In this free-for-all-Friday Trent explores different fictional works that include characters who try to communicate popular media in a post-apocalyptic future.
Transcript:
Welcome to the Council of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.
Trent Horn:
It is free for all Friday here on the Council of Trent podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers apologist and speaker, Trent Horn. On Mondays and Wednesdays, we talk apologetics and theology, how to explain and defend the Catholic faith, but on Fridays we talk about whatever I want to talk about, and today I want to talk about how are you going to pass the time after the apocalypse, after you have survived the unsurvivable? Do you want to know how I know you’re going to make it? You like listening to free for all Friday. I bet you’ve listened to all the Free for All Fridays. You don’t skip the uninteresting topics. No, that’s not true. I know a lot of people do that, and it’s actually been a while. I haven’t done an episode on surviving what to do in disasters, how to survive the apocalypse, all kinds of good stuff like that, so pretty soon I should put out a few more episodes on that.
Let’s say you get past the apocalypse. What are you going to do, not just to survive but thrive? Let’s say 99% of humanity is gone. You’re part of the 1% that’s left. You don’t want to just survive. You want to thrive. You want to bring back human civilization, and you’ll certainly try to do that. You just might bring back strange little pockets of it in weird ways that you’re not remembering correctly. So what I want to talk about today is post-apocalyptic literature and storytelling. What do I mean by that? I want to talk about a convention that is explored in apocalyptic fiction that I find to be fascinating. Once again, niche topic, but Free for All Fridays are all about niche topics that when you look at literature that talks about post-apocalyptic, so not just people facing the end of the world, then it’s the end of the world. And it’s done. Well, what about that remnant of humanity that survives? What do they do? I mean, human beings want to survive. We’re good at scraping our way through different situations, but we also want to thrive, that even when humanity has gone through difficult periods in human history.
I mean, when you think about what our ancestors had to go through in order for us to be here today … Here’s something wild to consider though, that all of your ancestors, none of them could have died before reproducing, that the reason you and I are here is because millions of people all throughout history interconnected with one another, lived to reproduce and procreate, and they lived through horrible periods with high rates of child mortality, constant warfare, famine, starvation, disease. And yet they lived on, they made it through. And I think that if humanity suffered some kind of catastrophe, humanity would endure in a similar way.
We would first focus on just building up an infrastructure for survival. We would try to quickly go back through the previous epics of history. We’d go through the agricultural. We’d speed run human history. We would first figure out the agricultural revolution, then we would go through Bronze Age, steam power, industrial revolution. Then once we had steady access to supplies and energy, we could hopefully salvage what we had left to get back to the information age, and it depends on the cataclysm, right? Some cataclysms might be some kinds of wars, might leave a lot of electronics and machinery unusable, but something like gamma radiation that’s just harmful, not gamma radiation. What am I thinking? A supernova, interstellar radiation, some of that might just be dangerous for certain kinds of organic life, but leave the machines that we created intact, so it wouldn’t be that hard to reverse engineer everything.
It’s not just technology, right? Once we’ve got the food on our plates, a roof over our heads, climate control to at least some degree, fire, security, protection, then what do you do? Throughout human history, think about it, once tribes managed to find some kind of stability, they would spend time gathering around the fire listening to a master storyteller. Human beings have always wanted to have entertainment when in between bouts of survival. Once they’ve had that successful hunt, once they’ve harvested the crops, we want to take a break and just listen to a good story. Now, I think after the apocalypse, the remnant of humanity that’s left would try to salvage the stories that we had before and retell them, the ones that they really enjoyed.
I want to share with you a few examples of fiction, well, two pieces of art. One is a film, the other is, I think it’s a Broadway play. It’s a play that was put on that explore these themes. And I just think it’s funny to think about what would we do in that situation if we were in the post-apocalyptic age, and you just wish you could just sit down and watch an old episode of Friends or The Simpsons? You don’t have the media around anymore. It’s gone, it’s lost, don’t have it. All that exists left is what is in your memory, and how would you entertain yourself with that?
