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BEGINNING WITH THE END |
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Forward to APOCALYPSE MOVIES (St. Martin's, January 2000), aka MILLENNIUM MOVIES (Titan Books, April 1999) by Kim Newman
BEGINNING WITH THE END
Giant, radioactive, skyscraper-eating monsters were not the problem. Goo-faced nuclear mutants were not the problem. The real evil, it seemed to me, even at age ten, was politics -- the cause of all those Final Conflicts. In movie after movie, politics and politicians were the real monsters, the ones culpable for atomically flushing the whole planet, thereby enabling all those big bugs and post-apocalypse wastelands. In many a film blaming the Bomb, politicians were the ones whose squabbles caused them to start stabbing big red buttons and upsetting property values worldwide ... so it seemed to make more sense to purge the planet of politicians, because they were and (and always will be) troublemakers. You can blow off a giant ant's antennae with a Tommy gun; shoot an isotope into the neck of the Rhedosaurus and he's pretty much done. Politicians just keep coming at you in waves until you're subsumed by the undertow of their doubletalk and the riptide of their malign intent, to drown an ignoble death in a muddy suckhole of lies. In movies, where events are more clearcut because they need to serve plot purposes, politicos who hasten the End of the World as We Know It rarely survive to fight the zeppelin-sized iguanas and club-waving throwbacks left in the subsidence of the big mushroom-cloud lightshow. If the planet is spared in one film, it is quite grimly written off in the next; if the atomic after-effects are not global, then they yield monstrosities with which the military (the political enforcement arm) is unable to cope ... until a scientist hands a last ditch bit of technological salvation to the nearest cinderblock-jawed hero-in-uniform. In fact, Apocalypse never seemed to have any significant consequences for those who fomented it, while the normal folks -- ground-pounders and common citizens -- were the ones who always had to pick up the check. Is there an upside to the End? On one hand, it certainly simplifies conflict in a world that has become too complex for most people to sanely bear. (Politically speaking, many films of the Atomic Decade, roughly 1951-61, render their choices down to black and white, subconsciously emphasizing the more significant contrast of Red Vs. White.) On the other hand, nuke movies are a de facto demonstration that the treacherous mettle of science will out, playing on the average citizen's latent distrust of technology. In such scenarios, the Bomb catapults us back to a more comforting realm, where the solutions that matter are the province of agrarian, reproductive human true grit, where nobility can prevail in a hard-survival context devoid of gray tones. Nuclear catastrophes are generally presented as a loss of control rather than an elective -- with exceptions like FAIL SAFE, which plays both cards and closes with the voluntary and US-mandated white-out wipeout of New York City. Needless to say, the President of the United States and the Premier of the USSR, along with all their cronies, weather this difficult-but-necessary crisis and keep their skin; the end montage hammers home repeated images of ordinary working stiffs catching an atomic fireball right where the sun doesn't shine. They are unwilling victims quite readily sacrificed by their elected representatives. Who, needless to say, don't have to fight any monsters, post-Bomb. For normal human beings, to solve problems is to pave the way for a new set of bigger and more complex problems. As Stephen King discovered when he was writing his epic novel, The Stand, to scrag 99% of the human beings on the planet was to cleanse the world of bullshit -- but at the immediate cost of progress, and eventual regression, since the human race usually has to re-learn how to feed, clothe, and shelter itself. But the World as You Know It changes, now, on a daily basis, every time someone patents new software -- granted, not a very thrilling or narrative sort of watershed (and hence not the sort that would form the basis for a good movie), but a world-changer nonetheless. These observations and other fallout were blizzarding through my mind before my scheduled meeting. Big studio, big producer, wanting a big movie about a big -- really goddamned BIG -- nuclear terrorism movie. The end of the world endorsed by all those movies made during the Atomic Decade, or Golden Age of Irradiation, didn't seem all that ominous anymore because we'd seen the same stock bomb-test footage too many times. World War III became passé about the time the Berlin Wall fell down and went boom. Today we know that a bunker and a pair of clunky sunglasses won't make you a survivor. The prime directive: If you sight it, you'd better ignite it -- don't tease the audience with nukes and not set off at least one -- so we made sure to plot devastation times two: one trashcan nuke vaporizes a small mountain town and strategically wipes out the government's entire N.E.S.T. response cell; a more sophisticated device goes off deep in the tunnels of the New York subway system. In between we had gruesome deaths from exposure to plutonium (thereby demonstrating what a hideously toxic substance it is, since most people don't know the details) and a long-term death due to radiation seeded during the very first atomic tests. We covered the moral scale from the individual to the mass; from personal consequences to worldwide ones ... mostly for naught, since THE PEACEMAKER handily cooled down the notion of an exciting nuclear terrorism movie. For now. What I secretly wanted to see was an elite government team of specialists devoted to dealing with all the stuff we really wanted to follow after the fallout. Instead of addressing the grim realities of losing hair by the handful, puking up your own entrails or becoming a walking tumor festival, we might posit a sort of Impossible Missions Force of atomic fabulism. One member could specialize in giant insects, another in revived dinosaurs. An anthro-etymologist would be essential for communicating with Morlocks. An ordnance expert would make weapons recommendations for torching pesky aliens who butt in to hijack our real estate while the planet is healing itself. A nuclear physicist could project how each kind of irradiation might effect monsters-to-be; bunny rabbits, after all, are perfectly harmless at normal size and without buzzsaw fangs, but make them as big as an aircraft carrier and they gain definite nuisance potential. One of the best science fiction short stories written with all this foreknowledge at hand is Edward Bryant's "giANTS" (1979), which gives us the big bugs we all crave, not in spite of the Square Cube Law, but dependent upon it. For those who walked in late: the big bugs of the Atomic Decade -- as well as the big humans and super-sized dinosaurs -- are impossible thanks to this simple law of physics, noted in the story:
