From the epic floods and divine battles of ancient mythology
to the nuclear holocausts and alien invasions of the Cold War, humanity has
been imagining its own demise since the beginning of civilization. Freud would probably
attribute this obsession to the death drive, a subconscious impulse toward
destruction that all people supposedly have. Apocalyptic fantasies allow us to
confront our fears of mortality, time, foreigners, etc., in a safe place,
distanced from the real world yet so rich with metaphorical possibilities, and
especially in a visual medium like film, they provide ample opportunity to
indulge audiences’ appetite for lurid spectacle.
Recently,
though, catastrophe has dominated cinema on a scale virtually unprecedented, dwarfing
the ‘50s sci-fi and horror B-movie craze. In 2011, we got the art house trinity,
Melancholia, The Tree of Life and, my personal favorite, Take Shelter. 2012 gave us Prometheus,
Beasts of the Southern Wild, Battleship and Cloud Atlas, among others (but curiously, not the actual movie 2012, which came out way back in 2009),
and 2013 had not one but two action-comedies
set during the apocalypse, not to mention an avalanche of weirdly glum, monochrome-hued tent-poles. This
year, there was Noah, Edge of Tomorrow,
Godzilla, Transformers: Age of Extinction, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Snowpiercer,
The Rover and Interstellar, as well as the usual procession of superhero flicks, which are apparently
required by Hollywood Law to have Armageddon-sized stakes. You can barely go a
week without seeing ads for yet another movie that threatens to destroy Earth –
or at least a major metropolitan area.
It’s also vaguely racist, though that’s nothing
new for animation.
At least 2014 offered a handful of movies that actually bothered
to acknowledge the consequences of the havoc they wrecked, instead of using 9/11
imagery for easy shock value or, worse, ignoring the darkness altogether. Edge of Tomorrow, for example, is essentially
a war movie in which “the enemy” happens to be aliens. Needless to say, it’s
not exactly Saving Private Ryan in
terms of exposing the horrors of combat and such, but Tom Cruise and Emily
Blunt’s self-assured performances convey a sense of trauma rare in action movies
of this magnitude (just compare Cruise here to his work in the Mission: Impossible series). Cage and
Rita seem genuinely scarred by what they’ve experienced, their interactions
tinged with weary desperation. Similarly
battle-hardened characters populate Dawn
of the Planet of the Apes and Snowpiercer.
In the former, Malcolm, played by Jason Clarke, has formed a makeshift family
with his son Anthony and Keri Russell’s Ellie, who lost her daughter in the
chaos that erupted after the simian flu outbreak. Like its predecessor, Dawn gives its humans thin
personalities, preferring to flesh out the titular apes, but you nonetheless
get the sense that there’s history between them, that they’ve been through a
lot together and grown accustomed to suffering in silence. In Snowpiercer, Chris Evans’s reluctant
revolutionary Curtis Everett is tormented by what he has done to survive
(spoiler alert: it’s cannibalism). These films all depict personal attachments
as liabilities, hindering individuals from taking the measures necessary for
self-preservation and the common good; in the apocalypse, you have to sacrifice
either your life or your humanity.
It’s not all doom and gloom. After all, whatever allegorical aims they might have, the aforementioned movies ultimately function first and foremost as escapist entertainment, full of gaudy visual effects and high-speed action sequences. Edge of Tomorrow in particular received abundant praise for its unexpected humor, as director Doug Liman and screenwriters Christopher McQuarrie and Jez and John-Henry Butterworth were compelled to constantly find new ways of enlivening the movie’s repetitive structure. For the most part, though, these films’ strength lies in their willingness to take their premises seriously, no matter how ridiculous (talking, machine gun-wielding, horseback-riding apes take over the world! A failed attempt to counteract global warming forces all humans to live on one really long train!). They rebuff the common misconception that earnestness and enjoyment can’t coexist or, by the same token, that flippancy necessarily signifies an absence of cynicism or pretension. Rather than an excuse to avoid addressing weightier issues, the moments of levity serve to balance out and, sometimes, even enhance the inherent tragedy of the characters’ situations.
Case in point: this short film that’s technically a promo
for Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
but also one of the most heartbreaking things I’ve seen this year
In many ways, the current apocalyptic film trend perfectly
encapsulates the general mood of 2014. It was an emotional year, to say the
least, brimming with controversies momentous and trifling. It was the year of
#CancelColbert, a semi-ironic Twitter campaign that blew up into a fleeting yet
heated national debate on the value of satire
and so-called hashtag
activism. It was the year of #YesAllWomen, #RapeCultureIsWhen,
#BlackLivesMatter, #WhyIStayed and several other online movements intended to provide
space for marginalized groups to express themselves. It was the year Renee
Zellweger got plastic surgery, Robin Williams committed suicide, Bill Cosby
fell from grace, and Dylan Farrow spoke out against Woody Allen. It was the
year of GamerGate; the year a 4chan user stole and publicized nude photos of
numerous female celebrities; the year campus rape, street harassment and
domestic violence, at last, dominated mainstream conversation. It was the year
Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice and Antonio Martin were killed by police
officers. It was the year we wondered if a crude Seth Rogen movie would incite
World War III (not really, though the fact that this seemed like an even
remotely imaginable possibility is, in itself, telling and terrifying).
