In 2014, Canadian author Emily St-John Mandel published Station Eleven. A futuristic novel, the story of a deadly flu that kills 99% of the population on Earth but leaves a child alive who joins a traveling theater troupe that persists in performing Shakespeare in the rubble. Six years later, in the midst of Covid, St-John Mandel is invited everywhere to comment, reassure and give possible ways out. The one who was able to unfold the disaster scenario must be able to guide us in the one that is playing out before our eyes. St-John Mandel may say that she is not the right person to forecast the pandemic and publish her new novel, The Sea of Tranquility, in which one of her characters is a writer who has written about a pandemic and who is constantly asked for her opinion on the ongoing catastrophe, it is impossible to accept that she is not the great Pythia of the end of the world.
The enormous success of Station Eleven (HBO is adapting it into a series in 2021), but also many books, films, series, documentaries, newspaper articles that attempt to tell the story of the end of the world, testify to our never-satiated appetite for this type of scenario.
Today, fears have changed, emergencies too, but the narrative is still there: what is the point of predicting the worst?
THE TICKING CLOCK RULE
Often used as a deadline, 2050 can be summed up as immense climate chaos: rising temperatures, 60 days of heatwave per year, forest fires everywhere, floods and droughts elsewhere, in short, a Jérôme Bosch painting in which we are sure that life will not be good. A disaster scenario by the book, except that we know that it is unlikely to end well.
The question is therefore not so much whether the scenario is plausible, whether it will actually happen like this (spoiler: yes). The real question would rather be: is anticipation two decades effective in trying to awaken consciences and begin to change our way of life?
The first element of the answer may be found precisely in fiction. Because the latter has accustomed us to scenarios of brutal rupture. Disaster films or books generally describe rapid collapses: a meteorite falling on Earth, an alien attack, a nuclear war, a sudden glaciation, a zombie epidemic. Everything goes to hell in forty-eight hours: the survivors barely have time to realize what is happening before they have to leave the city with their little bundles. Even in the oldest stories of the end of the world, the texts of the Abrahamic religions, there is talk of the day of the last judgment, that is to say 24 hours when everything changes.
This speed of execution of the disaster is one of the most effective springs of fiction. It’s even a rule that can be found in all screenplay manuals worthy of the name: the ticking clock rule. Something is going to happen in X time, which creates a sense of urgency that is supposed to mobilize the character and push him to do everything to save the situation in a given time. The most obvious example of this process is perhaps the series that announces the ticking clock in its title: 24h, in which the countdown to which Jack Bauer is subjected is regularly displayed on the screen. Except that.
Except that we have entered the era of slow catastrophes. It is no longer a question of waiting in your little bunker to know when the nuclear strike will fall but rather of witnessing a long and inexorable collapse. Plunge a frog into a boiling pot: it will escape. Place it in cold water and heat over low heat: it will get used to the temperature variations and will remain calm until it ends up boiled.
We are like frogs, waiting for the tipping point without realizing that it has already been crossed. 2050 is for that: to produce an image that acts as a signal (since six-month summers are not enough to get us out of the pot), an image that is capable of producing in us the representation of a clear and massive rupture, of a “real” catastrophe.
AND YOU,
WOULD YOU LIKE TO STAY ALIVE?
One of the other advantages of the worst-case scenario is to offer a roughness, a grip, paradoxically reassuring, because it allows to recreate a form of logical unfolding in a situation so confusing that we no longer know where to take it. This is the famous catharsis of Aristotle, a feeling of appeasement and personal and collective “purification” felt by spectators during and after a dramatic performance. We share the anxiety, and the relief of not (yet) living the drama that is unfolding before our eyes.
In other words, we are happy to find our little life in a world out of order, rather than being stuck in the lava flow, the glacial episode or the invasion of grave desecrators. There is also a personal development and cognitive and behavioral therapy exercise called the worst-case scenario. It involves creating a tree in which each branch allows us to anticipate the worst-case solution. In the end, we end up with the most difficult situation (the goal being to realize that, even in this case, we are capable of getting out of it and coping).
But beyond the exercise of impulsive release, these scenarios also serve to better understand what is happening. As spectacular as they may be, apocalyptic fictions are generally extrapolations, amplifications, of fears that we are already experiencing. During the Cold War, most science fiction production revolved around nuclear destruction (and aliens who often symbolized the communist threat). Ecological and industrial disasters appeared in the 1980s, pandemics in the 1990s. From the 2000s onwards, natural disasters or large-scale acts of terrorism took over.
This development clearly shows that disaster scenarios adapt to the fears of the moment, that they are a narrative of diffuse anxieties that are too vast to be grasped by the accumulation of facts. In this sense, they are proof of a general awareness. But they are also a kind of pre-disaster dress rehearsal.
THE BUSINESS IN THE TRIAL OF DRAMA
Like a dance teacher who shows the steps to perform before asking his students to do the same, the disaster story allows us to observe the different acts of the tragedy before having to undergo it. During the Covid 19 epidemic, the film Contagion, although dating from 2011, became one of the most watched films of the year. For Coltan Scriver, a PhD student at the University of Chicago who is working on the notion (and benefits) of morbid curiosity, the latter is first and foremost “an internal motivation to learn more about the threats that surround us, in order to be able to avoid these threats in the future.” Because the brains of those who drink disaster fiction regularly simulate disaster, they would be better prepared to experience real disaster. A study published in January 2021 by the journal Personality and Individual Differences even showed that consumers of horror films, particularly zombie films, were better prepared for the Covid-19 pandemic. In companies, the worst-case scenario is also an exercise in facilitating meetings, to allow participants to anticipate a problem they would not have thought of, or even to imagine innovative solutions.
