I have a thing for disaster entertainment, especially the end-of-the-world or post-apocalypse variety. I like thinking about how people might act when all the normal rules are out the window, and it’s fascinating to imagine society starting from a clean slate, even if it’s a dystopian one.
Faced with annihilation, some characters make good choices, others bad. And then there are characters who make ridiculous choices. In James Cameron’s Titanic, after the ship has hit the iceberg, when it’s clear that it is sinking, and passengers are already scrambling onto lifeboats, there’s a scene where a jealous Cal (Rose’s wealthy fiancé) chases Jack through the listing ship with a pistol. I didn’t like the film in general, but this is where it lost me completely. In the darkness of the movie theater think I laughed out loud watching the two men locked in their silly beef, despite being so obviously doomed by greater forces.
A slightly different flavor of humans behaving badly against a backdrop of bigger problems is the disaster entertainment trope where nobody helps anybody else. Think of the moment that comes early in such stories, where the protagonists (and we, the audience) first become aware of imminent catastrophe in the form of a storm perhaps, or a swarm, or a missile, or a giant monster. Our protagonists are the first ones to see it coming, but they never shout, “everyone look out!” Instead they quietly grab each other and whisper-shout “let’s go!” Our heroes escape, everyone else recedes into the background, and we understand that the rest of those people are goners. What a close call for the four people who matter to the story! In a later scene, we might find our heroes struggling to make headway against a dense throng of people (they alone know that safety is the other way, the opposite direction!) or navigating their vehicle through a desperate crowd, hoping the windows hold up against all the frantic bashing.
In post-apocalyptic stories it’s even worse. In a world of zombies or just extreme scarcity, the greatest threat is always other people. It’s kill or be killed. It’s stay hidden or die. It’s move along or else.
Is that really how it would be in a disaster situation? There are a lot of prepper types who seem to think so, but I suspect they are wrong. I suspect it would be different because it has been different with every recent disaster that comes to mind—9/11, hurricane Katrina, shipwrecks, tornadoes, earthquakes, etc. In real disasters, what seems to happen is that neighbors and coworkers help each other. Strangers help strangers. This is true not only while the disaster is unfolding, with people making daring rescues and giving lifesaving aid, but also in the aftermath. People help clean up and rebuild, donate essentials, offer shelter. Maybe conflict and dog-eat-dog selfishness makes for good television, but I’m pretty sure the disaster entertainment genre gets this wrong.
Another approach to the end-of-the-world story is one where the apocalyptic event is some months away. I find this angle particularly fascinating because when everyone on earth is effectively confronted with the same terminal diagnosis, it puts every aspect of individual and collective life into sharp focus. What would people do with their last days is a question that has so many interesting avenues when “people” means absolutely everyone.
The sharply funny Netflix film Don’t Look Up suggests that people would largely avoid and deny the certainty of their doom. The story begins (spoiler alert) with the discovery of a planet-killing comet that is on a collision course with earth. Impact is only months away, and the two astronomer protagonists who discovered it desperately endeavor to get the U.S. government to take some kind of action. When these efforts fail, they try to alert the public, and they are met everywhere with only disbelief and denial. From one side comes an anti-science backlash that dismisses the whole thing as fake news. The other side is too deeply wrapped in a comfort bubble of entertainment and consumption to absorb the news at all.
In the Netflix limited series, Carol & the End of the World, the timeframe for oblivion is similar (7 months, when the series begins), but avoidance and denial are not options, for the most part anyway. There’s a sad/funny plot thread where Carol discovers a whole accounting department of a defunct company still acting like everything is normal. They dress up in business attire and commute to work in an office tower that is vacant, except for their floor. They need the comfort of routine it seems. Nearly everyone else, however, engages in a kind of mass bucket-list frenzy. Most people want to use the final months of planet earth to live their best life. Some people seek spiritual awakening. Others plunge into a feverish bacchanal. All of it happens against a backdrop of a city that is clearly degrading, where trash pickup and street cleaning are sporadic at best, most retail stores are closed, and grocery stores are manned by National Guard troops.
This starts to get at how I imagine it would be. Assuming some number of people absorb the news of impending apocalypse and take it seriously, life would change quickly and dramatically. This is a dark thought experiment, but I’m drawn to it for some reason.
Even in a scenario where doom is certain, some people would still try to escape. I imagine that the infamous space billionaires in particular—Bezos, Musk, and Branson—would try to accelerate their plans to colonize Mars. I mean, what’s to lose? Maybe a few of their billionaire friends would try to buy their way into that plan, which raises questions about the value of money (not to mention friendship) and what it would even mean to be a billionaire in a world that’s about to end.
Extremely wealthy people don’t work for their money. Instead, it comes mostly via different forms of rent, interest, and arbitrage. These are all contracts with the future, effectively, and if there is no future then those contracts become meaningless.
Finance exists as legal code (i.e. contracts), but it’s also a social agreement to some extent. From that standpoint, would a billionaire’s money carry any weight with other people in a world that’s about to end? Might not people just laugh at a billionaire’s attempts to influence them with money in that environment? At least some of the super-wealthy are worried about this. Author and futurist Douglas Rushkoff tells a funny-not-funny story about how he was invited (duped, perhaps) into meeting with a small group of billionaires who wanted to pick his brain about ways they might maintain the loyalty of their security teams and other staff, in a world where money is suddenly worthless.
Speaking of contracts with the future, A lot of what we humans engage in is dependent on the future. We take out loans to buy houses or go to college, and then we work jobs in order to make payments against those loans. We buy stuff on credit and defer payment to a time when it’s more convenient or more feasible. And then we diligently make payments on all those loans to keep our credit healthy, so that we can buy more stuff on credit in the future. All of that would instantly collapse, wouldn’t it?
All those finance-related jobs would become pointless, and so would many other jobs. Most jobs probably. That’s what happens in Carol & the End of the World. Most people stop working because their jobs become pointless.
There are other jobs, however, that seem to quietly carry on. The show doesn’t give these any attention at all, but they are there. The grocery store is pretty well stocked. Buses and commuter trains still operate.
As we do, the show takes it for granted that food is available on grocery store shelves, forgetting that actual people planted, harvested, and processed those crops, and raised, slaughtered, and processed the livestock that became food on the shelves. In the show, Carol’s parents decide to go on a months-long cruise, a world tour. Similarly, the show ignores the fact of tourism and hospitality workers.
What if the end of the world was two years away instead of seven months away? What if we still needed people to produce our food for another year or two? What about people to operate power plants, sanitation, etc?
During Covid, we learned about “essential workers,” which referred not just to healthcare workers, but also teachers, grocery store workers, delivery drivers, and more. An end-of-the-world situation would bring its share of essential workers, but how would we make that happen if all money was worthless?
Maybe we’d all participate in rotating shifts, rapidly learning new jobs on the fly. I don’t know, but I keep thinking about it.
Beside the point…
My heart is aching for the people of Gaza, and so much of the discourse around what’s unfolding there is incredibly frustrating, sometimes infuriating. Few people seem to be able to discuss the issue in an honest and open but still unflinching way. Somehow,
and have been able to find that mode. In particular…