Apocalypse-Cinema

2012 and Other Ends of the World

Peter Szendy, Will Bishop

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780823264810, 9780823264803
• eBook ISBN: 9780823264827
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Apocalypse-cinema is not only the end of time that has so often been staged as spectacle in films like 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and The Terminator. By looking at blockbusters that play with general annihilation while also paying close attention to films like Melancholia, Cloverfield, Blade Runner, and Twelve Monkeys, this book suggests that in the apocalyptic genre, film gnaws at its own limit.Apocalypse-cinema is, at the same time and with the same double blow, the end of the world and the end of the film. It is the consummation and the (self-)consumption of cinema, in the form of an acinema that Lyotard evoked as the nihilistic horizon of filmic economy. The innumerable countdowns, dazzling radiations, freeze-overs, and seismic cracks and crevices are but other names and pretexts for staging film itself, with its economy of time and its rewinds, its overexposed images and fades to white, its freeze-frames and digital touch-ups.The apocalyptic genre is not just one genre among others: It plays with the very conditions of possibility of cinema. And it bears witness to the fact that, every time, in each and every film, what Jean-Luc Nancy called the cine-world is exposed on the verge of disappearing.In a Postface specially written for the English edition, Szendy extends his argument into a debate with speculative materialism. Apocalypse-cinema, he argues, announces itself as cinders that question the "ultratestimonial" structure of the filmic gaze. The cine-eye, he argues, eludes the correlationism and anthropomorphic structure that speculative materialists have placed under critique, allowing only the ashes it bears to be heard.

CHAPTER 1  Melancholia, or The After-All

I am in front of the black screen.

In the black screen.

I disappeared at the same time the last image did. I melted into darkness. I, too, exploded, and my remains have been dispersed into the universal night.

I am the darkness. I no longer am.

This is what, speechless, I was saying to myself—this is what each one says to himself or herself, I think, without the words or breath to say so—in that ever so brief and yet infinitely distended instant that, at the end of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), separates the last image from the credits.

It is ten seconds, a tiny bit more, of total darkness. We first hear the dissipation of the echo of the orchestral rocket fire from the prelude to Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde—that mesmerizing ascension, those incessant irruptions of sound that prepared and accompanied the catastrophe. The last trails of the sound of the planet’s explosion that just took place also die away; they expire bit by bit. And then there is silence.

Silence and profound darkness, and they last.

Never, to my knowledge, has a film so closely conformed to what would be the strictest law of the apocalyptic genre (if indeed there is a genre): that the end of the world is the end of the movie.

Or vice versa (because this terrifying equation of filmic eschatology can be reversed without being changed in the slightest): The end of the movie is the end of the world.

Never, then, in cinematic history had it been exposed in so drastically exact a way what an apocalyptic film worthy of this name should, in all rigorousness, be. In Melancholia, there is something like the strictest radiography of the skeleton of a genre, in other words that ineluctable and radical sign of the equality or coincidence of, on the one hand, the annihilation of the world, without anything remaining and, on the other hand, the final point of the cinematic work that reaches its end.

Melancholia will perhaps have been and may perhaps forever be the only film to respond so purely and absolutely to the demand that is proper to apocalypse-cinema: that the last image be the very last image, that is, the last of them all—of all past, present, or future images.

For the same reason, never have the credits of a film seemed so reassuring: After these ten seconds of a darkness deafening in its silence, to see the name of Kirsten Dunst (Justine) appear, followed by that of Charlotte Gainsbourg (Claire), and then that of all the other actors, followed by the name of the director, to hear music also being quietly reborn means coming back to the world as if after a fainting spell or general anesthetic.

As you slowly gather your spirits, you tell yourself: It was just a movie; it was just a movie, after all.

And yet however much you minimize the impact of the cosmic detonation you have just witnessed, these words don’t really provide much reassurance; they continue secretly to tremble, as if within them were still echoing the explosion that has just taken everything away: When I attempt to convince myself that this was only a movie, after all, I unavoidably hear that it is also a question of a cinema of the afterwards, of a cinema that comes after it all, after everything has disappeared.

And that is certainly the case; you are convinced of it at the end of Melancholia. Nothing else remains. It is not only our planet that has just in effect exploded, it is not only life on Earth that was just annihilated (to Claire who suggested that “there may be life somewhere else,” Justine had abruptly answered, “But there isn’t”). What there isn’t anymore is the world. Not the mineral cosmos, but the world as world, the one that opens, as Schopenhauer said, with the “first eye,” with the first opened eyes.¹

The dark film of these several seconds at the end of Melancholia is no longer really cinema anymore. Or if it is, it’s a cinema of the after-all.

