homeowner who thwarted an attack using deadly force with a legally owned firearm.
The courts have also ruled time and again that the police have no legal obligation to protect the public that pays their salaries and benefits.
blh557 says:
Actually, overall crime is down (in the US) even in those hotbeds of crime like Chicago, LA, Philadelphia and Washout, DC. Media coverage, on the other (or is it under) hand is up significantly, leading to the findings that 57% of "people" think crime, and especially gun crime, is up. The facts are that, in the US, as opposed to, let's say Great Britain, people are becoming less likely to commit VIOLENT crime. In the UK, on the other hand VIOLENT crime has increased significantly even to the point where Britain is now being called the violence capital of Europe… and so they opt for even stiffer gun-related penalties and restrictions.
Low-brows like Piers Morgan point to the fact that gun-related crime is down significantly in the UK, although you are 1200 times more likely to be bludgeoned to death, a fact he seems to be able to avoid at all costs. The problem is that trying to compare gun-related rates of crime in the UK vs. the US is like comparing the number of auto-pedestrian accidents from 1999 with those in 1799. If there were no automobiles the rate will be lower.
The stats don't add up, though, when you look at the real numbers. Less guns has made Britain less safe… even less safe than us blood-thirsty Americans.
Now if we could just get socialized dentistry… ;)>
Jewell says:
Danno, I don't know where you get your allegations about law enforcement, but I take offense to your statements. I have two sons who are police officers and they put their lives on the line every single day to protect the people in our community. Saying they want more dead crime victims to pose beside is the most insulting, preposterous thing I have heard anyone say in a long, long time.
Not preposterous at all. It may be necessary to make a distinction between the cop-on-the-street and the political higher-ups, though. It's so common it's not even news when police unions and police chiefs lobby the legislature to take away our freedoms.
But even making a distinction between the "good" cops and the "bad" cops doesn't get to the whole story, because the "good" cops are not arresting or whistle-blowing on the bad cops. It's that whole "thin blue line" thing. Corruption rises through the ranks, and you're more likely to be corrupt the higher up you go…and if your sons are truly not corrupt, then they may well find themselves one day being forced out or forced to take night shifts if they're not willing to look aside for, or even directly support, their corrupt co-workers. If you didn't know all that already, then you're willfully blind.
Sorry, I don't agree. It may be true where you live, and I don't know where that is, but I would stake my life on there being no corruption in our police department. I know too many people and too much of what goes on in the department to accept that precept. I'm not saying it will never happen, just that it does not exist now.
Sure, I can acknowledge that there are some non-corrupt police departments in the country, although if you're talking about anything above a tiny town, you're dreaming. But the general trend is more and more militarization, more and more corruption, more and more "policing for profit". The drug war was the big foot in the door. It provides all the right (wrong) incentives to police forces to grind our liberty under foot, for fun and profit. The war on terror is even worse, although realistically it can't be used to target EVERYONE like the drug war can.
Shooting somebody with a high powered handgun results in such injury (assuming you hit them at all) that many people may be reluctant to use them. Would it make more sense to equip homeowners with a 22? They are easier to aim, less lethal, and more likely to be used. A person with a 22 could offer a threatening thug an early sample of hurt while avoiding the possibility (maybe even likelihood) of going to jail themselves.
In the event that a thief is making off with your property, shooting them in the back with something dangerous like a Glock would put you in jail. But tagging them with a 22 won't likely kill them, and even if they continue their escape will probably want the lead removed at a later date. Just the thought that there are a lot of trigger happy citizens around may deter crime. Use of a 22 makes this more of a sport than a war on crime.
dumbest comment ever… you use deadly force only to repel the threat of deadly force and you do it decisively and to stop the threat.
DEPUTY says:
Here in Bexar County you can't even get the Sheriff to patrol your neighborhood, let alone take any enforcement action, especially against Blacks who commit the majority of the crime. The Precinct 3 Constable promised to take over all of the law enforcement functions in North Bexar County, but he has done absolutely nothing in that regard, and rarely, if ever, do you see his deputies on patrol. I don't place all of the blame on law enforcement. Now days, if a law enforcement officer tries to do his/her job, they are labeled racist, especially if they take enforcement action against Blacks or Hispanics, even though these groups are the offenders. Citizens have to protect themselves!!
