They’re clustered together around a single feeder, dumbly nuzzling and preening. Mice cluster around a water bottle.īut only a few now survived-about 120 specimens. Calhoun’s daughter would later recall the smell, above all the stench of two thousand mice. Calhoun, climbs down into the pen, watched by the camera that McGraw-Hill educational films have brought to record the interview. Its floor is a spindle of sixteen segments split by low dividers-just tall enough to keep mice from making contact, but not so high they can’t easily climb over.
Universe 25 is a nine-by-nine-foot square arena with five-foot high metal walls built within the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, MD. They’re mice, and they’re the only living remnants of Universe 25. These are also the survivors of a societal collapse.
#Mouse utopia experiment criticism series#
Series VII: Negatives, Photographs, and Slides, 1960-1992, box 142, folder 21.Ī world of perfectly clean and well tended inhabitants, coexisting harmoniously. Here’s an alternative scenario: Mice in Universe 25, Image #1633, no date. Post-apocalypse represents regression to pre-history, of motivational surrender to the throbbing urgency of the lizard brain. This is how the world looks from the brain stem, this is the view from the cerebellum. Just the base instincts survive, and survival requires just the base instincts. The rules went away with the society they formed, everything now is pure id. Because in the post-apocalypse, nobody plays by the rules. Here’s how things would be if we didn’t play by the rules. Functionally, it acts as a counterfactual, a reminder of the fragility of order, of how much our society depends for its continued operation upon our willing and mutual consent. It’s a place where bands of ragged survivors roam over a defoliated wasteland, their engagements marked by the expression of terrible violence and unchecked sexual aggression.įor fiction, the post-apocalypse is a theatre in which to explore humanity’s barely subdued inhumanity. We’ve seen it in the movies (George Miller’s Mad Max), read about it (Cormac McCarthy’s The Road), and even played the video game (Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us).
We know-we think we know-what the post-apocalyptic world will look like.
This is not the event, but its aftermath. What have we missed? For now, it’s enough to know we’ve arrived late in the game. Scenes Include Last Survivors.” This is the text on the opening slate.
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