In the play Copenhagen, the Nazi scientist Werner Heisenberg meets with Niels Bohr to discuss the creation of the atomic bomb, and whether Germany or the Allied Powers will use it. For decades, historians have argued that Heisenberg deliberately sabotaged the Nazi’s research, knowing the catastrophe it would inevitably bring. However, new information has come to light that suggests that Heisenberg had no qualms about building the atomic bomb for Hitler. In a letter that Bohr wrote Heisenberg, but never sent, which is now archived in the Niels Bohr Archive (NBA) in Copenhagen, Bohr makes it clear that Heisenberg meant to go on with his work. As Finn Aaserud, NBA director states, “essentially, the letter shows that [Heisenberg] told Bohr that it was possible that the war would be won with atomic weapons, indicating that he was involved in such work” (qtd. in Glanz 4). Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, concurs with this revised view of Heisenberg’s activities. Rhodes feels that Heisenberg “simply failed despite his best efforts” (Glanz 4), and only his limitations as a physicist held him back from the final breakthrough. Says Rhodes:
This letter confirms what I think was always pretty clear in the record, and that is that Heisenberg was not making some deal with Bohr. He was trying to find out what Bohr knew. He was trying to do a little espionage. (qtd. in Glanz 4)
Bohr abruptly terminated the meeting and completely broke relations with Heisenberg, although the two men had been friends for years. Gerald Holton, emeritus professor of physics at Harvard University, agrees with Rhodes’s analysis based on his own examination of the unsent letter. Glanz reports that Dr. Holton stated:
“Dr. Aaserud’s report about some of its content is quite coherent with what we know” from other sources, including statements by a son of Mr. Bohr, the physicist Aage Bohr. Mr. Holton said, “It is significant that Dr. Aaserud does not mention that any moral scruples or intention to sabotage the bomb project were reasons for Heisenberg’s visit to Bohr.” […] Mr. Holton also shed new light on why Mr. Bohr suddenly cut off the meeting and why it destroyed what had been Mr. Bohr’s lifelong friendship with Mr. Heisenberg. Though some have attributed Mr. Bohr’s reaction to anger, another explanation is more likely, Mr. Holton said.
“The first thing that would come to mind is not anger but deep fright,” he said of Mr. Bohr’s reaction to learning of a Nazi bomb program. “He understood what that would mean for civilization.” (4)
But now the stakes are significantly higher. Every nation that wants nuclear capability can purchase it, either through legitimate channels or on the black market. In a world where one person can wipe out an entire metropolis with a nuclear device no larger than a suitcase, everyone is at risk. International boundaries vanish. Territories are zones of commerce. The entire world has become a potential battleground, a vivid and unsettling demonstration of what physicists have dubbed “the mediocrity principle,” which states that no one place in the universe is more important than any other. We all live in a nuclear nation, no matter what our nationality. Our beliefs, our values, our memories, and our careers fade into insignificance, even as we contemplate our own mortality and the inherent transience of all our works. As the tagline for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) rhetorically asked, “Who will survive, and what will be left of them?” What remnants of our shared civilization will survive a nuclear holocaust, and what sort of new existence will we be faced with?
In 1969 the music festival at Woodstock, New York, was a relatively peaceful, if undisciplined, affair in which hundreds of thousands of people gathered to celebrate three days of “peace, love and music.” The event was a financial disaster, but a cultural milestone. Banners proclaiming “We Proved It at Woodstock” perpetuated the myth that somehow society had been fundamentally altered and that the fabric of American consciousness would never be the same. But the reality was something far more disturbing; the concept of Woodstock had become a commodity to be marketed and repackaged at will. When the festival was “revived” in 1994, it was a paean to corporate sponsorship, rather than to countercultural social values. As Caryn James reports, “Häagen Dazs paid $ 1 million to be the official Woodstock ice cream, Vermont Water $ 1 million to become the official water, and Pepsi $5 million as a major sponsor” (“Woodstock” B1). More significant, the artists who performed at the 1994 concert were openly contemptuous of the original model. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails described Woodstock 1969 “an ancient, hippie-oriented thing,” and Henry Rollins declared, “I’m staying at the Marriott” (“Woodstock” B5) rather than pitching a tent in an open field. By Woodstock 1999, punctuated by rapes, random violence, and looting, society clearly had changed, and the concept of a music festival with it. Violent times demand violent music, and Woodstock 1999 did not disappoint in this regard.
