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APOCALYPSE CINEMA

QUICK TAKES: MOVIES AND POPULAR CULTURE

Quick Takes: Movies and Popular Culture is a series offering succinct overviews and high-quality writing on cutting-edge themes and issues in film studies. Authors offer both fresh perspectives on new areas of inquiry and original takes on established topics.

SERIES EDITORS:

Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is Willa Cather Professor of English and teaches film studies in the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Wheeler Winston Dixon is the James Ryan Endowed Professor of Film Studies and professor of English at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

Rebecca Bell-Metereau, Transgender Cinema

Blair Davis, Comic Book Movies

Jonna Eagle, War Games

Lester D. Freidman, Sports Movies

Desirée J. Garcia, The Movie Musical

Steven Gerrard, The Modern British Horror Film

Barry Keith Grant, Monster Cinema

Julie Grossman, The Femme Fatale

Daniel Herbert, Film Remakes and Franchises

Ian Olney, Zombie Cinema

Valérie K. Orlando, New African Cinema

Carl Plantinga, Alternative Realities

Stephen Prince, Digital Cinema

Stephen Prince, Apocalypse Cinema

Dahlia Schweitzer, L.A. Private Eyes

Dahlia Schweitzer, Haunted Homes

Steven Shaviro, Digital Music Videos

David Sterritt, Rock ’n’ Roll Movies

John Wills, Disney Culture

Apocalypse Cinema

STEPHEN PRINCE

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY PRESS New Brunswick, Camden, and Newark, New Jersey, and London

Library of Congress Catag-in-Publication Data Names: Prince, Stephen, 1955-2021 author. Title: Apocalypse cinema / Stephen Prince. Description: New Brunswick : Rutgers University Press, 2021. | Series: Quick takes: movies and popular culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020043868 | ISBN 9781978819849 (paperback) | ISBN 9781978819856 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978819863 (epub) | ISBN 9781978819870 (mobi) | ISBN 9781978819887 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Apocalypse in motion pictures. | Apocalyptic films—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.A64 P75 2021 | DDC 791.43/615—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020043868

A British Catag-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2021 by Stephen Prince All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please Rutgers University Press, 106 Somerset Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08901. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.

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CONTENTS

Introduction

1. Sources and Traditions in Apocalyptic Cinema

2. Astrophobia

3. I’m Not Saying We Wouldn’t Get Our Hair Mussed

4. The Revenge of Nature

Acknowledgments

Further Reading

Works Cited

Index

About the Author

APOCALYPSE CINEMA

INTRODUCTION

Movie audiences today know exactly how the world will end. They’ve seen it countless times. It brings tidal waves that engulf entire cities, earthquakes that split giant sections of coastline and drop it into the ocean, asteroids that smash into Earth and create a debris cloud that turns day to night, alien visitors that devour the planet and its inhabitants, and climate changes that blanket the planet with fire and ice. This book explores these visions of world’s end as found throughout the history of cinema and situates them in relation to the sources and traditions from which they derive and the crises to which they respond. While these depictions were relatively rare in the early decades of cinema, they increased significantly following World War II and now proliferate in hundreds of films. At any one time, viewers, depending on their mood or interests, can choose different versions of the way things will end. The sheer number of contemporary productions means that this slim Quick Takes volume cannot furnish an encyclopedic overview of the genre. Instead, its chapters are organized according to the nature of the threat that brings about an apocalypse, and this threat is examined in relation to key, representative films. Because apocalypse movies are extremely popular and have a large, devoted fan base, many books about the genre nod to its fans by adopting a tone that is affectionate, whimsical, and even joking. This is a way of suggesting that the movies are not to be taken too seriously. Indeed, some apocalypse movies are so preposterous that skepticism and irony are appropriate responses. But in this study, no matter how outlandish the story situations might be, I’ve treated the genre as one that reflects and embodies genuine fears and concerns that people have about the world and their place in it. I regard it as a genre that can explore fundamental questions of existence. Thus, while most of the movies examined in these pages clearly are fantasies, the problems they examine are not. Our own time, for example, is an epoch marked by increasingly severe symptoms of climate change and environmental destruction. The emergence of new diseases is one symptom of these changes. As I write this introduction, a novel coronavirus has spread worldwide, infecting and killing millions of people and paralyzing the world’s economy. No one knows at this time how the pandemic might end or

what the world will look like on the other side. There are good reasons, then, for examining how movies have told us the world will come crashing down. Chapter 1 examines the foundations of the apocalyptic genre and its appearance in early cinema. A principal source lies in prophetic and eschatological literature and folktales from the ancient world. These include the Norse legend of Ragnarok, Zoroastrian myths of cosmic struggle between good and evil, and, most relevant for Western culture, the apocalyptic prophecies found in the books of Ezekiel, Daniel, and Revelation (John II). With Revelation’s images of fire, pestilence, geological destruction, and death and killing on an epic scale, its visions established a warehouse of images that filmmakers have drawn on. These can be understood broadly as “poetic expressions of human experiences and hopes” (A. Collins 3), and often this is how filmmakers have used them. Very often apocalypse movies are secular translations of these traditions of religious prophecy. In this respect, throughout popular film, the early religious impulses manifest in the prophetic books of revelation are often replaced by contemporary fears about threats to human survival: disease pandemics, environmental collapse, nuclear war, and artificial intelligence. Exploring these anxieties, popular literature got there before cinema did. One of the genre’s most important sources is Mary Shelley’s novel The Last Man, published in 1826, depicting a plague that wipes out all human life, excepting a sole survivor. The novel bequeathed to the genre an enduring narrative template that informs scores of films. Apocalyptic narrative fiction flourished from 1890 to 1914, at which point cinema, then still in its infancy, began to absorb it. Films discussed in chapter 1 include The End of the World (Verdens Undergang, 1916), La fin du monde (1931), Deluge (1933), Things to Come (1936), Metropolis (1927), The Quiet Earth (1985), The Rapture (1991), Signs (2002), Knowing (2009), The Road (2009), and Take Shelter (2011). Chapter 2 examines the cosmos as a source of danger, fear, and threat, experienced as overwhelming because of its scale relative to human life, which holds at best a modest place in the universe. The awe-inspiring nature of the cosmos when it threatens humanity is a striking secular transformation of the exercise of divine wrath as found in the various biblical apocalypses. The world is threatened with destruction from two main sources: collision with another celestial object and alien invasion or attack. In each case, the threat activates wellsprings of human ingenuity, creativity, selflessness, and comion that counterpoise the threat of destruction. Films discussed include When Worlds

Collide (1951), Armageddon (1998), Deep Impact (1998), Melancholia (2011), The Thing from Another World (1951), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), The War of the Worlds (1953), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), The Thing (1983), Independence Day (1996), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), and Avengers: Endgame (2019). Chapter 3 explores the threat of nuclear annihilation, which, in 1945, opened a new chapter in human history and became a key driver of apocalyptic visions in cinema. As many commentators have pointed out, it resonated with biblical prophecy (2 Peter 3:10) and seemed to usher in a sense of eschatological end times. While the prospect of a nuclear doomsday motivates many action films and thrillers, it has also driven filmmakers to craft serious cinematic responses. The most uncompromising depictions of apocalypse in cinema tend to be found in these candid responses, films that deal directly with this threat. Films discussed include On the Beach (1959), Panic in Year Zero (1962), Dr. Strangelove (1963), Fail Safe (1964), The War Game (1966), The Day After (1983), Testament (1983), and Threads (1984). Chapter 4 examines films that portray the planetary threat posed by Homo sapiens and the manner in which nature has pushed back against that threat. Many of these films envision nature as an adversary. Movies about climatechange catastrophes and viral contagion emphasize this outlook, and in contemporary culture, zombies have become iconic figures of contagion and plague. While nature may be morally indifferent to human welfare, it s the significant impact of human beings on the Earth. The contemplation of deep time, the immense interval of planetary history preserved in the geological record, shows that human history is a tiny interval compared with the eons during which other life forms have flourished on Earth. Contemplation of deep time places the apocalyptic impulses found throughout cinema in a different, more substantial and challenging context and have informed the apocalyptic visions of several key films. The chapter concludes with a brief summary of the study. Films discussed include The Andromeda Strain (1971), The Omega Man (1971), 28 Days Later (2002), 28 Weeks Later (2007), Contagion (2011), World War Z (2013), No Blade of Grass (1970), The Day after Tomorrow (2004), 2012 (2009), Snowpiercer (2013), The Time Machine (1960), A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001), and The Turin Horse (2011).

1

Sources and Traditions in Apocalyptic Cinema

The villain Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War (2018), part of the Marvel superhero film series, rampages through the universe, destroying planets, intent on wiping out half of all life in the cosmos. When he succeeds, the Avengers regroup in Avengers: Endgame (2019) to reverse Thanos’s victory and restore balance to the cosmos. This saga of destruction and rebirth resonated strongly with audiences throughout the world. Earning $3 billion in world markets, Avengers: Endgame swiftly became the top-grossing film in cinema history. The two films skillfully employ an enduring narrative archetype that helps to explain their global box office. Apocalyptic narratives are a genre, an ancient one that predates the cinema. The genre retains its tremendous influence, as the remarkable popularity of apocalypse-themed films for contemporary audiences attests. But cinema has been very selective in the ways that it uses this genre, and the genre’s salience for cinema has not been constant. In fact, it barely existed in earlier decades. This chapter examines the sources and traditions that inform the genre of apocalyptic narratives and the ways in which cinema came to embrace them. Apocalypse narratives have held great appeal throughout human history, and their roots lie in legend, folklore, and religion. The stories focus on cosmic battles between good and evil (readily lending themselves to Marvel superhero narratives), which typically climax in a final confrontation during which the world is destroyed, evil is eradicated, and the cosmos is reborn. The Norse legend of Ragnarok (loosely depicted in the Marvel superhero film Thor: Ragnarok [2017]), for example, relates the doom of the gods in a great Earthdestroying battle. Odin, their king, is killed by a monstrous wolf; his son Thor dies in combat with a giant world serpent. Humanity is engulfed by violence as people slaughter one another. The sun turns black, a giant with a flaming sword unleashes fire that scorches the Earth and touches the heavens, and the land sinks into the sea. But the end times are not final. Consistent with many premodern cosmologies, time is cyclic. Following the doom of the gods, the Earth reappears

from the sea, lush and green, to be inhabited and repopulated by two surviving humans. Many world cultures have similar legends and beliefs. The ancient Babylonian creation myth sees a terrible battle between the gods Marduk and Tiamat, the latter of whom in some s takes the form of a sea dragon. Tiamat is slaughtered, and from her body, Marduk creates heaven and Earth. The Stoics in Hellenistic Greece believed that the world would be destroyed by fire and then renewed in a never-ending cycle. Seneca, the Roman philosopher and dramatist, wrote that time brings inescapable catastrophes that destroy all. “It will swallow up cities in yawning chasm, will shatter them with earthquakes, and from deep below send forth a pestilential vapor; it will cover the floods with the face of the inhabited world, and, deluging the earth, will kill every living creature, and in huge conflagration it will scorch and burn all mortal things” (qtd. in Harrill 124– 25). From these disasters, the world would be renewed and re-created. The second epistle of Peter in the New Testament offers a similar prophecy: Once the world was formed out of water, then made to flood and perish. Now, it will be destroyed by fire. “For the day of the Lord will come like a thief. Then the heavens will away with a roar; the elements will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and all its works will be found out” (3:10). Hindu religion sees human history as recurring cycles of four ages, the last of which, Kali Yuga, is an age of moral decay, darkness, and degeneration. The Zoroastrian end times, from ancient Iranian mythology, sees a final battle between the forces of light and darkness during which all of humanity is covered by an ocean of molten metal spreading across the land that burns the wicked according to their degree of sin, after which the dead are resurrected and live with God in a purified state. Cosmic battles between supernatural beings with the fate of the world hanging in the balance are a common heritage of the ancient world. “Every major culture of the ancient eastern Mediterranean world had at least one native version of such a combat myth” (A. Collins 3). Many of these myths are linked by a common view of an end-of-times doomsday followed by regeneration. “Hindu eschatology and the terminal visions of ancient Greece and Babylon clearly belong to a common thought-world” (Wagar 40). This heritage of doomsday and cosmic battles underlies the emergence in the late first or early second century CE of a genre of writing that was explicitly labeled as apocalyptic (J. Collins) and that contains numerous works. These include the Jewish apocalypses of Daniel, Ezekiel, Enoch, Ezra, and Baruch and the New

Testament book of Revelation. The term “apocalypse,” so familiar to modern moviegoers, derives from the Greek apokalypsis, meaning “revelation.” Stories in this genre are about the experience of divine revelation, conveyed to a mortal witness through visions, supernatural beings, and otherworldly journeys. “The constant element is the presence of an angel who interprets the vision or serves as guide on the otherworldly journey. . . . The revelation of a supernatural world and the activity of supernatural beings are essential to all apocalypses. In all there are also a final judgment and a destruction of the wicked” (J. Collins 15). Of the many apocalyptic texts, the New Testament book of Revelation has had the biggest influence on the arts in the Western world, including cinema. Also known as the book of John II and written between 70 and 90 CE, its author identifies himself as John of Patmos (Patmos is an island in the Aegean Sea). An angel of the apocalypse (revelation) visits John and takes him up to the heavenly throne room, where he sees God on the throne and his eternal worship. Then begin numerous visions of divine wrath being visited on the Earth and its sinners and unbelievers. Seven seals within the book of God are opened, which unleash the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who ravage the Earth and kill one-quarter of its people by sword, famine, plague, and wild beasts. When the sixth seal is opened, it unleashes a great earthquake. The sun turns black and the moon blood red. The stars fall from the sky; the sky rolls up like a scroll. God’s angels visit another set of woes on the Earth when they blow their seven trumpets. From the first trumpet issues hail and fire mixed with blood that burns up a third of the Earth. The second trumpet turns the sea to blood; the third poisons a third of the rivers and waters on Earth, killing many people. A fourth trumpet turns day to night, and the fifth unleashes an army of giant locusts to sting and torture their victims. The sixth trumpet heralds a vast slaughter that kills a third of the Earth’s population. A third series of woes occurs when seven angels pour out the contents of their bowls on the land. People break out in painful sores, every living thing in the sea dies, and the sun’s power increases to scorch people with fire. Beset by these pains and sores, people gnaw their tongues in agony. When the seventh bowl is poured, a tremendous earthquake occurs, destroying cities and obliterating islands and mountains. These woes directed at the sinful and unbelieving are preludes to the two final battles between God’s angelic warriors and the army of Satan. The first battle

occurs at Armageddon. Satan is temporarily defeated, and a millennium of peace ensues. In a second and final battle, Satan’s armies are burned alive by heavenly fire, and Satan is cast forever into a lake of burning fire. The dead are resurrected, and a Last Judgement rewards the righteous, whose names are found in a book of life. The universe is renewed as the old Earth is gone forever, and the chosen ones enter a new heaven and a new Earth. The calamities that befall humankind described in Revelation—earthquake, fire, storm, war, pestilence—are enduring forms of disaster that have plagued humanity. In this sense, Revelation envisions some of the fundamental existential challenges to the continuity of human life and, as such, transcends its immediate religious context. Its images might best be understood as “dramatic manifestations of deep human yearnings which transcend their mythological representations” (O’Hear and O’Hear 51). We will find a similar impulse throughout popular film. The imagery conveys fears and doubts about the sustainability of human life, about its inherent vulnerability amid the numerous challenges to its continuity. And yet disaster is intimately connected to hopes for a millennium and salvation. “The first [disaster] suggests death and desolation, the second, salvation and fulfillment. . . . Men cleave to hopes of imminent worldly salvation only when the hammerblows of disaster destroy the world they have known and render them susceptible to ideas which they would earlier have cast aside” (Barkun 1). Disaster kindles the hope for fundamental change. “If much of the visible world alters, then surely the period afterward will be the new order. The slate will be clean” (Barkun 210). When the disasters described in Revelation were taken up by writers and filmmakers, who were responding to different challenges and calamities, their stories often displayed the same terrifying anxiety that human life is not sustainable, but the end of the world in human has proven to be difficult to imagine. As Wheeler Winston Dixon notes, “each filmic depiction of the apocalypse inherently projects the existence of surviving witnesses, for whom the film has been made” (3). Literature and film tend to mitigate the horror of apocalyptic destruction with messages of hope and imagery of renewal and regeneration. In this respect, they conform to a tradition exemplified in Revelation. For a Christian audience, Revelation counterpoints its horrifying visions of destruction with the reassuring message that a moral balance will be restored at the end of time and that the faithful will be rewarded, however much they have been made to suffer by natural catastrophe or by the wickedness of the sinful. The modern understanding of apocalypse typically does not encom these

original meanings of divine revelation, moral balancing, renewal, and regeneration. As Natasha and Anthony O’Hear write, “In the twentieth century, this redemptive, more positive aspect of the term apocalypse has largely fallen away. . . . It has become synonymous with the ‘end times’ and with the dark catastrophes associated with those events” (236). The horrific visions of disaster, violence, pestilence, and death that fill the book of Revelation inspired and influenced centuries of art. For filmmakers, the visions of Revelation—its images of fire, pestilence, geological destruction, death, and killing on an epic scale—established a warehouse of images that countless films have drawn on, even if they are not in themselves apocalyptic. The German science fiction classic Metropolis (1927), for example, which is not about the end of the world or cosmic destruction, nevertheless draws from the ancient traditions, using a metaphorical mode to present apocalyptic imagery from biblical texts (Bergvall). While the imagery of destruction found in Revelation has influenced countless films, religious revelation itself has played a much smaller role in films marketed for mass audiences. (Films marketed for evangelical Christians are a different matter. These include the Left Behind [2000–2016] film series, depicting the Rapture, based on best-selling novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.) Partly this is because the idea of apocalypse has become quite secularized in contemporary culture and typically refers to a massively destructive event that befalls the planet or the human race and does not necessarily hold an overtly religious meaning. Sometimes, however, Hollywood movies have directly acknowledged a connection with Revelation, and before we examine the early history of apocalypse movies, it will be helpful to note how overtly religious themes from Revelation occasionally show up in contemporary film. In Knowing (2009), Nicolas Cage plays a professor of astrophysics named, symbolically, John. He finds a set of seemingly random numbers created fifty years ago by a little girl named Lucinda, who was instructed by mysterious, whispering voices that only she could hear. This puzzling document is the film’s version of the heavenly scroll that John sees in the throne room of God and that, when its seven seals are opened, unleashes visions of disaster on Earth. John (in the film) decodes the numbers and finds that they are a series of dates on which deadly disasters occurred during the intervening fifty years. The last date, about to fall, points to the final end time, which will occur when a massive solar flare

