"People are afraid of the rain." - Hiroshima Mon Amour
"We should be eating our pets." - Industry
Hollywood is gone. As seen on screen. In an increasingly every “where.” A cardinal direction, a region instead of a country. Scenes satellited into my phone, which is balanced on my pillow, in my palm. Online, I watch the shellshocked eulogies for doctors.
But this is not The End. This is just: forest fires, conflict. Which we have seen before. Which we have studied. Signed treaties. Promised to intervene. In the inevitable. For, this has happened before. This is happening. It will again. Despite previously listed reasons.
And if there has always been war, then this is merely the present. The chest of success will rise again. Don’t be so negative. Don't Look Up (2021).
The real thing? The apocalypse. We will know it when we see it. Like pornography or vegetables. According to Congress.
"The real thing? The apocalypse. We will know it when we see it. Like pornography or vegetables. According to Congress."
The penultimate chapters will have a certain accent. Evident, obvious. The Big Bang in reverse. This is the way the world ends. We will hear it whimper. Surely.
Despite the ambivalence of Shaun of the Dead (2004) and the lack of an end to endings. Despite our inaction, our plans, the drafts. The future falling apart like peace talks.
But there aren’t monsters. Yet. Only world leaders. Only limbs missing on infants, vaccine shortages, medical evacuations. Though, we seem ever closer to being locked in the spiritual basement of Cloverfield (2008). We watch the horizon for the looming silhouette of worse.
We are convinced the apocalypse will be moss-covered, grotesque, punctuated with elements which remind us of its former grandeur. As if we will continue to repaint the Eiffel Tower up until the very last breath. As if the last volley of heat-seeking missiles will fall on sites of historical significance. As if we will not pull apart our monuments, feeding scrap metal to the war machine and growing vegetables in our front gardens. Death by bioaccumulation.
We will know it, without questioning its presence. We would know it in total darkness. Bird Box (2018). In muteness. A Quiet Place (2018). In bodies and lives unlike this one. The Matrix (1999).
In that way your loved ones say, I just knew something was wrong. Trouble will find us.
Dr. Strangelove (1964) cometh. We wait in the armistice. In a puddle of ticker-tape. In the self-congratulation of parades.
Perhaps there is hope in this dogged pursuit of the next page. We sit, assured of something after the credits. The protagonist stands with the love interest. Raising their literal or symbolic child. Linkin Park plays as the survivors, the inhabitants of the new day gather. Our planet will be a place of refuge. Rebuilding, not ruin. The Transformers (2007) and the transformed.
As if the Capitals are not already the targets. As if we’ve never seen destruction before. As if we’ve never salted the ground of our enemies. That was Carthage. That was them. We gesture to the past—there be ghost towns. This is now. Today. That is The Day After Tomorrow (2004).
That is something separate. This is the apocalypse, something distinctly unimaginable. Which does not resemble anything we’ve heretofore witnessed. And yet. The end is frequently shown as overgrowth enveloping street signs, scattered wildfires, icicles clinging to the skeletons of skyscrapers.
"This is the apocalypse, something distinctly unimaginable."
As the imagined and the witnessed blur in our visions. As we write and rewrite the auto fiction of our nations. We assure ourselves of the barriers between genres. Science fiction and Horror are shelved elsewhere, distant from history. Those are cult classics, something you watch, rewind, review. This is different.
Like a radio play everyone mistakes for real life, dials will be swiveled. Children will be pulled out of school. We will know what to do. Our roles will emerge. We’ll be marooned with our families, our friends. This Is The End (2013).
We are confident. There will be: Precipitating events. News bulletins. The country will somehow slide into ambiguous ruin. With a momentum not unlike erosion. The riverbank of the present collapsing into the rush of time. The future moving past us as we are upstreamed by the next dominant species.
There is a panic, which erupts, but also smothers itself. The fever of unrest breaks unto a morning of the new now. There will be horses.
Here, through blooms of anarchy, we stay locked in two-bedroom houses or hopscotch amidst unexploded ordnance on our way to some rumored safety. Catching coelacanths, goldfish in remote rivers, raiding dusty convenient stores for now valuable nonperishables.
But there will also be shelter, order. Somewhere. Unlike Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) we will not collapse to our knees having been turned away by the absence of escape.
In our fictitious depictions of the world unraveling, movie stars evade grotesque monsters along sidewalks upset by root systems of poplars. Greying bus shelters are plastered in the warning signs of uncertainty. Political slogans promising peace. Or else. Blue and red beacons of suppression. Or resistance.
