| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation extrapolates the problematic of the post-war heroes in the television series 11. 22. 63, premiered on February 15, 2016, on Hulu, through a textual analysis across a variety of interdisciplinary frameworks including psychoanalysis, sociology, politics, economics, visual studies, historicist and transcendental approaches.
Different from previous dystopian heroes who “drop out” into the immediate flows of perception which serve as the “return of the repressed” under the inhumane gaze of the big brother, the characters’ restless effort to change the past—the JFK assassination— in order to revamp the future compels my reading to conceptualize several post Freudian-Marxist notions such as the omnipotence of mobility, reproduction of failed heroes, the interpellation of dream, and the weaponization of time and space. I use these concepts to delineate a transformation from the threat of the atomic destruction in the Cold War up to the apocalyptic revelation of the “ubiquitous Net” concerning Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid modernity in the post-war era. I compare the character Oswald in Oliver Stone’s JFK and 11. 22. 63, looking into how the predicament of a dystopian hero trapped into unfathomable conspiracies in the former is, in the latter, resolutely affirmed as the neoliberal potentials of the individual’s struggle for sensation seeking.
Another focal point of this dissertation concerns developing the conception of speculation according to Aimee Bahng and Mark J. P. Wolf, but regarding the Cold War reverberations in these contemporary works. The crux of this dissertation restates the status of the subject in terms of psychoanalysis and argues that futurities illustrated in 11. 22. 63 implicate a breakdown of the balance of terror, overlaying the antipodes of the speculative sublime and the speculative horror. This outcome is escalated by the characters’ sacrifice to resurrect the symbol of the Home, with resort to the Deleuzian war machine. The post-war heroes encounter a deadlock of modernity: the groundbreaking power of creative destruction which circulates as the impetus of capitalism.
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