hits the Earth, destroying its ozone layer and killing all living things. Meanwhile, John’s young son Caleb (another biblical name) is being visited by strange men who speak to him telepathically in odd, whispering voices. One appears in his bedroom at night pointing to Caleb’s circular window, which has a fiery ring around it, like the rainbow encircling the heavenly throne in Revelation. Caleb’s visitor shows him a vision of the planet’s impending end, of the Earth in flames. These strange men prove to be aliens (angels) who have come to Earth to take the children, those who have heard the call—the whispers—to safety. Caleb and other deserving children are the chosen ones. A day of judgment has come. Unusually for apocalyptic movies, Knowing goes all the way in showing the total destruction of life on Earth. When the solar flare hits, a massive wall of heat incinerates Manhattan (standing in for all of the world’s mighty cities), and the oceans boil and evaporate into space. Before dying, John’s father, a reverent man, assures John that this is not the end, and John says, “I know.” In the film’s final scene, Caleb and another child walk in verdant fields in an illuminated, spiritualized world that is not of this Earth. This last scene visualizes Revelation 21:1: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had ed away, and there was no longer any sea.” The Rapture (1991) stars Mimi Rogers as a woman leading a life of quiet despair who finds answers to her spiritual malaise in fundamentalist religion. Sharon becomes a devoted convert, marries happily, and has a child whom she names Mary. When her husband is killed in a workplace shooting, her faith is shaken, and she goes into the desert with her daughter awaiting a vision, a sign, of God’s presence. It never comes, and as they are worn down by hunger and heat, Mary tells her mother that they should die now so that they can go right to heaven. Confused and despairing, Sharon murders her daughter, believing that this will send her straight away to heaven. Sharon is jailed for the crime, and Mary appears to her accompanied by two angels. Mary tells her the day of judgment is at hand and asks Sharon to proclaim her love for God so that she will be saved. Sharon cannot do so. “He left us alone in the desert. He let me kill you. How can I love a God that let me kill my baby?” The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse appear, and the Rapture begins as worthy souls are lifted to heaven. As the apocalypse comes, Mary reappears to Sharon asking her to love God, but Sharon won’t do it. There is too much suffering and pain in the world. She asks how she can love a God who allows that to occur. As the film ends, Sharon remains behind, refusing what she now regards as an unacceptable form of blackmail, a forced choice between burning in hell or telling God she loves him. She cannot accept the of that bargain.

Knowing and The Rapture found only modest success at the box office and were greeted ambivalently by critics, who seemed uncomfortable with their relatively direct engagement with scripture, even though this engagement in Knowing was through science fiction metaphor and in Rapture ended in Sharon’s skeptical, rationalist rejection of the apocalyptic contract contained in Revelation. Unlike the Left Behind series, these were not films aimed mainly at a religious audience. They built explicitly on the sources and traditions that inform apocalyptic narratives. But their tepid box-office success seemed to validate Hollywood’s general reluctance to fund overtly religious films for fear that box office will suffer. Accordingly, other apocalyptic films incorporating the book of Revelation did so obliquely. The nature of the apocalypse in The Quiet Earth (1985) remains largely unspecified. The main character, Zac, a scientist working on an experimental global energy grid, awakens one morning to find that the world is depopulated. Cars and trucks sit askew on the road; water is running from faucets in empty houses. An airplane has crashed nearby. Seatbelts are fastened on all the seats, but there are no bodies living or dead. Where are all the people? Have they been called heavenward? Has the Rapture occurred? When Zac dies, he awakens in a strange land that is not of the Earth, and in the heavens are strange planets not of our solar system. Is this the new heaven and new Earth of Revelation? The Quiet Earth is one of many apocalypse films that pull back from identifying the nature of what has devastated the Earth and that offer instead signs and forebodings that deepen the essential mystery of why and how the wreckage has occurred. In The Road (2009), the world has been devastated by something fiery and concussive that is partially glimpsed in the film’s opening scene. Perhaps a global war has occurred, or perhaps this is the thunder and lightning that signals Christ’s return at the end of time. This apocalypse has destroyed all animal and vegetative life. Bands of cannibals roam the streets and forests, and an itinerant old man (played by Robert Duvall) named Eli, after the Old Testament priest and judge, announces that there have been signs and warnings of the end times that people have ignored. The film never literalizes the meanings or causes of the bleak world it depicts—the devastation itself provides sufficient grounding for its narrative. Take Shelter (2011) portrays the signs of a coming end time. Birds swarm ominously in the sky, rain falls thick as oil, black clouds gather in malevolent shapes. These remain invisible to all except for one man, Curtis (Michael Shannon), who has been called to see them and understands them as eschatological signs. His visions and the anxiety they trigger nearly drive him insane. To others, he seems increasingly lunatic, until the film’s end,

when his visions of a storm that will obliterate everything prove to be real. In the last moments of existence, his wife, Samantha (Jessica Chastain), can see the approaching storm, and they share a brief, doomed gaze at each other before the darkness falls on them. In Signs (2002), the film’s title evokes the eschatological context for a story of an alien invasion from space, heralded by cryptic messages carved into fields of corn, and a parable of religious faith lost and then regained by a pastor (Mel Gibson) whose renewed belief in God enables him to triumph over the hostile inhuman intruder. These poetic films based on the book of Revelation were part of a huge boom in the production of apocalypse movies that occurred after the millennium in the year 2000. As noted, most evoke spectacles of destruction without being necessarily religious. Because apocalypse movies are so plentiful today, it may be surprising to realize how slowly cinema came to the genre and then only after it had been popularized in literature. Literary fiction took up the apocalyptic narrative and developed it as entertainment before the arrival of cinema. The first apocalyptic novel, published in in 1805, was Le dernier homme (The Last Man). Modeled on the book of Revelation, it depicts the inevitable end of the world as the sun dies, but this proves to be a necessary prelude to the spiritual rebirth of humankind when all the world’s graves open. Mary Shelley, best known as the author of Frankenstein, expressed a more radical view, denying any connection between apocalypse and millennium (Paley) in her novel The Last Man (1826). “Fire, and war, and plague, unite for thy destruction” (108). So laments a dying character who despairs that the human race can endure. In the novel, human life is decimated by a worldwide plague, and omens of the end time abound. A black sun plunges the world into darkness, and the sea burns like a furnace as if composed not of water but of molten lava. The plague destroys everyone, except for a sole survivor. There is no resurrection, no millennium, no salvation—only death and despair. “We must all die; nor leave survivor nor heir to the wide inheritance of earth. We must all die! The species of man must perish” (245). Shelley imagines apocalypse as a final end, a feat that is rare in the genre. Ironically, in light of this achievement, by bequeathing to cinema the trope of a last man, her novel helped to invent the postapocalyptic genre that influences and informs countless movies. Will Smith, for example, is the last man in I Am Legend (2007), while small, beleaguered bands of survivors battle hordes of zombies in films such as 28 Days Later (2002) and World War Z (2013), alien invaders in War of the Worlds

(2005) and Independence Day (1996), or mysterious, malevolent creatures in A Quiet Place (2018). The bands of survivors in postapocalyptic movies are a transfiguration of the righteous who are redeemed in Revelation. They are akin to the “smaller group of the righteous martyrs [who are] separated off from the unrepentant masses” (O’Hear and O’Hear 241). The lastman trope provides a measure of reassurance, illustrating the continuity of human life in the face of terrible disaster. Although Shelley’s novel has a last survivor, in time he, too, will die, leaving no one. Her novel is ferociously bleak in a way that few movies have dared, and it implicitly raises the specter of deep time and its implications for the human species. We will examine this subject in chapter 4. Stories and novels of apocalyptic fiction obsessed the late-Victorian imagination. “Between 1890 and 1914 alone, almost every sort of world’s end story that one finds in later years was written, published, and accepted by a wide reading public. . . . Floods, volcanic eruptions, plagues, epochs of ice, colliding comets, exploding or cooling suns, and alien invaders laid waste to the world” (Wagar 20). A deadly fog kills everyone in London in The Doom of the Great City (1880). In The Purple Cloud (1901), a giant volcanic eruption produces a cloud of poison gas that encircles the Earth. H. G. Wells’s classic novel The War of the Worlds (1897) depicts a Martian invasion and war against Earth that nearly succeeds, and in The Time Machine (1895), he depicts the extinction of the human race, a topic he also explored in a short essay titled “The Extinction of Man” (1897). Ailise Bulfin writes in her survey of fiction in this period, “The unifying concern of this set of texts is the continued sustainability of human society. Their verdict, reinforced by the body of apocalyptic illustrations that accompany them, seems clear: that change is necessary or disaster will ensue” (“Natural” 97). H. G. Wells’s classic novels were published at the dawn of cinema (the first public film screening occurred in 1895), but it would take a comet and another decade and a half before moviemakers took up stories about the end of the world. The reappearance of Halley’s Comet in 1910 ignited a panic about impending disaster—people feared that its tail contained poison gas that would choke the Earth. These fears and an associated media sensation stimulated production of a cluster of comet-themed movies that brought apocalypse at last to cinema. The Comet (1910), an eleven-minute short produced by the Edison Company, shows massive destruction caused by a ing comet. “Large scale explosions, farms, cottages, railway stations, mansions and entire forests bursting into flame kindled the silver screen for the first time. . . . The complete

devastation of the surface of the Earth is captured in a final panoramic scene” (Enyedi 49). Disaster proves unfounded in Frightened by the Comet (1910), an erroneous prediction in How Scroggins Found the Comet (1910), and a source of comedy in Alice Guy-Blachet’s Cupid and the Comet (1911). While these are all shorts, the earliest extant apocalyptic feature film, Verdens Undergang (The End of the World, 1916), capitalized on the legacy of fear inspired by Halley’s Comet and also on the horrific devastation of World War I, then in progress. In this prestigious production by Denmark’s Nordisk Film studio, directed by August Blom, a comet approaching Earth threatens the onset of an inescapable disaster that the film frames in biblical as an occasion for the purging of sin and the regeneration of society. Frank Stoll, a wealthy mine owner, gets rich off the impending disaster by publishing a newspaper article claiming that no danger exists, driving up stock prices for the benefit of his personal fortune. He then hosts a wild party just before the comet strikes and announces his plan for the very rich to found a new world after the disaster and become its masters. The film intercuts this selfish and wild abandon among the rich with a hillside prayer service, led by a visiting preacher, where the workingclass miners in the village gather seeking solace. The film skillfully uses an optical effect showing the comet in the sky, growing larger scene by scene, to convey the impending approach of doomsday. And like hundreds of apocalypse movies to come, it relies on visual effects to create a spectacular display of destruction. Earth es through the comet’s tail, and flaming chunks of the celestial body scorch the planet, igniting the mining village, as the ocean rises and floods the land. Frank Stoll and his wife have sought refuge in the mine, but the comet’s age releases poison gas (harking back to the 1910 fears about Halley’s Comet) that kills them. The flames and flood, iconic as biblical visitations, evidently kill everyone in the village except for the preacher and Edith West, the virtuous daughter of the mine’s supervisor. She wanders dazed through the scorched rubble of the village, imagery that resonates with the world war then ongoing, before meeting her fiancé, who had been at sea but has now returned. In the film’s final moments, the two kneel in prayer and, gazing heavenward, are described in an intertitle as “a man and a woman.” This new Adam and Eve will repopulate the Earth and begin again without sin. In La fin du monde (1931), the French director Abel Gance also used this plot device of a comet ing near the Earth, causing storms, tremors, and tidal

waves that destroy much of the planet. Gance’s version of the film ran three hours and was severely cut down for release by its producer, making it essentially a lost film in that the full version does not survive and cannot be seen today (Cuff). From this early period of cinema history, one film clearly stands out as the grandparent of today’s end-of-the-world movies. Deluge (1933) is a pre-Code Hollywood production that skillfully uses miniature models to depict the type of large-scale, extended scenes of destruction that are so familiar in today’s films. In the story, a sudden onset of severe natural disasters destroys much of the habitable Earth. An abnormal eclipse of the sun triggers violent storms and four days of earthquakes throughout Europe. A tremendous quake destroys the West Coast of the United States, submerging it beneath the ocean. The quakes spread across the continent, destroying Chicago, New Orleans, and Manhattan, submerging these beneath the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Atlantic Ocean. An extended visual-effects sequence depicts all of Manhattan’s skyscrapers disintegrating and toppling, then the entire city being engulfed by an epic tidal wave. Because the film was made before Hollywood began more stringently enforcing the industry’s Production Code (this occurred in 1934 and thereafter), Deluge contains scenes of vivid violence, as people are crushed beneath crumbling buildings or swept away and drowned by the floodwaters. Deluge seems to be the earliest extant film that set the for modern apocalypse movies in its showcasing of vivid special effects to simulate exciting scenes of large-scale devastation and to offer these as a thrilling entertainment. Indeed, the film begins with a title card reassuring the audience that the story being depicted is strictly an imaginary one presented for the purposes of entertainment. Then follows a quote from Genesis 9:11, in which God promises never again to destroy the world by flood. After these calming assurances, the movie proceeds to vividly shock its audience with visions of epic carnage, thus establishing one of the essential ways that apocalypse movies have operated ever since. Only one other significant entry in the genre appears during cinema’s first half century. Things to Come (1936) is a futuristic science fiction film based on a screenplay by H. G. Wells, whose novels and writings had done much to popularize apocalyptic fiction. Although Things to Come is routinely classified as an apocalypse movie, its actual status is somewhat questionable. It depicts a global war beginning in 1940 and lasting for thirty years, during which a plague

wipes out half of humanity. This sounds pretty bad, but little lasting damage occurs. Society rebuilds itself and makes great technological progress as humanity dedicates itself to peace and scientific knowledge. As the film ends, its characters have entered a better world. Although, as we have seen, influences from the book of Revelation reach into the contemporary era, cinema moved slowly and hesitantly during its first fifty years to adopt and embellish the apocalyptic genre. Productions in the first half century were sparse. Following Deluge, which points the way toward modern films, the Hollywood studios avoided end-of-the-world movies until the onset of the nuclear age after World War II. This was probably due, in part, to the industry’s Production Code, which cautioned filmmakers to avoid excessive gruesomeness and brutality on-screen. Visualizing the apocalypse, especially as Deluge had done with its extended scenes of destruction emphasizing the fragility and evanescence of human life and society, strained against the boundaries of the Code and the borders of what was permissible in the era of film censorship. And yet popular belief in prophecy and end times has remained deep and abiding, and in that respect, the genre’s return to cinema was inevitable. This is because the visions of Revelation and other apocalyptic texts are suggestive and capable of numerous meanings and applications. They are protean and “can be plugged into any conflict” ongoing in the world (Pagels 172). Interest in prophetic interpretation intensifies “during periods of uncertainty, upheaval and danger” (Boyer 45), which today seems an inescapable part of our world in a time of global climate crisis and nuclear-armed states. The appeal of the apocalypse lies in its power to give history a shape and a meaning, to punctuate time in ways that make human life central to its project, and to imbue life with the certainty of a transcendent value that continues beyond death, which is not a final annihilation but merely the prelude to a higher, more evolved existence. Even today, when apocalypse has been decontextualized from its original revelatory meaning, the end of the world in most apocalypse movies is not really a final ending. Geoff King has described this as “apocalypse postponed” (144). As Wynn Hamonic writes, many apocalypse movies “provide audiences with the message: ‘You can survive the impending cataclysm, and here’s how.’ . . . In apocalyptic films, characters are either trying to prevent an oncoming cataclysm from occurring or preparing to survive an inevitable catastrophe” (7). Frank Kermode speculates that the need for an ending is deeply encoded in the human mind, and in this respect, apocalyptic thinking is a basic mode of cognition, an essential way to make

sense of reality. He writes that for people to make sense of their life, of their brief span of time, they require beliefs that posit an origin and an end. “To make sense of our lives from where we are, as it were, stranded in the middle, we need fictions of beginnings and fictions of ends, fictions which unite beginning and end and endow the interval between them with meaning” (190). Because apocalypse narratives do this in the most dramatic possible, their attraction for cinema and its audiences has proven to be unshakeable. In the next chapters, we examine the essential ways that cinema has framed and portrayed its apocalypses.