Here’s the first one I want to talk about is a film, A Reign of Fire, 2002, so that was about 20 years ago. Some of you might remember this film. It is pretty over the top, but it’s a fun post-apocalyptic film. It’s called Reign of Fire. It stars Christian Bale and Matthew McConaughey. So imagine, there you got Batman, “Where were the other drugs at?” and then Matthew McConaughey, “All right, all right, all right.” It’s called Rain of Fire. And the apocalypse here is caused by dragons. Yeah, you heard that, right.
It says here film is set in England in the year 2020, 20 years after London tunneling workers inadvertently awakened dragons. The movie takes place, the beginning of the movie is in the year 2000. Little boy, he’s in this tunneling thing. They’re working on the subway, and then they accidentally release a dragon and then these other dragons start coming out of the earth and they’re flying, fire breathing dragons, and the militaries of the world try to fight them. They aren’t able to do that, so they use nuclear weapons and it ends up basically destroying the world, and most of humanity has died off. And the dragons are starting to die off. They can’t find food either, so there’s just a band of survivors. And the film takes place, I think it’s set in England where Baal and McConaughey are there, at least Christian Bale.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the film, but they’re holed up in this castle and they’ve got other people there and other little kids who were born after the apocalypse, and they’re just trying to survive and make do. There’s one scene, where to entertain the kids, they act out Star Wars. Specifically, they act out The Empire Strikes Back from memory, and it shows a scene where they’re acting out. They change the vocabulary a little bit for them. I mean, these are kids who’ve never seen the Star Wars film. They can’t possibly visualize it, so they talk about it as if it was like knights a little bit, but they act it out, just to provide a good story to tell them, when it’s really just they’re trying to act out Empire Strikes Back from memory. Here’s the scene.
Speaker 3:
“Join me,” the black guy says, “And we can end this conflict forever.” “Never. I’ll never join you,” the white knight says, “You killed my father” The black man’s stares through the holes in his shiny mask and he speaks words that burn into our hero’s heart forever. “I am your father.” “No.”
Speaker 4:
“Yay.”
Trent Horn:
Okay, so that’s the first one that I wanted to share with you when I was thinking about post-apocalyptic storytelling. The other one is not telling a story, but it’s about preserving knowledge that has been lost. Very interesting for you to check out. Skip ahead in three minutes if you don’t want the spoiler, but I’ll tell you the spoiler anyways, because it’s just interesting, but skip ahead three minutes if you don’t want to hear that. In 2010, there’s a post-apocalyptic western action film called The Book of Eli, starring Denzel Washington. And Washington is this nomadic character, Eli, traveling through the desert trying to get a book that he has with him to a safe location. And so he’s going and he has to fight people, and they try to use this book to control other people. And it turns out the book is the Bible, but the twist is that it’s in braille and Eli is blind. And you hadn’t figured that out through most of the movie because he’s cool, he can beat up people, doesn’t need to see them. The Bible is something you want to be able to keep, but it’s in braille and only he knows it, and he has the Bible memorized because of that. And so he dictates and recites the Bible at the end of the film so its knowledge can be passed on.
Once again, I think that it’s fascinating that if we were in the post-apocalyptic age … You know what’s hard about that, by the way, that I have really torn feelings about? A lot of the media that I have in my home is streaming media. What stinks is that I could lose that in a second. If it’s on the cloud, a lot of films I have, I’ve purchased them on Amazon. I sit down with my wife and we’ll scroll through Amazon and say, “Yeah, let’s just buy that.” And you click and you buy it, and then you can just watch it right on your TV, and it’s great. You don’t need anything else, but that’s dangerous because as soon as you lose, not even the apocalypse, you just lose internet, you can’t watch any of that.