Are you feeble bob? Do you view every confrontation as a deadly threat? Not everybody is like that. How often do you face deadly force? Is every burglar a deadly threat to you? That's why people don't carry Glocks. That is why some people carry tasers and mace. They don't want to be responsible for someone's death, but some measure of force is desirable to deter petty criminals.
Here's another point bob: how close do you have to be to a target to be assured of hitting it? Pretty close with a Glock, not so close with a 22. Your best defense is distance and the Glock is just good close up. I'm all for gun control and that means being able to hit your target. You can hit that target farther away with a small caliber weapon.


I am on digital detox: Swara Bhasker.
Mumbai: Swara Bhasker has temporarily quit Twitter and the actor says she is on a "digital detox".
When searched for the actor's verified account with the handle, @ReallySwara, the page showed no results.
Swara told PTI that she is currently holidaying in Europe and will be back on Twitter when she returns home.
"I deactivated it. Digital detox. (I) will be back when I return to India next week," she told PTI over a series of text messages.
"I wasn't being able to enjoy my holiday and was all the time tracking what's happening in India. I just felt I'm getting addicted to Twitter," she added.
According to reports, the 30-year-old actor, who is a vocal critic of the central government, had went off the micro-blogging site due to incessant trolling on her posts.
But the actor refuted the claims, saying "All other reasons being ascribed are mere speculation and gossip!".
Swara, however, is still active on other social media platforms -- Facebook and Instagram.


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Tag Archives: The Final Conlict
#30DaysOfFright, Film
The Omen #30DaysOfFright
An American diplomat's wife loses her baby in childbirth; he is replaced by an orphan baby. A series of strange and deadly accidents occur around the family, could the spoutings of a mad clergyman be correct, can five year old Damien Thorn really be the son of the devil? Having initiated the switch at birth his father now teams up with a photographer to discover the horrific truth. Can they stop the forces of evil before they become another accident?
The devil had already become something of a movie star in Hollywood, thanks to Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist, The Omen saw him reach a box office high. I've always had a fascination with The Omen since I bought the trilogy as part of the Fox All Time Greats collection in 1987 from Woolworths in York.
We were on holiday there over Easter (irony) and what made that trip all the more memorable is that we also visited Fountains Abbey in Ripley, Yorkshire, which is where the finale of The Final Conflict takes place. Those VHS tapes took a serious hammering and I read the original books and the two further book sequels that followed.
These continue directly after the ending on the third film and were entitled Omen IV: Armageddon 2000 and Omen V: Abomination, both penned by Gordon McGill, who also wrote the adaptation of The Final Conflict.
The Omen has been a part of my life since I was at least 11 and, save for Jaws, is my favourite horror-related film. Like Jaws you could say that it taps into the disaster movie genre that was so big at the time with the likes of The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake and The Towering Inferno.
Post-Watergate it's also akin to the conspiracy thrillers of the period such as All the Presidents Men, Klute, Three Days of the Condor, Capricorn One and The Marathon Man. It probably shares most of all with The Parallax View as Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) uncovers something so vast it is almost hard to comprehend, and like Warren Beatty's character in Parallax, everyone he comes into contact with comes to a sticky end. You could even say that in many ways the endings are very similar.
It is a fantastical idea and one that is writ large. The Exorcist was about a girl in her bedroom and set in one house, this is about the man who could be the next President of the United States. It's something referenced by Kathy Thorn when she hears her husband has got the job of US Ambassador to Great Britain, a position once held by none other than JFK.
The Omen is set in the heart of the world of politics and takes place in London, Rome, Israel and er Windsor Zoo. It's practically the James Bond of horror with its globetrotting. I guess The Da Vinci Code and their sequels do the same sort of magical mystery tour thing today.
Whether you believe the story that 2000 years after the birth of Christ a comet that shines in the opposite place in the sky to that of the star of Bethlehem heralds the birth of the anti-Christ is one thing but the one thing you do believe is the performance of Gregory Peck. We follow it because he does, we share his idea that it is preposterous and then the slow realisation that this is all true.
The discovery in an abandoned graveyard that his son was murdered at birth and that the mother of the child he is raising is a jackal is compelling and heart wrenching. It's all the more poignant as the year prior to filming Peck had lost one of his own son's to suicide, something which he blamed himself for not being able to stop. Peck is of course an incredibly gifted actor and carries a huge amount of gravitas and that amazing voice. He is Abe Lincoln, he is Atticus Fitch, we will believe in him. With an actor of less stature it simply would not have worked.
