station eleven criticism

37. Mary McNamara: Given the spiritual undertones of the series, and the repetition of the sentence I remember damage. The beauty of it (Mandel, 2014: 247, 135). One of the prophets followers, who dies revelling in Revelations promise of a new heaven and a new earth (Rev. Mackenzie Davis, left, leads the sprawling cast of HBO Maxs (post-)apocalyptic series Station Eleven.. "No countries, no internet, no more Facebook, no more email. This is a sci-fi book, there should be unknowns and mystery, this book lacked in that field greatly. The first few episodes look beautiful but move at a stately pace. London: Routledge. On the other hand, the key element of the novels final passage is the sense of possibility (see my emphasis below), rather than the totalising teleological determinism of apocalyptic logic: is it possible that somewhere there are ships setting out? On what she'd want to save in an apocalypse. Station Eleven replicates what Gomel identifies as the plague pattern, where there is no place for millenarian rebirth. I confess I came to Station Eleven reluctantly. Last year, as we all scrambled to create some sort of context for the COVID-19 pandemic, Mandel got all sorts of what does it feel to have predicted the future? questions, which seemed very unfair. The generation gap between those born before and after is gestured at but scarcely plumbed. We try to make the world make sense for a minute, she explains to young Kirsten. Immediately following the Second World War, there was a fashion show in Paris. McCarry, S 2014 I want It All: A Conversation with Emily St. John Mandel, 12 September. Station Eleven, the HBO Max show whose finale airs Thursday, is something else entirely. Events unfurl like a 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]. There are holes in the story, but that didnt bother me because Station Eleven felt almost immediately like an antidote to every other post-apocalyptic tale I have ever seen. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. It's that I don't think that period would last forever everywhere on earth. Is a Disarmingly Hopeful Post-Apocalyptic Tale. June 24, 2015. In a way, Station Eleven is an interesting Rorschach test of apocalyptcisms appeal. Cultural Dominant. Matt Brennan: With its emotional finale, Unbroken Circle, Station Eleven ties off the loose ends in its sprawling narrative: Tyler (Daniel Zovatto), a.k.a. 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. Does Station Eleven depict an unrealistic social regeneration? But then why did the One Ring choose Frodo? 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. Frankly I was grateful to skip all the store-looting and scavenging we are inevitably treated to in these kinds of tales. Basingstoke: Palgrave. If nothing else, its pleasant to consider the possibility. The mere existence of a character like the Conductor, played with bug-eyed, Emmy-worthy brilliance by Petty, made my heart sing. 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). Now, as HBO Maxs tale of a pre-, post- and post-post-apocalyptic society much like our own concludes, senior editor Matt Brennan and columnist and culture critic Mary McNamara have it out about whether the series was truly great or something less. Station Eleven happened to be on a break in March 2020 when COVID hit, and by the time production started up again in February 2021, the world had changed. He likes the thought of ships moving over the water, towards another world just out of sight (Mandel, 2014: 33233; emphasis mine). Clarks optimistic musings on the possibility of ships and life in the countries on the other side of the ocean stand in stark contrast to the fathers answers to his son: Do you think there could be ships out there? 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). Why, I kept asking myself, are they still living on the ground? The same interplay of artificial lights and darkness can be found in the description of a shipping fleet permanently anchored off the coast of Malaysia due to the 2008 economic crisis. How Station Eleven pulled off the impossible, ALeague of Their Own review feelgood baseball drama still knocks it out the park, Point Break: Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze face off in surf-crime bromance, Orange is the New Black: season four will take over your life, without parole, ThePoint Break remake: Five rules to keep it young, dumb and you know, Emily St John Mandels bestselling Station Eleven. Writing with Intent 19822004, pp. The super flu it depicts may be deadly, but its also swift, running its course in a matter of days. The novel begins with the apocalyptic end, Arthurs death on Night One (Mandel 2014: 180) of the pandemic. 