I mean, some people can have that offline to be able to watch, but if it’s just on that Amazon server, one day they could just take all that away from me. Jeff Bezos can say, “Ha ha ha, foolish mortal, I shall take away your complete seasons of The Simpsons.” And I will say, “Ha, ha, ha, Jeff Bezos, you can’t do that because I have all the seasons that matter on a physical DVD. Good luck prying those from my cold, dead hands.”
That’s true. Actually, I have this big DVD collection. I have one of those big DVD binders. I bought it many years ago with the plastic sleeves inside. When I was late teens and going through college, when I would go to Walmart or Target, I would go to the $5 DVD section. I wouldn’t buy crummy DVDs, but I would say, “Hey, is there something good here for $5?” And if there was something good there for $5, I would buy the DVD, take the disc out, and put it in the big sleeved container that I had of DVDs. So my point is, I got hundreds of DVDs in this case. And it’s nice because if something weird happens, I mean, at the very least, I feel like if I could come up with a generator, you just got to find a DVD player and a TV and just have enough power to run them, and it’s not that much power. Even a portable D V D player … They got a lot of things, a portable DVD player, I have one of those, you can just put the DVD in, open it, and then you can watch stuff. I actually have that in our little emergency supply thing because it’s not that hard to charge it with a solar-powered … Hey, it gives the kids something to do, something to watch.
What if eventually you don’t have electricity or you’re in the digital dark ages and you don’t have that, and you have to do everything from memory? This is the most interesting one right here that I want to share with you. It’s the Broadway play. And speaking of the Simpsons, that’s what ties all this together. It is called Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play. It was written by Anne Washburn, and it premiered at the Wooly Mammoth Theater Company in May of 2012. I’m looking here. I don’t think it was Broadway. I don’t see Broadway here in the lineup. It was produced in London, also in Sydney. Let’s see, it was nominated for Drama League Award for production of a Broadway or off-Broadway play, so I guess it must’ve been on through there.
It’s a weird play, and I’m just going to basically share the plot summary with you because I find it fascinating, and I’ve watched little clips of it here online, so here goes. The play takes place over three acts over the course of 75 years. So in Act I, you just have a band of six survivors around a campfire, and it’s alluded there’s some kind of apocalyptic event. I think it’s some kind of nuclear energy crisis, and people went too far with nuclear power. And so now you have these six people, and they’re just trying to survive. They’re trying to get information. They’re like, “Oh, what happened in Boston? Are things okay there?” They’re trying to figure out who’s okay, who’s not okay, and gather supplies. They’re sitting around a campfire, just trying to kill some time, and also to distract themselves from mourning and sadness over the death and destruction that happened in this unspecified apocalypse. One thing they do to try to pass the time is they attempt to retell an episode from The Simpsons, and the episode that they choose to retell is Cape Fear.
Speaker 5:
It starts. The episode starts with Bart, and he gets a letter saying, “I’m going to kill you, Bart.”
Speaker 6:
Right, right. “I’m going to kill you, Bart,” because doesn’t Lisa have a pen pal or something?
Speaker 7:
Oh.
Speaker 5:
No, that’s something … Wait, she does have a pen pal, and that’s another yes. And it starts off with she has a pen.
Speaker 6:
She has a pen pal from someone in some Asian country.
Speaker 5:
Yeah, a repressed country or something. And Bart, he thinks that’s making fun of her.
Speaker 6:
Something like that, and then he gets a letter.
Speaker 5:
Right, right. He gets the letter written in what appears to be blood-like, “I’m going to kill you, Bart.”
Speaker 6:
But that’s not how it starts. It starts … They’re on the couch, Bart and Lisa, and they’re-
Speaker 5:
Oh.
Speaker 6:
They’re watching TV, right?
Speaker 5:
That’s right. Yes, they’re watching Itchy and Scratchy.
Speaker 6:
Itchy and Scratchy.
