[COLUMN] Fallout is a Nostalgic Post Apocalyptic Western | by Darren Mooney

NOTE: This piece contains mild spoilers for the first season of Fallout. Primarily backstory stuff, very little plot-driving information, but just worth flagging. The first season is fun, so check it out. If you want to go in completely blind, you can bookmark and check back later.

Fallout is, in many ways, a post apocalyptic western.

This is true in a very literal sense, in that most of the story takes place in the American West. This is a story about characters in and around California. When the Ghoul (Walton Goggins) is resurrected in the premiere to chase characters running to California, which is “where [he’s] from.” Much of the mythology of the show focuses on the destruction of “the New California Republic”, an earlier attempt to forge civilization from the post-atomic western.

 “What is it about California that we all came to this place?” asks Lee Moldaver (Sarita Choudhury) during a flashback later in the season. “When you think of the promise of the American Dream, you think of California.” California signifies the end of the American West, the point at which the frontier inevitably gives way to the unyielding Pacific Ocean. It is the boundary on Manifest Destiny. It is as far west as it is possible to go.

However, Fallout also understands that California is paradoxically not just the end of the west, but also the beginning of it. That is the central irony of the post apocalyptic western as a genre typified by examples like the Hughes Brothers’ Book of Eli. It’s the belief that the end of the world might represent the opportunity to start over, that it might somehow take the country back to its origins, as if sweeping away layers that have accumulated over that central mythology.

“Once we realize that contemporary end-of-the-world scenarios share with Westerns the goal of imaginatively returning their characters to the state of nature, we can see how the American nightmare can turn into the American dream when rampaging aliens or zombies descend upon a quiet American suburb,” Paul A. Cantor mused of the apocalyptic subgenre. “The dream of material prosperity and security is shattered, but a different ideal comes back to life – the all-American ideal of rugged individualism, the spirit of freedom, independence, and self-reliance.”

Fallout plays with this idea. It’s probably not a surprise, given that the show was initially developed by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, who previously created and showran Westworld. That series dabbled in similar ideas, juxtaposing the narratives of an imagined frontier past with the nightmarish realities of late capitalism to explore the American character. Fallout does something similar, populating its atomic desert wasteland with gunslingers, predators and even snake-oil salesmen.

That said, what’s interesting about Fallout is that it understands that the modern conception of the western isn’t a historical genre, but instead a narrative that was largely refined in the middle of the 20th century. The western genre is almost as old as the medium of cinema, dating back to Kidnapping by Indians in 1899 or The Great Train Robbery in 1903. The genre was reasonably popular in the 1920s and the 1930s, but it really exploded in the postwar era.

According to Stanley Corkin, three out of every ten movies produced between 1946 and 1950 were westerns and over 50 westerns were produced each year between 1950 and 1958. The western also colonized the nascent medium of television during that decade, with shows like Rawhide, Bonanza, Have Gun – Will Travel, and many more. A lot of what audiences associate with the western genre, such as those iconic widescreen vistas, was only really codified during the 1950s.

Fallout understands this. The show is in many ways about nostalgia for the 1950s. Although the series takes place on an alternate Earth with a different history, it is very much informed by the aesthetics of that decade. As the bible for the source video game explains, “the Fallout universe is what people in the ’50s believed the future would be.” As such, it is also about what people from the future understand the ’50s to have been.

The Ghoul might be a bounty hunter in the atomic wasteland, but before the end of the world he was an actor named Cooper Howard. In the very first scene of the show, Cooper is introduced working a child’s birthday party in Los Angeles on the day that the bombs detonate. Cooper is not a cowboy, but he played one int the movies. Fallout suggests the difference is negligible, that the west was only ever real inside these fictional constructs.

In this alternate world, America is still locked in a Cold War with the Communists, although the implication is that the ideological conflict is primarily against the Chinese rather than the Russians and there are suggestions that the conflict has turned bloody in regions like Alaska. Still, the logic underpinning this imagined funhouse mirror of Hollywood is recognizable to anybody with even a casual understanding of the history of the entertainment industry.

In that opening scene, it is implied that Cooper is a victim of a blacklist, labelled as “Pinko.” Flashbacks to production of one of his films suggest his Hollywood is in the midst of a Red Scare. Cooper is horrified to discover that one of the writers – “Cadillac Bob” – has been fired because he was “a bit of a communist.” Cooper is also frustrated by revisions to the script, changing his cowboy persona is being presented, transformed from a sheriff into a vigilante.

