Anterograde Palimpsests Haunting Eco-Dystopian Cinema: The Past, Present, and Future as Terminable and Interminable

Films fictionalizing ecological disaster tend to be positioned in a near-future where the crisis has reached dystopian proportions, but complicate this temporal shift by including palimpsestuous intertextual memories of real-world catastrophes from the past, such as the Holocaust and the Atlantic slave trade. This article is concerned with how this complex layering of past, present, and future participates in the kind of dehistoricizing passivity that Fredric Jameson associates with postmodernism. The article argues that these films temporarily imagine how contemporary capitalist-industrial behavior condemns humanity to a nightmarish future, but then disavow this imagination via a repetition of ostensibly resolved quasi-historical memories.