Genteel Apocalypse: The Quiet Earth
I’ll confess something right up front: I typically detest post-apocalyptic fiction. I find its implications and culture to be in many cases, a fair indicator of mass defeatism. Most post-apocalyptic fictions - TV shows, movies, video games and comic books (especially comic books) - seem to pose little if any interest whatsoever about how the world got to be the way it’s depicted. There’s almost never any tie-in with anything recognizable from the old world in terms of emotional or spiritual affirmation. Everything has been deserted or destroyed. So it’s hopeless, most of these fictions tell us, to hold on to the concerns of the old world. Because survival is now the name of the game, with all of the shopworn tensions that brings. Much to the approval of the dreary accountants and executives who preside over the making of today’s movies, there is effectively no point in caring.
Where I run into trouble with this mentality is that I feel like it stems in part from an inability or unwillingness to try to affect real political change on the current stage - a form of paralysis that’s related to a widespread refusal to accept the hard truths about American Failure. For all our chest-thumping bravado, we still live in a society that is, in large part, unable to accept its limitations. Doing so might actually liberate us but the next step is rolling up our sleeves and doing something about it and I’m in agreement with Professor Noam Chomsky that the problems we face as a country and as a planet - in essence, as a species - are (shockingly) all solvable. But this is not the story we prefer to tell ourselves. The story we’re made to accept by the media (and that includes Hollywood) is one of doom and gloom. Ride things out and worry about yourself. Maybe people are more obedient consumers when they’re made to think this way.
It’s in this context that defeatism, nihilism, miserablism and apathy become attractive ideologies, comforting us like a hot bath. And the fictions that come out of a society that would warm itself with these mentalities typically feature and emphasize decay, grime, and varying notions of defeat - all forms of denial in their capacity for letting the masses off the hook. Under this aegis of gloom, all questions about our culpability in the Mass Disaster - the Erosion of Democracy, Environmental Failure, the Normalizing of Fascism and Injustice - as well as our responsibility to act in response, seem to melt away. We come to admire the aesthetics of the entertainments that reassure these attitudes, which are often indifferent towards human violence and cruelty, as if this was some mark of world-weary maturity.
The audience is reassured in these fictions, their bleak assessments of the world as a complex and screwed-up mess beyond understanding deemed correct and that they’re right to do nothing to change it. This is cynicism - not to be confused with the skepticism of questioning what one is told but actual cynicism, which tells us that we are ignorant and powerless. That we are right to do as little as possible to act in response. That we are better off not knowing, or worse, not caring about who’s running the show, how and why, or who we are and what we can do about it. A special effects team takes care of the rest.
This passivity is the laziest kind of civilian mentality and it’s one that Hollywood has been in love with for decades. No matter how visually impressive and idea-driven post-apocalyptic fiction can be, it can flatter our passivity as citizens and as consumers, legitimizing our place in the world as empty vessels, wandering the landscape thoughtlessly consuming media and resources until we die. A part of me can see the allure of this grimness. It can feel like weight off one’s mind. I’m no saint. I get the same feelings of hopelessness I suspect many 21st century people with consciences do. Since Blade Runner (1982), Hollywood has become brilliant at glamorizing these attitudes. It handily compliments certain visual styles, with their capacity to dazzle us. Blade Runner’s future is bleak and hopeless but also rather sexy and glamourous, which makes assessing the social implications of the material a little more complicated.
But even in cinema, I’m often at a loss to invest myself too much in many of these visions. Though the impasto of their sense of decay is always fascinating, what I’m seeing never winds up meaning much to me. The filmmakers are always too busy having the heroes escaping zombies or roving steampunk gangs in spiked vehicles to let us into the emotional wreckage there would have to have been in such developments to engage me. Even in Blade Runner’s most thoughtful moments, there is, as Pauline Kael observed in her essay, virtually no curiosity about how the world got this way. No one talks. Everyone has their head down or has gone into combat mode.
I submit Geoff Murphy’s The Quiet Earth (1985), adapted from a 1981 novel of the same name by Craig Harrison, as an exception to this tendency. It was made in New Zealand and its feelings of human decency distinguish it as a film with a calm sensitivity that could never have seen it made in America or Europe. The characters seem to be the only inhabitants left on Earth and though there are tensions and jealousies, a sense of empathy, gentleness and grace can be found in many of their interactions. At one point, two of the characters, a man and a woman who’ve become lovers, encounter a third person brandishing a gun. They meet in an empty town square, eyeing each other suspiciously. The gunman drops his weapons and smiles. He approaches the Adam and Eve of this new world and they hug.
