I saw a feminist video yesterday that made me see something I can't now unsee. That zombie apocalypse genre is white supremacist. Making a whole class of subhumans so that the (usually white, cishet) protagonists can take what they want when they want it and slaughter the subhumans by whatever means desired, violently.
I've always seen it as an allegory for capitalism. The zombies have sped up from the shamblers of Night of the Living Dead as we've accelerated ecosystem destruction. Now there's another layer.
It's the same with the show I've been watching on Max, Falling Skies (circa 2011-2016). I'm pushing through it because I like post apocalypse stories (civilization has finally fallen so the natural world can regenerate--hooray!) but it's such a patriarchal, white supremacist show that I'm spending most of my time grumbling at it while I note the many ways in which it's fucked up.
The main character (a cishet white man, and intellectual history professor) and his three sons, plus his father figure (commander in the militia he belongs to after alien invasion) are the only characters with any depth. Everyone else is an NPC. They kill off people of color willy-nilly (starting with black men), and white women also including the prof's own daughter end up being just two dimensional plot devices, vehicles for showing the suffering and heroics of the leading men.
I'm almost to the end of it and nearly turned it off for good last night because of a plot line in which the eldest son's girlfriend is badly wounded and they want to infect her with alien biotech to save her. She clearly and plainly told him no, she didn't want that in her and he had to let her go. So he lied to the doctor and they infected her anyway. A clear violation of consent because he "just couldn't do it" selfishly. After she miraculously recovered, she ended up belting him across the face for doing it against her will then kissed him in thanks for saving her life. The female doctor, a stepmother figure, told him that she'd have done the same for his dad. Making violating consent "romantic" and excusing it.
It's gotten really hard to watch cheap and easy sci-fi and horror because of awareness of the systems of oppression that permeate these offerings and reinforce these fucked up narratives. I'm only interested now because I've only one season out of five to go so I'm probably going to keep watching it and hating it the whole time. Mainly because it's nearly impossible to find anything that isn't this politically awful and I'm not a rom-com person.
If I was younger and had the chops I'd try to write something feminist and anti-racist set in a dystopia, for TV or film. But I don't have it in me to do that anymore and even if I did, there wouldn't be any studio that would make it more likely than not, because the storytelling machine that is the film and TV industry is there to prop up the themes of patriarchy, racism, and the state, not warn us about them.
As per usual I'm barely awake and still ingesting coffee so no doubt there will be multiple edits for clarity and typos.
