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. The Museum, set up by Clark in the Severn City Airport, hosts everyday objects of the pre-apocalyptic society, such as a laptop, an iPhone, a credit card and a snow globe. Ah, you say no. There are as is starting to feel mandatory with small-screen dramas two timelines. Log In; Herein lies its critical distance from the utopian teleology of the traditional apocalyptic paradigm. I even caught myself asking a blasphemous question: If art were truly capable of saving us, wouldnt we already have been saved? Or, more precisely, it is half masterpiece, half not. Mandel, E S J 2014 Station Eleven. At first, Station Eleven is bewildering, all discombobulating cuts between the present and what seems to be a desolate, sparsely populated future. Zamora, L P 1989 Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American Fiction. Ricoeur, P 1984 Time and Narrative, 1. 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. Chaudhary, it finally clicked: Station Eleven soars when it rejects the mantra There is no before when it acknowledges that the future is a science fiction. Why in his life of frequent travel, had he never recognized the beauty of flight? 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. | ISSN: 2056-6700 | She was the leader of a band of survivors not because she was a ruthless martial arts expert but because she continued to write symphonies, and understood that music and theater fulfill a deep-seated need. Im calling it a partial masterpiece! So that line became almost the thesis statement of the entire novel. 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). WebRotten Tomatoes reports a 98% approval rating with an average rating of 8.1/10, based on 54 critic reviews. (2018) Critical Temporalities: Station Eleven and the Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel, American Literary History, 23(3): 48399. As Mark West points out in another article in this special issue, Clarks reflection addresses but rather miscasts the globalized trade networks in that it fetishizes the beautiful objects at the expense of the workers who make them, workers who are dehumanized into assemblies of working parts (note the emphasis on their hands) (2018: 19, 20). Traditional apocalyptic narratives reveal a utopian teleology to history, a conception of time that deeply informs western modernity and its metanarratives. 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. Station Eleven and The Last of Us share one more very specific similarity: juxtaposing destruction with art. Set in the days of civilization's collapse, Station Eleven tells the story of a Hollywood star, his would-be savior, and a nomadic group of actors roaming the ), entropy reigns. Abrams, M H 1984 Apocalypse: Theme and Variations. Snow and stopped cars with terrible things in them. At first, Station Eleven is bewildering, all discombobulating cuts between the present and what seems to be a desolate, sparsely populated future. Open Library of Humanities 4(2), 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. 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). The final season of Game of Thrones notwithstanding, I remain a big fan of the epic quest, so I chose surrender. But it wasnt part of his plan. 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). McNamara: As a nonmillennial Im not going to dive into those murky generation-defined existential waters, debate the historical nature of progress or try to predict the fate of democracy, though I think we can agree any television show that sparks debate about those things is a damn good television show. (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. I did find it hilarious that, during the winter flashback, the roads were plowed, a sleight of hand Somerville admits was necessary for production to continue. The novel begins with the apocalyptic end, Arthurs death on Night One (Mandel 2014: 180) of the pandemic. Derrida, J 1992 Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy. Even the guy who auditions by reciting Bill Pullmans speech from Independence Day believes. Told in a relentless stream of disclosure, the story swirls around two troubled siblings, an addict named Paul and his absurdly gorgeous half sister, Vincent. The final minutes of the Station Eleven finale reunite Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis) and Jeevan (Himesh Patel) after 19 years apart. 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. 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). Yes, an episode that aired in 1999. As the season unfurled, though, I found myself frustrated by a structure that, roughly speaking, toggled between the pandemics onset and a time, 20 years on, in which Kirsten and her Traveling Symphony have forged a new society through the cyclical performance of plays. However, on the one hand, the novel is far from adhering to the radical utopian renewal of traditional apocalyptic discourse. It is in the context of what Heather J. Hicks, in her study of the twenty-first-century post-apocalyptic novel, discusses as an unprecedented outpouring of fully developed post-apocalyptic narratives by major, critically acclaimed anglophone [sic] writers (2016: 56) that my article situates Station Eleven. Nor did I want the kind of Theres Got to Be a Morning After survival celebration disaster stories so often rely on. Available at: https://www.booklistonline.com/Station-Eleven-Emily-St-John-Mandel/pid=6862248 [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. It wasnt like that. Rosen, E K 2008 Apocalyptic Transformation: Apocalypse and the Postmodern Imagination. What if it's also a self-published comic book? WebThe book Station Eleven, by Emily Mandel, started when a famous actor dies on stage while performing the play King Lear. The primary example of this is Shakespeare, specifically King The critical temporalities of the contemporary post-apocalyptic novel not only expose the apocalyptic conception of history as a narrative construct enmeshed within power structures through their critical appropriation of religious apocalyptic tropes and the subversion of utopian teleology, but, through their structures, these fictions challenge what is an essentially apocalyptic model of narrative dominated by the end and invite us to conceive of history beyond the determinism of the sense of an ending. Mousoutzanis, A 2014 Fin-de-Sicle Fictions, 1890s1990s: Apocalypse, Technoscience, Empire. 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. People die alone, with their loved ones unable to be with them, and people grieve alone. Why, I kept asking myself, are they still living on the ground? The following contains spoilers from the season finale of Station Eleven.. We begin, really, to care, to wonder, to ask more questions. 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. Keller, C 1996 Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the World. The acknowledgment section explains Mandel took this statistic from Simon Parrys 2009 Daily Mail article Revealed: The Ghost Fleet of the Recession Anchored Just East of Singapore. Yeah, I was interested in the randomness of what survives and what doesn't. 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. The series creator explains why. People with chaos in their hearts cannot abide here (Mandel, 2014: 61). 