Taking the Oscar stage in early 2024 to collect his award for Best Actor, Cillian Murphy offered as equivocal a statement on Christopher Nolan’s Best-Picture-winning film Oppenheimer (2023) as he could muster. “You know,” Murphy hedged, “we made a film about the man who created the atomic bomb and, for better or for worse, we’re all living in Oppenheimer’s world.” Lauded for the film’s direction nearly an hour later, Nolan’s own acceptance speech only deepened Murphy’s equivocations: “And to the Academy,” Nolan ventured after thanking his production partners at Universal, the film’s cast and crew, and his family, “Just to say, movies are just a little bit over a hundred years old. I mean, imagine being there a hundred years into painting or theatre. We don’t know where this incredible journey is going from here, but to know that you think that I’m a meaningful part of it means the world to me.” Addressing a Hollywood institution long wracked by existential anxieties and recently embroiled in lengthy labor disputes with the Screen Actors’ and Writers’ Guilds over the entertainment industry’s ostensibly AI-powered future, Nolan invoked the “century of cinema” whose mediation of the “American Century” Oppenheimer not-too-subtly commemorates. In tandem with Murphy’s attempt to soften the film’s exceptionalism, which is baked into Oppenheimer’s account of the extraordinary wartime accomplishment that launched America’s apex hegemony, Nolan’s sublimation of that accomplishment’s geopolitical violence into an abiding love of medium—the transformation of “Oppenheimer’s world, for better or for worse” into the “incredible” world of cinematic experience made “meaningful” by and for Nolan—articulated the ideological compact between America’s hegemony and Hollywood’s, even as it signaled that compact’s twenty-first-century disarticulation.
“Haunted by visions of a secret world,” as Nolan’s J. Robert (Murphy) puts it, the Los Alamos “director” conveys that ideological compact in the full auteurist idiom of the film’s director, propelled by a relentless drive to realize the picture inside his head and believing that, once realized, that picture might subsequently “ensure a peace mankind has never seen.” Oppenheimer stages that picture’s realization over a luxurious ten-minute reenactment of the famous Trinity test, a sequence that unfolds before a crowd of stars, including Oscar winners Rami Malek and Matt Damon, Josh Hartnett, David Krumholtz, and the actor/writer/director Benny Safdie, who together resemble nothing so much as the Awards committee itself. Offered in place of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the Trinity sequence instead aestheticizes that reality’s encapsulation by cinema, a reflexively absolving fantasy of victimless war that cannily enforces what Alexander Galloway describes as the “teleological quality of utilitarianism as utopia.”1 Backdropped in early 2024 by bombardments across Ukraine and Russia, Palestine and Israel, Nolan’s film yearned not simply for the heyday of American power evinced by that utilitarianism but also for a historical modality of power capable of being instrumentalized by a dominant mediaform; for a totality whose expedient realities might once again accord with cinema as primary apparatus and vehicle to power’s totalizing command. As JD Connor writes, the slogan for that coordination might simply be “no hegemony without media hegemony, and no media hegemony without allegory,” an injunction to apprehend hegemony’s potential to “agglomerate the diversity of contemporary sociopolitical life, to gather metonymic force, [and] to achieve necessary anagnorisis [only] when it is channeled through a dominant, coordinating mediaform.” Projected by Hollywood across the globe, Oppenheimer grossed close to a billion dollars worldwide, American bombs falling on Kursk and Gaza while audiences watched Benny Safdie watch the Trinity detonation. It was Oppenheimer’s world, for better or worse.