But had Woodstock ever existed? Was the spirit of anarchy and freedom that typified the 1960s merely an impressive and persuasive illusion? Or has technology, and our reliance on it, substantially altered our lives? If one looks at our shared cinematic past, we can see that we have always been playing with disaster, fascinated by destruction. The 2,823 victims of the September 11 disaster, and the 16 acres of damage at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon are merely the fulfillment of a dream of annihilation that has fascinated us for centuries. It is only in the latter part of the 19th century, the 20th century, and now the 21st century, that we can give these phantasmal visions faces and sounds a sense of concrete actuality. The regime of CGI effects has made the illusion even more seamless. Where once matte lines and other technical imperfections created “limit zones” of visual reality that distanced us from the spectacle we witnessed, now CGI makes a tidal wave, an atomic blast, a hurricane, or a meteor impact seem as real as late afternoon sunlight spilling through a back porch window. There is no separation anymore, no zone of the real and the not real. The cinema of the 21st century makes our most violent dreams of self-destruction simultaneously mundane and yet instantly attainable.
While we entertain ourselves with staged “celebrity boxing” matches, such as the much-touted Tonya Harding/Paula Jones bout on Fox television, the clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists keeps ticking, now set (in 2002) at seven minutes to midnight (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists). We can amuse ourselves, momentarily, by enumerating the various natural and/or man-made scenarios of apocalyptic destruction, such as:
an asteroid impact, a gamma ray burst, collapse of the vacuum, rogue black holes, giant solar flares, reversal of the earth’s magnetic field, volcanic eruptions, global epidemics, global warming, ecosystem collapse, biotech disaster, environmental toxins, global war, a war on humans by a race of self-procreating robots, mass insanity, alien invasion, divine intervention (the Rapture), or perhaps the fact that someone wakes up and realizes that all of human recorded history is merely a dream. (See Powell for more on these variant theories.)
But all of these hypothetical end games are something to do to pass the time. Of all the scenarios previously listed, global nuclear war is the only one that has any genuine credibility. Smaller scale visions of the apocalypse, such as that offered in San Francisco (1936) or The Day the Sky Exploded, offer an exit point for the viewer. In San Francisco, the earthquake is containable, confined to one area and one reel of the film’s running time. In The Day the Sky Exploded, a missile explodes in the upper atmosphere, bringing down a rain of cosmic debris on the earth’s inhabitants, but once again the threat is transient. In Hooper (1978), two stunt men earn their living creating realistic scenes of death and destruction for the cinema, climaxing in a final sequence involving a “rocket car” that nearly kills them both. But nothing is really at risk; what has been staged can be deconstructed, and the “chaos” is both staged and formulaic. In The Last Days of Man on Earth (1973; original title The Final Programme, 1973), the backdrop of destruction serves merely as a setting for a romance between the film’s two protagonists, who wander about a landscape littered with heaps of rusting automobiles in no particular hurry to escape their putative fate.
