Mackenzie Davis in HBO’s adaptation of Station Eleven.
Ian Watson/HBO Max
In early 2020, earlier than the lockdown, earlier than the COVID-19 coronavirus even had a reputation, the passengers and crew aboard the cruise ship Diamond Princess started a two-week quarantine off the coast of Japan. I bear in mind telling a good friend the world was beginning to really feel like Station Eleven. Life imitating artwork.
One of essentially the most memorable and haunting pictures of Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 speculative novel Station Eleven shouldn’t be a cruise ship however an airplane. An airplane assembly tarmac, slowing to a cease and sitting dormant with out opening its doorways or releasing its passengers, sealing the an infection inside. It is Schrödinger’s airplane, its passengers already ghosts earlier than they die.
Now, in late 2021, the wildly well-liked before-times novel is an after-times HBO Max unique restricted collection. Instead of COVID-19, Station Eleven’s world is devastated by the Georgia Flu. Its story of collapse and rebirth returns to search out an viewers that could be too weary to show to dystopian hypothesis for leisure. Because now Station Eleven jogs my memory of the early pandemic: grocery hoarding, overrun emergency rooms, face masks. Art imitating life.
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The first demise we see shouldn’t be from the flu: Movie star Arthur Leander (Gael García Bernal) is enjoying the titular function in a stage manufacturing of King Lear. Child actor Kirsten Raymonde (Matilda Lawler, performed as an grownup by Mackenzie Davis) watches Arthur succumb to a coronary heart assault whereas viewers member Jeevan Chaudhary (Himesh Patel) interrupts the present to carry out CPR. Arthur dies on stage. Soon, nearly everybody within the theater might be lifeless, too.
The fictional plague is each extra lethal and extra contagious than COVID-19, killing some 99% of the earth’s inhabitants in a matter of weeks. Those who survive grow to be unwitting actors on a post-apocalyptic stage the place there aren’t any docs, no international locations, no provide chain, no web, no celebrities, a world the place luck and destiny decide who lives or dies, and youngsters study to kill or be killed.
Matilda Lawler as younger Kirsten.
Parrish Lewis/HBO Max
“I bear in mind harm,” Kirsten repeats 20 years later, quoting a comic book e-book known as Station Eleven that was given to her by Arthur earlier than his demise. Kirsten has improbably survived the pandemic and joined The Traveling Symphony, a roving Shakespeare troupe, spreading artwork and tradition from the earlier than occasions to a Great Lakes area that’s now dotted with small settlements of survivors coexisting in relative concord, however with an ever-thrumming baseline of hazard.
Civilization in a post-pandemic world
The plot unfurls throughout not solely timelines however characters, and Kirsten’s comedian e-book is the portkey that reveals the tangled net we weave — the six levels of separation, the missed connections, the “what a small world!” coincidences. The world of Station Eleven is small, the ensemble forged like that of a late-career Garry Marshall movie. We leap from the earlier than to the throughout to the after; between Kirsten and Jeevan and Arthur; and in addition Arthur’s first spouse Miranda (Danielle Deadwyler), his second spouse Elizabeth (Caitlin FitzGerald), their son Tyler (Julian Obradors), and his good good friend Clark (David Wilmot). We see how this interconnectivity each creates and dismantles civilization. It is that this similar connectedness that permits a virus to proliferate, in spite of everything.
One of essentially the most unsettling of the COVID-era catchphrases is “new regular.” And whereas the display screen adaptation of Station Eleven considerations itself extra with the speedy aftermath of the collapse than the novel does, it’s nonetheless primarily a narrative of rebuilding normalcy. Not solely do individuals proceed to carry out Shakespeare within the after-times, however they fall in love, they provide start, they go swimming, they learn comedian books and so they curate museums. Strangers grow to be household. Stranded airport denizens grow to be a neighborhood. The world is as totally different between Year 20 and Year One because it was between Year One and “pre-pan.”
In this fashion, Station Eleven depicts not the top of the world — not a earlier than and after — a lot because the inflection level of common techniques collapse, a concept that posits extra of a cyclical sample, a waxing and waning of societal complexity all through historical past. (Sally Rooney’s 2021 novel Beautiful World, Where Are You additionally references this concept.) Our infrastructure is tenuous in its complexity, a reality we have grappled with in actual life amid provide chain disruptions and the coining of “important employee.” So it’s considerably comforting to have a look at collapse by the lens of enterprise as traditional.
A up to date soundtrack does the heavy lifting for the collection’ level about continuity, and each recognizable tune is a reminder that this unfamiliar world is not as far eliminated as we would prefer it to be. Unlike the novel, by which Kirsten’s recollections of Year One have been misplaced, Davis’s Kirsten remembers so vividly that she basically lives in each timelines directly, even returning to the early collapse and conversing along with her youthful self in a fever dream. Her performances are animated by her grief, and the collection appears to say that artwork is not only a comfort prize, however a present. Perhaps Station Eleven shouldn’t be even dystopian then, however a somber grasp at utopia.
Adapting Station Eleven for the small display screen
The venture of any book-to-screen adaptation is to recapture the magic of the unique utilizing the instruments of the brand new medium. And showrunner Patrick Somerville (of Netflix’s Maniac) achieves this aim deftly, bringing to life a few of Mandel’s most indelible pictures — the ghost aircraft, the horse-drawn pickup vans, the failure of {the electrical} grid — whereas amplifying a number of the e-book’s quieter moments. The adaptation turns Jeevan and Kirsten’s probability encounter into the collection’ emotional hinge, a revision that appears so becoming I needed to double-check it wasn’t within the supply materials.
Himesh Patel and Matilda Lawler as Jeevan and younger Kirsten in Station Eleven.
Parrish Lewis/HBO Max
The largest change in HBO’s adaptation is the remedy of the prophet (Daniel Zovatto), whose easy villainy within the novel fuels the plot and supplies the stakes in Year 20. Here, his “there isn’t any earlier than” perception system is extra enigmatic and empathetic and thus, frankly, extra attention-grabbing. This model of the prophet is understandably extra enticing to Kirsten, too, battling with the preservationist ideology behind the Museum of Civilization. Even post-collapse, human tradition finds its footing astride the conservative and the unconventional, and the prophet jogs my memory of the burn-it-all-down, can’t-go-back-to-normal rhetoric of our present pandemic, the place systemic inequality is lastly foregrounded within the cultural dialog.
Still, the miniseries is quieter than a number of viewers will count on, given the premise and style, and by complicating the prophet, the story loses a lot of its momentum. Tonally, moments of lightheartedness really feel dissonant and even cringey, just like the message of hope is a tablet the actors could not fairly swallow. Perhaps the difference would have felt totally different if it had arrived earlier inside our personal pandemic, however after all it was the pandemic that delayed filming.
The Traveling Symphony’s mantra is “Because survival is inadequate.” As a chunk of tradition in a post-COVID world, the HBO miniseries has taken up this mantra itself, a reminder of dystopian fiction’s raison d’etre. It is why everybody began streaming Contagion and studying Camus final 12 months. Even when the bubonic plague shuttered Shakespeare’s Globe Theater, the present went on. Art has its personal survival intuition.