Apocalyptic Procedurals

"In my dream I was drowning my sorrows
But my sorrows, they learned to swim"

U2 - Until the End of the World


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Spoiler alert: main plot element of Arrival.
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A relative's visit prompted a family movie night, which got me to finally watch Arrival. As first contact stories go, it's no Glos Pana, but still a decently executed bit of speculation. As long as you ignore the Hollywood convention that emotion trumps intellect and that acting like a reckless, impulsive, codependent, grade epsilon sub-moron always yields scientific progress. Instead of, y'know, rational inquiry, conceptualization, analysis and experimentation.

I'm more insulted by the even more anti-intellectually fatalistic conclusion, and 'fatalistic' doesn't begin to describe it. The movie's wikipedia page wisely links to the concept of amor fati which, while valuable inasmuch as it expresses unblinking realism, can easily be taken to counterproductive conclusions. The sort of automatic, unbidden prescience Arrival's protagonist experiences, propped up no less by an interpersonal device like language and not individual cogitation, reminds me of Philip K. Dick's The Golden Man.* It is less likely to yield a new age of advancement, peace and prosperity than a devolution to purely reactive, sub-sentient interfacing with one's environment. It would mean the end of thought, an apocalypse more thorough than any pandemic or nuclear holocaust.

But this train of thought did drive me to ask why we see so little attention paid these days to the "how" of the world's end. Post-apocalyptic fiction has made a comeback after 2008, but unlike the old Cold War variety, new stories tend to elide the apocalypse itself or as often reference it as simply a mysterious "event" somewhere in the background. The Road likely serves as the Ur-example to our current trend, and hey, no complaints as to that itself. Beautiful piece of work. Movies have picked up on the idea of systems collapse and tend to run with an everyman road warrior's poignant, relatable point of view of the end.

The Rover banks on anomie squared and seems a deliberate slap in the face to Mad Max's cut-and-dried antiheroics and Hollywood gritty-prettiness.
How I Live Now falls on the positive, adaptive side of amor fati. Thanks in no small part to Saoirse Ronan's restrained intensity it manages to partly elevate adolescent angst to its apocalyptic scenario instead of degrading the second to the baseline of the first.
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World takes a marginally more black-humorous bent, but at least it defined its apocalypse.
Melancholia went a step further and masterfully wed looming celestial menace to psychological catastrophism, fatalism and personal fables.

Still, my personal tastes lead me to think we're leaving too much sci out of our apoca-fi these days, too much how out of the what, and here zombie movies can prove surprisingly encouraging. After all, much of their fascination lies in the process of infection and mortification itself. The under-appreciated Maggie successfully recalled these basic elements at the individual level. At the other end of the spectrum you have World War Z's globetrotting militarism and for once I think that martial 'can do' attitude may be warranted. Unfortunately it doesn't help that attempts at characterizing some naturalistic means of mass destruction like The Happening have been so scientifically illiterate as to make their 1950s monster movie inspirations look erudite by comparison.

While the image of a plucky survivor treading the chaotic tides of a history much greater than oneself is a valuable and touching mode of storytelling, movies have fallen too far into that mindset. We should remember the influence of deliberate (if not always conscious) action in shaping the world. Apocalyptic stories should rightly deal not only with the divergent impact of a great event on different parts of the world but on the myriad ways in which humans (fail to) adapt to a new idea, technology or event. Place more emphasis on  the naked apes' incompetence and sadomasochism, machinations or critical failure to machinate; provide step by step guides to combating or engendering the end of all things. How does your great event halt the intellectual upswing of civilization? By what means do the worthy few seek to combat it? What resources and organization do they adopt to solve the problem - or as a corollary, by what mechanistic suite of events do they bring about their world's demise? Don't just tell me civilization has crumbled. Depict the crumbling and the crumblers.

Love the bomb.



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*No, NOT that idiotic farce of a movie adaptation with Nick Cage. Go read PKD's actual story The Golden Man.