In The Bed Sitting Room (1969), the banalities of class struggle continue even after the world and most of its inhabitants have been vaporized in a final, massive conflict. Yet amidst the ruins, civilization retains a pernicious hold on the film’s characters, who perform Beckettian slapstick routines as they struggle toward a vision of normalcy in a world that no longer cares about their existence. When Worlds Collide (1951) presents a genuine vision of Armageddon, as a stray planet crashes into Earth. But the scenes of Earth’s demise are balanced by the escape of a handful of survivors in a custom-made rocket, which takes them to a new, Edenic planet. Significantly, the images of flooding and disaster that punctuate the final reel of the film are conspicuously devoid of people. We are not one of the dead, but rather one of the survivors, and the new paradise is ours to share with the privileged few who have cheated catastrophe. This is the secret hope that lies behind all scenarios of apocalyptic destruction: because we have witnessed them, we have survived, and the simulacrum of Armageddon has somehow replaced the reality of the event itself. There is always a way out. There has to be. Otherwise, how could these documents have survived to give us a warning?
The H-Bomb! The H-Bomb! The H-Bomb! Flash of brightness. A tremendous roar. […] And I, the complacent American, thinking that on one would ever dare attack an American city. And I told my friends that nuclear war would never happen […] but it did. I always thought I was a good American—patriotic and civic minded. But I was wrong. I failed myself and my country. (Conelrad, “Complacent”)
This first-person confession comes from a 1961 record album entitled The Complacent Americans, in which an unprepared “good American” is vaporized by a hydrogen bomb attack. Now, speaking from beyond the grave, he laments his lack of vigilance, his lack of cooperation with civil defense authorities, his inability and unwillingness to fit into the milieu of Cold War American paranoia:
I can see people alive in the fallout shelters. Had I learned the rules as set forth by the Office of Civil Defense, I would be alive and in that shelter now. How simple it looked—those who knew what to do and where to go are still amongst the living. I had my opportunity, but I was the Complacent American. (Conelrad, “Complacent”)
Could he have done anything differently? Could he have survived? In a sense, as with the films just discussed, because he can relate his experience even after death, he has survived if only to create this aural artifact. But does The Complacent Americans promote civil defense awareness, or does the hysteria and fear surrounding the possibility of an atomic invasion promote The Complacent Americans as a product to be purchased? Is the threat genuine? Is the record itself genuine? When Invasion U.S.A. first appeared in theaters in 1952, the promotional suggestions for theater managers included staging air raid drills, civil defense parades, even displaying actual nuclear weapons in the theater lobby, all in the cause of selling the picture to the public. Among other ideas to sell Invasion U.S.A. to potential patrons, theater owners were urged to:
Work out, if possible, a “siren” opening of your film—a test “alert” for civilian defense workers. This practice drill, called in conjunction with Invasion U.S.A., should be an invaluable promotion idea.
Distribute posters, for use in all public buildings throughout your city, boosting civilian defense and your showing of Invasion U.S.A. Sample poster copy: “Learn What Will Happen If the Bombs Start Falling! Join the Civilian Defense Corps. […] See Columbia’s Invasion U.S.A. State Theatre Friday.”
Arrange a special exhibit of new techniques of warfare that are off the secret list, but are not too generally known. Display photos and, if possible, weapons themselves. (Invasion U.S.A. pressbook)
Above all other considerations, Invasion U.S.A. was an exploitation film, as producer Albert Zugsmith made abundantly clear in a 1973 interview. After beginning his career in the eastern United States as a newspaperman, Zugsmith sold his interests and moved to Los Angeles, hoping to break into the film industry. Always an able self-promoter, Zugsmith struck a deal with arch anti-Communist crusader Howard Hughes, who was then running RKO Pictures into the ground through inept management. Hughes was hungry for product, so Zugsmith came to him with an offer
