station eleven criticism
Station Eleven repeatedly emphasises that there is no deterministic pattern to time, contrary to what apocalyptic logic affirms. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. Mitchell, D 2004 Cloud Atlas. In this sense, it is interesting to note that, just like another winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, Margaret Atwood (, On the essentially temporal nature of traditional apocalyptic logic see also Kermode (, See also the prototype of the Western concept that history has an intelligible and end-determined order, whether fideistic or naturalistic, is the scheme of the course of earthly affairs from genesis to apocalypse which is underwritten by a sacred text (, Indeed, it is my contention that, in its critique of the apocalyptic understanding of history, the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel addresses aspects of Western modernity that transcend national borders, which in any case become irrelevant after the catastrophes depicted by the texts. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 59(2): 24357. While The Roads passages signify the critique of utopian teleology through a hopeless dystopian scenario in which we find an entropic dissolution, Station Elevens ending subverts utopian teleology through speculations. Backstories are filled in notably of Miranda (Danielle Deadwyler), Arthurs lover and the author of the graphic novel (called Station Eleven, but dont let the meta-ness put you off) that has been Kirstens lifeline over her 20 years of post-apocalyptic wandering. Keller, C 1996 Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World. Every individual experiences what she or he experiences and deals with it in a different way. And escape, I am tempted to tell you that whatever imperfections you felt you experienced in Station Eleven were deliberate, a kind of cinematic wabi-sabi to remind us that the quest for perfection is not only impossible it is the wrong quest. Having established its Serious Credentials, it gains confidence and begins to move away from the elegiac tone that threatens to overwhelm it. His co-stars can't remember if he had a family to notify. Goldman, M 2005 Rewriting Apocalypse in Contemporary Canadian Fiction. Gomel, E 2010 Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination. The contemporary post-apocalyptic novel, instead, is not only predominantly dystopian but articulates temporalities critical of the apocalyptic model of history to make space for unwritten futures which are key to agency. WebStation Eleven contains many explicit references to other works of art, and relies on them heavily for source material. Bearing the unmistakable mark of The Leftovers, the masterful apocalyptic fiction on which Somerville cut his teeth, these installments felt alive to me in a way the others never did. Further threads arise from the stories of other settlements one led by Clark and the female actor (Elizabeth, played by Caitlin FitzGerald, who ended up marrying Arthur after an affair they began while he was with Miranda) and begin to be woven together. Station Eleven. Just like the parallels between the stories, the conclusion emphasises the individuals agency to shape the future and the openness of actual time, as opposed to the closure of time in traditional plots. At first, Station Eleven is bewildering, all discombobulating cuts between the present and what seems to be a desolate, sparsely populated future. Ermarth, E D 1992 Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time. Born in the Boston area, educated at USC and an adoptive New Orleanian for nearly 10 years, he returned to Los Angeles in 2019 as the newsrooms television editor. You know because, mayhem is not a terribly sustainable way of life. This deliberate timing allows Mandel not to dwell on the horror and mayhem brought about by the Georgia Flu, horror and mayhem which are instead at the core of The Roads borrowed world (McCarthy, [2006] 2007: 130). Station Eleven is a massive collaborative effort, but much of the series warmth is shaped by three key visual choices in its first episode. As he claims, when we speak of the light, we speak of order. Station Eleven self-reflexively emphasises this difference between traditional and contemporary apocalyptic imagination. Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/38e15y/hi_im_emily_st_john_mandel_author_of_station/ [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. Station Elevens structure similarly articulates a critical temporality that complicates the sense of an ending. The scene in which a dozen women give birth was the before giving way to the future, just as all the scenes in which Miranda struggles to write Station Eleven were. Station Eleven, by contrast, is postapocalyptic in the truest sense of the term. Station Eleven and The Last of Us share one more very specific similarity: juxtaposing destruction with art. Because in stretches the first comes achingly close to being a masterpiece. Foursquare City Guide. Now that that's all mapped and charted out and there are no more frontiers that's left us with a