ON THE CULTURAL PROJECTION OF

POPULATION CRISIS: THE CASE OF

THEOMEGA MAN
Justin Sully

In 1974, Kurt Waldheim, then secretary-general of the United Nations

(UN), declared the year to come World Population Year (1974).1
Coming less than a month after the divisive and widely publicized World
Population Conference in Bucharest the same year, the UNs agenda
reflected an already charged and unprecedentedly global circulation of
population alarm.2 The briefest historical overview of industrial capitalist
culture suggests a consistent coincidence of moments of systemic economic
crisis with the proliferation of alarmist discourses of population. The
Malthusian problem of population, for example, was born in the context
of industrialization in Britain in 1830s, whereas the eugenics movement
reaches the height of its influence in the wake of the Great Depression
(192939) (and the 1917 October Revolution), during the volatile inter-
war years. In this sense, the popular alarm about overpopulation that
reemerges in the late 1960s can be read as a simple reflex response to the
systemic crisis that is dated to these years. Yet, as the significant periodiz-
ing claims rooted in these years suggest (articulated by the now familiar
terms of deindustrialization, post-Fordism, globalization, and neoliber-
alism), there is room consider the possibility of a more complex shift at
work in the idea of population itself. In other words, it is worth asking
how the discourse of population-as-threat, which was (and remains) such
a powerful reactionary discourse when articulated through the lenses of
nationalism, industrial class antagonisms, and biological racisms, adapts
to the transformations of scale (global), production (post-Fordist) and so-
called cultural racism.
This essay explores the relevance and consequence of this question
from the standpoint of popular film culture. I first situate the crisis dis-
course of population within the volatile political-economic conjuncture
of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the period during which the idea of a

Criticism Winter 2016, Vol. 58, No. 1, pp. 087113. ISSN 0011-1589. doi: 10.13110/criticism.58.1.0087 87
2017 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309
88 Justin Sully

population bomb takes hold in the popular imagination. I turn to film

and the problem of crowd photography to theorize a framework for read-
ing the media aesthetics of population alarm. I finally look to American
science fiction cinemaperhaps the most concentrated archive of demo-
grafictions of any historical periodand, in particular, The Omega Man
(dir. Boris Sagal, 1971). Situating these cinematic imaginings of apoca-
lyptic demographic futures within a longer history of a crisis discourse
of population and its ideological function during moments of capitalist
system failure exposes an internally conflicted field of political invest-
ments and points to a deeper conceptual crisis, apparent in the 1970s, of
the modern, industrial imaginary of population.3

The Crisis Discourse of Population

By the 1970s, a discourse of crisis focusing on population dynamics had

already undergone a series of transformations. What appears as the threat
of a global population bomb in the popular culture at the very end of
the 1960s builds upon a discourse of disaster that had been shaped and
reshaped, over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in relation
to the concentration of urban populations, wage labor, and the develop-
ment of statistical management and medical rationalities of reproduc-
tion. Popular cultural expressions of population alarm in the 1970s can
be usefully read as emerging from within a polarized discursive field that
was a constant characteristic of earlier imaginings of population crisis. At
one pole, there is the threat of overpopulation: the alarmist prognostica-
tions of a global population bomb revitalize the logic of the Malthusian
problem of population, extrapolating their environmental and political
catastrophes from the assumption of the natural inequity of two p owers
of population and the production of the earth.4 At the other extreme
and less evident in the dominant 1970s rhetorics of population bombs
is the threat of population decline. Exemplary here is the eugenics
movements that exerted such widespread influence across Europe and
North America during the first half of the twentieth century. A certain
fear of overpopulation certainly motivates Euro-American eugenicist
thought, but it is the overriding emphasis on the differential decline of
a genetically fit population that comes to replace absolute population
growth as the site of crisis. Though expressed in significantly different
terms, the variegated historical discourse of population crisis that the
1970s inherits can be plotted in terms of this rough gravitational field,
apparent in some form in all its prior articulations.
 THE CASE OF THE OMEGA MAN 89

Acknowledging the immensely complicated history out of which these

concerns emerge, for the purpose of this essay I will focus on the basic con-
tradictions internal to the inherited idea of population crisis. Chief among
these contradictions is the perplexing coincidence of popular (and expert)
fears about population growth and population decline that becomes par-
ticularly apparent in the alarm of the 1970s. Conceptualizing the geneal-
ogy of this discourse in this way tends to de-emphasize the increasingly
sophisticated racialized logic of population, which in turn has the benefit
of exposing the tight connection of population and economic discourses
of crisis. Already during the early period of European industrialization
and urbanization, demographic crisis is structured around a magnetic
pull between the threatening poles of overpopulation and underpopula-
tion. As Karl Marx so convincingly demonstrated, the embarrassingly
shaky assumptions of T. R. Malthuss theory of population growth are
less damning than the blatant class interest that underwrites Malthuss
infamous pamphlet. The appeal of Malthuss pamphlet, the pretended
discovery of which was the ostensibly eternal law of population growth
outstripping its natural means of subsistence, was grounded in the context
of the Poor Law of 1834 and the spectacular appearance of the nascent
industrial proletariat. The Malthusian theory of population is from its
beginnings the expression of the fears of a dominant, minority class. Thus
Marx, in one of his many attacks on Malthus, writes [T]he hatred of the
English working class against Malthus is therefore entirely justified. The
people were right [in England] in sensing that they were confronted not
with a man of science, but with a bought advocate, a pleader on behalf of
their enemies, a shameless sycophant of the ruling class.5
This contradiction is only rendered more obvious at the turn of the
twentieth century, when the rise of the international eugenics movement
reorients the polarity of Malthusian population alarm. With the decline
in crude birthrate statistics across Western Europe, widely recognized as
a sustained trend by the turn of the twentieth century, what should have
been a miraculous refutation of neo-Malthusian predictions becomes,
with extraordinary speed, the catalyst for widespread alarm about
depopulation.6 The manner in which the discourse of differential fertility
decline becomes tethered to a genetic narrative of national race suicide
is perhaps the most lasting legacy of the eugenics movement. Yet, beneath
the emergence of the new, scientific raciology of population is a cruder
contradiction wherein depopulation can, with astonishing ease, replace
its apparent opposing term (overpopulation) as the looming signifier of
crisis. This cruder contradiction is one that shares obvious parallels with
the cyclical reversals of capitalist crises that had, by midcentury, become
90 Justin Sully

