The Opposite of Apocalypse
Me and Chris Nolan are plotting the beginning of the end of end times stories.
May 7, 2024
Christopher Nolan
Syncopy Productions, Inc.
2049 CENTURY PARK EAST. #1400
LOS ANGELES CA 90067
Approx. Reading Time: 11 minutes
Mr. Christopher Nolan!*
This is a doozy of a FAN letter. But if you can spare 11 minutes, it plants a seed—a “thought experiment”—for how you might rescue humanity from impending DOOM.
It centers on the following pleasantly alliterative storytelling QUANDARY of our time:
What is THE OPPOSITE OF APOCALYPSE?
{*Aside: If you’re Mr. Nolan’s gatekeeper, PLEASE expedite this to him—you don’t want the GUILT of knowing you could’ve helped him save the world entire! Plus, it’s FUN!}
1: Apocalypse Now(adays)
First, an all-too-obvious observation: apocalyptic stories are a THING. They are such a thing that one must pause to wonder, are we trying to talk ourselves INTO these fates, or OUT of them? Are we viewing these as CAUTIONARY tales, or stealing ourselves against the INEVITABLE?
Maybe the threat of extinction’s just an easy PLOY to ratchet up entertainment value—it SELLS. I imagine movie execs negotiating more marketable plots with filmmakers: “Chris, if there can’t be an apocalypse, at least give me a DYSTOPIA!”
Granted, existential risk is not a NEW thing, nor are the stories about it. Our cave-dwelling ancestors were probably perennially terrified of being wiped out by things they understood FAR less than we do. They survived BECAUSE their abundance of irrational fear made up for the fact that they hadn’t yet DEVELOPED rational fears.
Someone would nick their thumb and perish from infection 9 days later, never knowing it was sharp OBSIDIAN that did it. They’d blame phantom spirits, angry gods, that extra-hairy neighbor jerk Zagnab (the first cave-scapegoat). Disasters. Fires. Floods. Killer BEES. Woolly mammoth stampedes. Simply eating the wrong damn MUSHROOM. For all of it, their antidote was to dance hysterically, worry freely, conduct elaborate sacrificial rituals you could only evade if there was an ECLIPSE at just the right moment. And, of course, they told STORIES.
{Aside: I think Apocalypto ripped off Tintin on that eclipse plot twist.}
So while this all started long ago, the ante’s been rising for DECADES. I came into it somewhere in that armageddon era of Dr. Strangelove, A Boy and His Dog, Escape From New York, Planet of the Apes, Logan’s Run, and War Games. In school, they made us watch the pseudo-documentary The Day After (not to be confused with The Day After TOMORROW, which, as the name implies, came later), a film that showed what would happen if Hallmark made a corporate office safety documentary about thermonuclear war. Then we went on a field trip to Lawrence Livermore Lab to learn about the ’80’s anti-ICBM laser satellite program (dubbed “Star Wars”). It was theoretically a way that possibly someday we MIGHT be able to MAYBE use semi-reliable technology to PERHAPS thwart a portion of an incoming shower of FOOLPROOF city-leveling missiles. That way, when our elderly American leaders emerged 3 years later from the canned goods BUFFET they’d been enjoying 400 steel-reinforced yards beneath a Colorado mountain, they’d find a bright new day wherein our nation would be marginally less radioactive than Russia.
VICTORY!
Point is, we seem to be getting ever more COMFORTABLE with the idea of not just one little cave or tribe getting wiped out, but ALL civilization being destroyed, leaving the last vestiges (if any) of the human species foraging through a smoldering WASTELAND.
It’s kind of a BUMMER.
Sometimes, storytellers don’t even bother to give us the exact reason WHY there are tumbleweeds lapping the deserted Champs-Élysées, or the Statue of Liberty’s torch just washed up on the shores of Coney Island. We join the story well after some vague reckoning, and all we know is it took down all the monuments and essential services, though you may have some luck looting Twinkies.
2: The Stone Age Revisited
In these stories things often get very bad, and (to make things WORSE) they often get GOOD at the end.
