Page - 37 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 05/02

two prequels, storytelling is foregrounded and examined as a collective process and as the basic means of world-construction. From this perspective, the apoc- alypse is also exposed as what it is – a story. It is a tale with a certain function, or, as I will argue, different functions for different groups of people and the respective worlds they inhabit and construct. THE APOCALYPSE AS POPULAR ENTERTAINMENT IN LATE CAPITALISM Seen from the outside, the three novels are a piece of art and popular enter- tainment aesthetically depicting the erasure of human society through an apoc- alyptic event. Hence, they could well be sorted into the genre of (post)-apoc- alyptic fiction. What distinguishes them from other works of the genre is the meta-perspective they assume, for in their story-world too, before the actual event, apocalyptic visions have become a queasy form of popular entertainment. There had been online TV shows about it: computer-generated landscape pictures with deer grazing in Times Square, serves- us-right finger-wagging, earnest experts lecturing about all the wrong turns taken by the human race. There was only so much of that people could stand, judging from the rating, which spiked and then plummeted as viewers voted with their thumbs, switching from im- minent wipeout to real-time contests about hotdog-swallowing if they liked nostal- gia, or to sassy-best-girlfriends comedies if they liked stuffed animals, or to Mixed Martial Art Felony Fights if they liked bitten-off ears, or to Nitee-Nite live streamed suicides or HottTotts kiddy porn or Hedsoff real-time executions if they were truly jaded. All of it so much more palatable than the truth.17 From the quote it becomes clear that the immense popular interest in apoca- lyptic tales and images in the pre-apocalyptic story-world does not represent a conscious reflection or an actual moral standpoint on the part of the viewers as perhaps in the case of “The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement”. Instead, it has to be seen as an extreme piece of entertainment for enormously bored and alienated subjects that could easily be replaced by any of the other horrific shows mentioned. The doubling of the apocalyptic imaginary the MaddAddam Trilogy represents endows the novels with a reflective angle on the function of apocalyptic tales and, indeed, of storytelling as part of worldmaking in and outside fiction as such. The pre-apocalyptic hegemonic world of the trilogy, depicted mainly in the first book, Oryx and Crake, is a future version of the contemporary neo-liberal late-capitalist world: “In Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, […] we find a near-future world that both approximates and projects forward from the political, socio-eco- 17 Atwood 2014, 32. Just Popular Entertainment or Longing for a Posthuman Eden? | 37www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 31–50