the dominant problem of economists. Indeed, it is more than c oincidental

that among the more notable public figures to make the transition from
neo-Malthusian to eugenicist (and back again) was John Maynard Keynes.
In a lecture delivered before the Eugenics Society in 1937, less than a
year after the publication of The General Theory of Employment, Interest
and Money, Keynes addresses the two devils of population. In an awk-
ward reversal of his earlier published neo-Malthusian alarm about the
economic consequences of overpopulation and unchecked population
growth, Keynes outlines an equally alarmist warning of the dangers
of a too rapidly declining population. Restating a contradiction that
Karl Marx had variously identified in his critique of political economy,
Keynes warns that having eliminated Malthuss first devil O of over-
population, modern states risked unchaining the Malthusian devil U
of underemployed resources and underconsumption, thus threatening
(economic) growth. The longer view of Keyness two Malthusian devils of
population suggests a perplexing relationship between these two figures
of crisis, a dyad that Keynes (and Marx before him) reminds us is firmly
conjoined with industrial capitals crisis-ridden dependence on the pro-
ducing and consuming activity of a laboring population for its continuous
reproduction.7
In the wake of World War II, with postwar birthrates rising in North
American and across most of Western Europe, the statistical trend toward
declining in birthrates that had supported the prewar rhetoric of class
and race suicide seemed to have reversed once again. In the wake of
the genocidal outcomes of the midcenturys racial politics of population
(whose logic emerged in part out of the European eugenics movements),
the prosperity of the postwar period engendered a relatively muted, or
at least more cautious, population discourse in the Euro-American con-
text.8 This brief sketch provides one important historical context for the
crisis-discourse population that emerges in the late 1960s and early 1970s;
yet, this period is defined as much by its break with the geopolitical and
economic contexts in which the modern notion of population emerges as
by the peculiar continuities it generates in its restatement of the problem.
Within the narrative that is generally accepted among political and
economic historians of the past fifty years, the long decade of the 1970s is
a pivotal period of crisis and transition, producing a fundamental shift not
only in the organization of the regime of capital accumulation, but also
at the level of the symbolic, in the field of cultural production and politi-
cal ideation.9 Typically, this period is dated from the first signs of sys-
temic crisis in profitability and the explosion of antisystemic movements,
both of which appear at the tail end of the 1960s. As with any transitional
 THE CASE OF THE OMEGA MAN 91

crisis between two regimes of accumulation, the organic composition of

capital and the distribution of labor underwent a violent, comprehensive
transformation. Set within this macroeconomic context, the 1973 oil cri-
sishowever one understands its significance for the broader economic
crisisrepresents a decisive and spectacular expression of the new global
parameters of economic life. A sharp reminder of the material and eco-
logical limits of capitalism, the oil crisis provided a new thematization of
old fears surrounding resource scarcity. It is through the expanded scale of
the political (and, I want to argue, demographic) imaginary of the global
and the closely linked resurgence of a public awareness of ecological lim-
its of industrial modernity that the contradictory logics of the inherited
discourse of population crisis are filtered in the 1970s. Anxieties about
overpopulation come crashing back into popular consciousness during
this period and resonate within a new framing of the plummeting profit-
ability of capital investment, rising unemployment, and the burgeoning
awareness of the ecologies of unfettered capitalist growth, resource scar-
city, energy consumption, and pollution.
By the beginning of the 1970s, it is possible to identify the emergence
of a properly global and unprecedentedly popular self-consciousness of
world population. Although earlier conceptions and even calculations of
a total human population can be evidenced prior to this period, for the
first time there emerges a truly popular identification, however ambiva-
lent, with a mass demographic unit that exceeds and incorporates famil-
iar national optics of population. New insecurities about the global scale
of resource acquisition (provoked by the oil crisis) and rising commodity
prices, as well as the reappearance (in an unfamiliar postindustrial, glo-
balized form) of what Marx calls the relative surplus population10in
terms of both the rising unemployment (particularly in the United States)
and the new specter of untapped planetary reserves of labor in develop-
ing nationsall come to play a role in the reshaping of old population
anxieties in popular consciousness and culture.
A demographic vector must be added to the formation of what
Immanuel Wallerstein calls geoculture, the cultural or cognitive dimen-
sion of globalization that Wallerstein associates with the world revolu-
tion of 1968.11 The growth of the international environmental movement
during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s is perhaps the most sig-
nificant contributor to the popular dissemination and identification with
a world population. The production and mass appeal of well-known
reports like the Club of Romes The Limits to Growth (1972) and best sell-
ers such as Paul Ehrlichs The Population Bomb (1968) (as I discuss fur-
ther in a moment) articulated a specifically demographic cause for alarm
92 Justin Sully

to a wider, growing popular movement that rested on the u ncertainty

of a common ecological future. As Andrew Ross notes, the effect of
focus[ing] public awareness on the international dimension of ecologi-
cal crisis was as pervasive as it was ambivalent in its effects. According
to Ross, the specter of overpopulation and ecological catastrophe sig-
nals that globalism, as an everyday idea, has finally broken the surface
of popular political consciousness, so long bound by short-term interests
and nationalistic anxieties or desires.12 Compounding this ecological glo-
balism was an increasingly totalizing escalation of financial capital, but
also new bodies and technologies of planetary management, such as the
World Bank, the UN Population Fund (UNPFA), and the International
Development Association.13 Set in the context of this epistemological and
institutional refiguring of the citizenship of the world, the appearance
of threat of a ticking population bomb expressed the parallel expansion
of the demographic imaginary, interpellating the consumers of the new
aspect of population disaster as a global population.

The Globalization of Population Crisis

If the 1970s marks the popularization of a consciousness ofand anxious

identification withan idea of world population, its first popular
articulation is found in the outpouring of best-selling nonfiction that
predicted a coming crisis of overpopulation, with food and resource
scarcity.14 Undoubtedly the most recognizable and influential of the
popular account of the population explosion, Ehrlichs The Population
Bomb had, in the first four years following its publication in 1968,
gone through twenty-two printings and sold over two million copies.15
Together with The Limits of Growth (1972), Ehrlichs book managed to
repackage a Malthusian fear about the rate of growth of the working poor,
refracting this old worry through a new ecological consciousness and the
multifarious crisis of the capitalist world system.16 The ideological work
that the popularization of the specter of the exploding third-world popu-
lations began to assume in the face of the globalization of labor is made
painfully clear in a personal anecdote in the preface to The Population
Bomb. Ehrlich describes his experience one stinking hot night in Delhi:

My wife and daughter and I were returning to our hotel

in an ancient taxi. The seats were hopping with fleas. The
only functional gear was third. As we crawled through the
city, we entered a crowded slum area. The temperature was
 THE CASE OF THE OMEGA MAN 93

well over 100, and the air was a haze of dust and smoke.
The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people
washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing and
screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi
window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People
clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people,
people, people. As we moved through the mob, hand horn
squawking, the dust, noise, heat, and cooking fires gave
the scene a hellish aspect. Would we ever get to our hotel?
All three of us were, frankly, frightened. It seemed that
anything could happenbut, of course, nothing did. Old
India hands will laugh at our reaction. We were just some
over-privileged tourists, unaccustomed to the sights and
sounds of India. Perhaps, but the problems of Delhi and
Calcutta are our problems too. Americans have helped to
create them; we help to prevent their solution. We must
all learn to identify with the plight of our less fortunate
fellows . . . if we are to help both them and ourselves
survive.17