I BRISTLE when a plot involves unfathomable death and destruction, and then wraps with “in the process of witnessing the annihilation of all we hold dear, I DO hope we learned a little something about the important things in life!”
At the end of San Andreas (which I’m not sure is technically an apocalyptic movie, but it sure apocalypses the CRAP out of California), The Rock looks down on the Golden Gate Bridge’s smoldering remains against the backdrop of a wholly deleted San Francisco (my hometown) and with that faraway I’m-currently-imagining-my-silken-superhero-cape-fluttering-majestically-behind-me-in-the-breeze gaze he says, “now, we rebuild.”
Then, after a brief pause, he ADDS, “now…we rebuild.”
In the “Director’s Cut” of my mind, of course, I seize the opportunity to highlight the absurdity of that SCENE by toppling the Transamerica Pyramid into North Beach for comedic effect after the first “now, we rebuild”. Then The Rock shrugs—whoopsie daisy…NOW, we rebuild (big shrug!)—and does 794 push-ups while the credits roll to the Benny Hill Show theme song. The Rock seems like a nice guy, but they just tsunami’d my mom’s house so I’m in no kinda mood.
Hey, the Golden Gate Bridge sure gets smashed a LOT in movies—if this letter does nothing else, maybe just casually mention to your Hollywood buddies to EASE UP on it. Despite The Rock’s intentions, it was not yet even PARTIALLY rebuilt by the time Denzel crossed it in The Book of Eli.
Even in instances where the worst is avoided we’re left wondering if we should really be relieved. In War Games, for instance, Matt Broderick was able to HACK into NATO using code word JOSHUAto avert a pre-emotive strike. So it’s a happy ending right up until you remember we live in a world of moronic PASSWORDS behind which the MISSILES are still POISED!
So this business of ending on the UPSWING just because no one (except maybe the French) wants to go home bummed out, may be a good formula for the American box office, but seems like a terrible RECIPE for a cautionary tale. You spend 2 hours identifying with characters who might, quite literally, be the ONLY PEOPLE who LIVE. So should we leave feeling just FINE if everyone else gets “bombed back to the Stone Age,” reassured that a Zagnab or two will survive to do history all over again and, you know…
REBUILD?
3: Things Fall Apart
Admittedly, I hate that I LOVE the whole genre.
I’m into post-apocalyptic, pre-apocalyptic, mid-apocalyptic. I really liked the aforementioned Apocalypto, which may have been ALL or NONE of those things at once. Station 11 on Netflix was awesome. And I OFTEN weave The Hunger Games “I volunteer as tribute” into conversations.
{Aside: I could do without the ZOMBIE genre, though.}
So I understand stories thrive on TENSION and ARC. No one comes to the theater to watch two hours of idyllic farming, or an extended SPA weekend where nothing happens but mani-pedis. No one makes movies about an average contented day in an uneventful small town, unless said HAMLET is about to be visited by horrific end times. In fact, such settings are immediately ominous—you show me paradise and I’ll show you a place where the audience KNOWS the apocalyptoSHIT’s about to hit the apocalyptaFAN.
I confess, every flavor of apocalypse story does remind us on some level of how GOOD we have it.
GRATITUDE!
My high school Film Literature teacher shed some LIGHT on this. The legendary Mr. Hilmoe at Washington High in San Francisco (RIP)taught a class so in DEMAND that you could only enroll the last semester of senior year. Hilmoe was big on symbolism and filmmaker “TELLS”. He dressed like James Dean would have dressed if he made it to 65 and taught Film Lit at a public high school. He was fixated on the first and last scenes, words, images of a movie and would QUIZ us on them without fail. He believed all stories started as either happy orderly Edens or sad chaotic Hells. Then they’d pivot and end on the opposite pole and—VOILA!—you had your arc. American films have to end on the UPSWING because we demand optimism and even we’ve heard of Aristotle we wouldn’t admit it. Europeans don’t mind a dismal denouement from time to time, especially the French.
So, having been deeply educated for an entire semester under the Hilmoe School, I’m of a mind that there are but THREE story arcs (to greatly oversimplify):
Eden > Hell > Eden,
Hell > Worse Hell > Eden
Hell> Eden > Hell (which only sells in France).