The Jeopardy board of a marquee capturing the last gasps of normalcy. A well-timed showing of Metropolis (1927). Doors uprooted from their hinges. Looters denoting moral backsliding and the inability to police. Desperation. As populations drain away from city centres. Corporate and coastal elites flee their million dollar beachfront properties which domino into a still recognizable ocean. Rain storms of dying birds crater the windshields of cars, stranded in the exodus. Pestilence. Viruses, generations of myxomatosis seething on the surface of whatever wildlife has outrun our sudden grounding.
We will capture, devour small game. We will retreat Into the Forest (2015) with our siblings, dancing to the beat of a lone metronome. There will be a keepsake, a photo, a fragment of our former lives tied to a piece of twine, tied to our survival.
Symbolic, stained glass windows where a church is no longer shelter. Perhaps, the teeth of their shattering filter the searchlights of passing zeppelins. Robots and oligarchs in segmented body armor fire strings of plasma the color of what were once flowers. Responsibility rests with the unseen overseer. The alien race. The army of unknown origin.
The earth is scorched, dust storms belch through aircraft boneyards, but will the fall of civilization be so cinematic? So centered on our place in the narrative.
"The earth is scorched, dust storms belch through aircraft boneyards, but will the fall of civilization be so cinematic?"
This end coats our present existence. It layers atop our lives, rippling through our structures, upending infrastructure, shedding vast tracts of asphalt like sunburn. We scramble over this lunarscape of once commute-heavy highways. We are there in the end. Dodging the whale falls of skyscrapers. We are still a character. A survivor. Still identifiable in this soothsaying of our not-so-distant future. If not in person—embodied in the few that outpace the blast, crawl out of the last trenchline—in echoes of pop culture.
Even on a planet populated by Apes, humankind still climbs through statistical unliklihood into screen time. We never co-star. This is the movies afterall.
But what if we don’t feature? The end after the end. The emptiness. Our planet alone. Human-less. Which isn’t horrific. Without us, “nature is healing.” The swans return to Venice. Flow (2024) finds a menagerie of creatures afloat without us. Life continues. Or so it’s been suggested. Our own private credit sequence. The unwritten memorial which just lists the dead. In a language there is no one left around to read.
The optimism of Zombieland (2009), an apocalypse at arm’s length. Each of the last living people given a moniker. Tallahassee, Wichita, Columbus. The irony of cities written in, chosen perhaps, for their distinctness. In this version, we are remembered, represented by indigenous language and the instrumentalist of a genocide. History rewritten and rewritten and rewritten.
When really our accomplishments do not last like classic cars under dust covers. Their paint flakes, overpasses sag. No one will remember the Star Spangled Banner in a world without desalinated water. Our symbols, the examples of our greatness will crumble. The windows on the Empire State Building, the Burj Khalifa will fall. Perhaps then we will realize our greatest achievements are mostly glass. We will see through the facade of progress and view the remains of the day impartially.
How lost those futurists will be without our context, like the bone-white flag pole sunk seven inches into the moon’s surface. They will not know who was here before them. Prometheus (2012) will resemble no one. They will only wonder about the faces of the Six Grandfathers.
For, there are no history books in a world awash with climate change. We will watch our fathers dismantle the pianos for warmth. But, perhaps, the courage will catch as we dash through the bombed-out buildings of the apocalypse. We will become our own achivists, librarians. Like the dissidents in Fahrenheit 451 (1966), we will whisper chapters of Jane Austen to each other. The body becoming the vessel of culture.
Recitations of Steel Magnolias (1989) by the undying campfire. The true script long lost, divided into regional interpretations, several dozen folios. But each one incorporates an impassioned, “The first time I didn't feel it, but this time I feel it. And I can't deny the fact that you like me. Right now, you like me.” Which dissolves into arguments about whether or not Julie Andrews ever got that Oscar. It goes on like this, among the bone-filled chickens, until the sirens start.
How far away are we? The concrete already has a cancer, chewing buildings slowly into dust. But this is not cinema. This is a problem for the architects, not the filmmakers. Theirs is an invited evolution.
"How far away are we? The concrete already has a cancer, chewing buildings slowly into dust. But this is not cinema."
Nevermind how nothing man-made has lasted being sandblasted, sunbleached. Acid deposition. Film dissentigrates beneath a theatre in the Yukon. Abandoned in favor of development. Or good old fashioned ambition. We bulldozed Penn Station. In the name of the monochromatic. A look toward, a preference for the future. We’ll canibalized ourselves before the enemy, the Army of the Dead (2021) even gets here.
Eternally, audience members. Lookouts. Eyeing the other. Bidding.
The most terrifying thing about “the end” is it is ultimately not fiction. The spectre of that great death is a slow encroaching reality. A persistence hunter. Dogging our scent on the wind. An ice bear.
Is the end the death of the last bone surgeon?
As the snow melts in Georgia, the scene seems to cut again to the present. The reel is replaced, freshened. A cigarette burn. And acetate. There is more film, still something to be seen.