Despite the somewhat clumsy reflexive afterthought in these last sentences

and the texts substantial condemnation of the unsustainable consumption
of over-developed countries, it is the dangerous proximityeconomic,
political, epidemiologicalof a racialized population of Indian bodies
that energizes Ehrlichs argument. What is decisively present here is the
construction of the groundwork for a popular identification with orin
the case of its EuropeanNorth American readershipagainst the threat
of a world population. The overextension of resources that Malthus prom-
ised at the national level is here projected on a global scale. The reader
is asked to see the growth of an Indian family as a threat to Americas
future source of food or fuel. Indeed, at the time of his visit in 1966, the
image of the teeming city in Ehrlichs anecdote was far less descriptive
of Delhia city no more densely populated at the time than New York
Citythan of the preexisting racialized discourse of the urban problem
that had gained new prominence after Daniel Patrick Moynihans infa-
mous 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case For National Action,
which focused racist attention on the disproportionate growth of the
(sociologically pathological) African American population living in US
urban centers.18 The extent to which the juridical adoption of racial popu-
lations in American domestic policy discourse dovetails with the wider
political context of the Cold War and the family planning industry has
94 Justin Sully

been and, as I will touch on again later, provides a key framework for
understanding the tone, function, and ideological significance of popular
cultural articulations of population crisis over this period.19 Although
the popular appeal of The Population Bomb can be all too easy to dismiss,
indeed, as yet another iteration of the same Malthusian alarmism that
runs throughout the history of capitalism, more is going on here.
Without ignoring Ehrlichs sophisticated analysis of the political ecolo-
gies of capitalist growth elsewhere, what is perhaps most notable about
The Population Bomb in the long tradition of demographic alarmism is
its elision of the political-economic roots and consequences of popula-
tion growth.20 In the lonely page and a half in The Population Bomb that
are devoted to the economic consequences of global population growth,
Ehrlichs text appears oblivious to both the Malthusian corpse that he is
reanimating and to the deep structural function that population growth
plays for capital accumulation, to say nothing of the ideological divisions
that cohered around the concept of development and dependency at the
time of writing. In The Population Bomb, the economic consequences
of overpopulation are reducible to a moral failure of big business. If
corporations irresponsibly encourage rising fertility, Ehrlich argues, it is
in order to profit by the higher cost of diapers. The ecological movement
for which Ehrlich was a pioneering figure was certainly not oblivious to
the relationship between unrestrained growth of a consumer capitalism
and ecological deterioration. Projects such as the Club of Romes The
Limits to Growth (1974) and the Carter administrations Year 2000 (1980)
are examples of sophisticated attempts to correlate a multiplicity of trends
and indicators in order to project a global future of population growth,
resource scarcity, economic growth, technological development, and even
new quotients like quality of life. Read against the crisis of capital from
the late 1960s and through the long 1970s, The Population Bomb, despite
standing as an exemplary and immensely influential contribution to the
production of a genuinely popular consciousness of world population,
seems notably out of sync with the emergent logic of capital.
In his 1972 analysis of the economic crises and transformations of the
late 1960s, Ernest Mandel argued that late capitalism, as he famously
named the coming epoch, cannot avoid a period of relatively decelerated
economic expansion if it fails to break the resistance of wage-earners and
so to achieve a new radical increase in [profitability]. . . . The extension
of the industrial reserve army has consequently today become a conscious
instrument of economic policy in the service of capital.21 Mandel was one
of the first to diagnose the emergence of a new, postindustrial mode of pro-
duction, providing a classically Marxian account of a technology-driven
 THE CASE OF THE OMEGA MAN 95

transformation of the organic composition of capital, complete with the

invention of a new (international) pool of reserve labor. Numerous critical
accounts in recent years have similarly consistently highlighted the need
for a reevaluation of Marxs concept of surplus population in light of the
changed spaces and technologies of capital accumulation that arose out
of the crises of the long 1970s. Mike Davis, David Harvey, and Zygmunt
Bauman, to name a few, have each pointed to the manner in which Marxs
analysis of the structural necessity of a growing surplus population of
unproductive labor for the continuous reproduction of capital reappears
out of the crisis of this period with a new relevance.22 This is, by now,
a familiar story to many. The failing profitability of industrial produc-
tion among advanced capitalist states, combined with the vulnerability of
Third World nations incapable of meeting foreign debt obligations in the
midst of the shocks and prolonged volatility of the world market, gave
birth to mechanismssuch as the structural adjustment programs of the
International Monetary Fundof accumulation by dispossession.23
These changes, in turn, enabled and are enabled by a new transnational
mobility of capital and the precipitous growth of financial speculation, the
results of which we are now all too aware.
The new face of uneven development that grows from the economic
crises of the 1970s also produced a fundamental change in the classical
relationship between population growth and production to which Marxs
analysis of the capitalist law of population addresses itself. Mike Davis,
in his Planet of Slums (2006), claims that the dynamics of Third World
urbanization both recapitulate and confound the precedents of nine-
teenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe and North America.24 He
continues,

Eighty percent of Marxs industrial proletariat now lives in

China or somewhere outside of Western Europe and the
United States. Since the mid-1980s, the great industrial cities
of the SouthBombay, Johannesburg, Buenos Aires, Belo
Horizonte, and So Paulohave all suffered massive plant
closures and tendential deindustrialization. Elsewhere,
urbanization has been more radically decoupled from
industrialization, even from development per se. . . . The
size of a citys economy, as a result, often bears surprisingly
little relationship to its population size, and vice versa. . . .
In African, Latin America, the Middle East and much of
South Asia, urbanization without growth is the legacy of
a global political conjuncturethe worldwide debt crisis
96 Justin Sully

of the late 1970s and the subsequent IMF [International

Monetary Fund]-led restructuring of Third World
economies in the 1980s.25

This delinking of the unemployed surplus population of the Third

World from the reproduction of capital that Davis sees beginning in the
1970s is a process that cuts evenly across the popular articulation of crisis
of population at the time. As I demonstrate in the second half of this essay,
what emerges from a conjunctural view of this moment is a pervasive
sense of anachrony and conceptual contradiction between the apparent
economic logic of population inherited by this period, the new political-
economic realities (and rhetorics) of a world population, and the popular
cultural imaginings of population disaster. The marked unevenness in
these various articulations of an idea of population crisis points beyond
itself to what might be imagined as a sort of crisis of the very idea of popu-
lation crisis. More specifically, looking at the popular culture of 1970s
population alarm, we find the messy process of reproducing the imagina-
tion of population as threat at a moment when the modern and particu-
larly industrial character of that threat is increasingly less operative.
The popular cultural expressions of anxiety about overpopulation
that emerge from the 1970s are fixed firmly in the interregnum between
two regimes of capital accumulation that, in turn, suggest two separate
regimes of population. The field of popular cinema, to which I turn in a
moment, provides a remarkably condensed enunciation of the overlap-
ping conjuncture of distinct systems of images, codes, and economies of
desire through which the broader historical transformations that I have
outlined are mediated and meaningfully organized. To provide some
sense of this, I will turn to a consideration of how these transformations
register in cinema. I look first in a general way at early cinema and its
photography of urban crowds. In the final section, I return to the case of
the 1970s and particularly its popular science fiction cinema and its repre-
sentation of population disaster.

