I will begin by admitting I have never played the video game Fallout. Indeed, I have not indulged in video games since the old arcade days of Donkey Kong, Asteroids, Galaga, and the mesmerizing Battlezone. Console games are as foreign to me as electric unicycles. And so I'm indifferent to those who praise Amazon Studio's Fallout for its fidelity to its source. What matters instead is just the TV series. Is it engaging? Is it smart? Is it visually compelling? Is it conceptually interesting? Season 1 of Fallout, which is primarily directed by Westworld's Jonathan Nolan and set in a future that never deviated from the Atomic Age, meets all of my standards and then some. It's the best science fiction series since Disney's Andor.
This post will express the author's admiration for Fallout in five short but packed theses. No other approach seemed more fitting than this, which was mastered and made fashionable by the German theorist Walter Benjamin.
Spoiler Begins With Thesis 1
Though Fallout is not original in its description of the world after the end (the collapse of society into Hobbesian tribes, bands, and individuals), it perfectly presents the irrationality of capitalism. We live in a world with billionaires—meaning, people whose wealth grows to heights that confound the mind. This, of course, is a form of madness. In fact, a person who talks to invisible cows is saner than one who endlessly accumulates universal equivalent (also called money). In Fallout, this madness is represented by a corporation, Vault-Tec, that envisions the end of history as a utopia composed of capitalists and their servants, scientists. In this profit-perfect society, workers, communists, unions, the poor, and class conflict have been incinerated by nuclear bombs. All that's left is what Paul Sweezy called, when describing Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky's "strange notion of production which has nothing but production in view while consumption appears only as a troublesome accident" as "Marxism gone crazy" (Theory of Capitalist Development). In this fantasy (which is never realized in Season 1), workers and their unions and demands for higher wages are the "troublesome accident."
Thesis 2
The corruption of power knows no color or gender. Fallout makes this claim unambiguously. Its future, which is set in 2077, is postracial—if it was ever racial at all. Interracial marriages seem to be more common than homogenous ones. Color doesn't exist even for a white man, Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins), who, in our world, would approximate the Marlboro Man. Also in our world, he would vote Republican and be a prominent figure in the MAGA movement. In Fallout, he has no idea that his wife, Barb Howard (Frances Turner), is Black and has in dress and manner the mode of a mid-century civil rights activist. Stranger still, it turns out that the celebrity cowboy is more liberal than his wife, who is not only an executive for the gone-crazy corporation Vault-Tec, but also proposes to investors the deliberate nuking of America. (Why wait for the Reds to do it?) Anything less than this catastrophe would result in weak or no profits for the company, whose market capitalization is around a trillion dollars.
Thesis 3
The American army is a religion. Generals are only priests. Soldiers are merely acolytes. In Fallout, the religion is called Brotherhood of Steel. And its members, some of whom wear robotic armor powered by a fusion core, worship not God or even the sun, but power over other humans who live on the surface of the earth. The corporate citizens of Vault-Tec live in elaborate and blast-proof bunkers.
Thesis 4
The humanism of the Enlightenment is a myth. Science is not about making the world a better place for all humans, but for the few who control wealth, not in the form of things but of what Marx calls value, the source of profits.
Thesis 5
Communism is a pipe dream. Even in a world that's been reduced to ashes by atomic bombs. And when one of the underground leaders of Vault-Tec, Hank MacLean (Kyle MacLachlan), discovers that some humans survived the catastrophe and built a town, Sandy Valley, on communal principles, he nukes it. The radicals not killed by that bomb are eventually eliminated by the Brotherhood. The world after the end of history only has room for the inhabitants of vaults made by Vault-Tec, gangs, mutants, cannibals, the army, and individuals. That is how the first season ends.
