Amazon's "Fallout" and the Allure of the Apocalypse

The end of the world is doing great business. That is, post-apocalyptic entertainment is very popular these days. Recent additions to a remarkably longstanding genre of doom include The Last of Us and Station Eleven on Max and Sweet Tooth, Awake, and Leave the World Behind on Netflix.

Amazon’s latest entry to the apocalypse field, Fallout, takes us on a wild ride through an irradiated Western endtime world. It’s entertaining, and like every other offering in the genre, it speaks less to an imagined future than to a worried present.

Fallout is based on a video game, but this shouldn’t stop non-gamers from tuning in. Whether you’ve played the game or not doesn’t matter. Like the excellent Last of Us, also based on a video game, Fallout takes an established brand and runs with it in interesting and compelling directions.

The gist of Fallout is that the world ended in a nuclear holocaust in an alternate Cold War America. This America is reminiscent of the 1950s, with cliché Western TV shows and happy nuclear families downing martinis together in wood-paneled living rooms. Via flashbacks, we learn that when the bomb finally came, a select group of rich folks fled to hardened underground shelter communities called Vaults. This left the rest of humankind to deal with the radiation and, yes, the fallout. Most of the topsiders died, with rangy survivors going on to become dirty, violent, sometimes mutated scavengers. Some managed to establish small towns. Others created a feudal society of power-armored knights-errant accompanied by cringing squires.

The story really gets going when a plucky resident of one of the underground Vaults is forced to go to the surface in search of her father, who has been abducted by a ruthless band of topsiders. She enters a desert hellscape and sets out to get her dad back.

In his classic book The Denial of Death, psychologist Ernest Becker asserts that we are all forced to live with the unthinkable awareness of our own demise. In response, we design creative ways of repressing it. One common strategy is to fantasize about cheating death itself, by creating what G. Stanley Hall calls an “immunity bath” against the Grim Reaper. Imagining going on after The End assuages our fear of demise.

The post-apocalypse genre taps into this desire. We imagine outlasting the ultimate End. But this flexible genre does more than simply respond to this simple urge. It also offers a critique of the present. Very often, these productions tell us that we are currently living in an era so tainted, so foul, so damaged, that a total reboot wouldn't be so bad. Mass extinction may even be something that we deserve. And yet, the fantasy is that we (the audience member) can somehow personally be among the chosen few exempt from this horrid fate.

Fallout plays to these longings. The End, though it happens to a fictitious U.S., is inflicted upon a place we know. Fallout’s America is filled with selfishness, small-mindedness, and malice. Its corporations, which are monstrous, soulless entities ruining the planet and profiting from human misery, turn out to be the cause of the catastrophe. Makes sense.

Playing to our desires, we find that the resulting new world, though a harsh wasteland, is also a place of opportunity where the tough and true-hearted might succeed.

In evoking the classic Fifties Western, Fallout taps into our mythical past. In the Western, brave loners make their stands, away from the corruption of big cities. They encounter a lawless and desolate space where guns and grit can fix the problems of “civilization.”

The Western, in its way, has always been a post-apocalyptic genre—it symbolically takes place after civilization has failed. Fallout fully capitalizes on this. The most interesting character in the series is an undead cowboy who plays by his own rules. As it turns out, he’s the one with the truest moral compass—he’s just looking for his family.

Fallout offers up yet another dire cinematic vision of a clean-slate wipeout of the world. It’s entertaining because it speaks to our present fears of social and planetary collapse, coupled with our longstanding human desire to survive death and start over.