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A Movie Happened: There Were No Survivors
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- Опубликовано: 25 июл 2024
- Or, A Guide to Doomer Cinema. A video essay about films that end the world, and living past those endings.
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Other, better researched essays on the same topic:
@zoe_bee | "Why We Secretly Want The World To End" • Why We Secretly Want t...
@SophiefromMars | "The World Is Not Ending" • The World Is Not Endin...
@WhatsSoGreatAboutThat | "Why do we want the world to end?" • The Four horse_ebooks ...
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This was certainly meant as a joke in the film but I got really emotional at the bit with the radio DJ playing the top 500 songs of all time and saying he'd be with the listener until the end.
It had a real "the band on the Titanic playing until the end" vibe. Just imagining a DJ choosing to spend his last hours on Earth playing music to comfort others.
Somehow i consider all his movies to be (very dark) comedies. At their darkest when they are most touching. Just consider Dancer in the Dark being a movie about the stagin of The Sound of Music with a near blind lead who can't find her spot on the stage, " My favorite Things" and it ends with the most emotional song and best edited hanging combi ever....You don;t get any darker comedy than that.... Only a few other directors like Verhoeven, Haneke or De Palma get close with these juxtapositions of image/sound and content.
I don't know that it was meant as a joke exactly? We start the film with a guy calling every customer to assure them he'll keep the power on as long as he can. Throughout Last Night we see lots of different attitudes towards the end, they never specify WHAT the cause is, just that everyone knows it's going to happen and it can't be prevented. We see people rampaging in the streets, people making plans with family, all sorts. Then there's people like the DJ and the power company man, deciding to continue with their jobs ... but not out of habit, out of a desire for comforting others. I think that's beautiful in a way.
I could see it being comforting for himself as well. Keeps your inner fears at bay when you are focused on others.
Can confirm that waiting for the fallout of bad stuff that’s happening all over the world to eventually hit us is a very Australian experience
I mean Australia did start out as the second most hostile continent to life...
@@joncarroll2040 my nation is mentioned. Yeah.
I do believe we’ll be like “WTF mate?”
I was about to comment about how america cinema dominaed an restricted australian cinema since te 1920 NEd Kelly Gang Movie,. butt australian cinema & television was so American,, to go to university from 1993 to 2000 topics were always about , How Globilist American family life in movies influenced Australian politics,, Globilist trope movies served as the basis is ,, with movis like Armeggeden,, & tom criuse War of the World,, were post ~ 2020 ,the survivor genre topics were more about , would you live out the past 7 years with Steve Corell & the Noahs Ark, Get Smart , a Friend for the End of the world genre , ,, Australia s the 56th state of America, after Trump bought & owed all the other 5 medical trade route partners ,, like the Australian political lobby group is 100 % American funded , NZ, Canada Britian , India , Indonesia , ,, wel especially since all the top4 platforms , twitter & fb , google & microsoft all have there Supercomputer hub in Indonesia,, but to explain the globalist change, i will call this part 1,.
Part2,, so as someone on the internet for a long time , i witnessed 7 main Australian ~American public relations Fall~outs , mainly Eisenhower, but after Nixon, and well the ColdWar was playboy president time , LBJ, Carter Reagan, where hot studs to all Australians at school, 1960 to 1990,, but that was a Family Ties , Alex P. Keaton similarity ,, so relations with America got hot & heavy with American british royal family & eipsteen saga ,being the one reason why the American President ,,in all Australian brothel, shag stories , we can thank the fact that all presidents as teenagers served about 30 years in Australia makin heirs to the empire,, so that as suppreme leader the Dna of a narcisstic leader is left i 50 decendends rather than the fake heir bourne on american soil, so to australians, our leaders have the burden of knowing we have to subsidise & keep heirs to America alive when the Idiocracy starts,, we aurvive cos one time 60 years ago a narc with ambitions paid Pacific leaders to keep their love children secret ,, & we all know as australians,
"Global apocalypse any% speedrun" is a superb translation, I love it, 10/10
"A world may end, but not the world."
This reminds me of a quote from someone I can't remember that says death is so horrible because that's an entire perspective, an entire world, that ceases to be. I'm pretty sure Kyle wasn't thinking of it when he wrote that line, but to me, it now reads like a statement on how the world will go on even when someone close to you dies. I don't know what to think about this strange association, but it certainly feels in the spirit of what he was trying to go for.
