AMERICA’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH THE POST- APOCALYPTIC MOVIE
“Do not, my friends, become addicted to water,” he instructs his slavish hordes. “It will take hold of you and you will resent its absence.” hellscape following a nuclear war in which all of society’s rules no longer have any purchase. The goal of the nameless man at the center of both the book and film is simple: He wants to keep his young son alive, and by alive, he means in large measure unmolested sexually and uneaten by cannibals. Not much more than that. Almost nothing more than that, in fact. But that is enough: McCarthy actually features a scene in which a baby is cooked on a spit. Why did the world fall in love with these bleak, bleak visions of a terrible future in which there is no hope? Your answer is as good as mine. One thing is for sure: You certainly feel better about the present. later into, what is to my mind, the most depressing movie ever made. McCarthy’s work always has a mythopoeic aspect, and that is certainly true of The Road , which examines the ideas of the protean philosopher Thomas Hobbes through the lens of a living This is a great line and an absurd one; how can people live without water, after all? They can if they’re not living in the real world, but inside a nightmare. Perhaps the most punishing of all post-apocalyptic stories is Cormac McCarthy’s The Road , a horrifying but brilliant 2006 novel made a few years
the 1960s were Westerns. People have always loved the black-and-white simplicity of the drama, but they tired of the form. So it came back in another form. (Remember that Heston, in that final scene, is riding a horse.) Anyone who walked the aisles of video stores – remember video stores? – can summon up the images of the VCR boxes of the literally hundreds of movies written and filmed and sold on this model. Many of them had the word “apocalypse” in the title, in case you didn’t get the meaning from the box image. The lettering on the boxes mimicked the graphic design of heavy-metal albums, which in turn mimicked the design of the boxes. And when George Miller revisited the Mad Max story in 2015’s Fury Road – which might be the greatest single action picture ever made – he incorporated the images of these boxes and heavy-metal albums into the vast battles across surreal landscapes. They included a man with long hair standing astride a tank-like car as he played an electric guitar. And he incorporated the original post- apocalyptic theme in a way he hadn’t before: This new iteration of Mad Max takes place 75 years after a nuclear war and many of the characters have been disfigured or poisoned by the continuing fallout. A warlord named Immortan Joe is the Big Cheese, and his power comes from the way he controls the lifeblood of humanity. “Do not, my friends, become addicted to water,” he instructs his slavish hordes. “It will take hold of you and you will resent its absence.”
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November 2018
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