We live in an era that can be said to be documented more than it is narrated. First, on the most immediate level every event, from mundane to world shattering, is photographed, live streamed, or tweeted, producing a real time account of events all over the world. Second, there is no shortage of documentaries or docudramas, every crime, scandal, and disaster seems to get its own series or podcast recounting the events that have happened.

However, the same period has also been marked by a decline in stories about itself, of works of fiction or film. It is not too much of an exaggeration that we do not really have a story that could be said to be about the Gulf War, the 2008 crash, the Trump presidency, or Covid. There have been a few films about the first few entries on that list, but Covid generally only shows up in film and movies in the behind the scenes photographs which often show a crew wearing N95 masks filming unmasked actors.

It appears that the closer we get to the present the harder it is to come up with convincing stories about the present. One could also argue these events seem to be already written, the shutdowns of Covid seemed to imitate every movie about plagues and social breakdown. Maybe we already made a covid movie years before it happened. In a similar manner you often hear that we are past the age of satire, Trump seems to make all satires of the stupidity and brutality of our politics from Being There to Idiocracy toothless and redundant.

Are we past the point of fiction?

In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers/ideas/texts/etc.:

• New York Public Library’s “Human Google”
• Aristotle, Poetics 
• The Big Short (Film, 2015)
• Apocalypse Now (Film, 1979)
• M*A*S*H (TV series, 1972-1983)
• Sound of Freedom (Film, 2023)
• Flight 93 (Film, 2006)
• For All Mankind (AppleTV Series, 2019-)
• Dan Hassler-Forest, Capitalist Superheroes: Caped Crusaders in the Neoliberal Age (2012)
• Her (Film, 2013)
• Nope (Film, 2022)
• The Magnificent Seven (Film, 1960)
• Ex Machina (Film, 2014)
• Battlestar Galactica (TV miniseries, 2003)
• Contagion (Film, 2011)
• Breaking Bad (Showtime TV series, 2008-2013)
• Station Eleven (HBO miniseries, 2001-2022)
• Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” (1944)
• Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (1993)
• Yves Citton, Mythocratie: Storytelling et Imaginaire de Gauche (2010)

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