Teenage Wasteland Chic
I definitely have a strange addiction to teenage post-apocalyptic movies. I suppose my generation grew up on them; The Hunger Games, Maze Runner, and Divergent series’ all debuted around the same era in my tweens, following the classic eerily prophetic “wouldn’t it be crazy if this happened” trope. While the most reasonable explanation for my obsession is the historically cyclical trend of these plot lines becoming less and less unthinkable by the day, I honestly do not think a lot of people are truly addicted, for lack of a better description to fully encompass how deep it is for me.
I know the Catching Fire dialogue by heart and could probably watch all four films, no headphones or subtitles, without missing a beat. There’s a detailed page in my notes app dedicated to which faction each of my friends represents within our group and why (I’m divergent but hear me out). If we’re counting Jurassic movies, which I do, I’ve spent almost two years perfecting my opinion of best to worst dinosaur villains weighing lethality, intelligence, visual impact, personality, fear-factor, and cultural impact. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It would take too long and perhaps be too triggering to describe my recurring dreams, and I can’t get started on the details of the novel I may or may not finally sit down to write one day, but since an addict’s first step towards recovery is admitting to a problem, here goes: I’m a YA dystopiaholic, it’s been six days since I last watched a dystopian movie, and I should probably talk to someone about this.
It definitely has something to do with the fact that I’ve seen them all one million times since childhood, so I know how to predict the world falling apart in each scenario. And obviously since the world is falling apart right now, this is just basic pattern recognition. That still doesn’t explain why I would have such an affinity to begin with, or why I’ve nearly memorized the trailer for The 5th Wave. I’ve also probably spent weeks, if not months or years, of my life listening to disaster podcasts and watching raw plane crash footage, and that can’t be normal.
I just looked it up and apparently that’s just morbid curiosity and it actually is a completely normal thing that other people experience, which totally makes sense. But as I was scrolling through the list of psychological explanations, none of them really resonated. Like of course it’s benign masochism and and adaptive function and neurochemical stuff, but part of me feels like it’s weirder and more fucked up than that. And then I scrolled down to the “When to be mindful” section and they started talking about desensitization and doomscrolling and I got freaked out. Regardless, the weird part is the fact that my morbid curiosity has manifested primarily in the form of Jennifer Lawrence and Shailene Woodley. My emotional processes just have to be so nuanced and complicated to combine my anxieties about the state of the world and lack of control with a really random and out of character nostalgia for middle school. I stuffed my bra and realized I was abnormally hairy when my guy friend asked me if I would ever consider shaving my “gorilla arms” in middle school. But I was also 100 lbs and shamelessly wore Tilly’s maxiskirts and my boyfriend got suspended for hitting a box mod in the bathroom during flex period, which all feels kind of chic in hindsight.
So that’s gotta be it. Everything is just really intense and apocalyptic and far too real, and I miss when the impending collapse of civilization wasn’t a concern so long as there were enough teenagers with impeccable bone structure to go around. Conflate that with the last time I wasn’t paralyzed by the constant shame that comes with being a woman in between the ages of 15 and 35, and it makes sense. The maxiskirt is totally coming back, though, and Mamdani seems like the type of guy to be lethal with a bow and arrow, so maybe there is a chance for us. I just hope that when it all goes down, it’s the genetically engineered dinosaurs that get us instead of something boring like famine or climate change.
