It’s getting harder and harder to stop your nose against the grim miasma of doom that seems to pervade the modern moment. There’s an ever-growing sense that the historical memory of the horror of the world wars has faded, and a growing belligerence and blood-thirstiness grips ever-growing segments of countries that would have liked to call themselves freedom-loving melting-pots a decade or two ago. In the name of so-called national security, Israel, armed with nuclear weapons, is herding Palestinians with precision bombs and quite literally bulldozing them inside their homes. The Israeli offensive in Gaza, which will almost certainly be viewed as a genocide by historians in twenty years if there’s anyone around to still record history, is giving fascists around the world the necessary blueprint for boiling their own frog.
Meanwhile, human technological advancement appears to be all at once a tower of Babel and a black hole. Excesses like artificial intelligence, which provide real but totally unnecessary increases in the much fetishized productivity, cost staggering amounts of resources, and more creatures go extinct, more forests are wiped off the face of the earth, and more people scramble to migrate to the parts of the world that are still livable, only to find that even the ostensibly liberal political class is telling them not to come.
And yet still the art that dominates the market currently tells us that if we just love each other enough, if we just vote, if we just read things that bring us to empathize with people unlike us, somewhere, someone else will act in such a way as to make a difference. Or at least our deaths will be redeemed. Meanwhile, things get worse. There’s hardly a substantial artistic movement out there that seeks to warn or disturb us. I’m not naive: of course there isn’t. The books, the movies, they wouldn’t sell, and art is no less a product to the economy than toilet paper, and it’ll be used as such if things get bad enough. Nobody wants to see ordinary people getting slaughtered unless there’s a message of hope. Maybe if a chainsaw-wielding maniac with a pervy dad is doing the killing, your average American can dig it, but even then it’s marginal.
Meanwhile, nearly everyone is trying to get theirs while they still can, the future being as uncertain as it is. There’s a cadre of idiots who seem to think if Elon would just try lithium or whatever, they might be able to go to Mars when the Earth finally catches on fire, but none of these people seem to have grasped Total Recall. Still others believe we’ll have nuclear fusion in time to save us from catastrophic warming of the globe. We’re promised over and over again that technology, which has gotten us to this place, will save us. This ignores that a powerful and substantial political faction are actually apocalyptic accelerationists, the ones who want America to defend Israel not because they care a wit about Israel, but because it might mean Apocalypse Now. The dominant cultural product is there for us to escape from our lives and our futures, or to tell us we’re doing our best, not to make us feel more alive or put us in touch with forces and feelings that might actually make us want to change our lives.
So I’ve become a little obsessed with books and movies that want to warn us. Threads is a movie that wants to warn us. The movie begins with ordinary British folk in Sheffield going about their days as saber rattling in the Middle East and abroad turns finally into full-blown nuclear warfare, and Sheffield, is of course, hit. Denial turns to panic turns to agonizing death or at best scrambling for survival in a nightmare of dust, radiation, and murder. The movie’s final shot is a tremendously depressing, literally a stillbirth, suggesting the end of humanity as we know it. But the scene I return to in my mind is at the movie’s fulcrum, when the bombs are just dropping. A man and his pregnant fiancee, who have largely been in denial about the new World War that appears to be fomenting, have been fighting more and more, and on the eve of disaster, he goes to get drunk and eventually to get laid with, well, someone else. When the bomb drops, he’s fucking in the back of a car, or at least on his way to fucking. Talk about coitus interruptus, he looks up to see the city lighting up through his car window. Next time we see him, he’s running through the streets, trying to find his love. He collapses before he can. His mistake, of course, is not just denial, but trying to get his while he’s still got a chance. There are others in the film who choose to stay with their loved ones, or who hide out in basements to try to avoid the apocalyptic fallout. Their fates are no less horrifying and arbitrary, which is what keeps the film from being a morality play where those who succumb to the temptations of flesh are the ones who must suffer, and you might have been saved if you just had the good sense to keep your prick in your pants. Even the preppers die in Threads. But there are those who at least get to die in the arms of the ones they love, and those who do not. As art, it recognizes not only our contingency as mortal creatures but our entire society’s contingency. Rather than skipping ahead to the post-apocalyptic landscape so we can watch people carry the light (or whatever), Threads reminds us that no one gets out alive, not even civilization.
Possession, a movie whose production was so famously difficult that one if its leads contemplated suicide, asks: what if a troubled marriage on its way to a divorce was made whole or at least exciting again by a tentacle monster? It’s a deeply unsettling film, bizarre and perverse and very, very funny.
The scene I want to look at is well into the movie, when Mark, played by Sam Neill, has already begun to accept that he has been replaced by a tentacle monster, that his wife is making love to a tentacle monster, and also that she is feeding it the men who have dared to hurt her, and he is actually finally there to observe her doing so. At first he seems to look on in horror,
and must look away, and even covers his face with his hands, and then, something shifts… He looks a second time.
He walks around the scene so he can observe at all angles.
He seems to be fascinated at least, approaching aroused. And his second appraisal made me revisit his first. What looked like horror at first may have just been fascination, so abject he felt he had to look away.
Regardless, he looks away for less time than he spends looking.
It’s another instance of observing an unfolding disaster, I suppose, but it has a fundamentally different charge from Threads. There we have a man finally realizing he is caught in a web, and there’s no escaping, here we have a man realizing that if he’s caught in a web, then he might actually like being tickled by the spider. There’s joyful participation in the suffering of the world, and then there’s this: if he possesses his wife, and the tentacle monster possesses his wife, then who’s making dinner? As it turns out, Mark is. He brings them more food in the form of detectives and men who’d like to possess her themselves. Eventually they are replaced altogether by the monster.
I suppose what I’m getting at is that obsessed with protecting and possessing those closest to us, we can become accomplices in our own destruction and the destruction of others. It’s no accident that the closing shot in the movie is (spoiler) their oft-neglected boy drowning himself in a tub as war begins in the background.
If these movies sound bleak, that’s of course because they are unrelenting in their vision of the destructive possibilities of the human animal. There is, of course, hope out there. Hope in the form of love, hope in the form of political movements that ask us to look out for each other and protect the most vulnerable people, but what these movies do for me is temper my hope. Hope unalloyed becomes delusion or worse, out and out cynicism when our lofty expectations for change aren’t met. What’s difficult is accepting that the world may very well be fucked, and trying anyways to mitigate the horror and pain and do something worthwhile for the people around us with the time we have left while the wildfire grows and spreads.
I loved this so much
A fascinating read! I found you through Dua Becker’s restack and I will be back for more