Cinema and the Demographic Imaginary

One need not look too deeply at the cinema of the first half of the twentieth
century to find expressions of population anxiety. The figure that comes
closest to suggesting an almost literal cinematic expression is the urban
crowd. That cinema is attracted to the crowd is one of the most well-
worn claims made about films first decades. Beginning with Siegfried
 THE CASE OF THE OMEGA MAN 97

Kracauers famous quotation of Flix Mesguich, the Lumire brothers

ace cameraman, film criticism long took for granted the notion that
the crowd and its eddies are the true domain of the cinema.26 This topi-
cal affinity with the crowd has certainly been revised, challenged, and
even reversed over the years by critics and filmmakers themselves; yet,
at least for the cinema of the first half of the twentieth century, films
love for the urban crowd remains, in the broadest terms, axiomatic. The
capacity of moving pictures to capture the press, scale, and speed, as
well as mass gestural behavior, is evidenced in many best-known works,
from the Lumires La Sortie des usines Lumire Lyon (Workers Leaving
the Factory, 1895), to King Vidors The Crowd (1928) or Dziga Vertovs
Chelovek s kino-apparatom (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929). And, in the
realm of theory and criticism, the media aesthetics of the crowd famously
articulated in the mid-1930s by Kracauer and Walter Benjamin forge a
topoi that eventually extends, with expanded significance, through post
World War II social and political thought. Henri Lefebvres specula-
tions on space, the Situationists unitary urbanism, the retooling of the
Spinozian concept of the multitude in the wake of the alter-globalization
movements of the late 1990s, and even Jacques Rancires recent geneal-
ogy of the aesthetico-political concept of the distribution of the sensible,
while moving in different, even sometimes opposing, directions, all rede-
fine the political through some mediated (filmic or otherwise) figure of
the crowd.
Such is the ubiquitous agreement about the mutual attraction of crowds
and film that a substantial critical reckoning with the cinematic crowd
itself can be surprisingly difficult to locate. Tony Fitzmaurice remarks at
the outset of his collection Cinema and the City (2001) that it is, of course, a
truism to point out that film is the urban cultural form par excellence;27 such
is the givenness of this connection that Stanley Cavell needs only a passing
parenthetical sentence to establish films natural attraction to crowds.28
So central is the city to film that, as David B. Clarke notes, paradoxi-
cally, the widespread implicit acceptance of its importance has mitigated
against an explicit consideration of its actual significance.29 Yet, whether
the long bibliography of scholarship on cinematic cities challenges or con-
firms Clarks claim requires a more precise statement of what an explicit
consideration of its actual significance might mean. Arecognition of the
urban crowd as actor is certainly not a foreign concept to film criticism, nor
is there any lack of consideration of the films tradition of crowd photogra-
phy. What the implicit acceptance of the importance of the urban crowd
in film seems to obscure is instead something closer to its social ontology
or, in other words, a critical apprehension of crowding.30 Reformulating the
98 Justin Sully

problem in this way addresses the conceptually hypertrophic tendency of

the cinematic crowd, looking instead to a wider, more differentiated spec-
trum of ebb and flow of crowds. Such a restatement not only reenergizes
the object of the cinematic crowd, it aligns the aesthetic morphology of
cinematic crowds with a range of overlapping and competing social and
political imaginings of the crowd, the mass, the people, the populus.
In 1925, Ren Clair directed his first film, a short comedic science fiction
entitled Paris Qui Dort (The Crazy Ray). The films story centers on a young
man, waking at the top of the Eiffel Tower, where he works as an over-
night watchman, to find the streets of Paris, far below, impossibly motion-
less. The night watchman and Clairs camera descend to the streets below
to find the citys population frozen, asleep in the midst of their evening
activities: couples paralyzed in midstride, restaurants and bars filled with
dozing customers. After exploring the ludic and romantic possibilities of
a city frozen in time, and after having realized the fantasy of unlimited
consumption that the abandoned city invites, the film gathers together a
ragtag group of survivors who set out to solve the mystery of their sleeping
neighbors. Anticipating what would become a standby in the science fic-
tion of the midcentury, the mystery is solved with the discovery of a mad
scientist and his paralyzing ray gun. The films denouement returns the
city population to life, providing comic resolution as the hero wanders the
activity of bewildered citizenry, who wake suddenly to find themselves in
the middle of their dinner at noon. What is noteworthy about this film is
less its anticipation of the death ray as plot device than its early cinematic
presentation of the figure and the fantasy of the deserted city.
Often identified as a tendency of new-wave-era directors like
Michelangelo Antonioni, the image of the deserted citywhen drawn as
a longer historical tendencypositions what has become the accepted fact
of cinemas demophilia in a different light. Indeed, so tied is the received
idea of the cinematic city to the dynamism of the urban crowd that to trace
the development of the appearance of the emptied city in cinemas early
years is almost to begin reconstructing an alternative, parallel history of
films relationship to urban space. Recasting cinemas crowds in this way
also inserts them, in a more dynamic and symbolically responsive way, into
a broader set of discourses about the city, the crowd, the demos or body
politic. It is here, in this dialectic of urban crowding, that I want to begin to
draw a tentative aesthetic register of the imagination of population crisis.
Reading cinematic crowding through the crisis discourses of popula-
tion dynamics, particularly in early cinema, offers a route through which
the specifically economic fears about overpopulation and u nderpopulation
(as Ive already quickly sketched them) are remediated and given
 THE CASE OF THE OMEGA MAN 99

aestheticform. Through this lens, the projection of the quotidian rhythm

of the industrial citys population becomes the synecdochic container for
larger demographic fears. Well-known examples of early filmic city sym-
phonies, like Walter Ruttmanns film symphony of Berlin (Berlin: Die
Sinfonie der Grostad [Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis], 1927) and Dziga
Vertovs of Odessa (Chelovek s kino-apparatom), offer exemplary cases of
how the crowding of city streets, like Clair, conjure the fantasy life of the
crowd out of its most everyday appearance. It is the ebb and flow and the
crowds of industrial workers in these films that establish the elementary,
defining structure of the genre. The crowds that rush into the streets of
Berlin and Odessa and their serial activity at work and play endorse the
claims of early cinemas attraction to the crowd. For all their differences,
these films project a similar ecstatic image of the crowd as the expression
of the citys vitality and modernity.
Whereas these frenzied daytime scenes in Ruttmann and Vertov films
represent among the most commented-upon examples of early cinematic
crowd photography, the absence of crowds that frame these daytime
scenes are equally important. Both films capture this absence in the early
morning and late night, the moments of pause and rest in the daily cycle
of the reproduction of the industrial citys workforce. The filmed image
of the empty city signifies, first and foremost, negatively: the image of
the vacant city street is necessarily an image of the absence of a crowd. The
deserted streets on display in these early films bear a deeply layered range
of associations. As portraits of the industrial city, there is an expected
and even comforting regularity of an everyday cycle of production and
reproduction: the climactic mass exoduses to and from the factory, and
the stillness of the time of labors nightly reproduction. Perhaps just as
familiar is the more unsettling, haunted appearance of the citys aban-
doned architecture, which is imbued with an eerie presence that draws
out the indexical claim of these images of streets that have long outlived
their inhabitants. But the unsettling effect of the deserted street runs
deeper than this. These images also afford a sense of the architecture of
the city space as pure, empty potential that resonates with Clairs image of
Paris abandoned and brings matters closer to the political register of these
images to which I turn later. The exuberance of the hero of Clairs science
fiction upon discovering the untended shops and restaurants of the artifi-
cially dormant city suggests the way that the pleasure of the depopulated
street is also deeply tied to a radically antisocial, perhaps distinctly capital-
ist fantasy of unfettered consumption. The image of the empty city street,
lined with empty shopslike the abandoned grocery store or shopping
mall that returns in the science fictions of the 1970sincites the fantasy of
100 Justin Sully

a commodity world suddenly liberated and absolutely available, an image

of the city that is, tellingly, perhaps achievable in film only through its
total depopulation.
To begin to introduce the demographic register contained within the
image of empty urban space is to recognize that while the slow panning
shot of the empty, sleeping, or early morning street of a city in Berlin:
Die Sinfonie der Grostadt engenders an unmistakable anticipation of the
return of its inhabitants, it also contains the trace of mingled fear and
excitement that, maybe this time, the morning crowds will not arrive. Of
course, the constructed image of the empty street is not the experience of
an empty street itself; it is the distance between the two that interests me
here. That which separates an empty city and the image of an empty city,
which is also to say, between the meaningfulness of an urban mass (or its
marked absence) and its visual representation on a screen, is the mediating
space of the politics of the aesthetic. In this sense, to reconfigure the famil-
iar claim of films characteristic affinity for the crowd as composed not
simply by the presence of mass bodies on the screen, but rather in terms
of a dialectic of the presence/absence of bodies, is not only to thicken the
problem at the level of the aesthetic, but also to introduce new ground for
theorizing how cinemas crowds are articulated to the concrete historical
conditions from which and to which they are addressed.

