In honor of The Walking Dead starting again this weekend, I have just finished re-reading The Road by Cormac McCarthy. It is the story of a father and son traveling and searching for hope in a post-apocalyptic world (actually if you know a little of McCarthy's University of Tennessee history, it is very apparent that a section of the book occurs on Hwy 441, through Gatlinburg and over Newfound Gap) Long story short, The Road is a great book written by whom I believe is the greatest living American writer, but if you don't want to take the time to read it, the movie is a pretty good adaptation. Besides being the most powerful story about parenting I have ever read (next to Hemingway's Islands in the Stream), it is absolutely the most dark apocalypse story I have read or watched. The movie does not quite capture how bad it is in the book, but I would say it makes the world of The Walking Dead look like the Magic Kingdom. The details are really too unsettling to repeat. Anyway, the whole thing got me pondering just what makes the apocalypse story so compelling for us? They are typically pretty horribly depressing and even when they end well...they don't end well. Why do we keep coming back for more?
I read an article on Cracked.com a while ago that shared several popular beliefs that are holding humanity back, (http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-popular-beliefs-that-are-holding-humanity-back/). One of the beliefs was that we are constantly living at the "end times", just a few years away from the end of the world. This idea is not just something for the evangelical viewer's of the 700 Club or conspiracy theorists on Nat Geo's Preppers. This belief has transcended all religions and cultures for centuries. Today our popular culture is awash with apocalypse stories that are not religious in any way. As a society we are fixated on the idea. And I understand the point about how this belief is harmful. It makes our priorities very skewed toward the short term. Why worry about the environment or education or fixing social security? It's not like any one is going to be around to appreciate our efforts anyway. I would suppose that even if you wanted to condemn the idea a little more, you could say that our end times beliefs/obsessions are really a meeting of our super ego and our sense of mortality; as in "I am going to die, so why should I think that the world continues beyond me?" But despite these arguments against it, I think there is some real value in a good apocalypse story.
1) It helps us shed just a little bit of our obsessive materiality, even if only for a minute or two. We live our entire lives accumulating all of this "stuff". To paraphrase George Carlin (I think), we buy all of this stuff, then we buy a house to put it in, then we buy more stuff, then we have to buy a bigger house, just to fit our stuff. Furthermore, as Americans, many of us have no real idea what it is really like to need anything (other than more stuff or a bigger house to put it in). Food for us never ends. It just keeps coming from the pizza place or the grocery store. Water just comes out of the kitchen sink. Warm air just comes out of the vents....well as long as you have money anyway. Apocalypse stories get to turn all of that on its head. Suddenly food, warmth, and shelter have actual meanings, and money can't buy much at all. I like the scene in the movie version of "The Road", where the man and the boy are walking through a department store and stepping on what used to be tens of thousands of dollars of gold and diamonds. Because despite what all those gold bug commercials on Fox News tell you, if when the real crap hits the fan, you can't eat your horde of gold.
2) It reminds us of our mortality and our frailty, in a good way. It is kind of bi-polar I guess, but when we aren't thinking that the world is ending, we think that we are the center of the world. Of course, we aren't, and getting reminded of it occasionally, via viruses, zombies, or aliens, does us some good. Being surrounded in an environment that threatens our very existence brings us down a few notches. I could try to explain more, but I think Jack London does a good job in his intro to "The White Silence". He is writing about the quiet of the Arctic night...
All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass, the slightest whisper seem sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrightened at the sound of his own voice. Sole speck of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead world, he trembles at his audacity, realizes that his is a maggot's life, nothing more. Strange thoughts arise unsummoned, and the mystery of all things strives for utterance. And the fear of death, of God, of the universe, comes over him - the hope of the Resurrection and the Life, the yearning for immortality, the vain striving of the imprisoned essence, - it is then, if ever, man walks alone with God.
3) It reminds us about the things in our lives that have real worth. Sometimes I think this is a real horrible sounding cliché, but it is my horrible sounding cliché. When you look at a candle flame in the normal light, it doesn't seem like much at all. But when you have a blackout and it has been pitch black inside for a while, a candle flame can be so bright that it hurts your eyes. I think by making the surrounding world dark, we can see how bright and great some things are that we normally don't notice as much. The relationships that we skim over every day between commutes and work and channel surfing, can suddenly become so much brighter when we "dim the lights". I think this is the strongest draw of the good apocalypse story. Blowing things up or killing whatever gets old pretty quick. The best stories are centered on relationships or on the basic fight to hold on to our humanity. A good reference for this is back to The Walking Dead, does the title refer to the zombies or the survivors? What does being alive really mean? What does being a human mean? If all you do is wander around and search for food constantly while killing anything that moves, what is the difference? A good apocalypse story makes us face these questions.
Anyway, like I do with most things, I am probably over analyzing this. But if you wanted to get real philosophical about it, a little end of the world now and again is probably a good thing. But it's probably best to do it with a little more appreciation, humility, and love, and maybe a little less gunfire, samurai sword work, and exploding zombie heads (although those things are still pretty freaking cool).
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