A couple of years ago I encountered the quote "When you save a life, it is as if you had saved an entire world." It's a (perhaps fuzzy) translation of something in the Koran, which I'm otherwise unfamiliar with. Regardless, it affected me deeply and I think of it often.
The comet in Don't Look Up may not be our fault, but them choosing not to stop it and instead try and exploit it IS, so it still works, 100%.
Apocalypse movies really do hit differently after living through an apocalypse. Covid may have been too cozy a disaster for many to really get it. For me, it hit hardest almost exactly two years ago, when Hurricane Ida made landfall on a coast I live about 60 miles from.
I sheltered in place in my apartment, and my parents stayed with me. Their house would lose the back two rooms in the storm. The eye wall seemed to sit over us for hours. The winds strong enough to bend trees did last for hours, and we never saw the eye, so it must have been the eye wall.
My town kept running water, the only place that could claim that for miles around. There was no communication in or out for three days. It took two weeks for power to be restored at my apartment, five days after the hospital down the street from me. Which means the hospital had to run off generators for a week and a half. Those weeks were spend seeing what could be salvaged from the wreckage and figuring out where we would get fresh food, drinking water, gas to fuel us ferrying between livable homes and less-than-livable homes, and relief from the heat. Every day felt three days long. It was much the same as when Hurricane Katrina hit when I was 17.
There were no heroes. No grand gestures. There were no heartless villains either. Just imperfect people and imperfect systems scraping together the best of bad situations.
In the worst of times, the vast majority of people want to care for each other in the small ways they can.
And life goes on. Not just like before, but anybody would be shocked how little fundamentally changes after the world crashes down.
What an amazing story. Thanks for sharing your perspective.
No villains? In covid? in katrina? I think you have that wrong. There were plenty villains around if you know where to look.
I work in a hospital lab, and one day I was trying to reach a patient's doctor. The patient had a critical result, something about their labs was so bad, the doctor needed to know right away. When I reached out about said patient, I was told that they had already died. Sometime in between the time their blood was taken and my call, they had passed. I was somehow profoundly sad for someone who I didn't know, who I had never even seen. I knew nothing about them, except they were gone. I marked their death in my notes and moved on. There was the rest of my shift to do. Other criticals to call.
My job continued. More patients died. I would still make calls about dead people and have to mark down in my notes. Then one day, a new hire was sitting at her bench confused. She asked me what she needed to do since she had a critical, but was told the patient had just died. And I had to tell her what I was told after my first death. She also expressed sadness for this patient, a person she had never met.
But life still went on. We never see death in the lab, but we still are still swimming in it. We will see a name come up again and again, until one day we don't see that name anymore. Did they die or did they go home? We may never know what happens to 99% of those who come in these doors. Still we hope for the best, and we cheer when we see improvement. I remember being joyful about a patient who was clearly improving to my coworkers. Their results stopped being critical! They were getting better!
My husband also works in healthcare. He mentioned that a patient died one day, and the next the bed was filled with a new patient. In a way that helps him. Life went on.
Death is inevitable. Maybe the end of the world is inevitable. Still, I want to keep hoping for better. Another day, another patient, another chance, maybe that's all we can ask for.
Thank you for what you do for those patients, regardless of outcome.
💗
Cardiac monitor tech. I watch them die on a live ECG. Document TOD. Print out the last rhythms. Clear the sector. Wait for the next patient to be roomed. I still cry a little for each one.
Kyle, 13 years ago you made a profoundly beautiful video that I think, in some significant way, changed my life, in part by getting me to watch Angels in America for the first time.
I’ll be darned if you ain’t just done it again.
Excellent work.
More life.
"Thinking eschatologically is a trap - if you act like the world is nigh, you stop preparing for the possibility the world will go on" yup, needed to hear this one.
When it comes to Australia I think it has the stereotype of bring the edge of “ European” civilization, and by extension it being the last to fall, represents the final corner of “civilization” being wiped.
The thing that gets me about all these movies is how big and impressive the end always is. People rarely imagine their end to be sad and slow and pathetic.
