Deferring or Denying Death: Upload, Black Mirror, and Mickey 17 as sites of Anthropocene Lament

Popular cultural narratives such as film and television programs serve as a terrain where competing meanings are assembled and contested, symbolically resolving tensions that may not be fully articulated elsewhere. Utilizing critical/cultural studies approaches to religious studies and popular cultural texts, in this paper we consider the ways that contemporary tensions around life/death and the human/machine interface are represented in the film Mickey 17 and in several television episodes of Black Mirror, Upload, and Severance, each of which depicts characters who leverage technologies as a means of overriding, denying, or deferring death. Building on the work of Donna Haraway and Achille Mbembe, we introduce the concept of Anthropocene lament to capture the emotional sense of mourning these narratives evoke as they speak to the tensions that emerge in a technoscientific system that allows colonizers to leverage technology to deny or defer the natural processes of death.