Is This The End Of The World?
My 89-year old mother, who lives in Miami, asked me yesterday, “Is this the end of the world?”
Could be.
At least, the end of the world as we once knew it. The old world may not be coming back any time soon, if ever.
The thing about The End Of The World is that it doesn't come with a big announcement. It doesn’t come the way it does in the movies. It doesn't come with a massive asteroid streaking towards the Earth, when we all know we only have seven days left to live and then it will all be over.
When the Roman Empire was collapsing, Romans did not sit around the Forum saying “Wow, the Empire was great, but I can’t believe we’re in that Dark Ages now…. and for a thousand years no less!”
Nope.
They just said, “Wow. Things are really getting weird and starting to fall apart a bit, but I bet we’ll be back to the old Empire by June. July at the latest.”
Their mistake.
I recently watched the classic film On The Beach, the 1959 post-nuclear holocaust sci fi thriller, starring Eva Gardner and Gregory Peck. In the movie, there has been a nuclear war and a band of radiation is now circle the earth, killing off all life, much like the Corona virus, but a bit more virulent.
Peck is the commander of a US Submarine, The Swordfish, that holds the last living Americans on earth. They were under the sea when the war took place. Now they are in Australia, the last pocket of human existence, also soon to be killed off — the last place to go.
How everyone excepts their fate with equanimity. No riots. No looting. Just nice long lines to get your suicide pills from the Australian National Health Service.
Although the movie is more than 60 years old, it really resonates. And it’s free on YouTube. The whole thing. Watch it.
Most Hollywood End of the World movies don’t end this way. Most of them have a happy ending with an amazing, and totally unexpected last minute rescue of the planet and all human life.
Just ask President Morgan Freeman. (Now there’s a President in a crisis I can get behind). In that one, Deep Impact, a comet is headed towards the earth and a space shuttle carrying nuclear warheads blows enough of it up so that the only real damage is a massive tidal wave that sweeps away MSNBC reporter Jenny Lerner, her father and a few million other people.
Phew, that was close!
Real End of the Worlds (at least as we know them) aren’t so clean, so well scripted, so fast and more importantly, I think, so well recognized by those going through them. Also, they tend not to focus on the life of a junior MSNBC television reporter and her estranged dad (probably not high on my list of personal concerns at the end of the world).
Take our own End of the World. The Current One.
Fires burn Australia and California. Antarctica melting. Once again, another record temperature for 2019, highest on record, again. And then the virus. Two out of four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have already arrived and you can bet that the third, Famine, is on the way — a product of the virus, of course. Just read today’s NY Times — famine projected to strike 265 million people now.
And then there is War, the fourth horseman. Well, isn’t it time to ‘get back’ at China? Or maybe Iran? Or both?
But are we like Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner, not to mention a killer performance by none other than Fred Astair as the required scientist who explains all?
Nope.
We are blithely waiting around for someone to come to the rescue. Surely someone will. All we have to do is sit around in our houses and apartments until we get the ‘all clear’ and we can resume life as it once was.
This passive approach to our own fate is a product, more than anything else, of the endless hours we spend watching TV and movies. 8 hours a day, these days. They shape our perception of the word. After all, in every TV show and pretty much every movie, everything always turns out OK in the end, doesn't it?
I mean, OK, a team of oil riggers are sent to the asteroid to blow it up, and just in time, right?
All we need is a bunch of oil riggers from Alaska to find those viruses and bang, it will be all OK, just like in the movies.
That’s why I like On The Beach.
It’s the only movie I can think of where things don’t work out OK in the end.
Which is, sorry to say, probably a bit closer to reality.
Did you get that, ma?
If you like this article, you can read a LOT more of it in my new book, Don’t Watch This: How The Media Are Destroying Your Life.