Not with a bang, but a whimper
true or one's end can be peaceful with family around them like my daddy was able to do. We just don't know how we'll all go which is why we should just live the best we can until that day arrives
One thing that annoys me about all these "the world would be better if we all died" types, besides ascribing blame to people who have no control over the problems/usually ascribe to pretty problematic answers, is they always leave out the fact that the absence of humanity isn't the same as the absence of man-made issues. Suppose we all go at once, what about the plastic in the ocean? Invasive species left to run rampant? Endangered species left to die because of negligence? Humanity isn't the problem: the problem is a select few with names and addresses to paraphrase Utah Phillips, so killing us all off is less of a cure-all and more a refuting of responsibility. It's basically a cleansing of all sins or guilt, which is what a lot of religious conservatives are after.
Yes, there would be changes in the environment still. But at some point, without humanity to keep making it worse, nature would find its new balance and it would then get better... That's what most people mean when they say it would be better if we killed off all of humanity. Not that it would instantly be better.
YES!! and also the many (MANY) indigenous communities responsible for preserving the environment in a lot of places around world!
@@vicenterosa25 indeed. Indigenous held lands account for a massive amount of protected biodiversity. They're the best custodians of the natural world.
Well, this is assuming that us staying around is actually going to fix it and not just keep making it worse. Also the "refuting of responsability" bit sounds very sins-of-the-father to me, the people who have to deal with the absolute worse of this are future generations who have had nothing to do with it, and as you said yourself most currently-existing humans are not to blame either. Like "humanity as a whole is not responsible" and "humanity as a whole need to stay to make up for their sins" seem very contradictory ideas to me.
@@Painocus there's no "us", though, at least in this case. I mean, we're not collectively doing something. Some people are breaking things and some other people are fixing them; and a lot of people, consciously or not, support one side or the other through their everyday choices. The main problem is the destroyers, not "humanity as a whole".
"Now I am become Dance, the tapper of toes..." Hilarious :)
The ending of this video made me cry - legitimately, when that monologue from Angels in America started I started thinking about my own struggles with apocalyptic thinking, and how I feel I can’t talk with anyone about it because I’m afraid of not being taken seriously. It just seems like everyone is so used to the idea of the end of the world that it’s been normalized. It makes it hard to believe there is a future that is good, that I would live to see. And I try, I always try to think that there are better, brighter days ahead but it just seems to be getting harder and harder to believe that. But when that monologue started and the guy said that he wanted to live in spite of the knowledge that the world will end, it touched me very deeply. Thank you, Kyle. You helped me remember that I need to keep trying, and that I can live in spite of my own fears and apocalyptic thinking, no matter how bad it gets.
“Yeah, it’s hard, but it’s not the end of the world, even as we know it.”
- Faded Paper Figures
That's how I feel too. It feels impossible to be on the same page as other people on this topic. It would be good if we were all the correct amount of cautious and deep down optimistic. But nobody knows how to be and we all judge each other.
okay doomer
So wild that so many of us had videos on apocalypses come out at the same time, especially given how long we would have all been working on them! When I saw Sophie's pop up I was like "haha cool I'm doing one too", then when I saw yours I was like :O I didn't even know about Zoe's until people in my comments told me (I should probably change my title in light of this knowledge haha). Really cool how they all still have such varied things to say. I'm always in awe of the breadth of films you use in your videos, I don't think there's anyone else who could be more all encompassing when it comes to cinema.
Must be something in the air? Loved your video btw! Wonderfully researched - those articles you quoted beautifully illustrated a lot about the zeitgeist. We really are in an apocalyptic mood - makes sense that so many are writing about it
@@KyleKallgrenBHH Thank you! :D Yes, it validates my feeling that there IS something going on right now that is somewhat distinct from the ever present prediction of the end that has haunted us since... well the beginning. We're at a peak again
The country that joned NATO, Finland, which is a country a lot like Netherlands mixed with Japan, has a lot of touch points with Australia.
There's a Billion dollars worth of imports coming from Finland, they know mining and the Waltzing Matilda there, and have imported a lot of Australian television like Round the Twist. There's a music video about the novel On The Beach, called Kymmenen Tikkua Laudalla.
It's not older than Road Warrior, but I see Australia being a big import-export funnel where a lot of this apocalypse media, like animation production from Asia to the West, is facilitated. Then Fury Road seems to reference Borderlands, which is honestly a video game made by weebs raised on ADV Films productions.
