Nietzsche—whom, like Kant, we might sometimes read as a science-fiction scriptwriter—also imagined a scene for the end of the world through glaciation:
Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed [erstarrte das Gestirn], and the clever beasts had to die.—One might invent such a fable, and yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened.1
In this cosmological fable, we could play at giving variations on the causes of the end. And we would come up with the classifications that some think they are able to propose of the species within the “apo” genre. The scholarly and stuffy tone of one Guide, for example, is funny (and I will not resist the pleasure of citing this long passage):
A basic definition of apocalyptic cinema is a motion picture that depicts a credible threat to the continuing existence of humankind as a species or the existence of Earth as a planet capable of supporting human life. The genre of apocalyptic cinema is closely related to, yet distinct from, a similar genre primarily known as post-apocalyptic cinema, which concentrates on survivors of a catastrophic event struggling to reestablish a livable society. In order to be classified as an apocalyptic film, the event threatening the extinction of humanity has to be presented within the story. If this catastrophe occurs prior to the events depicted on the screen, the film is post-apocalyptic. Naturally, there can be a blurring of the lines of these two genres, and a number of pictures can legitimately be labelled as both.… Apocalyptic films can be classified into seven specific categories: Religious or Supernatural; Celestial Collision; Solar or Orbital Disruption; Nuclear War and Radioactive Fallout; Germ Warfare or Pestilence; Alien Device or Invasion; and Scientific Miscalculation.2
Playing at this clean-up game, some intelligent animals might be tempted to put Nietzsche in the category of “Solar or Orbital Disruption” alongside Robert Altman for Quintet, Steven Spielberg for AI, and Roland Emmerich for The Day After Tomorrow or 2012. Animals well versed in film studies and endowed with a historian’s penchant might want to superpose this reasoned classification of species with other considerations of their evolution, which would sometimes lead them to apparently insoluble choices: In 1931 Abel Gance’s End of the World is said to be “the first apocalyptic film in the history of the cinema” at the beginning of a monograph called Le Cinéma de science-fiction, while fifty pages later, “the first film of this sub-genre [the “apocalyptic S-F film”] is Five” directed by Arch Oboler in 1951.3
These dilemmas and housecleaning and tidying problems awaken the curiosity of the animal that I am.
I’ll investigate a bit more.
Apo or post-apo, as we say to keep it short.
Thus, among the blogs hosted by AlloCiné, a French film website, one finds a Petit blog du post-apo. The abbreviation allows for quicker and more efficient classification as a way of ensuring generic enjoyment without losing too much time. When—as happens to us all from time to time—one is looking for cinematic pleasure that is generically guaranteed because it belongs to a genre.
I imagine myself addressing some real or virtual salesperson to ask him, for tonight, about a good (post-)apo movie I can indulge in. I see myself explaining to him that I want to be able to take in and quietly savor the worst threats raining down on the world without the genericity of the scenes ever being called into question—yes, I tell him, I will all the more readily enjoy the general annihilation to come if the genre itself remains intact. What advice will he have for me? Blade Runner, perhaps, which, in a December 3, 2009, post on a blog hosted by the very serious Encyclopaedia Britannica, I find classified seventh in the genre’s hit parade—“#7, Blade Runner (Top 10 Post-Apocalyptic Films)”?
With Blade Runner, and we’ll be returning to this, everything does indeed seem to be in place for enjoying a good old post-apo. Unless the genre’s simplicity is misleading, as the same blogger suggests a few lines further down, this time about John Carpenter’s They Live. “Call it a pre-post- apocalyptic movie, since it’s not clear, at the film’s end, whether earthlings or ETs will prevail.” Pre-post-apo, then?
But doubt, I tell myself, would also be appropriate as far as Blade Runner is concerned, and today—thirty years after its 1982 release—more than ever: After feverish debates nourished by the contradictory signs strewn from the first version to the final cut and including all of the director’s successive commentary, it would seem that many exegetes agree that the bounty hunter Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is himself an android. If this were true, this would quietly shift Blade Runner’s plot to a kind of unavowed Terminator.
What then is Blade Runner’s genre? Pre- or post-? Both at once, perhaps—prepost, if something like that is conceivable? Or why not quite simply apo, without any other prefix?
As soon as one starts to interrogate a genre, apo, which is constantly diversifying into pre- or post- or post- and pre-, which themselves subdivide into nuke or biological or naturalocatastrophic or extraterrestrial or something else, in short, as soon as one starts to grasp the apo as such, one is quickly led to a simple yet devastating question, an atomic one, if I may put it this way: Has there ever been a properly and literally apocalyptic film?
It would seem, as I have already suggested, that the only veritable yet perhaps impossible law of the genre is as follows: The end of such a film will coincide with the end of the world. The final fade-out is destined to be that of the end of everything, including of film, of that film we just saw. Which would end not only because there is nothing left to tell, but also and above all because its end includes—or is included in—general and generic disappearance.
I must therefore repeat that I know of only one film that is worthy of this definitively final gesture that signs what is proper to the purely and absolutely apocalyptic genre: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, a kind of hapax legomenon in film history that ends with this black screen where the final point of the story affecting the characters and that of the universal history of humanity are mixed up at length and slowly but crazily exchanged—the one is constantly equivalent to the other in their mute oscillation.
A hapax legomenon, really?
Are not all films inhabited by the archi-fade-out of general annihilation?
Every end of every film (not to mention the end of a series …) is no doubt the end of a world. And in this sense, cinema, after all, is perhaps, each time unique, the apocalypse.