Notes from an Apocalypse A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back - Mark O'Connell Page 0,11
extent to which the show is in fact a reality TV psychodrama about masculinity in crisis.
The protagonists of the show, typically middle-class rural white men—not especially wealthy or highly educated, but comfortable enough to invest significant proportions of their income on fantasies of rugged self-sufficiency in the wake of a great civilizational crackup—are uniformly obsessed with purifying their lives of dependence on others. These men’s critique of modernity, such as it is, is a critique of the extent to which the individual has become weakened and compromised by such dependency. “I was raised to not rely on anybody,” as one prepper puts it, in a more or less representative statement of the movement’s politics. “Don’t rely on your government, don’t rely on your neighbors. You count on yourself first.”
The show is grindingly repetitive—once you’ve seen one middle-aged American white guy pursue his elaborate fantasy of individualism and self-sufficiency, you’ve pretty much seen them all—but there is a bleak comedy to the spectacle of these men performing, and imposing on those around them, their understanding of what it means to live in the “real world.” They are, almost to a man, deeply invested in the notion of their own pragmatic approach to life, and to the future. These preppers are often surrounded by people—usually women—who are less driven by the desire for independence, less maniacally certain about the advent of apocalypse, and who must therefore be taken in hand, initiated into the ways of the prepper.
In one episode, we meet Brian Murdock, a Massachusetts real estate broker and devout Christian. Brian is the consummate prepper, in the sense that every aspect of his life appears to be subservient to the overall project of readying himself for the collapse of civilization. (The particular scenario in Brian’s case is a third world war, arising out of a nuclear attack by the United States on Iran, avenged by a counterattack on Israel. “I know this with every fiber of my being,” he says, leaning against the wooden porch of his colonial home, lemon polo shirt tucked into the waistband of his checked board shorts. “One-third of the earth will perish.”) His decision to marry, he says, was taken after learning that the chances of surviving a catastrophic event greatly increase when you have a partner who is invested in your survival.
And so, in an apparent effort to reverse engineer a normal human relationship from the premise of his own self-interested survivalism, he joins a dating website and meets a young woman from Colombia named Tatiana. Having made a couple of trips down there to get to know her, he arranges for her to come to America as his fiancée. He is particularly drawn to Colombia as a wife-sourcing location because he has heard that their way of life is very simple, and that they have a culture of “gratitude” and “respect.” Brian doesn’t mention feminism, but it seems implicit, as we watch his intended young bride loading the dishwasher after her first meal in America, that traditional gender roles are an important part of his vision for postapocalyptic survival.
“I believe that the blessing of marriage,” he says, “the covenant of marriage, is very central to prepping.”
Having arrived in the United States, Tatiana is taken aback to be told about Brian’s nuclear war plan to retreat to a fifty-acre property seven hours’ drive away. Before she is even allowed to unpack her suitcase, she is made to prepare a bug-out bag. None of this—prepping, bugging out, nuclear contingency plans—had come up in their conversations before she’d come to America, and it all seems strange and confusing to her. “When Brian told me he was a prepper,” she says, “I thought he was crazy. In Colombia we don’t do it. We don’t know about saving food for bad times, you know, because there are bad times all the time already.” But her husband is wise, she says, and she is committed to one day becoming the perfect prepper wife.
The show overwhelmingly presents women as naive and in need of tutoring in the ways of prepping. Wives are skeptical, concerned with the frivolities of everyday life, but invariably come round in the end to the necessity of regular drills, firearm training, and so forth. Daughters are taught to fear “marauders,” hungry men with rage in their hearts and lust in their eyes. The family becomes a kind of fortress against the dangers of the world, the father a figure of feudal paternalism, offering protection