“She’s everything. He’s just Percy” got me 😂
"Come on ya apes, d'you wanna live forever?"
"Yes. Yes I do."
As an Uzbek American, the audible SHRIEK I let out at 23:25 cannot accurately be conveyed at the joy of seeing Uzbek animation referenced by someone. This is the first time in my entire life I have ever seen a non-Uzbek reference anything Uzbek in any capacity (outside of Redditors saying Uzbek is the most useless language on Earth). Sure, the name of the country that made it wasn't said and the deeper implications of that story being animated in a country that the Soviets trashed wasn't delved into but I'll take the representation when I can get it.
I love that animation!
As a Dane, I get that! Verdens Undergang, as with every Danish writing online, came as a shock to me.
I deeply disagree with the idea that humanity surviving an apocalypse should be any sort of comfort to anyone.
We should all work towards a better future, not resign ourselves to bleak horrors planned by the owning class.
We should prevent and fight dystopias, not prepare for them, especially since we are living in one right now.
Our lives are so much worse than any of the satires we've seen or have read. The horrible things that made us laugh during the last 30 to 40 years are reality now.
To this day, I couldn't be more astonished that people accept a world in which a billionaire builds personal rockets, or buys a whole social platform, or prevents vaccine to be distributed throughout the world because of patent laws, while at the same time there are poor and hungry people anywhere in the world, while some people don't have clean water, while 100 to 1000 species die every year, while children die working to provide resources and products for the 'global north', while not even the citizens of that same 'global north' can't have a decent life with almost any semblance of dignity.
The politicians and media owned by the billionaires tell us that the criminals of the past and their ancestors who inherited their blood money are better than the rest of humanity, that their opinions are what matter, that empathy is a flaw. They keep talking about productivity, synergy, tech solutions brought by 'geniuses' and 'thought leaders'.
Those who whistleblow end up as 'traitors, enemies of the state, and so on'.
We shouldn't wish for or prepare for the end of the world. We should end the world that we live in. We should radically change the system that's killing every living thing on this planet.
We should protest, join a union, join a cause that fights for equality.
I mean yeah, I agree with you, but I think at the same time wanting to seek comfort in the resilience of the human spirit is also not a bad thing, given how positively overwhelming and despairing the current landscape we live in can be sometimes. All of those action steps are wonderful and necessary, but speaking from experience it's incredibly hard to stay motivated to do them when the horrendous state of the world is consuming you whole and it feels like nothing you do will matter in the end.
I think, if anything, having that comfort that we can find a way to keep going despite the worst happening is even more motivating to make change. It's like having a starting foundation: "Yeah, we *could* potentially get through as a species/ecosystem/society/etc. if the world ended. That sounds like it sucks ass though; let's put efforts in to join those unions, fight for peoples' rights and make changes for the better instead"
I think part of the appeal of post-apocalyptic fiction is that it takes all the complicated and overwhelming problems of the real world and replaces them with simpler, more personal problems. Seeking food and shelter is comparatively easier to solve than the climate change crisis or the war in Ukraine.
get a fucking medium account.
im sorry but things are far from perfect but life has never been as good as it is at this very point in time. society has never been more inclusive, wealth descrepancy is way smoother now, health care has never been more developed, we live in an era of knowledge, people have never been more educated now etc. all of these facets of our society, among many others, still need a LOT of work, improvement is never really something that ends, theres always something to improve, but to have such a bleak perspective on modern society is lacking perspective of where we came from imo. i do agree with the general sentiment of your comment, although you are still viewing the argument from just one perspective. you can have great ideals and fight for them, but the descrepancy in power could make the end of the world could still happen ( assuming societys end wouldnt be a natural one) humanity being able to survive it and possibly flourish after is by nature a comforting thought, it speaks on our resilience, a resilience that is inherently also responsible for many of the improvements we have had in our society over the thousands of years of our existence. understanding this doesnt nullify the need to fight for a better world, these are mutually exclusive mindsets, and both can be held by someone, you are treating it like they contradict each other when its very much objectively not the case. preparation is not necessarily crossing your arms either.
