This year’s main theme is “post-apocalyptic visions,” films reflecting the human struggle that results from a past cataclysmic event, be it nuclear war or world pandemic or vanished resources. In deciding what films we would show this year, a lot came up that we would consider “apocalyptic,” those films that depict the cataclysm itself – the zombie attack, the tidal wave, the outbreak. And we rejected them, looking for films that had a little more to say about our world, even as they were depicting it in ruins.
We ask you to consider, briefly, the difference between the two types of movies. The Apocalyptic film is essentially a heroic tale – people faced with suddenly oppressive odds. Maybe they win, maybe they don’t, but the emphasis is on an ultimate struggle, a cosmic cage-match with the future going to the winner. The Post-Apocalyptic film, on the other hand, suggests that Man lost. While the heroes in Post-Apocalyptic films still struggle, still exhibit classic heroic traits, these films are more about social commentary. Take Road Warrior, George Miller’s bleak vision of a world in which civilization has collapsed and roving bands of violent thugs fight over scarce gasoline resources. Miller doesn’t even hint at what brought humanity to this point; instead, his film coldly suggests that faced with the crisis people reverted to selfishness, brutality, and sadism. Apocalyptic films tend to show people at their best; Post-Apocalyptic films tend to indicate that even if good people still struggle on, they tend to so against people at their worst.
What we find most compelling about these post-apocalyptic movies, like Franklin Schaffner’s original Planet of the Apes, Jeunet and Caro’s Delicatessen, L. Q. Jones’ A Boy and His Dog, and Geoff Murphy’s The Quiet Earth, is their exploration of a world past the brink. These, like so many others in the genre, seem rooted in a fatal logic: we can’t remain civil toward one another if our basic comforts are removed. We might understand if the suddenly missing ingredient is, like, water. But it’s scarier to think that we might come to the same violent primitivism by the mere absence of something really mundane, like digital communication or something. The movies we’re showing this year that explore this speculative future provide a wide variety of possible cataclysms, but they’re almost uniformly pessimistic.
Even WALL-E, tonight’s first film in our “post-apocalyptic visions” series, despite being a light comedy for young people, relies on a darker criticism of human nature, positing that humanity has brought itself to a conclusion through its own devices, specifically the relentless pursuit of convenience and instant gratification. Think about that the next time you drive to Taco Bell so you can have dinner in your car. You will enjoy our intrepid little hero, a sentient garbage can, but it’s interesting that the hero in this film is not human; he’s cleaning up after them. Nor do the humans regain any sort of nobility. For them, it turns out, it’s essentially over. And now we can turn our attention to the far more efficient, and in the end human, robots that have inherited the earth. (Or if you’re watching Cameron’s apocalyptic Terminator films, it’s anti-human terror.) WALL-E, like so many other Post-Apocalyptic films, is a requiem. We’ll leave it up to you to decide if it truly is our future to end, not with a bang or a whimper, but with a whimper after the bang.
R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser
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