Slavoj Žižek

The future will not follow any of the already imagined Hollywood movie scripts

Apocalypse now: Roland Emmerich’s '2012' (2009). Image: Sony Pictures Entertainment / Kobal / Shutterstock

We often hear that what we are going through is a real life case of what we used to see in Hollywood dystopias. So what kind of movie are we now watching?

When I got the message from many US friends that gun stores sold out their stock even faster than pharmacies, I tried to imagine the reasoning of the buyers: they probably imagined themselves as a group of people safely isolated in their well-stocked house and defending it with guns against a hungry infected mob, like the movies about the attack of the living dead. (One can also imagine a less chaotic version of this scenario: elites will survive in their secluded areas, as in Roland Emmerich’s 2012 where a couple of thousand selected survive – with the admission price of $1 billion per person.)

Another scenario along the same catastrophic lines came to my mind when I read the following news headline: ‘Death penalty states urged to release stockpiled drugs for Covid-19 patients.

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