The Projection of Demographic Apocalypse: The Omega Man

The outpouring of popular science fiction film in the 1970s is among

the most concentrated cultural expressions of popular anxieties about
population. The dystopian futures projected in films such as ZPG: Zero
Population Growth (dir. Michael Campus, 1972) and Soylent Green (dir.
Richard Fleischer, 1973) emerge out of a popular demographic imagina-
tion and tap into an ambivalent and elusive pleasure rooted somehow
in their perceived inevitability. The image of Charlton Hestons char-
acter in Soylent Green matter-of-factly picking his way across floors and
streets carpeted with loitering, sleeping, unproductive bodies, while less
spectacular than the infamous cannibal punch line of the film (Soylent
Green is people!), captures a deeper, dull horror and fascination with the
quotidian experience of overpopulation and resource scarcity (figure1).
Dystopian fantasies like ZPG, Zardoz (dir. John Boorman, 1974) and
Logans Run (dir. Michael Anderson, 1976) offer in some ways the more
explicit examples of demographic fantasy. These films project a vision
of a future reproductive hierarchy where rampant population control
 THE CASE OF THE OMEGA MAN 101

Figure 1. Charlton Heston makes his way up a staircase of sleeping bodies in Soylent Green.

conditions the privilege of a social elite, whose domed cities and invisible
barriers exclude the teeming populations of barbarians at the gate.
Tapping the old fear of differential population growth, these films invite
a more complex economy of identification wherein the audiences guilty
Malthusian fears are laundered through the moral alchemy of narrative
sympathy with the films excluded political/demographic underclass.
The cult British television series Survivors (BBC, 197476) provides
the supreme example from the period that produces what appears as
the opposing fantasy of disaster. In Survivors, the sudden and random
though, implicitly, Cold Warinflectedappearance of a global flu pan-
demic leaves all but a handful of the worlds population dead. The series
follows a group of British survivors left to recycle, reuse, and attempt to
reincorporate a hyperspecialized societys artifacts that seem now (with
the sudden disappearance of knowledge and infrastructure) an almost
alien technology. Set against the contemporarily more recognizable dys-
topian fantasies of overpopulation, Survivors presents an imagining of
immanent depopulation, registering an opposing form of demographic
fantasy that is simultaneously firmly situated within the dialectic of the
presence and absence of cinemas crowds.
Richard Mathesons 1954 novel, I am Legend, and its various film
adaptations provide a fascinating set of cultural expressions that fuse the
apparently opposing fears of overpopulation and depopulation. In some
obvious ways, these films may appear an odd place to explore the image of
population, particularly in a historical moment when fears of global over-
population dominate. The titles of the two film adaptations that I want
to examine in detail, The Last Man on Earth (dir. Ubaldo Ragona, 1964)
and The Omega Man, announce their place within the narrative genre of
last-man stories. Perhaps best understood as a subgenre of postapocalyptic
literature, the generic conceit of the last man on earth story has yet to receive
102 Justin Sully

the critical attention it warrants.31 While castaway stories such as Robinson

Crusoe (1719) appear to provide something of a precursor to the conceit of
the last man on earth, the last man story is in a number of ways distinct.
The specificity of story of the last man on earth is already apparent in
the first formulation of the narrative conceit (and one of the earliest exam-
ples of the science fiction novel) in Mary Shelleys The Last Man (1826).32
Set in the late twenty-first century, Shelleys novel imagines the final years
of humanity, brought to the brink of extinction after the spread of a super-
natural plague that leaves only the narrator, Lionel Verney. Three motifs
or features of Shellys novel are worth highlighting. First, Shelleys story
combines a first-person narration and an overarching analeptic narrative
discourse in which the narrator, the last man, reflects upon the events lead-
ing to his present condition. In this way, the story borrows from castaway
stories such as Robinson Crusoe, but reverses many of its conceits: unlike
the memoirs of a rescued castaway, the last-man story typically follows the
narrators tale with the certainty, not that the protagonist will finally return
to the fold of society, but rather that all the characters must die before the
story ends. Second, the events of Shelleys story cross continents, touching
in an astonishingly contemporary way upon problems of immigration and
exile. This planetary scale of The Last Man seems to mark another generic
trait of the last-man story. This aspect of the story and its generic specific-
ity is articulated by Shelleys narrator upon realization of his total solitude:

What a pitiable, forlorn, disconsolate being I was! . . . For a

moment I compared myself to that monarch of the waste
Robinson Crusoe. . . . Yet he was far happier than I: for he
could hope, nor hope in vainthe destined vessel at last
arrived, to bear him to countrymen and kindred. . . . He
knew that, beyond the ocean which begirt his lonely island,
thousands lived whom the sun enlightened when it shone
also on him: beneath the meridian sun and visiting moon,
Ialone bore human features; I alone could give articulation
to thought; and, when I slept, both day and night were
unbeheld of any. . . . I knew that I, the offspring of man,
during long years one among manynow remained the
sole survivor of my species.33

The distinction outlined in this curious metanarratorial comment is

simple, but crucial for grasping the specificity and the historical signifi-
cance of the generic conceit of the last man. The last man is never the
last Frenchman, nor the last German; rather, the distinctive condition of
 THE CASE OF THE OMEGA MAN 103

the genre assumes a capacity to imagine plot and character at the scale
of species. The significance of the epidemiological plot deviceanother
feature that may be attributable to the subgenrewhile underlining
the extent to which the fantasy of the last man fits neatly alongside the
Foucauldian genealogy of biopower, must be considered in terms of the
way that the last mans experience of an essentially biological condition
(extinction) remains articulated in terms of the experience of space and
sociality (or the absence thereof). The specific mode of reflection on soli-
tude in The Last Man mixes the existential terror so apparent in this pas-
sage with a peculiar glee at the sudden disappearance of competition and
the absolute availability of the resources of a depopulated world. The
wonder and excitement of the last man at the ready abundance of aban-
doned stores and granaries are present in a way that already anticipates
the full-blown capitalist fantasy of unlimited consumption that is repeated
in the spectacle of the abandoned, postapocalyptic shopping mall in 1960s
and 1970s science fiction. It is in this sense that the generic conceit of the
last man can be read as articulating political allegory through a specifi-
cally demographic tropology, recasting, in narrative form, the polarity of
the presence and absence of the urban crowd that I have outlined earlier.
The films adapted from Mathesons I am Legend provide an intrigu-
ing case of the last-man story. What distinguishes these films among
iterations of the last-man story and positions them as exemplary cases of
the popular cinematic projections of demographic disaster is the manner
in which they manage to contain within the story of the last man on earth
its generic oppositenamely, the modern figure of the pressing, threat-
ening crowd. The first adaptation of Mathesons novel, The Last Man
on Earth, is perhaps most faithful to Mathesons source story. Its care-
ful narration of the details of Nevilles daily routinethe eponymous
last man, his provision of electricity and food, and his ceaseless labor of
fighting the vampires that are born of a viral infection that has at once
depopulated the earth and filled it to bursting with the groaning, noc-
turnal, mass of creatures bent on making Neville one of their ownis
drawn unaltered from Mathesons novel. The Last Man on Earth also fol-
lows the novel in its presentation of a complex and variegated typology
of different classes of infected vampire: some infected but living, some
(un)dead but animated through the presence of the virus, and, in the
final stage of the film, the third cohort of the infected, who have learned
to treat and repress the symptoms. Like Survivors, Mathesons story and
this first filmed adaptation are fixated on the practical: the daily routine
of subsistence and security, but also the sometimes confusing, pseudosci-
entific cataloging of classes and types of the infected. Indeed, one of the
104 Justin Sully

