The Lack of Fallout

Judge them by what they do not say or know, as well as by what they do say and know.

The Fallout video game series is one of those geek franchises that occupies a special place in my heart. When me and my wife, on our wedding/honeymoon holiday, visited the Hoover Dam I spent a lot of time bemusing her by pointing out the places where a key part of one of the quest lines in Fallout: New Vegas takes place. I also repeated some of the dialogue while explaining the quest and commenting on how closely the game designers had mirrored the real look of the buildings on top of the dam.

Astonishingly, she still went through with the wedding.

A lot of the charm and brilliance of the Fallout franchise comes from its aesthetic, humour and approach to history. All of this is wrapped up in the fact that what it presents is a retro alternative history of the real world. It’s not a series simply set in the future. It’s a series set after an apocalyptic nuclear exchange in an alternative version of Earth which retains many familiar events from the real world but exaggerates and distorts them too.

The most glaring and obvious of the changes is the way the society immediately prior to the nuclear exchange is depicted. The pre apocalypse Fallout universe is an exaggerated and satirical version of the 1950s. The clothes, styles, in game comic books, cars, buildings and social attitudes all reflect the real world 1950s, but in a Funhouse Magic Mirror kind of way. Artefacts from before the nuclear bombs go off show a world where the ‘nuclear family’ and the American Dream are the height of social aspiration, where women are mothers and housewives, where apple pie is always cooking in the kitchen, and where commercialism and advertising is everywhere. The destroyed world is discovered through the surviving remnants of corporate titans that fell when the bombs landed-for example the principle currency of the game are metal bottle tops from old ‘Nuka Cola’ bottles, the in-universe version of Coca Cola and Pepsi.

In yet another great device for showing social and even philosophical issues in a micro-cosm, parts of the old pre apocalypse world survive in Vaults, including people descended from original Vault dwellers who escaped the devastation in these giant nuclear bunkers. In these settings, we have lots of separate little tales of horror and collapse (a mini apocalypse within the apocalypse) since some of the Vaults succumb to dangerous experiments, inbreeding effects, famine, internal battles or paranoid and delusional leadership. Each of these takes of collapse and be reconstructed from computer logs and diary entries or from discovered physical evidence.

Then there are the Vaults that survive. Those people are often ignorant of the wasteland survivors and world above their heads, indeed of any world outside the Vault. They might have a better understanding of the past (or an even worse one based on handed down propaganda). The interactions when they emerge into the wider world provide yet another opportunity for commentary on human nature, conditioned beliefs, and political satire.

Players can even encounter virtual reality devices. That is, their character within the fictional Fallout Universe can enter other fictions-climb into a pod and experience a recreation of a key military in the war just before the nuclear war that ended everything, or another virtual reality environment which presents a small ‘idyllic’ town ruled by a malign and psychopathic intelligence.

The whole retro-future alternative timeline gimmick then allows enormous possibilities for in jokes, commentary on the real world, and even commentary on how we understand the past and media and corporate influenced distortions of that understanding. People some two centuries after a nuclear exchange have distorted ideas about the past. Sometimes they uncover the truth. Just as often they uncover a lie. And frequently the artefacts of the past give them a partial understanding or they hilariously misread these messages.

And during this process players are constantly encountering in universe fictions and accounts on a smaller scale than virtual realities-whether those are discovered corporate reports, advertising posters, diary entries, audio recordings or even film footage.

It all works on several interacting levels:

1. True things about the 1950s style pre apocalypse Fallout Universe.

2. Exaggerated satire from this alternative past telling us things about our real past.

3. Untrue things from the 1950s style pre apocalypse Fallout Universe.

4. General messages about lies and truth and how human beings construct their viewpoints or how advertising and media distort these things.

5. Truths about the 200 years later post apocalypse Fallout Universe.

6. Untrue things about the 200 years later post apocalypse Fallout Universe.

7. General messages about how human beings react to disaster, fear, social collapse, social rebuilding, violence, crime and social conformity in stress or survival contexts.

8. How myth making works particularly as a survival mechanism.

9. Uplifting tales of heroism that are true.

10. Uplifting tales of heroism that are lies, advertising, or false memories.

11. Vault stories as a microcosm of societies under pressure.

12. True and untrue Vault understandings of the in-game present.

13. In-game virtual reality settings exposing truths or lies about the in-game universe.

14. In-game virtual reality settings providing true and untrue comment on our real world.

Politically, there was always a certain level of leftism in the Fallout Franchise. The targets of much of the satire are predictable targets of the traditional Left-corporate greed, commercialism, the consumer society, capitalism at its worst, patriotism that is just a cover for power and greed, rightwing prejudice and bigotry, and the normative demands of traditional gender roles (particularly the supposedly patriarchal nuclear family setup).

