Amazon Prime Video's Fallout continues the increasingly bleak streak of post-apocalyptic, capitalist-critiquing series made by corporate overlords.
“Hollywood is the past. Forget Hollywood. The future, my friend, is products. You’re a product. I’m a product. The end of the world is a product.” – Matt Berry’s Sebastian Leslie in Episode 6, “The Trap.”TV series represents a culmination of iteration, revival, and corporate consolidation on a road leading nowhere good, whose story grows out of corporate executives, with a fiduciary responsibility to make the world worse, buying up anything they can squeeze for the sweet juice of profit.
We enter the era of the post-apocalyptic videogame television adaptation as the entertainment media ecosystem careens towards crises—streaming, the, feels primed to collapse. Humans imagine post-apocalyptic civilizations because of innate fear of death; apocalypse is the metaphysical death of a society’s culture alongside the literal mass death of its inhabitants. Nuclear war, a threat hanging over our heads nearly as long as we’ve had television, exacerbates this mass death anxiety.
As the contradictions under capitalism heighten and sharpen, corporate art isn’t up to the task of speaking to the moment because at the core of 21st century liberal ideology is an ahistorical belief that, is seen as the apex of civilization. If it collapses under its construction, we are prone to repeating mistakes.
Attempts at poignancy are a component of the marketing tactic of authenticity, but fall flat under a worldview where change is unimaginable. The other half of marketability is being comforting enough, even in cynicism, for wide consumption by a populace that is assumed to be incurious and so loses curiosity. The finale came centimeters short of being as cynical within its actual plotting, reflecting the meta cynicism of salesmanship instead.
Kevin Fox Jr. studies history, literature, videogames, film, TV, and sports. He dreams of liberation and is always seeking recommendations for his endless backlog and reading list. He can be found on TwitterApril 17, 2024 | 5:17pm
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