THIS WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS
December 21 2014.
“The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.” (Jeremiah 8:20)
Another year is almost behind us: Time to tally the toll for 2014, this time looking at movies and books. Are they harbingers of what is to come?
It has become plain that nothing has improved in the past year. On the contrary. What has become increasingly obvious is that the entire world is racing toward its end, and people, especially those in the entertainment industry, are started to realize this and warning people to prepare. It reminds me of another Bible passage at the start of the Mark Gospel where John the Baptizer calls himself: “A voice crying in the Wilderness, preparing the Way of the Lord.” I feel a kinship with that solitary figure.
What is it that is evident to Hollywood and the literary scene but fails to register with business and politics? Has Hollywood, the film industry, whose wicked people bring us nothing else but violence and murder and fornication, a message for us that by and large churches fail to bring? Yes, when it comes to the steady unraveling of essential earth systems — ocean health collapsing, biodiversity plummeting and, of course, the fraying of the atmosphere’s stability — much of the political establishment continues to ignore this, but Hollywood capitalizes on these disasters. Politicians find no votes in doom and gloom. False optimism is the politicians’ mantra. How wrong they are, but then looking ahead and ‘govern’ has never been the politicians’ strong point.
Filmmakers are sending out an unambiguous S O S: We’re doomed. We are doomed, but….. we can fix the problem somehow. For some people that is, and actually, they are right for the wrong reason. It reminds me of a saying of Jesus when he said (Matthew 3:9) that God could raise children of Abraham out of stones, so he certainly he can use films by godless people to proclaim the truth, or a version thereof. End-of-the-world scenarios appear so regularly in books and films now that they have their own mini-genre — cli-fi: climate – fiction. By and large cli-fi films have gotten grimmer. Have I seen any of these? No, except for AVATAR I haven’t seen a movie in years, but I always read the reviews because movies often signal the future.
One example is the writer-director Christopher Nolan’s epic sci-fi adventure, “Interstellar.” With Earth on the brink of collapse as crops wither and oxygen in the atmosphere dwindles, a team of astronauts race to distant galaxies in search of a new planet for the human race. Earth’s last survivors won’t starve, we are told. Lack of oxygen will do them in. Still, “It’s a perfect planet,” one of the astronauts says in “Interstellar,” referring to spaceship Earth. “We’re not going to find another one like it.”
In this day of global warming – the year 2014 will go down as the warmest ever – cli-fi made an early splash with “Waterworld.” There Kevin Costner in 1995 had already a vision of a future where the polar icecaps have melted and Earth is almost entirely submerged. Another example is “The Day After Tomorrow,” where also a climate disaster is unfolding. While that movie had its fair share of Hollywood hollowness (there was a wolf pack chase through Midtown Manhattan), the film at least made an attempt to detail the basic science of man-made climate change. The protagonist, Dennis Quaid, was a climatologist.
I also read about “Elysium,” in which Matt Damon fights to get off a dusty, overcrowded Earth and makes it to an Arcadian space station. Pixar’s “Wall-E” had a similar scenario, apparently. In that computer-animated satire, Earth is toast, and what’s left of humanity spends its days slurping supersize drinks and splurge-shopping on a blimp-like spaceship. In “Avatar,” – the movie I did see – the Marines are on the planet Pandora, because we’ve already strip-mined Earth.
According to another review I read, perhaps the best of this bunch is “Snowpiercer,” the Korean director Bong Joon-ho’s fable about social injustice and environmental hubris. Released earlier this year, “Snowpiercer” imagines that civilization — in a botched attempt to reverse the effects of global warming via atmospheric geoengineering — has turned Earth into something like the ice world of Hoth from “Star Wars.” I have no clue who or what Hoth is, but it must feature in Star Wars somehow. There the survivors are stuck on a train that rattles in an endless circle around the planet. The folks in first class get spa treatments and dance parties, while the proletariat in the caboose has to choke down protein bars made of ground-up bugs.
Conservative reviewers like to grumble that such films just spread liberal propaganda. After all, so says ultra-conservative Senator Inhofe, Climate Change is a hoax: perpetrators are like communists such as Obama. But ecological meltdown makes for a reliable sci-fi setting for the same reason Wall Street tycoons are convenient villains — to the average moviegoer, it’s believable.
Let’s face it: serious environmental dislocations are all but inevitable. Many of them are underway. The last line reminds me of placards I have seen at climate marches: “There Is No Planet B.”
Books also have this “Armageddon” theme, including Margaret Atwood’s dark MaddAddam trilogy, Nathaniel Rich’s “Odds Against Tomorrow” and Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” which closes with New Yorkers flocking to the top of a giant sea wall, one of the few spots in the city where you can still glimpse a proper sunset.
Here’s what I read in the New York Times a while ago:
“Emily St. John Mandel doesn’t seem like the paranoid type. Cheerful and preternaturally poised, she spends her free time tending to the flower beds in her rooftop garden in Brooklyn and working on her rudimentary French.
“But last fall, she started fretting about the end of civilization — specifically, whether publishers were growing tired of the dystopian trope. She was shopping around her new novel, “Station Eleven,” which is set in the near future, after a flu pandemic has wiped out most of humanity. Ms. Mandel, who got her start writing crime fiction, worried that the post-apocalyptic wave had peaked.