But what distinguished the series is the cleverness of the retro future setting. This allowed criticism of America to be criticism of a fictional, knowingly exaggerated America, lessening the sense that the writers and designers are attacking modern America or Real America. And it’s done with a great deal of wit and humour-like all of the best satire is. Through this it becomes more of an intelligent, sometimes despairing and sometimes hilarious commentary on human foible and folly rather than a targeted leftist assault on the things American conservatives and Republicans care about. It’s much more about human folly generally than attacking the real world 1950s, it’s just that the 1950s gives an aesthetic consistency that is a great design choice as well as, in the Cold War, giving us a real world template for understanding the big themes being reflected on.

As an example of this humorous element of the Fallout interaction with real history, Fallout New Vegas (for me the best in the series) includes a semi-benevolent urban gang who model themselves on the little the world recalls about Elvis Presley. Another gang, really an army, mimics imperial Roman ranks, clothing and crucifixion punishments because it is led by a man who models himself on Julius Caesar (allowing as well joking references to the real world Caesars Palace casino). Yet a third gang are a punk/Native Indian cross who brew drugs in the desert and reference Genghis Khan a lot. One of the main villains is essentially an even more exaggerated than he was in reality version of Howard Hughes. All of pop culture or actual history from the real world can be drawn in and commented on this way-there’s a Lovecraft influence pd segment in one of the games, and a DLC based on the Alien Greys popular culture/ufology and conspiracy theory trope.

Contrasting with the sophisticated and multiple meta-levels approach of the game franchise, which makes sure that leftist attitudes are satirised as well as rightwing ones (the commies, beatniks and leftist collectivists in the Fallout universe are just as folly ridden as the 1950s Family and Nation patriots are), the Fallout TV series approached the whole thing with the typical clumsiness of modern progressive writing teams. Even intensely harsh satire that is good transcends the immediate thing being criticised-few people other than literary scholars for example immediately recall the specific 18th century figures Swift was criticising or need to care about the Royal Society when reading about the ridiculous and disgusting experiments conducted on the floating island of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels. Swift’s target is not JUST the Royal Society, but any over intellectualised, professorial or academic descent into absurdity.

In other words, Swift’s satire is not constrained by its time and place or solely about its time and place but is about the generality of human error. What he says about Laputa applies today, centuries later, to modern scientists, experimenters, theorists and intellectuals, indeed it could be said to apply much more forcefully today then it did to the generally more benign Royal Society. When Swift was critical of what is really academic divorce from reality and institutionalised scientific arrogance, there was no Harvard funded geoengineeering study of blocking out the sun, no real world plan for human faeces to become a reconstituted dietary supplement, no genetically engineered mosquitoes and no serious researchers telling us that cow farts are killing the planet. There certainly wasn’t a mass injection of a dangerous experiment into the entire population of the planet when Swift was talking about how scientists and alleged rationalists can promote absurdity just as easily as religious fanatics can.

Isaac Newton was a far more substantial and accurate scientist than Dr Fauci.

In the Fallout TV series, it becomes much more a case of the REAL 1950s being hated and mocked, with the satire serving ONLY the grist of modern liberal prejudices and with none of the humour and self awareness of the game franchise levelling the messages. The immediate effect of a cruder and more genuinely modern prejudice driven version is to alienate rightwing and conservative fans who were happy to play through the game versions. Those players will accept that the version of the 1950s in the game is a Funfair Mirror Satire exaggerated version when EVERYTHING is subject to the same treatment, but not when ONLY rightwing concerns are. But more importantly the fact that you can now tell the satire has one modern agenda means that the Fallout TV version, both deliberately and unknowingly too, says more about our times than about the 1950s.

While the game universe certainly presents seemingly rightwing patriotic American exceptionalists in a negative light, it doesn’t assign guilt for the in game nuclear war to them. That war is shown to follow a North Korean/Chinese invasion of Canada and North America. Corporate and capitalist guilt is not as the instigators of the war, but in constructing escape plans for themselves (the Vaults) that excluded ordinary people except as servants and unwitting test subjects. In the Fallout TV series there is much more the sense that pure American greed and arrogance causes the nuclear war. Its portrayal is similar to the modern portrayal of the sinking of the Titanic-that this hubristic class-ridden thing simply had to sink as a moral comment on its nature. With typical crudity, modern race narratives are woven into this as the man who defies convention with a black wife is also one of the few to see through the pool party and open plan mansion lifestyle, together with seeing that the bombs are coming.