By what rights and with what nerve can one state, as I just have, that Melancholia is and will remain the only rigorously apocalyptic film in the history of cinema?

Clearly, there could be many others yet to come that will repeat this synchrony or superimposition of the two ends—that of the film and that of the world—thus retrospectively confirming Melancholia in its status as the exemplary incarnation of a generic formula, as its type or paradigm. But before Melancholia there were already movies in which the last still perfectly coincided with the annihilation of everything. I am thinking in particular of Ted Post’s Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970): As he lay dying, Taylor (Charlton Heston) murmurs with his last breath that the day of the last judgment has arrived (“it’s Doomsday”) before he collapses and sets off the atomic explosion that destroys the whole Earth. Over a white screen, the off-screen voice concludes, “In one of the countless galaxies in the universe lies a medium-sized star. And one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead.” The fade to black concludes just as the two final words are pronounced: “now dead.” Here too it would thus seem that the end of the film absolutely coincides with general extinction.

And yet in Beneath the Planet of the Apes, there is a narrating voice that actually continues after or over the final image, that continues to recount, that becomes the huckster for a sequel that we obviously don’t see but that could still be shot someday: Not only does a continuation remain possible here in theory (and as a matter of fact, it actually exists and was shot in 1971 by Don Taylor under the title Escape from the Planet of the Apes, featuring three refugees who were able to flee before the cataclysm), but it is in a way contained or implicitly inscribed in the words that say something in spite of it all, in these sentences that call up in advance the script for future sequels.

This is not the case with Melancholia. Until the final credits begin to roll, there is at least the radical suspension of an absolute silence that, for a few moments, allows us to glimpse the possibility of an archi-fade to black, of a total erasure after the ultimate image.

The end of the film as end of the world would then also be the end of cinema itself.

Acinema, finally, in the end.²

CHAPTER 2 The Last Man on Earth, or Film as Countdown

I am writing these pages in the United States, certainly the biggest producer of apocalyptic images in the world. America is the place where the genre its French fans call “apo” has flourished. You can feel it on every street corner; imagery of the end is everywhere.¹

Yesterday, February 13, 2012, I bought the most recent edition of that indescribable weekly rag called Sun Magazine (not to be confused with the respectable monthly The Sun). Under the gaudy name of the newspaper, if one gets close enough to make out the small print, one can read: “God Bless America®.” But what drew my attention as I was waiting in line at the supermarket cash register (oh, the supermarket! that postapocalyptic place par excellence, the topos of survival …) was the main headline on the first page: “New Mayan Prophecies Reveal … End Times Begin On Valentine’s Day.” The apocalypse, as the reader I am is meant to deduce, is for tomorrow. Or rather, tomorrow, it will start being prepared.

This extraordinary bit of news is developed over a double- spread inside page. Under a hill in Georgia, a team of archaeologists is said to have exhumed a Mayan pyramid on a site that is said to be that of the mythic city of Yupaha, the very one the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto was looking for in 1540. Sic. I rub my eyes. But wait, that’s nothing yet: In the pyramid has been found a stone calendar that measures time in long cycles of 63,123,288 years. Nothing less. And, get ready for it, a writer and explorer by the name of Beverly Neeson, who is interviewed in the article, explains that there is a mistake: The famous apocalyptic predictions for December 21, 2012, she says, are based on an erroneous interpretation of the Mayan calendar, for the engravings in the stone indicate that the End Times will begin … starting tomorrow, February 14, 2012. At which point we will see (citing randomly) that Iraq has nuclear weapons, that tsunamis will flood Japan and other countries in Asia, that extinct volcanos will erupt all over Europe, that fires will ravage Africa, that huge tornados will streak through the United States. But in the fall, Jesus will appear throughout the world to bring all this suffering to an end with his message of hope and salvation.