Problem is, apocalypses are a special kind of Hell that BREAK all the stories—a level of Hell where you really CANNOT in good faith end back in Eden lest you normalize, perhaps even trivialize, the proceedings. It’s ABSURD, like the script of San Andreas. Brother they just laid waste to a top Metro Area, you’re gonna need more than Elmer’s Glue.
But you also have to make a film that sells outside of France.
4: Pandoranheimer
Somewhere in the aforementioned prime childhood armageddon movie ERA came Apocalypse Now, a great movie but one that few people would actually classify as, well, APOCALYPTIC. Which reminded me to ask that most basic of questions: what the Hell does apocalypse even MEAN?
Like most people, I just define it as “everyone and everything is comprehensively fucked and so OVER and we’re all dead”. That’s PART of it!
But I Googled apocalypse (which, by the way, I do NOT recommend) and while it’s now used to describe end times, I learned it means “revelation” and comes from a Greek word which means to pull the LID off something. In SHORT, the whole myth of Pandora’s Box was about an apocalyptic apocalypse.
Which further reminded me: Oppenheimer.
That film, as you may remember, ended with a bit of a Pandora’s Box-like wake-up call:
J. Robert Oppenheimer: Albert? When I came to you with those calculations, we thought we might start a chain reaction that would destroy the entire world...
Albert Einstein: I remember it well. What of it?
J. Robert Oppenheimer: I believe we did.
OUCH! That one hurt. How you gonna leave us there?
Maybe some folks walked out of the theater thinking, OKAY, let’s start working on Paragraph 57 Section 3 of the UN Agreement on Nuclear Arms Proliferation (I made this up, but I sure hope it EXISTS), write letters to leaders (WORKING on it!), form disarmament LOBBIES, get to DISMANTLIN’, or just build underground SHELTERS. I dearly hope people do those good and practical THINGS.
But while they’re doing that, we also need to TACKLE the problem head on.
The problem, as I learned from my extensive Googlings, is that by definition the apocalypse has ALREADY happened. The apocalyptiCAT, so to speak, is out of the BOX…bag… We are ASWIM in revelations of our own making, yet still mostly worried about OTHER stuff.
All the cautionary TALES seem more aimed at DEFERRING, not DELETING, the inevitable.
The thing that really chaps my HIDE when I sit up at night worried about existential risk—and I DO!—are the fates that seem avoidable. The ones where we do it to ourselves, or fail to prevent it, out of PRIMAL TRIBAL reasons that would all seem RIDICULOUS if we were ever, heaven FORBID, to look back on them from a future WASTELAND:
Thermonuclear War: Utterly preventable
Contagion: Somewhat preventable
AI/Robots/Computers: Preventable…for now
Climate-Related: Preventable…for now
Asteroids/Comets: Predictable, not too preventable
Zombies: Annoyingly fictitious (may relate to 2, I guess. Zombies are dumb, though)
Aliens: See zombies, shutup Spielberg
Monsters/Cryptozoology: See aliens
Religious Reckoning: Leaving this one to a higher power
Ice 9: Kurt Vonnegut’s fault
Earthquakes, Volcanoes: Bad, maybe not existential
Other: None of the above, or all of the above
We’ve had bad, serviceable, and great book and film entries in all these categories. They’re all ENTERTAINING and leave me GRATEFUL we are ALIVE. And ALSO a bit MIFFED that I now have to worry more about how we might NOT be.
Okay, if the San Andreas fault slips and suddenly the Pacific Coast is in Kansas, or a Denmark-sized comet hits Westminster (I know, low blow, but now you now how I FEEL), maybe I can (figuratively) live with that apocalypse. But if some hungover corporal spills Dunkin Donuts coffee on his circa 1996 missile guidance computer sparking a malfunction and 3,500 ICBMS are 22 minutes from their targets. Or, AI-powered robot drones built by tech billionaires who are scarcely more civilized than latter-day Zagnabs invade the world’s top 20 metro areas all at once.
Well, shame on US for not coming up with a better IDEA than mutually assured destruction. Something that totally flips the SCRIPT.
5: Seeds of Eden
Which leads me to Inception.
