Constructions of Non-Diegetic Hope in Don Mckeiiar's Last Night
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The turn of the twenty-first century witnessed a deluge of American apocalypse films. Films such as Independence Day (1996), Armageddon (1998), Deep Impact (1998), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), and 2012 (2009) articulate fears regarding the demise of American culture in the face of interstellar or ecological disaster. These films all focus on possible causes of apocalypse, and how the actions of predominantly male American heroes, under the patriarchy of the American industrial military complex, might save the world from disaster. The fundamental question these films pose is If you found out the world was going to end, what would you do to stop it? Last Night (1998) is a single representative example of a Canadian film that explores the apocalypse from a distinctly different perspective. Last Night follows the interconnected narrative trajectories of various characters as they live out their final moments on earth and concerns itself with a more open ended question: If you found out the world was going to end, what would you do? Reasons for the characters' fear and unhappiness are all personal and social. Larger ecological causes or causes stemming from lacking governmental intervention, distant from a heroic individual and beyond their control, are irrelevant to the narrative. Last Night ends with what seems to be the death of all life on earth. Does this mean that the Canadian apocalypse film is void of themes of hope? The question seems counter-intuitive to a film so full of folly, levity, and revelation. However, if all the characters die where can the hope be? Hope, in the form of social revelation within the diegesis of Last Night, is aimed more directly at an audience that will survive the fictitious apocalypse and puts the audience in conversation with the narrative rather than distancing them from it as with the American apocalypse blockbuster. One of the most interesting aspects of the Hollywood blockbuster apocalypse film is that the apocalypse never *pens. Perhaps the most obvious example of this characteristic occurs in Armageddon. This film depicts a ludicrous resolution in which the asteroid that threatens the destruction of life on earth is successfully diverted from its collision course in a spectacular space mission. Many American apocalypse films focus on the discovery of cause and a plan to avert annihilation. Independence Day, Deep Impact, and Armageddon all deal with interstellar threats to the life on earth. These films locate the cause of the potential apocalypse within the scope of an alien other, either sentient or not. Following 9/11 the source of apocalypse became more mundane. The Day After Tomorrow and 2012, for example, consider global warming the ecological source of potential disaster. In Cinema Wary: Hollywood Film and Politics in the Bush-Cheney Era Douglas Kellner suggests that these films emerged as an expression of the anxieties experienced by Western culture in the face of mismanaged foreign, industrial, and ecological policy by the Bush-Cheney administration.(1) Whenever social anxieties proliferate, films and fantasy evoke social apocalypse, a trope evident in the Hollywood films of the 2000s that articulate worries about environmental crisis and socioeconomic and political collapse. (2) However, these films attempt to displace responsibility for the apocalypse away from American culture. For example, in Independence Day, David's recycling efforts and his concerns about nuclear fallout are trivialized against the threat of alien invasion. Once the source of apocalypse has been traced and displaced onto a specifically non-American source, the fantasy of aversion can play itself out. While the earth might take a beating and major populations are obliterated, these films all end with the clear indication that life on earth will continue on its merry way having avoided annihilation. In its simplest articulation the American apocalypse film is an escapist fantasy that valorizes the power of American patriarchy on a global scale. …
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it