Chapter 5 - Land: Neoliberal Wastelands in Contemporary Postapocalyptic Irish Cinema

Summary

This chapter examines a number of postapocalyptic Irish films produced and released in the aftermath of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger economy in Ireland. It considers the ways in which three of these films in particular, Conor Horgan’s One Hundred Mornings (2009), Stephen Fingleton’s The Survivalist (2015), and David Freyne’s The Cured (2017), represent both the state of the nation in the wake of fiscal catastrophe and its future self-projections: the “post” of “postapocalypse.” The films depict bleak presents, clearly reflecting the socioeconomic context of recession and austerity in which they were made. Yet they also offer bleak futures, with limited potential for transformation or growth. The sites of resistance to neoliberal dystopia that emerge within the films, especially those based on reconstruction of a premodern, pastoral community as an ethical alternative to capitalist subjectivities (a key signifier of the postapocalyptic genre), are profoundly ambivalent and contingent. Thus, the chapter argues, the postapocalyptic cycle of Irish cinema represents a key cultural engagement with the economic discourses of recovery and restoration that emerged almost simultaneously with discourses of crisis in Ireland.