I believe where we stand today is a PROBLEM where through our stories and worries, passed down over generations not just through tradition but also through some deep-seated homo sapien LIMBIC fight-or-flight DNA, we have opened the little VAULT in our collective 7th DREAM level and implanted within it this idea that we ARE going to face annihilation. We are in FAIT ACCOMPLI mode, like someone put humanity’s Tesla on auto-pilot and aimed it at the void.
{Aside: a very FIRST WORLD, possibly even NORTHERN CALIFORNIA analogy, I know.)
This idea is lodged deep in the reptilian LOBE, likely cowering beneath the neurons that control the tonsils and APPENDIX. It requires not just EXTRACTION but, well, you know, the OPPOSITE of that.
Leo DiCaprio’s Cobb: “An idea is like a virus, resilient, highly contagious. The smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you.”
Our job, then, is to plant a new SEED that breaks this apocaSPELL. And by “our job” I mean “your job”. Because while I’m happy to HELP if you see a way, I’m just a guy who writes excessively verbose and demonstrably DAFT letters. On the other hand, you craft EPIC cinema experiences with some chance of transforming the human condition.
Plus, you’ve got a strong handle on things like space-time continuums. In this process, we also may NEED to figure out how quantum physics is good at something BESIDES bombs.
In short, I don’t think you can close Pandora’s Box and put the lid back ON. The OPPOSITE OF APOCALYPSE requires a new BOX with different contents.
6: Home
Which brings me, with great France irony, to Dunkirk.
As you know, the “boats arriving” scene in Dunkirk is the greatest MOMENT in cinema history. A moment when all hope is lost, the kind of horrific pickle we always promise we’ll NEVER be in again. Here, at the darkest moment of impending DOOM, the relentlessly tense SOUNDTRACK shifts. Mark the time!
In case you forgot, it is now that the soldiers—just BOYS—believing they will SURELY be strafed on the basilisk having FAILED their nation and their family, catch sight of this “absurd collection of vessels,” this mishmash of “YACHTS, PADDLE STEAMERS, FISHING TRAWLERS, DAY SAILERS, FERRIES, DREDGERS, DINGHIES, ROW BOATS”. All are helmed, figuratively and sometimes literally, by their fathers. They are coming for good and PRACTICAL reasons, but I imagine they are coming most of all to EXPRESS something, like: “You will not perish alone today, son, on the coast of some mopey foreign land. Not if my arrival can assure you it is ME who let YOU down by not PREVENTING the world from slipping into war so soon after the one to end them all.”
WHEW! I need a minute.
I’m BACK. I sometimes Google that scene on the YouTubes and just watch the part where ol’ Ken Branagh looks through the binoculars.
COLONEL WINNANT: What can you see?
Commander Bolton slowly lowers the glasses.
COMMANDER BOLTON: (gentle) Home.
So where they were in Hell, then Worse Hell, now they are heading back to Eden (home). It hinges on this plot twist that is almost ABSURD; while they prayed for their nation’s best rescue planes and navy boats, it was DADS IN DINGHIES who saved them.
{Aside: Maybe it wasn’t the best idea just now to try and “mansplain” a movie to the guy who actually made it… it may have all been off base.}
I’m just saying, I imagine us all waiting with our last SHRED of hope for something we never could’ve imagined—the DADS IN DINGHIES of the apocalypse.
We’ve had our run with irrational fear, rational fear, and boring old rational optimism. What the world needs NOW is WAY more irrational optimism.
7: Drop the Irrational Optimism Bomb
A growing number of people, you may be aware, believe we are ALREADY living in The Matrix. Even if they’re not literally spot on, there’s a whole other group of even SMARTER people who could probably make the argument that maybe that’s what quantum physics actually IS. Lil’ particles flying around like bits and bytes, governed by laws and designs we don’t yet fully understand and that our senses only GUESS at.
So today, we are asking what being human MEANS. What happens if the machines we’ve built don’t replace or kill us, but they HELP to free us? What are humans here to DO that our GODS and MACHINES can’t? It can (and should) get downright sci-fi.
