“Nothing short of apocalyptic-”
“-five tropical cyclones-” “-four million acres have already-”
“-half the planet-” “-the end of the world as we know it-”
[Title: I Hope It Ends With A Monster] I hope it doesn’t end at all. Doomsday would
probably be a huge bummer... you and everyone you know annihilated — every human achievement,
every memory, every cone of gelato erased. But if we’re choosing apocalypses out of a lineup,
if the world… is going to end, I think a monster might be our kindest method of exit. Nearly every
mythology has a creature whose job it is to wipe things clean come Armageddon — it’s strangely
universal. “Big monster!” And I’d argue that’s because, ironically, it’s the gentlest ending
we can imagine. I’d like to prove this with a banana. Specifically, this banana, from the
channel Yeti Dynamics. A computer simulated, moon-sized hunk of potassium, the object appears
downright apocalyptic, particularly when it blots out the sun. I’m reminded of a passage from W.B.
Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” of all things, in which a colossal beast threatens to plunge
civilization into darkness. Yeats’s monster is as close to an archetypal herald of doomsday as one
can get, a demon with “a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun” — fear personified. Because, it
would be scary… right? To be snuffed out by some malicious giant, to witness destruction on a scale
beyond the boundaries of anything glimpsed before? Though not actively malevolent, a banana that size
colliding with the Earth would still obliterate humanity, kicking off a Yeatsian end-of-days —
and, silliness aside, that should be a frightening concept. And yet when I gaze upon the Great
Banana, or even a more traditional apocalyptic colossus, I find I’m rarely as scared as I should
be. Enormous threats are, theoretically, more horrifying than small ones. Yet past a certain
blockbuster-threshold of destruction, I think that devastation can start to feel like entertainment.
Look no further than the rise of online shorts depicting absurdly-vast creatures wreaking havoc.
Animated to mimic something shot on a phone, these clips are usually posted with the caption
“What would you do in this situation?” — the joke of course being, that there’s nothing you
could do. And I think ‘joke’ is the right word: like the banana simulation, these shorts seem like
they’re meant to be more fun than frightening. And they are fun, because while, yes, a giant monster
destroying everything would be horrific… if a threat is so big that there’s nothing you
can do, you might as well watch the show. We’re culturally-well-acclimated to seeing
world-ending dangers as Hollywood spectacle. Just look at the legacy of a character like Galactus,
a supervillain who helped establish the trope of a ‘Planet Eater’ in pop-culture. Galactus is the
apocalypse at its most gloriously over-the-top, his very inception the result of writer Stan
Lee gleefully pushing the boundaries of scale: “I said to Jack, ‘make him the biggest guy you can
draw.’” When viewing entities with this magnitude of destructive power, individual lives lost become
impossible for audiences to quantify. When threats are this massive, the camera pulled this far back,
humanity disappears, in the same way that crowds in a disaster movie become faceless cannon-fodder.
It is exceedingly difficult to remember the human cost of a large-scale apocalypse. It is
exceedingly difficult to remember the individual. The film “Beasts of the Southern Wild” offers a
uniquely personal perspective on not one, but two ‘ends of the world.’ The first ending is all-too
familiar — out-of-control flooding leveling entire communities, destroying housing, displacing
families... The second ending is a little less familiar: giant pig monsters, once frozen in
ice, are seemingly coming to smash civilization to pieces. Both disasters loom large in the mind
of our protagonist, a six-year-old girl living in the Louisiana bayou. How could they not? To her
these calamities are not headlines: as part of a community living south of a protective levee, for
her the floodwaters are literally at her doorstep, each day bringing another catastrophe, another
symptom of a world out of balance. In his book “Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid,” biologist
Thor Hanson states that “when consequences seem distant… the human brain is perfectly capable of
simultaneously understanding and ignoring abstract threats.” He’s citing George Marshall there, a
writer famed for his research into how humans are, psychologically, extremely poorly equipped to
handle our current climatological crisis. Because if a problem seems too large or too gradual to
be imminently solvable, our brains will just sort of… shut down our fear response. We might
feel a gnawing, nonspecific dread about the state of things, sure, but it’s hard to fully process
an issue both massive and removed. What are we supposed to do in this situation? Of course, it’s
harder to forget a threat when it’s flattening your home. Though there’s an argument to be made
that the more literal monsters of “Beasts of the Southern Wild” are an abstraction, an attempt
by the protagonist to understand the tragedy surrounding her, there is ultimately nothing
abstract about the disaster she faces. When the film was shot on location in 2011, real flooding
frequently interrupted the production… flooding which has since become precipitously worse. Is it
surprising, then, that a child encountering such a calamity might imagine a different sort of ending,
one equally colossal and destructive, but at least a little more theatrical… a little quicker?
