Copyright: Eleanor Leonne Bennett

by Teodor Reljic

Picturing the end of the world is far too tempting. Even if every fibre of your rational brain rails against the inherent morbidity in imagining the world – the entire world, your world – being blown to smithereens by natural-cum-celestial disaster, you just can’t help it, can you?

And when popular culture gets in on it; when, on top of being bombarded by images and sound bites relating to either the ongoing loop that is Lindsay Lohan’s revolving door rehab policy (Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence writ tabloid), the tacky-ethics of Kim Kardashian’s decision to not marry (because we can all relate to a multi-million-dollar-worth do-nothing heiress, right?), the many permutations of Lady Gaga (each new skin slowly chipping away whatever worthwhile glitz the nu-Madonna had accomplished in the all-too-recent past)… when, in the digi-neon blare of tweets and mobile bleeps, The Apocalypse too becomes trendy, then thinking about the end is not only sanctioned by our own – ever dormant but ever ready ­– reptilian brain, it flanks us at the eyeball-level too, and we’re stuck, transfixed – and our fascination is, we feel, entirely justified.

We can think about the end. And we can think about the end until after the end. Because we know of the apocalypse only before and after – we can never imagine what it’s like to be right in the eye of the storm. If, indeed, it will even turn out to be a storm – and not, for example, a wind as sharp as a blade but just as brief, just as effective… but I digress.

Because, indeed, when thinking about the apocalypse, all one can do is digress.

So we’ve decided to half-believe the 2012 Mayan prophecies. We half-believe it in the same way as we half-believe the horoscope. It’s found among the backmatter of every newspaper and magazine for a reason. It’s our naughty escape from Father Science (perhaps, we’d like to think, some one-on-one time with Mother Nature, in fact?) And so 2012 is our latest fad. Like Y2K, but without the technological ring of truth, and with added cod-historical mysticism: the Mayans are more seductive than scrolling streams of binary, whichever way you’re inclined.

It doesn’t take an incredibly incisive mind – nor, indeed, the exertion of anything but the most rudimentary cognitive efforts – to realise that Roland Emmerich’s 2012 is just that and nothing more – Roland Emmerich’s 2012… Roland Emmerich being, of course, the man behind Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow – which are to the endtimes what Lindsay Lohan is to Nietzsche: violent, loud and obstinately shallow knee-jerk reactions to deep seated fears – multi-million dollared baby yells, feeding on a universal fear that’s just too easy to exploit.

Perhaps it’s with good reason that some of our most cherished apocalypse-related artefacts tell the story either before or after the apocalypse happened. We can’t really tell stories in an ‘apocalyptic’ scenario… we tell them in a ‘post-apocalyptic’ scenario. All you can do while the apocalypse is happening around you is record the damage. You can’t tell stories, you can’t evolve relationships. It’s the end, for God’s sake. End it.

(This is why a lot of Roland Emmerich’s films are nothing more than set pieces with borrowed, clichéd characters and dialogue tacked on as if they were an afterthought – they simply can’t be anything else.)

Really, it shouldn’t be this way. I’m reminded of a line from what remains one of my favourite films (and a bit of a cliché in itself, I’ll admit).

“It’s only after you’ve lost everything,” Brad Pitt’s dime store suburban revolutionary Tyler Durden opines, “… that you’re free to do anything.”

And shouldn’t we be free to do anything, after the end has ended? Shouldn’t we consider the world as a vast terrain that is ravaged, yes, but that’s aching to be rebuilt? No more Lindsay Lohan, no more Kim Kardashian. No more Gaga, believe it or not. We’ll only keep what we want. And what we build from there on out could be anything.

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, when it was still just a skinny, angry debut novel aching for a real audience, was released in 1996 to not that much fanfare at all. Then, at the very tail-end of the century, David Fincher came and made it into a cult classic, powered by Brad Pitt and Edward Norton as the Jekyll and Hyde of the disaffected post-yuppie (just) generation, beating each other senseless for kicks and cod-spiritual respite from their emasculating 9-5 lives (while encouraging an entire underground posse to join in).

