Major Acid's E-Rag
After Nine Eleven
Elegance
at the End of the World
October 9, 2001
Have you been wondering what it will look like, how it will begin? The
end, that is. What will the beginning of the end of the world as we know
it look like? For some members of the Taliban at ground zero of the
US-British attacks the end has already come. For some 5000 people in the
World Trade Center towers the end came on September 11, 2001. But is
that how it will look, the end? Is this the best the Four Horsemen have
in store for us all? A moment of nearly unbearable suspense before
civilization implodes, and then a long, slow, bloody decline into chaos?
Is it too much to hope for that there could be, in the end, even if only
to heighten the irony of our own self-induced destruction, a sense of
elegance?
We have, in
the western world, been contemplating the aesthetics of the end of the
world for a long time already, first in novels and more recently in
films, some efforts meeting with greater success than others. One
memorably forgettable example of this is The Last Canadian, a paperback
novel whose main character is American, curiously, but who does spend
much of his time paddling the rivers and streams of northern Canada
trying to ferret out survivors of a world-destroying plague. When he
spots such a survivor, he paddles furiously towards him, longing for
human contact, only to find his quarry lying dead as he closes in. Our
hero is a carrier of the disease, transfiguring him into a sort of angel
of death in a post-apocalyptic world.
The end of
the world courtesy of disease is a favourite of apocalyptic authors.
However, seldom are the bacteria either equipped with vision or so
swiftly self-propelled as those that hover about the hero of The Last
Canadian. Apparently, though unexplained (and likely not thought of) by
the author, the bacteria see a survivor as soon as the hero does, and
they then race ahead of him and his canoe to strike the survivor down.
Stephen
King, no slouch himself in the imagination department, has yet to resort
to apparently sentient bacteria, but he did posit the end of the world
as the result of disease in The Stand. King’s killer virus may have
escaped from a military lab only to destroy some 99 44/100ths of the
world’s population, although he is not always so direct. King enjoys
playing on the North American penchant for anti-government paranoia by
hinting at, but not confirming, the source for whatever evil haunts a
particular tale. This was the case in his novella “The Mist,” a finely
wrought piece, perhaps one of King’s best. The mist in “The Mist” may
have emanated from a mysterious government lab near the hero’s summer
place, but that is never determined for sure.
“The Mist”
is a tale in which the end of the world is more supernatural than
natural, so whatever end our world finally takes, it is unlikely to be
close to that particular nightmare. The Stand is more prosaic, at least
as regards the end. Both, however, exhibit an interest more centered on
survivors of the apocalypse, a common feature of the bulk of this kind
of writing. Many authors, like King, give the events of the end itself
short shrift. This habit is, in a way, an aesthetic problem. How the end
comes about, how it affects the characters, and what that means for
their actions later on, is arguably crucial to the literary value of the
work. The Stand suffers from this lack, although the mind reels at the
thought of giving King the idea he should add to his ponderous tome,
which he has already done once since its initial publication. There are
already too many characters and too much description. The thought of
tens of thousands of words added to that is mind numbing.
The idea
that the frame of the story is important, that it adds to both character
development and internal consistency, should not be underrated. An
editor who ventured down that path might suggest that Tolstoy’s War and
Peace would be a better read without all the war scenes, or that Clint
Eastwood’s long The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly would be better without
the Civil War scenes. In fact, the extended battle sequence in
Eastwood’s film is crucial not only to the atmosphere of the film, but
to the development of both Eastwood’s character, the Good, and Wallach’s,
the Bad. The film would be shorter, which would have made many critics
happier, but it would also have been a far slighter effort.
Eastwood’s
film is not an end of the world story, of course, but Dr. Strangelove
is. Peter Sellers’ classic black comedy in fact, is all about the
beginning of the end. The end itself – nuclear holocaust – is no more
than a backdrop over which to roll the credits. The climax of the movie
is Slim Whitman’s iconic turn madly waving his cowboy hat while riding
the bomb to ground zero. It is a fitting end for all the Cold War
paranoia that leads up to it.