When compared to a slower exit, to an apocalypse that appears on the news every night yet one
is helpless to avert, is it so irrational to dream of a monster? [Carol Gasps] The show “Carol
and the End of the World” perfectly captures the apocalyptic anxieties of our current era through
two devices. There’s Carol… and there’s the end of the — “Hurtling towards earth, unclear but
we believe — does your dog know it’s the end of the world? — every second is precious now —”
The end of the world part is self-explanatory. An ominous rogue planet is hurtling towards
earth, and while not a traditional monster, the object promises an ending of similar bombast
and swiftness. What isn’t self-explanatory… is Carol’s reaction to the planet, because with
just seven months and fourteen days remaining, Carol — an ostensibly normal middle-aged-woman —
isn’t up to a whole lot. And she knows she should be — everyone else is up to… what you’d
expect when time is a dwindling resource, living the lives they’ve always wanted, because
why would you spend a second doing anything you don’t enjoy if there are only so many seconds
left? But Carol isn’t changing her routines. She is still folding her laundry, still
trying to schedule doctor’s appointments, still sending checks regarding her expired credit
card statement. When I first watched this show, a part of me wanted to shout at Carol, to ask
‘what are you doing, don’t you know that time is fleeting, that the end is coming and these moments
are all you get?’ …and a part of me understood completely. Because we’re all Carol, to an extent.
We’re all, in the digital age, aware on some level that any number of looming catastrophes might cut
things short — and yet it’s extremely hard to hold onto that fear, to use it to break from routines,
to do anything but stay the course while trying to ignore our ever-present dread. What else
can we do? One of the more pointed aspects of “Carol and the End of the World” is a company,
openly called ‘The Distraction,’ where Carol and others like her do menial office tasks, for
the benefit of seemingly… absolutely no one. But at least when busy and overworked… it’s harder to
remember what’s hanging overhead. The devastating impact of “Carol and the End of the World” can be
best understood in conversation with the equally devastating “Melancholia” …a film about another
rogue planet, identical both in appearance, and trajectory. Much of the actual plot, however,
revolves around a different sort of impending disaster — a wedding between lead character,
Justine, and a man who appears to make her… profoundly unhappy. For the first part of the
film, most people aren’t aware of the coming planet, but it’s implied Justine has a unique
cognizance of Melancholia’s trajectory — so why, with doomsday on the horizon, would she attempt
to stay on a course that’s causing her misery? “I thought you really wanted this.” “But I do.”
…There are unseen layers to Justine’s sadness, the title ‘Melancholia’ referring to both the name
of the incoming stellar object, and to melancholic depression, a mental condition that Justine is
living with. It is ambiguous how much of Justine’s melancholy comes from external circumstances and
how much comes from within — but still, it seems inarguable that the approaching wedding is a
source of despair, and yet a part of her still seeks to go through with it, as if she still
has all the time in the world. The truth both “Melancholia” and “Carol and the End of the World”
confront... is that we’re not very good at living our lives like they have an ending. Because even
if nothing goes wrong planetarily, our time here is fleeting, that’s how it works — but knowing
that rarely seems to help. Everyone in “Carol and the End of the World” could have, of course,
been living like each moment mattered all along, just like how Justine could have called off the
wedding ages ago, but even with the end in sight, choosing to actively change trajectory, to break
from routine, can feel… impossible. Trying to live a life while waiting for the apocalypse… almost
seems worse than the event itself. And though with most rogue planets in fiction, the moment of
impact is instantaneous — before that comes this nightmarish limbo, a period of protracted dread
rarely experienced with conventional doomsday monsters: who mercifully tend to get right down
to business. Perhaps the most notable exception to this is Unicron from the Transformers franchise, a
Galactus-inspired world-eater that merges the most harrowing aspects of rogue planets and rampaging
beasts. A living stellar object, Unicron often doesn’t slay its victims in the initial collision.