to make three very low-budget pictures at prices which Howard Hughes was reputed to have said: “It can’t be done.” They were $100,000 each. Under strictly union conditions, IATSE conditions, and on the old RKO-Pathé lot, now called the Culver City Studios, which were the old Selznick studios. So we made them with our own money, but Hughes reimbursed us, up to $100,000—no more than that!—on each picture. (McCarthy and Flynn, “Zugsmith” 412)
Right from the start, Zugsmith was interested in films that dealt with the Apocalypse because he knew that spectacles of mass destruction always performed reliably at the box office. Not that he was under any illusions that he was creating something of value; no, what Zugsmith wanted to do was make money, and the end of the world was as promising a prospect as one could imagine. After all, Zugsmith was financing the films with his own money, which amounted to an interest-free loan to Hughes and RKO, and he had to be certain to recoup his investment. Zugsmith recalled that:
We made these three pictures for RKO and, of course, we were forced to use people we didn’t want to take as actors, so the pictures weren’t that great. The first one was a look into the future, which we called 3000 A.D. RKO, possibly on Mr. Hughes’s orders, changed the title to Captive Women [1952]. It was a look at what would happen to places like New York after the atomic bomb fell, and so forth. Something like Beneath the Planet of the Apes [1971]. So I was determined then to make a picture of my own and I made Invasion U.S.A. [1952], which was my first big sleeper. I made that for $127,000 cash and about $60,000 deferred. […] And while it’s far from perfect, for $127,000, for a film shot in seven days, I feel it’s a good job. Of course, full of heartaches and headaches, but worth it. And I suppose the public responded, because the net profits on the film were close to $1,000,000. (McCarthy and Flynn, “Zugsmith” 413)
The trailer for the film certainly helped with taglines such as, “SEE! New York Disappear! SEE! Seattle Blasted! SEE! San Francisco in Flames!” as nominal stars Gerald Mohr and Peggie Castle stroll through the wreckage of Manhattan, and Mohr observes sanguinely that, “War or no war, people have to eat and drink […] and make love.” As the film’s pressbook noted, “Invasion U.S.A., in which cities vanish before your eyes, will inspire awareness of civilian defense in everyone” (Invasion U.S.A. pressbook). Or perhaps it will just inspire them to sit at home, draw the blinds, and prepare for the worst.
Economies in the film are everywhere. William Schallert, perhaps best known for his role as Patty Duke’s father on The Patty Duke Show in the 1960s, worked only one day on the film (April 7, 1952) and was paid $75 for his efforts (Conelrad, “Invasion U.S.A.”). Amazingly, for a film with such a spectacular exploitation campaign, the production is, for the most part, confined to three or four cheap sets (a bar, an apartment, a television station, and a munitions plant office), interspersed with miles of stock footage of the Allied offense during World War II, which was obtained without cost from the US National Archives and Records Administration. The New York Times, for one, was not deceived, noting in their review of May 1, 1953, that:
Invasion U.S.A., the Columbia release opened yesterday at the Globe, is an atomic-war picture showing the invasion and subjugation of the United States by an unnamed, but obviously Soviet, army. It is almost wholly composed of stock combat newsreel footage taken during World War II. But its clever editing makes it a war of the future, complete with atom-seared American cities, drowned American children (when Boulder Dam is atomized), and gut-shot senators on Capitol Hill. And, as a pièce de résistance, a stately and desirable American girl commits suicide to avoid being revoltingly pawed by a fat, brutish, whiskey-swilling soldier whose accent places his origin just north of Minsk. It is a message picture. All the actors in it, especially the leads, Gerald Mohr, Peggie Castle, Dan O’Hierlihy [sic], and Robert Bice are dismal in their roles, (qtd. in Conelrad, “Invasion U.S.A.”)