2

Astrophobia

“Tell the world. Tell this to everybody wherever they are. Watch the skies, everywhere. Keep looking. Keep watching the skies.” This urgent warning from the journalist Ned Scott (Douglas Spencer), carried by radio from an arctic research station at the North Pole, alerts all of humanity to the danger of alien invasion from space. The scene occurs in The Thing from Another World (1951), in which an isolated band of scientists and soldiers battles a malevolent, blood-drinking creature that has crash landed near their research station. Speaking for the survivors, Scott warns humanity that henceforth it must be vigilant about the arrival of dangers from outer space. In cinema, these dangers take two forms: alien invasions and collisions with celestial objects such as meteors and asteroids. Each can be severe enough to trigger an apocalypse. The beginning of Armageddon (1998), about a giant asteroid hurtling toward Earth, reprises the ominous rhetoric that closes The Thing from Another World. The actor Charlton Heston delivers the opening narration, which strikes a biblical tone because Heston was well-known for his performances as Moses in The Ten Commandments (1956) and as the title character in Ben-Hur (1959), based on a novel subtitled A Tale of the Christ. Speaking about the extinction of the dinosaurs, Heston intones, “A piece of rock just six miles wide changed all that. It hit [the Earth] with the force of ten thousand nuclear weapons. A trillion tons of dirt and rock hurtled into the atmosphere, creating a suffocating blanket of dust the sun was powerless to penetrate for a thousand years. It happened before. It will happen again. It’s just a question of when.” In other words, keep watching the skies! The Thing from Another World belongs to a large group of alien-invasion movies made in the 1950s that commentators often attribute to the Cold War atmosphere of the period, when fears about communist infiltration of life in the United States were acute and anxiety about nuclear weapons also ran high. And yet as John Martens points out, these explanations do not for the enduring appeal of these movies: “Many commentators . . . often interpret these films as allegories

for Communist invasions of the United States. I do not want to deny this link, but the political interpretation of these films does not explain the deeper, spiritual connections and realities, nor does it for the continuing interest in, relevance, and power of these films” (141). The films built on a preexisting tradition. Stories about alien invasion were common in science fiction literature during the 1930s and 1940s and go back even further to such novels as H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) (Jancovich and Johnston 91). While the astrophobia—fear of the cosmos—found in these movies can function metaphorically to express the anxieties and concerns of a historical period (such as those aroused by advances in the 1950s and 1960s in rocketry and space travel), as we will see, its roots lie much deeper in the human condition, beset by catastrophes that challenge deeply held ideas that planet Earth is our natural, enduring, and secure home. Not all alien-invasion movies invoke the apocalypse, but a great many do. John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing from Another World is more faithful to the original story, “Who Goes There?,” published in 1938 by John Campbell, in portraying the alien as a shape-shifter that takes over the men at the polar research station by assuming their likenesses. The monster in the original film doesn’t change shape or appearance. It is humanoid, and the threat it poses is singular and limited. The movie expresses a can-do attitude—the men at the station prove to be quite capable at destroying it. More cynical and despairing, Carpenter’s The Thing (1983) ends by obliquely evoking a looming apocalypse. The monster isn’t destroyed. In the last scene, the two surviving men await their doom in the snow, having torched their camp in a futile effort to kill the thing. They will freeze to death in moments, but one is not human. It is the thing, which will simply go to sleep in the ice and wait for the rescue team to find it and then transport it to a more populated area, where it can spread. The polar scientists had calculated that the thing could rapidly infect the entire world’s population after first , and this is clearly what is going to happen. Though it is not portrayed on screen, The Thing is about the end of the world, its final scene concluding just before that happens. Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, with remakes in 1978, 1993, 2007) operates the same way, its final scene pointing to a looming apocalypse. Alien seed pods from space land on Earth and hatch a life form capable of exactly duplicating any person in close proximity. They quickly take over the small town of Santa Mira, California, and, using it as a base, begin distributing pods nationwide. Once a person is taken over, they lose all individuality and

emotion and become a kind of drone serving the master objective of the alien race, which is to seize possession of the Earth. The film’s main character, Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy), and a small group of his friends discover what is happening but fail to prevent the pod people from spreading. In Siegel’s original ending, Bennell is the sole human survivor from Santa Mira, and he runs into traffic, appearing to ing motorists like a lunatic, as he rants, “They’re here already! You’re next!” before the film cuts to black in an abrupt, disturbing fashion. He’s like an Old Testament prophet, warning of the apocalypse. The producer, Walter Wanger, however, didn’t want an apocalypse and had Siegel add framing material at the beginning and end showing Miles reaching the authorities and alerting them to the danger. The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) also invokes but doesn’t depict an apocalypse visited on the Earth by alien invaders. A flying saucer brings a humanoid alien to Earth. Klaatu (Michael Rennie) is the emissary from another planet who has come to deliver an ultimatum: “Your choice is simple: us and live in peace, or pursue your present course and face obliteration. We shall be waiting for your answer.” Now that humans have weapons of mass destruction—that is, atomic weapons—the interplanetary organization that Klaatu represents views them as a threat to peace in the cosmos. Klaatu leaves after delivering his ultimatum, and while the choice that humanity makes is not portrayed in the film, the violent history of humankind suggests that it will not avoid obliteration. The literary source behind all these invasion films is H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, in which invading Martians use highly advanced technology to incinerate London and other major cities throughout the world. According to the renowned science fiction author Isaac Asimov, Wells’s novel was “the very first tale of interplanetary warfare the world had ever seen” (201). The story describes, as Wells wrote, “the beginning of the rout of civilization, of the massacre of mankind” (War 114). The Martian war machines are ruthlessly efficient, and the armies of the world cannot stop them. Nothing stands between the Martian attack and human oblivion except a strain of disease bacteria for which people have an acquired immunity but against which the Martians are unprepared. The Martians drop dead, and humanity is spared. Wells’s novel has been filmed numerous times, most notably in 1953 by the director Byron Haskin and again by Steven Spielberg in 2005. Both versions devote extensive visual attention to the Martian attack, the helplessness of

humanity, and the ensuing destruction. Although Wells was critical of religion in his novel, the 1953 film suggests that a divine intervention from God halts the attack. Spielberg doesn’t invoke the deity in his version, but he does end the film with a reassuring sequence showing the survival and reunion of the extended family of the main character, Ray Ferrier (Tom Cruise). Both outcomes gloss the underlying theme of Wells’s novel, which is the extinction of humanity, something that Wells saw, from a scientific perspective, as being inevitable. On the basis of science of the period, he understood that planet Earth will die. “His vision of the inevitable death of the planet has affected the mind of every subsequent science fiction writer, because that is an inescapable truth in any scientific conception of the cosmos as vital—not just species but planets, stars, galaxies can, do, and will die” (ix). Wells wrote in his essay “The Extinction of Man” that “it is part of the excessive egotism of the human animal that the bare idea of its extinction seems incredible to it” (172). But many animals have increased and multiplied “and ed at last into the night.” Why should human beings be an exception? “From the scientific standpoint at least any reason for such exception is hard to find,” he wrote (115). Humanity is spared in The War of the Worlds by an accident, the work of a microorganism the Martians hadn’t counted on. But for that, this Martian-borne apocalypse would have ended all human life. While Wells grants a reprieve to humanity in The War of the Worlds, it’s clearly a temporary one. Nevertheless, the alien-invasion movies that have come from the tradition established by his novel for the most part pull back from the darker knowledge that lies at the core of that novel. They show that humanity is triumphant in defeating alien aggression and in ways that enable the films to celebrate military power. In the 1953 War of the Worlds, the president of the United States orders that a nuclear bomb, more powerful than those used against Japan in World War II, be dropped on a nest of Martians just outside of Los Angeles. The same thing occurs in Independence Day (1998). In that film, massive alien spaceships suddenly appear, hovering above the world’s major cities, and they fire deadly beams that destroy these urban centers. It’s the first move in a takeover of Earth. The president orders a nuclear attack on one of the giant saucers hovering over Houston. As Kim Newman points out, these movies tell stories legitimating the use of nuclear weapons: faced with such an implacable, powerful enemy, “we have no choice but to throw whatever ultimate weapon we have at them” (130). Though the nuclear bomb fails in Independence Day, humankind still wins a military victory when it figures out how to disable the defensive shields used by the alien invaders to protect their warships.

Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame likewise invoke the apocalypse only to skirt it. While threats of world destruction occur all the time in the Marvel superhero films, these two Avengers movies take things to a bigger, cosmic level. Thanos (Josh Brolin) is a world-destroying villain who wants to wipe out half of all life in the universe. This fractional decimation carries biblical overtones—the angelic destruction visited upon Earth in the book of Revelation likewise obliterates a specific proportion of sinners but not all; for example, “A third of mankind was killed by the three plagues of fire, smoke and sulfur” (Rev. 9:18). When Thanos targets Earth, the Avengers stand against him. As in the two supernatural battles against Satan described in Revelation, the Avengers fight two cosmic battles against Thanos. In the first, they lose, and half of all life is wiped out; whereas in Endgame, the surviving Avengers go back in time to alter the outcome and prevent Thanos from depopulating the universe. In this they are victorious, even bringing back the dead through their manipulation of time. It’s the book of Revelation with superheroes. Most striking in the films is that humanity seems uninvolved in the outcome. All of the story events focus on the superheroes. No scenes depict the loss of human life that is said to have occurred, nor are there responses by the police, the army, or even armed vigilantes to the military attacks launched by Thanos and his armies. The life that Thanos wipes out doesn’t include plant life or animals. Earth, in fact, is not decimated. Nor is there an effect on the industrial infrastructure—the surviving Avengers have electricity and functioning cell phones and computers. Unlike the book of Revelation, where the visions are horrifying because they are anchored in human realities, the cosmic battles here lack a scale for calibrating their effect in human . The apocalypse arrives, but it remains abstract and, really, not so bad. If our phones and computers keep working, one might even get used to it. To the extent that The War of the Worlds, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Avengers: Infinity War, and other alien-invasion films raise the specter of human extinction, they swiftly back away from that prospect by showing that it cannot happen and that it is unthinkable. In this way, they avoid the end of meaning that extinction entails and proffer an alternative viewpoint in which meaning endures. We’ve been warned to watch the skies. In the movies, they are very busy. Aliens are abundant, and they visit our planet regularly. There are traffic jams in space of saucers waiting to land. A small, partial sampling of alien visitation movies would include The Man from Planet X (1951), Invaders from Mars (1953, 1986), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), It Conquered the World (1956), Invasion of the Saucer Men (1957), The Brain Eaters (1958), The Day Mars

Invaded Earth (1963), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. (1982), Fire in the Sky (1993), Mars Attacks! (1996), The Day the Earth Stopped (2008), Battle: Los Angeles (2011), Cowboys & Aliens (2011), Pacific Rim (2013), Arrival (2016), and Annihilation (2018). How different this is from reality. The skies are silent, enduringly silent. There have been no visitations, no verifiable sightings, no signals or communications from intelligent extraterrestrials in spite of concerted searches by NASA and other organizations. “Where, then, is everybody?” That question or one like it is said to have been posed by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, creator of the first nuclear reactor. It is known as Fermi’s paradox. There are thousands of confirmed planets existing outside our solar system, and these numbers inspire hope among scientists that intelligent life may exist on other habitable planets. SETI scientists use the Drake Equation to estimate the number of habitable planets containing intelligent life, based on the number of planets in the galaxy, the portion that are likely to be habitable, and the probability of life arising there. The estimates are speculative and are based on optimistic assumptions about the likelihood that life will develop when conditions are right. And yet, on Earth, it took a very, very long time for complex, intelligent life to emerge. The earliest single-celled life forms developed at least three and a half billion years ago, and carbon remnants potentially left by primitive life forms go back four billion years (Bell et al.). It took much longer for elaborate organisms to arise. Complex, multicelled life forms appeared six hundred million years ago, dinosaurs and early mammals appeared two hundred million years ago, and the earliest evidence of Homo sapiens, modern humans, is only two hundred thousand years old. Using a method of statistical inference, astrophysicists in the United States and Japan found that, though primitive life forms originated relatively rapidly on Earth, this did not provide confirmation of its existence elsewhere, despite the number of planets that have been identified. “Our conclusion [is] that the early emergence of life on Earth is consistent with life being very rare in the universe” (Spiegel and Turner). This view provides one way of resolving Fermi’s paradox. Perhaps Earth is an anomaly, and given the fragility of life, if it does emerge, volatile, unstable, or radically changing planetary conditions can erase it. These conditions might include climate change, volcanic eruption, or collisions with comets or asteroids, all of which have held great interest for filmmakers who have vividly pictured these disasters and their effects. Indeed, with alien invasion, the other prominent form that astrophobia takes in cinema is collision

with a large, interplanetary object that threatens to wipe out life as we know it. Unlike stories about alien visitation, though, celestial impact events are not imaginary. This means that whereas the alien-invasion movies notably depart from reality, movies about celestial collisions have a basis in fact. A massive impact event sixty-six million years ago wiped out 75 percent of all Earth species. The Chicxulub crater, 110 miles in diameter, in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula is the remnant of the asteroid popularly known as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. Sustained bombardment by meteors and asteroids was extremely common in the early history of the solar system, as planets formed and collided with leftover remnants of matter and then shifted their orbits onto paths that intersected with asteroids (Goldin; Fassett and Minton). Millions of years later, Earth experienced another episode, known as the Late Heavy Bombardment, when impact events again surged. All terrestrial planets show traces of this process, and it created a volatile environment challenging to life. “This early bombardment would . . . have frustrated the development and evolution of early life, with the largest impacts having the capacity to effectively sterilize the surface of the globe” (Earth Impact Database). Large impact events produce a fireball that blows a hole in the atmosphere, dispersing a plume of material that can encircle the globe in a short time, blocking the sun and altering temperature as in a nuclear winter. An impact event producing “energy greater than the world’s nuclear arsenal occurs on a time-scale of less than a million years” (Earth Impact Database). This is outside the scale of human history, which means that it’s not something we should worry about today, but it will happen. The opening rhetoric of Armageddon about it being inevitable that a large impact event will occur is not an exaggeration. As noted by the Earth Impact Database, which compiles a global record of known, verified impacts, “While we seldom think of civilization in of millions of years, there is little doubt that if civilization lasts long enough, it will suffer severely or may even be destroyed by an impact event.” As we’ve seen, the very first apocalyptic feature film, Verdens Undergang, pictured a global disaster resulting from a large comet ing near the Earth. Filmmakers often have returned to collisions with celestial bodies as a plot device, perhaps, in part, because they’ve had continuing inspiration from actual close calls. In 2003, the asteroid Hermes ed by Earth at a distance close to that of the moon. Hermes had visited four times previously, going back to 1936, when it was first seen. In 1989, another asteroid ed Earth’s orbit within half a million miles, which is just a few hours at orbital velocity. The impact from

either would be equivalent to twenty thousand hydrogen bombs (Leary). The first significant production of a collision film in the sound era, When Worlds Collide (1951), based on a 1933 novel by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie, invokes a biblical framework for its disaster narrative. The opening credits appear against a background of flames, and its first image is of a Bible being opened to Genesis 6:12—“And God looked upon the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth”—and then the pages are opened to 6:13, with God’s promise to destroy the Earth. Scientists discover a large star, Belus, with an Earth-sized planet, Xyra. Belus is on a collision course with Earth and will obliterate it, while Xyra will close by but not hit the Earth. Newspapers proclaim, with the cynical toughness that movies have traditionally attributed to journalists, “End of the world, just around the corner,” while the astronomer Cole Hendron (Larry Keating) persuades a few humanitarian investors to fund his project to build a rocket ship that can transport up to forty people and animals to Xyra before Belus hits. It becomes a race-against-the-clock story as Hendron and his team work feverishly to build the ship and then select its engers. As Xyra approaches, it triggers volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and floods, which the film depicts with visual-effects imagery of collapsing bridges, tottering and exploding oil derricks, villages consumed in fire, blown-out electrical transformers, molten lava pouring down a mountainside, glaciers fracturing and crashing into the sea, tidal waves flooding the land, and an inundated New York City, where giant ships lay capsized against the skyscrapers. (For centuries, Manhattan and its familiar landmarks have been inviting targets for the apocalyptic imagination of novelists, artists, and filmmakers [Page]). It is the orgy of destruction that apocalypse movies traditionally promise to deliver to audiences, and in its wake, society begins to break down, with rioting and looting as symptoms of end-times behavior and of the corruption that God promised to punish. The workers at Hendron’s compound who’ve not been chosen to evacuate Earth arm themselves with guns and attack the rocket ship as it prepares to take off, which it manages to do under fire and at the last possible moment as Belus draws near. The ship successfully lands on Xyra, which proves to be an Earth-like planet. The rocket ship is clearly a new Ark, and as the engers disembark, carrying two animals of each kind, a heavenly choir appears on the soundtrack and a closing text, in the same font as the earlier biblical quotes, tells us, “The first day on the new world had begun.” Xyra is the New Jerusalem promised in the book of Revelation, the new heaven and the new Earth. Mass destruction of Earth has occurred, but the ending gives it a moral justification within this biblical framework of renewal

and regeneration. Comets and other celestial bodies worked a variety of mischief in the years that followed. In The Monolith Monsters (1957), fragments of a meteorite that crashes in California begin growing to mountainous size and turning people to stone. A ing meteor shower in The Day of the Triffids (1962) blinds all who see it and leaves spores on Earth that turn into giant, carnivorous plants. Dust from a meteor tail turns people into zombies in Night of the Comet (1984). In The Day the Sky Exploded (1958), Meteor (1979), Deep Impact (1998), and Armageddon (1998), giant asteroids heading for Earth promise to create extinction-level events, and in some of these films, nuclear weapons save the day. (This strategy has been seriously considered. Officials examined the use of nuclear weapons against asteroids at a conference held in Colorado in 1982 [Leary].) Fired at or planted on the approaching rogue impactors, nuclear weapons turn them to harmless rubble. These films make a collective statement that the resourcefulness of humankind, its technological prowess, and its scientific and military might will prevail against the most daunting cosmic challenges. Though apocalypse and extinction seem to draw near, humanity’s can-do attitude defeats them. In Armageddon, Bruce Willis detonates an atomic bomb in the last, precious seconds to destroy the monster asteroid before it can strike Earth. He heroically sacrifices his own life, as do a group of astronauts in Deep Impact who pilot their spacecraft into a crevasse on the asteroid and detonate a nuclear weapon, which obliterates them but saves Earth. These sacrificial gestures stave off extinction for humanity, and the films use the moral value of heroic self-sacrifice as a means of exorcising the threat of extinction. How can humanity possibly end when it is capable of such transcendent gestures? The marketing tag line for Deep Impact expresses the collective orientation of these films: “Oceans rise. Cities fall. Hope survives.” Indeed, despite the hundreds of movies depicting an apocalypse, those that show a real, final ending where there are no survivors are rather rare. As one of the screenwriters of Knowing (2009), Ryne Douglas Pearson, remarked, “Hollywood really doesn’t make movies like this where the world ends. Bruce Willis saves it” (Moore 181). And yet, despite this apparent confidence, the approach of the millennium seemed to renew doubts about the sustainability of human life and an accompanying fear of the cosmos. The new century saw a boom in production of movies about celestial collision: Post Impact (2004), Futureshock: Comet (2007), Collision Earth (2011), Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