Instead they are slowly digested within the planet’s intestines, the very boundaries of their
bodies gradually broken-down. It’s a concept that seems the worst of both worlds, both sudden and
agonizingly drawn-out, a paradoxical form of doomsday that could surely only exist within the
boundaries of fiction. “The blast shock passes in a matter of seconds. You cannot sense the presence
of nuclear radiation effects.” Atomic annihilation is the kind of ending that’s difficult to
encompass with a single metaphor. Like many apocalypses, it is frequently represented with a
monster — either a fiery behemoth standing tall as a mushroom cloud, or a mutated human: a victim of
lingering radiation. Both of these models capture… an element of what makes a nuclear detonation so
monstrous, but I think monsters alone fall short when trying to convey the horror of an ending
both instantaneous and gradual, an ending where it’s almost better to be caught in the blast than
to suffer through what follows. “I wouldn’t worry nearly as much about the atom bomb if it were to
kill you right out. What scares me is that awful gas that deforms you.” Both aspects of a nuclear
apocalypse are illustrated in the 1986 animated film “When the Wind Blows.” Based on the graphic
novel of the same name, the narrative involves an elderly couple in the English countryside
who learn that global nuclear war is only days away. And yet at first, neither seems particularly
worried — they’re worried about scraping the paint on the doors they use to build their pitiful
fallout shelter; they’re worried about not having enough custard — but not about the bombs
themselves. They refuse to change their habits, because they have unwavering faith that the
information contained in their government-issued pamphlets will protect them. It’s an outlook
emblematic of Cold War attitudes that one must only follow procedure, and the end of the world
can be gently sidestepped. “Do the right thing if the atomic bomb explodes. Duck and cover! That’s
the first thing to do.” The couple’s optimism isn’t entirely unfounded. They both lived through
the bombing campaigns of World War II as children, so a few more bombs don’t seem worth making a
fuss over. Even after the detonation comes — and it does come — the couple thinks they must be in
the clear after surviving the initial blast. What they don’t realize, what they can’t imagine… is
that a nuclear blast is more than an explosion, a flash in the pan — fallout is an invisible hell,
a plague that creeps into rain and groundwater, that cannot be outsmarted by simply ducking and
covering. “It’ll take more than a few bombs to get me down.” The confidence of the couple in “When
the Wind Blows” that everything will work out, even after the sky turns dark and the nation
falls silent, speaks to a larger disconnect between how we perceive apocalypses, and what
an apocalypse actually looks like. Earlier, I spoke of crowds in disaster movies, how they
cease to be individuals — but separate from those crowds are always the protagonists. The chosen
few who, when doomsday comes, will hop in their cars and escape what the rest of humanity cannot.