But no matter. The film seduced its patrons into theaters with a promise of the ultimate conflict and then delivered precisely what $127,000 and seven days would allow: a shoddy spectacle that, in the end, turned out to be the result of a hypnotic trance created by Mr. Ohman (Dan O’Herlihy)—just another nuclear nightmare. Although Invasion U.S.A. has attained a certain cult status as an authentic artifact of Cold War hysteria, it is not one of a kind, and it speaks to our current political climate, just as The Sum of All Fears caters to contemporary paranoia. There is no end to the list of atomic apocalypse movies, but the genre is far from being moribund or confined to the concerns of a single title. Films such as Survival Under Atomic Attack, Genbaku Shi: Killed by the Atomic Bomb (1994), America’s Atomic Bomb Tests (1998), America’s Atomic Bomb Tests: At Ground Zero (1997), America’s Atomic Bomb Tests: Operation Hardtack (1997), Enola Gay: The Men, the Mission, the Atomic Bomb (1980), Trinity and Beyond (1995), My Mother-in-Law Is an Atomic Bomb (1952; original title Hamati kombola zorria, 1952), R.C.A.F. Nuclear Defence: H Hour Now (1959), The Atomic City (1952), Atomic Journeys (1999), Atomic Juggernaut (1971), The Atomic Kid (1954), Atomic Lady (1963), Atomic Power (1946), Atomic Rulers of the World (1964), Atomic Samurai (1993), The Atomic Submarine (1959), The Fiend with the Atomic Brain (1972; original title Blood of Ghastly Horror, 1972), Canadian Mounties vs. Atomic Invaders (1953), Class of Nuke ’Em High (1986), How We Stole the Atomic Bomb (1967; original title Come rubammo la bomba atomica, 1967), Atomic Rocketship (1936; original title Flash Gordon, 1936), Invasion by the Atomic Zombies (1980; original title La Invasión de los Zombies atómicos, 1980), Atomic Monster (1953; original title Man Made Monster, 1941), Atomic Cyborg (1986; original title Mani di pietra, 1986), The Atomic Brain (1964; original title Monstrosity, 1964), Atomic Agent (1959; original title Nathalie, agent secret, 1959), Atomic Reporter (1991; original title Revenge of the Radioactive Reporter, 1991), Atomic Secret (1967; original title Tecnica per un massacro, 1967), The Atomic Man (1956; original title Timeslip, 1956), and numerous other titles offer reassurance, if that is the right word, that the thought of imminent destruction is never far from our cinematic consciousness. Numerous Web sites, such as Conelrad (which specializes in nuclear disaster scenarios) and It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad Max World (which deals with all sorts of apocalyptic visions, be they natural, nuclear, or supernatural), proliferate on the World Wide Web. If anything, the current appetite for corporeal and spiritual destruction is nothing more than a manifestation of manic information overload. We now have access to everything, but the sheer quantity of information overwhelms us. From the Nazi cinema’s obsession with death, evident in necrophilic spectacles such as S.A.—Mann Brand (1933), Hitler Youth Quex (1933; original title Hitlerjunge Quex: Ein Film vom Opfergeist der deutschen Jugend, 1933), and Blutendes Deutschland (1932), which glorified mob violence, self-sacrifice for Hitler, and virulent racism, to after-the-fall ruminations on the lingering effects of the Third Reich such as Hitler: The Last Ten Days (1973), The Night Porter (1974; original title II portiere di notte, 1974), and The Damned (1969; original title, La caduta degli dei, 1969), all is available to us. The more contemporary films distance us from the Nazi regime, aestheticizing it as a phenomenon to be observed, dissected, and understood, as if such a thing were possible. No matter what the makers of these later films intend, they serve only to keep the memory of Nazism alive, a potentially “cool” lifestyle (as we have seen in the use of Nazi imagery in video games) that loiters about, waiting to seduce those who wish to toy with the themes of destruction. In contrast, Alain Resnais’ masterful short film, the 28-minute Night and Fog (1955; original title Nuit et brouillard, 1955), positions the existence of memory as an unreliable guide to comprehension of the past, intercutting captured Nazi atrocity footage with scenes of the death camps 10 years after their reign of human destruction. In Hitler Youth Quex, the story of a blond Hitler youth who is killed by Communist thugs and thus becomes a martyr to the Nazi party, the dead youth becomes the symbol of a new, “racially pure” Germany, his figure superimposed on the swastika flags and Baldur von Schirach’s marching song booming across the soundtrack:
For Hitler we march through night and through dread
With the flag of youth for freedom and bread […]
Yes, the flag means more than being dead! (Phillips 50)
This is the same cult of death we pursue now, as the ultimate decadent recreation.