(2012), Earth’s Final Hours (2011), These Final Hours (2013), Asteroid vs. Earth (2014), Impact Earth (2015), Annihilation (2018). Belonging to this millennial production boom, but more reflective and philosophical because it comes from the art-film tradition, is Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), which expresses a level of pessimism that one rarely finds in cosmic end-of-the-world movies. A giant planet that astronomers have named Melancholia is on a collision course with Earth, and two sisters, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and Justine (Kirsten Dunst); Claire’s husband, John (Kiefer Sutherland); and her child, Leo, await the arrival of the rogue planet at a wealthy country estate. Justine suffers from a crippling depression that makes her seem indifferent to the planet’s approach. John, an amateur astronomer, believes the predictions of scientists that the planet will close by but not hit the Earth. Claire is terrified that it will hit. As Melancholia grows ever larger in the sky, John realizes that he and the scientists were wrong, that it will obliterate the Earth, and in an act of cowardice, he commits suicide, abandoning his family. Claire reaches out to Justine for comfort and is rebuffed. Justine coldly tells her, “The Earth is evil. We don’t need to grieve for it. Nobody will miss it. We’re alone. Life exists only on Earth, and not for long.” As Steven Shaviro writes, the film “makes us aware of a universe that is not centered upon, or necessarily correlated with, humankind.” Von Trier thus denies the various systems—belief in religion or science or technology, belief in heroism and self-sacrifice—that impart transcendent value on impending catastrophe and that traditionally operate to create meaning in stories about cosmic destruction. Not only does von Trier deny them a role, but he suggests that the comforts they provide are wholly imaginary. As the planet draws closer, a frightened Leo says to Justine, “Dad said there’s nothing to do, nowhere to hide.” To reassure him, she promises to build a magic cave that will protect him. They cut tree limbs and place them together in the form of a teepee. It’s the skeletal outline of a structure. It has no covering, just the sticks converging in teepee form, and sits in a field on the estate’s golf course. Justine, Claire, and Leo shelter inside this meager structure in their final moments. Claire weeps in fear, Justine remains very calm, and Leo appears to believe in the magic of the cave, but it makes no difference, offers no protection. There is no magic. They are incinerated. But von Trier cannot cancel all value. Their end is accompanied by the luscious, gorgeous music of Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. The beauty of this music expresses a transcendental emotional value as art, something that von Trier has denied to religion, science, or technology. Justine’s philosophical nihilism, her inability to find meaning or value anywhere, proves to be incompatible with art

itself and the human strivings that inform it, with von Trier’s own carefully crafted work as a filmmaker and the energy and belief that he has poured forth into that work. Making and seeking meaning prove to be an inescapably human impulse. Though Melancholia gestures otherwise, it cannot dispense with this element of redemptive meaning. Eugene Thacker writes that human beings cannot not seek meaning, and so we inevitably think about the world as being a fundamentally human place: “We cannot help but to think of the world as a human world, by virtue of the fact that it is we human beings who think it. . . . All of these interpretive lenses— mythological, theological, existential—have as their most basic presupposition a view of the world as a human-centric world, as a world ‘for us’ as human beings, living in human cultures, governed by human values” (8). Extinction challenges this orientation because it involves a world that is without us, which Thacker calls a spectral and speculative concept, one difficult to think about. How can a thinking person picture a world where thought does not exist? It is equally difficult to picture one’s own death and a world-without-me. As Edward Mooney writes, “If I try to think of my own death, I have to picture myself both dead and undead—I must be undead to do the picturing of my death. This enigma is uncanny because we half-see, half don’t see, what’s going on.” The worldwithout-us lies somewhere between what can be conceived and what cannot (Thacker 9). Films have difficulty depicting a world-without-us because if the images are there, it means that a camera operator is there, which is incompatible with extinction. In Melancholia, the film ends at the point of extinction, whereas in most other apocalypse movies, it fails to happen. The movies about large objects from space striking the Earth propose that extinction-level events may result from the impact. In some—Melancholia, These Final Hours, Seeking a Friend—the end of all human life does occur. In most, however, human resourcefulness and bravery avert total catastrophe. Although these films portray a dangerous cosmic intervention into the state of life on Earth, the outcome is one consistent with the viewpoint of natural theology that Earth was created to be the home of humankind and that this home, this world of nature, will remain a stable and enduring one. Thus, most of these movies are about the triumph of humanity and the preservation of its natural home. In a similar fashion, the model of apocalypse in the Judeo-Christian tradition that many films draw from proposes that the reward for a virtuous humanity is a transcendent rebirth at the end of time. And yet the geological record of life on Earth suggests differently. It shows that a series of extinction

events have occurred that have wiped out 70 to 90 percent of Earth’s living species (Brannen). Many were accompanied by impact cratering from collisions with celestial objects and/or by catastrophic levels of volcanic eruption that produced continent-sized lava flows (Keller 725). The extinction of the nonavian dinosaurs and marine life sixty-six million years ago, for example, occurred in the same geological time that a large asteroid struck Earth in the Gulf of Mexico and that massive lava flows from erupting volcanoes in India had been ongoing for thousands of years (Richards et al.). Although scientists do not fully understand the interaction or relation between these catastrophes, they would have produced numerous toxic effects: a fireball and shockwave, a worldwide rain of meteorites as the ejected material from the asteroid strike fell back to Earth, global warming and ocean acidification from the buildup of carbon dioxide released by volcanism, and ecosystem poisoning from sulfur dioxide injected into the stratosphere (Shoene et al.). Some evidence indicates that there may be a recurring, cyclic interval to these events, with extinction events and impact cratering occurring on an apparent twenty-six- to thirty-million-year cycle corresponding to the movement of the solar system through the galaxy (Rampino; Rampino and Caldeira). In these ways, Earth’s history and its life forms are affected by catastrophes tied to the actions of other bodies in the universe. The effects of impact cratering and volcanic activity are observable elsewhere in the solar system, and, as Michael Rampino writes, “Why should the Earth be spared the cosmic disasters so evident on other planets?” (227). These disasters have produced irrevocable changes on Earth and have decimated many of its forms of life. Indeed, the majority of species that ever lived are now extinct. One resolution of Fermi’s paradox is that the aliens are silent because they are extinct, that “early extinction would be the most common fate of planetary life” (Chopra and Lineweaver 8). The volatility of early planetary conditions might work to eliminate emergent life before it can become established, and over time, planets would evolve away from habitability. “Extinction is the cosmic default for most life that has ever emerged on the surfaces of wet rocky planets in the Universe”—early extinction is the norm, write Aditya Chopra and Charles H. Lineweaver (7). “Early life is fragile, so we believe it rarely evolves quickly enough to survive” (Australian National University). This view takes us to a different place than does the idea of apocalypse, which makes human life central to the workings of the cosmos and reveals the eternal life at the end of time. The idea of apocalypse is inextricably linked to concepts

of justice and reward. This helps to explain the evident paradox that apocalypse movies can be highly pleasurable. More often than not, they are tales of survival; they tell us how we can surmount catastrophe. But apocalypse and extinction are not the same thing. Instead of the moral order that apocalypse establishes, extinction and the planetary catastrophes of impact events and severe volcanism point to a cosmos whose physical workings are indifferent to human life. As Thomas Moynihan writes, “Apocalypse means revelation. Extinction, by direct contrast, reveals precisely nothing, and this is because it instead predicts the end of meaning and morality itself—if there are no humans, there is nothing humanly meaningful left.” Judgment Day is comforting—the workings of the universe accord with justice and morality. “On the other hand, extinction alerts us to the fact that . . . everything is at stake” (Moynihan). While apocalypse movies have begun to explore this idea, we’re now in a position to see that apocalypse does not mean “the end.” Extinction does. Because it is more pleasurable to tell stories about apocalypse, we may regard it as a narrative form that exorcises the world-without-us from our collective consciousness.

3

I’m Not Saying We Wouldn’t Get Our Hair Mussed

In War Games (1983), a US Air Force supercomputer abruptly stages a massive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union, which military officials manage to cancel, but the computer keeps trying to start a nuclear war and cannot be disconnected. In Miracle Mile (1989), a wrong telephone number alerts a young couple to an impending nuclear attack within the hour, and they try desperately to get out of the city. In Panic in Year Zero (1962), a suburban family heading for vacation in the mountains is startled to see a mushroom cloud rising above Los Angeles, and they are soon plunged into a survivalist nightmare. In Planet of the Apes (1968), a nuclear war brings an end to human civilization and ushers in a topsy-turvy world where apes rule. In Deterrence (1999), faced with an Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the US president obliterates Baghdad in a nuclear attack despite Iraqi warnings that it will launch devastating strikes against numerous Western countries. A game changer in human history, nuclear weapons motivate the cataclysms in scores of apocalypse and postapocalypse movies. Among the visions and revelations contained in the apocalyptic texts appearing in the Bible, the second epistle of Peter foresees the world being destroyed by fire. “The heavens shall away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up” (3:10). When the United States destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs in 1945 at the close of World War II, many people invoked this age from Peter as a means of explaining and making sense of the destruction (Boyer 116). Biblical prophecy and apocalypse provided a means for understanding the dawn of the atomic age. But by focusing on fire alone, Peter’s prophecy doesn’t go far enough as a description of atomic weapons. They have numerous kill mechanisms. An electromagnetic pulse causes a surge of voltage through electrical lines and batteries that knocks out power and communications, crippling the fragile network that modern society depends on. Radiation released into the environment enters people, animals, soil, and crops, poisoning all. A fireball and

thermal pulse incinerate everything within miles of ground zero and spread a blast wave outward in all directions. Radioactive dust and debris are sucked upward into a giant mushroom cloud and become lethal fallout as they gradually return to the ground, with toxic effects on all living things. If enough atomic weapons are used in a major war, the resulting dust and debris may enter the upper atmosphere, encircling the Earth, blocking out the sun, and causing a nuclear winter that lowers global temperatures, killing plants, inhibiting photosynthesis, and causing widespread food shortages. Little Boy, used on Hiroshima, was a 15-kiloton bomb (the force of one thousand tons of TNT). Fat Man, used on Nagasaki, was 20 kilotons. More than 90 percent of the buildings in Hiroshima were destroyed or damaged from the blast. That was seventy years ago, and today’s warheads are more powerful. In 2019, the United States had an estimated stockpile of thirty-eight hundred nuclear warheads (Kristensen and Korda). The US Air Force maintains four hundred silo-based Minute Man intercontinental ballistic missiles in Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming, each carrying 300–335 kiloton warheads. The US Navy’s ballistic-missile submarines carry approximately ninety warheads per submarine, which range up to 455 kilotons per warhead. The Air Force fields sixty strategic bombers, with each carrying between sixteen and twenty 400kiloton bombs. Unlike zombies, alien invaders, or giant asteroids smashing into Earth, frequent causes of apocalypse in the movies, atomic war is a real and immediate threat, an ongoing danger to humanity. In 2019, the nine nuclear-armed countries spent $73 billion on their arsenals containing more than thirteen thousand nuclear weapons. The United States spent significantly more than any other country, amounting to $67,000 every minute of 2019 (ICAN). Rather than evoking the immediacy of the problem, apocalyptic movies dealing with atomic war often channel it into fantasy or science fiction stories, where its dangers and the anxieties these arouse can be sublimated into resolutions that provide a degree of reassurance that the worst will not occur. As we saw in chapter 2, for example, nuclear weapons provide a good line of defense against aliens and asteroids. Movies often embed the threat of nuclear war in the format of a thriller in which heroes—Tom Cruise, James Bond, Jack Ryan, Batman—intervene to save us and annihilation is narrowly avoided at the last moment: War Games (1983), By Dawn’s Early Light (1990), Crimson Tide (1995), The World Is Not Enough (1999), Deterrence (1999), The Sum of All Fears (2002), Mission Impossible— Ghost Protocol (2011), The Dark Knight Rises (2012). (Thrillers might yoke

multiple anxieties together, blending, for example, fears about nuclear war with anxieties about technology and artificial intelligence, as found in War Games and Terminator 2: Judgment Day [1991]). But sometimes nuclear war is not avoided, and a subset of apocalypse movies, known as postapocalypse films, deal with the aftermath of a devastating event that changes life on Earth but also provides opportunities for having fun. Battling deadly mutants unleashed by radioactivity or disease is an important job for heroes in the postapocalyptic world: The Day the World Ended (1955), The Creation of the Humanoids (1962), The Omega Man (1971), 2019: After the Fall of New York (1983), The Book of Eli (2010). Marauding gangs of punks, thugs, and barbarians also test the bravery of postapocalyptic heroes: Panic in Year Zero (1962), Zardoz (1974), Escape from New York (1981), The New Barbarians (1982), Radioactive Dreams (1985), The Postman (1997). One of the finest pleasures available in the postapocalyptic world is not obeying traffic laws. You can be antisocial, drive fast, aggressively attack other motorists, and totally surrender to road rage: Death Race 2000 (1975), Damnation Ally (1977), The Road Warrior (1981), Miracle Mile (1988), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). In the movies, apocalypse provides new forms of vacation fun. We can shed our inhibitions, kill zombies and mutants, and drive recklessly like there’s no tomorrow because, indeed, sometimes there isn’t. (The postapocalyptic future, of course, isn’t always a West-world vacation land. It can be grim, brutal, and downbeat, as in The Road, Snowpiercer, Time of the Wolf [2003], and others.) These approaches simultaneously acknowledge and calm the anxieties that surround nuclear weapons. These have never gone away because the problem itself endures. As Jonathan Schell writes, “Because the peril is rooted in basic scientific knowledge, which is likely to last as long as mankind does, it is apparently a permanent one” (147). In this chapter, I examine the movies that aim to come to serious with this threat and to candidly represent the apocalypse it would bring: On the Beach (1959, remake 2000), Dr. Strangelove (1964), Fail Safe (1964), The Bedford Incident (1965), The War Game (1966), The Day After (1983), Testament (1983), Threads (1984). Except for the remake of On the Beach, all of these are Cold War–era films, made in a period when tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were very high and their stockpile of warheads was far bigger than it is now. Following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States and the Soviet Union embarked on a nuclear arms race that rapidly escalated in the

1950s as the two superpowers worked to build nuclear arsenals so vast that they would have the ability to annihilate each other, in a policy known as mutually assured destruction (MAD). Whoever launched a first strike would be destroyed in turn by the adversary launching a retaliatory, second strike. During the Cold War, MAD furnished the basis for a policy of nuclear deterrence. But the standoff was terrifying because everyone understood that the prospect of sudden nuclear death was ever present. Presidents, generals, and their policy analysts planned wars calculated to kill hundreds of millions of people. Accepting doomsday created a kind of cultural schizophrenia; daily reality was broken and bifurcated “by a backdrop of scarcely imaginable horror lying just behind the surface of our normal life, and capable of breaking through into that normal life at any second” (Schell, 46). Production of On the Beach, Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe, and The Bedford Incident occurred during this intensive arms race, which reached its peak in 1965–66 when the United States had stockpiled thirty-two thousand nuclear warheads (Norris and Cochran). The buildup was unchecked by any effective efforts to control it. No treaty aimed to reduce the number of warheads until the SALT 1 treaty in 1972. That and subsequent treaties between the United States and the Soviet Union helped to reduce the stockpiles that prevailed in the mid1960s. These four films, then, hail from a period when the acronym MAD accurately conveyed the insanity at work. The three films made in the early 1980s, Testament, The Day After, and Threads, reflect a renewal of nuclear tension connected with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the confrontational spirit of Ronald Reagan’s presidential istration, which labeled the Soviet Union an evil empire intent on world domination. That no comparable films to these have been made since the end of the Cold War is striking because it suggests that a level of complacency and false comfort has replaced the anxieties experienced by the people living during the Cold War, when children did duck-and-cover drills in elementary school, hiding under their desks in the event of a nuclear attack (adults told them with straight faces that desks would protect them), and again in the 1980s, when nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union was being openly discussed. For the most part, these are not movies that present atomic war within the conventions of popular entertainment. Avoiding the conventional plotlines and emotional satisfactions of entertainment is challenging for filmmakers because a candid film about nuclear war is one without an uplifting resolution. That said, several of these productions attracted massive public attention and arguably

exerted a corresponding influence on the attitudes of viewers as well as political leaders. Threads attracted seven million viewers when it aired on BBC television in England, and more than one hundred million viewers tuned in to watch The Day After when it aired on the ABC television network. President Ronald Reagan watched the film before it aired and wrote in his diary, “It’s very effective & left me greatly depressed. My own reaction was one of our having to do all we can to have a deterrent & to see there is never a nuclear war.” During his term of office, President Reagan negotiated the START I and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaties with the Soviet Union, suggesting that The Day After fit with, and perhaps helped reinforce, his inclinations to pursue these arms-reduction measures. While the low-budget, independent film Five (1951) may have been the first US film to depict the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust and was swiftly followed by the nuke quickies Captive Women (1952) and Invasion USA (1953), On the Beach was the first major Hollywood production to explore this theme and did so using famous stars: Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, and Fred Astaire. Based on a 1957 novel by Nevil Shute, it was produced and directed by Stanley Kramer, well-known as a liberal filmmaker who based his movies on challenging and controversial subjects. The film’s story begins just after a nuclear war has wiped out life in the Northern Hemisphere. Survivors in Australia await their doom from radioactive fallout, which the global wind currents are bringing, and the movie builds its emotional power by observing its characters living out their lives and embracing daily pleasures before the inevitable end. These include sailing, bathing at the beach, fishing, raising children, and falling in love, all conducted within the shadow of their rapidly approaching deaths. Their embrace of life at the very end of their time on Earth creates a profound pathos. Gregory Peck plays Dwight Towers, commander of the US submarine Sawfish, which had been at sea during the war and made its way to Australia to escape fallout in the North. His wife and child have died, and he struggles to accept this loss, even as he is drawn toward Moira Davidson (Ava Gardner), a socialite who lives in Melbourne. The Royal Australian Navy has been receiving a strange, garbled, indecipherable signal from the West Coast of the United States, which had been presumed to be entirely dead. Towers agrees to return to the United States with the Sawfish and search for the source of the signal and any signs of life. The answer they find is bleak: a Coke bottle is tangled in the cord of a window shade and is hitting a telegraph key when the wind blows. There are no people left alive. The film’s