So important.
If people now seem overly prone to
hyperbole (2014 is unofficially known as the
worst year ever), it’s because gradually, over the past half-century, our
perception of reality has been radically, irrevocably altered. With the rise of
digital technology, space and time no longer exist, at least not in the way
they used to; they have been compressed, warped, transcended. Thanks to the Internet, you can carry on entire
conversations and relationships with people you’ve never actually seen or
spoken to; you can follow news, detail by detail, as it happens from the
comfort of your couch; you can look into the past simply by scrolling through
Twitter, unlimited information at your fingertips, intact.
It can hardly be an accident that Interstellar, a movie that proudly advertised
its availability in 70mm and 35mm film, is so preoccupied
by the concept of time: even more than Memento
and Inception, it’s Christopher
Nolan’s attempt to cope with his anxiety about the digital age. Film has always
been an uncanny medium, manipulating camera and editing techniques to create the
illusion of a reality, but celluloid is, by nature, not permanent, composed of
chemicals that slowly erode its physical material even as they’re meant to
preserve the images it captures. As David Norman Rodowick says in his book The Virtual Life of Film, “This is one
of the many ways in which watching film is literally a spectatorship of death.”
In theory, the transition to digital eliminates this process, allowing art to
persist unscathed for eternity, sheltered from the scars of time’s passage. But
this, according to people like Nolan, who has long
advocated on behalf of celluloid, is its own kind of death – the death of
time, of history, of memory, of death itself. If we’ve achieved immortality, if
we have nothing to lose, then what is there to give life meaning? In Interstellar, humans can delay death,
maybe even cheat it, but the threat of it is always present, just beyond the
horizon; we will always have to fight for survival, each passing moment another
step in the inevitable march toward extinction.
Wish for 2015: Tom Cruise learns from his own work and
does something, you know, different.
Yet the most memorable apocalyptic
fiction of 2014 didn’t come from film. Television has spent the 21st
century thus far mired in a plodding yet inexorable shift, its deep-rooted
insecurities and rigidity competing with the promise offered by rapidly
developing technological innovations. As the emergence of digital filming and
editing equipment allowed networks to drastically reduce costs and artists to experiment
with form, style and content with a freedom that had once been unfeasible,
if not downright impossible, we were rewarded with shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Lost, which boasted complex, serialized
narratives steeped in mythology and fantasy, as well as 24, whose split-screen device remains unique to this day. In 1998
and 1999, respectively, HBO debuted Sex
and the City and The Sopranos, and
the cable era was born, ushering in an embarrassing wealth of diverse
storytelling, from violent, psychologically intimate dramas like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones to bawdy, profanity-laced comedies like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Girls. The more creatively fertile
television got, however, the less it resembled real television, in the
conventional sense. Whereas before, seasons typically adhered to a strict
22-episode model, many shows now air as few as ten or even six episodes a year,
and with the rise of anthology and auteur-driven series as well as more
sophisticated visual techniques, the line between TV and cinema grows
increasingly hazy. As demonstrated by the surprise success of new platforms
like Netflix and Amazon, you no longer have to appear on an actual TV channel
to qualify as “television,” much to the chagrin of broadcast networks
struggling to reconcile their archaic ratings systems with shifting viewer
habits. In a way, the famed Golden Age of TV (or, if you want, the Silver
Age) is also the story of the medium’s demise.
When True Detective debuted in January, it felt like a denouement of sorts,
the convergence of all the trends that had defined television for the past couple
decades. Technically a single, self-contained narrative divided into eight
parts, HBO’s Southern Gothic-infused neo-noir was touted as the complete,
unadulterated vision of creator and sole writer Nic Pizzolatto and involved
contributions from numerous individuals with backgrounds in film, including
director Cary Fukunaga and actors Woody Harrelson, Matthew McConaughey and Michelle
Monaghan. It centered on a tantalizing mystery and made several allusions to obscure
philosophers and literary works, turning its viewers into inadvertent
detectives who searched
obsessively for some deeper meaning much in the way Lost fans did not too long ago. It employed a distinctly cinematic
aesthetic, featuring a much-hyped six-minute tracking shot at the end of its
fourth episode – incidentally the precise moment it transformed from just
another critically acclaimed cable drama into a full-fledged cultural
phenomenon.
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