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    Approaching the End: Imagining Apocalypse in American Film
    Approaching the End: Imagining Apocalypse in American Film
    Approaching the End: Imagining Apocalypse in American Film
    Ebook137 pages2 hours

    Approaching the End: Imagining Apocalypse in American Film

    By Peter Labuza

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Tracing a timeline from World War II to the present day, Approaching the End rethinks apocalyptic cinema by considering its relationship to film noir, the fatalist crime genre of the 1940s and 1950s that remained pervasive through Hollywood’s changing tides. Challenging the common notion of apocalyptic films as special effects destroying cities through natural disasters and alien invasions, Peter Labuza examines films that truly push humanity to the edge, considering why certain American works have imagined our ends.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBookBaby
    Release dateOct 14, 2014
    ISBN9781941629017
    Approaching the End: Imagining Apocalypse in American Film

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    • 4/5
      Using Linda Williams' ideas on the modality of melodrama with the idea of Film noir as that which stands in opposition to, or at least modally opposed to, melodrama, Labuza looks at specific apocalyptic films he views as embodying noir's sensibilities. One big difference is that the innocence or purity of the protagonist is no longer the only thing at risk but rather society as a whole, whether from an apparently 'normal' state or from an already dystopic state.I find the arguments persuasive and they have given me a lot to consider as I look at some of these films again from a relatively new perspective.I would recommend this to those both in academic film studies as well as the cinema fan who likes to think beyond simply the plot as presented on screen.Reviewed from an ARC made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

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    Approaching the End - Peter Labuza

    it.

    Introduction

    If you’ve been looking around these past few years, it seems living among the civilized has become passé; the apocalypse is in. Or better to say, you can’t go much of anywhere without seeing or hearing something about the end of the world. There have been omens of a not-so-fantastic sort—the global warming scares of cities becoming submerged, a financial meltdown in 2008 that rivaled the Great Depression, and the political instability throughout parts of Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. But there were also rumblings of another kind. In 2011, we survived the doomsday rants of Harold Camping, a Christian evangelist and radio personality, prophesying not one but two possible dates for the coming of the apocalypse—May 21 and October 21—neither of which resulted in an extinction-level cataclysm. But the big event came in 2012, with the end of the Mayan calendar. This wasn’t just one man’s prediction, but rather the apparent warning of an entire civilization, whose vanishing made for the all-too-perfect doomsayers’ myth. December 21, 2012, however, also passed without incident.

    But even if fire and brimstone never arrived outside our windows, it rained down on movie and television screens instead: from the alien attacks of Battleship (Berg, 2012) and Battle: Los Angeles (Liebesman, 2011) to the dystopias of The Hunger Games (Ross, 2012) and Dredd (Travis, 2012), to television shows like Revolution (Kripke, 2012-2014) and The Walking Dead (Darabont, 2010-), and even the cutesy independent-cinema world depicted in Beasts of the Southern Wild (Zeitlin, 2012) and its post-Katrina landscape. By 2013, the film blog The Playlist ran a feature, Get To Know Your 2013 Apocalypse Movies, to capitalize on the deluge of a theme that seemed worthy of notice.¹ The apocalyptic scenario film is hardly a new genre (you could go back to Abel Gance’s End of the World (1931) or even the silent film The End of the World [Blom, 1916], where a nearby comet causes ecological and social disorder), but has since the mid-2000s become commonplace in numerous forms: climate change, solar winds, nuclear weapons, zombies, dragons, and good old fashion God (as the most successful of any work over the last two decades is not any film but a series of books: Left Behind, by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins).

    But something has struck me odd about most of these films—specifically the ones taking place in a pre-apocalyptic universe, as opposed to the slightly more common post-apocalyptic universe. These films are almost all about the end of the world, ostensibly, and yet most of them are about the endurance of humanity through these crises. The films certainly display enough CGI-enabled carnage and destruction, but none of them particularly feels like the end of the world. After all, they always end with the birth of a new utopia: various characters celebrating the possibility of not only a new but better society, now that the woes of the old one have been washed away. You go into Roland Emmerich’s 2012 (2009) expecting the end of the world, but there at the end of it is John Cusack and his daughter hanging out on a boat with a bunch of other survivors cruising toward Africa and checking out a sunrise. It’s boring.

    Even Alfonso Cuarón’s critically-acclaimed Children of Men (2006), a film that begins in a world specifically without hope for a future, strikes me as quite dubious. The film’s premise is certainly filled with promising disillusionment: a world where humanity is no longer able to reproduce, leading to a dystopic society where rules and niceties are slowly wasting away. Some create anarchy, while others preserve what art and culture they can. We get to see a soothing commercial for an assisted-suicide drug (Quietus: You Decide When); and through it all, Clive Owen simply looks dire, unsure of what to do with what little time he has left. Then the film changes its tone: it becomes a Messiah story, with a woman out of nowhere emerging as the sole pregnant person on the planet and need-ing safe passage to a secret research vessel. Even with its intense dystopic landscape—along with brutal imagery that feels ripped from the headlines of various terrorist bombings and war coverage—it’s a film about rescuing innocence, saving it, and putting oneself on the right side of morality. By the time the entire film literally comes to a halt to parade a newborn through a suddenly silent war zone, I threw up my hands at the film’s attempts to reduce everything to the same tired dichotomy of good and evil. Cuarón couldn’t even be bothered to leave us with an ambiguous ending.