Some Atomic Decade stinkers are undeniably surreal, such as REPTILICUS, released in 1962 -- fallout from the Decade, if you will. I could understand that Reptilicus was some sort of prehistoric creature (ie., completely made up) and that it could regenerate its entire physical structure from a shred of its tail (ie., complete sci-fi hogwash), and that, sure enough, it was not only growing but swelling to enormous size (ie., tumescent enough to knock down buildings and squash soldiers). What I did not understand, and what I was absolutely knocked out by (and still am), was the fever-dream notion that Reptilicus has the ability to retaliate by vomiting on his attackers -- bright yellow/green streamers of puke referred to in the movie as "acid slime" (wow!). Now, don't misunderstand me; REPTILICUS is a dreary little fart of a movie with lousy puppet monster effects and cardboard miniatures, zombie acting by a plank-faced cast of Danes, and an idiot script shoveled through the sausage conveyor of fast-forward production by sci-fi vandal Sid Pink. It is, you might say, a bad film. But it contains two ideas that can only be described as deliriously wonderful, if you're predisposed to this type of film: the pre-title sequence, in which a drilling team brings up fresh blood on the nose of its bore, and the aforementioned Reptilicus emesis. Godzilla had shot a kind of death-ray out of his mouth, but lethal monster throwup was an innovation that remained largely untapped in movies until its reappearance, in a different context, in David Cronenberg's version of THE FLY in 1986. Most reference books available at the time, and there were precious few, seemed convinced that Reptilicus' deadly barf was radioactive, and why not? Weren't big monsters just sort of ... naturally radioactive, the way Oscar Madison says gravy just "comes when you cook the meat"? None of the primordial genre film studies of the late 1960s and early-to-mid 1970s (ie., pre-STAR WARS) seemed to know, since their authors wrote text largely dependent upon their imprecise memories of seeing the subject movies. Today, right now, the chances are better than ever that you can procure on demand nearly any film discussed in this book, either on a rental shelf near your home, or via some form of mail-order. Today, right now, if you need to know the ins and outs of Reptilicus' non-radioactive vomitus, you can actually plug in the movie and find out, probably within 24 hours of reading this. Kim Newman would want you to go that far. I doublechecked REPTILICUS just to ensure Kim would not have to besmirch his own dignity by including it in the book you are holding now. Should you sally forth and watch any samples of Atomic Cinema (with this book at hand, one hopes), you may also discover that many of these films were not really made to withstand repeated viewing, let alone serious study. Not only the passage of time, but step-framing and the ability to scan and re-scan video have killed a lot of the magic and made the suspension of disbelief that much more difficult. Yet these movies endure -- the worst of them, as camp; the best, as both nostalgia and culture. Moreover, you'll find that the tackiest Roger Corman quickie somehow has the mystical ability to outlast many hits or award nominees released the same year. Once this stuff grabs your imagination, it never totally relinquishes its hold. When I was eight years old, WORLD WITHOUT END -- which you will find in this book -- was pretty near to my concept of a perfect movie. It featured a future Earth, a spaceship, faster-than-light travel, time travel, savage mutant primitives with faces like melted wax, and a subterranean hive of humans composed of withered, geeky men wearing tights and silver skullcaps, and hot, leggy, overstimulated babes in Vargas drag. Introduce a quartet of rugged American know-it-alls into this problematic future and voila -- adventure, or something like it. It was one of those movies whose joys are hard to explain, since it happened to fly in while I was young, and my window of input was wide open. It opens with the surety of ritual, with scratchy, orange-tinted, too-obvious stock footage of an atomic blast, followed by a plaster replica of the Earth, rotating grandly in space; add the first to the second and well, that's what Atomic Cinema is all about. When I saw this film for the first time, on television, I had no idea it was in color. Once I learned it was in color, I had no idea it was in CinemaScope (even though the opening credits, even on the washed-out pan-and-scan version, specify both CinemaScope and "print by Technicolor" in nakedly huge titles). Thus, I've had the pleasure of "rediscovering" it twice as an adult. The punchline came when Kim noted that WORLD WITHOUT END was, "for some reason, a lost film in the U.K." ... thereby empowering me to have even more fun by inflicting one of my childhood faves upon him. Did I mention that WORLD WITHOUT END is also a quintessential example of Atomic Cinema? I'll leave it to Kim to explain further. But I hope Millennium Movies can do you the same sort of courtesy, prompting you to discover some films and rediscover others. You may find your imagination seized, and the weight of disbelief not so hard to hoist after all. -- David J. Schow Hallowe'en 1998 |
The end of world? No big deal. By the time I was ten, I'd been through
it dozens of times.
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