So I invite all storytellers and filmmakers to take a break from nuking the Golden Gate Bridge and playing on caveman fight or flights and ENVISION a different outcome that feels more UTOPIAN. We can still have all tension and ARC, just without the irreversible horror in the middle.
Let’s envision a world that isn’t a smoldering heap ruled by roaches, burlap, and sand. Let’s imagine that all our enemies become COMMON enemies and the anti-Pandora’s Box is about the flip the script:
Food: Nutrition’s a given. Flavor’s for funsies, like music for your taste buds (bonus: same calories as music, too).
Fitness: Like food, need’s been replaced by want. For instance, the huge market for 20th Century infomercial fads like Thighmaster and Shake Weight is driven solely by their power to produce spasmodic laughter.
Creativity: Everything else is handled. So we’re connecting with each other in technicolor dreamstates and great waves of quantum entanglement, as though we just licked a South American toad, anytime we want.
Love: See Creativity. These two modes of connection are now our “jobs”.
Lifespans: Everyone lives to exactly the same age and is then uploaded (hey, heaven really is in the cloud) and we chat often. Shout out to William Gibson’s Neuromancer!
AI: Until these “steam shovels of the information age” came along we spent all day digging ditches out of data. THAT sucked. Playtime!
Income: Universal, mostly useless.
Internet: It’s still around here somewhere, we know we’ve seen it.
Space: We’ve got shortcuts across light years, because otherwise things are just too FAR.
Aliens: We’ve met intelligent life from other planets. Meanwhile, they’re still not convinced they can say the same.
Air: The return of gills is the highlight of a bunch of vestigial wins (FYI tonsils turn out to be KEY).
Health: We’ve got a molecule for everything that the ability to program your DNA doesn’t solve.
Energy: Never stops being hilarious to say, “they had unlimited power blasting from the sky all day every day, but for centuries chose to burn dirty old dinosaur bones instead.”
Nations: It’s like that club day in college when they put out the folding tables and lure you into joining too many things, except now you can join France just because croissants, or Pakistan for the cricket, or you just thought it fun to say, “I wanna Botswana” and now you’re a citizen.
Language: There’s an app for that and everyone’s got it installed in their mind.
War: If that’s your bag, go do it on Proxima Centauri b. Just 4.2 light years away, the “paintball arena” of the galaxy is a great place for humans who like to do historic reenactments and shoot things at each other like in barbaric times. Bring a heal kit, some pointy things, and an old Civil War uniform. Don’t hurry back.
Envy: No need.
True, I read that and IMMEDIATELY I start wishing stuff would blow up. It all sounds like the ROSY start of a Black Mirror episode that quickly goes DYSTOPIAN. I know fear SELLS (movies, canned goods, Cybertruks). But going forward, irrational optimism WORKS. We must stick to that SCRIPT for once!
The most important thing we need is the belief that not only will good things happen, but that we’ll MAKE them happen.
It’s a whole new GENRE. Not pre-, mid-, or post-apocalypse, but ANTI-apocalypse. The OPPOSITE OF APOCALYPSE.
RIGHT?
Any storyteller can feel free to pick any vision of the future and realize that we WILL find some way to fuck it up, flirt with Hell. But at least we’ll still be HERE.
8: Help Us Nolan One, You’re Our Only Hope
Perhaps it’s poor FORM, but I end with a quote from someone else’s FILM that seems to apply:
Princess Leia: “This is our most desperate hour. Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.”
To be clear, I’m not threatening to take this humanity-saving idea to George if you don’t pick up the mantle. {Aside: he does HAPPEN to live in the same town as me.}
What is the OPPOSITE OF APOCALYPSE? We may need a lot of answers to that.
But from our view here in a world that sometimes seems like Hell but really is still comparatively closer to Eden, it’s really ANYTHING that isn’t the end of EVERYTHING. Anything that imagines we’ll CONTINUE to tell stories, good and bad. But we WILL continue. With apocalypse, the enemy is entropy. In its opposite, the enemy is human nature. The difficulty of cooperation and compromise when building something together.
Please help us sneaky-wedge that into our collective brains.
Phineas Bling
PS: I heard a RUMOR you might re-do The Prisoner, and that’s cool, too.
