Apocalyptic narratives can secretly gratify desires for depopulation and simpler life.

Evidence

The last people on earth, therefore, emerged into a forbidding landscape in which they could fill their car without charge from the gas pumps and take cans of food off the shelves in empty grocery stores; California, for them, was returned to the stage of a paradisal landscape free of overpopulation, while the survivors settled down to idyllic agricultural and communal existences, much like the (to me) Utopian outcomes of John Wyndham’s various apocalypses. The show thus offered existential terror and melodramatic grief, backed with the very real advantages of a reduction in competition and a more humane way of life. I call this kind of film a Utopian wish fulfillment wrapped in dystopian wolf’s clothing, and think it is only fair and prudent, as far as the nastier sides of human nature are concerned, to vigilantly scrutinize apparent nightmares of this kind for traces of that different and more egotistical drive toward individual and collective self-gratification that Freud found living on insatiably in our Unconscious. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 823

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the ‘Utopian wish fulfillment wrapped in dystopian wolf’s clothing’ formula, a reusable analytical template.
• SHARE: Good for someone who studies disaster films or environmental doom narratives; the gas-pumps-for-free detail makes the latent content vivid.
• SEED: Angle: apply this reading template to modern climate fiction and prepper/doomer culture — what covert gratifications hide inside today’s apocalypse narratives.