presented very much like a prison.
The Cured also plays its zombie metaphor as a broader political allegory with particular resonance to Ireland. It is a story about reconciliation after a horrific period of social turmoil. It is about the struggle to integrate people who have commenting horrific acts during a time when civil society broke down. It resonates with all manner of events from recent history; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, the road to reconciliation in Rwanda after the genocide, the delicate balance to be struck between Serbia and Kosovo. In Ireland, these challenges manifest themselves in relation to the Troubles, an idea that has been explored in earnest in films like The Truth Commissioner. How does it feel to live near people responsible for the death of a friend or a relative, to interact with individuals who have committing horrific acts in living memory?
The Cured seems to bridge these two central metaphors in the name of the virus responsible for the crisis. “The Maze Virus” evokes the name of the infamous prison outside of Belfast during the Troubles, where the British government would incarcerate suspected Republican terrorists. This connection is reinforced by David Freyne through the casting of Tom Vaughan-Lawlor in The Cured. Vaughan-Lawlor plays Conor, a reformed zombie who embarks upon a campaign of political agitation (nominally) to draw attention to the experience of these individuals rehabilitated and released. Vaughan-Lawlor had previously appeared in the film Maze, playing a prisoner who masterminds a daring escape from captivity in that iconic institution.
In order for these central metaphors to work, The Cured needs to unfold after an apocalyptic event and within a recognisable political framework. This explains why The Cured unfolds against the backdrop an apocalyptic event that didn’t destroy civilisation as the audience recognises it. However, The Cured belongs to a recent and popular subgenre of apocalyptic fiction, one that blurs the traditional line between before and after the end of the world. Increasingly popular culture explores the end of the world as a perpetual and on-going process.
Historically, apocalyptic narratives have relied upon a clear delineation between stories about an apocalypse and stories that unfold in the wake of an apocalypse. Films like Terminator 2, The End of the World and Independence Day all treat the end of the world as a cataclysmic event towards which the characters are hurdling. Films like The Book of Eli, Waterworld and Children of Men all treat the end of the world as something that happened. Recently, there has been an interesting shift in emphasis, a tendency to portray the apocalypse as something that is constantly happening; not as a single catastrophic event, but as a slow crumbling of recognisable structures.
There are plenty of examples. The television series The Leftovers repeatedly suggests that its characters have effectively lived through the end of the world, but live in a state of perpetual denial of that fact. The villainous Guilty Remnant exist to remind the characters that the world has ended and that business cannot continue as usual. The film Logan hints the complete breakdown of governance in a version of the United States that still has working (and recognisable) casinos and petrol stations. Interstellar unfolds in a world where mankind has clawed itself back from the abyss of a horrific global war to the point that there are taxes and schools and baseball games, but is still slowly suffocating in the dust. The recent Planet of the Apes trilogy depicts the slow and gradual decline of the human race over the course of three whole films.
Of course, there are any number of reasons why this sort of slow and gradual apocalypse has become such a fixture of contemporary popular culture. The threat of immediate extinction of the human race through mutually-assured destruction has greatly decreased since the end of the Cold War. As recently as 1982, two-in-five thought that a nuclear war was “fairly likely” or “very lIkely.” However, by 1993, only one-in-five Americans thought that nuclear war would break out before the turn of the millennium. An expert in risk perception, David Ropeik has argued that people’s fear of nuclear energy has gradually morphed from fear instant death in nuclear holocaust to anxiety about a slower and longer death due to cancer from exposure.
The Truth Commissioner
MAZE
The Cured
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Logan
Independence Day
Waterworld
36 CinÉireann / April 2018