    Is this what we want out of an apocalyptic narrative? For me, what’s exciting about having the apocalypse as a plot device is that it’s a chance for anarchy—not just in the sense that characters are out looting the streets, but also that we as spectators are left unsure which way is up. The apocalypse means there is a serious moral or ecological terror at stake. Wheeler Winston Dixon writes of the apocalypse, All bets are off, all duties executed, all responsibilities abandoned. . . . Equality will at last be achieved in the final seconds before Armageddon, when countries, boundaries, and political systems instantaneously evaporate . . . the absolute destruction of the earth, and all the peoples on it, will create a vacuum only for those who no longer exist.² Perhaps the problem is not the spectacle of these apocalyptic films, but the tone. These films rely on optimism and the salvation of the human race instead of looking toward its darker edges, and if they do find a dark edge, they always seemed determined to recreate a moral order. For an apocalypse to happen on screen, one must dig deep into a desire and reason to see humanity destroyed. To reconsider how to think about a cinematic apocalypse, I would start instead on a microcosmic scale instead of a macrocosmic, and with films that detonate the cosmos of their protagonist: film noir.

    Film noir emerged partially out of the ashes of Hiroshima, after all. Its period in American film history produced a universe in stark contrast to what had previously defined the nation’s cinema: tough guys and devilish women, crime narratives lacking a clear moral center, and a repartee and cynicism all its own. Along with its unique lexicon, it produced a number of canonical works: Out of the Past (Tourneur, 1947), Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944), In A Lonely Place (Ray, 1950), Mildred Pierce (Curtiz, 1945), The Killers (Siodmak, 1946), and Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955).

    Kiss Me Deadly is particularly noteworthy for its unforgettable final image: a femme fatale opening an atomic suitcase, causing fires to ignite—and what appears to be the end of the world. It is perhaps the most noir of noirs, so what does it mean that it is also the only one in the cycle to end with an image of the apocalypse? Perhaps searching through other examples of apocalyptic films (as opposed to post-apocalyptic films set after the bombs have dropped), the connections between film noir and the apocalyptic narrative are less tenuous than they appear; this American phenomenon is perhaps essential in the way we can trace our own social and cultural history over the last seventy years.

    When one begins pulling films together that might constitute this list—from classic atomic-anxiety depictions like The Lady from Shanghai (Welles, 1947), to religious doomsday films like The Rapture (Tolkin, 1991), to science fiction satires like They Live (Carpenter, 1988)—the commonalities at first appear incoherent. These films are apocalyptic tales, undoubtedly, but how are they also film noir? If common noir tropes are not immediately recognizable, then perhaps they can instead be viewed throughout the films’ skeletal structures as a more pervasive mode.

    In her work on melodrama, Linda Williams considers the genre beyond the limited notion of women’s pictures and instead as a larger movie modality. She argues, Melodrama is a peculiarly democratic and American form that seeks dramatic revelation of moral and emotional truths through a dialectic of pathos and action. It is the foundation of the classical Hollywood movie.³ Williams’ descriptions of the signifiers of melodrama—innocence, victim-heroes, realism, and pathos vs. action—are broad enough to subsume other genres like the gangster film and the western, and she argues that melodrama is actually the basis for Hollywood narrative from the silents until now. Given the violent shift in culture after World War II, a period that was deemed prosperous but filled with uncertainty, would it be possible to see film noir as a response to the modality of melodrama, a reworking of melodramatic terms for a post-war age in which morality can no longer be clearly drawn? Noir’s signi-fying tropes-hypermasculinity, a lack of innocence, guilty-heroes-can be conceived as twists on the tropes of melodrama. Such a model could provide an explanation for why noir became so pervasive in every genre for a fifteen-year period. I would argue that this is essential for the post-studio works as well, as the subcategory of apocalyptic noir is less defined by repeating visual signifiers of classical noir than by a particular narrative mode. This approach to noir may breed new ways to consider the problematic term.

    Using this model, I would propose that two key aspects infuse apocalyptic narratives and modal noir structures as inseparable. As Vivian Sobchack argues, most noir films are tied to space and time—specifically, a loss of space (the home) and a loss of time (the time of innocence). Describing film noir as a set of films that take place in spaces called lounge time, she notes that they are constantly reminded of an idyllic life-world of domestic peace and harmony . . . a structuring absence that contributes to the closed-off yet unstable spatiotemporal nature of lounge time.⁴ These spaces thus represent this time of instability, between the inaccessible past and the approaching apocalypse. Within this loss of time also comes an absence of moral discourse. Without loyalty to the past, and with an uncertain future, the noir protagonist suffers from what I will call temporal dislocation. Within this space of transition, of in-betweenness without morality, the protagonist makes an existential choice,

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