depiction of San Francisco and San Diego, visited by the Sawfish, shows that nuclear war exceeded the representational possibilities of what could be shown on-screen in this period. Although in the novel San Francisco has been destroyed, in the film there is no visible damage to the city or any to San Diego. (The 2000 remake corrects this limitation.) There are no bodies in the street, even though everyone has died. If the horror of nuclear war lies in its capacity to destroy humankind and the ecosystem of the planet, On the Beach gives its audience a somewhat sanitized view, without visible victims or physical destruction. Moreover, there is no depiction of nuclear winter because the film preexists that theory. Its exploration and scientific validation were under way in the 1980s, when the astronomer Carl Sagan and his colleagues developed and used the concept to challenge the nuclear politics of the period (Rubinson). The film depicts Australia’s natural world as bucolic, beautiful, and untouched by the conflagration that has destroyed life across the Northern Hemisphere. Towers, Moira, and their friends can lead normal lives here, enjoying nature, food, and drink until the fallout belatedly arrives. Their friends take suicide pills provided by the government, as will Moira. Towers, dying from radiation poisoning, bids Moira good-bye as he and his crew leave Australia in an effort to return their vessel to its home waters. The film’s final images show the public square and streets of Melbourne, now empty of life, looking as San Francisco and San Diego did, dead cities on a planet from which human life has vanished. The final shots emphasize a banner in the public square that reads, “There is still time . . . brother,” an unsubtle warning to the film’s audience. While the film depicts human extinction as the outcome of nuclear war, strategic planning in this period was theorizing that nuclear war could be survivable and winnable. While officials accepted that it would be necessary to kill hundreds of millions of people in a nuclear war, analysts coolly measured victory as anything that fell short of total destruction. Herman Kahn was a physicist and military strategist who worked at the Air Force’s policy think tank, the RAND Corporation, and was involved in the development of the hydrogen bomb. In his widely read book, On Thermonuclear War (1960), he criticized the thesis of Nevil Shute’s novel that nuclear war would lead to total devastation. Calling the novel “badly researched,” he wrote that it was “a fantastic notion that nuclear war would mean the inevitable end of the world” (9). He argued that with proper planning, there would be very distinguishable postwar states, ranging from one with 2 million dead to one with 160 million dead (20). Recovery rates would vary accordingly, and he argued that US society should invest in shelters that would reduce the level of megadeath to an acceptable threshold. If, by investing

in fallout shelters and using mine shafts where people could be evacuated, “we can cut the number of dead from 40 to 20 million, [we’d] have done something vastly worth doing!” And he insisted that “even though the amount of human tragedy would be greatly increased in the postwar world, the increase would not preclude normal and happy lives for the majority of survivors and their descendants” (21). These ideas shaped one of the most influential and extraordinary films about nuclear war, Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Its director, Stanley Kubrick, had read Kahn’s book and consulted with him during production, and he incorporated many of Kahn’s ideas and phrasings into the film (Broderick). The war is triggered when a deranged general, Jack D. Ripper (Sterling Hayden), orders a nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union because he has become sexually impotent, a failing that he insanely projects as necessitating a global nuclear war. “I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids,” he rants, as a low camera angle accentuates the giant cigar in his mouth. Phallic imagery and sexual metaphors abound in the film, which eroticizes the weaponry of mass destruction, fusing the twin primal human impulses that Sigmund Freud described as Eros and Thanatos, the life instinct and the death instinct. Indeed, sexual images and metaphors and fears of emasculation, of looking weak, have long informed military policy and strategic planning. One RAND strategist, for example, described a limited nuclear strike in the of a sexual act, one interrupted by withdrawal before ejaculation, while an all-out nuclear strike was like intercourse that goes all the way (F. Kaplan 142–43). Kahn coined the term “war orgasm” to describe the all-out frenzy of nuclear destruction that he believed the Strategic Air Command generals wanted (223). Kubrick shows this in the film, ending it with a wargasm, a montage of mushroom clouds, the ejaculatory spasm of the “doomsday machine.” Developed secretly by the Soviet Union, the doomsday machine triggers a global nuclear war. The film’s doomsday machine is a computer network that automatically launches a series of nuclear bombs in the event of a first strike against Russia. Though the film presents this as fantasy, in reality the Soviet Union developed such a mechanically delegated device, known as Perimeter or Dead Hand, and the former RAND analyst Daniel Ellsberg speculates that similar doomsday devices have been developed by the other nuclear powers to

ensure effective retaliation in the event of a first strike against them (15–16). By showing that the mad general Ripper has the ability to launch a nuclear strike, the movie unmasks the reality that had been concealed from the US public throughout the Cold War, namely, that US presidents have predelegated launch authority to lower levels of command and, in doing so, have dispersed the launch codes throughout the command hierarchy. This policy increases the probability of a launch by someone other than the president. Ellsberg writes that what seems more likely than the Dr. Strangelove version is “that one or another sane and conscientiously loyal commander might have reason to believe that he was authorized to start a nuclear war under not-uncommon circumstances: possibly on the basis of ambiguous or false tactical warning during a failure of communications with higher command” (75). Before the doomsday machine is triggered in the film, Strategic Air Command (SAC) General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) urges the president, Merkin Muffley (Peter Sellers), to launch a massive first strike against the Soviet Union to limit its ability to retaliate. He uses Kahn’s terminology to press his case: “It is necessary now to make a choice, to choose between two ittedly regrettable but nevertheless distinguishable postwar environments: one where you’ve got 20 million people killed and the other where you’ve got 150 million people killed.” President Muffley objects that this is mass murder, not war. Turgidson replies, bragging euphorically, “Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops, uh, depending on the breaks!” Even in the film’s final moments, before the doomsday device is triggered and disaster is unavoidable, Turgidson and the German scientist Dr. Strangelove (Peter Sellers) plan to evacuate key military personnel to mine shafts where they will breed with a captive supply of attractive women so that society and the military elite can carry on. Stimulated by all of the death that lies ahead, Strangelove’s twisted, crippled body reverts to its Nazi origins. He begins calling the president “Mein Fuhrer,” and his right arm juts upward, erect in a Nazi salute. Kubrick had set out to make a serious film about nuclear war and then realized he couldn’t do it that way, that only satire—cold, savage humor—could do the topic justice. Hence the outlandish character names, the exaggerated eroticism of the weapons of war, the comic mugging in the performances, and the appearance of the actor Peter Sellers as three different characters. This was a brilliant move on Kubrick’s part, a bold stroke that instantly set this film apart from all others on the topic and that enabled it to depict the fundamental insanity of nuclear war

planning, in which megadeath is calibrated in the hundreds of millions or even billions and in which mutually assured destruction is regarded as a viable form of defense. More than any other film, Dr. Strangelove captures what Ellsberg described as the “dizzying irrationality, madness, insanity, at the heart and soul of our nuclear planning and apparatus” (140). And yet its humor gives the film an icy tone. Its characters are comic grotesques. The film does not ask its viewers to empathize with them. Indeed, empathy has no place in the world that Kubrick depicts here, and while this sharpens the film’s wit and savage ironies, it limits viewers’ emotional and moral response to the prospect of nuclear apocalypse. When the world ends as the film’s doomsday machine goes off, it inspires no horror because there is no feeling for what is lost. Doomsday is merely the cream of the jest, the joke that tops all others. Fail Safe was released the same year as Dr. Strangelove and by the same studio, Columbia Pictures, but whereas Kubrick’s film plays nuclear war for comedy, the deeply serious Fail Safe plays it straight. The director, Sidney Lumet, acknowledged these differences: “The two movies, Strangelove and Fail Safe, have everything in common in of storyline and nothing in common in of character, intent or style.” As in Kubrick’s film, US bombers launch a first strike against the Soviet Union, but now, instead of a mad general at fault, the problem is a mechanical breakdown in the computer system that controls the launch. When the breakdown occurs, a congressman, Raskob (Sorrell Booke), is visiting the Strategic Air Command, which oversees the nation’s force of strategic bombers, and is dismayed and frightened by the extent to which computers and machinery operate the nuclear weapons forces. Raskob points out that none of this machinery is under democratic control. About the apparatus and the military men who maintain it, he asks, “Who voted who the power to do it this particular way? I’m the only one around here that got elected by anybody.” With his response, the film acknowledges that the US public has become hostage to a system of mass destruction that it has no say over and no ability to consent to or to challenge. This is an unusual moment. Movies about the danger of atomic war generally base their appeals on humanitarian grounds; they tend not to question or challenge the politics of power that have given rise to these systems in the first place. In an effort to avert all-out nuclear war, the president (Henry Fonda) telephones the Soviet chairman and offers to help the Soviets shoot down the bombers. But one gets through and obliterates Moscow. In the film’s horrifying climax, the president placates the Soviets by offering a sacrifice. He orders the nuclear

bombing of New York City. Lumet ends the film here, with an evocation of the unsuspecting victims and the lives that are lost, establishing a moral framework that is very different from what Stanley Kubrick offered in Dr. Strangelove. As the bomber pilot counts down the final ten seconds before dropping the bomb, a montage of ten shots, one second each, provides glimpses of children playing, visitors to the zoo, a woman walking her dog. Lumet said, “There are ten closeups of the most ordinary street activity going on in New York. What was important to see was the ten little pieces of life that we had up there ended at that moment.” Visualizing the effects of a nuclear bomb used against a city is challenging, posing a problem for representation. As Jonathan Schell writes, “When we strain to picture what the scene would be like after a holocaust we tend to forget that for most people, and perhaps for all, it wouldn’t be like anything, because they would be dead. To depict the scene as it would appear to the living is to that extent a falsification, and the greater the number killed, the greater the falsification. The right vantage point from which to view a holocaust is that of a corpse, but from that vantage point, of course, there is nothing to report” (26). When the bomb hits, Lumet and the editor Ralph Rosenblum reprise the ten shots, very rapidly, with an optical zoom on each, enlarging its focus on the victim. Each zoom ends on a freeze frame. When the reprise ends, the film cuts to white frames, which are followed by a black screen, and then the end credits scroll. It is a devastating ending. The only solace or consolation offered lies in the film’s premise that nuclear disaster can be contained and minimized (only two cities nuked) by the calm, rational thinking of wise political leaders who keep control of the situation. In reality, nobody has figured out how to do this. Like Dr. Strangelove and Fail Safe, The Bedford Incident was made at the height of runaway nuclear escalation in the 1960s and shows how Cold War confrontation between the superpowers might easily end in a nuclear response. It portrays the pursuit of a Soviet nuclear submarine that has been detected inside Greenland territorial waters by a US destroyer, the Bedford. The Bedford’s captain, Eric Finlander (Richard Widmark), is obsessed with confronting the sub, hounding it until its air supply is low and then forcing it to surface under the US guns. His obsession ends in tragedy when an inexperienced ensign misunderstands Findlander’s basic orders and launches an antisubmarine rocket. The sub, detecting the rocket launch and before it is destroyed, dispatches four nuclear torpedoes, which obliterate the Bedford. As in Fail Safe, the film visualizes the explosion from the inside by showing its effect on the principal characters. A rapidly edited montage shows each character in a freeze frame,

which then bubbles and melts, as if the film itself were burning inside the projector. The film ends with the mushroom cloud into which the Bedford has been vaporized, and when the closing credit—“THE END”—appears on screen under the darkened heavens, it’s clear that this credit is also meant as a prophecy for humanity. Produced during a period of uncontrolled nuclear escalation, these films envision circumstances that get out of control—a deranged commander, mechanical failures, errors of tactical and strategic judgment—producing nuclear catastrophe. All were made after the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, a thirteen-day standoff between the presidential istration of John Kennedy and Soviet Russia that nearly spun out of control. Soviet efforts to install nuclear missiles in Cuba triggered the crisis, and though leaders on both sides recognized that it would be foolish to launch a nuclear attack, they were prepared to do so and sacrifice their own people. As the president’s brother Robert Kennedy reflected in his notes at the time, “I felt we were on the edge of a precipice with no way off. . . . President Kennedy had initiated the course of events, but he no longer had control over them” (47–48). The inadvertent nuclear wars depicted in Dr. Strangelove, Fail Safe, and The Bedford Incident all seem to have been inspired by the danger represented by the Cuban Missile Crisis (and Bedford closely tracks a real incident that occurred during the crisis). A second wave of serious cinematic warnings against nuclear war appeared in the early 1980s following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a resumption of hostile relations between the superpowers, and their deployment of new generations of nuclear missiles in Europe. As New York’s Village Voice noted at the time, the bellicosity of superpower rhetoric “quite simply terrifies people” (Cockburn, Ridgeway, and Cockburn), and it produced huge antinuclear demonstrations across Europe and in the United States. Against this backdrop, Testament, The Day After, and Threads were produced for television and offered strong protest against the idea that a nuclear war between the superpowers might be survivable and winnable. Testament tracks the experiences of the Wetherly family living in a suburb outside San Francisco. There is no advance warning of an attack. Suddenly one afternoon while Carol (Jane Alexander) is at home with her three children, their television program is interrupted by a newscaster who announces that there have been explosions of nuclear devices “in New York and up and down the East Coast.” The television signal dies, and they see a blinding white flash outside their window from a bomb that has detonated on San Francisco. Beyond this, there are no images of devastation in the film. Its focus

instead resembles that of On the Beach, concentrating on the pathos of watching characters whom we have come to know succumbing to the toxic effects of fallout. Subsequent scenes depict the poisoning and deaths of everyone in Carol’s suburb, including her children. She buries two of them, and as the film ends, she awaits the death of her oldest son and of herself. By avoiding imagery of physical destruction from nuclear explosions, the film keeps its focus on the human of Carol’s efforts to cope with unbearable loss. The Day After presents a more comprehensive view of what could happen. Set in the Midwest in the cities of Kansas City, Missouri, and Lawrence, Kansas, and on surrounding farms, the film introduces a broad swath of characters: a medical doctor, Russell Oakes (Jason Robards), and his family; the medical staff of a hospital in Lawrence; an airman stationed at a Minuteman missile silo; a Missouri farmer and his family; and a graduate student (Steve Guttenberg) traveling between Kansas City and Joplin, Missouri. The film’s opening shots evoke mythic scenes of Midwest Americana, which play off the mounting sense of dread felt by the characters listening to radio reports of clashes between Soviet and US forces in Europe. The escalating conflict results initially in a limited, tactical nuclear exchange on the battlefield, but this swiftly leads to a massive, all-out attack by each superpower on the other. The film shows the silo-based Minuteman missiles launching from the verdant fields and farms of Kansas and Missouri. The imagery is powerful and surreal. As the missiles streak into the sky en route to the Soviet Union, stunned farmers and ordinary folk watch with gaping mouths. They knew the missiles were there, buried beneath their fields, but they built their lives believing they’d never have to be confronted with that reality and what it meant. The sequence vividly shows how intertwined the nuclear state has become with everyday life in the Midwest. Dr. Oakes is driving to the University of Kansas, where he lectures, when a nuclear bomb is airburst above Kansas City, producing an electromagnetic pulse that knocks out all of the cars on the highway and all electrical power in the city. Two evil-looking mushroom clouds swell above the roadway, and then the film shows an extended sequence of destruction from the blast and heat wave. People and animals are vaporized, shown in visual effects shots in which their skeletons appear inside their bodies like an x-ray before they disappear entirely. The remainder of the film shows the characters who survived the blast slowly succumbing to radiation poisoning. At the end, Oakes, who has lost his family, makes his way to Kansas City and finds that it has been completely obliterated. The film ends here, with the suggestion that the rest of the country is like Kansas City.

Threads provides a yet more comprehensive and bleaker portrait of nuclear war, and it was a second attempt by the BBC television network to explore the topic. Its first attempt two decades earlier was Peter Watkins’s The War Game (1966), which offered harsh criticism of governmental officials and civil defense programs that promoted the idea that nuclear war could be coped with and survived. Watkins’s film used a documentary style to portray a nuclear attack on the United Kingdom that utterly devastates civil society, and the BBC refused to air it on the grounds that what it showed was too horrible for an audience to watch. Though the film had a brief theatrical release, it was largely suppressed at the time and was not aired on television until 1985, just before a repeat broadcast of Threads. Directed without compromise by Mick Jackson, Threads depicts life in Sheffield, a city in northern England. A Soviet invasion of Iran leads to a series of limited nuclear exchanges with the United States that rapidly become full-scale attacks. Eighty megatons of nuclear bombs fall on the United Kingdom, devastating Sheffield. People are blinded, burned, and radiated, incinerated in their homes, which the government has told them to fortify with sandbags. The civil defense authorities in Sheffield, appointed to coordinate recovery efforts, are buried and suffocated under the rubble of the building where they work. Unlike most other nuclear-war films, which end shortly after the bombs have fallen, as if anything further is unimaginable, Threads extends its portrait of suffering and social breakdown into a full decade following the nuclear war. A nuclear winter has cut crop yields and produced widespread starvation; a diminished ozone layer has produced blindness and cancers; the population level in Europe has fallen to medieval levels; subsistence farming is performed with primitive tools; and young people born after the war, lacking education or an intact family, speak a primitive, broken form of English. All life is not wiped out, and a rudimentary social recovery begins to happen; but a decade after the war, overall living conditions remain barbaric. The film’s portrait is a radical challenge to political leaders who tell their publics that nuclear war can be a tactical and controlled battlefield exercise. Testament, The Day After, and Threads leave viewers feeling shaken and upset, and this is their aim. They are not postapocalyptic dramas of survival; instead, they are responses to specific fears and stressors produced by the Cold War and by the dangerous and prolonged nuclear checkmate that has succeeded it. The dearth of such films since the 1980s suggests that anxiety levels have diminished, but this complacency relies on an illusion of safety that is hardly warranted because the threat of nuclear apocalypse remains more dangerous than ever. Today nuclear treaties and agreements are being abandoned by the United

States and Russia, new nuclear powers are emerging, such as Iran and North Korea, and the superpowers are developing new generations of weapons with first-strike capabilities and enhanced destructive power and are openly stating that limited nuclear strikes are an acceptable battlefield strategy. Since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has issued a yearly statement about threats to humanity and the planet and has used the metaphor of a Doomsday Clock counting down to midnight (apocalypse). The clock’s time had been measured in minutes until 2020, when the unit shrank to seconds. The Bulletin moved its clock forward to one hundred seconds before midnight, the closest it has ever been to apocalypse, and wrote, “Any belief that the threat of nuclear war has been vanquished is a mirage” (Mecklin). Describing the global situation as “unsustainable and extremely dangerous,” the report stated, “The world is sleepwalking its way through a newly unstable nuclear landscape. The arms control boundaries that have helped prevent nuclear catastrophe for the last half century are being steadily dismantled. . . . Civilization-ending nuclear war— whether started by design, blunder, or simple miscommunication—is a genuine possibility.” The Bulletin’s concluding statement is unambiguous: “It is now 100 seconds to midnight, the most dangerous situation that humanity has ever faced” (Mecklin). It has been more than two generations since the television feature films of the 1980s warned of the looming danger. Why has cinema remained so quiet about the ongoing threat while flirting with nuclear-war thrillers and postapocalyptic movies of survival? Why has the danger of nuclear war seemingly vanished from culture and the arts and from public awareness? As the famed novelist John le Carré has asked, “Why isn’t the threat of nuclear war today as present or terrifying to us as it was in [earlier generations]? Is it simply that the nuclear threat is so ubiquitous, so diffuse and irrational?” Perhaps it is the sheer difficulty of imagining the stakes involved and the willingness of political leaders to sacrifice their own people in games of nuclear brinksmanship. Or perhaps by pretending not to know or to worry, the danger can be imaginatively erased. This is what Fred Kaplan concluded about the politicians, strategists, and planners of nuclear war during the Cold War, those who spoke calmly and confidently about survivability in the face of billions of casualties: “They performed their calculations and spoke in their strange and esoteric tongues because to do otherwise would be to recognize, all too clearly and constantly, the ghastliness of their contemplations. They contrived their options because without them the bomb would appear too starkly as the thing that they had tried to prevent it from being but that it would ultimately become if it ever were used—a

device of sheer mayhem, a weapon whose cataclysmic powers no one really had the faintest idea of how to control” (390–91). Representation in cinema and elsewhere in popular media tends to pull back from an abyss that can hardly be contemplated for long. The apocalyptic portraits of nuclear war burn through the popular imagination, scorching it with visions that cannot long be held within the mind’s eye.

