The Road: McCarthy
Filming Literature
McCarthy’s The Road
Tells us of another world, the world elsewhere of McCarthy is not the alternative world of promise that Coriolanus almost commits to but fails, foiled by women.
Like Coriolanus it is a world of the margins, a world of poverty, a world without spectacle, without media. but here the world elsewhere has become the only world and it does not offer alternative. (the first staggering difference) This is all there is, there is no longer the possibility of imagining the outside. There is no promise of the elsewhere.
This is a world to be sure that is outside of capital that is arguably outside of the nuclear family, that is outside is the saturation of media and the commodity.
But the promise, that promise looks nothing like the utopia we might have hoped for but a dystopia of post traumatic landscape sort of this idea if we can just get out of capital, if we can just get out of the family, out of media, out of this world that is saturated with images at every turn with wage labour where are lives are sort of like we’re machines. if we can get out of that then yeah! like the world is amazing and then heres McCathy saying like well no not at all its even worse.
McCathy seems to be suggesting that there is a world outside of media, outside of the spectacle, outside of the commodity and capital and its a world in which there is nothing to see. a world in which there is nothing to have, a world that is pure survival. its the quote “ponderous counter spectacle of things ceasing to be” 274
This is a world after something to which we have no access instead the novel transpires entirely in an after with little access to the before and no access to the event or events that caused the rupture.
The world the setting that we are immersed in in McCarthy’s novel is one in which temporality as we know it is over. There is no past no future there is just now now now now.
Can see it in the novel. there is the episodic structure one
McCarthy’s The Road
Tells us of another world, the world elsewhere of McCarthy is not the alternative world of promise that Coriolanus almost commits to but fails, foiled by women.
Like Coriolanus it is a world of the margins, a world of poverty, a world without spectacle, without media. but here the world elsewhere has become the only world and it does not offer alternative. (the first staggering difference) This is all there is, there is no longer the possibility of imagining the outside. There is no promise of the elsewhere.
This is a world to be sure that is outside of capital that is arguably outside of the nuclear family, that is outside is the saturation of media and the commodity.
But the promise, that promise looks nothing like the utopia we might have hoped for but a dystopia of post traumatic landscape sort of this idea if we can just get out of capital, if we can just get out of the family, out of media, out of this world that is saturated with images at every turn with wage labour where are lives are sort of like we’re machines. if we can get out of that then yeah! like the world is amazing and then heres McCathy saying like well no not at all its even worse.
McCathy seems to be suggesting that there is a world outside of media, outside of the spectacle, outside of the commodity and capital and its a world in which there is nothing to see. a world in which there is nothing to have, a world that is pure survival. its the quote “ponderous counter spectacle of things ceasing to be” 274
This is a world after something to which we have no access instead the novel transpires entirely in an after with little access to the before and no access to the event or events that caused the rupture.
The world the setting that we are immersed in in McCarthy’s novel is one in which temporality as we know it is over. There is no past no future there is just now now now now.
Can see it in the novel. there is the episodic structure one