Hoarders, Doomsday Preppers, and the Culture of Apocalypse

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137468086
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The culture of twenty-first century America revolves around narcissistic death, violence, and visions of doom. Foster explores this culture of the apocalypse, from hoarding and gluttony to visions of the post-apocalyptic world.

1

Disposable Bodies

Abstract: The culture of apocalypse—in all forms—as entertainment. Reality television shows that deal in death and dismemberment: I Was Impaled, 1000 Ways to Die, and The ABCs of Death. Sociopathic behavior and “collective narcissism.” America as a perpetual theater of war. Doomsday “preppers” and the fear of the unknown. The rise of “apocotainment”—the end of civilization as television programming. The culture of guns and violence. The crisis of masculinity in the 21st century. Fear of the “Other.” The military-industrial complex.

Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Hoarders, Doomsday Preppers, and the Culture of Apocalypse. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137468086.0002.

There’s no escaping it; in the 21st century, we live in a world that celebrates death, “prepping” for the end, and wasteful consumption as the supposed “norms” of society. As Rosalind Williams puts it, “the end of history dwells in the present as a rolling apocalypse . . . We do not have to wait for the last fish in the ocean to die, nor the last tree in the forest to be felled, to see the end coming. It is here and now and all around . . . Human empire appears invincible in the short run and unsustainable in the long run” (2013: 344–345). This brief book explores some of the themes that circulate around our apocalyptic obsessed culture, which has grown to the point that it both permeates and informs our daily lives. Death itself is the product most consistently sold to us, or the hope of escape from death. Apocalyptic gloom sells. But in the end, our culture of narcissistic doom wants more than anything to create a climate of fear and isolation, in which we are forced to endlessly consume and die emotionally, as willing participants in late-stage capitalism. Indeed, we really have little choice in the matter; as society becomes increasingly stratified into the very rich and the very poor, human misfortune and visions of apocalyptic doom have become our principal source of entertainment. I’m calling it “apocotainment”—the apocalypse as entertainment for the masses.

Television shows such as I Was Impaled (2012) and 1000 Ways to Die (2008–12) appropriate tropes from horror film and re-narrate them into digestible bite-size “safe” forms that temporarily distract us from the horrors of ecological destruction of the Earth and the collapse of capitalism. I’d argue that apocotainment has voyeuristic pleasures similar to the traditional horror film, but they are increasingly shorn of narrative and any sense of morality. In 1000 Ways to Die, “hilarious” stories of death, loosely based on actual stories, are stripped of any humanism, and edited together as a series of graphic and repetitive meta-narratives of sadistic slaughter. It’s all for sick kicks; set to quirky music, sutured together by a wisecracking voiceover narrator. Here, the casual and routine destruction of the body acts as the postmodern destruction of humanity, with a snuff-like lack of ethos; presented much in the same manner as the “funny” clips from America’s Funniest Home Videos, which themselves often rely on the humor in watching, for example, people injuring themselves. Sentiment and sympathy are antiquated notions, but pain is hilarious, gallows humor for an apocalyptic mindset. This is the mindset in which the arts and humanities are viewed as hopelessly dated antiquities; sentiment, romance, and humanity lose all value when they are merely reduced to a commodity. We are alienated from others, even as we virally “like” and “friend” others, we are now both product and consumer but we pay a dear price for allowing this alienation and taking part in our own surveillance.

Our culture is dominated not by Eros, but by Thanatos. We live in an era of what I call “family friendly torture porn”: amoral grotesque snack-size tales that display our collective dismissal of empathy for others surround us and reflect our pathologies. Our insatiable appetite for the display of excessive pain, death and dismemberment reflects our embrace of an endlessly warring culture. We barely acknowledge our own ghoulish depravity as cultural imperialists and warmongers as we continue to support questionable invasions and occupations. We are told to “support the troops,” but we are rarely allowed to openly question exactly what acts and policies are we being forced to accept? Our blind acceptance of a culture of war and death, and the big business economy of a warring culture is blithely accepted by most.

