In the Amazon Prime series 'Fallout', the world's post-apocalypse survivors live in underground vaults like this. — Amazon Prime
THE hallways on the television shows I watched recently have been driving me mad.
On one sci-fi show after another I’ve encountered long, zigzagging, labyrinthine passageways marked by impenetrable doors and endless blind alleys – places that have no obvious beginning or end.
The characters are holed up in bunkers (Fallout), consigned to stark subterranean offices (Severance), locked in Escher-like prisons (Andor) or living in spiralling mile-deep underground complexes (Silo). Escape is unimaginable, endless repetition is crushingly routine and people are trapped in a world marked by inertia and hopelessness.
The resonance is chilling: Television has managed to uncannily capture the way life feels right now.
We’re all stuck.
What’s being portrayed is not exactly a dystopia. It’s certainly not a utopia. It’s something different: a stucktopia. These fictional worlds are controlled by an overclass and the folks battling in the mire are underdogs – mechanics, office drones, pilots, and young brides. Yet they’re also complicit, to varying degrees, in the machinery that keeps them stranded. Once they realise this, they strive to discard their sense of futility – the least helpful of emotions – and try to find the will to enact change.
The stucktopia might start to seem resonant to you, too.
Time is a flat circle. The same two political candidates are running for president, while parodic commentary is once again being provided by Jon Stewart, who first hosted The Daily Show in 1999.
Congress produces little more than increasingly outlandish sound bites. There are protests nearly every day, yet no resolution or change.
Mass culture has come to a standstill, with endless reboots and resuscitations. Thanks to knockoff mania and fast fashion, clothes and décor look like copies of copies.
We spent a pandemic locked up in our homes, and the outside world – with superstorms and deadly heat waves – is no longer the respite Thoreau once envisioned. If we retreat into our phones, we end up algorithmically chasing ourselves down familiar rabbit holes.
Pop culture, performing its canary-in-the-coal-mine function, has been trying to warn us about stucktopia. Every age gets the dystopian nightmares it most fears: In the 1930s and 40s, it was George Orwell and Aldous Huxley’s visions of totalitarianism; at the millennium, it was dark imaginings of societal collapse, whether a zombie apocalypse or the hunger games. Our new fictional nightmares are all about being trapped: mice running in an endless maze, too cowed by the complexity of the system to plow through the dead ends and find freedom.
Televised portrayals of stuckopia can’t defeat authoritarian governments or teach us how to do so ourselves. But they do offer a first step toward action – a way to recognise what parts of us are purposely staying stuck. Considered together, these shows force us to consider whether we’ll stay content with our meager daily doses of cold comfort in a larger, broken system – or toss them aside and find a new way to live.
A common thread on stucktopian TV is the contrast of two worlds: an inside world, held together with delusion, and an outside world that’s unknown, potentially fraught and full of imagined dangers.
On Severance, Mark S. has willingly had his consciousness bisected; “innie” Mark sits at an outdated computer terminal in the shadowy subterranean offices of Lumon Industries, blissfully unaware of the rest of his life, while “outie” Mark grieves for his dead wife in his empty house. The severance procedure is Mark’s bleak hope to trade emotional pain for perpetual numbness; it doesn’t help.
On Andor, the hero Cassian Andor is exiled to a floating prison, where he is sentenced to perform menial labor for the galaxy-controlling Empire. On Silo and Fallout, life in the inside world – large bunkerlike complexes built in response to a toxic environment – is humdrum and limited, while the outside world is verboten and only visited by the foolish and the reckless.
Stories like these are, of course, heirs to Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett, the great chroniclers of meaningless make-work and the labyrinthine nature of modern life. But they also capture something essential about our current moment, in which we’re too often defeated by the sense that we’re too small to crack the structures that entrap us.
In these shows, the characters summon the will to recognize the oppression inherent in these systems and to challenge their conditions.
Juliette, the rebellious protagonist of Silo, who’s responsible for maintaining the bunker’s generators that keep the underground population alive, ultimately heads outside, opting for potential death in the barren landscape over continued compliance.
On Fallout, Lucy, who has led a charmed existence as a “vaultie” in a hermetically sealed hide-out, decides to walk off into the unknown of the desert and face the world’s barbarity.
Andor leads the other inmates to revolt, choosing to jump into the surrounding sea rather than continue to labor for their oppressors. A teaser for Season 2 of Severance suggest that Mark is finally getting closer to rejecting his self-imposed psychological exile.
In our world, the small comforts offered by a real-life stucktopia can feel like consolation for staying trapped. I’ve felt this inertia, and complied with it, every time I’ve griped that our attention is constantly co-opted by the affirming banality of social media and meme-sharing, then passed along a dozen memes a day. Or when I’ve planned a carbon-dense family jaunt to ski on the disappearing powder, even as I recognise the planet is being rendered uninhabitable.
I know these behaviors are perpetuating my own mental stuckness, but they feel too good to give up – which is exactly the problem. That’s something else we can learn from stucktopian TV: We aren’t just cogs in the machine because that’s our assigned role. We’re cogs because breaking out from our prescribed slots seems deeply difficult and uncomfortable.
We’re not stuck in our circumstance. We’re stuck in the ways of living that perpetuate it.
If enough of us give up the sense that things are inevitable – that we’re stuck – it’s possible that we can course-correct humanity, or at least nudge it toward a hopeful path.
There’s another more realistic option that offers a thrill and reward of its own.
If we don’t let the stucktopia keep its hold on us, if we rebuke it, maybe we shift ourselves ever so slightly toward optimism, and give the system whatever small hell we can. — ©2024 The New York Times Company
Hillary Kelly is a literary critic.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
