AMERICA’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE POST- APOCALYPTIC MOVIE
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The subject of these movies and the other nuke-obsessed films of the time was the Bomb itself, what it would do, and whether anyone could survive it. It took a while for the ineffable chill of Planet of the Apes to permeate the minds of the next generation of filmmaking talent. Remember, Planet of the Apes preceded not only the Internet but cable TV and the advent of the VCR. A particularly crazy follow-on came in 1975 with a picture called A Boy and His Dog , in which Don Johnson wanders a devastated Earth with a mutt with whom he has established telepathic communications. The dog helps Johnson rape women in exchange for dog food. When he is kidnapped by a tribe to be used as a sperm donor, he finally escapes – and feeds the Machiavellian woman turned it into – a story about mutation. It was about how our children’s future was going to be a living nightmare and there wouldn’t be any way to fix it. Apes would be in charge, humans would be their voiceless slaves, and there was no getting off the planet and going somewhere else. “A change is gonna come,” as Sam Cooke sang, and it’s gonna be just hideous ... The future of the Earth is a horror film. Still, the subject of these movies and the other nuke-obsessed films of the time was the Bomb itself, what it would do, and whether anyone could survive it. Planet of the Apes took things in a new direction. It wasn’t about survival. It was – or as that last minute on the sand
he greatest twist ending in Hollywood history came in 1968 when Charlton Heston rode shirtless on a horse down a beach, saw something horrid, and threw himself to the ground. “You maniacs! You blew it all up!” he shouted as the camera pulled back to show the Statue of Liberty mired in the sand on the Planet of the Apes. It turned out that Astronaut Heston had not journeyed deep into space; rather, he was hundreds of years in the future and the Planet of the Apes was our Earth, which had mutated in the aftermath of a nuclear war. This moment, which still has the power to stagger even if you first saw it half a century ago (as I did), gave birth to an entire motion picture genre: the post-apocalyptic film. There had been two prior cinematic efforts that sought to depict the condition of the world after a global thermonuclear war. Both were released in 1959 and, remarkably, both had the same design concept, which was to show us stunning shots of entirely emptied cities. The World, the Flesh and the Devil showed us a New York with only three people in it, while On the Beach was largely set in a depopulated Melbourne. Just revisiting some of the visuals of The World, the Flesh and the Devil on YouTube is enough to give you the creeps and make you wonder how on earth they pulled it off – long before computer-generated imagery created the same image with Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky , we see Harry Belafonte walking entirely alone through Times Square.
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November 2018
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