"People are afraid of the rain." - Hiroshima Mon Amour
"We should be eating our pets." - Industry
Hollywood is gone. As seen on screen. In an increasingly every “where.” A cardinal direction, a region instead of a country. Scenes satellited into my phone, which is balanced on my pillow, in my palm. Online, I watch the shellshocked eulogies for doctors.
But this is not The End. This is just: forest fires, conflict. Which we have seen before. Which we have studied. Signed treaties. Promised to intervene. In the inevitable. For, this has happened before. This is happening. It will again. Despite previously listed reasons.
And if there has always been war, then this is merely the present. The chest of success will rise again. Don’t be so negative. Don't Look Up (2021).
The real thing? The apocalypse. We will know it when we see it. Like pornography or vegetables. According to Congress.
"The real thing? The apocalypse. We will know it when we see it. Like pornography or vegetables. According to Congress."
The penultimate chapters will have a certain accent. Evident, obvious. The Big Bang in reverse. This is the way the world ends. We will hear it whimper. Surely.
Despite the ambivalence of Shaun of the Dead (2004) and the lack of an end to endings. Despite our inaction, our plans, the drafts. The future falling apart like peace talks.
But there aren’t monsters. Yet. Only world leaders. Only limbs missing on infants, vaccine shortages, medical evacuations. Though, we seem ever closer to being locked in the spiritual basement of Cloverfield (2008). We watch the horizon for the looming silhouette of worse.
We are convinced the apocalypse will be moss-covered, grotesque, punctuated with elements which remind us of its former grandeur. As if we will continue to repaint the Eiffel Tower up until the very last breath. As if the last volley of heat-seeking missiles will fall on sites of historical significance. As if we will not pull apart our monuments, feeding scrap metal to the war machine and growing vegetables in our front gardens. Death by bioaccumulation.
We will know it, without questioning its presence. We would know it in total darkness. Bird Box (2018). In muteness. A Quiet Place (2018). In bodies and lives unlike this one. The Matrix (1999).
In that way your loved ones say, I just knew something was wrong. Trouble will find us.
Dr. Strangelove (1964) cometh. We wait in the armistice. In a puddle of ticker-tape. In the self-congratulation of parades.
Perhaps there is hope in this dogged pursuit of the next page. We sit, assured of something after the credits. The protagonist stands with the love interest. Raising their literal or symbolic child. Linkin Park plays as the survivors, the inhabitants of the new day gather. Our planet will be a place of refuge. Rebuilding, not ruin. The Transformers (2007) and the transformed.
As if the Capitals are not already the targets. As if we’ve never seen destruction before. As if we’ve never salted the ground of our enemies. That was Carthage. That was them. We gesture to the past—there be ghost towns. This is now. Today. That is The Day After Tomorrow (2004).
That is something separate. This is the apocalypse, something distinctly unimaginable. Which does not resemble anything we’ve heretofore witnessed. And yet. The end is frequently shown as overgrowth enveloping street signs, scattered wildfires, icicles clinging to the skeletons of skyscrapers.
"This is the apocalypse, something distinctly unimaginable."
As the imagined and the witnessed blur in our visions. As we write and rewrite the auto fiction of our nations. We assure ourselves of the barriers between genres. Science fiction and Horror are shelved elsewhere, distant from history. Those are cult classics, something you watch, rewind, review. This is different.
Like a radio play everyone mistakes for real life, dials will be swiveled. Children will be pulled out of school. We will know what to do. Our roles will emerge. We’ll be marooned with our families, our friends. This Is The End (2013).
We are confident. There will be: Precipitating events. News bulletins. The country will somehow slide into ambiguous ruin. With a momentum not unlike erosion. The riverbank of the present collapsing into the rush of time. The future moving past us as we are upstreamed by the next dominant species.
There is a panic, which erupts, but also smothers itself. The fever of unrest breaks unto a morning of the new now. There will be horses.
Here, through blooms of anarchy, we stay locked in two-bedroom houses or hopscotch amidst unexploded ordnance on our way to some rumored safety. Catching coelacanths, goldfish in remote rivers, raiding dusty convenient stores for now valuable nonperishables.
But there will also be shelter, order. Somewhere. Unlike Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) we will not collapse to our knees having been turned away by the absence of escape.
In our fictitious depictions of the world unraveling, movie stars evade grotesque monsters along sidewalks upset by root systems of poplars. Greying bus shelters are plastered in the warning signs of uncertainty. Political slogans promising peace. Or else. Blue and red beacons of suppression. Or resistance.
