ALL TOO FAMILIAR
Hosted by author and critic Catherine Wheatley
Archived Discussion
Thursday | September 28 | 12pm pt
A family of four flee the city for their rural cabin, but why have they run? And what is the disaster that’s driven them from their comfortable middle-class lives? At the time of its release, Michael Haneke’s Time of the Wolf was critiqued for being too oblique about the catastrophe that sets its narrative in motion. Today it looks all too familiar.
Time of the Wolf is one of several 21st-century artworks that seem to predict Western responses to the global pandemic, sitting alongside novels such as Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind (2020) and Don DeLillo’s The Silence (2020). To paraphrase Alam, the protagonists of these novels, like the family at the center of Haneke’s film, are facing the end of the world, but they’re also dealing with a financial crisis—and sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s worse.
In this discussion, author and critic Catherine Wheatley will expand on her Galerie essay “The Prognosticator,” making the case for understanding Time of The Wolf as an uncannily prescient reflection of middle-class response to apocalyptic threat. What’s at stake for a society that believes the stuff we own will be our salvation?
