“Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret! Why didn’t you tell the world!?” -Dr. Strangelove, or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Many stories in literature, film, and video games deal with events to prevent the End of the World (in whatever form it might take) or to deal with the aftermath of a devastated planet. Examples of the first include the Pern series, The Fifth Element, and entries in the Legend of Zelda or Final Fantasy franchises. Examples of the other includes The Road, 28 Days Later, and The Last of Us. Preventing the End from coming allows (not exclusively) for stories of the unambiguous struggle between good and evil, life over death, and freedom of will over the cold hand of fate. Coping with a post-apocalyptic world gives storytellers the chance to question what humanity’s true nature is in the face of calamity, whether morality can or should transcend social circumstances, and what there is in pre-apocalyptic society which is best left in the charred ruins of ground zero. Both of these approaches to apocalyptic storytelling deserves discussion, and they might receive treatment in later posts, but for the moment I would like to examine the tale which ends with an apocalyptic event.
While apocalypse-based stories come in many diverse forms and thus have a variety of tones and morals, those which end with an apocalyptic event tend, in my opinion, to have far more of a political or satirical aspect to them than most of their kindred tales in the genre. Why end a story with the bombs exploding, the comet crashing, or the gates to hell opening? Why do the heroes fail to save humanity? The solution lies in interrogating two things: who the heroes or protagonists are and whether humanity is worth saving. If the protagonists are not heroic (at least in a traditional sense) and if humanity is seen as too flawed or their preservation comes at too high a price, then the human race will likely suffer an apocalyptic fate.
Let us take a look at two examples briefly. First, the Cold War dark comedy Dr. Strangelove. This 1964 movie tells the story of a psychotic Air Force general who orders his nuclear bombers to drop their payload on the Soviet Union and the desperate attempts of inept of deranged politicians, scientists, and generals to prevent a radioactive doomsday. They do not succeed in this. As the movie ends, so, too, does our world. But why is this? In one sense, those directly responsible for the end of the world, the bomber crew who unwittingly follow unauthorized orders and trigger a chain reaction that will irradiate the earth for 100 years, are quite heroic. They do their duty as if their country was counting on them and accomplish their mission to the best of their abilities. As the movie’s US president sadly boasts to his Soviet counterpart, “It’s initiative!” They have a strong dose of the everyman in them, particularly the pilot. Those in the leadership, however, are the ones who make a mess of things. Aside from a secretary, we never see a regular civilian. We are only presented with soldiers, politicians, and scientists involved with classified information. Humanity certainly is worth saving, but they are absent. The bomber crew is heroic, but they are inadvertently the instruments of doom. Who are our protagonists? The world’s leaders, but they are not heroes. And so the end comes.
Next, let us turn to another Cold War movie about atomic destruction, though perhaps not an expected one: Beneath the Planet of the Apes. This is direct sequel to the original Planet of the Apes, both starring Charlton Heston. Most people are aware of the ending to the first movie which reveals the story of an ape-ruled planet actually takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth. The ending to the sequel, however, is also noteworthy in its own regard. In the ruins of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, a single atomic bomb still exists, one with the power to destroy the whole planet, bearing the extremely eschatological name “Alpha and Omega,” or “the beginning and the end.” It is worshipped by the mutated descendants of humanity. Taylor (Heston’s character). Tries to prevent the weapon from being triggered when an army of apes arrives to kill the remaining humans. But when Taylor is injured and asks for help from Dr. Zaius (the ape antagonist from the first film), he is spurned. With his dying breath, Taylor activates the bomb, destroying the apes, the humans, and all life on earth. In this act, Taylor repudiates both the humans and the apes. Both are incurably wicked in his eyes. Humans nearly destroyed the earth once; apes seem little better, and they all too prone to the same errors of pride and aggression. He is not heroic in a traditional sense, but that is because both humans and simians are not worth saving. He damns them all in deed, just as he had damned in words the humans responsible for the previous nuclear holocaust at the end of the first movie.
In both of these examples, overt yet non-specific criticisms are being leveled at their audiences and contemporary society. In the first case, doom might come about through incompetence and paranoia among the leadership, despite whatever ideological positions are supposedly at stake. Perhaps the ideologies themselves are driving the leaders to such lunacy. In the other case, the movie seems to say that any people with the will to use such horrible weapons deserves to be destroyed by them. Perhaps these messages could have been portrayed without complete destruction, and many stories do end with a sense of relief at having narrowly escaped a fate that humanity might well have earned. But by letting the button be pressed, the storyteller gives the unmistakable impression that these things might actually happen, that someone might go too far – a sense harder to achieve when there is a happy ending. Even in stories that have ridiculous means of destroying the world (like Cabin in the Woods), when the world is allowed to die, the audience must ask themselves, “Should it have been saved, could it have been, or is destruction inevitable and, perhaps, appropriate?” By asking these questions, one hopes nihilism does not conquer but rather a desire to become a people both worthy and capable of overcoming absolute destruction.
“In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead.” -Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)
Stables of the Apocalypse 