The Quiet Earth is a thoughtful and slow-moving movie about a
future apocalypse. It was released in 1985, during a period of heightened
cold-war tension, and on one level (a very superficial one) it can be
interpreted as a cautionary tale. In such an interpretation this critique would
be directed above all against the United States, and the insatiable and
paranoid demons that besiege a superpower in an age where its empire is being
threatened. In a similar line pioneered almost two hundred years ago by Mary Shelley
and her novel Frankenstein, it also
represents a long-standing critique of scientific hubris and of humans who, as
one character expresses it, would play “God”.
The premise
of this movie is that human civilization has come to an end. It wasn’t the slow
and drawn-out process we fear, those gradual and terrifying scenarious that
involve plagues or environmental destruction. It was a sudden and abrupt end
that was thoroughly unanticipated and yet logical. It is like falling over a
cliff while sleepwalking. (Sleep represents a powerful motif, a living death
that seems to consume the characters.)
Apocalyptic
endings seem to be an long-standing and enduring motif in our culture. From a
narrative standpoint they are compelling, for they signify that final element
in a story in which significance and meaning are assigned to the prior sequence
of events. A conclusion is the necessary precondition for the engagement of a
new story, for a new beginning, and as such, these apocalypses are always
transition points. What will come after?
Currently,
one of the most popular television series is one that represents an adaption of
Robert Kirkman’s comic The Walking Dead.
As with the stories of alien invasion that were so popular in the 1950s and
were parables of Cold War angst, or the genre of future and culminating war
novels popular in the late 19th century (there must surely have been
many other instances), these would seem to reflect period of heightened angst.
Perhaps these
cultural narratives of decline and decrepitude or extinction reflect the
anxieties that accompany periods of change. Whether it be the onslaught of the
Industrial Revolution or the fear of decolonization or the supposed perils of
demographic bubbles that are being shattered, or the rise of alternative and
competing systems or just the bewildering nature of economic bubbles that are
shattered as with the Wall Street meltdown of a few years ago, the groundwork
for these narratives has already been laid and they are, indeed, memes that
find fertile terrain.
How else
can we explain the appeal of zombie movies or the element of darkness and
pessimism that seems to characterize so many contemporary series? It is an
apocalyptic sensibility that has been stoked, and we are fascinated by the
assorted retinue of compelling figures, such as those of the anonymous zombies
(we are they, after all) that have relentless appetites and aggressive impulses
that, rather than seem bewildering, seem all too recognizable.
It is my
contention that we are not as frightened by the unknown as we proclaim to be.
The unknown produces paralysis, perhaps, or wonder, or maybe, boredom that
leads to its dismissal. We are frightened, instead, by what we know and what we
find familiar, and in zombies and in the vision of a self-destructing social
system, we find a logic that seems compelling.
It is our pretensions that are being shattered, the illusions we so
carefully cultivate.
However
unpleasant we may find cadavers, and however much they may remind us of our
susceptibility to disease as well as all the many material and social ailments
that befall us, it is nonetheless the case that they represent a circumstance
against which we have developed powerful defenses. Whether it be euphemisms or
the ethical narratives that help us to accept them, we can and always have
adjusted to them. But what proves to be much more compelling, however, in the
case for example of zombies, is the spectacle of a self-feeding mechanism that
resists ethical judgement. There is no meaning in zombies other than to posit
that we are always in the process of devouring ourselves, in all the
metaphorical ways in which we elaborate our social behaviors. It is the urge
for power as an appetite that can never be fulfilled.
Returning
to the movie under consideration, it was released at a moment in which bluster
and increased confrontation seemed to characterize the conflict between the two
superpowers. The Soviet Union was undergoing a series of succession crisis,
while the United States seems to be pursuing a policy of increased
confrontation with a president who seemed unable to strike a conciliatory note.
It was a period of provocative actions, and it contributed to much worldwide
anxiety. This was reflected in our popular culture.