“I'm the sheriff, right?” he asks Emil (Ash McNair). “Well, why can't I just arrest the guy like I normally do?” Emil counters that the rewrites are a reflection of a changing world. “You see, it’s a new kind of western,” he explains. “The power of the individual when the chips are down. The New America, that’s what I’m telling you…” He continues, “’Cause out here, it’s just you, your gun, and your personal code, bringing order to the wild, wild west.”

Not coincidentally, this mythology has long benefited corporate entities. “The myth of the cowboy — the individualist — was a kind of cover for the attitudes that favored large employers, including mining, railroad, financial, and ranching interests,” argues Nute Berger. “The bosses discouraged workers from unionizing or acting collectively. To the oligarchs East and West, North and South, the idea of the unrestrained individualism of the cowboy, devoid of responsibility for others, suited a divide-and-conquer strategy very well.”

After all, the 1950s were a decade in which American embraced individualism. During the 1930s, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal helped the nation to survive the Great Depression. During the 1940s, facing a generation-defining war, the country came together in solidarity. However, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the Red Scare provided a nice pretext for dismantling this notion of collective action and patriotic solidarity in favor of rugged individualism.

The 1950s were the decade of Ayn Rand, whose philosophy argued that man “must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose in his life.” Rand’s Atlas Shrugged would spend 22 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller List between 1957 and 1958. This was the fantasy of the 1950s cowboy.

Ironically, while this ideal of individualism was used to attack the idea of organization among the working class, it was also weaponized by larger corporations. “Cowboys did not become a serious medium for selling things until the 1960s,” noted historian Eric Hobsbawm, pointing to icons like the Marlboro Man. “The real invented tradition of the west, as a mass phenomenon that dominates American policy, is the product of the eras of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan.”

Reagan is a great example here. Reagan rose to prominence as a cowboy actor during the 1950s, starring in movies like Law and Order, Cattle Queen of Montana, and Tennessee’s Partner. However, he also served as a spokesperson for General Electric, selling their homes of the future to the American public. During the 1950s, while the cowboy served as an icon of masculine individualism, he was also domesticated.

In Fallout, Cooper becomes a spokesperson for Vault-Tec, a salesman for their bunkers designed to survive the nuclear apocalypse. This is the real revolution taking place in Cooper’s Hollywood, what one Vault-Tec employee describes as “vertical integration.” Several of Cooper’s friends point it out. Fellow actor Sebastian Leslie (Matt Berry) opines, “Listen to me, Hollywood is the past. Forget Hollywood. The future is a product. You’re a product, I’m a product, the end of the world is a product.”

While Leslie has resigned himself to this idea, selling his likeness rights for a quick buck, the implications are more unsettling. “So, the U.S. government has outsourced the survival of the human race to Vault-Tec,” explains Cooper’s old service buddy, Charlie (Dallas Goldtooth). “Vault-Tec is a private corporation.” Cooper laughs it off, “That’s called capitalism, Charlie.” However, Charlie pushes the point, “What happens when the cattle ranchers have more power than the sheriff?”

While Fallout positions this ideological shift in the context of the 1950s, it resonates outside that context. Cooper’s Hollywood anxieties speak to a modern industry in which studios are constantly being swallowed and regurgitated by faceless conglomerates. Private corporations have stepped into roles previously occupied by the state, such as space travel or prison services. Philosophers like Yanis Varoufakis argue that the world is heading towards a sort of “techno-feudalism.”

As with Westworld, this is the central paradox of Fallout, the myth of personal independence packaged and sold to empower corporate entities. In the post apocalyptic future, Cooper has internalized the harsh capitalist logic of this new world order. “Sometimes a fella’s gotta eat a fella,” he explains to Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell). Lucy herself is a survivor of the Vaults, another example of retrofuturist mythology lifted directly from the 1950s.

If the wasteland is the American West, the Vaults are “a nightmare parody of picket-fence ’50s suburbia.” Even before their dark secrets are revealed, the Vaults recall the way in which – through the suburbs - “white, middle-class Americans could isolate themselves from perceived urban ills, in a static and regulated environment where private space, property ownership, racial homogeneity, and the nuclear family were the dominant values.” Naturally, Lucy likes to watch westerns.

Venturing out into the world, Lucy finds herself thrown into sharp ideological conflict with Cooper. Cooper argues that the only way to survive in the wilderness is to look out for oneself above all, but Lucy believes that there is a better and more selfless way. Naturally, Lucy’s optimism is challenged and tested over the eight-episode season, but she doesn’t need to look far to see the world that Cooper’s ideology has created: one only fit for Ghouls.