4

The Revenge of Nature

In December 2019, a new and severe respiratory disease appeared in China, and in three months, it spread throughout the world, infecting millions of people. It paralyzed the global economy, overwhelmed hospitals whose corridors were stacked with corpses in body bags, and killed so many victims that industrial cranes were used to lift bodies into refrigerated trucks for storage and internment in mass graves. By mid-April, four months after it had appeared, it was killing between two and three thousand people a day in the United States (Fox et al.), which swiftly became the country with more infection and death than anywhere else in the world. During the winter that followed, a second wave pounded countries across the globe, driving infection rates and deaths to even higher levels. While this sounds like a movie, the Covid-19 pandemic not only is real but is the most recent in a long series of pestilential catastrophes that have blighted human life and overwhelmed societies. This history furnishes an important source for cinematic visions of the apocalypse. In light of pestilence’s extensive effects on human history, it barely makes an appearance in the book of Revelation. Famously riding a pale steed and bringing hell with him, the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse slaughters one-fourth of the people of the Earth by sword and by famine and then somewhat incidentally by plague. Subsequently, when an angel pours out the first of the seven bowls, the sinful of the Earth break out in ugly and painful sores and curse God. That is it for pestilence, all that Revelation has to say. By comparison, in that book, the divine wrath favors spectacular forms of physical destruction: oceans turning to blood, stars falling from the heavens, titanic earthquakes and fires, cities and mountains torn down. While there are numerous incidental references to pestilence throughout the Bible, and while the ancient world was well acquainted with epidemics of disease, pestilence plays a small role in the Bible’s most famous book of the apocalypse. By contrast, pestilence plays a major role in apocalyptic movies, where it is often the cause that brings on (or nearly brings on) the world’s end: Bio-Dead

(2009), Carriers (2009), Contagion (2011), I Am Legend (2007), The Omega Man (1971), Doomsday (2008), Infected (2012), Pandemic (2016), Plague (2015), Containment (2015), Stake Land (2010), The Stand (1994), Quarantine (2008), Terminal Virus (1995), 12 Monkeys (1995), 28 Days Later (2002), 28 Weeks Later (2007), World War Z (2013), Flu (2013), Train to Busan (2016), Cargo (2017), Patient Zero (2018). Most of these productions appeared after the year 2000, suggesting that they are responses to a contemporary sense of crisis in which large-scale disease infection furnishes an especially salient trope. Pandemic movies rarely appeared in earlier decades. Their closest approximations are infrequent movies such as Panic in the Streets (1950) and The Cassandra Crossing (1977) in which authorities try to track and trace a carrier of plague before he can infect large numbers of people. Additionally, historical dramas set in the Middle Ages, such as The Seventh Seal (1956) and The Devils (1971), include depictions of the Black Death as part of their period setting. But none of these qualify as depictions of an apocalypse. Disease apocalypse movies imaginatively transform the heritage of pestilence in human history, in which its relentless march has evoked a sense of the end times. In the sixth century, for example, bubonic plague decimated the Roman and Persian Empires, and the pathogen returned in the fourteenth century. Known then as the Black Death, it killed more than thirty million people in Europe and depopulated the Middle East and China. The Black Death assumed three forms. As bubonic plague, fleas that feasted on rodents spread the plague bacillus to people, causing them to break out in purple splotches and large, festering boils, killing 60 percent of those who caught it. Its second form was pneumonic plague. If the bacilli invaded the victim’s lungs, the sufferer would violently cough up blood and sputum, transmitting the disease like flu. If the bacilli migrated in massive numbers to the victim’s bloodstream, septicemic plague would develop and kill everyone who contracted it. This could happen in as little as fourteen hours. So many people died and so quickly that it seemed like the world was ending. The Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun was seventeen years old when the Black Death struck Tunis in North Africa, and he wrote that it was “as if the voice of existence in the world had called out for oblivion” (qtd. in Kelly 12). In 1918, an avian virus jumped species and infected humans with an extremely lethal, highly transmissible form of influenza that swept the globe and killed upwards of fifty million people. Most died from a vicious form of pneumonia. Victims’ lungs filled with cell debris, fluids, and pus and became hardened and

inflexible, unable to oxygen to the blood. People turned blue from cyanosis. Many turned so dark that doctors thought the Black Death had returned. Indeed, there were so many strange symptoms not typically associated with flu that doctors believed the outbreak must be caused by something else. Many symptoms were hemorrhagic. Victims vomited blood, and it spurted and leaked from their eyes, ears, noses, and other openings. Autopsies revealed that numerous internal organs had been ravaged by the virus. The onset of symptoms could lead to rapid death within hours. “Influenza struck so suddenly . . . that throughout the world reports were common of people who toppled off horses, collapsed on the sidewalk” (Barry 242). When the virus burned through Philadelphia, hundreds of thousands fell ill, and hundreds died daily (Barry 222). As with Covid-19 today, doctors and nurses worked at the front lines of the battle, and many sickened and fell. Hospitals were overwhelmed, and the dead piled up in homes and on the street, too many to bury. The air reeked of death, and the city buried many bodies in mass graves. It was a horror scene akin to what a movie might portray. Indeed, this experience with a viral pandemic strongly influenced the zombie apocalypse movies that we will examine in this chapter, which portray zombie plagues as epidemiological outbreaks. The 1918 flu was a zoonotic disease, meaning that the viral pathogen originated in animals (in this case, in birds) and moved into humans when it had mutated in ways that enabled it to lock onto and attack human cells. Often an intermediate host is necessary, such as a pig, which is genetically similar to humans and can serve as a mixing vessel for human and animal viruses (Oldstone 323). Once in its human host, the virus invades human cells, taking them over and using them to manufacture millions of new viruses, killing the host cells. The 1918 virus could send tens of thousands of virus particles to the lungs, far more than ordinary seasonal flu, and was a hundred times more lethal (Jordan, Tumpey, and Jester). When zoonosis occurs and the pathogen jumps species, its effects can be aggressive and deadly because people lack immunity to a new pathogen. H5N1 bird flu, which broke out in Hong Kong, killed 60 percent of the people it infected. Ebola virus (from bats), which produces hemorrhagic fever, kills between 45 and 83 percent of its victims, depending on the outbreak. AIDS (from monkeys) jumped the species barrier a century ago, but a massive outbreak did not occur until the 1980s. Since then, it has killed twenty-four to forty-four million people (UNAIDS). Terror and superstition accompany the infectious waves of these pandemics because the killers cannot be seen, their approach is stealthy, and their feasting

on human beings produces horrifying results, which apocalyptic movies portray in especially vivid . This terror is rooted in what the pandemics reveal about the nature of a disease apocalypse: that it and the pathogens that cause it are part of an ecosystem that human beings cannot escape, to which they are biologically bound, and in which they are food sources, as are all other living things. A disease apocalypse reveals the vulnerable place that people occupy in the web of life, where they are beset by microorganisms seeking them as hosts. “Humans are inseparable from the natural world. . . . Humankind is part of that world, as are the ebolaviruses, as are the influenzas and the HIVs, . . . as is the next murderous virus—the one we haven’t yet detected” (Quammen 518). Indeed, the virosphere—the universe of viruses—contains billions and billions of viruses, found on land, in the ocean, and in the atmosphere (Suttle; Mushegian), most of which remain unknown to science. The deadly zoonotic viruses result from us, our behavior. As forests are cut and people move into what once were wilderness areas, crowding their wild animal denizens or bringing wild animals into dense urban populations, as occurs in China’s wet markets offering wild animals for sale as food, zoonotic viruses have greatly increased opportunities to adapt to human hosts. The Covid-19 virus probably originated in bats, probably in China’s horseshoe bat, serving as a reservoir species carrying the pathogen for decades before it ed to humans and successfully adapted to them (Boni et al.). As the disease historian William McNeill writes, “most human lives [are] caught in a precarious equilibrium between the microparasitism of disease organisms and the macroparasitism of large-bodied predators, chief among which have been other human beings” (24). Movies depicting a disease apocalypse emphasize the horror and terror that accompany a rapidly spreading pandemic plague and, in many cases, situate these responses within action-adventure narratives. While a plague afflicting humanity provides a premise for the story, the movies frequently emphasize a different set of conflicts and goals among the characters. The Satan Bug (1965), for example, posits that a bioweapons facility in the California desert develops a pathogen capable of wiping out every person on the planet. A mad doctor, Hoffman (Richard Basehart), working at the plant steals the virus along with another, less deadly toxin and threatens to release it. The story focuses on a raceagainst-time effort by an intelligence agent (George Maharis) to locate and retrieve the virus, and his efforts generate the film’s suspense. The story is not about human struggle against the virus itself but against the mad doctor and his efforts to blackmail the world. The Andromeda Strain (1971) depicts a virus

from space that comes to Earth riding on a government satellite and wipes out life in a small New Mexico town. Four scientists in a government lab below ground in Nevada work feverishly to decode and neutralize the pathogen, but, fortunately, it mutates into a nonlethal form, sparing the planet a possible doomsday scenario. The film’s climax focuses on efforts to avert a nuclear explosion rather than the ravages of viral death. Both films include eerie, disturbing sequences showing the deadly effects of an aggressive pathogen on small communities. Flyover images show bodies littering the streets in Florida (The Satan Bug) and New Mexico (Andromeda), ordinary people cut down suddenly amid their daily activities. But neither film focuses directly on the spread of disease among a vulnerable population. In each, this remains an unrealized threat, whereas in contemporary films, the focus on pathogenic spread is ongoing and common. Outbreak (1995) depicts the emergence in Africa of an aggressive, lethal virus, which the film names Motaba but which is based on the hemorrhagic fever diseases Ebola and Marburg, which have caused many deaths throughout that region. The film has the US military weaponizing the virus and storing it in its biological-warfare arsenal, but then a new outbreak occurs in the United States, which a team led by the army colonel Sam Daniels (Dustin Hoffman) investigates. While the paranoia subplot of US Army malevolence, personified by the villainous Major General McClintock (Donald Sutherland) who is ready to firebomb a US city to conceal the secret of the virus’ origins, takes the film into the familiar action-adventure genre that disease apocalypse movies generally favor, Outbreak also focuses closely on epidemiology, as Daniels and his group try to contain the virus by tracing, by mapping the chronology of known infections. The initial viral host is a capuchin monkey shipped to the United States for research but smuggled out of a quarantine facility and brought to a pet-shop owner in Cedar Creek, California, for sale on the black market. The monkey spits water into the face of the smuggler and scratches the pet-shop owner, transmitting the virus to both. Now feverish, the smuggler takes a plane to Boston, where he infects his girlfriend. Each dies, but, inexplicably, the viral transmission in Boston stops there, despite the man’s symptoms, which should have spread to other people on his flight and in the city. (This is what happened with Covid-19. Most New York cases originated in viruses brought by travelers from Europe, and travelers leaving New York then seeded the rest of the United States [Zimmer; Carey and Glanz]). A viral epidemic begins in Cedar Creek

when a lab technician is splashed with blood from the dead pet-shop owner. Now infected, the technician goes to a movie and begins coughing violently. An eerie and disturbing visual effects sequence shows the spread of viral particles, spewed from the coughing technician and traveling throughout the theater. They float on air currents, landing on other people, even into a woman’s mouth open with laughter at the on-screen antics. It is perhaps the single sequence in the film that resonates most directly with today’s pandemic because Covid-19 is air transmissible. (Finnish researchers released a computer simulation showing how a single dry cough, a common Covid-19 symptom, will distribute microscopic aerosolized particles that hang in the air like a cloud and can travel relatively far on air currents [CSC—IT Center for Science]. Seven months after the Covid-19 outbreak, the World Health Organization remained skeptical that aerosolized viral particles posed much of a threat, but it eventually changed its mind.) The coughing technician in Outbreak exits the theater through the lobby, still coughing, infecting more patrons. Hospitals are overrun by sick and dying people, and Cedar Creek is placed under military lockdown. The sequence shows in powerful how quickly a viral pandemic can spread, how quickly bodies pile up, and how fast hospitals may be paralyzed by an influx of the sick. All of these things happened during the global spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus. Flu, a Hong Kong medical-disaster film, depicts the carnage inflicted by a mutated strain of the H5N1 bird flu, which decimates the country. Cities are under military curfew, rioting and looting break out, and so many people die that their bodies are lifted by construction forklifts into giant pits that are set afire. The bird flu mutation has almost no incubation period and has a 100 percent mortality rate (this is actually bad policy for a virus), and the film shows its relentless transmission from person to person, including a visual effects sequence like the one in Outbreak showing the spread of viral particles spewed by coughing victims. In both films, daring action by noble heroes foils the malevolent efforts of corrupt officials to use the pandemic to secure and enhance their power. In each film, the climax focuses not on struggles against the virus but on efforts to derail the villains’ plans, which, in the final scenes, seem to carry more emotional weight than the runaway disease. Melodrama trumps apocalypse. In many other films, the pandemic has already occurred, leaving society devastated, human life gutted and nearly extinct, and a new race of mutants or zombies as the dominant life form. In The Omega Man, germ warfare between

the United States and the Soviet Union creates hordes of psychotic albino mutants who wage war against the last surviving man, Robert Neville (Charlton Heston). Will Smith plays Neville in the remake, I Am Legend, in which the mutants have become faster and more vicious. In Resident Evil: Extinction (2007), The Sky Has Fallen (2009), and others, isolated bands of human survivors battle mutants, zombies, or cannibals, the savage detritus left by a raging pathogen that has wiped out most of humanity. The emergence or release of the pathogen, its age through societies and countries, and its infectious destruction often are not depicted in much detail. As backstory, those things lie outside the narratives, which focus on a postapocalyptic landscape where the major story situations involve running from and fighting the zombies and mutants. Although the premise of the films leaves little room for narrative development—what counts are the characters’ postapocalyptic survival skills— the sheer repetition of scenes showing survivors running and fighting for their lives effectively conveys the bleak tone central to this subgenre, in which the of life have been reduced to an endless Darwinian struggle. Zombies are the genre’s most iconic figures, ones that have pervaded contemporary culture and colonized the popular imagination (Olney 5). The zombie apocalypse has evolved over the decades so that in today’s movies, it is a literal plague, a viral pandemic. The zombie today is “a figure of contagion” (Boluk and Lenz 3). “Plague, zombies, and apocalypse are deeply entangled with one another” (Boluk and Lenz 7). This is a distinctly modern conception because, though the term “zombie” can be traced back to the nineteenth century, when zombies first appeared in movies, they did so in stories set in Haiti and according to Haitian voodoo conceptions of a dead person who is brought back to life to work as a slave. White Zombie (1932) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943) depict Caribbean settings where corpses do the bidding of White masters and move about slowly as if in a trance. Zombie films in this period are bound to the White-supremacist politics of colonialism, and White Zombie was produced just as the US military occupation of Haiti, begun in 1915, was ending. George Romero brought a modern spin to the zombie genre in Night of the Living Dead (1968) by dispensing with voodoo and a Caribbean setting and presenting zombies as cannibals risen from their graves to feast on human flesh. In one sense, Night of the Living Dead is not a zombie movie. The word never appears in the film, and Romero has stated that he was influenced by Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend, which is about a plague of vampires. But there are continuities with earlier zombie pictures, in particular the way that the zombies move—slowly, awkwardly, trance-like. Romero also jettisoned the racism of

