Memory, Future Selves and Climate Trauma in Dystopian Cinema

E. ANN KAPLAN
’Memory, Future Selves and Climate Trauma in
Dystopian Cinema (with Reference to The Road
(2010)’
E. Ann Kaplan er Distinguished Professor of English and Cultural
Analysis and Theory ved Stony Brook University, hvor hun
grundlagde (1987) og bestyrede det internationalt anerkendte The
Humanities Institute. Hun har været og er fortsat en afgørende
skikkelse særligt indenfor feministiske filmstudier,
traumeforskningen og den humanistiske aldringsforskning. Blandt
hendes publikationer kan nævnes: Women and Film: Both Sides of
the Camera. (1983, 1990). Motherhood and Representation: The
Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (1992, 2002). Looking
for the Other: Feminism, Film and the Imperial Gaze. (1997).
Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and
Literature (2005). This lecture expands classic trauma theory in
addressing futurist dystopian cinema related to climate change. I
theorize a new condition, Pre-Traumatic Stress Syndrome
(PRETSS) as against the familiar Post-traumatic Stress Syndrome
(PTSD). I will focus on issues related to future time in thinking
through the meanings (and the cultural work) that pretrauma
imaginaries perform in our newly uncertain historical era. I
undertake two related but distinct discussions, using Cormac
McCarthy’s novel and Hillcoat’s film adaptation as my case study:
First, I explore the future selves viewers are invited to identify with
in climate disaster films like The Road, and the potential impact
(such as PRETSS, political and economic despair) on their current
selves. Second, I explore ways such fantasies also function as
warnings, what I call “memory for the future,” now in relation to
the self as part of the human species. The fantasies raise
anticipatory anxieties beyond the individual. They become
collective and ultimately global because all human life is now at
risk. Finally, I discuss what future memory itself has as the
fictional humans come to the end.