certain restlessness, that I suppose gets channeled into our interest in this futuristic, speculative fiction. Station Eleven , the HBO Max show whose finale airs Thursday, is something else entirely. Different episodes concentrate on the experiences of different characters, but the through line is young Kirsten (an absolutely extraordinary performance from 13-year-old Matilda Lawler in her first substantial role), a child actor who is abandoned by her chaperone when a stage performance of King Lear is chaotically truncated by the death of the lead, Arthur (Gael Garca Bernal). The Traveling Symphony is a troupe of actors and musicians dedicated to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. (Sorry, it all always comes back to Lord of the Rings.) Because this is an epic quest and those kinds of stories make certain demands. New York Times, 5 September. NATIONAL BESTSELLER NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FINALIST Set in the eerie days of civilizations collapse - the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking In this section, I compare Station Elevens narrative structure with that of Mitchells Cloud Atlas.10 Both texts complicate the teleological linearity of apocalyptic narratives to make space for unwritten futures which are key to agency. Clark lashes out at Arthur after a bender; the music scores the end of the episode at 00:56. The Museum soon becomes a sanctuary where people go to pray, for Station Elevens post-apocalyptic characters clin[g] to the hope that the world they remembered could be restored (Mandel, 2014: 213), just like the people of the Undersea in the comic Station Eleven, penned by Miranda, the title of which signals its status as a mise-en-abyme text.9 Thus, children at school are taught about the way things were, although these are just abstractions and essentially science fiction to them (Mandel, 2014: 269, 262, 270). It's some sort of combination of pessimism or narcissism that it's almost as though we want to believe or living at the climax of the story. These gaps keep spaces of possibility open in the novels structure, indicating Mitchells intention to debunk apocalyptic determinism and narrative foreshadowing. But the recent surge of post-apocalyptic novels brings to the fore this critical tension between the contemporary and the traditional understanding of apocalypse by appropriating apocalyptic tropes to subvert them from within and, more fundamentally, by being essentially concerned with time and history, a concern that is often embodied within their structural narrative features. I dont [sic] think so. On what she'd want to save in an apocalypse. Both texts expose how apocalyptic discourse is fabricated to push ideological agendas. Mary McNamara is a culture columnist and critic for the Los Angeles Times. While Station Eleven does not fall into the traps of the utopian teleology of traditional apocalyptic logic, which risks, in its determinism, legitimising oppressive power dynamics, the novel is too complicit with the current system and its exploitations. What the readers find in Mandels novel is not the destruction of the corrupt old world and subsequent ushering in of a utopian new world but, rather, a lament about the lost wonders of technology and the splendours of the former world (Mandel, 2014: 288, 231) which undermines apocalyptic sense-making. Coupland, D (2010) 2011 Player One. De Cristofaro, D., Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/books/station-eleven-joins-falls-crop-of-dystopian-novels.html [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. Zombies show no talent for climbing; is there no engineer or architect among them who could construct an elevated village? As Rachel explains, the sniper is deploying poetic devices, such as rhythm and regularity of speech, in order to have a stronger impact and to quickly and effectively indoctrinate (Coupland, [2010] 2011: 1878). Available at: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/station-eleven-offers-suspense-and-science-fiction-but-it-is-undoubtedly-a-literary-work/article20577909/ [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. From Station Eleven to Atlanta, GLOW and more, Christian Sprenger has shot some of TVs most beautiful images. I read Emily St John Mandels bestselling Station Eleven shortly after it came out in 2014, when the tale of a mysterious flu sweeping the globe and laying waste to normal life lay wholly beyond the bounds of reality. WebIn this video we take a deep dive, review, recap and explain the ending to HBO's adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel's novel STATION ELEVEN. Audience member Jeevan (Himesh Patel) tries to take her home, but they are overtaken by the collapse of civilisation and begin their new life navigating the disaster together. Read full review Though their plague is much more devastating than ours (it has a 99% fatality rate), it is still quite something to see people coughing in enclosed spaces while those nearby bristle, and others wonder about masks or gather supplies so they can hunker in apartments until the virus has burned itself out. The primary example of this is Shakespeare, specifically King This refusal to paint the old world as worthy of a destruction that paves the way for a utopian renewal articulates the novels critical temporality but is not devoid of issues, as Station Eleven ends up unquestioningly celebrating the current system. Ricoeur, P 1984 Time and Narrative, 1. Arthur C Clarke Award 2015 2015 Winner. A finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner, Emily St. John Mandels best-selling Station Eleven is set in the eerie days of civilizations collapse. The things Jeevan sees vividly recall The Road. Or, more precisely, it is half masterpiece, half not. It's not that I don't think that there would be a period of absolute mayhem and chaos and horror. