Unhappy endings

The earful of Wagner is your first clue that some variety of disaster is on its way. And then, slowly, comes a parade of images to put you in the mood for apocalypse: thunderous stars and galaxies; a horse dropping dead like something from one of the gloomier lines in a Roman augury; breathtaking footage from the dark side of Kirsten Dunst; a rogue planet roaring towards our world and smacking it to pieces as if it were a spaceborne meringue sandwich.

The planet is called Melancholia. It’s the star—as it were—of the new picture by Lars von Trier. He’s the man who shot The Idiots and Antichrist—and he is a talent for whom the customary description “maverick Danish film director” is too sane and comprehensible a phrase. Von Trier upended this year’s Cannes Film Festival by making some dumb remarks about Hitler; but in the short half hour between the end of his screening and the beginning of his disgrace, the festival hacks and hangers-on were actually talking about the film, and how Melancholia had blown up the world with astonishing power and beauty.

We humans don’t mind living on the Earth, by and large. It has excellent amenities like oxygen, forests, mountains and Paris. If you’re affluent enough to go to the movies regularly, life on its surface can’t be treating you too badly. So why, along with more obviously attractive fantasies about swashbuckling and sex, does cinema keep reselling us a dream about the destruction of our species and the end of civilisation?

In the last year of moviegoing, I’ve seen Keira Knightley and her mates farmed for their internal organs in Never Let Me Go I’ve seen Viggo Mortensen pushing his Walmart trolley through the cannibal badlands of The Road. I’ve seen Denzel Washington wander the wastes of The Book of Eli. And the doomsday cycle isn’t yet over. After Melancholia has destroyed the Earth for the arthouse crowd, James Franco will stick one too many syringes of brain-boosting serum into a chimp and trigger the Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Next year’s fare already promises more end-of-the-world scenarios than a Rapture party: 95 per cent of earth’s population will be killed by flu in The Stand; another virus will reduce us to a rabble of blood-randy fiends in The Passage; humanity will retire to cities floating above the polluted ground in Oblivion; teenage gladiators will fight to the death in the arena of The Hunger Games, a post-apocalyptic romance that may do for social collapse what Twilight did for vampirism.

This season’s doomy dramas—many of which are adaptations of recent novels—are not like those that once put the wind up our culture. Frankly, the end of the world isn’t as much fun as it used to be—and I’m not the first to notice. In the 1970s, the science fiction writer Brian Aldiss felt moved to coin the term “cosy catastrophes.” He was thinking of Day of the Triffids, which, despite being about meteor-blinded Londoners getting stung to death by carnivorous alien plants, is a story that can’t quite conceal its delight at the thought of a Britain suddenly unburdened of 1950s mores and rich with lootable tinned fruit.

The second world war had introduced the notion of mass destruction as an agent of positive social change, but the attractions of this idea proved remarkably tenacious. The world of Kevin Costner’s 1997 film The Postman was as sunny as those drawings of the future earthly paradise you see in The Watchtower. The 1976 epic Logan’s Run didn’t make yomping through an empty 23rd-century America with Jenny Agutter look like the worst fate that could befall a man. Some episodes of the BBC’s original 1970s Survivors series were so hooked on the business of post-apocalyptic self-sufficiency that they’re almost indistinguishable from The Good Life.

This kind of post-apocalyptic pastoral now seems madly out of fashion. The new Survivors occupy a much harsher version of plague-struck Britain than their forebears. The world of The Road is freezing and rotten; a place where half-starved human cattle are corralled in foul cellars. The streets through which Julianne Moore leads her sightless crew in Blindness are squalid and nightmarish. (Their shoplifting spree in an upmarket deli might have been a guilty pleasure: it turns out to be one of the film’s most alarming scenes.)

The clearest distinction, however, between recent armageddons and those of yesterday is the clarity of their cause and effect. We know that atomic war creates the zombie-populated landscape of The Omega Man and the besieged Australia of On the Beach. We know that nuclear tests generate the catastrophe of The Day the Earth Caught Fire, a thrilling exercise in 1960s cinema verité that concludes with its journalist-hero standing in the offices of the Daily Express, laying out two alternative front pages. (One reads “World Saved,” the other “World Doomed.”) Even at their most peculiar, the catastrophes of 20th-century cinema are absolutely explicable. In The Bed Sitting Room, a 1960s oddity co-scripted by Spike Milligan, Rita Tushingham discovers that her parents have been transformed into a chest of drawers and a parrot—but we’re left in no doubt that radiation caused the metamorphosis.

The causes of contemporary dystopias and cataclysms are not so easy to diagnose. The Book of Eli tells us that a war has “blown a hole in the sky,” but not much more. Some kind of environmental tipping-point has been reached in The Road, which robs the world of its animal life and sterilises its trees. But for the characters wandering its landscape—and for us, too—the nature of the disaster is never fully articulated. It’s like a fire burning somewhere on a distant hill; a place we will never visit.

The nature of the planet Melancholia is similarly fuzzy. That planetary body actually exists—it was first spotted in 1977 and is entry 5708 in Lutz Schmadel’s Dictionary of Minor Planet Names. But the von Trier version is both much bigger and much less substantial than the real thing. Earth faced a comparable threat in a 1950s film called When Worlds Collide, in which the smart people (all white, worryingly) escaped in a spaceship. None of von Trier’s characters can be bothered with stuff like that. Melancholia is a colossal metaphor for their unhappiness. You can’t outrun a metaphor.

So in our last moments together on this fragile little page, I want to share a depressing idea. Most of the old cinematic dystopias proved avertable. We weren’t blinded by the green meteors. We didn’t drop the bomb. Nobody mutated into an occasional table. Everything turned out OK. But few of the new catastrophes look as easy to outmanoeuvre. They don’t come with a four-minute warning. The environmental meltdowns of The Road and The Book of Eli are too mysterious to be prevented. Never Let Me Go is actually set in the past. Its prim, sickly 1970s England is an utterly recognisable one—like a Frinton where the population uses medicalised human sacrifice to overcome cancer and heart disease. And if Lars von Trier is proposing that humanity is being annihilated by its own unhappiness, there are mornings when that hardly seems a radical position. Perhaps, these films suggest, the end of the world has already begun. Dystopia, or something like it, may already be flowering on the street where you live. To such notions, melancholia may be the only rational response.