I think it’s hard, when imagining the apocalypse, not to picture yourself as one of these
sole survivors, someone who is, somehow, canny enough to stay ahead of Armageddon. These
sorts of fantasies ignore, of course, that most everyone sees themselves in this way, that in
the face of any real disaster roads will become clogged with countless people with the same idea,
that some calamities simply can’t be hightailed away from. …I think most of us know that on some
level, but still, it’s hard to truly accept that the end of the world will also apply to you. “We
better clean up this broken glass and all this debris. All in all, I’d say we’ve been very lucky
around here.” I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that “When the Wind Blows” does not end with the
couple driving away to safety. Radiation isn’t the kind of ending you can escape post-exposure,
or outwit with a few minor precautions. It is not the sort of problem that can be solved by not
thinking about it. And yet… [translated] “The mass destruction unceasingly claimed by the media
hasn’t occurred.” The same year that “When the Wind Blows” was released, a very real nuclear
disaster struck Eastern Europe. If there’s one throughline that emerges in Svetlana Alexievich’s
book “Voices from Chernobyl,” a collection of interviews from survivors of the catastrophic
nuclear plant meltdown, it’s that government officials consistently downplayed the risks of
radioactive exposure. “No one said anything about radiation,” one survivor recalls, “The doctors
kept telling [people] they'd been poisoned by gas.” There is a sense, in these interviews, of
the profound disconnect between what people were seeing, and what they were being told they should
see. In a scenario that darkly reflects George Marshall’s writings on the human ability to ignore
abstract threats… when faced with a massive, unwieldly problem, authorities decided to
outwardly pretend the fallout simply wasn’t happening. “The radiation level is being
constantly monitored.” Despite attempts at coverup, we now know that there is a monster
— still living — at the heart of Chernobyl. It’s called the ‘Elephant's Foot,’ a gargantuan
mass of melted corium so radioactive that at the time of discovery just standing next to it for
five minutes proved lethal. And if this creeping mass were to ever hit groundwater… the resulting
explosion would kickstart a new disaster, likely even more destructive than the first.
Today, the ‘Elephant's Foot,’ now solidified in concrete and steadily dropping in radioactivity,
doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere. But it’s still surprising to me that the solution has
been to just… leave it there. Then again, isn’t that usually humanity’s solution when it
comes to large-scale threats — to ignore them, and then, if that doesn’t work, say there’s
nothing we can do? In Gareth Edwards’s 2010 film “Monsters,” giant alien squids are spreading
across the globe, and yet people are treating the situation… like they would any other far-off
disaster. They’re acting as if there’s nothing to worry about. Though we, the audience, can tell
the creatures are capturing city after city, that the zone of infection is rapidly growing, very
few characters seem to be panicking. “It’s fine, this town isn’t going to get hit for another two
days.” And despite our track-record of ignoring dangers, a part of me wants to believe that if
actual, honest-to-God monsters showed up humanity wouldn’t continue on with a business-as-usual
approach. And there’s a part of me that understands what the director means when he calls
this film “the world’s most realistic monster movie. People aren’t running and screaming — life
goes on, it’s kind of normal.” There is — almost reassuringly — a fair bit of running and screaming
in “Cloverfield,” another monster flick, from the same era, also attempting to be…. quote-unquote
‘realistic.’ In 2008, this meant shooting the whole thing in found-footage-style shaky-cam — a
stylistic approach that in a way makes the film feel like the ancestor of the ‘What would
you do in this situation’ clips of today. Like those videos, “Cloverfield” strives for a
kind of point-of-view-immersion, to the point where the film was advertised less like a movie,
and more like an event you could choose to live through. “In a way the film is an experience. The
experience of what it would be like if you were there when this monster attack occurred.” But is
“Cloverfield” believable as a ‘real incident?’ In a strange way, I hope so. Because I think this
scenario, horrifying as it appears, is actually preferable to the one in ‘Monsters.’ At least
here everyone is taking the creature seriously, everyone is screaming — but they’re all screaming
together. No one in the crowds is saying ‘it’s not that big a deal’ or ‘we should still go
to work tomorrow.’ I can’t say that recent experiences have given me… an abundance of hope in
humanity’s ability to handle, or even learn from, global crises. In his article “Why We Don’t
Remember Pandemics,” Mark Honigsbaum writes that despite high death tolls, disease is one of those
sizable yet removed threats we have difficulty fully processing. Though it leaves visible scars
in the population, illness is ultimately… an invisible vector, and therefore easier to overlook
and ignore. During the height of the pandemic, I saw a lot of people posting about how even if,
say, zombies were rising up, a lot of employers would still ask us to come into work, and — yeah,
I can see that. At which point, a part of me would rather they just hurry it along. “When you think
you’re going to get eaten and your first thought is ‘Great I don’t have to go to work tomorrow?’
