Seven billion enter, no one leaves
Twice this month I’ve seen movies in which a man walks across a post-apocalyptic landscape littered with the carcasses of abandoned cars and patrolled by bands of vicious cannibals. I suppose this is Hollywood’s way of cashing in on our fears of worldwide environmental catastrophe, whether brought about by wars or climate change.
In The Road, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy, a fearful Viggo Mortensen travels through a frozen wasteland with his young son; their only weapon is a gun with two bullets in it, which they intend to use on themselves if the situation becomes untenable (or even more untenable, which is hard to imagine). I know, it’s a veritable bundle of cheer, the perfect antidote for an excessive sense of well-being.
In The Book of Eli, Denzel Washington strides across a parched wasteland in blazing sunshine, carrying a certain book. He is frequently set upon by thugs, whom he efficiently dispatches with fists, bow and arrow, and a very large knife. The villain, whom we instantly recognize as the villain because he is played by Gary Oldman, wants the book badly enough to kill him. The rest of the tale unfolds in typical action movie fashion, with gunfights, explosions, and so on.
My problem with these post-apocalyptic scenarios is their unrelenting dourness. Why so serious? The worst has already happened! Society has collapsed, civilization is dead, everything’s fallen apart. It can’t get any worse! All right, there’s death, but in these scenarios it’s actually a reprieve. If you really think about it, the fact that they’re still alive after the apocalypse is amazing. Nearly everyone’s dead, only they live.
Some people need a sense of proportion.
Thoughts of apocalypse are on our minds, what with all the news of natural disasters, environmental destruction, drought and famine, and other real-life horrors. Remember when the weather was a topic for small talk? Now the most innocuous “It’s so hot today, no?” leads to arias of despair about global warming and homeless penguins.
On one hand it’s a good thing many of us have become conscious of climate change and how we can do our part in stopping it. On the other hand, I wonder if our constant panic about global warming is producing the best results.
A friend of mine likes to remind people to bring their own shopping bags in reusable canvas, cotton, or nylon instead of using plastic grocery bags. He recently issued the reminder to some people in their 20s, who responded by rolling their eyeballs and saying how tired they were of the constant “Environment this, environment that.”
It’s easy to say, “Oh these young people, don’t they care at all about this very serious issue, after all it’s their future we’re worried about.” Yes, they are annoying, but put yourself in their shoes. They were born on a planet that was broken by the previous generations, but they have to live with it, they have to fix the damage done by older people. Wouldn’t you feel cheated, too?
Maybe we could augment the doomsday scenarios, which are effective but which may also lead to feelings of helplessness and futility, with suggestions for tiny adjustments in our day-to-day lives. I mean changes so small we can hardly notice them, but which make an appreciable impact. I’ve just read The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook by David de Rothschild, which lists 77 essential skills to stop climate change — or live through it. There is no mention of how to deal with cannibals, but there are some suggestions that anyone can follow.
This one is the easiest: Pull the plug. When you turn off your television or DVD player, you may think it’s really off, but it’s not.
Many appliances have timers, clocks, or standby mode, and they still suck up power even when you’ve hit the Off button. This is known as phantom electricity, or if you prefer something more Gothic, vampire electricity — energy used up for no reason. According to the book, “The phantom electrical load in the industrialized countries alone accounts for 75 million tons of carbon dioxide emitted and billions of dollars wasted per year. . . If one million household eliminated their phantom power load, we’d eliminate 150,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year.”
“But I want to be able to turn on the TV the second I get home,” some of you may complain. “I don’t want to have to reach behind the TV and plug it into a socket.” Right, you might sprain your arm from the effort. What you do is, get those power strips that have several sockets for your appliances, plug your TV, DVD player, etc. into it, and then turn off the power strip when you’re not using them. This way you only have to push one button, and you eliminate your phantom power load.
I know people who keep their cellphone chargers plugged even when they’re not charging their phones. “It’s estimated that only five percent of the power drawn by cell phone chargers is actually used to charge phones.” The other 95 percent is just wasted. How hard is it to unplug a charger you’re not using?
The problem of global warming is extremely serious, but let’s not make ourselves more miserable than we already are. Going back to movies set in the post-apocalyptic world: in the attempt at seriousness, let’s not forget that people go to the movies for entertainment. These are not arthouse films, they’re commercial projects. What happened to capturing the sheer weirdness of life and the resilience of the human spirit?
I’ll give you post-apocalyptic movies that were actually fun: the Mad Max series by George Miller. The world is a desert, the survivors are terrorized by marauding bands of freaks with strange hairstyles, the most valuable commodity on earth is gasoline, and scariest of all, the human race’s only hope is Mel Gibson! Aaaaaah! I mean Max, the laconic driver. There are no lines in The Road or The Book of Eli to compete with the immortal lines from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome: “Two men enter! One man leaves!” Scary as Gary Oldman is, his villain is no match for Tina Turner’s Auntie Entity. She could destroy him just by crossing her legs.
