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Ours is an age of post-truth, war on science, and anti-intellectualism (McIntyre 2018; Mooney 2007; Jacoby 2018). That America is also surging with authoritarian populism is no coincidence (Morelock 2017). A classical component of authoritarian populist movements is promotion of irrationalism (Marcuse [1934]1968). In America today, this trend is clearly rampant. In a recent article, I presented an analysis of tribalism and morality in I Am Legend. I argued that over time, between the 1954, 1964, 1971 and 2007 versions of the story, compassion decreases, and the moral frame simplifies toward ‘us-against-them.’ I suggested this may present something of a window into America's “tribal turn” over the past several decades (Morelock 2018a). Yet America today is not only replete with tribalism, but also with irrationalism and authoritarian populism (Morelock 2018b).1
In this paper I give an alternate and complementary reading of I Am Legend and its remakes, focusing on the psychodynamics behind authoritarian populism. My analysis is rooted primarily in Fromm's theory of the authoritarian character ([1941]1994, [1955]2012, [1973]1992, 1984), Kristeva's (1982) theory of abjection, and Sontag's (1989) theory of plague as metaphor. I explain these in greater detail below.
All versions of the I Am Legend story start from the following basic narrative: Robert Neville is the last vestige of modernity in a post-apocalyptic world of diseased humanoids. He is also alienated,2 having no interaction with other humans. He is immune to the disease, but the infected still present him with the constant threat of death, since they seek to kill him. They are abject; in being human but diseased to the point of inhumanity they threaten the borders of the human. The pandemic context involves a combination of the threats of death, madness, or some allegorical form of either/both, such as losing one's individual identity to a collective mind; all meaning in one way or another leaving behind the sy