@@samuraibeluga3749
Here's a few channels: Adam Conover, Our Changing Climate, potholer54, Renegade Cut, Some More News, The Leftist Cooks, thejuicemedia, Thought Slime and Three Arrows.
Might change your mind. Might not.
Good luck!
"I will remain emotionally unaffected through this entire video!!!" "There Will Come Soft Rains" "AH FUCK"
i really need to watch Threads
"You lot, you spend all your time thinking about dying, like you're gonna get killed by eggs, or beef, or global warming, or asteroids. But you never take time to imagine the impossible. That perhaps you make it."
Survive until a year with an Apple in it. Good ol' Nine.
I live in Hungary. There is a war on our borders, second time in my life. People fled for their lives. Everyone who remembers the war in Kosovo knows what happened, and is happening. Not a big deal for us all, but for the people in the war zone, it is the end of the world.
And I could see US citizens tell me to shut up, because it is not the end of the world or anything. Same people who seemed to have no issue claiming the world is over because of any sort of voting or local event or pride parade.
The world is still going on. This is what I like in the more... Eastern European horrors. The world ends not by everyone dying. It ends in small zones, and the rest of the world adapts, goes on, and people eat their food and dance and fall in love... and not care for anyone in the world where it all is over already, as long as we can not leave from the barbed wire erected not just for keeping the problem in, but keeping looters out.
When all of the world ends, it is just over. No more problems, no survivors, nothing. It is just over.
Now to make it a twist: the world is often over for everyone in a group, especially for people who are claimed to be the Enemy for some Powers That Be. It is often very personal, which a giant spectacle movie rarely show. I live in it, as a Hungarian queer person, every day is the end of the world in a small, personal piece. For me, the whole spectacle ending is just... Boring. Too much of a nothing because it wants to put in too much, as people often shut down when the camera is far outside. That is where we can get to what you mentioned. It is making B movies more.
Still, I think an apocalypse is rarely going to be huge. It is going to be alike World War One: the world ends, everyone looks around, confused, but there is a line: the old world and the new world. People may not live to see it, but the Earth will be there.
And maybe otters will inherit the Earth.
This is so good. I think a lot of what happened in pop culture in the 90s can only be reasonably interpreted as our culture trying to cope with the fact that we had been promised a nuclear conflagration and yet here we were, still having to be alive.
I too have trouble with confusing eschatology and scatology, but that shit ain't the end of the world.
Comet in the Don't Look Up is not human fault. Not destroying it even though it was possible because of greed is. And I refuse the idea that satire falls flat because it is not 1:1 analogy.
It’s a bad movie either way, so…
@@longlivethesheet4561 Quality of the movie is irrelevant.
@@longlivethesheet4561 I did like the scenes of DiCaprio's and Lawrence's characters freaking out on TV. Something cathartic about seeing scientists screaming their lungs out at news presenters for trying to laugh off a serious crisis
I always loved "Seeking a friend for the end of the world" because it kinda helped to start thinking different about myself when I was walking through a depressive episode.
Yeah its a movie about inevitable death, and no one would survived, but I somehow found myself uplifted by how everyone got on a quest to try to find a silver lining, even if the world seemed to fall apart people still try to reach for eachother and find comfort in eachother... Wich despite being the "party like there is no tomorrow trope" was one of the few movies where it seem people were doing not out of extreme desperation, and more because they want to leave with a single final good memory.
I know its not the exact topic of this video, but its one end of the world movie that actually didn't filled me with dread in the end.
A better world struggles to be born, and how kind and loving it will be depends on how soon and fiercely we fight for it.
Man that piece from Angels in America is incredible.
The first flash fiction piece of mine that I ever got published was a piece I named “the world is ending tomorrow” and I didn’t know it at the time but I think this was exactly what I was getting at. My generation (early gen Z) has kind of always internalized the idea that we could all die at any moment: 9/11, school shootings, the pandemic, we’ve lived through some shit and we’re not even 30. But while we have accepted things to some degree, I still think we try to work for a better future. If anything, we’ve noticed that older generations that have one foot in the grave are the ones who don’t care about the world they leave behind. Sometimes they actively work to make the world worse, partially out of jealousy that they themselves were not afforded some of the comforts we have when they were young. At the same time, they aren’t very prepared for actual end times (I remember some Texas doomsday peepers forgot a can opener to open the massive amounts of food they had prepared during the blizzard). It’s almost sad really
The Splatoon game series is both of your categories funnily enough: humanity hasn’t survived at all, but life still goes on…marine life that is. And it’s fresh as hell 😎
God I wish the rest of "The Last Man" was as good as that. Shelley never understood that her Romantic lovers and friends were all just preening bougie psychopaths.