For example, we have almost completely forgotten the shocking photographs of our torture in Gitmo and elsewhere, and we ignore at our moral peril our collective ability to find laughter and hilarity in depravity and our fascistic impulses. We seem, as a culture, almost bored by death and pain, and at the same time there is a rise in the fascistic display of sculpted bodies of perfection, the hypermuscular bodies of 300, for example: these are bodies only sculpted in readiness for war and death. Morally, we must take note that fascistic anti-human TV is but a small reflection of our widespread acceptance of the practice of torture and the wider embrace of a culture of death and self-surveillance in American popular culture.

I Was Impaled is slightly less snarky than 1000 Ways to Die, but bodily harm and gruesome depravity are still presented with lip-smacking relish here, as if the entire affair was some sort of ghastly freak show for our depraved amusement. Impalements, horrifying despair, and ghoulish bodily dismemberments are edited together for shock value, though they become numbingly boring as a result of their generic display. We appear to be lacking in affect as images of pain becomes dull, millions obediently tune in for Game of Thrones, the Super Bowl of rape and death. The danger of such a growing lack of empathy is paved over by laughs and thrills. Significantly, in these television programs (and many similar ones that I simply don’t have time to discuss here) the victims are so fully “othered” as objects of morbid fascination and fun that in both shows the dominant message is that these Darwinian idiots “deserve to die.”

In fact, these shows trade on the hierarchical idiom of the question of who most “deserves” to die. The idea that some humans are less than human and “deserve” to die should certainly be familiar to anyone with an understanding of mass genocide. A culture ready and willing and able to commit genocide is only possible in an ideology that supports the notion of the “deserved” death. It comes as little surprise then that the official website for 1000 Ways to Die opens with the most popularly searched online feature, of the show, “The Most-Deserved Deaths on 1000 Ways to Die.” Writer Aaron Ahmadi (2012) opens the piece with the following paragraph:

On 1000 Ways To Die you’ve seen plenty of folk falling into the hands of the grim reaper because they were either just plain stupid or full of vein-popping rage (heck, sometimes both). Many of these imbeciles were just jerks and had it coming one way or another—real jerks. With all these jackasses on the show you’re probably thinking the same thing as us at this point: which of these numbskulls deserved what they got in the end the most? Hmm, do we really have to pick?

Immediately under this paragraph, episodes featuring the most popular and most “deserved” deaths are available by download and, interestingly enough, they are promoted exactly the same way porn sites present the most popular pornographic “money shots,” most often involving brutality and inhumanity. Currently the most popular porn “money shot” involves a very young Asian girl being repeatedly punched in the face while she is sprayed with male ejaculate and/or fecal matter. I mention this popular depravity because it demonstrates that family friendly apocotainment holds no higher moral ground than sexual porn. No doubt the Asian Other is seen as a Darwinian idiot who supposedly “deserves” such abasement. The debasement of animals and nature is rooted in the same social Darwinism found particularly in affluent people. Speciesism is a form of class Darwinism as demonstrated by Matthew Hutson (2014), whose study proves that the super-rich actually believe themselves to be genetically superior to the poor, who deserve what they get in life (or they deserve to die). As Hutson notes, the poor are commonly equated with animals. This is exemplified in the comments Hutson quotes of former Lt Governor of South Carolina, Andre Bauer, who told a town hall meeting that indigent and poor people, like “stray animals,” should not be fed, “because they breed (web).” Just like rich figure poor people deserve to die, the poor mimic the behavior of the rich; and all humans place animals and the Earth below them on the Darwinian hierarchy of those who “deserve to die.” Is it any wonder that our planet is rapidly dying and so are so many species disappearing at an alarmingly fast speed?