earlier zombie films by reversing its focus. The hero of the film is a Black man, who is more resourceful and cooler under pressure than the White characters with whom he is hiding in a farmhouse from zombie attackers. Despite his bravery, at the end he’s killed by a mob of White vigilantes who mistake him for a zombie. The freeze-frame images showing the vigilantes carrying his body to a bonfire resonate explicitly with the history of lynching in the United States, which often included burning the victim. The cult success of Night of the Living Dead helped establish zombies as enduring figures in the popular imagination, but Romero’s film doesn’t employ a disease metaphor or have an epidemiological focus. 28 Days Later and its sequel, 28 Weeks Later, revised Romero’s work by making the zombies move much faster and attack more swiftly and viciously and by depicting their loss of humanity as the result of a viral outbreak. In 28 Days Later, a rage virus is unleashed in England when animal-liberation activists free an infected monkey from its laboratory cage. The rage virus resembles a more severe form of rabies, prompting its hosts to attack and bite others, spreading the pathogen. It moves so swiftly throughout England that society collapses, and survivors must barricade indoors, hiding from the infected. Infection carries no latency period. Once infected, the victim instantly becomes a slavering, vicious animal intent on biting, slashing, and attacking. The film memorably evokes this loss of humanity when Frank (Brendan Gleeson), a cab driver traveling with his daughter, Hannah, in an effort to reach safety at a military compound, is accidentally infected when blood from a zombie victim drops into his eye. Understanding what is going to occur, he pushes his daughter away and cries out in desperation that he loves her and then turns mindless with rage and aggression. Hannah’s life is spared when soldiers who are nearby shoot and kill her father before he can tear her apart. Scenes like this one in zombie apocalypse movies reimagine in vividly melodramatic the physical and emotional suffering that disease pandemics leave in their wake. Pandemics tear through families without respect for the loving connections that sustain them, and they also reveal people’s true colors, their essential nature. Some behave selflessly; others seek to consolidate their own power or condemn multitudes to death for selfish reasons that include amassing wealth. As the Covid-19 death rate climbed in the United States, the White House muzzled scientists, suppressed medical studies projecting the consequences of inadequate testing and uncontrolled infections, lied about its failure to respond to numerous warnings of an impending pandemic, and

subverted public health efforts by ridiculing the use of face masks as barriers inhibiting transmission. Even as case counts by December reached fifteen million and nearly three hundred thousand deaths, the lies continued. The zombie apocalypse movies depict this kind of moral villainy in scenes where friends and family turn on one another. Zombie viruses destroy not only people but the bonds and identities that sustain society. Children attack parents and rip them apart; friends savage friends and cannibalize them. These betrayals are a key element of the horror in zombie apocalypses, and they track real-world scenarios, in which pandemics illuminate the foolishness, malevolence, and cruelty of human behavior. While bubonic plague, yellow fever, Ebola, and Covid-19 do not turn people into zombies, their assault is just as unthinking and destructive, and this is why the zombie apocalypse furnishes such an effective metaphor for disease pandemics. Like zombies, viruses do not have a mind or act according to willful intention. Their behavior is chemically scripted, and, also like zombies, it is not clear that they are even a form of life. Scientists disagree about whether viruses are alive (Brown and Bhella; Villarreal). Luis Villarreal writes that life may be thought of as emergent property of certain nonliving things: “Approached from this perspective, viruses, though not fully alive, may be thought of as being more than inert matter: they verge on life.” Zombies, too, verge on life, and yet as many films suggest, like viruses they are not self-sustaining. In 28 Weeks Later, when the zombie plague burns through London, the zombies themselves die. They starve to death, like viruses without hosts. Viruses are not made of cells but consist of a core composed of genetic material (RNA or DNA) wrapped in a protein. They do not grow and cannot sustain themselves, cannot long exist outside the cells of a host organism. Once inside a host, they commandeer the host’s cells to produce their own genetic material, and when this is accomplished, new viruses bud or burst out of the host cells, which are destroyed. Twenty-Eight Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Train to Busan, World War Z, and other zombie movies stage memorable set pieces showing the conversion of human to zombie when the snarling, enraged viral being bursts forth from its human shell. In World War Z, the former UN employee Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) and his family are driving through Philadelphia when traffic stalls and odd things begin to happen. A motorcycle cop buzzes past his car so closely that the bike clips and shatters the car’s side mirror. A crowd forms on the streets, murmuring, then shouting, then running in desperation, and the Lane family is caught in the ensuing stampede. Seemingly normal of the

stampede turn on others in the crowd or attack nearby cars, bashing their heads against windshields in a frenzied effort to reach drivers cowering inside the vehicles. They bite and slash, spraying blood, and those attacked in turn become frenzied marauders in search of blood and flesh. The sequence shows the emergence of a zombie pandemic as the spreading virus burns through the crowd of human hosts. A similar sequence in 28 Days Later shows a massive zombie outbreak in a military safe zone in central London, as a fleeing crowd is attacked from within by its own who contract the zombie virus. In these films, the onset of zombie symptoms following with the virus is swift and unstoppable, and the zombies cannot be mistaken for normal, uninfected people. By contrast, the devastating effects of Covid-19 lie in its relatively long incubation period and in its ability to infect carriers who themselves show no symptoms while transmitting the virus to others. Both conditions enhance its ability to spread. In this regard, the vivid melodrama of the zombie movies fails to approximate the insidious, deadly effects of many real-world pathogens. 28 Weeks Later, however, does include a character who is an asymptomatic carrier. She seems virus-free but infects her husband with a kiss, and he becomes a bloodthirsty berserker reigniting the plague inside the military safe zone. The biggest action set piece in World War Z shows a gigantic wall that has been erected around Jerusalem for protection against an enormous horde of zombies, many thousands that have gathered on the other side. They fling themselves atop one another, creating a mountain of writhing bodies that others can climb, and they breach the wall, leaping into Jerusalem and overwhelming its army, devastating the populace in a savage attack. While critics and many viewers derided the sequence as an example of digital visual effects run amok, regarding it as existing mainly to showcase visual effects wizardry, it nevertheless stands as an effective, poetic visualization of the viral metaphor. The scale of the images, the sheer number of invaders, is an emblem of viral assault. The zombies breach the wall because of their viral load. In empirical , viral load is the amount of a virus in one’s body, and it often influences the severity of the sickness that befalls the victim. Bodily fluids from people with viral infections can contain up to a hundred million viruses per milliliter (Skinner). The zombie horde breaching the Jerusalem wall visualizes the kind of attack that occurs from a viral infection at the cellular, microscopic level, where the invading pathogenic horde penetrates cell walls and takes over the cells’ genetic mechanism, generating vast numbers of new viruses.

Although many zombie apocalypse movies rely on viral metaphors, they resemble other pandemic thrillers like The Satan Bug and Outbreak in the way they personify disease through colorful villains whom the hero must battle. Mad scientists, zombies, and venal military or government officials furnish the story conflicts and thrills, rather than disease in itself doing so. (It is worth noting another category of pandemic dramas. Films such as 93 Days [2016], about the Ebola outbreak in Lagos, Nigeria, and Virus [2019], about the Nipah viral outbreak in India, are factually based medical dramas and are not apocalyptic.) Contagion, scripted by Scott Z. Burns and directed by Steven Soderbergh, stands as a notable exception to this trend in which disease apocalypse is personified as a struggle between heroes and villains. The filmmakers wanted to show what would actually happen, from a scientific standpoint, in the event of a global pandemic caused by the emergence of a novel pathogen. Burns said, “I would have never imagined that the movie needed a ‘bad guy’ beyond the virus itself. It seems pretty basic that the plot should be humans united against the virus” (Norris). The film’s fictional pathogen, MEV-1, is a genetic mix from bat and pig viruses that jumps to human hosts as a result of deforestation and unsanitary food preparation. It kills 25 to 30 percent of those who are infected, and the film concentrates on efforts by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the World Health Organization, and scientists the world over to culture the virus and create a vaccine. This they do in an improbably rapid fashion. Scientists have given the movie high marks for its accuracy, and, while it emphasizes the importance of a science-driven response and honors the heroism of medical workers, it also shows in chilling detail the relentless spread of a deadly, crafty pathogen. Several frightening montages show all of the surfaces in a restaurant or bar that an infected person might touch, which then become fomites, disease-bearing sites of future transmission. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the film found a vast new audience of viewers on streaming channels who were hungry for information and a realistic depiction of what they were then experiencing. In this respect, it is ironic that Contagion failed to capture the ways in which bad decisions and opportunistic behavior by political leaders could worsen a pandemic’s impact, compromise science, and politicize scientific agencies like the CDC. Contagion presents an efficient, rational, science-based response by authorities, whereas national and global leaders badly bungled their responses to Covid-19 and actively sought to corrupt scientific knowledge and scientific agencies for political ends, increasing the global body count beyond what it otherwise would have been. The film’s screenwriter has owned up to this

oversight: “I would have never thought in writing the screenplay for Contagion that one of the variables would be a government that doesn’t believe in science and then misinforms the population” (Brown). In contrast to this blind spot in Contagion, a clever, sardonic scene in Train to Busan shows a spokesman on television claiming that the government’s heroic response has contained all zombie outbreaks and that no one’s safety is in jeopardy. Intercut with the speech are images of Busan afire and zombies rampaging and killing in numerous cities throughout South Korea. The crisis depicted in Contagion abates once the vaccine is discovered, but the film saves for its final scene a revelation of the pandemic’s origin. A bulldozer clearing a forest in China dislodges bats from their roost, and one finds shelter at a pig farm, where it drops scraps of food to the floor, where they are eaten by pigs. A restaurateur working in a Macao casino buys one of the pigs, which transmits the virus to human hosts when it is slaughtered and prepared for food in the casino’s kitchen. This reveal at the end of Contagion shows that people have caused the pandemic. An expanding global population disrupts biodiversity and alters existing relations among people, animals, and pathogens. “Such changes are particularly intense in tropical regions where primary forest is opened up to mining, logging, plantation development, and oil and gas extraction. This deforestation poses a threat to global health because many of these regions are emerging disease hotspots—rich in wildlife biodiversity and probably rich in the diversity of microbes, many of which have not yet been encountered by people” (Karesh et al. 1940). Zoonoses that emerged in this fashion include “HIV/AIDS, which was linked to the butchering of hunted chimpanzees, SARS, which emerged in wildlife market and restaurant workers in southern China, and Ebola hemorrhagic fever linked to the hunting or handling of infected great apes or other wild animals. All these disease transmissions are examples of organisms or pathogens exploiting new host opportunities resulting from human behavior” (Karesh et al. 1939). These plagues may be regarded as nature’s revenge, its pushback against the ways that an exploding human population is changing the planet. Reversing the lens reveals a startling perspective. As William McNeil writes, “It is not absurd to class the ecological role of humankind in its relationship to other life forms as a disease. . . . [Humankind] upsets older balances of nature in quite the same fashion that disease upsets the natural balance within a host body” (41). Human

impact on the Earth and its environment is so significant that geologists have begun using the term “Anthropocene” to identify the present era, since the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century, during which human activity has been the dominant influence on the planet’s geology, climate, and ecosystem. The Anthropocene has become synonymous with apocalypse because global warming and climate change constitute an existential threat to species survival and seem to be causing an episode of mass extinction comparable in magnitude to five great earlier ones. “While there was every reason to suppose that the Earth’s physical future as a planet would be as lengthy and eventful as its deep past, it seemed less certain that it would in the long run remain habitable by Homo sapiens” (Rudwick 294). Numerous films have depicted the apocalyptic potential of the Anthropocene. In The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961), simultaneous nuclear tests conducted at the North and South Poles alter the Earth’s orbit and send it heading toward the sun. As the planet heats to an intolerable degree, social collapse ensues, and the human race seems doomed. In Silent Running (1972), Earth’s biosphere has been destroyed, and the world’s last remaining plants are preserved in geodesic domes on spaceships orbiting beyond Earth. They are lovingly cared for by a botanist (Bruce Dern) who reveres them as valuable artifacts of a vanished world. A virus destroys the world’s staple grain crops of rice, wheat, and barley, threatening massive famine in No Blade of Grass (1970). In Snowpiercer (2013), a new ice age has killed almost all life on Earth. In Sunshine (2007), the sun is dying, the Earth is freezing, and astronauts use a nuclear bomb to try and reignite the dying star. In The Day after Tomorrow (2004), the planet’s Northern Hemisphere plunges into a new ice age accompanied by massive, destructive storms. Manhattan freezes over, and the US government survives by fleeing south, where it finds shelter in a Mexican refugee camp. At film’s end, the Northern Hemisphere has become a massive ice cap. In 2012 (2009), a solar flare heats up the Earth’s core, triggering huge earthquakes, eruptions, and tsunamis that destroy Los Angeles and other cities and landmarks around the world. Flood waters engulf continents across the globe, while hardy bands of survivors seek safety aboard specially commissioned arks, and at film’s end, they find refuge in Africa, the last remaining major landmass. Although the director Roland Emmerich made 2012 and The Day after Tomorrow as action-adventure films showcasing climate change through elaborate visual spectacles of destruction, both films express a strong, sincere belief that climate change in reality will bring catastrophe. Indeed, this anxiety can be found throughout cinema’s climate-change apocalypses. In these films,

“the premise is that short-sighted human behavior has led to the point where the natural systems on which human life on earth depends have been severely disrupted, or even entirely destroyed rendering life on earth impossible” (Bulfin, “Popular” 141). In this respect, they arrive at their vivid depictions of doomsday by mapping the short span of human activity onto the longer span of planetary history. In most popular movies—indeed, throughout cultural life in general— these things are ordinarily distinct and separate, and yet notable exceptions stand out. The time traveler in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine journeys many millions of years into the future and finds a dying planet beneath a dimming sun and an inky black sky. The Earth’s rotation has ceased, and the traveler stands on a twilit beach covered with monstrous crab-like creatures. The traveler journeys onward, many thousands of years more, watching “the life of the old earth ebb away.” The sound of all living things ceases, replaced by a terrible desolation, an icy cold, and a growing darkness. Seized with horror at this void from which life has vanished, the traveler flees back to his own time. Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: Artificial Intelligence portrays a postapocalyptic era in which the polar ice caps have melted and drowned coastal cities throughout the world. The main character is an artificial boy, a humanoid robot, who had been abandoned by his adoptive family. David desperately longs to become a real boy so that then he might truly be loved, but his quest fails. Trapped in an aircraft that crashed into the waters off Coney Island, he maintains his wish until his power supply runs down and he freezes in a new ice age that turns Manhattan glacial. Thousands of years after the extinction of human life, aliens visiting Earth find David and reconstruct his visual memories as a means of learning about the now-vanished human race. David, the mechanical boy, is “the last survivor to have frequented the living beings that we humans were” (Szendy 48). The Time Machine and A.I.: Artificial Intelligence map their stories along the deep time of planetary history, and in so doing, they depict the era of Homo sapiens as a bounded interval that has closed. In this respect, they anticipate the provocation extended by the concept of an Anthropocene. “The idea that we might be living in a geological epoch of our own making is an important provocation, as it deliberately links observed environmental events with the history of human activity, while simultaneously locating that human activity within the frame of planetary history. The effect of human behaviour is shown as a mark in deep, geological time” (Irvine 157). This concept of “deep time” emerged from the scientific understanding of Earth

history as an immensity of eons so vast as to boggle the mind. The discovery of deep time in British geological thought is conventionally identified with James Hutton, whose study of unconformable rocky strata—horizontal layers atop vertical striations—recognized them as pictures of a gap in time, episodes of erosion and uplift separated by epochs. Hutton saw these formations most notably at Siccar Point in Scotland, where a horizontal layer of Old Red Sandstone, three hundred million years old, sat atop a vertically tilted deposit of graywacke sandstone four hundred million years old, creating the picture of a one-hundred-million-year gap in time, formed by multiple episodes of deposition, uplift, and erosion. These unconformities offered “direct evidence for time’s cycle and an ancient earth” (Gould 63). The graywacke formed as horizontal deposits beneath the Iapetus ocean during the Silurian epoch some four hundred million years ago. Tectonic shifts raised this above sea level and tilted it vertically. Erosion by wind and waves created its rib-like appearance. Millions of years later, the seas rose again, and horizontal strata of Old Red Sandstone formed, which were then uplifted but only slightly tilted. The cyclical nature of planetary erosion and uplift had occurred across so immense a stretch of ages, Hutton famously wrote, “that we find no vestige of a beginning—no prospect of an end” (304). About the unconformities, his biographer John Playfair wrote, “The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time” (qtd. in Dalziel 1999, 120). Many primitive landscapes enable the viewer to stare back into this abyss, such as Monument Valley in Utah, with its sandstone buttes from the Permian period 270 million years ago. On the geological record of Earth history, stretching back billions of years, human activity barely exists. Radiometric dating of rocks and astrophysical data show that the earth is 4.6 billion years old and also show that 5 billion years from now, it will be obliterated when the sun becomes a red giant and expands to a hundred times its present size. Any remaining ecosystem on the Earth will be incinerated, and the outer layers of the sun will explode outward, consuming the Earth, as the core of that star collapses into a white dwarf. Human life exists at the midpoint of this planetary process, but it has arrived only recently. Other species have thrived far longer than humans. Trilobites resemble horseshoe crabs and were among the most successful marine animals, living for close to 300 million years, until they were wiped out in the Permian extinction event that killed nearly all species living in the sea. Homo sapiens has been around only a fraction of the time that trilobites flourished.

