The blackout that culture already predicted
“What would you do if everything suddenly stopped working?” This is the dedication written by Jordi Santasusagna throughout April 23rd. He has just published Baby Carrington (Andana), where a solar storm has caused a blackout across southern Europe: “I almost feel guilty because the initial situation is very similar. This morning, when I saw what was happening, I was overcome with something…” In the first chapter of his book, a man gathers everything he needs for a blackout, as some people may have done yesterday: “Butane gas cylinders, jugs of water, cans of all kinds of preserves, liters and liters of milk, rice, pasta, flour, and everything else he could find that wouldn’t go bad in months.” This isn’t the first time he’s predicted the future. In 2011, with his novel L'infern d'alabastre (Crims.cat), he imagined municipal elections in his town, Cardona, with a twist that seemed improbable to him and he guessed the councilors of each party.
Throughout history, the cultural world has repeatedly attempted to imagine a scenario as unlikely as yesterday's. Books, magazines, plays, films, and TV series have recreated all kinds of situations, ranging from everyday references to apocalyptic atmospheres. In The Silence (Seix Barral / Edicions 62, 2020), Don DeLillo depicted, in just 112 pages, a United States without power. No electricity, no cell phones, no internet on a night as momentous as the Superbowl final. “A major digital blackout is perfectly possible,” he warned readers in an interview with La Vanguardia published in 2022. “The first idea came to me on a plane traveling from Paris to New York. I stared at the little screen with all the flight data: altitude, kilometers to destination, speed... I was fascinated by the attraction it exerted on the passengers. Why did we feel compelled to look at it? What would happen if, suddenly, the system failed?”
Writer Don DeLillo warned that “a global disaster is only a foretaste of what awaits us all.”
Alex Garcia / OwnA year before Don DeLillo, Bangladeshi-born American writer Rumaan Alam also warned in this newspaper that "a global disaster is just a foretaste of what awaits us all." He said this in response to the anguish expressed in his novel Leave the World Behind (Salamandra/Columna, 2020), in which a family on vacation to a house lost in the woods takes in an elderly Black couple, who ask for accommodation because a power outage prevents them from driving to New York. Filmmaker Sam Esmail took Netflix by storm with this terrifying tale starring Julia Roberts, Ethan Hawke, and Mahershala Ali.
Read also Don DeLillo: “A major digital blackout is perfectly possible.” Xavi Ayén
Marc Elsberg's bestseller , Black Out (Duomo, 2015), also made the leap to cinema in 2021. Like his colleagues, the Austrian author portrayed the fear that Europe could be plunged into darkness. "A blackout reminds us exactly what we have to lose," he said at a press conference to present his book. The plot begins in Milan with a pile-up of several cars caused by a malfunctioning traffic light. No one knows what's happening, except for a young computer scientist whom the authorities consider a suspect. To prove his innocence and find the culprit, he will have no choice but to cross the European night.
Another case of adaptation was the novel In the Heart of the Forest (Errata Naturae, 2020), by Jean Hegland, which director Patricia Rozema brought to the big screen with Evan Rachel Wood and Elliot Page in the role of two sisters who try to survive in a world without electricity thanks to their ingenuity to fight against hunger and looters.
'Leave the World Behind,' the series about a blackout that swept Netflix
APChildren's literature has also attempted to explain some significant power outages. In Blackout (Tramuntana, 2011), John Rocco brought to the forefront the great blackout that hit New York in 2003, when 14 million people were left without electricity, "forcing people to slow down and interact with each other, instead of being occupied with their electrical appliances," the author reflected in the New York Times . It wasn't the only blackout the city experienced. On July 13, 1977, the Big Apple went through the same thing, experiencing a wave of crime and nighttime violence. Cinema chronicled these events a year later with the B-movie Blackout in New York , by Eddy Matalon.
The film industry has undoubtedly experienced the fade-to-black sensation intensely. Viggo Mortensen, for example, was one of the thousands of passengers trapped yesterday at Sants station. A scene that might have seemed like déjà vu to more than one person, as the actor starred in The Road , a film based on Cormac McCarthy's novel in which the power also goes out, but for reasons as dystopian as the coming of the end of the world.
The actor Viggo Mortensen waits at the doors of the Estació de Sants in Barcelona to be able to enter after the great electricity blackout
Pau Venteo / Shooting / CollaboratorsThe public was also very aware of Rodrigo Sorogoyen's Blackout , a miniseries that premiered in 2021 on Movistar Plus and tells the story of a total power outage in Spain caused by a solar storm. Each of the five episodes shows the human stages of the mishap: denial, emergency, confrontation, survival, and balance. These are stages that the characters in Zero Day also go through, the Netflix series led by Robert De Niro that also brings viewers closer to what it's like to live in the dark and without an electrical grid. A plot that highlights contemporary society's dependence on energy to maintain order.
Another shocking series at the time was Revolution (2012), produced by JJ Abrams and Bryan Burk, whose premise followed the events of a major blackout fifteen years after it occurred. What is it like to survive in the dark for so long in such a hostile environment filled with warlords? The answer lies throughout 42 episodes that kept viewers on the edge of their seats. But even greater excitement was generated by the French series The Collapse and its eight heart-stopping episodes filmed in single takes that arrived on the Filmin platform in 2019, just before the pandemic.
'Blackout', by Rodrigo Sorogoyen
Movistar +Years earlier, in 1996, American screenwriter David Koepp made his directorial debut with The Ripple Effect, which featured the same plot but focused on his own country, setting the epicenter of such chaos in California. "We take our technology for granted and expect it to always be there. I don't think the fabric of society would rip in half if something like this happened, but I do fear the edges would fray," he noted at the premiere.
Audiences have embraced the apocalyptic plots of series like 'Revolution,' 'The Collapse,' and 'Blackout.'When it comes to music, perhaps the best example is Bad Bunny, who in 2022 released El apagón (The Blackout ) as part of his album Un verano sin ti (A Summer Without You ) to denounce the situation in Puerto Rico, where blackouts are common, especially since Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017 and left thousands of people without electricity for months. As an anecdote, Uruguayan composer Jorge Drexler recently encouraged people at a concert in La Palma to put aside their phones and gaze at the stars. “An unpolluted sky is the best scenery one could dream of.” A few words to reflect on.
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