Watching this on my lunch break, and "oh no! Not the time square Bubba Gump Shrimp!" Made me choke on my sandwich.
End of Evangelion I’d say portrays a similar theme of finding a reason to live in the apocalypse. The Rebuilds maybe more so.
Kyle, there is a comedy series I think you especially would love. It is called "Staged" and it's a piece of comedic art unlike anything that will be made again possible. It was filmed during COVID-19, and so first season is almost entirely zoom calls between the two main leads from the Good Omen tv series. David Tennant and Michael sheen play fictional versions of themselves trying to reherse a performance of Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author during lockdown via videoconference. It is funny, it is bleak, it is sad, as these two actors stuck at home with only each other as company outside their families, grapples with isolation, and idleness.
Good recommendation! Spouse and I just started watching it this week. Enjoyable with strongly oblique humor. Tennant and Sheen in another weird buddy comedy.
The subject reminds me of a philosophy book I recently read called Death and the Afterlife (Samuel Schafer) uses a similar thought experiment - that you know all of humanity will die 15 days after you - to explore the ways humans value. It weirdly beautiful. For example, it reveals how many of our individual projects are premised on the continuation of others.
Embracing radical optimism has helped me a great deal these last few years. And perhaps helped me find a community or two of wonderful people as well. And yeah there's plenty going on that's awful. But fighting those things, to build a better tomorrow, to avoid the end of all things... it kind of requires a lot of optimism. So why not go all in? Declare ourselves ready to kick ass? And to let our compatriots know that we got their back, and are going to help fight for this world along side them. For them.
I am forever reminded of abolitionist Mariame Kabe's quote, "Hope is a discipline."
And where is that optimism located? In Gaza? In Ukraine? or somewhere a little safer.
Just wait til the nukes fly, then we'll see where your optimism is.
"Man plans & god laughs."
@@leeporwoll2380 If the missiles are on their way and there's clearly no place to hide or run to, and all the world is screaming for me to lie down and die, then perhaps my only real option is to pick up a bat and prepare to knock that missile away. Because screw laying down and letting the world dictate that there is no hope.
More seriously... When the realistic option is not a reasonable one, that's when it is time to go all in on finding new solutions or fighting for the ones that are known but seem a bit of a reach given the powers allied against you. And that is true where I'm at, it is true in Gaza, it is true Ukraine, it is true in Sudan, it is true everywhere. Yeah, it might mean going through hell on earth. It might mean we die. But if the options are death or fighting like hell to still probably die, then why not fight like hell?
Roger Rabbit's "Trail Mix-Up" may be the most entertaining of these.
> Gets to ending
Yay, he used it! 😂
That last monologue was *begging* for a "Life, ah...find a way..." drop that sadly never came
You're Marvin the Martian impression was spot on.
Junji ito's hellstar remina fits in i feel
Interesting comment you made early in the video about the wildfires. As a Californian whose town was surrounded by wildfires several years ago, I saw the story about the smoke clouds in NYC and shrugged my shoulders not getting why it was a big deal as the actual fires were hundreds of miles away. Your take on it made it make sense to me.
Saw _On The Beach_ in one of my college film classes. Was my last class of the day. The sensation of leaving that classroom and seeing the world still going on around me was definitely surreal.
Regarding the whole Australia angle: in Kinji Fukasaku’s Virus (1980), all the survivors of a worldwide pandemic flee Down Under at the end of the movie. It can be found on YT and the Internet Archive
(Edit: I actually just remembered it was Patagonia)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did a story in which a fake-out apocalypse happened.
His characters express a similar comfort to "all going together."
I always thought it was funny that the world is ending, but tv new reporters are still doing their jobs. I guess going to work and pretending it's a normal day is comforting to some
Has the same vibes as the videos of people using their phones to record the California Wilfires on their commute to work.
I got to give you credit Kyle, you made a video about the end of the world and end of all life so much fun, that takes real skill.