Thus potentially, in comparison with even the most extreme horror films, family friendly torture porn is even more exploitational, by virtue of the fact that it is presented as “all in good fun.” I suggest that even though it may seem like silly innocuous “fun” and perfectly appropriate material for family viewing, family friendly torture porn reduces horror to a series of excessive, interchangeable, violent, bloody and gory thrills shorn of any cohesive narrative, any sense of identification, and any sense of humanity. It cheapens all life, not just human life, and frequently appropriates the aesthetics of horror film while selling a product devoid of any morality and one that is indicative of a coldhearted culture of depravity and routine political atrocity, thus positioning the viewer as a sadistic libertine and exposing our culture as one of brutal fascistic pleasure, a culture at home with genocide, pain, death, torture and the destruction of the planet and all forms of life.

I find it fascinating that people are so uncomfortable with narratives of pleasure and sentiment, love and the nurturing of bodies. The most routinely scorned programming on television is that which embraces Eros and life, and stories of romance, love, and melodrama, specifically the Lifetime Network, which is signaled out as an object of constant derision. The ideology of bodies “deserving” of love, life, romance, and heart-touching lovemaking and intimacy is routinely met with scorn and outright hatred. We are a culture that seems to hate love; we seem to be oddly disgusted by romance. Any sentiment and feeling for others is frequently viewed as a stupid waste of time. If it is not a narrative of death, dismemberment and indescribable pain, it must be sentimental, melodramatic, sappy, and associated with the female, the overly emotional. She is too compassionate and empathetic: compassion and pathos are rejected in our culture and replaced by genocidal impulses that betray our wider embrace of a warring Thanatopic culture, one that celebrates Darwinian individualism, empathy deficit disorder, and conspicuous hyper-consumption of atrocity-entertainment for family fun-time pleasure.

For anyone unfamiliar with the infamous Discovery Fit and Health channel’s program I Was Impaled, I’ll offer here some brief plot summaries. I Was Impaled features people who accidentally end up with foreign objects impaled in their body. While examining how these mysterious items were often initially ignored and later “discovered,” the producers carefully “reenact” gruesome impalements and also employ faux forensic material popular to any reality programming. Here, in CSI style, we are treated to gruesome reenactments of actors playing medics and surgeons who use the most groundbreaking techniques to extract objects from bodies as a flat voiceover narrative explains what we are watching in excessively bloody detail. Using cutting-edge animation, firsthand testimony and sophisticated recreations, often including CGI, each 60-minute episode highlights the stories of three or four “impalements,” from the time the injury occurs to the moment the person “realizes” he or she is actually impaled by something, through the euphoric moment when the object is removed, and usually it includes an actor saying “I should not be alive,” or some variant on that idea, in this way gesturing to the trope of the so-called deservedness of death as it is featured on 1000 Ways to Die.

The horrific stories include a woman who was impaled on a five-inch iron spike railing; a man whose esophagus was ripped open by a French fry; a gardener who fell face first onto his pruning shears; a young man who was accidentally shot with a five-foot long fishing spear; a man who was impaled by a six-foot fence post; a woman who fell directly onto a hooked planter while gardening; a man who had a foreign object mysteriously lodged into his brain; a woman who was impaled through her neck by a Christmas tree; a boy who accidentally swallowed a barbed hook while fishing; a man who nearly died after being pumped full of enough air to blow up a thousand party balloons; a surfer who ended up with his fiberglass surfboard embedded in his skull; a motocross rider who crashed and ended up with a stick in his face; a 64-year-old woman who discovered a bug in her ear and a pencil in her brain; a carpenter who got a splinter in his eye; and an ex-Marine who was left with a pole penetrating his mouth after a car accident (TV Tango).

