End Games

The elephant in the room has always been that one day the World will come to an end. It is nature’s most absolute truth, but also it’s least important fact; plants, insects, and monkeys don’t seem particularly occupied with the coming doom, nor do bacteria or starfish. In fact, there is only one organism under the sun that seems to both understand and fixate on the inevitable: Us.

Apocalyptic literature is far from new. The Endtimes, The Armageddon, The Apocalypse, any society’s version of The End can usually find it’s first reference in the first time someone put pen to parchment. The Epic Of Gilgamesh, perhaps humankind’s first piece of ‘literature’ is also our first attempt at dealing with the epic futility of being. Of all the thoughts and ideas in the bible, it is the Book of Revelation, a piece of puritanical pornography, that has most inserted itself into Western popular culture. So long as we can speak and write, we will speak and write about it.

And yet this new trend in film is different. Perhaps it’s because we have the tools to not just talk about destruction, but show it; perhaps it’s because our visual imagination has gotten so much sharper; perhaps it’s because sound plays such a major part in our perception. Or maybe it’s because lately it all seems so goddamn possible.

In Cloverfield, the images of firetrucks and police cars roaming frantically, aimlessly though New York City don’t seem far-fetched, but eerily familiar. The shaky cheap camera capturing disasters and small tragedies, death and destruction, isn’t poor production values, but what we saw on the news last night or what we watched on YouTube when no one was looking.

In 28 Days Later and it’s sequel, 28 Weeks Later, we never seem to realize the obvious: The plot of this film is as stupid and improbable as the worst offences of Italian Zombie/Exploitation movies. But we believe it. We no longer have a problem excepting the destruction of society and order. Foaming, raging, human beings running through the streets killing each other is remarkably realistic and strangely probable. Some stupid lab worker dropping a canister and destroying the world is, somehow, completely believable.

Diseases, epidemics,monsters, earthquakes, vampires, hurricanes, zombies, terrorist attacks: Nothing now seems too far from reality. The complete breakdown of civilization has infected our dreams in a time when civilization seems to have gotten too big, too oppressive, too stifling. The monsters, whether covered in secrecy in the caves of Afghanistan or covered in parasites from the depths of the Hudson River, are now more appealing to our senses and sensibilities than scantily clad members of the opposite sex.

As I said, we’ve always known the world will end, but it’s the when and how of it that keeps us occupied. The answer to the first question lately, for many, is ’soon, soon…’. The answer to the second question is just a matter of time, budget, and technology.