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). 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. Notice, in this sense, Clarks musings on the snow globe housed in the Museum. Goldman, M 2005 Rewriting Apocalypse in Contemporary Canadian Fiction. Modern metanarratives are apocalyptic, in that they are totalising explanations of history based on utopian teleology. the Prophet, reconciles with his mother (Caitlin FitzGerald); graphic novelist Miranda Carroll (Danielle Deadwyler) meets her fate; Sarah (Lori Petty) shuffles off this mortal coil; and, most importantly, Kirsten (Mackenzie Davis as a adult, Matilda Lawler as a child) reunites with Jeevan (Himesh Patel), capping off one of the most finely wrought love stories in recent TV history. From Station Eleven to Atlanta, GLOW and more, Christian Sprenger has shot some of TVs most beautiful images. Are you ever surprised? There is nothing in the history of human endeavor, not the Bible, Shakespeare or the annals of HBO, to suggest that we are capable of the regeneration it depicts in the span of one lifetime, much less 20 years. One of the prophets followers, who dies revelling in Revelations promise of a new heaven and a new earth (Rev. His co-stars can't remember if he had a family to notify. Previously she was assistant managing editor for arts and entertainment following a 12-year stint as television critic and senior culture editor. If one of the precepts of the series own holy text, a graphic novel, is show, dont tell, it seems to me indicative of the series strengths that its most moving moments feature spliced-in images, memories, of the characters former selves. 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. Confused? Events unfurl like a runaway train: Jeevan (Himesh Patel), an anxiety-ridden mess, is attending a performance of King Lear when an onstage tragedy prompts him to intervene. Immediately following the Second World War, there was a fashion show in Paris. For the profound influence of apocalypticism on modernity can also be qualified as a chronic disease of the Western politics and poetics of temporality, a disease characterised by what Derrida called the disorder or delirium of destination (Gomel, 2010: 121). Clark lashes out at Arthur after a bender; the music scores the end of the episode at 00:56. The improbability of it, muses Clark, who is echoed by Kirsten reminiscing about the urban landscape seen from a plane at night: clusters and pinpoints of light in the darkness, scattered constellations linked by roads or alone. Israeli police lobbed hundreds of stun grenades, fired water cannons and arrested at least 40 people in response to Wednesdays demonstration in Tel Aviv against a judicial overhaul. ow deeply strange it is, how deeply unsettling, to be able to compare and contrast a fictional pandemic with the real thing. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 59(2): 24357. Here in the present, we play we play musical instruments at refugee camps. Just like Tyler, Bertis sees himself as the prophet of the new world to come, which is, however, not for everyone. I dont [sic] think so. Yet Tylers apocalyptic narrative indicates not only the complicity of apocalyptic logic with violence and power structures but also how the appeal of this kind of narrative depends on its promise of a sense-making temporal order. Why Netflix is dabbling in livestreaming, Stranger Things play that may hold key to the end taking 1959 Hawkins to West End, NBCs Chicago series have strong showings but CBS wins weekly TV ratings race, Before and after photos from space show storms effect on California reservoirs, Dramatic before and after photos from space show epic snow blanketing SoCal mountains, The chance of a lifetime: Five friends ski the tallest mountain in Los Angeles, Best coffee city in the world? Station Eleven self-reflexively emphasises this difference between traditional and contemporary apocalyptic imagination. DOI: http://doi.org/10.13130/2035-7680/2987, De Cristofaro, D 2018 Time, no arrow, no boomerang, but a concertina: Cloud Atlas and the Anti-Apocalyptic Critical Temporalities of the Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Novel. We are the pure, working towards the advent of a new world, the divine plans for which were revealed to him in dreams (Mandel, 2014: 60; emphases in original). 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. 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. Among the 1% left Himesh Patel and Matilda Lawler in Station Eleven. You know, it's interesting to think about what survives. DOI: http://doi.org/10.16995/olh.235. By Richard 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. You know because, mayhem is not a terribly sustainable way of life. According to Elana Gomel, plague narratives are structured by the logic of iterative mortality that undermines the teleological progression of the apocalypse. 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. Does Station Eleven depict an unrealistic social regeneration? Station Eleven. You know, it's no longer possible to set out as a pioneer and stake a claim and start a new life. The Station Eleven soundtrack song accompanies a flashback sequence. To take refuge in the art, dammit. The light we carry within us is the ark that carried Noah and his people over the face of the terrible waters (Mandel, 2014: 60). Huntley, K 2014 Station Eleven: Booklist Review, August. Washington Post, 15 October. Station Eleven repeatedly emphasises that there is no deterministic pattern to time, contrary to what apocalyptic logic affirms. Available at: http://www.tor.com/2014/09/12/a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel/ [Last accessed 24 October 2018]. This critique of teleology is reflected in Station Elevens narrative structure. 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 has a nonlinear storytelling style: The story doesn't begin at one point and then progress through time to an ending; it often flashes forward or back in time. Plymouth: Lexington. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of Station Eleven and what it means. London: Routledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Altre Modernit, 9: 6680. 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. But book awards and They discuss both shows and recap the events of Station Eleven, then halfway into the podcast, set the two shows against each other in a head-to-head battle. The concluding chapter seemingly adheres to the apocalyptic pattern of end and rebirth, for the depiction of Arthurs and Mirandas last hours is followed by Clarks musings on another world just out of sight (Mandel, 2014: 333). Of traditional apocalyptic narratives reveal a utopian teleology approval rating with an rating. Pandemic with the real thing from the utopian teleology to history, a 2014 Fin-de-Sicle Fictions 1890s1990s... What apocalyptic logic affirms //www.tor.com/2014/09/12/a-conversation-with-emily-st-john-mandel/ [ Last accessed 24 October 2018 ] Narrative. Question: if art were truly capable of saving us, wouldnt we have! And entertainment following a 12-year stint as television critic and senior culture editor novel, American Literary history a... 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