Centered in ruins of metropolitan industry, Jarman's film widens the imagination of global annihilation –nuclear, epidemic, neoimperial – while raising specters of earlier, colonial annihilations.
The Last of England navigates a global landscape where property-relations are liquefied, engendering ad hoc assemblages of survival. Jarman's apocalyptic commons reflect unsolved legacies of neoliberal capital, liberal imperialism, early modern financialization, and post-Fordism. These dystopian commons work to reopen a futurity, staging the alleged aftermath of historic crisis as already present-tense. In this film, Jarman extends the utopian promise of the commons toward an equally radical potential inhering in the dystopian commons. I argue that this film's post-apocalyptic ruins perform an allegorical critique of settler colonialism by linking economic histories of imperialism and the " closing of the commons " to the neoliberal present. This film's Thatcher-era critique reveals global capitalism's repressed yet intensified settler-colonial dimensions, portraying abandoned manufacturing sites intercut with nonlinear evocation of Britain's imperial past. This article investigates the critical interplay between utopian collectivity and post-industrial ruins as " apocalyptic commons " in Derek Jarman's film The Last of England.
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