In contemporary popular culture, apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic crises are often represented as allegories of our present. Contemporary dystopian movies belonging to the cyberpunk or dieselpunk genre such as the Mad Max franchiseare the most prominent examples of this; they often depict current crises of capitalism as persisting in a futuristic world. According to Mark Fisher, contemporary dystopian movies generally fail to imagine a future world in which capitalism no longer exists. In his book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009), Fisher named such reification of capitalist reality in our imagination and cultural productions as ‘capitalist realism’. This is expressed precisely in the representation of crises, law, and subjectivity in the world of Mad Max. However, in the latest installment of the franchise, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), spectral and dispossessed subjects also play pivotal roles in revealing and negating a spectral figure of law in a way that can also be read as attempts to circumvent the threshold of capitalist realism. In other words, these are attempts at imagining redemption in a world in which capitalist realism has become the norm in post-apocalyptic/dystopian representations.
Continue reading
Parvez Alam 