In this
classic movie almost all of humanity has suddenly disappeared. The teeming life
of our cities, the struggles and dreams of all those vulnerable masses, the conflict
between different world systems and different corporate groups, between
different institutional subjects, has all been superseded by the fact that
everyone is gone. We have what seems to be only one individual left, a
middle-aged scientist by the name of Zac who slowly discovers his new
circumstances.
Why he
should be the only person left, we don’t know. He seems to be surprised and
even a little disappointed to wake up (we find out later that he had taken an
overdose of medicine, planning as he was to commit suicide), but old habits die
hard. (Life is a habit, is it not?) He leaves his house and is slowly made to confront
the fact that only objects have been left behind, and the world has been depopulated
in a sudden flash. This is most aptly illustrated by the fact that he
encounters kitchen appliances that are still running, showers flooding
buildings and houses that are going up in fire, as well as cars that have been
abandoned and the remains of crashed airliners smoking on the ground. It is a
mystery that, for all its terrifying implications, doesn’t seem surprising to
him.
What caused
this catastrophe? It all seems to be the result of a top-secret project named
“Flashlight”, only the latest of a continual series of examples of
technological hubris that produced other calamities such as the mustard gas or
the atomic bomb. The protagonist knows
this and seems to accept it, seeing it as a logical culmination at the same
time as he seems almost mesmerized by what he finds. We are mesmerized as well,
these scenes of an uninhabited city, of untended property, of the detritus of
modern consumer society but without the most necessary element that gives it
meaning, namely, consumers. What was consumerism all about, then?
When
society has disappeared, all those physical as well as ideological restraints
that were the source of so much conflict and confusion seem to evoke nostalgia.
As much as behavioral scientists have pioneered the development of an
analytical framework that traces human institutions and behaviors to evolutionary
impulses (a form of economics that has accumulated biological trappings and
that serves as a continuation of the materialist trend of analysis), much of
social behavior and our own neurotic impulses seem to be rooted in irrational
and at times whimsical impulses. Much of it is absurd, and that is part of the
appeal of movies and novels and themes and motifs and our fascination with the
uncanny and the macabre, for they work to peel back layers of artifice and
point to a more primal level of existence. We aren’t as complex and civilized
as we proclaim ourselves to be.
Zac
discovers that all animal life seems to have disappeared. There are no animals
left, no birds, no dogs, no life other than vegetable life. The destruction has
been total and complete, and there is a grand and majestic spectacle in these
scenes where he wanders from one building to the next, walking or driving along
lonely avenues, unimpeded, broadcasting his existence to an indifferent world.
The entire world has become Robinson Crusoe’s island. Perhaps survival is an
economic proposition, and this will serve to give this narrative its veneer of
comprehensibility.
He is not
alone, however, and he will encounter two other individuals who have similarly
survived under unique circumstances, a young and acerbic woman and a Maori man.
It turns out that they had all died at the precise moment in which the
experiment was run. Are they, then, leftover spirits?
There is
little hope for reversing this experiment and bringing back what has been lost.
We have, now, only fragile relationships that seem all the more precious
because destruction has been so complete. Which is not to say that there is no
conflict, no jealousy, and that the hidden demons of the prior age are not
still active. They are, legacies that have not been purged, or as the Maori Agi
proclaims, people still “lie”.
The pace of
the film is languid, for the most part, and despite the vast and empty spaces
of these landscapes, seems psychologically claustrophobic. We yearn for closed
spaces, by which we take it to mean, those artifices and customs that regulate
human society and help to provide boundaries. It is all the more revealing for
the fact that consumption is not enough, but it can help substitute for what is
needed. Most people never question this, because it does open up vast and
threatening spaces that might similarly swallow them.
In the end,
we have a film that offers us parables not about endings, but about beginnings.
The protagonist is continually divested of human company, and perhaps this
helps to explain the way in which his isolation finds its culmination in an act
of sacrifice. The sun has been stabilized, at the price of having fear purged.
There is no fear at the end, only wonder, and a new landscape, a vast placenta
(the ocean) with eerie clouds that loom like white anvils, and above it all,
Saturn rising in the twilight.
Eternal Observer -- ORomero (c) 2013
Copyrights ORomero 2013
No comments:
Post a Comment