14. The End-of-the-World as World System

From The Hunger Games to World War Z, dystopian narratives with apocalyptic themes have dominated mainstream popular culture in the United States and worldwide in recent years. Reflecting on Fredric Jameson’s famous remark about how it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism, this chapter suggests that the predominance of apocalyptic themes paradoxically discloses an effort to imagine the world system in its unrepresentable totality. Examining a number of recent films, it identifies three particular traits—clear temporal limits, an identifiable political order, and the desirable simplification of social complexes—that make possible a sort of political unconscious of dystopian cinema, which in turn becomes a way of understanding the seemingly chaotic world system itself.