We'll prevail in the face of rampant wildfires. Credit: Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
A few months back, a friend of mine had a baby girl, and so, on the card accompanying her birth gift I wrote, “When you’re my age, I’ll be 118.” This is funny because in 59 years I’ll be dead, but it’s also depressing because I’ll never get to see what happens next in the unfolding narrative called the world we live in.
My writing has often fixated on the end of the world, perhaps because I’m jealous of a future I’ll never get to see, so, in response, I think, “Well, if I can’t see who wins the Academy Awards of 2083, then nobody will get to see the Academy Awards of 2083.” Hence, I have, or rather, once had, a tendency to latch onto apocalyptic thinking — except I’m actually finding that harder to do these days. I once thought the end of the world was kind of cool, but now I see it as corny, even though depictions of it are irresistible, like Beatles music or Ranch dressing. The bogeyman du jour tells you a lot about a culture at a given moment; there’s a reason UFOs became a thing during the McCarthyist Fifties.
The house I grew up in was sold a few years back and the house next door was torn down and replaced by what is arguably the ugliest McMansion in Canada. Most trees in both properties were chopped and — there’s just been too much change, and because of this I’ve lost all desire to ever visit there again. This is something of a counterargument against being jealous of the future and wanting to see how things change after you die. I suspect the future is neither a glorious Brave New World nor a zombie apocalypse. It’s just a lot of tasteless chipping away at the things you once held to be important. In some senses, the future reminds me of a game of Monopoly because nobody ever actually wins a game of Monopoly: people merely drift away from it to do something else, and there’s no satisfying win or loss. How on Earth has that game persisted for so long? Maybe because it unwittingly mirrors the ageing process and prepares us for death.
Having said that, there will, one day in the future, come the day when someone drives a car for the very last time. There will come the day when somebody makes spaghetti for the very last time. A day when — well, you catch my drift. Everything must end at some point, and it’s the end of these small things that make any description of the end of the world extra disconcerting, poignant, and even frightening, because they’re the things that structure our days. But it’s also those small losses that make End Times scenarios fun to read about and fun to watch. There exists a website out there that is devoted to finding chronoclastic errors within zombie TV shows. These sites are fuelled by people who watch the TV screen with a finger on the pause button as they hunt for innocuous background set-dec errors like a recently mown lawn. They’re thinking, After the zombie apocalypse, nobody will ever mow a lawn again. How could this TV show be so clueless? This is the same sort of person who watches movies set in World War One only to spot railway station signs done in Helvetica Bold, and declare the movie is dead to them. And this person is me.
But so much of what we think of as the look of the end of the world comes from film, TV and their often extremely low set-dec budgets. 30 years ago, in Vancouver, I lived in a neighbourhood that was always being used as some sort of film or TV set. In the mornings I’d open the blinds and the streets below would be lined with Sixties muscle cars from Detroit, so I could tell it was a period piece movie set back then. Or sometimes there would be Model T’s and the show would be set in the 1920s. And sometimes I’d open the blinds and there would be tumbleweeds, huge piles of litter and a few sloppily modified electric cars, and this meant that the movie in question was set in a post-apocalyptic future. If you ever wonder why the future in movies is not bright, it’s because using litter and keeping the lights low is a really simple way to stretch your budget.
In our culture, the end of the world seems to happen in very predictable ways and there’s a kind of reassurance and comfort that comes from this. Capitalism runs amuck; AI runs amuck; viruses run amuck; environmental catastrophe runs amuck. Amuck. Amuck, amuck, amuck. If you say the word a few times in a row, it starts losing its meaning and becomes just a sound effect. If you watch too many disaster movies you get the same blanking out effect; it all turns into colourful explosions and alien Halloween costumes.
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