Fallout and the Metamodern Search for Story

Lucy MacLean wants to believe in some things – right and wrong, human dignity, the golden rule. What she doesn’t want is to be deceived or manipulated. You could say that Lucy MacLean wants the truth, but she also wants the truth to be good news.

It’s a tough road to take in a post-apocalyptic, devastated world – after all, it might not be so easy in the pre-apocalyptic world.

Lucy McLean stars in new Amazon-MGM series fall outbased on the long-running video game series. fall out The story of individuals and factions vying for power and purpose in a world devastated by nuclear war. Perhaps due to the nature of role-playing games, most of the titles in the series fall out The series is firmly rooted in the tradition of postmodern storytelling: individual characters have motivations and values, but all the “metanarratives” that drove the old world (political, philosophical, religious, etc.) have been reduced to dust by the nuclear winds.

of fall out TV Series (2024) tells a different kind of story, the difference is subtle but crucial. fall out is a typical Metamodern Story. This is not just a meaningless, space-trotting existential adventure. On the contrary, fall out It speaks to the underlying longings and fears of our metamodern age: a deep desire for true stories. and A good thing, and the fear that such a story may not exist.

I recently wrote Christianity Today article On the rise of metamodernism. Metamodernism is a new cultural mood that has arisen in response to the long-standing influence of postmodernism. For the church, identifying, understanding, and engaging with the metamodernist impulse is crucial as we seek to communicate the person and work of Jesus to a changing culture.

Story fall out will help make that happen: by closely following the show’s major characters and storylines, we can watch in real time as its metamodern impulses take root and grow.

Before we dive in, though, a quick disclaimer: this article contains: fall out The series contains scenes of extremely graphic and gratuitous violence throughout, and some of the content is not recommended or endorsed. If you want to understand the ideological leanings of the show without watching it, you will be able to fully understand the arguments in this article without watching the show.

So, back to Lucy McLean. At the beginning of the series, Lucy is the perfect modernist. modernism Broadly speaking, it is a collection of feelings, assumptions, and expectations about reality that took root during the Enlightenment and continued into the early 20th century.^Number 21st century. Modernism is rooted in an atmosphere of humanistic optimism, fueled by scientific and technological advances and rationalist philosophy. Simply put, modernism is the belief that humanity can and will steadily improve over time through the responsible application of our growing intelligence and self-understanding. Modernism is a confident, humanistic, and optimistic view of reality.

Lucy was raised within just such a modernist framework. Optimistic humanism may seem surprising in a world torn apart by nuclear war, but Lucy is a “Vault Dweller,” raised in borderline utopian isolation in Vault 33, far beneath the war-torn Earth’s surface. Lucy and her community are driven by a strong sense of purpose: they await “Rebirth Day,” the day when the Earth’s surface will be safe enough for human habitation and the Vault Dwellers will emerge to repopulate the planet.

Sadly, throughout the series, Lucy realizes that the story that has given her life meaning and purpose is built on a series of lies and cover-ups. When brutal “raiders” from above raid her vault and kidnap her father, Lucy tracks them down. What Lucy finds on above is not an empty, healing planet waiting to be reclaimed by humans. Instead, she finds a barren wasteland inhabited by surviving humans in abject poverty, deeply distrustful of others, and plagued on all sides by terrors both natural and man-made.

Lucy is horrified to discover that the surface dwellers constantly lie, cheat, steal and murder, and is quick to jump into dangerous situations to teach them a simple moral code: “You shouldn’t treat people like that!” Lucy confidently declares to a bounty hunter who has killed many innocent people in his pursuit of his target. “Why?” the bounty hunter replies with some amusement, to which Lucy replies, “It’s the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Lucy’s basement neighbors maintain the same attitude as they debate how best to deal with her attacker, whom they imprisoned after the attack. Despite wanting justice for the killer, the majority vote for ethical rehabilitation. “They didn’t know any better,” says one basement dweller. “How could they know that without a formal education?” This is modernism at work: an unshakeable faith in the essential goodness of the human spirit.

Unfortunately for Lucy, this worldview doesn’t seem to match the reality of the wilderness above. Lucy’s attempts at rational conflict resolution are repeatedly met with scorn from the skeptical and hopeless. This confusion and frustration comes to a head when Lucy’s friend Maximus is needlessly shot by suspicious strangers, causing Lucy to cry out in anguish, “Why?! I don’t like it here!”

Watching Lucy’s story exposes the “beautiful lie” of modernism. After all, humanity is not fundamentally or inherently good, and progress towards peace and cooperation is not inevitable. Worse for Lucy, the entire story that has underpinned her values ​​turns out to be false. “My purpose in the Vault,” Lucy explains to Maximus, “was to get out and restart civilization. Today is the day of regeneration. That’s what’s driving us all. And… it’s already happened without us.” Maximus tries to comfort Lucy, responding, “If that makes you feel better, it didn’t work.” Human civilization still exists without the Vault Dwellers and regeneration, but it’s far from the utopia Lucy and her people had envisioned.