“When I started writing, there were a few literary post-apocalyptic novels, but not quite the incredible glut that there is now,” Ms. Mandel said in an interview on her terrace. “I was afraid the market might be saturated.”
It wasn’t. A three-day bidding war broke out among a half-dozen publishers. The novel sold to Alfred A. Knopf, which paid a mid-six-figure advance, far more than Ms. Mandel had made on her previous three novels combined. She now feels reassured — if not about the future of the planet, then at least about the shelf life of dystopian fiction.
“It’s a somewhat anxious time, and post-apocalyptic fiction is a way to channel our anxieties,” she said.
Station Eleven,” is part of a cluster of post-apocalyptic novels landing this fall that seem steeped in the anxieties of our era: pandemics, environmental catastrophes, energy shortages, civil unrest. These works blur the line between literary and genre fiction and seem positioned to capture both science-fiction readers and fans of more experimental fare.”
Michel Faber’s “The Book of Strange New Things” unfolds on a distant planet as a Christian missionary seeks to convert its inhabitants, while his pregnant wife, left back on Earth, is shaken by a series of global disasters: extreme weather, famine, widespread power failures.
Howard Jacobson, a Man Booker Prize laureate, surprised critics and readers recently when he abandoned his usual comic motifs and turned out “J,” a dark novel about a broken futuristic society in which everyone has suppressed the memory of a horrific historical catastrophe.
In David Mitchell’s new novel, “The Bone Clocks,” the narrative stretches to the year 2043, as dwindling fossil fuel supplies, shortages of food and medicine and global warming cause governments to collapse.
“It’s in the air, isn’t it?” Mr. Mitchell said of the literary preoccupation with the end of the world. “In a way, how can you be a sane and compassionate human being and not be increasingly alarmed by what’s happening to the planet, when it’s potentially civilization-ending?”
While some literary critics have started to grumble about post-apocalyptic-fiction fatigue, publishers, agents and authors are betting that readers’ appetite for cataclysm is nowhere near sated. Dystopian series like “Divergent” and “The Hunger Games” have sold tens of millions of copies and seem to occupy a permanent place on young adult best-seller lists, while also attracting swarms of adult readers.
And the end-of-the-world scenarios continue to multiply. Edan Lepucki’s recent breakout debut novel, “California,” takes place in the near future, as a young couple flee Los Angeles for the California wilderness to escape food shortages and rising violence as society collapses. Laura van den Berg’s “Find Me,” due out in February, centers on a lonely grocery store clerk who struggles in the aftermath of a deadly mass contagion.
Humanity is even worse off in Benjamin Percy’s forthcoming novel, “The Dead Lands,” a retelling of the Lewis and Clark story set in a futuristic America that’s been destroyed by a super-flu and nuclear fallout.
End of my survey of recent ‘end of the world’ movies and books. Do these writers sense something?
Time to face reality
So with the Gospel of Hollywood out there, and lots of books with an apocalyptic theme, what else is going on?
The oil price collapse, the Russian ruble rout, the stock market extreme volatility all signal one message: The days of plenty are over, the high-energy phase of human life is coming to a close, and we have not yet learned all that we need to know — about ourselves or the world — to adapt to a new era. We better start learning fast, not really a human trait, because our greatest handicap is our politicians and the system in which they operate, predicated on Economic Growth. Any normal person – and fortunately there still are a few left – who is only faintly aware of what’s happening out there, given the intensifying negative effects of our activity on the water, soil and climate of the planet, must come to the unpleasant conclusion that an ongoing large-scale human presence on the planet is impossible. Put bluntly: what we have conceived as being “the good life” is inconsistent with Life: it has become a way of Death. Sorry to offend you. Pussyfooting the issue is no longer proper.
I take the slogan “reduce, reuse, recycle” seriously. I guess it helped that I grew up during the Depression and War-time Holland. Expect those conditions to re-appear, and worse. What kept us going then was: After the War matters will improve. Now there is not such an outcome.
Time to face reality. And the reality is that there is more to the new life to come than just being frugal and living simply. It takes an entirely new mindset, where agitating against capitalism’s logic of endless growth and the mindless consumption that it generates is not enough. The truth is that our society today is based on a collective denial of limits, a delusion made possible temporarily by the reigning fundamentalist faith of our day, technological fundamentalism — the belief that the increasing use of evermore sophisticated high-energy, advanced technology can solve any problem, including the problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology. Frankly there is no evidence that any society is ready to engage in the necessary discussions or consider the necessary changes, least of all we in North America.
I have a dear friend who told me that he, at times, suffers from physical and emotional pain because of the State of the Earth. To him apply the words of Jeremiah: “My grief is beyond healing, my heart is sick within me.” (Jeremiah 8:18)
We pray in The Lord’s Prayer: “Your Kingdom Come”, without often realizing that we are asking God to speed up this earth’s demise – something which we are very good at – and bring on The New Creation. It takes more than a song and a prayer to become ready for this. It is THE major challenge that faces us bar none. It starts with grief and ends with confession.
Till next week, the week after Christmas and before New Year.