I want to understand how a novel which I enjoyed, but largely forgot, has become a show that made me weep openly, and that I haven’t been able to get off my mind. Somerville’s adaptation doesn’t just change the original; it has a radically different philosophy of art. Station Eleven was a novel about the persistence of art — about the “classics” that continue to illuminate the human condition, no matter what happens to our society — but the substance of Patrick Somerville’s vision turns out to be “adaptation” itself. The show is about how art must be transformed as the world changes, how it must grow and change if humanity is to survive. You might even say that it’s about how, in 2021, we need a different Station Eleven than we did in 2014.
Most of all, it’s about the hope that people are basically good, that trauma is survivable, and that any stranger — no matter how lost or wild — can be made into a friend.
This shift is refreshing, since most post-apocalyptic stories feel like fictionalized prepper manuals, filled with strangers trying to kill you and take your stuff. To survive, you must bug out, build a fortress, and defend it. Zombie stories particularly tend to be Hobbesian parables about the war of all against all that begins once society falls, with its walls, cops, and dads. In such a world, not dissimilar from the fantasy world of Fox News, strangers are the danger: outsiders must be kept out and the kids must be kept in, for their safety. If you see a zombie — even if it used to be someone you love — you must shoot it in the head.
In Somerville’s Station Eleven, the dangerous thing is being alone. What, after all, is a “stranger” in a world when everyone you knew and trusted is dead?
https://www.gawker.com/culture/hbos-station-eleven-surpasses-the-book
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