The Collectivist Apocalypse of The Three-Body Problem
Netflix's hit series has a very un-American approach to saving the world. In in a good way.
2024 is Peak End Times.
As I’ve obsessed over several times here in Both/And, Americans are united by the belief that the world as we know it is ending, though we are diametrically opposed as to the reasons why. Mostly, we blame one another. Liberals fret about climate disaster, the end of democracy, and a looming economic collapse – all of which are generally the fault of capitalism, conservatives, and corporations. Meanwhile, while conservatives worry about the loss of American identity, a looming moral chaos, or the actual Rapture (around a quarter of Americans say that the apocalypse and/or Second Coming will take place during their lifetime) – all of which are generally the fault of liberal, non-white, or unfaithful or un-Christian people.
The result of all this end times thinking is a lot of end times culture: just as I was finishing this newsletter about The Three-Body Problem, yet another quasi-end-times film came out (Civil War), which I’m dreading but which I feel like I have to see. Yes, I have to triage apocalypse media.
The Three-Body Problem is fascinating for a number of reasons, many of which derive from the fact that it originates from neither a right-wing nor a left-wing American perspective, but from the trilogy of books by the Chinese speculative fiction writer Liu Cixin. Many thought the trilogy would be close to unfilmable; a lot of the first book, in particular, takes place inside people’s minds. But now, Three-Body is a phenomenon, produced by the team that brought us Game of Thrones, and sitting atop the Netflix charts. (Spoilers follow.)
To make the jump from page to screen, a huge amount of adaptation was necessary, not only transplanting much of the narrative from China to England, but condensing the book’s narratives, jetting some of the conspiratorial elements of the original material, and breaking apart and recombining the trilogy’s main characters into a veritable posse of young, attractive nerds who fall in unrequited love with one another, struggle with millennial angst, and generally move the narrative from inside brains and computers to, you know, a television screen.
This can cause the series to seem (even) less plausible than the books, as the fate of the world is largely entrusted to that same small group of attractive nerds, wrangled by a grizzled le Carré type in an empty English manor. (The aliens who threaten the earth also make themselves known much sooner than in the book.) Still, much of the material feels eerily plausible. In both book and film, we can viscerally sense the alienation of scientist Ye Wenjie, who watches her father get murdered during the Cultural Revolution and comes to believe that humanity cannot save itself; it is she who contacts the alien race despite warnings not to do so. (Interestingly, her partner in crime, oil scion turned environmentalist Mike Evans, is motivated by a bitter anti-humanism in the book, but in the film is more like a naïve cult leader, hoping the aliens will help us progress.)
Most of all, the fundamental hypothesis at the heart of the trilogy – named after its second book, The Dark Forest – is so plausible as to be chilling. The Dark Forest hypothesis is a response to the so-called Fermi Paradox, which notes that (a) in this vast universe, life must have evolved elsewhere and yet (b) there’s no evidence of it. “Where is everybody?” Enrico Fermi is reported to have asked in a conversation with other physicists.
The Dark Forest hypothesis says: they are hiding. As developed by Liu, the theory is that since resources in the galaxy are finite, eventually the most violent and rapacious civilizations will become dominant. Other civilizations, learning of this, must hide their existence lest they be discovered and annihilated.
Now there’s a new thing to worry about: Voyager 2 may doom us all.
The existence of this kind of threat necessarily leads to a more conservative politics, since strength, rather than kindness or justice or love, is what determines survival. The universe is a hostile place, and a cruel Darwinism prevails. Yet Three-Body complicates that somewhat, suggesting that intelligence can outwit than brute strength. After all, its heroes are nerdy scientists — yet scientists pressed into military service as the reality of war often trumps moral considerations. This ambivalence is reflected in the way the series depicts its characters. Sometimes, as in Hollywood military flicks, its tough-talking military types seem wise, but other times they are cruel and myopic. Sometimes, its principled scientists seem like the renegade heroes of Hollywood’s liberal movies, but then they are shown to be naïve in the face of the existential threat faced by humanity. Fortunately, the series never quite takes a side.
Accordingly, the “conservatism” of the series is not the American conservatism of individual heroism; especially the latter episodes, which mostly draw on books two and three of the trilogy, have a communitarian orientation quite unlike that of most American disaster, apocalypse, and zombie films. In Hollywood apocalypses, there’s usually a lone hero (plus sidekick, family, or small band of followers) somehow making his way in a world gone mad. (It is usually “his.”) In Three-Body, however, humanity has to get its shit together, and that often means individuals and even nations ceding enormous power to a few powerful global leaders who guide the collective.
Some commentators have suggested reflects the series’ Chinese origin, which could be true. Though again, those powerful leaders ultimately depend on the intelligence of quirky, individual, ambivalent scientists – if this is autocracy, it’s more a meritocracy and technocracy than the know-nothing brutality of the Cultural Revolution, or White Christian Nationalism. But it is definitely more collectivist than American apocalypse films; the hero isn’t a lone ranger surviving amid a broken system, but people trying really hard to get the system to save humanity.
This divergence is also true, of course, in the real world. Faced with the climate crisis or extreme inequality, progressives almost instinctively reach for collectivist solutions, while conservatives recoil from them. Indeed, right-wing conspiracy mongers often claim that the great crises of our time, like Covid and climate change, are sinister left-wing lies designed to get us to surrender our individual freedoms. Perhaps they aren’t wrong that there’s something un-American about collectivism, but in our globalized and interconnected world, that only bodes ill for America.
Which makes me wonder if the ambivalence of The Three-Body Problem, translated into our fragmented reality, might help bridge that divide in time to save us — if not from interstellar aliens, then at least from ourselves.
Topics I decided not to write about in this week’s newsletter:
How the OJ Simpson trial woke 24-year-old me up to the intersection of race, law, and policing in America
The outrageous, racist blockade of Adeel Mangi’s judicial nomination. Luckily Chris Geidner wrote all about it here. Read that piece - this is a scandal.
Civil War
Reflections on the extremely intense reactions I’ve gotten to my piece on the moral panic over antisemitism
Fact-checking the error-ridden article in The Free Press about NPR’s alleged political bias, which was mostly about the writer’s generational grievance
Psychedelics and RFK Jr. (will get to this one soon)
The belief that “Trump will handle the economy better” (ditto)
The scam of plastics recycling
Anti-trans politics is now a conspiracy theory
What’s great, and so infuriating, about the new book on “White Rural Rage”
Western Buddhism and political problems
Meditation
Quite a list, really. Let me know what topics you’d be interested in by sending me a message or leaving a comment here. Also, check out David Lat ‘s excellent analysis of the antisemitic (really) protests at UC Berkeley and where legitimate political protest crosses the line into illegitimate bigotry. Or, you know, try this short guided meditation I did on experiencing happiness. Or both/and?
I'd be interested in your take on White Rural Rage.