As you can tell from these excessive and repetitive plot descriptions, the definition of “impalement” is stretched beyond credulity. The show promises the kinds of impalements one would expect from a horror film, but impalement from within by a French fry, or being pumped up with excess air seems hardly comparable with classic horror movie impalements. A classic horror film, usually a moral tale, often involves the impalement of a vampire by wooden stake, or a villain being impaled on an iron spike, specifically a black wrought iron spiked gate of the type found either in Victorian England, or the Transylvanian countryside. While I Was Impaled may borrow from the classic horror film (one that almost always features a clear morality tale), it leaves behind the moral binarisms of good vs. evil in the traditional horror film. Notably, however, this program foregrounds a series of impalements and dismemberments without the narrative conscience of a moral center.

Reality horror shows such as I Was Impaled routinely appropriate many of the common tropes of horror films through reenactments that gesture to classical horror as well as more recent torture porn. The musical score, editing, lighting, foregrounding, narrative emphasis upon dread and fear are all common filmic devices appropriated here, but reality TV tends to flatten the horror narrative into simple affect, devoid of romance, sentiment, good guys, bad guys, audience problem-solving, moral conflict and most significantly—emotional involvement. It is therefore difficult to summon any moral complexity, emotional richness, or resolution from a show such as I Was Impaled, except that human beings are idiots who deserve to get impaled for the amusement of a society that suffers from emotional flatness and the dulling sensation of affect disorders associated with a lack of empathy.

James Fallon aptly describes this appetite for cruel amusement, a form of insatiable thrill seeking, in his study of the psychopath. Full on psychopaths not only have an affect disorder characterized by a “lack of remorse, lack of empathy, and refusal to accept responsibility for one’s actions,” but they often also “feel a strong need for novel, thrilling and exciting stimulation” (Fallon 2013: 12–13). In short, they get bored quickly, seek risky behavior and intentionally manipulate others. These are traits common to personality disorders such as narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths; they exist on a spectrum from the boastful guy at the office to the homicidal serial killer. The neurology and psychology of empathy disorder is complex, but when it comes down to basics, Fallon and other neurologists demonstrate that the brain functioning of antisocial psychopaths is directly tied to a profound lack of empathy. Martha Stout (2005), in The Sociopath Next Door, argues that America is a breeding ground for sociopaths; again a lack of empathy is at the center of her study. “Collective narcissism” is a long-established term that describes large group of narcissists who are often connected by nationalism and hatred for other ethnicities and enjoy group displays of humiliation and bullying. Collective narcissism is most closely associated with fascist ideology and group aggression and a collective lack of empathy, and it is also ethnocentric by nature. This is an accurate description of the audience for shows such as I Was Impaled and other apocotainment.

In I Was Impaled, the frail and permeable human body is reduced into consumable bite-size portions of snuff-like snark and gallows humor, the disposable body as a consumable Other, at the expense of those who have been unlucky or stupid enough to find themselves staked, impaled or otherwise gored. The problem with those who deserve to die or deserve to be impaled is that they are not fascistic impermeable bodies as presented in hyper-muscularized warring culture such as that prominently displayed in 300 or The Hunger Games and everywhere in our war-obsessed popular culture, a culture of disciplined bodies preparing for endless war. It comes as little surprise then that in violent warring cultures such as our own, there is a demonstrable genetic difference in brain chemistry associated with the “warrior gene” as discussed in relation to the rise of “a belligerent warrior culture” (Fallon 2013: 108) and it is related to the brain chemistry of psychopathic nationalistic groups.

I Was Impaled is just as mindless and formulaic as 1000 Ways to Die, and, similarly, its staged reenactments have the bizarre effect of summoning indifference; a flattening of what should be a heightened effect. We become fully desensitized to the pain and horror. Psychopaths exhibit a flattening affect disorder, and psychotropic drugs such as anti-depressants also can cause emotional flattening. But indifference may also suggest other factors at work, such as boredom with meaningless violence. As Cynthia Freeland notes:

If the narratives and specta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Disposable Bodies
• 2  Bunker Mentality
• 3  Buy Before You Die
• 4  Embracing the Apocalypse
• 5  The End of the Future
• Works Cited
• Index