Imagining the Becoming-Unextinct of Megalodon: Spectral Animals, Digital Resurrection, and the Vanishing of the Human

Abstract

This chapter discusses two faux documentaries originally broadcast during Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives (2013) and Megalodon: The New Evidence (2014). The chapter demonstrates the ways in which these two faux documentaries exemplify an ontological shift in the relationship between human and non-human animals, as non-human animals are replaced by their digital duplicates. In the faux documentaries, the return of a prehistoric animal in digital form seems to offer hope for future human survival on a planet increasingly hostile to life due to the long-term effects of climate change. However, the chapter argues that the expulsion of actual animals into the digital domain anticipates the disappearance of humankind from the face of the Earth.