Apocalypse New

By Lev Grossman

In 1824, Mary Shelley, famous now (and even then) as the author of Frankenstein, was casting about for a new idea for a novel. She was in emotional straits. She had already buried three children before her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned in 1822. Their friend Lord Byron had just died in Greece. She felt as if everyone she knew--the age itself in which she lived--was passing away around her.

So her imagination ran forward to the late 21st century. Greece and Turkey are at war. The last King of England has abdicated. A virulent plague is scouring the earth of humanity, but our hero, a disaffected nobleman, is strangely immune to the disease. The end of the book finds him climbing the dome of a deserted St. Peter's in Rome--a dog his only companion, the last human being left alive on the planet. Shelley called the book The Last Man.

The Last Man is no Frankenstein. It's overly long and almost unreadably dull. But like Frankenstein, it's a founding work in what has proved to be a surprisingly durable genre. It's true what the movie poster says: THE LAST MAN ON EARTH IS NOT ALONE. The joint is crawling with last men. Will Smith in I Am Legend. The nameless hero of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Road, an Oprah pick last year. Yorick from the hit comic book Y: The Last Man (which publishes its 60th and last issue at the end of this month), who survives a plague that kills only men--the women are fine. Even Disney is doing it: Wall*E, a Pixar film that opens in June, is about the last robot on an empty, trash-strewn future earth. "The idea of being the last person on earth is pretty universal," says Francis Lawrence, who directed I Am Legend. "There's not anybody who hasn't imagined it, either as wish fulfillment or nightmare."

Of course, to be the last man, you have to make it through the apocalypse. TV's Jericho and Battlestar Galactica are about bands of survivors (of nukes and Cylons, respectively). The video game Half-Life 2 is set on an earth conquered and picked over by alien invaders (you play a resistance fighter). And then there's Cloverfield, which opened on Jan. 18 and follows a group of unsuspecting partygoers on the night a massive beast attacks New York City. (See review, page 115.)

With apologies to Al Gore, the end of the world is hot. What's behind our appetite for the apocalypse? Is it a way of confronting deep-seated, species-wide fear? Or is it something more--might there be something about the end of the world that we just can't wait for?

Granted, it's rarely been out of fashion. The apocalypse probably seeped into Western thought via the Book of Daniel, with its 10-horned beast devouring the world, and the Book of Revelation's four grim horsemen. Shelley was among the first major writers to convert the tale into a secular narrative, with no beast, but far from the last. It was taken up by, among others, T.S. Eliot, whose "The Hollow Men" ends with the famous lines "This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang but a whimper."

Of course, Eliot was writing metaphorically about a culture that he felt was exhausted and dying, but with the advent of the atom bomb, the end of the world got a lot more literal. (Eliot later confessed that he wouldn't have written the same lines after the coming of the H-bomb.) One of the cultural aftershocks of the bombing of Hiroshima was the awakening of Godzilla and the Japanese monster movie as a way of reckoning with the nightmare of U.S. atomic weapons. "Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears," says J.J. Abrams, creator of Felicity, Alias and Lost and producer of Cloverfield. "When Godzilla came out, the idea of doing a movie about the destruction of a city because of a radioactive man-made thing must have had a similar feeling. On the one hand, it's a silly man in a rubber suit. On the other hand, it's a way to process these fears that are mostly bottled up."

And what fears are we currently bottling up? In one of the great ironies of 21st century culture to date, the U.S. has now imported the Japanese monster movie--created in response to their fear of us--as a way of dealing with our own fears, starting with the attacks of Sept. 11. The result is Cloverfield.

The movie is shot in the same shaky-cam, amateur-video style as The Blair Witch Project, and like Blair Witch, it has a star-free cast. The film purports to be a record of what happens to a group of average twenty-somethings on the night a massive creature attacks New York City. It features shrieking, running, cleavage, the severed head of the Statue of Liberty (a nod to two postapocalyptic classics at once, Planet of the Apes and Escape from New York) and a giant monster (the number of horns wasn't available at press time) shouldering its way between skyscrapers. But the most indelible images are of clouds of pale dust billowing down city streets and shredded copy paper sifting down out of the sky in eerie silence, images that instantly evoke the 9/11 attacks. "With Cloverfield, we were trying to create a film that would be entertaining and, as a by-product of the subject matter, perhaps be a catharsis," Abrams says. "We wanted to let people live through their wildest fears but be in a safe place, where the enemy is the size of a skyscraper instead of some stateless, unseen cowardly terrorist."

Much of Cloverfield's visceral force comes from its use of handheld cameras. By the time Blair Witch was made, unstabilized amateur footage was already visual shorthand for disaster, the vernacular of the apocalypse--think of the Zapruder film or the footage of Rodney King being beaten. And that was long before Sept. 11 and YouTube. Grainy, unstabilized footage gives us a sense that what we're watching is real--that the hand brake is off, that we won't be protected by the bland, safe conventions of a studio movie. "I felt like there had to be a way to do a monster movie that's updated and fresh," says Abrams. "So we came up with the YouTubification of things, the ubiquity of video cameras, cell phones with cameras. There are hundreds of incidents and images out of Iraq on handheld video that are horrifying. All of those images we considered because they show the way things actually look."

After the beast is through with us, what then? The postapocalypse comes in two varieties: the sterile kind, which leaves behind a dead desert, and the fertile kind, in which destruction makes room for new life and nature gloriously reclaims a human-free earth. In The Road, McCarthy--following Eliot and Mad Max--imagines an earth from which every cell of nonhuman life has been burned. It's a vivid fantasy, but it's not the most plausible scenario. Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, a sleeper hit last year, is a carefully researched look at what a depopulated earth would really be like. It turns out to be not all bad.

Plants would crack and pulverize cities and highways. Moose and wolves would return, and the forest would become dense again. Reading The World Without Us, you want to cheer at the springy resilience with which the earth bounces back from the damage humans inflicted on it. Global warming is our newest and most cherished apocalypse, but even the atmosphere will eventually rebalance itself, more or less. "I wanted to write a book that was intentionally not apocalyptic," says Weisman, who teaches journalism at the University of Arizona. "Apocalypse means destruction, and the whole world ends. In my book, I show how beautiful things could get--and how quickly--if we weren't around. How things revert to wilderness, almost like the Garden of Eden." (The History Channel's Life After People, which airs Jan. 21, has essentially the same premise.)

Weisman's book gets at the paradox of the apocalypse, which is that it's weirdly seductive. Watching Smith in I Am Legend as he romps through a Manhattan blessedly free of people, you try to remember that he's supposed to be mourning the death of humanity, but it's damned hard. He's playing golf and driving a sports car. He's picking corn and hunting deer--he's eating locally! The apocalypse is an epic tragedy, but it's also a fantasy of cleansing and regeneration wherein everything inessential and inauthentic is swept away so that we can build afresh among the ruins. It's a convenient untruth. "I've been struck by the number of New Yorkers who have actually said to me, 'God, it was so much fun watching the city fall apart like that,'" says Weisman. "There is on some level a secret longing that people have, saying 'Let's just give it up. What a mess we've made just by being alive.' We all have this footprint now. We've redefined original sin."

We won't reveal what kind of apocalypse the beast in Cloverfield brings, whether it leaves behind a charred, crispy earth or a moist green one or whether it just--no fair!--succumbs to old-fashioned human military might. But there's a part of each of us that is rooting for the monster and that would be glad to see us go. Because we know there's a little beast in us too.

With reporting by Reported by Amy Lennard Goehner/Los Angeles, Rebecca Winters Keegan/Los Angeles