Lucy isn’t the only character fall out Disillusioned with modernist optimism. Cooper Howard, the show’s secondary protagonist, had his confidence in humanity shattered long before Lucy was born. Howard was a famous Western actor in the pre-war era, more than 200 years before the show’s main timeline. He was a man of good old-fashioned American beliefs, dedicated to the story of the American Dream.

It is both tragic and ironic that when the bombs fell, Howard was exposed to dangerous mutant radiation, turning him into a ghoul – a mutated human cursed with an abnormally long lifespan and near-constant suffering. For over 200 years, Howard has lived as a “ghoul” and become a notorious bounty hunter known for his amoral and brutal nature. He appears to have no convictions, no purpose, no grand plan whatsoever. He is merely a man who has lost everyone he ever loved and is cursed to continue living in a world he hates. His previous idealism is long dead, and Howard as a ghoul is the perfect contrast to Lucy’s modernist self-confidence. He sees in her a naive foolishness that is linked to his own past. He is a bounty hunter who questions Lucy’s moral certainties and seems happy to see her illusions crumble.

Howard paints a wonderful portrait of postmodernism with its cynical, skeptical view of life and its abandonment of principles. After World War I, modernist humanistic optimism seemed at best foolish and at worst dangerous. Postmodernism countered this by rejecting all attempts to understand reality through grand narratives. All the stories that seemed to give meaning to reality – religious beliefs, political movements, etc. – were discarded as so many dangerous lies. Postmodernism embraces a cynical skepticism and encourages the individual to forge his or her own path in a world that has become emptied of real meaning.

The point is that true postmodernists consider this attitude to be an honest response to reality. The postmodern mindset holds that anyone who is intellectually honest will ultimately accept postmodernism’s skeptical, individualistic outlook. Howard defies precisely this expectation. When Lucy, appalled by his lack of principles, asks Howard, “Who are you?”, his reply is significant: “Oh, I am you, dear boy. You just need to take a moment.” In Howard’s eyes, postmodern cynicism is the inevitable result of the death of modernist idealism.

Here the story begins fall out The story moves in an important direction: Lucy’s modernist optimism is shattered by the chaotic and dangerous surface world. Howard thinks it’s only a matter of time before Lucy embraces the cynical postmodern nihilism that has become his own attitude. But the story doesn’t get there. Instead, it moves in a direction that MetamodernismIt is a fusion of modernist and postmodernist impulses, and it is beginning to have a major influence on our world.

in fall out, Lucy discovers time and time again that much of her worldview is based on lies – after all, the Vault was not built by altruists to preserve humanity until a heroic rebirth, but by the corporation that dropped the first nuclear bomb in order to sell expensive homes in the Vaults. Lucy’s father is revealed to be a Vault-Tec executive who murdered his own wife, Lucy’s mother, when she discovered the truth about life on the surface.

But even as the narrative that justified Lucy’s ethical beliefs is torn apart, Lucy remains steadfast in certain beliefs, such as her dedication to the Golden Rule and the importance of treating other human beings with dignity. These beliefs, for now, are drifting without an anchor. They hang in the air, without a narrative to justify them. Why care about others? What does it even mean to care about people? Why not forge her own path and embrace postmodern cynicism like Howard does? Frankly, Lucy isn’t entirely sure. She doesn’t want to cling to a lie. By the end of season one, she has no intention of returning to the Vault and has resolved to accompany Howard in his search for the executives behind the Vault-Tec project and the nuclear war. She wants answers. She wants the truth.

Similar destruction is happening in our world.^Number The 21st century has made it clear that modernist optimistic humanism doesn’t fit reality, and so far, so does postmodern cynicism: its lack of fit is felt in our very bones.

Lucy sincerely hopes that the truth she has discovered will give her newfound justification for her commitment to certain beliefs. She believes that not only is the Golden Rule good, truthBut for now, Lucy intends to maintain the tension, which is a key feature of metamodernism. oscillationLucy is hanging on a pendulum between modernist optimism and postmodern cynicism, refusing to land on either. This is a metamodern age: people are swinging, caught between stories of human progress that ultimately turn out to be lies, and a boring cynicism that produces nothing but moral bankruptcy.

Lucy is both an idealist in search of a story and a believer in desperate search for something worth believing in. She is not content to sink into meaninglessness, but she also does not want to feel naive or simple. She seeks to deconstruct and reconstruct false stories. She has the intellectual courage to seek the truth and the heartfelt hope that the truth might be more than a tragedy. She is one of us, a metamodern generation, wandering a world haunted by dead stories, trying to find a story that, against all hope, is still alive, a story that is true but is also true. and Something good, something that can produce beauty.

Perhaps they are expecting the gospel.