Walking Away from "Society Snuff"
I've been avoiding the stuff for almost a decade. Maybe you should too.
I was high school/college age during the height of the “zombie apocalypse” peak in American culture. Notably, Walking Dead premiered in 2010, ending recently in 2022. But the zombies were just a prominent subgenera of our turn-of-the-millennium obsession with our sudden and graphic demise.
I’ve dubbed this overbearing “artistic movement” Society Snuff. The fixation on our civilization’s suicide was not limited to TV shows and popcorn flicks. Even literary giants like Cormac McCarthy was in the mix with The Road in 2006, which also received a worthy film adaptation in 2009. I swallowed the grim read in a day.
But as we entered the 2010s, the Society Snuff movement metastasized in a staggering array of well funded, imaginative, well-written dystopian visions for binge streaming TV shows. Want to wallow in the hell that would’ve been the Axis Powers winning WWII and conquering the world? Man in the High Castle has got you covered. Want to combine a dissolution of America with a despotic vision of cruel patriarchal rule? Handmaiden’s Tale is for you.
I count dystopias like Hunger Games as Society Snuff too, the future of humanity and America war torn and cruel with kids murdering one another for reality TV. Society Snuff is still going strong with Squid Games and Last of Us and White Noise and Station Eleven and on and on and on. Heck, the Obamas produced the new Society Snuff film Leave the World Behind and there’s literally a Civil War movie from A24 studios coming out this year. Yeesh. Between these titles alone, we have fever dream ends of ourselves by zombies, climate change, nazis, patriarchy, Big Brother, fungus, toxic cloud, civil war, disease, and cyberattack. And I’m just scratching the surface.
Along the way, sometime in the mid 2010s, I quietly decided to opt out. I have yet to see any of the aforementioned movies or shows after 2015 or so. I’ve walked away from Society Snuff. Maybe you should too.
Context: Apocalypse Obsession is Ancient
Naturally, the context to all this is our own humanity. Whether one refers to Judgement Day of the Old Testament, Shiva’s universe destroying dance in Hinduism, or Norse pagans that described Ragnarøk in almost pornographic detail, The End Times are a cornerstone of religious thought. Just as we all someday die, so must the world we know. Always, so far as I know, there is a process of rebirth. God’s chosen ascend. Shiva’s power destroys but also creates a new universe. Some of the Viking gods live and a few people repopulate the Earth. The End Times may very well be one of those timeless stories of our psyches.
In the modern world, our scientific knowledge largely buttresses our instincts. The sun will explode in so many billion years, wiping out our wee planet. The universe itself seems fated for some kind of end as it expands. Alas.
I bring this context up because in more balanced times, I think one or two interesting Society Snuff films or TV shows a year is natural. Many of these concepts are pretty intriguing and it’s a fertile playground of storytellers to explore.
The issue is that we’ve veered wildly from what feels balanced. If one goes to church, it’s normal for the preacher to mention hellfire every once in a while. But what happens when the preacher talks of nothing else? What happens when Father So-and-So constantly whips himself into a rabid frenzy, foaming at the mouth and howling, making children cry? I don’t know about you, but I’d probably shop around for another church after so many sermons. I’m seeking spiritual solace after grandpa’s death not found with this public hellfire masturbation. What happened to that nice bit where we hug our seated neighbors with a “peace be with you”?
I’ve distilled my beef with the contemporary Societal Snuff movement to four concrete reasons.
Reason #1: Boring as Hell
When I was a teenager who saw The Day After Tomorrow in theaters in 2004, the tidal wave consuming the Statue of Liberty was a shock to the senses. Now? Please. If you’ve been even a casual consumer of the aforementioned stories across mediums you’ll have seen far worse, like baby cannibalism in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Heck, the Statue of Liberty is draped in Third Reich regalia in Man in the High Castle. In fact, if the last seasons of Game of Thrones didn’t suck so bad, show running writers Dave and Dave might’ve launched their dream Society Snuff show where the Confederacy won the Civil War. Woo hoo?