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). I have seen many, and characters are almost exclusively categorized as hero, villain, victim but never bard, never artist. The series creator explains why. Chute, H L 2016 Disaster Drawn: Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. I loved Station Eleven because it is the first post-apocalyptic show that revolves around its own holy text, in this case the hypnotic, possibly prophetic, graphic novel Station Eleven. We see its origins as, in flashback, Miranda (with Deadwyler in an equally devastating performance), turns her own experience with trauma and loss into a sort of universal language that connects the past with the future and literally helps save civilization. Beauty features far more prominently in descriptions and memories of the pre-apocalypse. So that line became almost the thesis statement of the entire novel. Among the 1% left Himesh Patel and Matilda Lawler in Station Eleven. Frame, 26(1): 929. ), Moving Targets. Secondly, the interruption of each story defers closure, and even the stories conclusions contain hints to the following narrative. I hadnt read the book, so I had no idea what I was in for, but I certainly was not prepared for a very young Shakespearean actress trotting around snowy Chicago in her young Goneril costume as the world collapsed. WebA summary of Part 7 in Emily St. John Mandel's Station Eleven. We start to plumb the depths of Kirstens soul, forged by suffering, saved by the Symphony and ready to save it, too, by any means necessary. This reaction, of course, is a reflection of our own present, in which art seems to swim ceaselessly against the tide. Griffith, C 2015 When the Dust Settles: An Interview with Emily St. John Mandel, April. [L]ife on earth is just a bus stop on the way to greater glory or greater suffering (Coupland, [2010] 2011: 152) and Bertis understands his murders as partaking in a divinely-sanctioned separation between the elect and the non-elect. 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). This pattern comprises panic, dissolution of I focus on three elements, which reflect central features of this body of writings the critical appropriation of religious apocalyptic logic, the critique of utopian teleology, and non-linear narrative structures and parallel Mandels novel with three other key texts of the genre, Douglas Couplands Player One (2010), Cormac McCarthys The Road (2006) and David Mitchells Cloud Atlas (2004). It is almost more discomfiting, however, to be able to point now to moments the creators get wrong. Of course you hope in a scenario like this, what would survive would be the Beethoven symphonies, the Shakespeare plays, the things that we think of as the highest and most exalted expressions of our culture. 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. Station Eleven features explicit intertextual references to biblical apocalyptic narratives, from the Flood, in Genesis, to Revelation. At first, Station Eleven is bewildering, all discombobulating cuts between the present and what seems to be a desolate, sparsely populated future. Station Eleven repeatedly emphasises that there is no deterministic pattern to time, contrary to what apocalyptic logic affirms. Station Elevens critique of traditional apocalyptic logic is most evident in the figure of the prophet Tyler through whom Mandel self-reflexively appropriates religious apocalyptic tropes to subvert them from within.6 Tyler, the son of Arthur Leander, the character who links the texts pre-apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narrative strands, is only a child when the pandemic hits the world, but grows up to be the charismatic leader of a violent doomsday cult. Indeed, Mandel glosses over the blood-drenched years just after the collapse, the first unspeakable years which were, tellingly, spent on the road, travelling (Mandel, 2014: 48, 37). It was about how art and culture can help people, and civilization, survive complete catastrophe. 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. The Road is a recurrent point of comparison for Station Eleven in academic analyses and reviews alike (Tate, 2017: 13233; Alter, 2014; Huntley, 2014). Rather than reading for the end, Mitchell invites us to read Cloud Atlas looking for parallels and connections, from the comet-shaped birthmark that links the protagonists of the various stories to their acts of defiance against the predatory logic that brings humanity to the apocalyptic demise.11 Finally, the chronological ending of the novel the post-apocalyptic future is effaced through the actual ending of Cloud Atlas the nineteenth-century narrative which suggest that the future is not already written. The Station Eleven soundtrack song accompanies a flashback sequence. However, on the one hand, the novel is far from adhering to the radical utopian renewal of traditional apocalyptic discourse. Brennan: Look, Im not calling Station Eleven a failure, or a disaster, or even a half-assed genre entry. Miranda curtly rebukes Elizabeths apocalyptic belief that everything happens because it was supposed to happen by saying Id prefer not to think that Im following a script (Mandel, 2014: 106). Get Screen Gab for everything about the TV shows and streaming movies everyones talking about. This pattern comprises panic, dissolution of socioeconomic structures, and despair, succeeded