The Postman
Encyclopedia : T : TH : THE : The Postman
- The Postman is also the English title of the 1994 Italian film, Il Postino.
The Postman (1985) is a post-apocalyptic novel by David Brin. A drifter stumbles across the uniform of an old United States Postal Service letter carrier and gives hope to a community threatened by local warlords with empty promises of aid from the "Restored United States of America." The first two parts were published separately as "The Postman" (1982) and "Cyclops" (1984). Both won Hugo Awards for Best Novella.
A film adaptation, shot in northeastern Washington and central Oregon, was released in 1997, directed by Kevin Costner and starring Costner, Will Patton, Larenz Tate, Olivia Williams, James Russo, Daniel Von Bargen, Tom Petty, Scott Bairstow, and Roberta Maxwell. The film version was only very loosely based on the novel, with important characters and subplots entirely missing from the movie.
The antagonist character named General Bethlehem (played by Will Patton) is almost completely based on General William Tecumseh Sherman. Will Patton is similar in looks, the main outfit was civil war based, and Bethlehem quotes Shakespeare and paints.
A 1999 episode of The Simpsons portrayed the DVD edition of the film as having a "director's commentary" track which was simply Costner apologizing for the film.
Compared to the film, the book is generally seen to have more substance. Despite the post-apocalyptic scenario, and several action sequences, the book is largely about civilization and symbols. Each of the three sections deals with a different symbol. The first is the Postman himself, who takes the uniform solely for warmth after he loses everything but his sleeping clothes. He wanders without establishing himself anywhere, and exchanges poorly-played scenes of William Shakespeare for supplies. His reputation as a real postman builds not because of a deliberate fraud (at least initially) but because people are desperate to believe. Later, in the second section, he encounters a community (Corvallis, Oregon) led by Cyclops, apparently a sentient artificial intelligence created at Oregon State University which miraculously survived the cataclysm. However, the machine was actually destroyed, and the appearance of it is being maintained by a group of scientists trying to keep hope, order, and knowledge alive.
Eventually, in the third section, as the Postman joins forces with Cyclops in a war against an influx of "hypersurvivalists" (the concept of survivalists taken to a slave-owning, misogynistic extreme—indeed, Brin has said that the novel was, in a way, an anti-survivalist novel), he begins to find that the survivalists are being pressed from the Rogue River area to the south as well. As the story ends, and he comes close to the survivalist's southern enemy, he begins to find traces of them, primarily in the symbol that they rally behind: the Bear Flag of California. The final scenes give the impression that the three symbols may rally together in an effort to revive civilization.
The hypersurvivalists are more commonly referred to as Holnists, after the founder of their ideal, Nathan Holn. Many times through the book curses are uttered which damn Holn for his actions.
Another message of the plot deals with the backstory of the post-apocalyptic world: specifically, that it was not the electronics-destroying electromagnetic pulses, nor the destruction of major cities, nor the release of various bio-engineered plagues that actually destroyed society: rather, it was the survivalists themselves, those who maintained stockpiles of weapons and ammunition and who preyed on humanitarian workers and other forces of order. The message of this is obviously that what could really destroy civilization is its own members.
External links
- [The Postman] publication history at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- [The Postman: The Movie, An Impression by the Author of the Original Novel] by David Brin
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.