Trent Horn:
That was an episode that aired October 7th, 1993, and I think it was genius that they picked this particular episode to retell, because this episode itself is a parody of a movie that’s a remake of another movie that’s based on a novel, okay? You may remember this. Back in 1962, there was a film called Cape Fear, featuring Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum. Then the film itself was based on the 1957 novel, The Executioners. And then it was later remade with basically the same story in 1991 with the same title, Cape Fear. This time though, it was directed by Martin Scorsese. It has Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte in it, and it is about a convicted rapist who uses his knowledge of the law and he finds all these loopholes to seek vengeance against the public defender, the attorney who was representing him at trial, and he blamed the attorney for being purposely incompetent and allowing him to go to prison, so he holds him responsible. And now that he’s studied the law a lot, he goes and tries to just terrify him and harass him just short of doing something illegal. And then it ends with this big climactic fight on a houseboat and it’s just over the top and really interesting.
They parodied this in The Simpsons, actually, in the episode Cape Fear. So here it is about one of the villains from the Simpsons, Sideshow Bob, who is voiced wonderfully by Kelsey Grammer from the show Frazier, which itself is a spinoff of Cheers. Sideshow Bob is going after Bart Simpson because Bart helped to put Sideshow Bob in prison when Sideshow Bob tried to frame Krusty the Clown. And so they basically remake Cape Fear, where Sideshow Bob gets out of prison and harasses Bart, and then follows him to this idyllic town. They’re put under witness protection and then they go to this town, and then the similar events to Cape Fear play out, okay? All that said and done, it’s funny that they picked this particular episode because it’s so deep and layered that in Act I of the play, they’re just trying to retell the story just to pass time.
Speaker 5:
Yeah. And then Marge says, right? Yeah. Marge says, “You’re an awful man. Stay away from my son,” but wait, no. No, no, no. This is after … Bart, oh, what does he say? “It’s you. It’s you. You’re the one who’s been trying to kill me, the one who’s sending me threatening letters.” And then Marge says, “Stay away from my son. You’re an awful man.” And then ominous, all ominous, “Oh, I’ll stay away from your son. I’ll stay away forever.” Yes, which freaks Homer out.
Speaker 6:
He does.
Speaker 5:
And then he’s frustrated because that’s not what he meant to say. “Oh, no, no. That’s no good.” And he’s just so frustrated. He just walks off.
Speaker 6:
Awesome. So good.
Speaker 5:
That’s it. Yes.
Trent Horn:
Oh, I should mention that the end of the play gets ridiculous because in the original Cape Fear, they have the climactic fight on the houseboat and then it catches fire and the villain ends up dying when the houseboat sinks and that happens. At the end of the Cape Fear episode of The Simpsons, Bart distracts sideshow Bob by asking him to reenact a musical. I think it’s the H.M.S. Pinafore, and they do this big gigantic musical number. And then right before Sideshow Bob kills him, the houseboat … And once again, I am not … It’s so funny, I’m trying to recall this from memory like the people on the play. The houseboat, it crashes onto some rocks, and then the police are there for some reason, I can’t remember, and then they arrest Sideshow Bob.
See, you wouldn’t want me in the troupe, because I remember the basic gist of the story, but I don’t have it all completely memorized. My friend Todd, though, who works at Catholic Answers, probably has the entire episode memorized. That is in the Simpsons and Act I is just them trying to remember the story.
Act II in the play, Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play, Act II takes place seven years later, and now the survivors, the surviving group, has a new member that has joined them. And it’s been seven years into the apocalypse, and they form a traveling theatrical group that goes around performing episodes of The Simpsons. It’s been seven years into the apocalypse, and there are groups that travel and reenact old movies and TV shows for movies. They’re like traveling acting troupes, and that’s a new, successful career in the post apocalyptic world.
And I completely believe this. I completely believe that in the post-apocalyptic world, you’d have theatrical troupes. You’d have maybe independent filmmakers creating short videos and films we want to see. I think that people would want to do that. Act II is about them arguing about what they should do with the next performance, what kind of props they should use, what kind of lines they should use. They also talk about how it is difficult that they have to barter with other acting troupes for the licenses to use particular episodes, to use particular lines, like, “We got to get these lines or those lines.”
