Apocalypses Now: Two Modes of Vulnerability in Last Night and The Mist
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper draws on Judith Butler’s notions of vulnerability, precarity, and grievability to examine two filmic texts: the Canadian Last Night (Don McKellar, 1998) and the American The Mist (Frank Darabont, 2007). Both primary sources feature the apocalypse as their principal narrative and thematic concern –a trope virtually unexplored from the standpoint of the production of vulnerability and the bodily dimensions of political and ethical life. In the present contribution I conduct a close analysis of both films so as to identify and evaluate the significantly contrasting modes of vulnerability produced in these two narrations. I argue that these conflicting worldviews originate from the differentiated episodes of (de)valuation, legitimization, and recognition experienced by and in bodies in the face of the ultimate phenomenon of vulnerability: the apocalypse. My structuring argument is that Last Night complies with the notion of vulnerability as a locus of ethical cohabitation and affective engagement while constructing a heterogeneous sense of Canadianness. The Mist, on the other hand, deploys vulnerability as a discursive mechanism that causes individual and social bodies to be subjected to a range of violence-prone asymmetries and processes of dehumanization, rearticulating key rhetoric and imagery from American cultural history
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".