It’s at this moment the audience may fully grasp what Murphy’s film may be knowingly telling us about New Zealand and the way Kiwi nationals regard their fellow citizens. That same sense of grace and empathy runs through the dynamic of these three characters as they undergo a sort of emotional evolution into their roles as the Earth's only inhabitants. Reviews of the movie at the time bemoaned the presence of Joanne (Alison Routledge) and Api (Pete Smith), believing these characters took our attention off of the progression of Zac Hobson (Bruno Lawerence), who turns out not to be the last man on Earth. That evolution in the way these characters relate to each other, how they reconcile their new reality with the people they used to be, is for me, where The Quiet Earth becomes more interesting and involving, not less.
Prior to that, we’re following Hobson from the morning he wakes up and knows something is wrong. He seems to be the only person that exists. Everyone has disappeared. Cars appear stalled on roads. Streets and buildings are empty. But there are no bodies. No trace of a plague. Hobson discovers a single corpse - a colleague at the underground laboratory where he works. He gets no word from response centers around the world and it becomes clear Hobson was involved in a government research project and knows something about the event which caused all the clocks to stop, the telephones to go dead and radio to go static, which he calls, “The Effect”.
I love that an actor with Lawerence’s physical specificity leads this movie. Diminutive and sad-eyed, with his bureaucrat’s balding pattern and gut bucket voice, he conveys a sense of loss at the sight of what’s happened, charged with a sense of guilt that suggests a complicity. His mental and emotional unraveling in the first act is beautifully handled in a film that never throws cheap shocks at us. The decadent fun he has at first with a world all to himself is relatively tasteful as he occupies the Governor’s mansion and eats rich food. There’s a wonderful smash cut from Hobson playing with a model train in a toy store to operating an actual train on the rail - an ever grander succession of toys. I love the schizophrenic snooker game Hobson has with himself. Murphy indulges the character by cutting the scene as if there were multiple players, instead of one man losing his mind, acting as if he were in a Bond movie.
When he starts to lose his mind, there’s a method to his madness. Having switched off the recording of a distress call he broadcasts on a loop over the airwaves, he can begin a gradual process of externalized deconstruction. The snooker game disintegrates the idea of the Other Person as an Obstacle. Freed from traditional notions of identity, Zac begins wearing dresses, enjoying the scent and feel of the fabric. Why not wear dresses? His eyes become tearful as he stares at himself in the mirror. It connects him to what he perceives as Female - the antithesis of everything that led to The Effect. His first suicide attempt is thwarted at the sight of an old TV talk show broadcast in which a hawkish talking head is propping up the jingoist order, prompting him to shoot out the TV Elvis style.
Then he dismantles Power. He sets up black & white cardboard cutouts outside the mansion and dressing like Julius Caesar (or more fittingly, Nero), broadcasts a presidential speech on the balcony complete with canned applause and cheering. The cutouts include Hitler, Richard Nixon, Mussolini, Alfred Hitchcock, Bob Marley, Charlie Chaplin, Elvis, Pope John Paul II and Queen Elizabeth II. His speech is a confession of his hand in causing The Effect: “For the common good, they said! (Cheers) How easy to believe in the common good, when that belief is rewarded with status, wealth.....and power!” He’s psychologically absolving himself of his crime, performing a confession in front of a confused human idea of Power. It’s one of many signals that this is a movie with a brain in its head and this assertion carries with it Hobson’s regret in succeeding where other mad dictators have failed. “Is it not fitting then that I be President of this Quiet Earth?”
His next task is to destroy God and it’s here we see that Hobson has lost it. He’s in a perfect state of readiness to be redeemed by the discovery of other people. His stalking and armed assault of Christ on a crucifix in a church (still wearing a dress) is perhaps the beginning of true insanity taking hold, before he’s snapped back into reality by an explosion at a gas station. Then a hard cut to Hobson bursting nude from the sea, as if baptized for life in this new world. With plans to grow crops, fiddle with his remote controlled lawnmower and live under relatively more modest means in Auckland, he meets two more survivors and it seems they have something in common pertaining to why they survived The Effect.
Even before they become lovers, the conversations Zac has with Joanne (a character absent in Craig Harrison’s otherwise closely adapted original novel) are introspective and curious. They suss out their feeling that there’s something still going wrong with the atmosphere (the dangerous project that caused The Effect seems to have been pushed to its limit by The United States, a fair indication of how more pacifistic parts of the world feel about American hubris). It’s a feeling they can’t describe. Are they dead? Or in a different universe? Is the sun pulsating?
She speculates about the shapes of the human face being determined consciously by the brain. The brain has a finite amount of determinative energy and can be spent in the direction of either physical appearance or mental capacity, she tells Zac. This while they discover fresh corpses (there are no maggots or any other fauna) that seem to have also survived The Effect. They plan to look for other survivors. She suggests searching prisons and mental hospitals: “places where people are either trapped or too afraid to leave.” Even in these conditions, her thoughts are of the less fortunate.
