Apocalypse. . . NOT!

Sunday night Sue, Enrique and I went to see 2012. We didn't get to go with Louis because he was at a church dinner. I was excited to see it with Enrique, since its all about a Mayan prophecy that interests him and since his own Mayan genes show up in his Mestizo features.

The movie has had bad reviews, has been bumped off the charts after only a week by those tanned and shirtless Vampires, and, yep, it most totally sucked. We watched it with our mouths agape, our eyes bulging, our fingers digging into the arm rests of the rocking-chair seats, but it sucked. You totally get your 10-bucks' worth with the special effects, but you come away wondering, "What the fuck happened?" In part, this seems to me to be due to the cowardice of the writers and producers, who were unwilling to make a movie with a real apocalyptic ending. By the end, billions have died horribly, but we don't really care because John Cusak has won back his family and they're going off like the family at the end of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto to "make a new life." or, as Gibson's Mayan puts it, "to make a world elsewhere." Yeah, yeah.

The "feel good" ending tacked on to this movie got me thinking about how we're imagining the end of humanity and mankind these days. The end of 2012 was actually a rerun of Steven Spielberg's The War of the Worlds, which took a big hit from the critics for shifting the horror of Wells's novel. At the end of the novel the human race is spared, but at terrible expense. In place of this, Spielberg gives us a family drama, so that the alien attack on earth and the human race is threaded through the story of how Tom Cruise has to reunite his alienated kids with their mom. Father and son learn to respect each other. By the end of both movies, we're, like, sad and stuff that most of us have died horribly, but we're still happy because the family has been healed and the American Spirit remains intact.


We have made some cult movies where the human race dies out, like Last Night, with its amazing performance by Sandra Oh, and the cult classic, Miracle Mile, which ends when the hero and his girlfriend and by implication the entire human race sink slowly into the La Brea Tar Pit in LA. But what struck me watching 2012 is that, like so many movies coming out these days -- Armageddon and Deep Impact, for example -- is that the human race not only survives, but it survives with all its technology and values intact. In The Day After Tomorrow, the world is pretty much destroyed, but we get an apology from the arrogant US vice-president who wouldn't listen to the scientist. There is a new ice age, and the US population has fled to Central and South America; but it's okay, because things will go on pretty much as they did before. Like with the Mayan apocalypse, this movie's feel-good punchline comes when -- Guess What! -- the scientist, Dennis Quaid, snow sleds from Washington to New York to reunite with his estranged son, Jake Gyllenhall (who, I'm happy to report, is in the process of consumating his love with girlfriend Emmy Rossum). So why save the family?

Mike Davis has written that the 9/11 events have pretty much shut down the possibility of beliving in American Exceptionalism and the notion that "it can't happen here." Wells also wrote about the bombardment of New York by dirgible, but, Davis claims, after the attacks in New York, it became harder to hang onto the idea of our invulnerability. So, maybe these films that have come out in the wake of 9/11 are a way of restoring the American "feel good": your eyes bulge, you grip the edges of your seat, and the world -- you along with it! -- is destroyed; but its okay because all the values that put you in that seat are alive and well. At the end of 2012 the man who has replaced Cusack in his family is sacrificed to save one of the escape ships trying to survive the new flood. He turned out to be a good guy, a worthy replacement for the estranged dad: but we're glad to see him go. The fat Russian prick has already died trying to get his kids onto the ship, an end that almost redeems him for being such a prick; and his young hottie drowns poetically while the ship struggles to close its doors against the flood. Cusack goes back into the water to fix the problem that is threatening the whole ship, and for just a second we think he also has been sacrificed. When, after a long wait, his head pops up from under the water, the audience I was in let go with a big cheer. Yay!

Faulkner famously declined to accept the end of man. But what would it take now to imagine it? And do these films flinch back from their own premises out of hubris or fear? Faulkner's line is from his Nobel Prize address, from the height of the cold war, a time that had its own apocalyptic obsessions. During these years, which also happened to be my childhood and early teen years, Americans built backyard "fallout shelters," and there was lots of talk about our family being the last survivors of a nuclear war. I remember my parents telling me they didn't want to build a shelter because, they said, "If everybody else is gone, I won't want to be here, either." The fallout shelter panic of the late-fifties and early-sixties is sent up in the comedy Blast from the Past, where Christopher Walken has kept his family underground for 30 years and now must believe that the world has ended. When he finally surfaces in present-day LA, he thinks the people living there are mutant survivors of a nuclear holocaust. Nevile Schute's 1957 novel On the Beach (film version,1959) is perhaps the most forceful of the anti-war sermonettes produced in the cold war, and it gets its power precisely because it ends with human extinction. After the awaited nuclear holocaust, the radioactive cloud is slowly covering the globe from North to South, while people in Australia wait helplessly. An American nuclear sub sets out to Seattle to answer an SOS call, but when they get there the call turns out to be coming from a coke bottle tied to a window shade and tapping out Morse Code on a radio left alive when everybody else is dead.

The novel's finish reminds me of Boccaccio's Introduction to his Decameron, which is an account of the world-ending event brought by the bubonic plague in Florence. Some people get religion, some get drunk, some run around and scream, some fuck each other: the captain of the American sub and his crew scuttle the ship at sea so an American warship won't be left behind. The last shot in the movie is a street in Sidney with newspaper blowing around. Boccaccio's remnant group retreats to a country estate and they begin telling each other stories. This, for a number of reasons, solaces them and restores them to a sense of community and hope.

Walker Percy writes in his book on language The Message in the Bottle, more or less a decade after Faulkner's speech, that "the real question facing us as a nation is not 'What will I do if the bomb goes off,' but 'What will I do if it doesn't.' " Percy goes on to imagine life-eternal in Burbank with Johnny Carson on the tube night after night. Percy is a Catholic and writes this line to remind us how precious our mortality is: that both life and death are the great gifts defining us from birth. Okay, I get that. But why edge up against the idea only to retreat from it?

I've always thought post-apocalypse movies of the Mad Max type, or slash movies set in our suburbs or vacation spots, reflected a death wish in our cultural unconscious. A wish for the materialist American dream to consume itself in a moment that would give it meaning. As the American suburban dream banishes death, sickness, and even age, I think the stalker-in-the-burbs movie longs for something beyond the comforts we enjoy. I tell my students the slash-horror film is the closest our culture comes to medieval literature, where death and life are versions of one another.The intrusion of a knive-wielding killer into the pristine American middle class would thus reflect a wish for something transcendent, something more than night after night with Johnnie or Jay. I get this wish.

But what about these most recent movies, where the world ends but the American family, American ideals, American technology, and American anxieties push to some sort of "beyond"? I wonder what we're wishing for now. In these movies the American family and the way of life it builds is not just pushed through the cataclysm to transcendence: the family, the father-son axis, IS transcendence itself; it is not the thing that survives, it is the meaning of all life on both sides of the catastrophe. Shortly after President Obama introduced himself as "a citizen of the United States and a proud citizen of The World," Newt Gingrich said at some banquet, "Let me be clear: I am NOT a citizen of The World." And why should he be, since as a few pop singers once put it, We Are The World.

The Mayans said the world will end in 2012. They didn't predict the strained survival of the American middle class. Fucking Mayans! After the movie, I told Enrique, "The World didn't even end! Mayans suck!"