Television, it seems, has entered the bunker.
Apple TV+’s Silo, Amazon’s Fallout, and Hulu’s Paradise are, one, hugely popular (the former was granted a third season; the latter two, a second), and take place after anthropogenic extinction-level events that push humanity underground, into a world of simulated sunlight and a nature that has been entirely replaced by agriculture.
What these shows have successfully sold to millions of Americans is the vision of a future where we survive the unsurvivable. In all three shows, this forced community results in depression, madness, and a delicate social order that’s always on the verge of collapsing into pandemonium.
Each bunker is kept from the edge of collapse by a ruling class—a powerful few that withhold knowledge, resources, and basic freedoms from the people they theoretically care for.
And in each bunker, the common, working people reject that premise. Revolutions explode regularly in Silo, whose subjects, 10,000 in number, have been in the bunker so long that they’ve lost their shared knowledge of the world on the surface to such an extent that stars—what they are and why they move across the sky—are mysterious to them.
In Paradise, it only takes a few years for discontent to escalate to an armed rebellion (led by Xavier Collins—Sterling K. Brown) that’s soon followed by bodies falling out of the fake sky, climate-control and surveillance computers crashing, and Secret Service agents killing Secret Service agents. At the heart of this mayhem is a tech billionaire (Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond—Julianne Nicholson) who is emotionally bankrupt and will do whatever it takes to maintain their grip on power.
In Fallout, the peace is destroyed by invaders from the toxic surface. (I like to think of these radioactive raiders as much like animal life that’s now found above the 56 million gallons of decaying nuclear materials buried in Hanford, Washington.)
In all shows, the bunkers don’t work out as planned. And I think this is what makes the shows progressive. Why? Because, ultimately, they all reach this conclusion: It’s much better to fix the world we live in than to give up and enter an underground world that’s dark, soulless, oppressive, and completely run by those who were mad enough to build bunkers as the only solution to capitalism’s destruction of everything that really matters to humans—the environment.
What we also see in these shows are societies (Silo is organized like a city; Paradise, like a gated community, and Fallout, like rural America) is a kind of economy called “necro-economics.” LA-based philosopher Warren Montag borrowed the concept from the Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe—a state of affairs or social situation that places a higher value on things than on human life. Why else would the rich build bunkers but to maintain a social order, an economic system that’s clearly far from anything we can describe as pro-life?
And now, we must ask the biggest question out there: Are these bunker shows about the future or the present? Maybe we enjoy these shows so much because we, at present, are already in bunkers that, considering the state of our rapidly deteriorating environment, are not made of concrete but the superstructural stuff of culture: government, churches, schools, the press. (The French philosopher Louis Althusser identified these cultural institutions as Ideological State Apparatuses—ISA.) Isn’t Trump’s presidency already a bunker society that’s made up of his hot air?
And last month, on the very week that more than 40 Americans were killed by what must have looked like world-ending tornadoes, wildfires, and dust storms, Trump’s administration released a video of alleged Venezuelan criminals (no proof of this was provided) who were flown to a prison in El Salvador that looked very much like the bunkers in the TV shows: dark, militaristic, and unforgiving. (Trump also threatened to send people who vandalized Tesla cars—“domestic terrorists”—to this underground American prison.) The whole episode was unabashedly staged and shot in a manner that could be edited right into a season of Silo or Paradise.
Meanwhile, the price of gas is a more powerful political issue than global warming—taking up more space than rising sea levels, floods, and super-powerful hurricanes. That was what life was like before we entered the bunker that opened when Trump was reelected. But will we soon see the utter madness of our present bunker mentality? Will we demand that the vaults be opened and we return to the surface?
SPOILER ALERT. Each show has its own answer. Fallout says the surface might be bad, but nowhere near as bad as the bunkers. And the first seasons of both Silo and Paradise end with a single person, a brave person (Rebecca Ferguson, in the case of Silo; Sterling K. Brown, in the case of Paradise), emerging from underground. But in the former, there is nothing on the surface. With Paradise, we expect what remains of life to, in season two, look pretty like the monsters, genetically modified freaks, cults, and cannibals who populate the surface of Fallout. End of ALERT.
The ultimate social benefit of bunker TV is that it arrived just in time to reveal that we are in Trump’s bunker world. The next step is to make our exit.
