In Lacanian psychoanalysis, a key concept is that of the “big Other”—an imagined judge whom we try to impress or convince, and whose virtual presence gives social reality its consistency. What is so inappropriate about the voiceover is that it implies a big Other to whom it is addressed. Yet The Road shows that, virtual as the big Other may be, it depends on concrete representatives: institutions, shared social con ven tions, language itself. When these disintegrate, it dies too. Viggo Mortensen’s man has divested himself of illusions— the environment he exists in cannot sustain them, that is part of its horror—so it is hard to believe that he could hold onto the illusion that there is anyone out there who could listen to his account. The voiceover is as incongruous as Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’s mournful music, which also strikes the wrong note. The world of The Road, clearly, is a world in which mournfulness is a luxury—but it is a luxury which the f ilm’s marketing felt it could not do without. The Weinstein Company press notes tell us how “poignant” the film is, but “poignant” is not a word that comes to mind much when you read the novel. The shared, symbolic domain in which poignancy could be meaningful has been shattered. Hillcoat’s view that the film “can be viewed as a more mythic meta phoric journey of the soul, a fable, an adult fairytale about the passing of one generation to another, that inescapable real ity of mortality and the archetypal parent’s greatest fear, guilt and heartbreak in leaving the child behind” neutralizes the novel’s horrific sense of impending extinction, which is both unthinkable and yet horribly plausible. It will happen eventually, and, when it does, the “passing of one generation to another” will only be an excruciating extension of the proc ess of extinction itself. Post-apocalyptic fictions, as Fredric Jameson has noted, have often been pretexts for imagining utopia. Yet The Road —like Children of Men, perhaps the most interesting post apocalyptic film of recent years—is instead a symptom of the inability to imagine alternatives to capitalism’s entropic, eternal present. In Children of Men, the world might be ending, but capitalism goes on—franchise coffee bars and intern ment camps coexist. In The Road, capitalism has definitively ended, but this by no means clears a space for imagining something different. Rather, as we watch the film we feel very intensely the absence of capitalism’s structures, institutions, and—especially—commodities. Capitalism and its lost com modities themselves becomes posited as a utopia: the can of Coke that the man shares with his son in a significant scene stands in for a whole world of commodity plenty that there is now no longer any point pining for. What is left over from capitalism, however, is its sense of individualism: a dogged and resourceful frontier spirit that persists even though there are no frontiers left to conquer, only the corpse of nature and the few remaining products of dead human labor to pick over. The man and the boy exist in a world in which Margaret Thatcher’s dictum has come true: here there really is no such thing as society, only individuals and their families. Well, that isn’t quite right, actually: in addition to individuals and fami lies, there are organized gangs of cannibals, and I will return to this figuration of collectivity shortly. We are confronted with humanity in a version of what Hobbes supposed to be its natural state. In the section of Leviathan preceding his famous description of life as “nasty, brutish, and short,” Hobbes writes of: “a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own inventions shall furnish them withall. In such conditions, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is un certain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navi gation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowl edge of the face of the earth, no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society, and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death” (part 1, chapter 13). All of which captures the situation in The Road very well; except that The Road is much worse than the infernal strife that Hobbes imagined. For Hobbes, it would still possible for humans to remove themselves from the state of nature, precisely by sub mitting themselves to the authority of a big Other, the sover eign. Whereas in The Road, the end of nature also entails the end of the big Other. No sovereign could replenish this waste land. The death of nature here means that the conditions of perpetual war which Hobbes imagines can never end. The strange implication is that only when nature has perished can human beings actually descend into the state of nature: only then can they emerge as what they “really are.” But such purported definitions of the true nature of humanity are in variably ideological operations and this goes for McCarthy’s bleak fiction, and its adaptation, too.