The tropes are tired. Oh wow, there’s the news anchor delivering the disastrous news as the TV cuts out. Oh gee, the troops got stomped mostly off camera. The family scrambles to gather things. Traffic jams and fires in the streets. Likely a bad guy faction trying to kill us. Maybe a crappy government. Blah blah blah.
In short, what was once jaw dropping is old news. I didn’t watch Last of Us, but do you know what scene everyone around me was talking about the most? The love story montage between characters Bill and Frank. Gee, I wonder why. Maybe it was a moment of actual humanity standing out from the Society Snuff fest that blends in with thousands of hours of other identical works?
It’s been done! This reason alone is more than enough to unplug from Societal Snuff. Swapping the baddies out for aliens or cyberattacks or what have you ain’t going to cut it.
Reason #2: Spiritual Damage, We are our Stories
I believe the interaction of a people and their stories is a two way street. Both are simultaneously up and down river of each other. What do I mean by that? Let me explain.
Let’s take a hypothetical clan of mammoth hunters in the Ice Age. When gathered around a fire, they naturally tell stories of mammoths and hunters. This makes intuitive sense and demonstrates how the stories are downstream of a people, i.e., the hunters tell hunting stories because of their lived experiences. They are expressing themselves.
BUT, the magic does not end there. Once shared, those stories have an effect upon the people hearing them. The bravery of the hunter in the story is translated into the minds and hearts of the children hearing the story for the first time. The elders will nod, the story reaffirming their life experiences and bringing them a certain peace that the tribe’s culture they’ve built is healthy. The non hunters of the group—perhaps the women or craftspeople—will be amazed and wiser for it, experiencing a slice of life that isn’t in their sphere. Hopefully they too get a chance to share their stories by the fire.
See what I’m getting at? There’s some timey wimey, feedback loop magic at play here. Grog the Mammoth Master inspires generations as a cherished, uplifting yarn.
Now let’s take this dynamic to the topic at hand. We as a people have these fixations and fears of civilization suddenly and violently imploding around us. Fine, got it. Happens. Now the stories are out there and most people think they’ve made a fine product that hopefully made them some money. But the stories work their magic back at us just as they’ve always done. They lead us deeper into these fixations until it’s essentially a mass neurosis—or hypnosis, even.
We can dwell in this pit forever if the cycle continues, or we bring balance to the force. There are other visions of where humanity is going. Stories in hearts and minds out there yet untold that pack the same storytelling thrills, yet don’t lead us down into the Judgement Day malaise. On this score, we as a people need to take the lead. I think most of us would be surprised how much a thrilling, original vision of—gasp!—utopian aspirations could influence our zeitgeist right now.
Reason #3: Misanthropy is Bad—Evil?
We live at a time where we’re constantly told—sometimes compassionately, sometimes forcefully—to control our behavior and words. Some call it progress, others law and order or guarding our values. Others a new form of classic American puritanism.
Irregardless of that conversation, here we are. So in the spirit of the times, I’m going to be the passionate weirdo spearheading terms I made up. I’m #callingout those who project deeply internalized misanthropic world views. Why? Because misanthropy is the root of all inter-human evil as I know it.
Every villain—both in fiction and in history—operates from the fundamental worldview of misanthropy. People are bad and they need ME to make them good.
Misanthropy is the headwaters of all the bad -isms and -ists. Anecdotally, I’m shocked on a regular basis as I talk to people both familial and newly met and see how much internalized misanthropy they carry. Liberal, conservative, politically apathetic. Young or old. It doesn’t matter much. Many seem to start from the basis “Humans suck”. Naturally, these folks have extracted themselves from the human race. They are not a part of the disgusting mob, no! By some miracle of self delusion, they float above, giving dictates and deriding the dangerous, writhing masses.
The Original Sin paradigm is stronger than ever.
The truth is, humans are pretty grand beasties. We see wounded birds and fix their wings. Trace amounts of meth and fentanyl aside, if you ride a Seattle Metro bus for more than a few stops, you’ll hear a fellow disembarking rider cheerfully thank the driver. Think of the most thoughtful gift you’ve received and I bet it brings a smile to your face. I’ve been first on scene for a bad car crash during a lunch break once, and dozens of passersby leapt into action with barely a word to extricate the wounded. The dangerous, writhing masses are overwhelmingly going about their days peacefully, working together, and putting bread on the table. It’s amazing what we create and what we are.