– What the **** is this world? What have they done to us?” Has the world ending with a monster
always seemed like a… relatively less terrible form of apocalypse? After all, it’s not like
the… ancient Norse were aware of the atomic bomb, so their monster-filled prophecy of Ragnarök
was probably just the scariest ending they could imagine. It probably wasn’t seen as
a mercy, right? …I’m genuinely not sure. Biblical accounts of beasts heralding the
end-times are often framed through more explicit language of punishment, and I think many
people therefore apply retribution models to other doomsday monsters. But I wonder if some ancient
peoples saw monsters more as… ‘bananas in the sky.’ That is to say: exits so grand and immediate
they lend themselves to disassociation. Because it’s not like our ancestors weren’t aware of other
kinds of endings — plagues, societal collapse, natural disasters — there have always been slower,
more mundane ways for our stories to conclude. And yet, over and over again, monsters have been the
method that cultures have put their faith in — as if we have some innate understanding that these
beasts will make for the best finale… The director of “Monsters” spoke explicitly about this instinct
for monstrous endings when he made his next film… about a figure that looms slightly larger.
“Godzilla is back, with a big new Hollywood reboot.” “I’m at the new Godzilla’s LA premier.”
In Gareth Edwards’s 2014 reimagining of Godzilla, the big G-man is no longer a direct metaphor for
atomic annihilation. Instead, he’s a creature implied to have existed since time immemorial,
a monster that it seems has always been there, ready to violently right the scales of the natural
order when the time comes. In portraying Godzilla, Edwards has stated he drew upon our predisposition
for doomsday monsters — the idea that somewhere, in the minds of humans, is the expectation that
a large beast will one day arrive and spell our doom. “There’s something deep in our DNA. There
was always this threat that an animal was gonna come. And now we live in the modern world and our
huts have got bigger, like thirty stories high, so our nightmares get thirty stories high.” …I
won’t claim that there’s sufficient evidence to claim our instinct for doomsday monsters is
molecularly-encoded. But there is, at least for me, an undeniable sense of inevitability to
the imagery of Godzilla — to any giant monster, really — towering over the horizon. “It taps
into something. It just feels right. ‘Of course, Godzilla was going to come. Deep down I knew he
was always coming.’” Inevitability is one of the few words, I think, that speaks to the impact of
the monsters in ‘Creatures of the End Time.’ The creation of filmmaker Christian Szczerba, this
video and its companion, ‘Creatures of the Fog,’ are, once again, shot in the handheld, ‘what would
you do in this situation’ format — except the feeling of raw dread they conjure turns them… into
something else entirely. Watching these recordings is an exercise in sheer, silent terror. Yet
though far from comforting, there is also a strange sense that you’re witnessing… something
that was always going to happen, like this is the natural decomposition process of Earth itself.
In contrast to your typical apocalyptic sky, flocks of birds appear in both videos. In fact,
the final shot of ‘Creatures of the End Time’ is a shimmering flock of… something — a sight both
unsettling and undeniably beautiful. And you’re left to wonder: ‘is this ending really so bad?’