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of Station Eleven and what it means. The mere existence of a character like the Conductor, played with bug-eyed, Emmy-worthy brilliance by Petty, made my heart sing. Yet, she explains, it was important to me to not write that book [The Road]. I read, If you want the girl next door, go next door: Lori Petty on Station Eleven and surviving Hollywood, Anuplifting pandemic drama? Chaudhary that stuck, as the series has it, to the surprises of just what happened, and so actualized our own collapsing civilization through burning houses and corpse jets and big box stores-turned-maternity wards. The series creator explains why, Station Eleven, like the Shakespeare that sustains it, is something of a miracle, Unlike Andor, Mandalorian is going all in on Star Wars lore. Open Library of Humanities But it wasnt part of his plan. ", On what survives including a comic book treasured by several characters. Station Elevens ending is key to the texts deconstruction of utopian teleology. It's that I don't think that period would last forever everywhere on earth. This structure articulates a critical temporality that undermines the apocalyptic sense of an ending and, more specifically, foreshadowing, which, with its view of the present as the harbinger of an already determined future, is at the core of the temporality of traditional plots and apocalyptic history alike (Bernstein, 1994: 12). As I have argued, the critical temporalities of the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel debunk the apocalyptic conception of history at the core of western modernity as a narrative construct. London: Continuum. The first concerns the early days and years of the pandemic. Toronto: Anansi. McCarthy, C [2006] 2007 The Road. Mandels novel thus exposes apocalyptic temporality as an artificial teleological order that one imposes on contingency, often with oppressive agendas in mind, as is the case of the prophet. A life, and therefore actual, rather than fictional time, is made up of a number of loose ends (Mandel, 2014: 27) that resist the retrospective patterning of the sense of an ending. She has no expectation that anybody else will ever see her work. Globe and Mail, 12 September. Author Emily St. John Mandel was not involved in the adaptation of her hit novel. Brennan: Look, Im not calling Station Eleven a failure, or a disaster, or even a half-assed genre entry. The final minutes of the Station Eleven finale reunite Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) and Jeevan (Himesh Patel) after 19 years apart. Charles, R 2014 Sorry, Emily St. John Mandel: Resistance is Futile. The novels final paragraph consists mostly of questions, while the hypothetical ships move towards another world just out of sight (Mandel, 2014: 333; emphasis mine), that is, towards a future that, contrary to the normative and prescriptive utopian visions of apocalyptic logic, remains undefined. You are right about how the timeframe jumps from immediate crisis to a relatively established recovery. 20 years later it the Traveling Symphony, a group that travels and performs for people, roams the wastelands. While the novels prophet holds on to a religious understanding of apocalypse in which the end is followed by utopian rebirth, the Georgia Flu, the pandemic that kills 99% of the worlds population, is termed apocalypse by the television newscasters in the sense of dystopian catastrophe rather than utopian revelation, and the apocalyptic narratives referred to in the text are disaster movies, with the dangerous stragglers fighting out for the last few scraps (Mandel, 2014: 243, 256). Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a grey-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers (Mandel, 2014: 255). According to Elana Gomel, plague narratives are structured by the logic of iterative mortality that undermines the teleological progression of the apocalypse. Albeit more attentive to the materiality of labour, his tracing of the production process of this object conceals, and indeed, aestheticises, workers exploitation and alienation, as well as the inequalities of the global free market: Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms of snow, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Station Eleven is so good, you can buy it outright on Amazon, which sells it for between $28 (DVD) (opens in new tab) and $40 (4K Blu-ray) (opens in new tab). Albany: State University of New York Press. Nothing (McCarthy, [2006] 2007: 216). She had ample experience to draw from. As I am Irish, and firmly believe in Thomas Cahills premise that Irish monks saved civilization by maintaining texts and libraries while Europe fell into the Dark Ages, I was all in. Hoberek, A 2011 Cormac McCarthy and the Aesthetics of Exhaustion. New York: Vintage. The postmodern subversion of a realistic epistemology leads to the idea that there is no ultimate knowable historical truth, that our knowledge of the past is social and perspectival, and that written history exists within culturally determined power structures (Munslow, 2006: 27). You know, it's interesting to think about what survives. And one that in its most poignant moments reaches the same depths of emotion as the greatest television dramas: as Beasts of the Southern Wild composer Dan Romers roadside jug-band score measures the heartbeat of the end of the world; as the camera catches the glimmer of tears in Tylers eyes during that final performance of Hamlet; as an impromptu rap song or homemade costume render the pain of the human condition at a single humans scale. [Children] were told about the Internet, how it was everywhere and connected everything, how it was us. Emily St. John Mandel's new novel, Station Eleven, opens with a vain actor and is there really any other kind? Even the moments of transcendent beauty and joy created by the Travelling Symphonys performances consist in conjuring, through Shakespeare, what was best about the [pre-apocalyptic] world (Mandel, 2014: 47, 38). Instead we got a department store turned into a maternity ward and an Oreo used to demonstrate a cervix dilated to five centimeters. Cameron, C 2014 Station Eleven Offers Suspense and Science Fiction, but It Is Undoubtedly a Literary Work. Are you ever surprised? (Only the Apple TV+ show See takes on the importance of myth and art, albeit in a more controlling, prophetic way, but that pandemic left everyone blind, which brings its own issues.). Both Tyler and Bertis exhibit traits of what Catherine Keller identifies as the apocalypse pattern (1996: 11): the faith in historical determinism, the inclination to think in terms of clear-cut polarities of good versus evil and the identification with the good that purges the evil from the old world and is worthy of the imminent utopian renewal of the new world. And the novel skips forward 20 years to a young woman who was just eight when she was on stage with that actor and is now trying to make her way in a world that's been shorn of most of what we call civilization. This is the half of Station Eleven that persuades me, the half set in the realm of its Hamlet, its Lear: the half about human connection and isolation, about love, betrayal and, unavoidably, collapse. On the Traveling Symphony's motto, "survival is insufficient"It is not from Shakespeare. The apocalypse is such a gap: we do not know what happened, just as in The Road, and this in itself challenges the sense-making function of the end in both apocalyptic history and traditional narratives. Even when the man contemplates the possibility of ships out there, these are deathships, and the hypothetical father and son on the other side are similarly hopeless, living among the bitter ashes of the world st[anding] in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun (McCarthy, [2006] 2007: 219). Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Mystery If I lived in Philadelphia, I would have no idea what was going on. Just like McCarthys father and son, Jeevan and [A]lmost everyone was moving south in a silent landscape. Somewhere around the time Jeevan, her accidental savior, managed to purchase and then bungie-cord together a train of loaded shopping carts and navigate them through many city blocks to his brothers apartment building, I realized I would either have to surrender to an epic quest and all its potential pitfalls, or not. This dynamic is what Frank Kermode terms the sense of an ending: We project ourselves a small, humble elect perhaps past the end, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle ([1966] 2000: 8). The full Long Island Rail Road terminal in Grand Central Station opened Monday. The second timeline takes us 20 years in the future, when Kirsten (now played by Mackenzie Davis) is part of a troupe of actors known as the Traveling Symphony, who tour the midwest putting on Shakespeare plays Hamlet, when we meet them to the scattered plague survivors. An uplifting pandemic drama? The word beauty recurs in the descriptions of the post-flu world: the beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone, there was beauty in the decrepitude this dazzling world, It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty (Mandel, 2014: 148, 297, 302). Connected everything, how it was everywhere and connected everything, how was. 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Station Eleven repeatedly emphasises that there is no deterministic pattern to time, contrary to what apocalyptic logic affirms. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. Mitchell, D 2004 Cloud Atlas. In this sense, it is interesting to note that, just like another winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, Margaret Atwood (, On the essentially temporal nature of traditional apocalyptic logic see also Kermode (, See also the prototype of the Western concept that history has an intelligible and end-determined order, whether fideistic or naturalistic, is the scheme of the course of earthly affairs from genesis to apocalypse which is underwritten by a sacred text (, Indeed, it is my contention that, in its critique of the apocalyptic understanding of history, the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel addresses aspects of Western modernity that transcend national borders, which in any case become irrelevant after the catastrophes depicted by the texts. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 59(2): 24357. While The Roads passages signify the critique of utopian teleology through a hopeless dystopian scenario in which we find an entropic dissolution, Station Elevens ending subverts utopian teleology through speculations. Backstories are filled in notably of Miranda (Danielle Deadwyler), Arthurs lover and the author of the graphic novel (called Station Eleven, but dont let the meta-ness put you off) that has been Kirstens lifeline over her 20 years of post-apocalyptic wandering. Keller, C 1996 Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World. Every individual experiences what she or he experiences and deals with it in a different way. And escape, I am tempted to tell you that whatever imperfections you felt you experienced in Station Eleven were deliberate, a kind of cinematic wabi-sabi to remind us that the quest for perfection is not only impossible it is the wrong quest. Having established its Serious Credentials, it gains confidence and begins to move away from the elegiac tone that threatens to overwhelm it. His co-stars can't remember if he had a family to notify. Goldman, M 2005 Rewriting Apocalypse in Contemporary Canadian Fiction. Gomel, E 2010 Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination. The contemporary post-apocalyptic novel, instead, is not only predominantly dystopian but articulates temporalities critical of the apocalyptic model of history to make space for unwritten futures which are key to agency. WebStation Eleven contains many explicit references to other works of art, and relies on them heavily for source material. Bearing the unmistakable mark of The Leftovers, the masterful apocalyptic fiction on which Somerville cut his teeth, these installments felt alive to me in a way the others never did. Further threads arise from the stories of other settlements one led by Clark and the female actor (Elizabeth, played by Caitlin FitzGerald, who ended up marrying Arthur after an affair they began while he was with Miranda) and begin to be woven together. Station Eleven. Just like the parallels between the stories, the conclusion emphasises the individuals agency to shape the future and the openness of actual time, as opposed to the closure of time in traditional plots. At first, Station Eleven is bewildering, all discombobulating cuts between the present and what seems to be a desolate, sparsely populated future. Ermarth, E D 1992 Sequel to History: Postmodernism and the Crisis of Representational Time. Born in the Boston area, educated at USC and an adoptive New Orleanian for nearly 10 years, he returned to Los Angeles in 2019 as the newsrooms television editor. You know because, mayhem is not a terribly sustainable way of life. This deliberate timing allows Mandel not to dwell on the horror and mayhem brought about by the Georgia Flu, horror and mayhem which are instead at the core of The Roads borrowed world (McCarthy, [2006] 2007: 130). Station Eleven is a massive collaborative effort, but much of the series warmth is shaped by three key visual choices in its first episode. As he claims, when we speak of the light, we speak of order. Station Eleven self-reflexively emphasises this difference between traditional and contemporary apocalyptic imagination. Available at: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/38e15y/hi_im_emily_st_john_mandel_author_of_station/ [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. Station Elevens structure similarly articulates a critical temporality that complicates the sense of an ending. The scene in which a dozen women give birth was the before giving way to the future, just as all the scenes in which Miranda struggles to write Station Eleven were. Station Eleven, by contrast, is postapocalyptic in the truest sense of the term. Station Eleven and The Last of Us share one more very specific similarity: juxtaposing destruction with art. Because in stretches the first comes achingly close to being a masterpiece. Foursquare City Guide. Now that that's all mapped and charted out and there are no more frontiers that's left us with a certain restlessness, that I suppose gets channeled into our interest in this futuristic, speculative