They meet Api, a Maori lance-corporal with secrets of his own. What he was doing during the effect and why he survived pertains to who he was before. He freely admits the details. The relevance of this is what the characters and the movie puzzle over, while Zac comes to notice a scientific basis for the possibility of another Effect on the horizon. If The Effect itself can be regarded metaphorically as an evolutionary shift or a marker of some spiritual or corporeal upgrade in human history - much like the black monoliths of 2001: A Space Odyssey - then there is a sense of these characters as the first pilgrims or cosmonauts on a voyage into a new phase of existence. Before they can evolve again, they must put away worldly human impulses towards jealousy and fear.
The people behave so damned sensibly. Sure, they steal high-end merchandise and drive flashy cars down city streets at top speed. But there’s no large-scale destruction or vandalism to speak of. Their behavior with a world all to themselves is almost shockingly responsible. An American movie would have included a montage akin to the one in the inferior 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, with the characters gleefully destroying property and behaving like libertines - essentially enacting fantasies that parody their deadlocked status as consumers.
These characters speak softly and clearly about how they grapple with what’s happening. There are no thrills or shocks to disrupt the tone Murphy and his savvy, three-headed ensemble are trying to convey. The performances match the somber nature of The Effect, whose aftermath is more like a Whisper of the end of Humanity than a Crash. Maybe there’s something about the openness of a depopulated world that has made the characters more lucid. Even as it seems that Joanne’s romantic and sexual interest is shifting towards Api, it’s something Zac is essentially okay with.
This kind of material is both utopian and cautionary, never blasé with that idea of Humankind (rather than specifically corporate greed and corrupt national governments) as a fully realized gravedigger of the Planet Earth. And this is a film that is always about people. It never lingers too long on the decay of the unoccupied landscape. In his wonderful cinematic essay, A Pervert’s Guide To Ideology (2013), powerhouse Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek sites German philosopher Walter Benjamin’s observation about our sense of history and our place as historical beings as defined not when we are engaged in things but when things stop moving and we see the waste of things being half retaken by nature. It’s then - in the wreckage - that we get a sense of what history means.
Žižek’s example for this segment comes from the movie, I Am Legend (2007) and it’s submitted as an example of what he sees as the redemptive value of post-apocalyptic movies. A lot of money is spent on special effects that show a devastated landscape in which a single hero eeks out his living. Empty stores, barren streets with grass growing through the cracks in the pavement. The psychoanalytic term would be “The Inertia of the Real.” In other words, “a mute presence beyond meaning.” In viewing a post-apocalyptic landscape littered with depleted structures, businesses, goods and advertisements broken from their endless cycle of functioning, we can arrive at what he calls an “authentic passive experience,” which can allow new social paradigms to emerge:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nT_po2E-kA
The infected/zombies and high-concept commercial thrills that make I Am Legend a piece of soft sci-fi rather than a hard one, are absent from The Quiet Earth, which is more concerned with the three major inquisitions of real science fiction: time, space and identity. The Quiet Earth depicts a suspension of this network of functioning whose failure allows these individuals to reconcile themselves with their past misdeeds and current jealousies. Hobson sees The Big Picture, and a sense of the sacrifice he has to make to set things right.
The grand and absurd climactic irony in what is arguably Zac’s second failure is that he’s again stranded with the consequences of his attempt at selflessness. What seems like another evolutionary step may in fact be the final nail in the coffin for the human race, which the movie saves for its astounding penultimate image, during which the end credits begin scrolling before we even have a chance to comprehend what Hobson’s assault on the lab has triggered. He intends an act of radical self-sacrifice and then has to live with the consequences of its selfishness.
The orchestral score by John Charles swells to its crescendo, which sounds like the precise moment of discovery of the most gorgeous and hideous catastrophe of human folly. It’s a great movie moment, steeped in a sense of tragic irony on par with the final moment ofPlanet of the Apes (1968), glaring at the insanity of a reality jarred completely beyond recognition. Cut to a reverse angle of Hobson’s reaction to the dread horizon, as he can only tear up in shock and horror and that is the image upon which Murphy chooses to set his final freeze frame. Not the famous image before it, which graces all the movie’s DVD covers and title screens. But the one with the human reaction. This is what Murphy is interested in.
That’s a perfect metaphor for the tone of this movie, which is always about these people and how they grow and what they come to understand about their place in the world and the changes in their relationships to each other within it. In extreme circumstances, a society living in a prolonged state of subdued madness pursues extreme courses of survival. In societies where people are more at peace with nature and with each other in day-to-day life (though still far from perfect), citizens may be much better equipped to handle the End of the World. It’s not about how many zombies you can kill or how many booby traps you can set up. It falls upon your ability to trust others and make sacrifices. For better or worse, you are always beholden to your human impulses. New Zealand’s entry into the realm of hard science fiction has a human center, which in the forthcoming age of Designer Defeatism makes it seem like a radical and even noble forerunner to a much bleaker set of artistic visions.
At the time of this writing, The Quiet Earth is available for free on Youtube here:
It’s also available on Amazon.
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