ways in which the various adaptations of Mathesons story can be charted

historicallythrough subsequent adaptations like The Omega Man,
I Am Legend (dir. Francis Lawrence, 2007), and, more tenuously related,
28 Days Later (dir. Danny Boyle, 2002)is in terms of the gradual wan-
ing of both the narratives interest in the practical routine of Neville and
the variegated complexity of the vampire horde. By 2007s I Am Legend,
the vampires have devolved into an indistinguishable, mindless horde of
screeching mutants.
The Omega Man largely abandons the complex, sometimes confused
differentiation of the vampire hosts that exists in Mathesons novel and
in the earlier The Last Man on Earth at the same time that it redoubles the
narratives effort to construct a metadiegetic code through which its own
events are to be understood politically. Rather than the variegated vampire
classes that are shown in Last Mancomposed of the lurching undead, the
still-living infected, and the new society of the curedThe Omega Man
reimagines the vampires as a single, hooded group defined as much by
their ideological affiliation as their monstrosity: no longer lurching and
groaning, they appear instead articulate, calculating, and organized. The
vampires of The Omega Man, or the Family, as they call themselves, have
now become devotees of a sort of neo-Luddite cult led by a newscaster
turned evangelist (played by Anthony Zerbe). Unlike all other treatments
of the story, the vampires of The Omega Man have lost none of their dex-
terity or language as a result of their infection; their disease brings with
it only an aversion to sun, the whitening of their hair and irises, and an
apparently instantaneous, pathological susceptibility to their leaders sug-
gestion (see figure 2). Particularly when set against the solitary, belligerent,
chauvinist independence of Charlton Hestons scowling, trigger-happy
interpretation of the character of Robert Neville, TheOmegaMans vam-
pires are marked by their relative sociality and organization. In the derog-
atory, pathologized figure of collectivity, we see the first indications of a

Figure 2. The Family confronts Robert Neville (Charlton Heston) in The Omega Man.
 THE CASE OF THE OMEGA MAN 105

self-conscious application of the ideological coordinates of the Cold War.

The book b urning, Luddism, and cultish collectivism of the Family con-
jure the familiar, propagandistic caricature of Sovietization.
The overt inscription of this geopolitical referent stands out when
contrasted with the 1964 adaptation of the story. Apart from an oblique
reference to early 1960s youth culture in The Last Man on Earth, the ear-
lier adaptation provides no historical or political referent upon which to
anchor the heavy suggestion of an allegorical code in the story. The Omega
Mans very explicit attempts to inject Mathesons narrative with the spe-
cific coordinates of 1970s US racial politics further provides evidence of
this marked attempt to provide explicit allegorical signposts. Running
throughout the film, the explicit reference to US racial politics emerges at
the beginning, when one black member of the vampire crowd describes
Nevilles apartment as a honky paradise, only to be chastened: Forget
your old ways, brother. All your old hatreds, all your old pains: forget.
And remember, the family is one. If the Family represents an oddly sin-
ister mixture of a postracial antimodernism (as well as a projection of a
particular moment in a specifically American story of race and urban-
ismof white flight), the emergence of the films third factionanother
group who have escaped infection and are surviving outside the city
expands the figurative content of the film and locates the initial allegory
of race on yet another referential axis.
The introduction of this third faction of characters into the plot
of The Omega Man presents a curious revision of Mathesons story as
geopolitical allegory. This faction of survivors enters from a spatial
periphery of the story into the central, urban conflict between Neville
and the Family, replacing or recoding a very different treated faction
in Mathesons novel and of The Last Man on Earth. In contrast to the
early adaptation, The Omega Mans development of this peripheral
cohort of characters into an allegorical figure of the Third World is,
on the whole, unambiguous. Lisa (played by Rosalind Cash), the leader
of the survivors, has clearly been modeled on Angela Davis, and the
group she leads is a multiethnic community of children. The scene of
Nevilles first encounter with this third group is exemplary. Arriving
from the city on a motorcycle, Neville dismounts before what vaguely
resembles a Caribbean or Latin American mountain structure, set in
thick vegetation, beside a dirt road. As Lisa jumps from the motorcycle
with her pistol trained on Neville, the camera performs an exploita-
tion-style rapid zoom to focus on the face of a young, East Asian boy,
crouching behind a mounted machine gun, to whom Lisas directs her
explanation: Its okay, Tommy. This is the man. And I mean the Man
(see figures 3a and b).
106 Justin Sully

Figure 3a and b. The Omega Man.

These details of The Omega Mans adaptation reveal the sensitivity, if

not subtlety, with which the plot registers deep transformations in the
parameters of the political at two sites: on one hand, the specifically (white)
American anxieties about the racialization of urban space, conjured
by the siege of the last, white man in his townhouse and, on the other,
the insurgence of a figural Third World and the dizzying expansion of
the phenomenological scalein short, the globalization of the experience
of the political.34 This effort to draw two sites or scales of crisis into the
same symbolic space renders the film a revealing historical allegory of its
moment. Even more remarkable here is the sort of demographic tropol-
ogy that the film draws upon to energize and symbolically fuse these two
scales. I want to suggest that it is in this (geo)political allegory at work in
The Omega Man that one finds a corresponding demographic double fan-
tasy of a North American audience: on one hand, the fear of Ehrlichs The
Population Bomb, combining an old Malthusian narrative with the dizzy-
ing expansion of scale of social and economic life and, on the other, the
concomitant torsions at home, in the West, the urgency of social antago-
nisms of race, class, and competing age cohorts energized by the rising
unemployment and the televised shock of gas-station queues (figure 4).
 THE CASE OF THE OMEGA MAN 107

Figure 4. Lisa (Rosalind Cash) walks through an abandoned pharmacy in The Omega Man.
Asign on the wall reads Planned Parenthood Supplies.