Of course there’s a nasty side to us, but on that score I contend we’re a lot like the other living things from the lion who slaughters defenseless cubs to the kudzu vine that strangles the noble old oak. Orcas and cats delight in the torture of their prey. Should we hate all life? A basis of misanthropy leads to many of our contemporary death cults disguised as intellectualism or artistic expression.
“But humans should know better!” you type, upset. I’m not a human exceptionalist in that regard, dear reader. We’re in Kingdom Animalia just like all the other critters, for better and for worse. Why are we comparing ourselves to angels from heaven? As aspirations, yes. As realities, it hardly seems fair to me.
Reason #4: Are the Powerful Screwing with Us?
Real talk. We live in an era of extreme wealth and power concentration, our entertainment landscape dominated by unprecedented corporate consolidations and financial monopolies run by secretive rich-people boards. This ain’t the era of George Lucas setting up shop to make his space opera vision via plucky indie studio. Ole Zuck is making my case here by apparently building an insane post-apocalyptic bunker on Hawaii. Guys like Zuck are the ones telling our stories now.
So what? Well, it’s a factor to think about. Why might these folks churn out endless rivers of Society Snuff films? There is a term in psychology called preconditioning that was coined by W.J. Brogden of Johns Hopkins University in 1939. An example, you train a monkey to receive a banana when you ring a bell. But now the monkey also salivates whenever he hears the sound of a bell. Unknowingly, the monkey has been preconditioned to salivate at the sound of bells. Voila.
To be blunt, are we being preconditioned via storytelling to hate ourselves, each other, our country, and the very idea of society by these obscenely wealthy psychos!? We, the monkeys, are lured to the theater or streaming service for entertainment (*ding ding* goes the bell!). We are fed a diet of Society Snuff in the form of big budget blockbusters featuring our favorite celebrity beautiful people, aka, the banana. Yummy, our brains light up.
What now? Well, you turn off Handmaid’s Tale and take out your latent feminist anger on your boyfriend (literally happened to me all the time with an ex who loved the show). Man in the High Castle is over and you internalize an America run by the Third Reich. Yeah, that could happen, you think for the first time. Where is the zombie movie where the characters grow positively, helping one another to create a better new world? Pfft, no. Spoiler, all those end with humans being the real monsters and a handful of “good people” barely surviving. You venture outside, looking at your neighbors with suspicion. “As soon as the lights go out… old man Bob next door is going to get me!”
If Society Snuff was only a handful of legitimately original stories a year, I wouldn’t take this conversation here. But a decade of this relentless, consistent pattern from a cadre of bad hombre oligarchs? It’s worth remembering that Walt Disney survived financially in those early days by making war propaganda cartoons for the military. Society Snuff could very well be a trillion dollars worth of effort by now. It’s not only natural to wonder who are churning these out and why, but imperative.
In Conclusion
I could go on, literally, for a whole book. Maybe I should! But, even if limited to the narrow confines of myself, I’m busting out of this storytelling doom loop. Henley’s Invictus tells us that, “I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.” I don’t control the world, but I am the damn captain of my own damn ship.
I won’t be watching the upcoming A24 Civil War movie. No. More. Society Snuff! It’s #1 boring, #2 soul damaging, #3 misanthropic, and #4 possibly oligarch preconditioning for another one of their creepy schemes. Call me crazy, but generally stories should be exciting, soul nourishing, pro-human, and for The People, no?
I think we storytellers are supposed to combat the doom loops, not fixate upon them. There’s merit to having one Nostradamus around, but a society where everyone including your bartender is trying to be Nostradamus is a nightmare. Let’s leave that work to the religions, both longtime established and newly corporate sponsored. We have a different job to do. Peace be with you, neighbor.
Many fine points. All gloom and doom makes humanity dull and frightened people. The assaults we see on democratically aligned societies and institutions may be related to this. The assumption in a society like ours is the people are good enough, smart enough, to govern themselves, at least through elected representatives. If people are seen as bad, then the whole scheme is nuts.