Doom and Gloom Guaranteed

In this provocative, passionate, and uncompromising brief book, professor of English Gwendolyn Audrey Foster does not mince words: humanity is definitely doomed, and it’s a good thing. The currently unfolding ecological catastrophe is bound to eventually wipe us off the face of the planet, and Foster, a self-described radical environmentalist, hopes that, once depeopled, the earth will be able to eventually heal itself. But before all this comes to pass, it is (presumably) still worthwhile to analyze the cultural foibles of a human civilization on the eve of destruction, and so Foster sets out in this book to examine what she calls the “apocotainment” pervasive in the American(ized) culture that is morbidly, tellingly fascinated with death, suffering, and its own impending demise.

Given the (rather puzzling) absence of an introduction, the first of the book’s five thematic chapters, titled “Disposable Bodies,” begins by briefly explaining that the author’s aim is to explore “some of the themes that circulate around our apocalyptic obsessed culture, which has grown to the point that both permeates and informs our lives” (2). To begin the review on a structural note, the organization of this exploration is fairly fluid and amorphous; the boundaries of the five chapters (there is also no conclusion) appear almost as an afterthought imposed upon the often meandering prose. (On occasion, Foster momentarily relaxes her focus on the culture of the apocalypse to indulge side conversations on topics close to her heart, such as the inhumane—or all too human, for her—treatment of animals like the “Blackfish” orca Tilikum, to whom the book is dedicated.) To compensate for the lack of a more formal structure, each chapter is prefaced by an abstract composed of a list of keywords and keyphrases, but many of these, it seems, could easily be moved around and still apply, since Foster leaves behind themes and texts to pick them again in later chapters, in different contexts. Subheadings would have been helpful.

The book’s main themes—hyperconsumption, gluttony, and above all, a cultural preoccupation with death and torture—are examined primarily in relation to recent reality TV shows, starting with I Was Impaled and 1000 Ways to Die. According to Foster, these shows appropriate tropes from horror films, but unlike those films, the shows lack a clearly defined narrative structure and well-defined heroes and villains, hence they lack “any moral complexity, emotional richness, or resolution” (7). The deaths they depict are exploited for “sick kicks,” a form of “gallows humor” that Foster clearly disapproves of (though she admits at one point that 1000 Ways to Die is so absurd and over-the-top that it might be “a self-reflexive parody”). Ultimately, for Foster, such “family friendly torture porn” or “apocotainment” is nothing but “televisual excrement” produced by and for a culture obsessed with death, not life, “dominated not by Eros, but by Thanatos . . . one of brutal fascistic pleasure, a culture at home with genocide, pain, death, torture and the destruction of the planet and all forms of life” (5).

Above all, Foster laments that such shows normalize and trivialize the death and suffering of others. But this is not the only critique she levels; in later parts of the book, Foster condemns the gluttony advocated by Paula Deen on her cooking shows; the media’s exploitation of communal grief following the deaths of Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston; and the exploitation of children such as Honey Boo Boo and the young girls on Toddlers and Tiaras. These shows do not easily fit into the category of “apocotainment,” but for Foster, they are all “repellent,” “ghoulish,” and “astonishingly exploitative.”

It is certainly hard to disagree that today’s reality TV is often appallingly exploitative; however, Foster’s broad-based critique of these shows as “mindless and formulaic” and “depraved” sometimes veers into preachiness; perhaps more importantly, it is not very original and does not tell us much that is new about...