“I CAN STILL FIX THIS”

Abstract

This chapter examines allegorical representations of living with terror, following large-scale catastrophe. It primarily analyzes a post-apocalyptic science fiction film, I Am Legend (2007), alongside an earlier film adaptation, The Omega Man (1971), and a touchstone film, The World, The Flesh, and The Devil (1959). Released in periods of national crisis, each deploys an iconic male star and a post-apocalypse to study American (and male) anxieties about race, class and gender. The chapter identifies how, in I Am Legend, paternal failure is entwined with the breakdown of society and the “final man” feminized in the succeeding post-apocalypse. The film outwardly assuages “protective” guilt through redemptive male sacrifice that reinvigorates a militarized masculinity. However, the chapter concludes that not only are females ultimately figured as redeemers, but also sacrificial paternal remasculinization irretrievably undermined by the hybrid indeterminacy of the vampire-zombie “terror-Other” and the hero’s becoming America’s most monstrous “terror-Other,” the suicide bomber.