Holed up in a downtown Chicago high rise, Kirsten, Jeevan, and Jeevan’s brother Frank begin what will be 80 days shelter-in-place. This first night, ordinary before cataclysmic, they huddle around the news broadcast in Frank’s living room, they swap looks of uncertainty, they anxiously wait for the emerging nightmare of contagion to subside. It will not subside. In the HBO adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s novel, Station Eleven, the rapid descent into pandemic apocalypse is signalled on this first night, when the three watch as a 747 falls from the sky, plummeting into Navy Pier and erupting in a crater of fire. Navy Pier, that bustling harbor of the 20th century, once conveying millions of people and cargo into the city of Chicago, is set ablaze; the unlikely quaranteam watch in horror as the wages of calamity are set in motion.
Throughout HBO’s Station Eleven, sites of industrial and logistical operation are reimagined as ruins. The show, like the novel, portrays a fictional flu pandemic that kills 99% of the world’s population, dispersing (at least some) survivors across the Great Lakes region. When the plane crashes into Navy Pier, the night shifts from confusion and speculation, into a clear recognition that “the world is ending,” as Jeevan yells to Frank. The inflamed and crumpled body of Navy Pier’s now famous ferris wheel signals terror; more, a plane not docked but rather crashed into the former harbor—the overlapping arrest of transport sectors—represents the end of this world: the logistically ordered one.
In a forthcoming article in a special edition of American Book Review on “Supply Chains,” I elaborate on how the framework of contagion enables our understanding of the fantasies and nightmares of logistical capitalism—and the logics that fuel them. Here, however, I want to linger at the pier and the port, theaters of the logistical reimagined in the show—first as site of terror, later as the renewed image of St. Deborah by the Water. Filmed in defunct portions of the Port of Oshawa in Southern Ontario, a still thriving port and “gateway to the world” for the Durham Region, the setting of St. Deborah by the Water works as a kind of visual shorthand for envisioning the “post-pan” landscape. The fiery grave of Navy Pier in Episode One inaugurates rupture: the grinding halt of logistical sectors. Stasis on the waterfront is circulationist death.
But what emerges from the show, is the end not just of the logistical world but by it. The contagion narrative of Station Eleven, less concerned with the emergence, tracing, and containing of the virus that is the standard structure of what Priscilla Wald describes as the “outbreak narrative,” instead focuses on its (infra)structural transmission, which is to say logistical transmission. More than mise-en-scene and metaphor, sites of logistical ruin make meaning beyond the story world of Station Eleven precisely for their placement on the Great Lakes. Contagion at Great Lakes harbors is, itself, a reality borne of the slow violence of accelerating commercial development. From invasive species contamination to the viral proliferation of logistical hubs and data centers, cataclysm on the waterfront is upon us. Via Station Eleven, reality is made strange through fiction.
In the wake of large scale infrastructural development throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Great Lakes watershed has faced nearly continuous exploitation as “the fourth seacoast,” driven by the imperative to reach new markets in the heart of North America and cut transportation and distribution costs by directing throughput down the St. Lawrence Seaway. At the construction as now, the Seaway’s promise of “low cost water transportation in the midst of rich markets” capitalized on the freshwater arteries to convey increasing amounts of break bulk and, eventually, containerized cargo.1 Today, the St. Lawrence Seaway Management Corporation continues to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in expanding Seaway capacity.
But as the language of promise has matured into the realities and ramifications of accelerating commodity transport, contagion crises have emerged. Invasive species such as the quagga and zebra mussels, the round goby, and the lamprey have been riding the waves via ballast water on commercial vessels straight into the Great Lakes and imperiling watershed ecologies. Now the Great Lakes faces over 180 non-native species documented in the watershed, causing seismic changes to its biogeographical make up.
Narrating the foreign invader contaminating the water body and body politic is part of an all-too-familiar grammar of threat which deploy militaristic response: border walls, chemical warfare, trap and kill. And this is not unlike tropes of the contagion narrative that, as Wald suggests, “establis[h] disease outbreaks as ‘foreign’ or ‘alien’ agents that pos[e] a national threat.”2 Rationalizing increasingly militarized itineraries of securitization—and ones that can quickly mobilize xenophobic policy under the rationale of national security (even as the infected territories are themselves transboundary water systems)—the language of foreign contagion simultaneously “obscures the infrastructural projects [and, (I’ll add) logistical imperatives] that have made [the invasive species’] movement possible,” Kathleen Blackburn points out.3 And, these commercial infrastructures of waterfront development face new challenges in the viral proliferation of AI technologies and their attendant data centers. “A single hyperscale data center can use more than 365 million gallons of water a year, equivalent to what 12,000 Americans use in that time. [These centers] are projected to withdraw as much as 150.4 billion gallons of water over the next five years, as much as 4.6 million American households,” Alliance for the Great Lakes’ Managing the Growing Water Needs of Data Centers, Critical Minerals Mining, and Agriculture in the Great Lakes Region reports. Not only draining life from the lakes but from the broader publics reliant on them, the cost of AI expansion is dire and immediate.
HBO’s Station Eleven reorients the threat of contagion away from the “alien” Other towards the system itself. The show even jettisons the novel’s place-specific name of the lethal virus, “the Georgia flu,” in exchange for emphasis on logistical corridors, technologies, and infrastructures that it recasts in the twenty years post-pandemic as no longer in use. In this way, the contagion crisis at the center of Station Eleven is logistical expansion and the infrastructures that enable it.
Station Eleven also represents the landscapes of possibility that lie on the other side of ceaseless expansion, circulation, and extraction. In the ruins of ports and gas stations and airfields, flora, fauna, and alternative ways of organizing life and conveying resources germinate. The visual language of the show—shifting from pandemic-spectacle at Navy Pier towards the communal life nestled on the waterfront of St. Deborah by the Water/Port of Oshawa— insists that logistical capitalist imperatives of “accelerate! extract! circulate! profit!” are not the only ways of being. As Wald reminds us, “outbreak narratives have consequences.” From epidemiological outbreaks such as the crisis at the center of Station Eleven to environmental contagion proliferating beneath and alongside the watery geography of Station Eleven’s logistical setting, contagion narratives “influence how both scientists and the lay public understand the nature and consequences of infection, how they imagine the threat, and why they react so fearfully.”4 Filming portside in Lake Ontario and Lake Michigan, part of the critical terrain for the logistical promise of the Great Lakes, show creators hail a geologistical history and present. How we imagine our threats to freshwater is inextricably linked to how we imagine threats to our public health. Constructing futures and possibilities that exist beyond threat and calamity, too, are the work of imagination–as they will also require infrastructures and modes of organization. Station Eleven may give us some of the visual language and imaginative capacity for both.
- Donald Wood, “The St. Lawrence Seaway: Some Considerations of Its Impact,” Land Economics 34:1 (1958), 61.
- Priscilla Wald, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative (Duke University Press, 2008), 27.
- Kathleen Blackburn, “Where do Fish Belong?,” Freshwater Stories, 2017.
- Wald, Contagious, 3.
cover image: Screenshot from Episode 2 of Station Eleven.
Tierney Powell