Lessons from society’s frameworks at the end of the world.

Dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies from 1968 to 2021 usually conclude with optimism, giving the audience a window into what is possible in the face of social dysfunction. The infrastructure that peeks through at the edges of the frame surfaces some of the concrete ways in which dystopian and post-apocalyptic survivors have made do with their damaged and destroyed worlds. In this book, Christian B. Long argues that if the happy endings so common to mass-audience films do not provide an all-encompassing vision of a better world, the presence of infrastructure, whether old or retrofitted or new, offers a starting point for the continued work of building toward the future.

Film imaginings of energy, transportation, water, waste, and their combination in the food system reveal what might be essential infrastructure on which to build the new post-dystopian and post-apocalyptic communities. We can look to dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies for a sense of where we might begin.