fiction. Station Eleven , the HBO Max show whose finale airs Thursday, is something else entirely. Different episodes concentrate on the experiences of different characters, but the through line is young Kirsten (an absolutely extraordinary performance from 13-year-old Matilda Lawler in her first substantial role), a child actor who is abandoned by her chaperone when a stage performance of King Lear is chaotically truncated by the death of the lead, Arthur (Gael Garca Bernal). The Traveling Symphony is a troupe of actors and musicians dedicated to keeping the remnants of art and humanity alive. (Sorry, it all always comes back to Lord of the Rings.) Because this is an epic quest and those kinds of stories make certain demands. New York Times, 5 September. NATIONAL BESTSELLER NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST A PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FINALIST Set in the eerie days of civilizations collapse - the spellbinding story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the scattered outposts of the Great Lakes region, risking In this section, I compare Station Elevens narrative structure with that of Mitchells Cloud Atlas.10 Both texts complicate the teleological linearity of apocalyptic narratives to make space for unwritten futures which are key to agency. Clark lashes out at Arthur after a bender; the music scores the end of the episode at 00:56. The Museum soon becomes a sanctuary where people go to pray, for Station Elevens post-apocalyptic characters clin[g] to the hope that the world they remembered could be restored (Mandel, 2014: 213), just like the people of the Undersea in the comic Station Eleven, penned by Miranda, the title of which signals its status as a mise-en-abyme text.9 Thus, children at school are taught about the way things were, although these are just abstractions and essentially science fiction to them (Mandel, 2014: 269, 262, 270). It's some sort of combination of pessimism or narcissism that it's almost as though we want to believe or living at the climax of the story. These gaps keep spaces of possibility open in the novels structure, indicating Mitchells intention to debunk apocalyptic determinism and narrative foreshadowing. But the recent surge of post-apocalyptic novels brings to the fore this critical tension between the contemporary and the traditional understanding of apocalypse by appropriating apocalyptic tropes to subvert them from within and, more fundamentally, by being essentially concerned with time and history, a concern that is often embodied within their structural narrative features. I dont [sic] think so. On what she'd want to save in an apocalypse. Both texts expose how apocalyptic discourse is fabricated to push ideological agendas. Mary McNamara is a culture columnist and critic for the Los Angeles Times. While Station Eleven does not fall into the traps of the utopian teleology of traditional apocalyptic logic, which risks, in its determinism, legitimising oppressive power dynamics, the novel is too complicit with the current system and its exploitations. What the readers find in Mandels novel is not the destruction of the corrupt old world and subsequent ushering in of a utopian new world but, rather, a lament about the lost wonders of technology and the splendours of the former world (Mandel, 2014: 288, 231) which undermines apocalyptic sense-making. Coupland, D (2010) 2011 Player One. De Cristofaro, D., Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/books/station-eleven-joins-falls-crop-of-dystopian-novels.html [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. Zombies show no talent for climbing; is there no engineer or architect among them who could construct an elevated village? As Rachel explains, the sniper is deploying poetic devices, such as rhythm and regularity of speech, in order to have a stronger impact and to quickly and effectively indoctrinate (Coupland, [2010] 2011: 1878). Available at: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/book-reviews/station-eleven-offers-suspense-and-science-fiction-but-it-is-undoubtedly-a-literary-work/article20577909/ [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. From Station Eleven to Atlanta, GLOW and more, Christian Sprenger has shot some of TVs most beautiful images. I read Emily St John Mandels bestselling Station Eleven shortly after it came out in 2014, when the tale of a mysterious flu sweeping the globe and laying waste to normal life lay wholly beyond the bounds of reality. WebIn this video we take a deep dive, review, recap and explain the ending to HBO's adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel's novel STATION ELEVEN. Audience member Jeevan (Himesh Patel) tries to take her home, but they are overtaken by the collapse of civilisation and begin their new life navigating the disaster together. Read full review Though their plague is much more devastating than ours (it has a 99% fatality rate), it is still quite something to see people coughing in enclosed spaces while those nearby bristle, and others wonder about masks or gather supplies so they can hunker in apartments