Meta: Apocalyptic Time (HTGAWM s2)--DFvQ

[xandromedovna]

CW: discussion of Christian theology

The planet is well on its way to becoming uninhabitable. We’re two years into a pandemic much of the western world has simply decided is over. Wars rage, injustices abound, infrastructure is deteriorating, rights are being curtailed—much if not all of the sky is falling, figuratively and sometimes literally. Which means it’s party time.

 

Besides the general fucked-up-ness of living in the 21^st century, the characters in HTGAWM are frequently one step away from having their lives ruined beyond repair. Certainly most of the series involves them doing everything in their power to get away with the various intrigues they’ve got going on, but at several vital points in the narrative, there is nothing they can do but wait to learn whether they’re going to jail or not. For example, in 2x14 Annalise kicks the 5 and Oliver out of her house as the likelihood of them getting caught (or killed by Philip) seems near-certain: “carpe diem before this whole ship goes down”. They take this opportunity to get trashed at the club.

Partially these moments are structural; the writers need to fill a full season, and lighter episodes both draw out the suspense and provide a breather for the audience. Missing a phone call while at a party or indulging in distractions is also a convenient way to ensure miscommunications, and club scenes add sex appeal. But what I’m interested in is the temporality of apocalyptic thinking. In his analysis of shipwrecks in Twelfth Night, Randall Martin connects the trauma of the shipwreck that incites the plot to the disrupted temporality of festival in the play and to Christian apocalyptic thinking: “Twelfth Night’s action of correcting festive suspensions and inversions by attempting to reinstate social hierarchies and gender conventions symbolically dramatizes the earlier historical process of subordinating the messianic state of nullified generic categories that began in Paul’s writings and ultimately became routinized in Western culture. The world-dissolving shocks of shipwreck, on the other hand, reintroduce the ethos of exceptional contingency and end-of-times detachment into Illyria” (126). Imminent doom or absolution is used as a rationale for the suspension of morality and good decision-making.

But this is also partly psychological. The human body isn’t structured in such a way that it can accommodate long periods of high stress, at least not the kind of chronically high stress the characters are under. When we are unable to release built up stress because the danger hasn’t passed, it is internalized and encoded into the body, creating adverse health outcomes (see Van der Kolk). For people with C-PTSD (chronic PTSD or sometimes childhood PTSD; not currently a DSM-recognized disorder), treatment of our PTSD is complicated by the fact that our stressor was—or still is—ongoing and pervasive. Also, the ‘post-‘ in ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ implies the trauma is over; for many of us, the trauma is still being inflicted. The inescapability of a traumatic situation can lead to increased nihilism, which in the case of HTGAWM is often expressed through partying or hooking up. In 1x15, Michaela goes out for drinks with Laurel because “I figure if Eggs 911 and Rebecca are about to take us all down and this is our last night of freedom, I want to be drunk enough to take home one of those bankers.” In 6x4, Connor and Oliver decide to have a threesome because “the FBI or the Castillos are gonna barge in here any second, so we might as well give them a show when they do.”

Notably, this wasn’t always their reaction. In 1x12, arguably one of the first times their freedom was in the hands of fate, the four involved in the murder nervously stand watch outside Annalise’s house as it’s raided. At this point in the series, they still have hope this is a nightmare that will soon be over instead of a state of being to endure. In s6, with graduation approaching, they once again feel hope that this signifies the end of their troubles, which Oliver suggests healing from with shrooms. Importantly, Connor tries to avoid catastrophizing impulsivity when he rejects Oliver’s marriage proposal at the end of s3. Connor had just been released from being tortured and Oliver proposed in relief that he wasn’t dead. Explaining the reason for his rejection, Connor says: “Of course I wanna get married. […] But I want to say yes because we’re in a good place, not because you’re afraid that I’m gonna go to jail or that someone’s gonna kill us, but because things are normal and good and we’re happy just being boring old us.” (4x1) Connor is embracing a queer future (assimilationism aside) instead of the eternal present of apocalypse.

In Christian eschatology, the apocalypse reveals a Great Tribulation in advance of the Last Judgment, where time comes to an end and all are ruled to be good or evil. Many Christian denominations, including the ones I was raised in, believe that the apocalypse is imminent and one must be a good Christian in the present in anticipation of the approaching destruction of futurity, thus the constantly deferred future end/end of the future paradoxically creates an eternal present (Motzkin 200). Annalise and her associates are constantly trapped in the anxiety of the present because of the threatened final judgment that they will be found guilty, that their future will be forfeit. For José Muñoz, however, queer futurity eschews the present “because the present is so poisonous and insolvent” for queer people (30). A rejection of the eternal crisis of straight time, “queerness is primarily about futurity and hope. That is to say that queerness is always in the horizon” (11).

Interestingly though, I argue that HTGAWM invites a bi futurity, one that makes room for both the queer futurity of Annalise’s future partners of many genders and for the reproductive futurity represented by Christopher taking Annalise’s place teaching the titular class. Because the final judgments of Annalise’s innocence and everyone else’s guilt have already come to pass in the finale, the forestalled future is now the past and movement towards another future can resume (for some of them at least). For now though, they drink to forget the past and the lost future.

 

Works Cited

Martin, Randall. “Shipwreck and the Hermeneutics of Transience in Twelfth Night.” Twelfth Night: A Critical Reader, edited by Alison Findlay and Liz Oakley-Brown, Bloomsbury Arden, 2014, pp. 123-43.

Motzkin, Gabriel. “Abnormal and Normal Time: After the Apocalypse.” Apocalyptic Time, edited by Albert I. Baumgarten, Brill, 2000, pp. 199-214.

Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. NYUP, 2009.

Van der Kolk, Bessel A. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books, 2014.