Yet all of it remains remote, carefully contained within a box of homicidal and genocidal dreams. In the middle of Jason X, two of the film’s characters play a video game in which they create an alternate universe and then proceed to hack each other to pieces with graphic verisimilitude. When Jason unexpectedly enters their game world, they both shout, “Game over,” at which point everything in their synthetic playground vanishes, except for Jason himself. As Jason lumbers toward his two victims, the players cry, “Pause, pause!” expecting Jason to freeze in his tracks. But Jason, of course, is not part of the game; he is, within the construct of the film’s narrative, real. And thus both players meet “actual” death, as Jason wordlessly dispatches one and then the other. Yet all of this moves us not at all because we know that we are “playing” a game, that we can hit the pause button at any time, or exit the theater without fear of reprisal. It is as if the events we witness in Jason X were produced in another world. As Paolo Cherchi Usai movingly writes:
We know little or nothing about the moving images produced in remote parts of the world and lost soon after their first exhibition. What kind of images can be seen in Baku? What is available to a viewer in Taveuni? What do they make of our images? Their relative distance leaves us with the same lack of involvement we feel at the news of the passing away of a person we have never heard of before. (97)
I once knew a man named Andrew Meyer, who created a series of lyrically beautiful films in New York in the 1960s, when a number of us were involved in what was euphemistically called the “Underground Cinema.” Working at first in standard 8mm, Meyer made the silent Shades and Drumbeats (1964), which chronicled the life of a group of his friends living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This first film was met with considerable critical acclaim, even receiving a number of public screenings (impossible in the current marketplace for such a personal project) and moved Meyer to create the 8mm film Annunciation (1964) and then the 16mm short Match Girl (1966), based on the Hans Christian Andersen story. As with most experimental films, Match Girl grew organically as Meyer sought to shape the storyline to his own personal world. At the time of the film’s release, Meyer commented:
I started out knowing I was going to do a film based on Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the poor little match girl, which had been filmed by Renoir in 1927. However, this got mixed up in my mind with a poor little rich girl story about a successful but lonely fashion model who idealizes herself as a story-book character. Out of this confusion comes one of the themes of the film: that what is most illusive can also be most real. Thus, when the girl hallucinates, she is watching Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a film which revolves around similar ideas. Besides the character of the girl, interpreted by model Vivian Kurz, there is a sort of Prince Charming, played by poet Gerard Malanga, also trying to maintain a certain image of himself. Andy Warhol appears as a witch or overlord of the pop milieu in which the action takes place. The grandmother in the story is replaced by Marilyn Monroe as a sort of fairy godmother to the girl. (New American Cinema Group 108)
The finished film, running slightly less than one-half hour and photographed in sumptuous color, won prizes at the 1966 Ann Arbor Film Festival and the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, also in 1966, and Meyer’s career seemed truly launched. His next project, the ineffably romantic An Early Clue to the New Direction (1967), won First Prize at the 1967 Ann Arbor Film Festival, and moved Village Voice critic James Stoller to declare the film “unexpected, glorious, and indescribably moving […] I can’t forget it” (qtd. in New American Cinema Group 108). Set in Boston, the film starred Prescott Townsend, a well-known Boston avant-garde figure, caught in a relationship triangle with Joy Bang and René Ricard, who both compete for his affections. Nearly plotless, the film drifts through a world of lazy afternoons spent bicycling down the streets of nearby Cambridge, having tea in Prescott’s suitably bohemian apartment, and tangentially considering what the future might bring. With the success of this second 16mm film, Meyer pooled all of his money and produced The Sky Pirate (1970), a 16mm feature film starring Joy Bang, which was indifferently received. Meyer’s meager resources were not adequate to the task he had set for himself and so, after due consideration, he left New York for Hollywood.