The key moment where he receives a call to say that his wife has died, that phonecall he receives after she has gone out the window is crippling. He really has nothing to lose. All is lost.
And then there is that cold, numbed reciting of the "when the Jews return to Zion" poem as he lays motionless on the bed.
Peck is ably supported with former Dr Who, Patrick Troughton, in a fantastically memorable part as Father Brennan, David Warner as the photographer was something of a hero when I was younger and he's great in this. And then there's Mrs Baylock, if Damien is the anti—Christ then she is the anti-Poppins, no one had arranged for her to arrive either. She exudes quiet menace and malevolence at first; her final scenes raise the shock level to their peak.
The film also looks amazing in its widescreen which is used to brilliant effect utilising it to its full advantage and creating some mesmerising imagery that really set it apart. As well as the frame impressing so does the action taking place within in.
Director Richard Donner constructs some still impressive set pieces; it must have surely secured him directorial duties on Superman: The Movie two years later, in fact the Daily Planet helicopter incident could have come straight from The Omen.
First there is the nanny, played by Jack Palance's daughter, taking a rope-assisted dive from the Thorn mansion during Damien's fifth birthday party, the way she falls and snaps back into that glass is horrible.
A suddenly windy day will always evoke thoughts of Patrick Troughton prior to getting spiked by a church spire; this was probably the only decent scene in the 2006 remake, Troughton's role played with vigour by Pete Postlethwaite.
Kathy Thorn's fall from the balcony whilst pregnant is also fantastically taut, and the scene is brilliantly executed, along with the goldfish. The effect of the camera following on the way down is still amazing. It's my favourite single shot after the reverse zoom and simultaneous dolly shot on Chief Brody in Jaws.
And of course the decapitation by sheet of glass, with David Warner doing his own version of the head spin. You think you see more than you do the blood you think you see is pots of paint. For such a film with so many nasty deaths it's surprisingly devoid of any real blood.
I also really love the set for the cemetery, it's like a grandiose set from a classic universal horror film, it looks fantastic, gothic and moody. And then the devil dogs attack, as a scene it is relentless, as is the Goldsmith score which kicks into high gear. It's Hound of the Baskervilles turned up to 11, is dripping with menace and quite frankly is absolutely knackering. Not that there is much time to get our breath back for the remainder of the film.
Like Jerry Goldsmith's score, the only one he won an Oscar for, the film just continues to build into a crescendo, become more frenetic and consuming. That's what it does to Thorn and us; it needs to do that to convince us that he should kill a child.
Would we be able to do the same if we knew he was the son of the devil, even Peck hesitates as the child pleads "please, daddy, no!" It was always a difficult watch, even more so having a daughter around Damien's age.
Peck is armed with the daggers of Megiddo, which have to be the coolest weapons of all time, I'd so pay to see Indiana Jones and the Daggers of Megiddo. But they do him no good, he is stopped with a policeman's bullet, it's downbeat but masterful.
We can hardly believe that Gregory Peck has failed. Or has he? We then see two coffins, one for Robert Thorn and his son, Damien? No, the camera slowly pulls back to reveal a small boy is holding the hand of the president. The little boy turns with a smile that breaks across his face, it is Damien.
The film may have dated a little but there is still no denying the power of The Omen, even after all these years, it's still devilishly good.
And the story goes that if The Omen had not been the success it had been for Fox then they wouldn't have been able to spend extra money on bailing Star Wars out. That's what you call the real power of the dark side.
All the Presidents MenAtticus FitchCapricorn OneChief BrodyDaggers of MegiddoDamien ThornDavid WarnerDr WhoEarthquakeFather BrennanGregory PeckHound of the BaskervillesJack PalanceJawsJerry GoldsmithKathy ThornKluteMrs BaylockOmen IV: Armageddon 2000Omen V: AbominationPatrick TroughtonPete PostlethwaiteRichard DonnerRobert ThornRosemary's BabyStar WarsSuperman: The MovieThe Da Vinci CodeThe ExorcistThe Final ConlictThe Marathon ManThe OmenThe Parallax ViewThe Poseidon AdventureThe Towering Inferno
Event Horizon #30DaysOfFright
October 9, 2016 loxley1975	Leave a comment
It is the year 2047, the rescue ship Lewis and Clark is sent to intercept the Event Horizon, a spaceship that mysteriously vanished some seven years earlier but has reappeared. Where has it been, where is the crew and who what is the sinister presence on board? Now the rescue crew, including the creator of the Event Horizon, must rescue themselves before it is too late.