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“One of the most terrifying parts of a nuclear explosion,” Jonathan Nolan told Forbes on the eve of his series Fallout’s Amazon Prime Video debut, exactly one month after his brother’s film swept the Academy Awards, “is that you see it a long time before you hear it. It takes, in some cases, minutes for that sound to reach you. [And] the entire opening sequence around Fallout’s opening prologue is built around that horrifying reality. But Chris got there first.” If Christopher Nolan provides the setup (the dawn of US apex hegemony in the shadow of nuclear apocalypse, courtesy of Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb), Jonathan delivers the punchline (the alternate history in which a protracted Sino-US standoff prompts the detonation of bombs across America, courtesy of Fallout’s depraved corporate executives). Based on the blockbuster video game franchise created by Tim Cain and acquired in 2004 by Bethesda Softworks and acquired in turn by Microsoft in 2021, Fallout’s live-action adaptation for Amazon was announced in 2020, with Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy set to produce alongside Bethesda’s Todd Howard. The series’ first episodes, which Nolan directed, sketch the origin story for Fallout’s post-apocalyptic world writ large. Eager to stake its hegemony amid America’s generalized decline, Vault-Tec, a former defense contractor turned tech-media-industry conglomerate, convinces its tech-media peers to cooperate in the instigation of Fallout’s so-called “Great War” with China by secretly dropping bombs on US cities. The conglomerate thus operationalizes its signature asset—bunkered underground vaults—as so many franchises to be divvied up among the firms while overseen by Vault-Tec’s chief executives.
“What is the ultimate weapon of mass destruction?” Vault-Tec manager Bud Askins (Michael Esper) prods Cooper Howard (Walton Goggins), a former US marine turned Hollywood actor turned Hollywood shill for Vault-Tec. “Time. Time is the apex predator. And in the event of an incident, time is the weapon with which we will defeat all our enemies. That is how we will win the great game of capitalism. Not by outfighting anyone, but by outliving them.” Less nostalgic than Oppenheimer for the “no hegemony without media hegemony” model, Fallout nevertheless prospects the “better or worse” political economy (to recall Murphy) for which “alternatives” to what Mark Fisher names “capitalist realism” remain unimaginable, the postwar strong-state’s “stodgy” culture of social consensus evolved to cyber-capitalism’s “seamless” control circuits of hypermediated consumption.2 As Fisher writes, “subjugation no longer takes the form of a subordination to an extrinsic spectacle, but rather invites us to interact and participate” as customers whose “desires and preferences are [perpetually] returned to us, no longer as ours.”3 Effusing this new regime’s efficiency, Fallout doubles down: “Most people think scale means increasing global market share,” Askins opines at a wrap party for Howard’s latest Vault-Tec ad. “That’s thinking in three dimensions, and I’m talking about four. Because what is the ultimate weapon to destroy your competition? It’s not outselling them. It’s not outsmarting them. It’s time. Time is the ultimate weapon. Sounds complicated, but the future of all humanity comes down to one word: management.”
Primed to the transcorporate managerial practice through which Vault-Tec and its competitors might weaponize “the future of all humanity,” the fictional Askins adumbrates an all-too-real “global war regime,” as Michael Hardt and Sandro Mezzadra recently put it, underwritten by our increasingly incestuous tech-media titans, whose inflation of the largest financial bubble in history renders each a supranation onto itself, unbeholden to state or inter-state jurisdiction. A reckoning with the polyform media now channeling this updated “cyber-capitalist hyper-realism,” Fallout allegorizes the competitive synergy of two such titans, Amazon and Microsoft, towards those inflationary ends: a long-game of four-dimensional speculative gamble of mutually-assured market-share dominance in cloud-based web services whose diversified consumer gateways include infinitely-running, nested subscriptions to Amazon Prime and Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass, where one might alternately watch Nolan’s Fallout series while buying anything at all from Jeff Bezos’s Everything Store, and play Howard’s Fallout 76, which is Bethesda’s live-service addition to the Fallout franchise, among any number of Microsoft’s 400-plus gaming titles, seemingly forever. This, the series croons, as insistently as its Nat King Cole/Johnny Cash/Brook Benton/Dinah Washington/Connie Conway soundtrack, is all you need and all you’ll ever need. And you’ve got all the time in the world.
