It’s the end of the world every day, sings Lou-Adriane Cassidy.
She’s not wrong. Beyond the small renunciations and the banal sorrows, there are these wars and this climate crisis and these planetary threats. Each day.
Although we may be optimistic, we read The Press waking up and remembering that we are “90 seconds from the apocalypse”1. It says in the paper: “Trends continue to point ominously toward global catastrophe. » The landing is smooth, we feel it. It remains to be seen whether it will be economic, political, climatic, pandemic, or all of that at the same time.
So what do we do ?
In my arsenal of escape tools, there is fiction. And in the last few months, I have consumed a disproportionate number of stories about… the apocalypse.
The world after us, The Last of Us, Station Eleven, Last Light ; if I trust the success of these works and others Silo Or The Scarlet MaidI’m not the only one who takes advantage of her free time to dive into dystopias.
Are we fleeing forward?
PHOTO MARCO CAMPANOZZI, THE PRESS
Richard Bégin, professor of cinema at the University of Montreal
I think there’s a bit of a fantasy aspect to it. What overlaps with most apocalyptic films is the idea that we lose our bearings and that laws no longer exist. It responds to a kind of fantasy of seeing the world to which we are accustomed no longer function and, through this dysfunction, finding a new meaning in life.
Richard Bégin, professor of cinema at the University of Montreal
The professor of cinema at the University of Montreal likes to look at the question of disaster. For him, there is in this theme the attractive idea of making a clean slate. Marie-Ève Thuot speaks of a “tension between anguish and hope”.
The author of the wonderful novel The trajectory of the confetti dedicated his doctorate in literature to end-of-the-world stories. As part of her research, she was influenced by Kant’s idea that we expect the end of the world when we feel that the world is unjust and does not deserve to continue in such a way. .
Fantasizing the end of a system to create a fairer one is a logical response to our crazy times. Although the reflex is not new.
Richard Bégin points out to me that the disaster film adapts to any era. Modern technologies distressed spectators in the 1960s, the nuclear apocalypse swept through the 1980s and zombies – synonymous with the loss of symbolic reference points in our societies – devoured the 1990s.
According to the researcher and composer (who draws inspiration from the catastrophe in his pieces dark ambient !), end-of-the-world stories teach us a lot about the relationship between humans and their environment: “We are confronted with what we risk losing and the fact that what we believe to be permanent is not is not. » This is why today we are treated to the media apocalypse in films such as Leave the World Behindwhere our communications channels are held hostage.
Besides, I wonder if I’m not watching all this to acquire a certain knowledge that has been lost over the generations… To get an idea of where to hide in the forest and how to trap an animal without use the internet. At the same time, I have very poor coordination and a poor sense of direction, there is not a single film that will allow me to be among the rare humans surviving a disaster. Internet or not.
I should perhaps side with the theory of Marie-Ève Thuot, who rather sees in our thirst for apocalyptic stories a quest for meaning. If it was once religious texts that helped us imagine the end of the world, let’s say that we have pretty much lost the reflex to look at myths to understand what awaits us…
I think that end-of-the-world films and novels fulfill this need to represent catastrophes, but also to find a certain meaning in them. Most stories don’t show total destruction of the world, we see humans struggling to rebuild things. There is always hope.
Marie-Ève Thuot, author
Hope is perhaps even hidden in the simple interest we have in this type of work. Marie-Ève Thuot quotes the philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy and his notion of enlightened catastrophism: “For him, the end of the world is inevitable, but the fact of representing such atrocious things can also act as a foil and awaken consciences. »
I like the idea. But hey, I wrote it earlier: I’m an optimist.