Disaster and Psychology: How desire meets reality in recent sci-fi

A less well formulated and shorter blog post this week because of some other commitments BUT WE NEED TO CARRY ON so here is a half developed idea that has been rattling around the old brain box for a while – it seeks to bring together a few areas so excuse me if I make some sweeping connections, but it’s related to a set of themes explored in shows I have watched recently – the sharp and brutal shocks that occur when reality and desire meet (these are messy terms of course, and I use them quite bluntly in this post, but I do hope that they lead to somewhere fruitful…).

It all started off whilst watching the criminally underrated (but thankfully returning for a second season) Avenue 5 (2019), a show about a three day luxury space cruise that is unexpectedly extended by a few years (if you think of a point on a Venn diagram between Star Trek Voyager, Red Dwarf and Veep this will be dead centre). Not to give it all away, but much of the humour and drama in the show operates around the sharp and brutal collision between thought, desire and reality. The spaceship is facing external threats, but the interior is designed to make the passengers happy, fulfilling their desires and generally making it it all EXTREMELY FUN AND GREAT. Their desires are managed, often poorly, by a PR machine whose absurdity is not only put into perspective by the cold and indifferent expanse that the ship is travelling through, but also by the ship’s ‘owner’ – the bleach blond megalomanic Herman Judd (Josh Gadd), whose erratic, self centred and egocentric whims frequently put the passengers and its crew in jeopardy (yes in the 60s spaceships had captains, now they have entitled owners of luxury leisure conglomerates…).

Aside from the perhaps obvious comparison to everyone’s favourite ex-president, Judd is a kind of mutant offspring of entrepreneurs including Elon Musk (for reasons obvious), Richard Branson (he also launched a space cruise company and also has absurd hair), and the creator of the hype meets reality Fyre (schadenfreude)fest Billy McFarland. The show sort of functions on one level as a clear satire of the hollow fantasies of those like WeWork’s Adam Neumann that somehow have attracted enough investment to pull off their mad schemes, but Avenue 5 can also be viewed a bit more abstractly: by depicting the space cruise’s promise of cute and cuddly fun in the cold abyss of space, it becomes a social and political satire that figuratively represents the little wormholes we can disappear down with nothing more than a good internet connection. To put it another way, social media and other online cultures can facilitate a solipsistic existence that allows us to believe what we desire, living out our fantasies no matter the reality of a situation may be. Speaking autobiographically, something I do if I am feeling a bit guilty about just having eaten a block of cheese (it happens) is I google ‘Cheese health benefits’ to bring up the sites there to tell you how this particular calorie laden dairy product is actually very, extremely, good for you. On the other hand, when I haven’t eaten it for perhaps a week and I’m feeling particularly smug with myself, I’ll google ‘cheese health risks’ and bask in the warm and ultimately absurd glow of my own self satisfaction.

Aside from me obviously going to hell for my vanity and stupidity, my desires are being played upon by the result to my searches due to the information presented in response to my queries functioning to attract my desire enough to earn a click. Making a few leaps here, but the kind of speculative investment that is satirised in Avenue 5 that has funded the cruise is attracted to ventures for similarly irrational reasons, with the Musks, McFarlands and Neumanns being successful in their designs partly because of the Svengali type personas that they have cultivated. But this is not the whole picture: another important part of their ability to dupe people into frittering away money on these crazy is their knowledge, perhaps instinctive, of how to pique the interest of their audience. 

Desire and reality, they meet and merge because these kinds of people are quite literally able to talk into reality projects that are unfeasible and unworkable: when they do manage to release them like some sad and poorly conceived robots, they fall apart magnificently. Like Ponzi schemes, they are again literally too good to be true, disappearing in a cloud of their own impossibility, becoming mired in lengthy and costly legal procedures. Once they have to meet the demands and commitments they have made, they meet reality, brutally so.

I am writing this in the wake of the 2020 US presidential election, and the connections between hype, desire and reality are clear. Although the votes are being counted as I write, Trump has declared himself the victor because he is used to bringing his desires into reality like his leisure resorts that have destroyed rare ecosystems, are hated by locals and are unsustainable financially. He is perhaps able to pull this off because he is attuned to people’s desires in ways that many others aren’t, but it seems at least that the tricks he has used in investment banking have run their course in the political sphere (for now at least).

I wanted to finish here by talking about the ending of the film Annihilation (2018) in which a psychologist meets reality in a particularly brutal way as she is obliterated into a million parts by an alien life form, but it seems a bit ill fitted, so will perhaps explore how that films explores violent collisions between our beliefs and reality in a future post. This is also seen during a particularly bleak and depressing scene in Avenue 5 (link below) that explores the destructive mismatch between reality and desire as passengers run into an airlock, convinced they are not trapped on a space ship that is falling apart under the weight of its owner’s hubris, but are actually starring in a reality tv show. Some have convinced themselves that if they take a leap of faith and ‘die’ within the show by releasing themselves out of the ship’s airlock, it will be revealed to them that they are in fact not trapped for years on a spaceship, and by detecting the big fat hoax, they will receive a lovely prize because they have overcome their fear of an icy death. I found this scene funny and terrifying in equal measure, and not since watching Lars Von Triers’ The Kingdom have I watched a show that has simultaneously amused and chilled me to the bone – it invokes the miserable and misanthropic schadenfreude that characterises the way we enjoy hype, desire, and reality brutally meeting, and was spectacularly manifested in Donald Trump’s recent behaviour. Although reality is hard to define, Avenue 5 does manage to articulate how our wishes can be viciously thwarted by objective danger, and the horror of witnessing people play an active role in their self destruction because their desire blinds them to threats external to them.