The spectacular profusion of new codes and geopolitical referents,

which distinguishes The Omega Man in its adaptation of Mathesons
story, is supported in a much more understated way by its representa-
tion of urban crowds and their alternating absence. In all adaptations of
Mathesons story, the stark contrast of the days abandoned city streets and
the nights threatening mass provides a rhythm to events, repeatedly shift-
ing between two equally pathologized images of the city population. Each
of the Legend films opens with a long montage of shots of recognizably
urban sites, emptied, abandoned, and decorated with the gradually more
explicit signs of disaster: cars on sidewalks, swinging shop doors, motion-
less streets, and the slow introduction of bodies strewn in parking lots and
stairways (see figures 5a and b). Bearing with it a sinister echo of Rene
Clairs frozen citizens and all the ambivalent associations of the emptied
cinematic city, the image of the city in the Legend films is defined visu-
ally in terms of the presence/absence of an urban population. The appear-
ance of crowds by night completes the reversal of the expected behavior of
urban populations and the time of production and reproduction.
The uncanny images of the city that are produced in this reversal are
not isolated elements, but rather a recurring motif, suturing the films
diegetic space and time. The oscillation between these two images of the
citythe vacant city by day that opens the film and the threatening urban
crowd by nightacts as a kind of motor propelling the pace of events
forward through the constant threat that Neville will be caught napping
at night or that the monstrous crowd will appear on the street by day.
While Nevilles constant fear of being caught out after dark appears as the
primary source of suspense in Mathesons novel, it is the rare appearances
of another human during Nevilles solitary daytime wandering that mark
the intensities of shock, fear, and violence in the films. This reversal of
108 Justin Sully

Figure 5. The postapocalyptic city in The Last Man on Earth (a) and in The Omega Man (b).

the expected rhythm of the city population marks the elementary sign of
the crisis logic that structures the film. The expected visual regime of the
modern city and the regime of population and production that it supports
are projected here in a monstrously inverted form that marks not only the
overdetermined bodies of the infected crowd, but also the space and time
of the urban environment itself.
What finally interests me about The Omega Man is the relationship
between the films two elements that I have highlighted: on the one
hand, the operation of threatening images of the citys population and,
on the other, the continuous profusion of political referents or codes that
is unique to this adaption of Mathesons story. The Omega Man is distin-
guished among the Legend films by how explicitly it activates the expecta-
tion of a political or ideological referent. Indeed, the narratives drive to
provide the expected political subtext seems to come unbound, reaching
an almost desperate pitch in the introduction of layer upon layer of alle-
gory and new political referents. The explicit, if incoherent, racial cod-
ing of the vampire host, the peculiar neo-Luddite, antimodern rhetoric
of the Family, the stark portrayal of the pathology of collectivism, the
 THE CASE OF THE OMEGA MAN 109

introduction of a figurative Third World, even the clichd Christian

iconography of Nevilles sacrifice at the end of the film, taken together,
present an absurd array of political referents. Precisely in its inchoate
multiplicity, the film reveals its concerted investment in a strategy of ref-
erential excess. Amidst or beneath this profusion of codes is, as Ive tried
to suggest, a steady rhythm of the depiction of the crowding and vacancy
of urban space that functions at every point to suture together an other-
wise disorganized assemblage of ideological referents with a familiar and
essentially demographic figurative system.
To diagnose the specificity of The Omega Man as symbolic act begins
with the narrative content and its adaptation of Mathesons story. The
historical location of The Omega Man and its coincidence with a moment
of global crisis and recomposition of capitalism are perhaps most evident
in the films overproduction of recognizable hermeneutic codes. The
ideological operation of a mass cultural artifact is always a negotiation
of wish fulfillment and the reaffirmation of the limits of cognition and
symbolization, a kind of psychic compromise or horse-trading, which
strategically arouses fantasy content within careful symbolic containment
structures.35 At the most basic level, the ideological aspect of a period of
crisis is characterized by the degree to which recognizable coordinates of
desire and the means of capturing, containing and directing its symbolic
projection become estranged, illegible, and misaligned. In the face of the
ever increasing capacity of mass cultural apparatuses to generate not only
new commodified objects of desire, but also new kinds of desiring sub-
jects, Antonio Gramscis famous dictum that the crisis consists precisely
in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born appears strik-
ingly relevant.36
The reproductive metaphor of Gramscis dictum applies with an
unmistakable literalness to the fixation on population throughout the
world systemic crisis of the 1970s. What could be more exemplary of
Gramscis ideological monster than the hybrid, mutant collective of the
family in The Omega Mana nocturnal, neo-Luddite, postracial, evan-
gelical cult? If this referential excess in The Omega Man is an embryonic
articulation of what Raymond Williams might name a cultural emergent
trying to be bornone steeped in Cold War and racial paranoia, but
also anticipating the culture wars and identity politics of the 1980s and
1990swhat makes it monstrous in Gramscis sense is less the internal
incoherence of its parts than the way it is drawn over the residual sym-
bolic architecture of the modernist crowd and its associated demographic
imaginary. I have argued that the dialectic of visualizing the industrial
crowd in early cinema returns with a special prominence and urgency
110 Justin Sully

in the science fiction films of the 1970s. In the latter case, however, the
familiar pulse of the city flooded and emptied of people becomes the
means of projecting a structural misalignment where the daily cycle of
the reproduction of industrial labor in some sense retains its rhythmic
consistency, but at the same time is inverted, causing the representation of
the modern industrial temporal order of labor/leisure and public/private
to become itself reversed and upended.
Examined seriously as an assembled symbolic whole, the projection
and encryption of population fears in The Omega Man give shape to the
coexistence of incompatible economic and ideological regimes. At one
level, this factious conjunction of discursive regimes is formed of, and
inseparable from, the transformation of the distribution of labor traceable
to the moment when the national parameters of the industrial produc-
tion begin to waver before an emergent transnational distribution of the
capital and labor. The film simultaneously registers the concrete confor-
mation of an environmental and epidemiological object of power that,
as the persistent moral and racial narrative fantasies of the unrestrained
fecundity of developing nations repeatedly confirm, brings into view an
expanded popular consciousness of world population, just as it reactivates
old Malthusian fears of the great unwashed to address the new, trans-
national mobility of resources and people. While alarm about overpop-
ulation during the 1970s attends to very real ecological problems, it is,
retrospectively, a remarkable record of the halting, uneven invention of
new codes and discursive procedures to express an emergent regime of
accumulation.

Justin Sully is an adjunct assistant professor in the cultural studies program at Queens
University, Kingston, Canada. His research explores the cultural history of demography and
statistical thinking and its implication in visual media culture from the late nineteenth century
to the present.

NOTES

1. 1974, World Population Year, United Nations press release, 21 September 1974.
2. On the Bucharest conference, see Jason L. Finkle and Barbara B. Cranes excellent
report, The Politics of Bucharest: Population, Development, and the New International
Economic Order, Population and Development Review 1, no. 1 (1975): 87114. For more
general accounts of the postWorld War II history of population control and family
planning, see Peter J. Donaldson, Nature Against Us: The United States and the World
Population Crisis, 19651980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990);
and Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
 THE CASE OF THE OMEGA MAN 111

