Back to the Cave

While the individual fallout shelter provided a new space for imagining the family unit in the context of broader social forces, the cave shelter stressed the animal nature of modern man. Whether fighting for survival in a savage postnuclear world, evolving into a new species, or devolving into animal behavior, the inhabitants of cave shelters display a feral identity. The cave has long carried this resonance regardless of whether composed of natural formations, human or machine-excavated tunnels and mines, or some combination of the two. As a postwar bunker space, the cave’s particular affordances are non-technologized shelter, an exposed passage to the outside world, and the animal survival of the dominant individual. Sometimes, we find a reduced and childless family unit, generally the male and his mate or mates; at others a lone wolf hidden from and pitted against a hostile world. In the cave, any remaining social structure is troped as animalistic or otherwise non-human and often a threat to the surviving individuals. The cave-space presumes not the home shelter’s projection of a strong and paternalistic government but the Hobbesian specter of the loss of any kind of humane community, homo homini lupus, the bunkered mentality that would eventually emerge in the 1980s as survivalism.