It’s when this more obviously leftist messaging is contrasted with our current reality that the whole thing becomes really telling. Where the game series ultimately reached universal statements about humanity that hold some meaning, the TV series tells us very little that’s interesting in its deliberate messages. What it tells us that is interesting only comes when we investigate it ourselves, in its real world context, for what it tells us about its makers and our society at this moment.

Look at this fascination with the slow approach to the nuclear exchange and the blindness of comfortable people to the possibility of a civilisation ending moment. The TV series is telling us that this is what traditional America was like….but it’s entirely what they are like. They fund Fallout as an anti war message and as a ‘look at the folly of rich people too arrogant to see what is coming’ message. But compare that with their real world politics.

They haven’t themselves learned what they are telling us to learn. Everything they criticise the 1950s for (which didn’t lead to nuclear war in the real world) is what they do today, while completely blind to it.

The incredible thing about Fallout’s warnings about a slow drift under the direction of eddies of greed and corporate influence towards nuclear apocalypse and people not seeing this, is that this message is delivered by people who exactly match the blindness they are talking about. In the real world, these are the people who now support and run the mighty and malign corporations. They are the people who consume mainstream media and advertising unthinkingly. They are the people who vote for the military industrial complex, and they are the people lost in the morality free enjoyment of social eminence and privilege while disasters they would be responsible for approach all of us.

The people who control Fallout the fiction, are the kind of people who might make Fallout a reality.

Nobody from the Bethesda Corporation that makes the Fallout games and controls the licence and intellectual property has anything negative to say in the real world about our military industrial complex and about neocon perpetual war policies, at least not that I’ve seen. None of them stop voting Democrat because the Democrats now press us to the brink, in REALITY, of nuclear apocalypse, or start respecting Trump because he wants peace. And the same of course goes for Netflix and all the people behind the TV version.

As we speak, an ICBM has been fired in a war for the first time in history. The type of missile that would be used to deliver a nuclear payload. London is just 17 minutes flight for one of these missiles. One or two of Russia’s biggest bombs could wipe out most of the UK. When questioned on US and UK recklessness in supplying missiles that will fire into Russia (and in supplying the crews and satellite system navigation those missiles need) Keir Starmer robotically intoned the importance of supporting Ukraine and defeating Russia. Biden escalates western interference. Russia is mass producing nuclear shelters.

Our entire media and political class act as if none of this is a concern and as if they have a mandate for entering a nuclear war with Russia, as if that is what people want. There is no real world fallout from their approach, no scandal about their reckless stupidity.

And the same is true of the western corporations carefully keeping their criticism of blind ideology to the 1950s and their fear regarding nuclear war to purely fictional settings. These are corporations telling us in fiction to avoid nuclear war and at the same time saying NOTHING negative about the rush to nuclear war on behalf of Ukraine. In fact, all of these people probably wave their Ukrainian flags and have them on their social media profile pictures. Not a word about the constant escalation from the West in the real world. Not a word about bombing a pipeline in a terrorist attack, or funding a coup that ultimately started the whole conflict. Fictional opponents of corporate greed and war mongering…..who have nothing to say about Biden family interests in Ukraine, or the Zelenskyy regime selling of Ukrainian land to Monsanto, or the BlackRock interests which make the western support of Ukraine more like a set of nation states being prepared to risk nuclear war to defend the corrupt commercial interests of an investment bank.

Zelenskyy both before and during this war has essentially sold his nation to BlackRock and its subsidiaries, and the entire western policy of interventionism is not the moral crusade it claims to be, but simply nation states and their military might used to support and enforce that deal. Robert F. Kennedy Jnr talks accurately about this. Mainstream media doesn’t care.

The remarkable thing is not just how we are drifting to nuclear apocalypse. It is the lack of fallout and call-out regarding that. It is being a society that simultaneously says in fiction ‘don’t let the rich do something this stupid’, while the rich people who fund and consume that message DO EXACTLY WHAT THEY WARN ABOUT.

It’s on the same order of cognitive dissonance you would need to both write the Terminator franchise and fund an AI called SkyNet.

Look how stupid and feckless and selfish the rich bastards of the 1950s were, say the rich bastards of the 2020s. Those sort of people create nuclear wars out of arrogance and greed. The man in front of the mirror says the man in the mirror is a fool.

They don’t know how right they are, do they?