Post-apocalyptic escapism

Ladies and gentlemen, we teeter once again at the brink of civilization’s demise. We’ve been here before; we know how the story goes – but it all still seems so real: banks die off like plague victims, bringing our nation’s whole economy with them. Wars devour lives and money like endless pits, while the terrorists around them gain strength and confidence. Scientific evidence of rapid climate change demonstrates the fragility of our planet, while politicians only argue the question of fault. Nuclear weapons appear suddenly in the hands of rogue states, causing new bouts of international angst. It’s not hard to imagine any one of these situations quickly escalating into a cataclysmic event that could sweep our lives into uncertain futures. These days, there’s something for everyone to feel anxious about.

Luckily, we’ve had a lot of practice for the end of the world as we know it. Books, films and television have imagined every possible way to reverse humanity’s progress, and we keep finding new nuances to explore within these scenarios. Certain eras inspire especially urgent explorations of the existential anxieties at hand: the late 19th and early 20th Centuries gave us stories of technology and nature gone awry; the ‘30s and ‘40s begat portraits of the buildup and aftermath of global wars; the ‘50s and ‘60s saw a spate of nuclear and space-based cautionary tales. We are in the midst of another such era, and we see a renewed deluge of apocalyptic narratives flooding our entertainment. The current trend is post-apocalypse – focusing on the aftermath of cataclysm rather than the cataclysm itself – and this new genre movement serves a new purpose. From these stories of humanity’s most hopeless hour, we derive a strange comfort.

Today’s apocalyptic subgenre enjoys commercial and critical popularity to a degree not seen since Dr. Strangelove graced cinemas in 1964. The death of society still makes great entertainment, and there is no shortage of works both new and adapted across all media. Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road is the exemplar of the new post-apocalyptic movement. Accessible yet uncompromising and horrifyingly plausible, the novel imagines a world burnt to ash by some unidentified cataclysm, a world so lifeless that even colors seem dead. With nothing left to eat, what remains of humanity has turned to cannibalism. Babies roasting on a spit, ash falling from a sunless sky, people being penned and butchered like cattle – these are a few examples of the imagery that dominates McCarthy’s relentlessly grim fable. Throughout, the author employs a minimalist, pseudo-biblical style of writing that highlights the universality of his story: the nameless man and son, who struggle to maintain hope despite an utter lack of material purpose, stand in for an entire civilization battling to retain its humanity amidst the most brutal chaos.

This constant battle against hopelessness is what keeps The Road from sinking into nihilism, and it’s the strongest emotional thread throughout the novel. It’s what drew in the audiences who made it McCarthy’s biggest commercial success, driving it to a coveted spot in Oprah’s book club and to the top of the New York Times bestseller list for more than two years. It’s what caused critics to proclaim it the author’s best novel, and to crown it with a Pulitzer Prize. It’s what allows The Road, despite the totality of its horror, to end on a note of resolute hope, as if consoling us that even after everything is gone, we can still find happiness through perseverance.

The Road establishes a standard for its genre’s emotional architecture: imagine a plausible scenario that results in civilization’s degradation or downfall, follow a small group of survivors through hardships most hellish, end with a poignantly uplifting tone that acknowledges the all-encompassing horror of the situation while implying better times ahead for its characters. 28 Days Later and World War Z apply this format to the classic zombie story, while Children of Men and V for Vendetta import it to different versions of Orwellian London. The Left Behind book and film series use it for the aftermath a biblical apocalypse in modern times, while films such as The Day After Tomorrow and WALL-E attach it to cataclysmic climate change. Updates and remakes of works past are also in vogue, suggesting that industries are coalescing around a lucrative formula: I Am Legend alters the ending of the source novel and two previous film adaptations to end on a more uplifting note, and War of the Worlds conjures a Spielbergian happy ending for Wells’ classic novel, while Battlestar Galactica updates its campy source material to examine the dramatic and ethical dilemmas of a small band of humans fighting for the survival of their race.

What ties all these works together, aside from their financial success, is that same thread of hopeful consolation that defines the emotional gravity of The Road. Previous genre movements have not been always adhered to this format – the post-nuclear subgenre in the ‘50s and ‘60s was largely cautionary and therefore largely depressing – but more recent works flout it at their peril: witness Doomsday and the Resident Evil series, which both rehash the lawless wasteland motif of trashy ‘80s sci-fi and have encountered minimal commercial and critical popularity.

Meanwhile, the influx continues unabated. Within the next couple months we’ll be seeing remakes or adaptations of Blindness (humanity suddenly starts going blind), The Day the Earth Stood Still (aliens threaten human extinction), City of Ember (society goes subterranean after ecological disaster), The Last Man (survivors wander a pandemic-stricken Europe) and McCarthy’s own opus, The Road. How or if these upcoming works incorporate that emotional thread of hope remains to be seen, but prior examples indicate that their popularity may depend on it.

Why do we get such catharsis out of imagining our own darkest days? Post-apocalyptic fiction provides a release, a receptacle for our contemporary dread. The Wall Street crisis that is threatening tens of thousands of people’s financial futures seems somewhat trivial compared to the wholesale carnage depicted in The Road. For a short time, we get to shrug off our very real worries in exchange for some fictional ones. Our situation can’t possibly be as bad as that, we might think as we watch cities crumbling to dust or the sun expanding to swallow the earth. But we still want to close the book, or walk out of the theater, or turn off the TV, with the satisfaction of knowing that things will turn out OK. The kid will survive after all, we think to ourselves after finishing The Road, and he even has a new family!

We then turn back to the mortgage bills we can’t pay, or listen to Ahmadinejad’s latest rants about a world without America, or think about the polar bears dying because of rising ocean levels and melting arctic ice, and we might think: we can get through this. These things could all get worse at any moment, and there’s precious little in the real world to indicate that they’ll get better, but at least we’re emotionally prepared. If we can imagine humanity rebuilding itself after the collapse of all civilization, then we can survive whatever’s coming. I could be standing in a field of dead trees surrounded by the incinerated victims of nuclear attacks, a dying sun casting its feeble glow through ashen skies while plague-stricken zombies rush at me to devour my flesh and the fanatical soldiers of a faceless totalitarian group take me away to crush my individuality, but I’ve seen all these scenarios before, and I know the good guys prevail. And I am one of those good guys.

The afterglow doesn’t last long, and we all know that life doesn’t always imitate fiction. The crises we face today are anything but trivial. But whenever we feel like things can’t possibly get any worse, we can always draw some hope from the end of the world.