“Romance” encodes the corporate compatibilities that underpin this ever-distending, cyber-capitalist expanse, a quilting of supranational super-rentiers pouring billions into one another’s AI products while routinely cannibalizing their own stock. Wounded and on the run from drug-addled cannibals, former vault-dweller Lucy (Ella Purnell) and hardscrabble surface-dweller Maximus (Aaron Moten) are taken in by the sympathetic leaders at Vault 4, which is populated by refugees like themselves and the recovering subjects of human experiments conducted, once more, by Vault-Tec. Traumatized by a lifetime of brutality on the Surface, which Vault-Tec has continued to bombard with nuclear weapons as a means of shoring up the value of its vaults, Maximus delights at his newfound home, settling into a private bunker to watch television and eat popcorn while clad in a bathrobe and slippers. But Lucy cannot. Weary of those delectations to which Maximus now lies in thrall, she craves those Surface thrills of incivility and conflict, intimacy and violence, action and adventure of which her bunkered life was utterly bereft. That chiasmic passage, a vertical metaphor of horizontal integration, throws the corporate arrangement into relief as two not-quite-seamless “realities” between which the two lovers might, in Fisher’s words, “smoothly migrate”: Vault and Surface, sit-com television and open-world action-adventure RPG, interpassivity and interactivity, commerce and computing: Amazon and Microsoft.
Even as they compete for cloud computing and web services market share, Amazon and Microsoft nevertheless synergize that competition in accordance with cyber-capitalism’s super-rentier model: if Microsoft dominates the global computing sector with such products as Windows and Azure, Amazon dominates that sector’s e-commerce and online-advertising complements. And if Amazon notably draws the bulk of its operating income from web services, both retail and subscriptions nevertheless remain its primary sources of revenue. That intersection, of “computing” and “sales,” amounts to “selling computing,” which is not coincidentally the driving impetus behind Microsoft’s monthly gaming subscription service. To be clear, Karol Severin writes, “the subscription fees themselves are not [Microsoft’s] commercial endgame.” But, over time Microsoft will “monetize those relationships beyond gameplay itself… includ[ing] in-game advertising and non-gaming item purchases, as well as benefits to Microsoft’s cloud business.” Plainly put, gaming subscriptions grow Microsoft’s cloud business because “games are valuable clients for cloud services, requir[ing] greater processing than unilateral formats such as video or music streaming.” From mushroom clouds to cloud-based services, so too might Microsoft’s subscription rhyme with Amazon’s “in-game” advertising analogs like “Shop the Look” and Prime Video “X-Ray,” leading out to the array of products with which the Everything Store is stocked. A competition, then, synergized by common form (the tech-media hybrid, strategically diversified across all manner of web services, artificial intelligence, and media content production) but synergized too, by a common conception of consumer subjectivity and interpassive/interactive temporal procedure (an always-monetizing appeal to what Chris Breu calls “avatar fetishism,” and an intraface aesthetic that compels the diegetic space of game or series toward the non-diegetic outside of commerce and computing).4 What better text than Fallout for these corporations to ply their synergistic potential?
Indeed, it’s in the most literal sense that the series is concerned with energy-intensive computing platforms and delivery systems, not only in its thematization of electrical power, but also in Cooper Howard’s nominal identity with Todd Howard, the game’s director, as well as in the dystopian, irradiated Surface’s evocation of Microsoft’s suite of Surface laptops and 2-in-1 computers. In September 2022, just months after Amazon announced the series adaptation, Microsoft spent $7.5 billion and created the temporary subsidiary “Vault” in order to acquire Bethesda Softworks’ then-holding company ZeniMax, a loose rhyme with Maximus, if also the A to Z that bespeaks both Azure and Amazon: totality from A to Z. We see this totality not only with the massively franchised figures—Howard and Maximus—but Lucy, too; Amazon’s cloud gaming service, Luna, where gamers can play both Fallout 3 and New Vegas, the location where the series’ first season ends, is only a couple letters off. “Hollywood is the past. Forget Hollywood,” rants Cooper Howard’s friend, Sebastien Leslie, having recently sold Vault-Tec the rights to his voice, to be installed in their latest AI butler. “The future, my friend, is products. You’re a product. I’m a product. The end of the world is a product.” It’s hard not to recall Microsoft and Amazon’s ambitious integration of their AI assistants, Cortana and Alexa. “The more you use it,” Amazon touts, “the more it will improve.”