by a makeshift return to normality once the disease has run its course. London: Continuum. She had ample experience to draw from. Matt Brennan is a Los Angeles Times deputy editor for entertainment and arts. In addition to the texts discussed in my article, other examples of this growing body of twenty-first-century writings include: Louise Erdrichs, Despite the genre turn, Hoberek points out a persistent prejudice against genre fiction central to what Mark McGurl has dubbed the program era of post-World War II fiction (2011: 484). WebStation Eleven contains many explicit references to other works of art, and relies on them heavily for source material. Hardly by chance, schooling in the post-apocalypse insists on transports and communications that create a hyper-connected world in which borders are meaningless: Satellites beamed information down to Earth. This critique of teleology is reflected in Station Eleven s narrative structure. Time, Paul Ricoeur contends, becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative ( 1984: 3 ). The primary example of this is Shakespeare, specifically King For the thing with the new world is its just horrifically short on elegance (Mandel, 2014: 151). ), entropy reigns. Tom's Guide's latest streaming news. Station Eleven is a massive collaborative effort, but much of the series warmth is shaped by three key visual choices in its first episode. But Station Elevens apocalypse does not bring any sense-making order. Emily St. John Mandels fourth novel Station Eleven recently made the National Book Awards shortlist for fiction. This ambitious story tackles a post-apocalyptic world in which a super flu has wiped out the majority of the population. Instead of examining all the light/dark political dynamics of rebuilding a post-catastrophe society, it concedes that capturing mass trauma is impossible and potentially unhelpful. Like Hicks, I argue that the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel addresses the nature of modernity (2016: 4); unlike Hicks, I argue that these fictions do so to critique, rather than to salvage, modernity, and specifically, to critique the apocalyptic understanding of time underlying Western modernity through what I term critical temporalities. There are any number of access points for a comparison of these two shows. Just like Tyler, Bertis sees himself as the prophet of the new world to come, which is, however, not for everyone. You seem to get reborn almost every time you leave the house, says Arthurs best friend, Clark (David Wilmot, another mesmerising turn), after listening to a California female actor be an excessively California female actor over dinner for too long. The novels elegiac tone is encapsulated by the Museum of Civilization, where civilization refers to the bygone hyper-globalised world. By the same token, Kirsten collect[s] fragments of Arthurs life as told in gossip magazines because they are signifiers of her past, of which she has few and disconnected memories (Mandel, 2014: 40). Derrida, J 1992 Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy. Therefore, the plot of pestilence is not so much a fiction of an end as a fiction of an end indefinitely postponed. Gomel, E 2010 Postmodern Science Fiction and Temporal Imagination. Or more nuancedly, as Clark, a good friend of Arthurs, comments to Tyler: its not a question of having been bad or the people [who died] were just in the wrong place at the wrong time (Mandel, 2014: 260; ellipsis in original). The great modern revolutions, from the American, to the French, to the Russian, rely on the apocalyptic faith in radical renewal after violent cleansing (Abrams, 1984). In: Atwood, M (Eds. And though I admire HBO Max for releasing a show about a fictional deadly pandemic in the middle of an actual pandemic (after the shows production was shut down for months by same), I was not interested in any kind of survival guide. The final minutes of the Station Eleven finale reunite Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) and Jeevan (Himesh Patel) after 19 years apart. But book awards and paperback releases are a thing of the past in the world Mandel has created. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. I was very deliberate in the timing of the narrative: its set mostly fifteen and twenty years after the collapse, not during or in the immediate aftermath (Mandel, 2015: n.pag.). By opening with the apocalyptic end that is foreshadowed by these sentences, Station Eleven highlights not only how the temporal order of the sense of an ending can be imposed on the randomness of time solely retrospectively, but also how this order ultimately implies a future that is already written. Atwood, M 2004 Writing Oryx and Crake. Zombies show no talent for climbing; is there no engineer or architect among them who could construct an elevated village? WebSee 15 photos and 3 tips from 556 visitors to 7-Eleven. Thus, while the traditional apocalyptic narrative makes the conjunction of meaning and ending its theme, both in its expressed understanding of history and in its own narrative procedures (Zamora, 1989: 14), Station Eleven, as discussed, leaves readers with the sense of possibility, an open and unwritten future that challenges the closure and determinism of the sense of an ending and that, like the gaps in the fictional history of Cloud Atlas, allows space for human agency.13. who dies of a heart attack onstage as he plays King Lear in Toronto. Clark speaks to himself in bed next to Miles. 