In Fallout, the Western is Remade, Again | The Backdrop
Added 2024-04-23 15:03:12 +0000 UTCA new episode of The Backdrop is now available!
Comments
This was a terrific video Darren. Finally finished the show and thoroughly enjoyed your thoughtful essay full of side bars and bad jokes. Great job on the edit too, look forward to finishing shogun to watch that one next :)
Snakeinthegarden
2024-05-06 01:08:57 +0000 UTCI mean, I think that you can market individualism in such a way that encourages conformity. Even today, a lot of people who position themselves as "free-thinkers" are adhering to a fairly standardised ideology with a conforming set of ideas. All of those fifties westerns might have been rugged odes to individuality, but a lot of those 50-odd westerns pumped out each and every year were functionally indistinguishable from one another. It's more the rejection of the idea of a shared communal society, which suburbia ties into. The whole point of suburbia is that you buy your own house with your own garden, separated from your neighbour by your own white picket fence. Sure, it's the same as everybody else - "I'm an individual, just like everybody else" - but it's a rejection of the shared communal spaces of the city, the houses built into one another, the apartments built atop one another, the blending and shifting of identities and cultures across time and space. You put a swingset in the backyard, so the kids don't share a playground. You get a car so you don't have to use public transport like trains or buses, or because you bought a house unconnected to train or bus lines. Later, you might install a hot tub or swimming pool so you don't have to share those spaces either.
Darren Mooney
2024-04-24 15:26:35 +0000 UTCI disagree with the assertion that the 50s were an essentially individualist decade. It's precisely the opposite: the 50s are probably this country's most conformist decade. I think that's one of the reasons that the western and the myth of the cowboy resonated so strongly in that decade; it was a backlash against that conformity (and against an increasingly sterile, suburban life).
Joseph
2024-04-24 14:43:28 +0000 UTCI love the re-writing of the old west in the in-show movie, where Cooper's sheriff shots the villain, calling him a "communist", an ideology that didn't even exist in the time period being portrayed.
KingDead42
2024-04-24 01:23:51 +0000 UTCAll the recurring preoccupations of Nolan and Joy are interesting. Moms as living memories. Severed heads as a vessel for important information. A man of two time periods as a reminder that to remember a time isn't necessarily to know how it was. The transcendence of mortality. I mean, in Fallout 4, there's a whole storyline where The Institute is making robots indistinguishable from humans. Could be worse recurring themes to sift through
Aaron Von Seggern
2024-04-23 22:29:51 +0000 UTCBecause that was the capital in New Vegas and the show takes place 5 years after the end of New Vegas, so either they were able to change capitals in 5 years or the NCR's capital city got wiped out
Ryallen
2024-04-23 18:08:42 +0000 UTCI don't understand why people say that the NCR in the TV show is thought to be destroyed. Shady Sands was the NCR's first capital, implying there is a second capital somewhere.
Wills
2024-04-23 16:59:01 +0000 UTCIt's fascinating that the show focuses on the Western aspect of the Fallout universe as opposed to the Eastern part, as Fallout: New Vegas (taking place on the West coast) is considered the best modern Fallout game to be released whereas Fallout 3, 4, and even 76 (on the East coast) are considered much weaker from a writing point of view, given that this is a Bethesda production and Bethesda didn't develop New Vegas, only serving as the publisher. The destruction of Shady Sands in the show was a fairly controversial choice given that New Vegas heavily involved the New California Republic (NCR) in its story and the destruction of not just the NCR but New Vegas felt like a denouncement of simultaneously the only game people unanimously like. Not just the only modern Fallout game that Bethesda didn't work on but also the destruction of a large portion of Fallout 1 and 2, also heavily involving the NCR and also not developed by Bethesda. But your analysis gives a stronger case for Bethesda not really being responsible for the destruction of both the NCR and New Vegas, even if it still hurts to see happen lol. I do think it's worth noting that New Vegas takes a sort of different approach to the idea of rugged individualism in contrast to the TV show's sort of rejection of this idea. Not really that "individualism is best" but more that the NCR is failing due to inept bureaucracy, incompetent leadership, and aggressive overexpansion and that a single person is capable of changing the course of history given the right circumstances. Mr. House, for instance, is able to preserve a great deal of New Vegas due to his intelligence and massive amount of wealth and aspires to maintain New Vegas as an independent city state, and given his wealth of resources and military might it's entirely possible to do so. He isn't perfect, of course, he likes to wipe out errant tribes that don't bow down to him (such as the Brotherhood of Steel) and it's probably a bad idea to give that much power to a single dude stuck in a metal and glass tube on life support for 200 years. The Courier themselves even destroys a large chunk of the West with underground nukes by accident by delivering a package that sets them off and wipes out a massive trade route filled with other tribes of people. It's even possible for the Courier to take over New Vegas and oust every other faction but that leaves a very large power vacuum and there's a good amount of chaos for a while during the interim of your assertion of power.
Ryallen
2024-04-23 15:47:35 +0000 UTCReally enjoyed it! Makes sense Westworld writers were involved in this, it felt thematically similar
William Axford
2024-04-23 15:28:37 +0000 UTC
