Love Letters From the Future

The use of salvaged objects in post-apocalyptic narratives has primarily been addressed in relation to Evan Calder Williams’s concept of “salvagepunk”—a repurposing of objects in an idiosyncratic way that Williams sees as a form of capitalist critique. Such a reading, however, accommodates neither the frequent emphasis on the novelty or sublimity of such objects, nor their tendency to collapse into nostalgia and ultimately capitalist reification. Far more often than not, the break between pre-apocalyptic past and post-apocalyptic narrative present is less a profound rupture opening up the possibility of a reimagined Utopian future based on reconfigured social relations, and more an inconvenient and lamentable fissure that will eventually be bridged. Attending to a variety of primary texts such as Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), David Macauley’s Motel of the Mysteries (1978), and Ruben Fleischer’s film, Zombieland: Double Tap (2019), this essay considers the ways in which salvaged items in post-apocalyptic narratives end up reaffirming the present status quo, once again proving the oft-cited maxim that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to capitalism.