Poor Paul (WS – as he is now known) Anderson has had something of a rough ride on the science-fiction slipstream, with numerous Resident Evils, Death Race and Alien Vs Predator – the latter which I rather liked in a Big Daddy Vs Giant Haystacks kind of way – all drawing buckets of scorn.
For me though his finest hour (or hour and thirty five minutes) has always been the 1997 movie, Event Horizon, and seeing as it part-inspired the uber-atmospheric PS3 smash, Dead Space, I'm not the only one.
Essentially the movie is Hellraiser meets The Shining in space…but then the Jaws in space tag never did Alien, which it has a nod to production design and creepiness wise, any harm. And for me that is what makes the movie so much fun, that it is essentially a haunted house movie in space, which is certainly more fun and original than The House on Haunted Hill remake or GhostShip (essentially the same tale as Event but…gasp…set at sea) and certainly better than Jason X which was also set among the stars.
Featuring a stellar (or should that be interstellar) cast comprising of Sam Neill (quite literally exorcising some demons he had left over from In The Mouth of Madness) and Laurence Fishburne, Joely Richardson, a pre-Harry Potter Jason Isaacs and the always dependable Sean Pertwee.
Sam Neill, as the designer of the Event Horizon, Dr Weir, is quality as ever, exuding authority and charm at first, with a disturbing back story that haunts him and us for much of the film. At first he is essentially like Ripley in Aliens, has knowledge but not acceptance of the crew. But if he's good at being good, he's great at being evil and devilish, see the third part on The Omen trilogy, The Final Conflict, and the aforementioned In the Mouth of Madness for further proof.
Fishburne as Captain Miller, in charge of the Lewis and Clark, is a great no nonsense turn and proves quite the foil to Neill and he really convinces in his leading role.
The film is as beautiful as it is deadly and is filled with intrigue, jumps and gore aplenty Event Horizon raises itself above the usual fair due to some wonderful set design and visual imagery – including the mother of all zoom outs from a space station – and a fantastic gate room that is a meld of Stargate meets Hellraiser box via Contact.
Zero gravity has never been so eerie with all manner of objects floating around the titular ship…which is a star of the show in its self, with its great design inside and out, taking its design cue from Notre Dame Cathedral.
With elements of The Shining, Alien, The Black Hole, Hellraiser, 2001: A Space Odyssey and Flatliners this isn't just a mishmash of what we have seen before simply set in space, it is far more intelligent than that. As a psychological space horror Event Horizon has plenty of the crimson stuff and gore, but it is that slowly building sense of dread and pulsating paranoia that gets us as much as the crew.
Adding to the general feeling of unease throughout is the score that is simply something else. Being essentially a science-fiction/horror movie the music is something else, a fantastic fusion of the work of the late Michael Kamen (who worked with Queen on Highlander and scored both the Lethal Weapon series and Die Hards) and the techno sound of Orbital, creating something that is raw and visceral and perfect for the mood of the movie. If you loved Tron Legacy's score then this is the horror equivalent.
Having experienced it on the big screen when it was first released it's a real surprise that it was something of a misfire at the box office as it really grabs you from the off and engages throughout, delivering both in the science –fiction and horror stakes in buckets (of blood).
I found it a disturbingly thrilling cinematic experience that lingers long after it has been seen, if you haven't explored the Event Horizon then you are in for one hell of a nerve-jangling ride.
This lean and mean film more than deserves its place with such sci-fi horror classics as Alien and The Thing and certainly packs a mightier punch and more jumps than both Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection, the latter released the same year.
It's not so much in space no one can hear you scream and more if no one is on board the Event Horizon then when you scream will anyone hear it? The answer to that one is an emphatic yes. Go see it!
2001: A Space OdysseyAlienAlien 3Alien Vs PredatorAlien: ResurrectionAliensContactDead SpaceDeath RaceDie HardEvent HorizonFlatlinersGhostShipHarry PotterHellraiserHighlanderIn the Mouth of MadnessJason IsaacsJason XJoely RichardsonLaurence FishburneLethal WeaponMichael KamenOrbitalPaul W.S. AndersonQueenResident EvilRipleySam Neillsci-fiSean PertweeStargateThe Black HoleThe Final ConlictThe House on Haunted HillThe Omen trilogyThe ShiningThe ThingTron Legacy


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