Finally, although we live in an era where a president can ask himself in 2023 “who could have predicted the climate crisis?”, worst-case scenarios, once they are validated by reality, can paradoxically bring a form of relief. This explains why we still bring out the MIT model from 1972 (the Meadows report) today, which already predicted the current collapse. Let us rediscover Spring_silent, the book by biologist Rachel Carson who warned in 1962 about the disappearance of birds. Or more prosaically, let us still wonder if The Simpsons are capable of predicting the future. It doesn’t matter that a whole bunch of models have not been validated (and therefore forgotten), this reinforces our idea that someone knew and that the catastrophe could have been avoided. And therefore that there is still a chance to escape the coming disaster.
This is the story, for example, of the Red Team, a collective of science fiction screenwriters (including Laurent Genefort, Xavier Mauméjean, DOA, the designer and scenographer François Schuiten and others who preferred to remain anonymous) who, in collaboration with the University of Paris Sciences & Letters, worked on disaster scenarios for the French army. All bound by state secrecy, the members of the Red Team began their work in early 2020, to produce four “seasons” of scenarios, most of which will not be made public. With a budget of 2 million euros, this project is designed to prepare the future of defense by focusing on other points of view than those of the military alone.
WHO WILL SING “I WILL SURVIVE”?
Capable of clarifying our fears, creating images strong enough to trigger our awareness and train us for what is coming, could disaster scenarios be what we need to avoid the coming catastrophe? Unfortunately, that would be far too simple. Because the disaster scenario is not just a story of destruction and annihilation. It is above all a story of survivors. With rare exceptions, there are always many people left after the event that has sent the world running to its doom.
The hardest scenario would be the one where there is no one left to tell the story. Melancholia, by Lars Von Trier, or the novel I am legend, by Richard Matheson (the film adaptation with Will Smith offers a happier alternative ending) do indeed tell the total end of humanity (one by a final explosion, the other by the last human who becomes a zombie) but they almost seem like anomalies. The principle of a disaster scenario is first of all to tell the life of those who survived. It is therefore more of a pretext to imagine how to start again differently, a fantasy of a clean slate from which we could build on new foundations, far from the mistakes of the past. Even under the ashes and acid rain, the apocalyptic story is first and foremost a utopia, which reassures us that life always ends up being reborn (most often in the form of a shared garden that miraculously blossoms amidst the smoking ruins of civilization). In this, it is less virtuous than it seems since it almost pushes us to wait until the damage is done before starting to roll up our sleeves. Despite the spectacular self-improvements and the eruptions of hope and humanity, this scenario is also a wait-and-see scenario. Nothing is possible to avoid the disaster, let’s focus on the aftermath, when we will have to rebuild everything.
In short, it is a bit like preferring to raze an old house that had charm and build a brand new one, rather than tackling a slow and complex renovation.
STORIES OF NECESSITY
This story of survivors, of a world after, is of course the glimmer of optimism we need to continue to believe in some form of future. But these stories also create a kind of ethics of necessity that can be problematic. Take The Walking Dead for example. A story of a zombie epidemic that spans who knows how many seasons. After the initial shock and its direct consequences (the event’s outbreak, rapid chaos, the formation of survivor groups, the convoy’s departure to places they hope will be more favorable), the story of the world after is first and foremost one of survival. During the 12,000 (perceived) episodes that form the narrative arc of the series, it is only a matter of doing what is necessary to stay alive / find shelter / save comrades / organize the new community.
The phrase that comes up most often in the characters’ mouths? “I did what I had to do” (even if it means decimating an opposing group). All these disaster scenarios are therefore also a way of drawing a fantasy of civilization where everything would be permitted in the name of survival. Necessity is the law and it is the human right to do whatever it takes to keep one’s place in a destroyed world. These scenarios are therefore most often the illustration of a capitalist and liberal vision of society, a return to man as a wolf for man, which values the strongest, the bloodiest, the smartest (the gentle and the pacifist end up inexorably dying in the arms of a hero who screams to the sky “why but why?”, before leaving with a heart filled with vengeance).
This vision is allowed by the existence of an evil described as absolute and impossible to completely defeat (the living dead, the epidemic, global warming) and which renders obsolete all human values of times of peace and innocence. The “unvirtuous” circle does not stop there, since these disaster stories can also show, as business schools and sinophiles teach, that a crisis is also an opportunity. Of course, the world is heading towards ruin, but there is always the possibility of pulling through (near us, just think of all the companies that have made record profits during and thanks to the Covid 19 epidemic).
Thus, the use of the disaster scenario, which could be thought of as an exercise in pooling fears, as a pooling of forces against a problem shared by all, does not escape the individualism of our societies.
This is indeed what Emily St-John Mandel’s character/avatar tells us in La mer de la tranquillité. During one of the conferences she gives as a writer and during which she is asked the eternal question of why humans need disaster scenarios, she answers this: “I think that as a species, we have the desire to believe that we are living the culmination of human history. It is a form of narcissism. We want to believe that we are uniquely important, that we are living the denouement of the plot, that now, after millennia of false alarms, the worst that has ever happened is finally happening: we have finally reached the end of time.” We warned you, the important thing is the landing.
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