I’m late coming to this, but I want to write a few words because the Apocalypse has become such a driving force in pop culture, and when I started TABOTD, in 2002, I was alone in my paranoia. Last weekend was apocalypse weekend here, as I finally saw “2012″ in a tiny theatre at the Beverly Center, with 50 seats and a 10-foot screen, like a wealthy person’s private screening room.

Want to preface this by saying I absolutely love “Independence Day.” A masterpiece of crap. “The Day After Tomorrow” is watchable enough. So I had some hope for “2012,” but it was very bad. Offensively bad. One wonders if Roland Emmerich saw “Cloverfield” – a more-realistic depiction of what a Godzilla monster would do to a city compared to his heinous “Godzilla” – and said, fuck it, I don’t do realism, I do fantasy. And so he made “2012″ which has no relation to reality whatsoever. At least “Independence Day” had a modicum of reality about what an alien invasion might look like. As did “Day After Tomorrow.”

One of the dumber – but forgivable – scenes in “Independence Day” is when Air Force One just escapes the White House being blown up in a cloud of fire. Fine, if done once. But in “2012″ Emmerich chose to do this over and over again – death-defying escapes from every possible explosion: 10.5 earthquake in L.A., super volcano, etc. etc. But what is so offensive is that he had to use this escape trope at all, as if the entire destruction of a city is not dramatic enough – especially in light of what is happening in Haiti and what this type of destruction signifies. I think there is something vaguely disturbing about turning so much destruction into pure purposeless entertainment. It’s as if Emmerich doesn’t want to face what he is actually portraying, so he paints it in a coat of stupid.

When I saw “Titanic” I thought, Jesus, you’re just watching people die for two hours. There was something distressing – and worthy of study – about just why this was attractive to people. But at least in “Titanic” you had some historical sense of what maybe the sinking of the Titanic could have been like. In “2012” you get nothing of the sort – you just get chase scenes.

You could say – a truly realistic depiction of the end of the world would be too harrowing and depressing, but there are significant ideas that can be explored with this premise. The fact that – not once – do they discuss the implications that a long-ago culture predicted the end of the world and what this signifies, or even how this ties into the Book of Revelation, shows how intellectually empty the movie is. But there’s none of that – it’s just about explosions and escaping from explosions.  Surprisingly forgettable, I was hoping for more.

The Road

When I first read The Road I was critical. I am very averse to anything that fetishizes suffering. And The Road is full of that – setting up scenes only so that people, including a child, will suffer. This is what I wrote about the book initially.

It was at this point I realized what this novel is: literary torture porn. Or a zombie novel for people who read the New York Review of Books. The only people left walk around with makeshift clubs, cannibalizing whoever they can find. Yes, it’s a zombie novel. Pandering and cheap, too easy for someone who takes such great pains with language. This end-of-the-world scenario was much better, for me, in Earth Abides, in which a man walks alone through the country after humanity has been decimated. But it’s without the comic book savagery of The Road. The people he meets retain who they were, rather than being transformed into monsters. Alas, Babylon, about the survivors of a nuclear holocaust in a small Florida town, is also much more measured. Some people turn violent, but not all.

The incongruity of the setting bothered me as well. Why, if there are only a handful of people left, and some cities are still left standing, can’t people go to the many storehouses to get canned goods? I can suspend disbelief and think, that’s just the way it is in the universe of this novel, but the people are always dressed in rags and their faces are always dirty – even though there are houses full of clothing and they’re camped out right next to the ocean. Why are the cannibals keeping a bunch of diseased people in a basement – how useful is diseased meat? Maybe small things – but it contributes to my feeling that these scenes are set up only to show people suffering, needlessly.

As a movie, “The Road” is serviceable and basically unnecessary, as the book is about the mood as conveyed through words, rather than plot. All that said, the emotion of “The Road” – the movie – got to me, especially at the end. And whatever disagreements I have with the book, it’s very hard to disagree with this reaction, from an interview with Cormac McCarthy:

I have the same letter from about six different people. One from Australia, one from Germany, one from England, but they all said the same thing. They said, “I started reading your book after dinner and I finished it 3:45 the next morning, and I got up and went upstairs and I got my kids up and I just sat there in the bed and held them.”

After “2012,” which serves no purpose at all – not even to make you fear, just to kill your time – I can definitely see the value in the novel.

Posted on January 14, 2010 at 11:12 am
http://www.theamericanbookofthedead.com/2010/01/14/2012-and-the-road/
Categorized under: Blog
Tags: 2012