By 1972, Meyer had become part of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures and was given a chance to direct Night of the Cobra Woman (1972), a low-budget horror film shot in the Philippines, which was an unsatisfying experience for all concerned, both critically and commercially. Thus, in 1973, it was pretty much a do-or-die proposition when Corman handed Meyer a print of the Japanese disaster movie Tidal Wave (1973; original title Nippon chinbotsu, 1973), and told him that he had two days with the Canadian actor Lorne Greene (best known for his work on the teleseries Bonanza and Battlestar Galactica) to revamp the film into a US version. Meyer slashed the original film’s 140-minute running time to 70 minutes and then shot 20 minutes of linking footage featuring Greene as Ambassador Warren Richards, with a cameo by future director Joe Dante. As Meyer told me, the material with Lorne Greene was shot hurriedly with little time for rehearsal. The one concession to visual luxury that Meyer’s linking footage possessed was that it was shot in Panavision to match the existing Japanese material. For most of his screen time, Greene reads speeches at the viewer, essentially saying, “just look at these scenes of terrible destruction,” as earthquakes, volcanoes, and hurricanes threaten to sink Japan into the Pacific Ocean. By the film’s end, of course, cataclysmic disaster is averted, but not before scene after scene of violence and destruction is unspooled before the eyes of the spectator. Intercutting and shortening the Japanese version to suitable length for commercial US distribution, Meyer edited out all of the exposition sequences, keeping only the scenes of violent destruction. Confined to a single set for his two days of shooting, Lorne Greene could do little more than gesture at the audience, reciting meaningless dialogue to fill up time and—not incidentally—lend the prestige of his name to the film’s credits. The film was a moderate success for New World, but no more than that. Tidal Wave was Andrew Meyer’s last film. He died in Los Angeles on March 8, 1987.
When Meyer was working in New York in the company of other experimental filmmakers such as Warren Sonbert, Gerard Malanga, and Andy Warhol, we would run into each other occasionally at parties, discuss plans for future projects, exchange gossip, and go our separate ways. The last time I saw Meyer was at a screening of the Soviet/US coproduction The Blue Bird (1976), a lackluster children’s fantasy film with an all-star cast including Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, Ava Gardner, Cicely Tyson, and Robert Morley. Meyer invited me to the film’s premiere screening at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to welcome me to Los Angeles; I was spending the summer there working for an experimental television group called TVTV headed by Michael Shamberg. It was not a pleasant evening. Despite George Cukor’s direction, The Blue Bird was a failure, and everyone in the auditorium knew it. Even at a modest 99 minutes, the film seemed interminable. As the first cinematic joint venture between Russia and the United States, it was hardly an auspicious beginning. The affair was black tie, and I felt somewhat out of place in a jacket and tie, whereas Meyer had clearly taken the occasion more seriously, renting a tux and greeting industry figures in the lobby before and after the film. It was all so cold, so joyless, and so calculated, that I knew then that I could never possibly live or work in Los Angeles. There was money to be made, true, but there were too many compromises. Meyer had strayed from his original vision to become just another commercial moviemaker, and his heart was not in it, even as part of him yearned for mainstream success.
What happens to us when part of ourselves dies? What happens to us when the world dies? At what point is annihilation so total that there is no possibility of repairs, no hope of rehabilitation, no possible way to recover what has been lost? When we view images in the darkness that prefigure our own end, we are trying to visualize our perfect death, to choreograph the end of time to our own personal advantage. When we cease to exist, the world ceases to exist because we can no longer apprehend it. And it is this moment that we fear and anticipate above all others because it represents the complete disintegration of the self. The visions of the apocalypse discussed in this book, and the strategies we may use to forestall them, are but a part of the stakes of cinematic representationalism. As we enter the era of holographic computer games in which we can die and die again, painlessly and in a variety of aesthetically pleasing ways, we must ask ourselves: what are we afraid of? The answer is simple. When we dream of the certainty and inevitability of the apocalypse, we are afraid of life itself.