Deep time displaces human beings from the center of the story of planetary history, whereas our literary and cinematic stories of apocalypse make them central. In movies, the timescape of apocalypse is a human one, and if it contains revelatory and redemptive elements, then the new world that emerges is an improved one, amenable to the flourishing of an ennobled human race, as if it has been prepared especially to safeguard human welfare. Earth’s ancient history reveals a different picture. The planet has undergone numerous changes, the land masses are shaped and distributed today differently than they were millennia ago, and the Earth has hosted many life forms, strange and bizarre-appearing to modern eyes. In contrast to these realities, popular cinema constructs time in ways that foreground human behavior. Time is highly condensed, and continuity editing connects events in meaningful ways and jumps over inessential actions and events. By using editing to focus on the narrative essentials, “undesirable temporalities” (De Luca 29) are eliminated. A relatively small group of films that are collectively known as “slow cinema” does just the opposite. Story is minimized, small events and details are given remarkably lengthy attention and emphasis, and intervals of dead time occur in which seemingly little or nothing is happening. Numerous commentators on slow cinema have remarked that its dilation of time produces a heightened, concentrated perception of duration in viewers, in part because it diverges from the conventional ways that time is constructed and experienced in cinema. By relying on long takes, attenuated actions, and dead time, slow cinema disrupts conventional time horizons. Slow cinema confronts spectators with a novel experience that is compatible with the contemplation of deep time. Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011), a celebrated work of slow cinema, creates a powerful portrait of doom and apocalypse that emerges organically from its pacing. Regarding Tarr’s films, Janice Lee and Jared Woodland ask, “Why does a slow pace or tempo suggest doom? Is eventlessness apocalypse?” The film’s story is quite minimal, and this summary will make it seem more event-filled than it is. The film concentrates on the harsh lives of an elderly peasant farmer, Ohlsdorfer, and his daughter over a six-day period during which an increasingly ominous series of events befall them and their aging horse as gale-force winds buffet their cabin and the barren land surrounding it. On the first day, Ohlsdorfer realizes that the sound of beetles gnawing at the wooden beams of his cabin, which he’s heard for fifty-eight years, has ceased. The horse stops pulling its wagon on the second day, and a neighbor visits who tells Ohlsdorfer that the nearby town has been ruined and blown away and that neither God nor gods, good nor evil, or people themselves exist, just an infinite silence. The next day,

the horse stops eating; and on the next, it stops drinking, and the well dries up. On the fifth day, daylight turns to night, prompting Ohlsdorfer’s daughter to ask, “What is this darkness?” The lamp cannot be lit even though it is full of fuel, the fire and its embers go out, the storm stops, and silence falls over the cabin. On the last day, Ohlsdorfer and his daughter stop eating and sit quietly. A final silence and darkness descend when the last image fades to black. With this film, Tarr said that he wanted to show “how we [people] disappear” (Lee and Woodland). “The key point is that humanity, all of us, including me, are responsible for the destruction of the world. But there is also a force above human at work—the gale blowing throughout the film—that is also destroying the world” (Petkovic). The film then offers a double portrait of world’s end. It arrives because of human behavior as well as because of environmental conditions. These can both be seen as planetary, in the sense that the characters and their situation are meant to be understood as emblematic of a larger condition and not as a localized instance of something that befalls two people. Tarr’s slow style—each shot is lengthy, and the 143-minute film contains only thirty shots—creates a phenomenological experience of time that, nudged by the film’s story situations, commingles with eschatology and a sense of endings. The film’s narrative brings the affinity between deep time and slow cinema to the fore, enabling its formal design to accentuate the disjunction between the Anthropocene and planetary history. Concentrated attention on the quotidian renders it with a depth and density that furnish an opacity consonant with apocalypse. As the familiar markers of time in cinema and its narratives are dissolved or attenuated, this change facilitates the opening of a more cosmic, less human-centric perspective. As Tarr said, “The apocalypse is a huge event. But reality is not like that. In my film, the end of the world is very silent, very weak. So the end of the world comes as I see it coming in real life—slowly and quietly” (Petkovic). Tarr’s portrait is consistent with what deep time teaches us: that events that are cataclysmic with regard to planetary history may be harder to perceive when measured on the scale of human lives. Climate change is incremental, proceeding silently and in ways that may be unrecognized until a threshold is reached where changes become exponential and undeniable. The Turin Horse forgoes the statements about survival and redemption that apocalypse movies tend to offer. This is because, in the end, it is not about an apocalypse, if that term is understood in its deepest sense of revelatory meaning. In the film’s last scene, when that final darkness falls around the farmer and his daughter, it signals not only their disappearance but the end of human life itself.

Apocalypse and extinction are not the same. Apocalypse is the regeneration of meaning; extinction is the end of meaning. The darkness at film’s end visualizes the end of the human enterprise, but not a planetary end or the end necessarily of life itself. The chemical and geological life of the planet will continue for billions of years, but it will do so without human meaning or human witnessing, without human perceptions and their construction of meaning, without Beethoven, Mozart, the sculptures of Michelangelo, without moral imaginings, ethical striving, epistemological questioning. It is nearly impossible to imagine a world without us because to do so requires that we be present to imagine it. At film’s end, when the light fails, darkness closes on our presence and consciousness. In this respect, the film portrays not the revelatory meaning of an apocalypse but the end of meaning that extinction entails, when there is no longer an observer to witness and wonder. In The Turin Horse, Tarr returns our attention to the depth and the limitlessness of time, the vastness of which exceeds the human enterprise. The stylistic imperative to slow time down is a way of expanding its scale until its vastness may stretch to infinity. And yet Tarr’s own carefully crafted work as a filmmaker, with its exquisite, precise formal design and the energy and belief that he has poured forth into this work, carries a stubborn assertion of redemptive meaning, as found in the intentional design and emotional valences of art, which insist on the presence of consciousness. Although the film’s gaze measures the end of consciousness in the vastness of time, it does so through an act of creation and with an appropriately humble perspective. Apocalypse in cinema tends to be a story of sudden, swift destruction, of great dramatic changes occurring abruptly, and almost always it features the survival of the human race. In planetary history, climate changes, continental breakup and drift, stratigraphic uplift and erosion, and the great extinction events occur on a time scale measured by a geological clock and not a cinematic or human one. In this respect, apocalypse stories portray human life as occupying a special and privileged place in the cosmos. They give history a shape and a meaning that is infused with hope and a yearning for release from the existential conditions of life that have proven to be so onerous and such sources of anxiety and uncertainty. Framed by the of apocalyptic revelation, planetary history becomes a saga for us and , as indeed it could not be otherwise since making meaning is a fundamental human enterprise and an essential constituent of art and because the end and absence of meaning is foreign to the apocalyptic enterprise and its quest for ultimate knowledge. In the Bible, the agents of revelation are divine, supernatural beings, whereas in cinema, it is filmmakers

who craft the tales of apocalyptic revelation. Perhaps for this reason, these stories, so pervasive throughout popular culture, are designed to provide pleasure. They assert that however destructive the future may be, culture and society will persist. Apocalypse movies thrill us with their chilling visions of destruction while reaffirming that life will resume when the cataclysms are over. They offer comfort, but their art and entertainment are rooted in real experience and real fears about the tenuous place Homo sapiens occupies in the web of life and the cosmos. Doing so, these films light a candle. They fashion beguiling visions from daunting conditions that have seemed inescapable to the human psyche throughout its centuries of existence. Although cinema did not embrace apocalyptic themes until the second half of the twentieth century, once it did, the embrace has been ongoing because the conditions of upheaval and uncertainty that underlie it are ongoing. The polar ice sheets are melting. The Amazon rain forest is being cut, logged, and burned. Nuclear war now is more likely than at any time in the past. Deadly infections that have never been seen before appear with increasing frequency. “Let me out of here!” apocalypse movies collectively shout, this cry the product of a long tradition of revelation and speculative fiction about the meaning of the universe and the place of human beings within it. That these movies offer portraits in which doomsday secures the greater human welfare is commensurate with the levels of stress that motivate them. Apocalypse movies depict the end of the world as a deeply human event, a cataclysm that the worthy survive. For this reason, like horror movies, which also speak to deeply rooted existential concerns, apocalypse movies will endure as an essential part of cinema so long as cinema itself and its audience are able to survive.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’m very grateful to Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Foster for their and enthusiasm, encouraging this project and finding a place for it in the Quick Takes series. They are always a great pleasure to work with. I also deeply appreciate Nicole Solano’s keen interest in the topic of apocalypse movies and swift decision to encourage me in bringing it to Rutgers University Press, which I am happy to say has furnished a home for my writing for many years. Rutgers is a wonderful press to work with. I also wish to thank Susan for providing all the warmth and needed when watching so many movies about catastrophe. I was writing the last chapter on plague when the Covid-19 pandemic erupted, and I will it that I stayed away from the keyboard for a couple of weeks when the things surrounding us came to seem awfully close to what I was writing about. Relaxing with Susan in the evenings provided the best prescription for an easy mind, with additional comfort supplied by a very large dog and a glass of port.

FURTHER READING

Bogue, Mike. Apocalypse Then: American and Japanese Atomic Cinema, 1951– 1967. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2017. Joustra, Robert, and Alissa Wilkinson. How to Survive the Apocalypse: Zombies, Cylons, Faith and Politics at the End of the World. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2016. Moore, David J. World Gone Wild: A Survivor’s Guide to Post-Apocalyptic Movies. Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 2014. O’Hear, Natasha, and Anthony O’Hear. Picturing the Apocalypse: The Book of Revelation in the Arts over Two Millennia. New York: Oxford UP, 2015. Ritzenhoff, Karen A., and Angela Krewani, eds. The Apocalypse in Film: Dystopias, Disasters and Other Visions about the End of the World. New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016. Szendy, Peter. Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World. New York: Fordham UP, 2015.

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INDEX

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, 6, 111 AIDS, 90 ancient world combat myths, 8–10 Andromeda Strain, The, 6, 92–93 Annihilation, 40, 48 Anthropocene, 108, 109, 112, 117 apokalypsis, 10 Armageddon, 4, 31–32, 43, 47 Arrival, 40 Asimov, Isaac, 36 Astaire, Fred, 64 Asteroid vs. Earth, 48 Avengers: Endgame, 5, 7, 38–39 Avengers: Infinity War, 5, 7, 38, 40

Balmer, Edwin, 44 Basehart, Richard, 92 Battle: Los Angeles, 40

Bedford Incident, The, 61, 62, 75 Ben-Hur, 32 Bio-Dead, 86 Black Death, 87–88 Blom, August, 25 Booke, Sorrell, 72 Book of Eli, The, 60 Brain Eaters, The, 40 Brolin, Josh, 38 bubonic plague, 87–88 Bulfin, Ailise, 23 Burns, Scott Z., 104 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 82 By Dawn’s Early Light, 59

Cage, Nicolas, 16 Campbell, John, 33 Captive Women, 64 Cargo, 87 Carpenter, John, 33 Carré, John le, 83

Carriers, 86 Cassandra Crossing, The, 87 Chastain, Jessica, 20 Chicxulub crater, 42 Chopra, Aditya, 54 Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 40 Collision Earth, 40 Comet, The, 24 Contagion, 6, 86, 104–7 Containment, 86 Cowboys & Aliens, 40 Creation of the Humanoids, The, 60 Crimson Tide, 59 Cruise, Tom, 36 Cuban Missile Crisis, 76 Cupid and the Comet, 24

Damnation Ally, 60 Dark Knight Rises, The, 59 Day After, The, 5, 61, 62, 64, 77, 78–79, 81, 110 Day after Tomorrow, The, 6, 109

Day Mars Invaded Earth, The, 40 Day of the Triffids, The, 46 Day the Earth Stood Still, The, 4, 109 Day the Earth Stopped, The, 40 Day the Sky Exploded, The, 46 Day the World Ended, The, 60 Dead Hand, 69 Death Race 2000, 60 Deep Impact, 4, 35, 47–48 deep time, 112–14, 117 Deluge, 4, 26–28, 29 Dern, Bruce, 109 Dernier Homme, Le, 25 Deterrence, 56–57, 59 Devils, The, 87 Dixon, Wheeler Winston, 14 Doom of the Great City, The, 23 Doomsday, 86 Doomsday Clock, 82 Drake Equation, 41 Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, 5, 61,

62, 68–72, 73, 75, 76 Dunst, Kirsten, 48 Duvall, Robert, 20

Earth Impact Database, 40 Earth’s Final Hours, 48 Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, 40 Ebola virus, 90 Ellsberg, Daniel, 69, 70, 71 Emmerich, Roland, 110 Escape from New York, 60 E.T., 40 extinction events, 52–54

Fail Safe, 5, 61, 62, 72–75 Fat Man, 58 Fermi, Enrico, 41 Fermi’s paradox, 41, 42 Fin du monde, La, 4, 26 Fire in the Sky, 40 Five, 64

Flu, 87, 95–96 Fonda, Henry, 73 Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 11, 18 Frankenstein, 21 Freud, Sigmund, 68 Frightened by the Comet, 24 Futureshock: Comet, 48

Gainsbourg, Charlotte, 48 Gance, Abel, 26 Gardner, Ava, 64, 65 Gibson, Mel, 20 Gleeson, Brendan, 99 Guttenberg, Steve, 78

Halley’s Comet, 24 Harmonic, Wynn, 30 Haskin, Byron, 36 Hayden, Sterling, 68 Heston, Charlton, 32, 96 H5N1 bird flu, 90, 95

Hiroshima, 58 How Scroggins Found the Comet, 24

I Am Legend, 22, 86, 96, 98 Impact Earth, 48 Independence Day, 5, 22, 38 Infected, 86 Invaders from Mars, 40 Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 4, 34–35, 40 Invasion of the Saucer Men, 40 Invasion USA, 64 It Conquered the World, 40 I Walked with a Zombie, 97

Jenkins, Jerry B., 15 John of Patmos, 11

Kahn, Herman, 67, 69, 70; survivability of nuclear war, 67–68 Kaplan, Fred, 83 Keating, Larry, 45 Kennedy, John F., 76

Kennedy, Robert, 76 Kermode, Frank, 30 Khaldun, Ibn, 88 King, Geoff, 30 Knowing, 4, 16–17, 48 Kramer, Stanley, 64 Kubrick, Stanley, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73

LaHaye, Tim, 15 Last Man, The, 3–4, 21–22 last man trope, 22–23 Late Heavy Bombardment, 43 Lee, Janice, 115 Left Behind film series, 15, 18 Lineweaver, Charles H., 54 Little Boy, 58 Lumet, Sidney, 72, 73, 74

Mad Max: Fury Road, 60 Maharis, George, 92 Man from Planet X, The, 40

Mars Attacks!, 40 Martens, John, 32 Matheson, Richard, 98 McCarthy, Keven, 34 McNeill, William, 91, 108 Melancholia, 4, 48–50, 51 Meteor, 47 Metropolis, 4, 15 Miracle Mile, 56, 60 Mission Impossible—Ghost Protocol, 59 Monolith Monsters, The, 46 Mooney, Edward, 51 Moynihan, Thomas, 51 mutually assured destruction (MAD), 61–62

Nagasaki, 58 New Barbarians, The, 60 Newman, Kim, 38 Night of the Comet, 46 Night of the Living Dead, 98–99 1918 influenza, 88–89, 90

93 Days, 104 No Blade of Grass, 6, 109

O’Hear, Anthony, 14 O’Hear, Natasha, 14 Omega Man, The, 6, 60, 86, 96 On the Beach, 5, 61, 62, 64, 66, 77 On Thermonuclear War, 67 Outbreak, 93–95, 104

Panic in Year Zero, 5, 56, 60 Peck, Gregory, 64 Purple Cloud, The, 23

Quiet Earth, The, 4, 19 Quiet Place, A, 22

Pacific Rim, 40 Pandemic, 86 Panic in the Streets, 87 Patient Zero, 87

Pearson, Ryne Douglas, 48 Peck, Gregory, 65 Peter, second epistle of, 57 Pitt, Brad, 102 Plague, 86 Planet of the Apes, 56 Post Impact, 48 Postman, The, 60

Quarantine, 87

Radioactive Dreams, 60 Rampino, Michael, 53 RAND Corporation, 67 Rapture, The, 4, 16–18 Reagan, Ronald, 63, 64 Rennie, Michael, 35 Resident Evil: Extinction, 96 Revelation, book of, 3, 11–15, 19, 28, 39, 46, 86 Road, The, 4, 19–20, 61 Road Warrior, The, 60

Robards, Jason, 78 Rogers, Mimi, 17 Romero, George, 98 Rosenblum, Ralph, 74

Sagan, Carl, 66 Satan Bug, The, 92, 93, 104 Schell, Jonathan, 61, 74 Scott, George C., 70 Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, 48, 51 Sellers, Peter, 70, 71 Seventh Seal, The, 87 Shannon, Michael, 20 Shaviro, Steven, 49 Shelly, Mary, 3, 21, 22 Shute, Nevil, 64, 67 Siegel, Don, 34 Signs, 4, 20–21 Silent Running, 109 Sky Has Fallen, The, 96 slow cinema, 115

Smith, Will, 27 Snowpiercer, 5, 61, 109 Spencer, Douglas, 31 Spielberg, Steven, 36, 111 Stake Land, 87 Stand, The, 87 Sum of All Fears, The, 59 Sunshine, 109 Sutherland, Kiefer, 48

Take Shelter, 4, 20 Tarr, Béla, 115, 116, 117, 119 Ten Commandments, The, 32 Terminal Virus, 87 Terminator 2: Judgment Day, 60 Testament, 5, 61, 62, 77–78, 81 Thacker, Eugene, 50–51 These Final Hours, 48, 51 Thing, The, 5, 33–34 Thing from Another World, The, 4, 31–33 Things to Come, 4, 28

Thor: Ragnarok, 8 Threads, 5, 61, 63, 77, 79, 80–81 Time Machine, The, 6, 23, 110–11 Time of the Wolf, 61 Train to Busan, 87, 102 Trier, Lars von, 48, 49, 50 Tristan und Isolde, 50 Turin Horse, The, 6, 115–19 12 Monkeys, 87 28 Days Later, 6, 22, 87, 99–100, 102 28 Weeks Later, 6, 87, 99, 101, 102, 103 2012, 6, 109–10 2019: After the Fall of New York, 60

Verdens Undergang (The End of the World), 4, 24–26, 44 Virosphere, 91 Virus, 104

Wanger, Walter, 35 War Game, The, 5, 61, 79–80 War Games, 56, 59, 60

War of the Worlds, The: book, 4, 22, 23, 33, 35–36, 37; film (1953), 36, 37–38 Watkins, Peter, 79 Wells, H. G., 23, 24, 28, 33, 35–36, 110; extinction of humankind, 36–37 When Worlds Collide, 4, 44–46 White Zombie, 97–98 Widmark, Richard, 75 Woodland, Jared, 115 World Is Not Enough, The, 59 World War Z, 6, 22, 87, 102, 103 Wylie, Philip, 44

Zardoz, 60 zombies, 97–104; apocalypses, 101; as viral metaphor, 101 zoonotic viruses, 89–90, 91

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Prince (1955–2020) was a professor of cinema at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. He authored numerous books, including Digital Visual Effects in Cinema: The Seduction of Reality and A Dream of Resistance: The Cinema of Kobayashi Masaki (both Rutgers University Press).