3. The term demografiction I owe to the title of Anton Kuijstens review essay,
Demografiction, in The Joy of Demography and Other Disciplines: Essays in Honour of
Dirk van de Kaa, ed. Anton Kuijsten, Henk de Gans, and Henk de Feijter, Nethurd
(Amsterdam: Thela Thesis, 1999), 83102.
4. T[homas] R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population, vol. 1, ed. Geoffrey Gilbert,
Oxford Worlds Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 15 (originally
published in 1798).
5. Karl Marx, Malthus on Overproduction and Overconsumption, in Marx and Engels
on the Population Bomb: Selections from the Writings of Marx and Engels Dealing with the
Theories of Thomas Robert Malthus, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ed. Ronald L.
Meeks (New York: International Publishers, 1954), 17392, quotation on 174.
6. See Richard A. Soloway, The Turn of the Century and Deterioration and Decline, in
Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century
Britain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 117, 3859; Marius
Turda, Race, Science and Eugenics in the Twentieth Century, in The Oxford Handbook
of the History of Eugenics, ed. Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine, Oxford Handbooks
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 6279; and Marius Turda, Modernism and
Eugenics, Modernism and . . . (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 2339.
7. See J[ohn] M. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of a Declining Population,
Population and Development Review 4, no. 3 (1978): 52123; reprinted from Eugenics
Review 29, no. 1 (1937): 1317. For further discussion of the development of Keyness
views, see William Peterson, John Maynard Keyness Theories of Population and
the Concept of Optimum, Population Studies 8, no. 3 (1955): 22846; and John Toye,
Keynes on Population and Economic Growth, Cambridge Journal of Economics 21,
no. 1 (1997): 126.
8. In a broader, global context, the 1950s in fact witnessed dramatic growth of population
control lobbying in the nascent Third World (see Connelly, Fatal Misconception, 11554).
9. See Ernest Mandel, Late Capitalism, trans. Joris de Bres (London: Verso, 1998); David
Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change
(London: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism, Post-contemporary Interventions (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1992); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the
Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1994); Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: A History
of the World, 19141991 (New York: Little, Brown, 1995); Eric Helleiner, States and the
Reemergence of Global Finance: From Bretton Woods to the 1990s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1996); Grard Dumnil and Dominique Lvy, Capital Resurgent: Roots
of the Neoliberal Revolution, trans. Derek Jeffers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2004); and Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence (London: Verso,
2006).
10. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (1976; repr.,
London: Penguin, 1990), 78590.
11. Immanuel Wallerstein, Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World-System,
Studies in Modern Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press/Maison
des Sciences de lHomme, 1991), esp. The National and the Universal: Can There Be
Such a Thing as World Culture? 184200.
12. Andrew Ross, Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits
(London: Verso, 1991), 188.
13. Ibid., 17985.
112 Justin Sully

14. The bibliography here is extensive and varied; the spike in publication is as apparent
among scholarly presses as it is among popular, best sellers, policy papers, and even
elementary school textbooks. An illustrative sample of popular titles includes Karl Sax,
Standing Room Only: The Worlds Exploding Population (Boston, MA: Beacon Press,
1960); William Vogt, People! The Challenge to Survival (London: Victor Gollancz, 1961);
Lincoln H. and Alice Taylor Day, Too Many Americans: A Sobering Look at Our Own
Overpopulation Crisis (El Dorado, AR: Delta Press, 1965); William and Paul Paddock,
Hungry Nations (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1966); William Paddock, Famine 1975!
Americas Decision: Who Will Survive? (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1967); Joseph D.
Tydings, Born to Starve: Is It Too Late to Help Millions of People Doomed to Live in Poverty
Hunger and Despair? (New York: William Morrow, 1970); Jack Parsons, Population
versus Liberty (New York: Pemberton Books, 1971); and Georg Borgstrom, The Hungry
Planet: The Modern World at the Edge of Famine (New York: Macmillan, 1972). Some of
these titles (for example, Famine 1975!) sold almost as well as Ehrlichs The Population
Bomb. One of the more remarkable records of these publications is a series of textbooks
assembled by the Population Reference Bureau, based in Washington, DC; the series,
all published in 197071, includes Vogts People! (grades 79), Betty Lou Tom, The
Population Dilemma (grades 1012), and Lillian Berson Frankel, This Crowded World:
An Introduction to the Study of Population (Bethesda, MD: Columbia Books, 1970). As a
addendum to this list, it is worth pointing out that Alfred Sauvys Zero Growth, trans.
A. Maguire (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 1976), and Joseph Spenglers Facing Zero
Population Growth: Reactions and Interpretations, Past and Present (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1978) both sold well, warning of the problems raised by sub-replacement
total fertility rates that by then existed in a number of advanced capitalist nations.
15. On the history of Ehrlichs reception in the popular press, see John R. Wilmoth and
Patrick Ball, Arguments and Action in the Life of a Social Problem: A Case Study of
Overpopulation, 19461990, Social Problems 42, no. 3 (1995): 31843; and Connelly,
Fatal Misconception, 25660.
16. Although there seems to be very existent work that has quantified the extent of the
rise in public interest in population questions over the 1960s and 1970s, some studies
have been done on the American context in particular. See, for example, Thomas
Schindlmayer, The Media, Public Opinion and Population Assistance: Establishing a
Link, International Family Planning Perspectives 27, no. 1 (2001): 4246; and Clifford
Grammich, Julie Da Vanzo, and Kate Stewart, Changes in American Opinion about
Family Planning, Studies in Family Planning 35, no. 3 (2004): 197206.
17. Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), 2.
18. Office of Policy Planning and Research, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action
(Washington, DC: US Department of Labor, March 1965), https://www.dol.gov/oasam/
programs/history/webid-meynihan.htm.
19. On the coevolution of foreign and domestic population control objectives in US his-
tory, see in particular Donaldson, Nature Against Us; and Connelly, Fatal Misconception,
23775.
20. This should not be taken to describe Ehrlichs writing elsewhere on this subject.
21. Mandel, Late Capitalism, 112.
22. Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts (London: Blackwell, 2004);
Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006); and David Harvey, The New
Imperialism, Clarendon Lectures in Geography and Environmental Studies (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003). See also Michael Denning, Wageless Life, New Left
Review, no. 66 (2010): 7997.
 THE CASE OF THE OMEGA MAN 113

23. Harvey, New Imperialism, 158.

24. Davis, Planet of Slums, 11.
25. Ibid., 1314.
26. Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1997), 31.
27. Tony Fitzmaurice, Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, in Cinema and the
City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, ed. Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 1920.
28. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Harvard Film
Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 35.
29. David B. Clarke, Introduction: Previewing the Cinematic City, in Cinematic City, ed.
David B. Clarke (London: Routledge, 1997), 118, quotation on 2.
30. For a recent and, it seems to me, very relevant reflection on film extras, see George Didi-
Huberman, People Exposed, People as Extras, trans. Shane Lillis, Radical Philosophy,
no. 156 (2009): 1622.
31. For an extensive bibliography of novels, television series, and films that fall under the
category, see John Clute and Peter Nicholls, Holocaust and After, in The Encyclopedia
of Science Fiction, ed. John Clute and Peter Nicholls (New York: St. Martins Press, 1995),
58183.
32. A more specific body of scholarship exists on the generic innovations of Shelleys
novel and its contribution to last-man texts in the late eighteenth century and early
nineteenth century. See, for example, Morton D. Paley, The Last Man: Apocalypse
without Millennium, in The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, ed. Audrey
A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor (New York: Oxford University Press,
1993), 10723; and Paul A. Cantor, The Apocalypse of Empire: Mary Shelleys The Last
Man, in Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein: Essays in Honor of the
Bicentenary of Mary Shelleys Birth, ed. Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory
ODea (Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997), 193211.
33. Mary Shelley, The Last Man (New York: Penguin, 2004), 35758.
34. See Stephanie F. Larrieux, Racing the Future: Hollywood Science Fiction Film
Narratives of Race (PhD diss., Brown University, Providence, RI, 2008), 84140. For
a fine institutional history of white flight in the United States, see Kevin M. Kruse,
White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2007). On the more specific location of domestic politics of race and
city space in relation to international population control advocacy, see Connelly, Fatal
Misconception, 25356.
35. Fredric Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, Routledge Classic (London: Verso, 1992), 24.
36. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey
Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 261.
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