until the virus has burned itself out. The primary example of this is Shakespeare, specifically King This refusal to paint the old world as worthy of a destruction that paves the way for a utopian renewal articulates the novels critical temporality but is not devoid of issues, as Station Eleven ends up unquestioningly celebrating the current system. Ricoeur, P 1984 Time and Narrative, 1. Arthur C Clarke Award 2015 2015 Winner. A finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner, Emily St. John Mandels best-selling Station Eleven is set in the eerie days of civilizations collapse. The things Jeevan sees vividly recall The Road. Or, more precisely, it is half masterpiece, half not. It's not that I don't think that there would be a period of absolute mayhem and chaos and horror. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of Station Eleven and what it means. The mere existence of a character like the Conductor, played with bug-eyed, Emmy-worthy brilliance by Petty, made my heart sing. Yet, she explains, it was important to me to not write that book [The Road]. I read, If you want the girl next door, go next door: Lori Petty on Station Eleven and surviving Hollywood, Anuplifting pandemic drama? Chaudhary that stuck, as the series has it, to the surprises of just what happened, and so actualized our own collapsing civilization through burning houses and corpse jets and big box stores-turned-maternity wards. The series creator explains why, Station Eleven, like the Shakespeare that sustains it, is something of a miracle, Unlike Andor, Mandalorian is going all in on Star Wars lore. Open Library of Humanities But it wasnt part of his plan. ", On what survives including a comic book treasured by several characters. Station Elevens ending is key to the texts deconstruction of utopian teleology. It's that I don't think that period would last forever everywhere on earth. This structure articulates a critical temporality that undermines the apocalyptic sense of an ending and, more specifically, foreshadowing, which, with its view of the present as the harbinger of an already determined future, is at the core of the temporality of traditional plots and apocalyptic history alike (Bernstein, 1994: 12). As I have argued, the critical temporalities of the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel debunk the apocalyptic conception of history at the core of western modernity as a narrative construct. London: Continuum. The first concerns the early days and years of the pandemic. Toronto: Anansi. McCarthy, C [2006] 2007 The Road. Mandels novel thus exposes apocalyptic temporality as an artificial teleological order that one imposes on contingency, often with oppressive agendas in mind, as is the case of the prophet. A life, and therefore actual, rather than fictional time, is made up of a number of loose ends (Mandel, 2014: 27) that resist the retrospective patterning of the sense of an ending. She has no expectation that anybody else will ever see her work. Globe and Mail, 12 September. Author Emily St. John Mandel was not involved in the adaptation of her hit novel. Brennan: Look, Im not calling Station Eleven a failure, or a disaster, or even a half-assed genre entry. The final minutes of the Station Eleven finale reunite Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) and Jeevan (Himesh Patel) after 19 years apart. Charles, R 2014 Sorry, Emily St. John Mandel: Resistance is Futile. The novels final paragraph consists mostly of questions, while the hypothetical ships move towards another world just out of sight (Mandel, 2014: 333; emphasis mine), that is, towards a future that, contrary to the normative and prescriptive utopian visions of apocalyptic logic, remains undefined. You are right about how the timeframe jumps from immediate crisis to a relatively established recovery. 20 years later it the Traveling Symphony, a group that travels and performs for people, roams the wastelands. While the novels prophet holds on to a religious understanding of apocalypse in which the end is followed by utopian rebirth, the Georgia Flu, the pandemic that kills 99% of the worlds population, is termed apocalypse by the television newscasters in the sense of dystopian catastrophe rather than utopian revelation, and the apocalyptic narratives referred to in the text are disaster movies, with the dangerous stragglers fighting out for the last few scraps (Mandel, 2014: 243, 256). Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a grey-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers (Mandel, 2014: 255). According to Elana Gomel, plague narratives are structured by the logic of iterative mortality that undermines the teleological progression of the apocalypse. Albeit more attentive to the materiality of labour, his tracing of the production process of this object conceals, and indeed, aestheticises, workers exploitation and alienation, as well as the inequalities of the global free market: Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms of snow, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the assembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Station Eleven is so good, you can buy it outright on Amazon, which sells it for between $28 (DVD) (opens in new tab) and $40 (4K Blu-ray) (opens in new tab). Albany: State University of New York Press. Nothing (McCarthy, [2006] 2007: 216). She had ample experience to draw from. As I am Irish, and firmly believe in Thomas Cahills premise that Irish monks saved civilization by maintaining texts and libraries while Europe fell into the Dark Ages, I was all in. Hoberek, A 2011 Cormac McCarthy and the Aesthetics of Exhaustion. New York: Vintage. The postmodern subversion of a realistic epistemology leads to the idea that there is no ultimate knowable historical truth, that our knowledge of the past is social and perspectival, and that written history exists within culturally determined power structures (Munslow, 2006: 27). You know, it's interesting to think about what survives. And one that in its most poignant moments reaches the same depths of emotion as the greatest television dramas: as Beasts of the Southern Wild composer Dan Romers roadside jug-band score measures the heartbeat of the end of the world; as the camera catches the glimmer of tears in Tylers eyes during that final performance of Hamlet; as an impromptu rap song or homemade costume render the pain of the human condition at a single humans scale. [Children] were told about the Internet, how it was everywhere and connected everything, how it was us. Emily St. John Mandel's new novel, Station Eleven, opens with a vain actor and is there really any other kind? Even the moments of transcendent beauty and joy created by the Travelling Symphonys performances consist in conjuring, through Shakespeare, what was best about the [pre-apocalyptic] world (Mandel, 2014: 47, 38). Instead we got a department store turned into a maternity ward and an Oreo used to demonstrate a cervix dilated to five centimeters. Cameron, C 2014 Station Eleven Offers Suspense and Science Fiction, but It Is Undoubtedly a Literary Work. Are you ever surprised? (Only the Apple TV+ show See takes on the importance of myth and art, albeit in a more controlling, prophetic way, but that pandemic left everyone blind, which brings its own issues.). Both Tyler and Bertis exhibit traits of what Catherine Keller identifies as the apocalypse pattern (1996: 11): the faith in historical determinism, the inclination to think in terms of clear-cut polarities of good versus evil and the identification with the good that purges the evil from the old world and is worthy of the imminent utopian renewal of the new world. And the novel skips forward 20 years to a young woman who was just eight when she was on stage with that actor and is now trying to make her way in a world that's been shorn of most of what we call civilization. This is the half of Station Eleven that persuades me, the half set in the realm of its Hamlet, its Lear: the half about human connection and isolation, about love, betrayal and, unavoidably, collapse. On the Traveling Symphony's motto, "survival is insufficient"It is not from Shakespeare. The apocalypse is such a gap: we do not know what happened, just as in The Road, and this in itself challenges the sense-making function of the end in both apocalyptic history and traditional narratives. Even when the man contemplates the possibility of ships out there, these are deathships, and the hypothetical father and son on the other side are similarly hopeless, living among the bitter ashes of the world st[anding] in their rags lost to the same indifferent sun (McCarthy, [2006] 2007: 219). Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies, including The Best American Mystery If I lived in Philadelphia, I would have no idea what was going on. Just like McCarthys father and son, Jeevan and [A]lmost everyone was moving south in a silent landscape. Somewhere around the time Jeevan, her accidental savior, managed to purchase and then bungie-cord together a train of loaded shopping carts and navigate them through many city blocks to his brothers apartment building, I realized I would either have to surrender to an epic quest and all its potential pitfalls, or not. This dynamic is what Frank Kermode terms the sense of an ending: We project ourselves a small, humble elect perhaps past the end, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle ([1966] 2000: 8). The full Long Island Rail Road terminal in Grand Central Station opened Monday. The second timeline takes us 20 years in the future, when Kirsten (now played by Mackenzie Davis) is part of a troupe of actors known as the Traveling Symphony, who tour the midwest putting on Shakespeare plays Hamlet, when we meet them to the scattered plague survivors. An uplifting pandemic drama? The word beauty recurs in the descriptions of the post-flu world: the beauty of this world where almost everyone was gone, there was beauty in the decrepitude this dazzling world, It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty (Mandel, 2014: 148, 297, 302). Connected everything, how it was everywhere and connected everything, how was. 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