The first episode of the new television series “Fallout†(Prime video) takes place for the most part in a large underground shelter complex. Rich people bought their way there when the earth was atomically bombed 219 years earlier. A retro-futuristic all-American 1950s culture still prevails there; morale is high, the overalls in figure-hugging synthetic material. Here lives, the residents imagine, the future of America – those who will one day repopulate the dead landscape and rule humanity rightly. No one leaves the bunker.
Until someone, of course, leaves the bunker. An attack from outside causes the young, naive and righteous Lucy to set out to find her kidnapped father. And outside, nothing is as she expected.
Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection/TT
It is a fantasy story – the bunker as a time capsule, the family or the loner or the whole little community preserved down there and finally climbing up to face the world. It has been made in many versions. Like the romantic comedy “Up in the 90s!†(1999) where Brendan Fraser plays a bunker-raised young man stuck in the 1960s culture who steps out into reality and falls in love with Alicia Silverstone. Like the wonderful comedy series “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt†(2015) where Ellie Kemper plays a freed kidnapping victim who has been held prisoner in a bunker for 15 years under the pretense that nuclear war is raging outside r. Like Hugh Howey’s novel suite “Silo†which was also made into a TV series last year – where humanity burrows into deep inverted towers after the apocalypse and slowly realizes the truth of what is up on the ground.
I’ve always thought that there are two kinds of people and that the personality test consists of asking what someone’s fantasy of the apocalypse looks like. Do you envision an immediate death a mushroom cloud? Or an existence as a lawless survivor who wanders the ruins of the earth dressed in animal skins? The choice says a lot about a person’s self-image. (Unfortunately, I am guilty of the enormous hubris of being convinced that one should belong to the latter category, despite the fact that I am of laughable weight apocalypse wood, weak, allergic to pollen and close to rsynth.)
But lately I’ve had to revise my binary analysis of humanity – there is a third kind: Bunker Man. The one who neither thinks of lying flat before the comet/bomb/climate disaster nor going full “Mad Max†, but digs in and waits for better times.
To be one bunker man you have to be terribly rich. And bunkers are currently very much in the hands of the terribly rich. The world’s leading bunker influencer Mark Zuckerberg had a 460-square-meter secret bunker constructed on a Hawaiian island recently, and it aroused the appetite of the one percent. “The phone doesn’t stop ringing,†says Ron Hubbard, CEO of a bunker construction company, to the Hollywood Reporter. Al Corbi, head of another bunker construction company, tells the paper about an anonymous project he is currently working on that includes “water cannons†, “flame throwers†, “gas systems†, and †a steel wall that can stop a long-distance trader who drives 130†.
There they will crawl down like cockroaches in earthen crevices, the richest, and shut themselves up while the rest of us writhe in radiation-damaged plagues and eat each other up. Then they should crawl back up when the danger is over. With their bare, free hands rebuilding capitalism dollar for dollar, or how they imagine the afterlife.
In “Fallout†Lucy is met of a transformed and violent world outside the safe bunker. She is being chased by one ghoul who has lived ever since the bombs fell, noseless and grotesquely mutated by radioactive radiation. One fine day it will be me, hungry for a trind and a tech billionaire favored by quality preserves.
