by Don Hall

I’ve been fascinated with the apocalypse since I was seven years old. Back in the days of three channels on TV and movie marathons that lasted all night, my mother would set up a Planet of the Apes fort. A card table with a sheet over it a foot or so from the set. A bowl of Raisenettes and peanuts, a bowl of Snickers Bars. A two-liter bottle of A&W Root Beer. A couple of pillows. And hours of Taylor, Nova, Cornelius and Zera. The end of the world as written by the master of the Twilight Zone, Rod Serling.

Jump cut a decade and I sat in our living room watching a much more contemporary made-for-tv movie, The Day After. Set in Lawrence, KS (we lived just outside of Wichita at the time) this nuclear war as it happens parable was absolutely terrifying. Given that we haven’t blown ourselves up since then, I’d like to believe perhaps we learned our lesson. Probably not, though.

The Omega Man. The Road Warrior. Escape from New York. Soylent Green. Silent Running. I grew up on these stories. 

So when I heard they were making a film based on David Brin’s The Postman I was in. I mean, sure, it was Kevin Costner directing himself. It was reported to be wildly over budget and really long. I didn’t care. My mom and I sat in the very front row, necks craning, and we loved it.

The gist is that prior to the tale, Earth has had enough and belches all the waste and pollution back up on land. The planet goes through a period of nature driven cleansing, effectively killing off most of humanity. Three years later, we meet a wandering survivor who travels from enclave to enclave of remaining groups of people. He performs barely remembered Shakespeare with a trained mule in order to eat.

He is captured by a militia headed by a former copier salesman turned dictator/conquerer but escapes.

One cold night, he discovers a wrecked postal truck and puts on the jacket and hat and takes the mail bag, still filled with letters (the paper is perfect for lighting fires).  As Brin himself puts it “The heart of my story is about a flawed and fretful hero who feels guilt over telling a beautiful lie, in order to survive.”

The lie is that he is, in fact, a postman. As he tries to convince people of this, the lie grows in size and scope and he inadvertently inspires hope in an otherwise hopeless world. He lies about a re-formed United States government. About new charters. About other (fictional) postmen.

Truth be told, there is a LOT of Costner in this thing. Meaning, a lot of close-ups. A lot of speechifying. Some heavy emoting. The movie has its flaws but it is the ideas that turn me on.

I love the idea of someone famous becoming the mayor of a mountain city. In the film, it’s Tom Petty but in today’s world, post-pandemic, it could be Sean Astin or Henry Rollins or Cardi B. I love the idea that it is the belief in the concepts behind the United States that make the reality true instead of the other way around. I love that the only movie (on the make-shift projection on a rock wall) that the militia will even bother watching is The Sound of Music.

I am most taken by the idea that the thing needed to unite us as a country is simple correspondence. Mail delivered and received. Making the postman a mythic figure connecting disparate groups and loved ones. At its heart, this story is one of the power of community and connection. Costner’s character is a reluctant hero. Content to travel alone with no community at all, it is the introduction of people who he grows to care about that force him into making the heroic choices.

I believe we are drawn to stories of the post-apocalyptic because it imagines a future we can see, a disruption of the mundane, a place to wonder if we would be the hero. Who would I be in this story? Would I be the warlord or one of his followers, conscripted into bloody and authoritarian guarantees of food and security? Maybe one of the many banding together creating mini-societies but still subject to the brutal tactics of the tyrants. I want to be the Postman. I want to be better than I am and use the fall of the world to bring hope and fight the good fight.

I love the stories of heroes with superpowers but the heroes of my youth were ordinary people rising to the challenge of extraordinary circumstances.

I don’t know if we are currently entering into the world of one of these movies I grew up with but I hope, if we are, that there are more Postmen (and women) than copier salesmen turned generals, more fighters for freedom and decency than followers only looking for a meal, more in search of community than domination.