The Jeopardy board of a marquee capturing the last gasps of normalcy. A well-timed showing of Metropolis (1927). Doors uprooted from their hinges. Looters denoting moral backsliding and the inability to police. Desperation. As populations drain away from city centres. Corporate and coastal elites flee their million dollar beachfront properties which domino into a still recognizable ocean. Rain storms of dying birds crater the windshields of cars, stranded in the exodus. Pestilence. Viruses, generations of myxomatosis seething on the surface of whatever wildlife has outrun our sudden grounding.
We will capture, devour small game. We will retreat Into the Forest (2015) with our siblings, dancing to the beat of a lone metronome. There will be a keepsake, a photo, a fragment of our former lives tied to a piece of twine, tied to our survival.
Symbolic, stained glass windows where a church is no longer shelter. Perhaps, the teeth of their shattering filter the searchlights of passing zeppelins. Robots and oligarchs in segmented body armor fire strings of plasma the color of what were once flowers. Responsibility rests with the unseen overseer. The alien race. The army of unknown origin.
The earth is scorched, dust storms belch through aircraft boneyards, but will the fall of civilization be so cinematic? So centered on our place in the narrative.
"The earth is scorched, dust storms belch through aircraft boneyards, but will the fall of civilization be so cinematic?"
This end coats our present existence. It layers atop our lives, rippling through our structures, upending infrastructure, shedding vast tracts of asphalt like sunburn. We scramble over this lunarscape of once commute-heavy highways. We are there in the end. Dodging the whale falls of skyscrapers. We are still a character. A survivor. Still identifiable in this soothsaying of our not-so-distant future. If not in person—embodied in the few that outpace the blast, crawl out of the last trenchline—in echoes of pop culture.
Even on a planet populated by Apes, humankind still climbs through statistical unliklihood into screen time. We never co-star. This is the movies afterall.
But what if we don’t feature? The end after the end. The emptiness. Our planet alone. Human-less. Which isn’t horrific. Without us, “nature is healing.” The swans return to Venice. Flow (2024) finds a menagerie of creatures afloat without us. Life continues. Or so it’s been suggested. Our own private credit sequence. The unwritten memorial which just lists the dead. In a language there is no one left around to read.
The optimism of Zombieland (2009), an apocalypse at arm’s length. Each of the last living people given a moniker. Tallahassee, Wichita, Columbus. The irony of cities written in, chosen perhaps, for their distinctness. In this version, we are remembered, represented by indigenous language and the instrumentalist of a genocide. History rewritten and rewritten and rewritten.
When really our accomplishments do not last like classic cars under dust covers. Their paint flakes, overpasses sag. No one will remember the Star Spangled Banner in a world without desalinated water. Our symbols, the examples of our greatness will crumble. The windows on the Empire State Building, the Burj Khalifa will fall. Perhaps then we will realize our greatest achievements are mostly glass. We will see through the facade of progress and view the remains of the day impartially.
How lost those futurists will be without our context, like the bone-white flag pole sunk seven inches into the moon’s surface. They will not know who was here before them. Prometheus (2012) will resemble no one. They will only wonder about the faces of the Six Grandfathers.
For, there are no history books in a world awash with climate change. We will watch our fathers dismantle the pianos for warmth. But, perhaps, the courage will catch as we dash through the bombed-out buildings of the apocalypse. We will become our own achivists, librarians. Like the dissidents in Fahrenheit 451 (1966), we will whisper chapters of Jane Austen to each other. The body becoming the vessel of culture.
Recitations of Steel Magnolias (1989) by the undying campfire. The true script long lost, divided into regional interpretations, several dozen folios. But each one incorporates an impassioned, “The first time I didn't feel it, but this time I feel it. And I can't deny the fact that you like me. Right now, you like me.” Which dissolves into arguments about whether or not Julie Andrews ever got that Oscar. It goes on like this, among the bone-filled chickens, until the sirens start.
How far away are we? The concrete already has a cancer, chewing buildings slowly into dust. But this is not cinema. This is a problem for the architects, not the filmmakers. Theirs is an invited evolution.
"How far away are we? The concrete already has a cancer, chewing buildings slowly into dust. But this is not cinema."
Nevermind how nothing man-made has lasted being sandblasted, sunbleached. Acid deposition. Film dissentigrates beneath a theatre in the Yukon. Abandoned in favor of development. Or good old fashioned ambition. We bulldozed Penn Station. In the name of the monochromatic. A look toward, a preference for the future. We’ll canibalized ourselves before the enemy, the Army of the Dead (2021) even gets here.
Eternally, audience members. Lookouts. Eyeing the other. Bidding.
The most terrifying thing about “the end” is it is ultimately not fiction. The spectre of that great death is a slow encroaching reality. A persistence hunter. Dogging our scent on the wind. An ice bear.
Is the end the death of the last bone surgeon?
As the snow melts in Georgia, the scene seems to cut again to the present. The reel is replaced, freshened. A cigarette burn. And acetate. There is more film, still something to be seen.