I found myself asking the same question while playing through Strange Shift Studio’s ‘Chasing
the Unseen’ — a game in which you explore a vast, ruined landscape inhabited only by yourself,
and immense, awe-inspiring creatures. The actual gameplay of ‘Chasing the Unseen’ is surprisingly
slow. The obvious parallel one could make is to the experience of beating “Shadow of the
Colossus,” a title with an equally desolate world, and equally imposing behemoths — but “Shadow
of the Colossus” is punctuated with moments of thrilling action — where you take your sword
and drive it into a Colossi’s head. “Chasing the Unseen” offers no such climactic beats… there
is very little to do except reflect on the state of the world. An overtly abstract game, it’s
difficult to say definitively that the story takes place after some calamity. But that was
how I interpreted the shattered landscape — and if that’s the case, then surely these monsters
are the culprits, the beasts who broke the world. But unlike in “Shadow of the Colossus,” these
creatures never attack you. They simply exist. The same is in fact true of the “Creatures of the
Fog and End Times,” they look menacing — but we never really see them destroying anything. There
is, at times, a sense in both pieces that these monsters are more like… the cleaning crew, here
to usher out a world that’s already dying. And even if these creatures are, in fact, the source
of the apocalypse, if the exit they offer is so gentle, so tranquil one can barely discern why
the lights are dimming — is that such a bad way to go? Hideaki Anno’s “Evangelion” series is, in
some ways, the ultimate summation of whether it’s better for things to end with a monster… whether,
if such an exit is on the table, the world should even be saved. Okay, I say that, but “Evangelion”
is so endlessly interpretable, so dense as a text, that making any judgement on ‘what it all means’
feels... all right, let’s just start with what we do know. Spoilers ahead. “Evangelion” primarily
follows the perspective of Shinji, an adolescent boy conscripted to fight against monsters that,
seemingly, seek to cause the apocalypse. But drafted into a war he doesn’t understand, facing
violence he can’t process, Shinji isn’t sure that existence is worth fighting for. He is, to put
it bluntly, an extremely troubled kid. Shinji, like most characters in “Evangelion,” lacks
the support structures needed to endure the trauma of the world around him, and deprived
of human connection, he struggles to see the value of humanity at all. Shinji’s task for most
of the series is to pilot a colossal EVA unit, a horrific war-machine just as bestial as the
invading creatures called Angels that it battles against. But the ultimate herald of the apocalypse
is Shinji’s friend Rei, who, in the film that caps off the original series, ascends to a form of
monstrous godhood. The reason all this happens is… so complicated, we don’t — it’s a whole thing
— it’s a whole thing. But what’s important is that Rei, seemingly, isn’t ending the world out of
malice… but out of mercy. Her decision actually borrows a preexisting plan by a secret society of
humans to end suffering through something called the Human Instrumentality Project. In abstract,
the goal of said project is to erase our ability to hurt each other, to wage war, to make any
mistakes at all, by becoming a single, unified collective. In practice… it means everyone turns
into orange goo. And Shinji… doesn’t seem entirely against this plan. “Evangelion” is one of the only
pieces of media I’ve seen where the protagonist, at least semi-willingly, works with the monster to
end the world, with the feeling that maybe this is better for everyone, that maybe the kindest exit
for humanity is that we all become soup. No longer will we be separate, no longer will we drop bombs
or poison our planet or cause any of the other, terrible endings we might have closed the book
with. What should we do in this situation? Nothing. We’re all goo now. We can finally
stop worrying. Except. That’s not where the story ends. Despite everything he’s been through,
all the suffering that others have caused and he has caused for others, Shinji, ultimately, rejects
this easy exit. Though the human condition is one of agonizing uncertainties, he decides that
humanity is still worth the gamble. And so, the monster crumbles away. I’ve heard people
describe this series as nihilist, and though it is, undeniably, at times extremely dark and
pessimistic — I’m not sure that label makes sense for a story that concludes with the assertion that
the best ending is the one where the world keeps turning. I honestly find this finale extremely
uplifting. Then again. There is that final, final, section, where reawakening from the goo, Shinji
finds the world still, in many respects, a place of ruin. Where actions still have consequences.
Where the struggle never ends. Maybe the true appeal of a monster… is that it takes away the
burden of accountability. When bombs fall, seas rise, contagion spreads, all those things are,
at least on some level, the fault of humanity, and that’s not a fun concept. But if, like, a
wolf eats the sun… I mean, that’s just bad luck. Unfortunately, or I should say, fortunately… I
think it’s reasonably unlikely that’s where things are heading. The kind of ending we’ll get probably
is going to be up to us, and that — kind of sucks, to be perfectly honest. Because the problems
we’re facing are unwieldy. systemic issues. The idea that there are things we can do in this
situation, is important to hold on to. I said at the beginning of the video that I hope it doesn’t
end at all, and genuinely, I mean that. But I think it’s understandable if, on occasion,
we take a moment to imagine some great beast wiping the pressure away. And then, we keep going.
And as always, thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this entry, consider lending your support by
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