Speaker 5:
If we stop, we’re going to lose out to other shows that keep buying lines.
Speaker 9:
Well, what if we restricted it to brokers, people we have trusted relationships with?
Speaker 5:
But those guys, I don’t know about those guys. They say they’ve got nothing. You trade a show to Richards, and suddenly they happen to have an entire show. The best lines we get are from people we don’t know, people who walk right up to the booth.
Speaker 8:
I got that guy who worked for Saturday Night Live.
Speaker 6:
I remember that.
Speaker 5:
Yeah, it was good, right?
Speaker 8:
Yeah, yeah. It was a whole chunk of Heart of Darkness plus some lines from Lisa the Vegetarian. And he said he had this really good part about Much Apu About Nothing, but that he’d have to join up. We’d have to take him on, and he was the man for it. I don’t remember what happened to him. Maybe he went to Richards.
Speaker 5:
Wait, they’re not taking people on, are they?
Speaker 8:
Sometimes. They’re also letting people go.
Trent Horn:
So even in the apocalypse, copyright law will survive. There will be copyright law and cockroaches. You can’t get rid of it. And it’s interesting. As you hear them tell the story, if you actually went back and looked at the original Cape Fear episode of The Simpson, so they’re still talking about that same episode, you would see they actually have subtle differences between the original episode and their retelling of it, which would make sense because you wouldn’t perfectly remember everything that happened. You would conflate things, you would get different things mixed up. And then finally, the play takes place in Act III, and Act III takes place 75 years later after Act II, so it’s been basically 80 years since the apocalypse. That would mean there have been two to three generations in the post-apocalyptic world, and a new culture has set in.
And so the story of Cape Fear, that episode of The Simpsons has been told and retold so much, it mutates and changes to become a strange myth, like an epic Greek myth, where The Simpsons characters represent forces of good and darkness. I’ll read the synopsis because it puts it very well. The final act is set 75 years after the second act. Cape Fear, now a familiar myth is being performed as a musical. The story, characters, and morals have changed into more serious epic forms. For example, Mr. Burns has been combined with Sideshow Bob, the actual Cape Fear villain, and is now a supernatural avatar of death and destruction. In the musical story. Burns destroys Springfield by sabotaging the nuclear plant. The Simpsons flea onto a houseboat. Burns, along with his demonic henchmen, Itchy and Scratchy, sneak onto the boat, untie the mooring ropes. Burns begins killing the Simpsons one by one, Bart, the last survivor, almost surrenders, but receives encouragement from the ghost of his family and kills Burns in a sword fight. Bart then sings the finale song about hope for the future. The stage is then lit up by bicycle-powered electric lights, the first appearance of electricity in the play.
Speaker 10:
(singing)
Trent Horn:
So that’s where Lisa and Bart are singing to Mr. Burns on the houseboat while they’re imprisoned by Itchy and Scratchy, his henchman. I love also the little bit they add there, where they’re singing the melody, I think sounds like it’s from the Flintstones theme song. (Singing) It’s interesting that if you were creating art, you’d probably subtly borrow from other pieces of art that you don’t remember. And then here’s just the very last thing that they sing and end the play with.
Speaker 10:
(singing)
Trent Horn:
If you search for it, Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play, you can watch it on YouTube. I think there’s two different theatrical troupes that put it on. And I will tell you this. It’s weird. It’s not about The Simpsons. It includes The Simpsons, but it’s not like a Simpsons episode. It’s not particularly funny. It’s more weird and bizarre, and it drags on in places, but if you have absolutely nothing to do and you want to check out an interesting piece of fiction, by all means have at it.
Thank you all so much. Hopefully you’ll remember Council of Trent episodes accurately when you retell others about them in the apocalypse or whatever fate befalls us in the future. Thank you guys so much and hope you have a very blessed weekend.
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