These reflexive literalisms matter as the tightening of audio-visual consumption into consumption more generally, a binding of text with paratext, diegetic with non-diegetic space. It’s Amazon’s newly-launched “X-Ray” and “Shop the Look” intrafaces, where the image gestures incessantly to a margin advertising products showcased by the series itself. An occupation of capitalist realism’s horizons of possibility as striking for its “seamlessness” as its asphyxiation, these instant gratifications of our “desires returned to us, no longer as ours” (to recall Fisher) dissolve the series’ realism into hyper-real product fetishism, sublimating desire only to desublimate it in turn. At greatest remove, these sublimations, desublimations, and resublimations mirror the super-rentiers’ increasingly conspicuous self-cannibalizations: rapid-fire cycles of IP-centric industrial mutation that barely manage to conceal the notoriously low returns and long-run stagnation those cycles inevitably beget.
It might come as little surprise, then, that this intrafacial procedure offers a conspicuous analog to the RPG interface: the deep representational space of activity overlaid by two-dimensional icons, text, progress bars, and other metrics according to which a gamer manages their activity. And so, it matters too that much of the activity in Fallout 76 isn’t the brutal takedown of ghouls and baddies but, rather, the building and adorning of one’s “camp.” “Fallout 76 is a game where you play in a casual and relaxed manner,” writes one Reddit gamer. “It’s not a competitive game by any means and is a fantastic choice to explore, quest, socialize and destroy at your own pace… Personally, I love decorating my camp and with [the optional Fallout 1st subscription] you can get monthly Atoms and special exclusive bundles, so it’s more than worth it for me.” Others echo the sentiment: “Personally, for me [the subscription is] a must. I doubt I would have the patience with all the managing that is required otherwise.” For all its graphic violence, Fallout 76 is essentially Animal Crossing. And Animal Crossing is essentially a trip to amazon.com.
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Fallout yearns for totality, if not the sort available to J. Robert Oppenheimer or envisioned by America when it dropped the bombs on Japan: not a Pax Americana augured by the mushroom cloud, but the droning expanse of Microsoft Windows updates delivered by the cloud to our fingertips. Not the supreme imperial-hegemonic power of the American state but a highly functional if protean superpowerdom cyberneticized by super-rentier tech titans working furiously to stitch together perpetually unravelling global markets. In Fallout, there are no dominant nation-states or supranational institutions, only corporations gunning to control capital’s sectors. There is, to be sure, a state—the two-headed bear that emblematizes the “New California Republic”—but that state emblem may just as well refer to the competitive synergy of the corporations themselves. The mediaform that makes sense of this new hegemony and its updated totalizing ambitions is naturally misshapen too: a polyform repudiation of medium distinction, a genre grab-bag whose capaciousness metonymizes “too big to fail.” If Oppenheimer consecrates a hegemonic medium, Fallout insteadpulls us toward the margins that frame our screens, where ad content and task notifications compete for attention, thinly costumed as avatar-based ego ideals. It’s a different kind of watching, seeing, being—a bid to merge diegesis with marketing but moreover to reconcile virtual with real beneath the cyber-capitalist horizon: the world outside as computer-desktop-background version of the world, where time is never free. It’s Amazon and Microsoft’s world, for better or worse.
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Endnotes
- Alexander Galloway, The Interface Effect (Polity, 201), 104.
- Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Zero Books, 2006), 76; 7.
- Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, 12; 50.
- Chris Breu, “Against Austerity: Toward a New Sensuality.” symploke 22, no. 1-2 (2014): 23-39.
Maria Bose
Jason Willwerscheid