I swear I have invented nothing; it’s all printed in black and white. And this kind of story populating the pages of celebrity and gossip magazines is also the matrix of blockbusters such as Roland Emmerich’s 2012, released in 2009. We need to pay particular attention to these “disaster movies,” a kind of attention they are not really paid when one stops with a gloss on the plot, the supposed ideology, distribution and reception, the box-office returns …

But before watching 2012 and other productions like it, let us lend an ear simply to that title. Let us try to hear what is housed in this date that, like so many dates, is part of the vast filmic archive of the ends of the world: To mention only films I’ll be discussing, we might think of 2001 (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) and its sequel 2010 (Peter Hyams, 1984), of Escape from L.A. (John Carpenter, 1996; French release title Los Angeles 2013), A Boy and His Dog (L. Q. Jones, 1975; French release title Apocalypse 2024).² … How many dates will have been inscribed onto the screen if we include all the ones that, without making it into the title, are embedded into the image over the course of the narration? “Early in the 21st century” are the first words at the start of the scrolling text that opens Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). And in the exposition that precedes the opening credits of 2012, one sees many inscriptions of place and date that note the signs from all over the globe that together announce the catastrophe: Copper mine in Naga Deng, India, 2009—Lincoln Plaza Hotel, Washington, 2009—G8 Summit, British Columbia, 2010—Cho Ming Valley, Tibet, 2010—Empire Grand Hotel, London, 2011—Louvre, Paris, 2011 … , a sequence that continues to accelerate right up until the moment when the title itself appears, 2012, but this time without any localization: 2012 is the date tout court, the nunc without hic, the fatal year. Finally, a reporter on TV explains that the huge collective suicide discovered in the ancient city of Tikal in Guatemala was motivated by faith in a Mayan prophecy that the world would end on December 12, 2012.

12–12–12: Here the date seems to be nothing more than its abyssal repetition. As we will see in a moment, a date is always carried away into its own commemorative whirlwind. This is why, in fact, a date remains essentially yet to come; it is that infinite approach to itself through which it tends to meet itself, to coincide with itself by going down in history [en faisant date].

In other words, a date is a countdown to the now it will always have been in advance. It’s a countdown apparatus like all the chronometers that measure the time that remains, starting with the Mayan calendar brought up to date through today’s fashion for the new age and ending with the Doomsday Clock, where the minutes separating us from the apocalypse—whether nuclear or otherwise—appear, and including millenarian countdowns like the one we see at the end of Strange Days (Kathryn Bigelow, 1995).³

Images of a deserted city scattered here and there with cadavers, on the sidewalks, in a doorway, on the stairs. The blackboard of a community church bearing the white letters of an inscription: “The end has come.” The camera enters through the broken window of the house of Doctor Morgan (Vincent Price). The alarm goes off. The doctor stretches and gets up—it’s the beginning of the story told by a voice-over. “Another day to live through. Better get started.” After a prelude that is silent until these two phrases are pronounced, the opening credits start to roll, and the narrative also seems to shake itself awake and stretch, with difficulty, as the protagonist drags himself, bent over and tired by his job as it starts up again, by the labor that consists merely in continuing to survive.

We follow the doctor into the kitchen where he finds himself in front of the page of a calendar. “December 1965,” his voice comments, slowly. And the camera pans down the wall where we see other dates scribbled in, 1966, 1967, months, March, April, May, grids made up of squares checked off every day, day after day. “It’s only been three years,” he continues, “since I inherited the world.” Another piece of the wall. 1968, January, February.… “It feels like a hundred million years.” He crosses off the square for September 5. He takes off the plank that locks the door from the inside. And goes out.

The Last Man on Earth (Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow, 1964) is the first film adaptation of Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend. Every day in it seems like every other, each night like each night. Passing time passes only like the needle of a phonograph that, in the morning, when the vampires have disappeared, skips and gets stuck in the last empty groove of the record that the doctor, as he fell asleep, left turning around and around. “Another day,” he says to himself as he awakens yet another time, “another day to start all over again.” Every day, Robert Morgan, the last man on Earth, thus seems to put the counter back ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword: One Sun Too Many
• Chapter 1 Melancholia, or The After-All
• Chapter 2 The Last Man on Earth, or Film as Countdown
• Chapter 3 Cloverfield, or The Holocaust of the Date
• Chapter 4 Terminator, or The Arche-Traveling Shot
• Chapter 5 2012, or Pyrotechnics
• Chapter 6 A.I., or The Freeze
• Chapter 7 Pause, for Inventory (the “Apo”)
• Chapter 8 Watchmen, or The Layering of the Cineworld
• Chapter 9 Sunshine, or The Black-and-White Radiography
• Chapter 10 Blade Runner, or The Interworlds
• Chapter 11 Twelve Monkeys, or The Pipes of the Apocalypse
• Chapter 12 The Road, or The Language of a Drowned Era
• Chapter 13 The Blob, or The Bubble
• Postface Il n’y a pas de hors-film
• Notes
• Index of Films