Today,
movies, far more than books, are the creators of our shared set of
western cultural references. Both, however, suffer from Sturgeon’s Law:
95% of everything is crap. While Sellers’ film (and Eastwood’s for that
matter) is certainly in the remaining 5%, any number of other end of the
world films are just as certainly crap. Among that list is the Wil Smith
offering, Independence Day.
Independence Day is crap, but it’s entertaining. It is also an example
of the end of the world brought about by aliens, another popular
scenario in both films and books. The super-powerful aliens in Smith’s
film spend most of their time destroying the world and doing, frankly,
an excellent job of it. In short order, all that’s left of humanity is a
small group of uber-patriots such as Smith – a trained fighter pilot
rather like Top Gun’s Tom Cruise without the angst – and Randy Quaid –
trailer trash doofus who magically learns how to fly highly
sophisticated fighter jets, which makes you wonder just what real value
Smith’s training is. Smith survives and Quaid dies, but that has more to
do with Hollywood star power than logical storytelling.
The lie
underpinning Independence Day is that an uber-patriot actually could
turn the tide against over-whelming odds. It is a lie. Slim Whitman,
sort of a one character amalgam prefiguring both Smith and Quaid, comes
to a far more honest end riding his bomb to the end of the world.
Literary
science fiction has its share of under-performers, too. The execrable
Battlefield Earth, nominally written by L Ron Hubbard, operates with the
same uber-partriot ethos. It is also responsible, in the film version,
for what is surely the nadir of John Travolta’s career, for which, if
for nothing else, Travolta should rethink his commitment to Scientology.
Another
literary offering that made the jump to the big screen – twice, in fact
– is John W Campbell’s “Who Goes There,” the genesis of the 50’s cult
classic The Thing, in which an unrecognizable James Arness (Marshall
Dillon in later years) is the monster, and in more recent times, John
Carpenter’s The Thing, starring Kurt Russell. The short story is an
excellent read, and Campbell, the leading sf editor of his day, knew
that brevity in sf (or horror) is usually a blessing. Of the two films,
the latter is better, with marvelously gross special effects, including
a particularly amusing walking head that seems distantly related to
whatever abomination the mating of an Alaskan King Crab and a tarantula
would produce. Carpenter, unlike Campbell, is not noted for thoughtful
restraint, although the final scene is surprisingly understated – almost
elegant, in fact – with Russell and the only other survivor, either of
whom might yet be the monster, sitting in weary resignation waiting to
freeze to death.
A less
pessimistic end of the world tale with ultra-powerful aliens is Arthur C
Clarke’s classic Childhood’s End. Unlike the purely evil creatures in
Independence Day, Clarke’s aliens are neither destructive nor vengeful.
Instead, they are cosmic baby-sitters, whose real task is to make sure
humanity doesn’t end of its own nuclear stupidity. Humanity as we know
it does end, but only in an evolutionary sense. Humanity evolves into a
new form of cosmic being, ironically infinitely more powerful than the
alien Overlords sent to safeguard the change.
For all that
it is considered a classic, Childhood’s End is a flawed work. It is
episodic, with chunks of time blithely passed over between segments.
Worse, real opportunities for dramatic power are consistently
underplayed, often glossed over in a few brief sentences. The sheer
terror that should have arisen from the evolutionary moment when two
children in one family signal the onslaught of the change is grossly
underdone. As for the billions of humans – the final human generation –
who are left behind when their children become something altogether
alien, their slide into self-destruction and final annihilation is
passed over in a strikingly brief conversation between an Overlord and a
human observer.
Evolution of
the species is a rare and somewhat elegant, if here only slightly
realized, form of positing the end of the world as we know it. Evil
aliens are more common, nuclear war is more common, and killer asteroids
or lethal viruses have their share of play, too. Whether in film or in
print – often in both, as in The Planet of the Apes, a novel by Pierre
Boulle turned into a star vehicle for Charlton Heston – there seems no
end of inventive ways of prefiguring our end. Sadly, few of these are as
satisfactory as Dr. Strangelove in film, and in print, satisfaction is
equally hard to find. Yet one example does succeed, and it comes from a
long tradition of British end of the world fiction. That book is John
Christopher’s The Death of Grass.
