Amusements Rick McGinnis
Growing up during the Cold War, I saw the Earth end many times over. Mushroom clouds bloomed in films and TV shows such as The Day After, Testament, Threads, The War Game, By Dawn’s Early Light, On the Beach, The Bedford Incident, Fail Safe and Miracle Mile. Looking back from today, they might vary in quality but they share a common tone – grim resignation – and I can recall with certainty that we took them all very seriously when we came across them in a theatre or late night television.
Despair is a sin, and each film did its best to make us commit that sin, for at least as long as we were encouraged to accept the premise – solemnly reaffirmed by statesmen, scientists, journalists and others – that nuclear war was a near-inevitability. Re-watching them now, their desperate message shamefully recalls bitter memories of the too-avid reception they once provoked, but I don’t imagine that anyone who didn’t live through that time would share my reaction. I guess you just had to be there.
Oddly enough, we’re being visited with a small boom in apocalyptic films, which shouldn’t come as a surprise since our appetite for stories of global destruction is as old as civilization itself. The threat of nuclear war has subsided, though, so these films arrive on a wave of inspiration that combines unequal parts morbid speculation, a need for a compelling plot device and – if the word isn’t being stretched to the outer limits of its meaning – whimsy.
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World was marketed to prospective audiences as a comedy, where Steve Carell decides to seek out lost love with mere weeks left before the planet’s demise, aided by Keira Knightley, who wants to get back home to her parents in Britain. The mirthlessness of the premise pretty much drains the laughs from Lorene Scafaria’s film after 15 minutes, and eventually resigns itself to the maudlin outcome that you’ve been expecting since the two characters met, but it’s the most hopeful film of the lot.
There’s no comedy attempted in either Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia or Abel Ferrara’s 4:44 Last Day On Earth. Both films follow a small cast as they cope with their oncoming doom, with predictably unhappy results. Both films focus on characters who are either wealthy or creative or both, either in the isolation of a vast country home or the burgeoning chaos of a city. Unlike Scafaria’s film, they were made for the art house and film festival crowd – Ferrara’s film barely escaped the festival circuit and has only just been released on home video – and say a lot about the worldview of this comfortable, educated and almost wholly secular demographic.
Melancholia is essentially the story of two sisters – brilliant, depressive Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and solemn, practical Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg.) The first half of the film is set during Justine’s lavish but disastrous wedding at her sister’s palatial country house, while the second begins with the ominous news that a heretofore undiscovered planet called Melancholia has emerged from behind the Sun and is on what we know – even if the characters don’t – is a collision course with Earth.
In the absence of the nuclear scenario, apocalyptic films are currently obliged to rely on aliens, impacts, or environmental catastrophe to start their clocks ticking. Both Seeking a Friend and Melancholia employ errant planets or asteroids, whereas 4:44 opts for ozone depletion, which for some reason has evolved from the vaguest of onetime threats to an endgame timed to count down to the precise minute. While the latter lays the blame firmly on our heads, the former is far more profound – what we would at one point have called an act of God, but which gets treated here as a bad roll of the orbital dice in an impersonal and uncaring universe.
I haven’t seen much more than the trailer for Ferrara’s film so I can’t speak for its sentiments or intentions, but Melancholia is steadfast in its advocacy for the sin of despair. As the end approaches, Justine emerges from her depression to embrace their fate, reflecting to her increasingly distraught sister that the Earth is evil and won’t be missed, and that human life is as pointless as it is unique in the universe. By this point the only problem is that Von Trier has filled his story with almost no redeemable or sympathetic characters, and as the killer planet approaches to the thundering bombast of Wagner, we can’t imagine that we’ll miss them when they’re gone.
Tellingly, the pivotal moment in Seeking a Friend arrives when Carell and Knightley come upon a seaside baptism, the first time when the world around them isn’t reacting with either despair or delusion. There’s nothing explicitly religious about the film before or after the scene, but you can’t help but notice that, reaching for a gesture that signals hope, the film latches onto the first and most essential of the sacraments.
I can’t explain the evergreen appeal of apocalyptic stories, but if I had to guess, I’d say it that getting life’s meaning to come into sharper focus requires putting it into the stark light of life ending. What I do know is that I can count on one hand the number of truly satisfying endings I’ve seen in films, and that the apocalyptic story can at least be relied upon to definitively end, either in a roar that bleeds to white or fades to black, and that a filmmaker who tries to ponder the end of life without entertaining its divine aspect is merely asking us to stare into a void.