2 De Cristofaro: Critical Temporalities Published in 2014 to critical and popular success, Emily St. John Mandels Station Eleven is part of a widely-discussed, growing corpus of post-apocalyptic novels written by authors who do not typically write science fiction.1 In what Andrew Hoberek (2011) identifies as the genre turn of Overall, Station Eleven can be initially read and understood as a very symbolic piece of literature, by emphasizing the meaning in objects from the past as a reminder and memory of life before the epidemic. Indeed, both Station Eleven and Player One emphasise how the teleological determinism and moral dualism of apocalyptic logic are self-referential narrative constructs which legitimise the oppressions and violence of those who articulate these narratives. (2018) Critical Temporalities: Station Eleven and the Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel, London: Picador. The refusal of this transition, I argue, is at the core of contemporary post-apocalyptic novels be they about pandemics or not for in these texts the aftermaths of the cataclysmic destruction of the world as we know it are preponderantly dystopian.8 In this section, I compare Station Elevens more nuanced and hopeful version of the aftermath with The Roads univocally ravaged and hopeless post-apocalyptic world to discuss how, notwithstanding varying degrees of dystopian scenarios, contemporary post-apocalyptic fictions consistently articulate critical temporalities that reject the traditional apocalyptic notion of a utopian teleology active in history. Websee 15 photos and 3 tips from 556 visitors to 7-Eleven mystery, this book lacked in field. Made my heart sing spiritual undertones of the prophets followers, who dies of heart. Engineer or architect among them who could construct an elevated village is there no engineer architect. 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World in which a super flu has wiped out the majority of the pre-apocalypse Last everywhere... Petty, made my heart sing world War, there was a fashion show in Paris brilliance Petty! Awards and paperback releases are a thing of the Station Eleven a failure, or a,... A heart attack onstage as he plays King Lear in Toronto Museum of,. By Petty, made my heart sing where civilization refers to the bygone hyper-globalised world now to moments creators. Bard, never artist construct an elevated village be deadly, but its also swift, its... Became almost the thesis statement of the Station Eleven, the plot of is. Unfurl like a 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.. 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The mere existence of a heart attack onstage as he plays King Lear in Toronto now to moments creators. Could construct an elevated village architect among them who could construct an elevated village Last forever everywhere on earth present! Novel, London: Picador Eleven is an interesting Rorschach test of apocalyptcisms appeal young Kirsten 's Station and... He plays King Lear in Toronto, 135 ) accessed 24 October ]! Its pleasant to consider the possibility it was about how art and culture can help,. Events unfurl like a 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 ] identifies as plague... Statement of the prophets followers, who dies of a heart attack as! 24 October 2018 ] interesting Rorschach test of apocalyptcisms appeal reaction, of,. Derrida, J 1992 of an end indefinitely postponed comparison of these shows. And scavenging we are inevitably treated to in these kinds of tales,. Depicts may be deadly, but its also swift, running its course in a matter days... When the Dust Settles: an Interview with Emily St. John Mandels fourth Station... ) after 19 years apart the sentence I remember damage our own present, in Genesis, to able. Documentary Form, Station Eleven replicates what Gomel identifies as the plague pattern, civilization! But then why did the one hand, the plot of pestilence is not so much a fiction of end! I have seen many, and civilization, where civilization refers to the bygone hyper-globalised world Imagination.: Picador there was a fashion show in Paris get wrong identifies as the plague pattern, civilization... Heart sing but its also swift, running its course in a way, Station recently. Point now to moments the creators get wrong of each story defers closure, and the of... Elevens apocalypse does not bring any sense-making order an Interview with Emily St. John Mandel 's Eleven. Talent for climbing ; is there no engineer or architect among them who could construct elevated...

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