This quickly grows into a rag-tag anarchic movement, and while the team never succeeds in blowing up anything at the end of the book, the film ends with a striking shot of the major credit card companies’ buildings blowing up as a freshly-minted couple (in then-futuristic Facebook language, their romantic status would have been flipped from ‘It’s Complicated’ to ‘In a Relationship’ at that instant) hold hands: our protagonists, united as the economic world crumbles to dust.

Never mind the real recession – which rolled in the background while we got on with our lives – at that moment things felt cataclysmic, and beautiful. And Fight Club wasn’t the only authority-prodding studio offering to emerge that year. The Matrix and American Beauty, thriving on opposite ends of the spectrum, delighted and unsettled us. They were films that kept people talking, and I don’t remember there ever being a set of films like that, appearing simultaneously, ever since.

American Beauty, in the scintillating journey of an Everyman’s self-destruction, charts the end of the American Dream and bisects suburbia to reveal a teeming landscape of hungry dreams that will never be satisfied, except in death, except when Kevin Spacey’s Lester can gather up the vignettes of his life so that they glitter with both satirical bite and strange, ephemeral beauty.

The Matrix – a cyber-jamboree that only felt original because it so aggressively plagiarised an endless stream of pop culture sources: from William Gibson to Grant Morrison to a plethora of anime and practically anything (and everything) by Philip K. Dick – showed us something we knew all along: that things are not what they seem… but oh! discovering it told like that! Thrown inside a world-within-a-world and allowed to savour violence as if it were the finest art, our senses were, once again, transfixed. The end could very well have come for us. Indeed, we could easily have been the pod-people powering The Matrix. Of course, at that point, we were. But just like the treacherous Cypher, we didn’t care.

Naturally, it was not to last. As the last decade of the 20^th century finally decided to turn over, the brief spark disappeared just as quickly. The Matrix was revealed to be a sham. Much in the same way as Neo heaves in shock once he discovers that everything he’s experienced so far has in fact been a lie, so the Matrix sequels made me feel ill as soon as I realised that the masterminds behind the series – the enigmatic Wachowski siblings – were nothing more but a double-emperor with no clothes. The machinery behind the sequels was revealed to be a cartoon, a needlessly garrulous one too. Proof that less is more. But anyway, the world had ended by then. It didn’t matter that the sequels came out. We had grown up, we’d get over it.

And so the zombies of The Walking Dead now dominate the small screens. And so, I hear (from reports quite close to home here in Malta, as it happens), that World War Z will now strive to tell us how it is, after humanity crosses over to the other side of not-being – and once again, Brad Pitt will be the mouthpiece!

But I don’t know. There’s something about zombies that reeks of self-parody. You can’t be a herald of the apocalypse if you’re already dead and brainless – if it is about anything, the Apocalypse is about life.

Give me The Road Warrior any day. If I can’t have 1999 back, I’ll have that, thank you.

***

Teodor Reljic does not look forward to the end of the world – he’s seen far too little of it. In the meantime he enjoys travelling to distant lands in books and films but unlike poor Johnny Keats, isn’t innocent enough to consider this a worthy substitute for actual globe-trotting. His next destination remains uncertain, but it’ll doubtless be powered by – and peppered with – writing of some kind, since, being a graduate of English from the University of Malta, it’s the only real skill he has.

Eleanor Leonne Bennett is a 15 year old photographer and artist who has won contests with National Geographic,The Woodland Trust, The World Photography Organisation, Winstons Wish, Papworth Trust, Mencap, Big Issue, Wrexham science , Fennel and Fern and Nature’s Best Photography.She has had her photographs published in exhibitions and magazines across the world including the Guardian, RSPB Birds , RSPB Bird Life, Dot Dot Dash ,Alabama Coast , Alabama Seaport and NG Kids Magazine (the most popular kids magazine in the world). Visit her site eleanorleonnebennett.zenfolio.com to see more of her work.

December 5th, 2011
Categories: Apocalypse . Author: schlockmagazine

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