The British
are very good at ending the world. H G Wells takes us on a
time-traveling tour that goes on post-humanity, and John Wyndham treats
us to an undersea evil (that may have originated on Mars) that melts the
polar ice caps and periodically crawls on shore to “shrimp” for human
prey. The Kraken Wakes is one of Wyndham’s best, although his most
memorable creation is the sentient, ambulatory, man-eating plants in Day
of the Triffids.
Christopher’s 1956 novel, though still in print, is less well-known, but
far superior to Wyndham’s works. The vehicle for the end of the world in
The Death of Grass is a virus. Intriguingly, it is not a virus that
attacks humans. Instead, it kills grasses. At first glance this might be
cause for nothing more than an aesthetic headache – what to do with all
those newly brown lawns. But when we are reminded that rice is a kind of
grass, and when we begin to imagine the billions of people who literally
survive on rice, the problem becomes much more deadly.
As the
disaster spreads west from China, the results are increasingly dramatic
effects on the novel’s characters. There is a moment of cheery optimism
when all believe the scientific “boffins” will find a cure, but that is
short lived. This novel was written long before HIV entered our
consciousness, but eerily, science fails to beat back the grass-killing
virus because the virus has a nasty habit of mutating, the same problem
that dogs efforts to find either a vaccine or a cure for AIDS. As
science fails, society begins to collapse. The good-natured British
‘stiff upper lip’ gives way first to paranoia, then to desperation, and
finally to panic. In a supremely ironic twist the panic leads to nuclear
threat as Britain’s own nuclear arsenal is trained on Britain’s own
rabbiting public. All of this is shown through the eyes of a small group
of characters trying to survive the end of their world.
There is
elegance to Christopher’s vision of the end of the world, an elegance
that is far more satisfying than the trash in The Last Canadian or the
inherent stupidity of Independence Day. It is an elegance too rarely
found in books or in films, the kind of elegance one can only hope for
in the real world, one that won’t be found in George Bush and Osama bin
Laden.
At this
historical moment, only just post-September 11th, when fears of a slide
into chaos loom large, when evil in the guise of bearded terrorists
threatens the end with everything from left-over Russian nukes to newly
engineered anthrax, conversation over coffee and cookies considers the
question: Is this it? Is September 11th the beginning of the end of the
world?
Undeniably,
though politically incorrect to mention it, there was an aesthetic
element to September 11th, a mesmerizing elegance to the slow motion
implosions of the twin towers that once dominated the New York skyline.
The compelling power of that moment of elegance might lead one to think
of this as the beginning of the end, but there is no logical leap form
New York to nuclear holocaust. The level of nuclear threat posed by
terrorists simply is not as great as the threat that fueled the Cold War
and which inspired the brilliance of Dr. Strangelove.
Nuclear
holocaust may yet lie in wait, in the seas around Taiwan, perhaps, or in
the Indian subcontinent, or on the shores of Galilee. Yet there are
other candidates, ones lost in the contemplation of September 11th,
including one striking possibility in a news release from a group of
Australian scientists. It is particularly beguiling because the aim of
the science was to deliver a more effective – and humane – control of
the rodent population through a form of birth control. The scientists
succeeded, too, in an unintended way, by accidentally turning a harmless
rodent flu into a raging killer that slaughtered their lab stock to a
one. Worse, the method is so simple, even a terrorist could handle it.
The
scientists claim there is no way of knowing for sure whether the same
procedure would turn, say, the annual routine of stomach flu in humans
into a biological nightmare that would shame the flu pandemic of 1918
and its millions of deaths. But the boffins thought people should be
aware nonetheless. Besides, there are all kinds of optimistic scientists
who have been telling us for years not to worry too much about
biological terrorism. It seems, they think, that the problem isn’t
really finding a lethal agent, but finding out how to deliver it for
really solid effect.
Blind faith
in science is not necessarily warranted. And if the Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse are casting about for a suitably elegant final blow to the
world, what more wonderfully ironic way could there be than by
destroying humanity with a new, improved, birth control for rats.