Your final Angels in America montage was amazing. Well done, Kyle.
Legend of Zelda wind waker had something that reminded me of what you said towards the end. The game isn't about the end of the world of course, there are still people who survived the apocalypse. But Hyrule is gone and for The King of Red Lions and Ganondorf, the world has effectively ended and they are both desperate to restore Hyrule to it's former glory. But for everyone on the surface, it's been probably millennia since the great flooding happened. They have moved on and adapted to their new circumstances and no one is looking back to the old days because of course they wouldn't.
Yeah I think Wind Waker a fantastic post-apocalyptic story, perhaps the most cheerful and whimsical, even while the king is seeing it all as a tragic survivor.
Re arks in space, it reminds me of harry martinsson’s aniara, where humanity leaves a destroyed earth on an ark. But they are flung off course and the steering is impossible to repair so they are all doomed to drift off course in space until they die. Saw a movie version of aniara a few years ago, and wow it was a lot
I admit I'm not a fan of this kind of media, since it tends to press my anxiety buttons.
Still, the video was strangely uplifting, especially at the end there. Kudos.
Also, am I crazy or Leonardo DiCaprio's character in "Don't Look Up" look an awful lot like Kyle? I'm not the only one who sees this, am I?
I think that’s because DiCaprio was made up to look like a charisma-free nerdy schlub and, well…
@@KyleKallgrenBHH Er... no offense was meant. If it's any consolation, I think you're both very good looking.
zomg I had forgotten about "Peace On Earth"! Really leans into the idea that the planet would be better off without humans.
The bit about the parrot reminds me of Don Hertzfeldt's "it's such a beautiful day" trilogy, an animated dark comedy about a man named Bill slowly succumbing to an unnamed mental illness. In the second film, "I am so proud of you", Bill has a nightmare about being old and on his literal deathbed. The narration is as follows:
""He pictures himself having trouble breathing and waking to a room of concerned faces. He’d be terrified of dying his entire life and as much as he tried not to think about it, death was always in the back of his head; Around every corner and hovering on each horizon.
He had brushed shoulders with death on a few occasions, but in his carefree youth it had always seemed like an abstract, impossible thing to ever happen to him. But with each passing decade, he had began to gauge the time he probably had left. And by his forties- what he had considered his halfway point at best. He had come to know one thing:
"You will only get older."
The next thing you know you’re looking back instead of forward. And now, at the climax of all those years of worry, sleepless nights, and denials. Bill finally finds himself, looking death in the face. Surrounded by people who no longer recognizes and feels no closer attachment to than the thousands of relatives who had come before.
And as the sun continues to set, he finally comes to realize the dumb irony in how he had been waiting for this moment his entire life."
Who needs therapy when I can cheaply cry at the end of video essays
IM GONNA SING THE DOOM SONG NOW! DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM
I visited Australia December/January '19-20. Sydney was hazy with smoke in the strange days between Christmas and New Years and the event I was there for was eventually cancelled due to the fires, a few days after which I got caught in a XR protest while trying to make my way through the city. In the midst of all this, I encountered an unattributed quote with regards to the "discovery" of Australia:
"[Cook] didn't discover Australia - it wasn't lost to us."
And so, as we entered the neo-twenties, pondering how long it took me to come here and how vast the distances were and how this would be my last trip before going no-fly; among plaques and plaques on modern buildings proclaiming that this land is not ours but we remain here nonetheless, I couldn't help but think about the world that WAS lost. About the world that DID end. About how for so long this land at the end of the world and the beginning of (european notions of) time was spared until it wasn't.
Anyway then I went back to the UK and two months later covid came knocking.
It reminds me of a quote from Urinetown (just to be clear, I don't agree with the musical's malthusian message, but this quote sticks with me a lot.) "We lived like there was no tomorrow, for there was no tomorrow, but there's always a tomorrow of some kind or another." That's what I'm worried about. Not that the world will end but that we'll create a future that just gets worse and worse and we'll have to endure it anyways.
Unexpected Tom Lehrer is always appreciated, now excuse me I must go poison pigeons in the park.
I love nausicaa for that. both the film and the manga miyazaki wrote himself and adapted. It deals with life going on, building a better world even as things seems dire. The manga goes even further, ending with a literal defeat of a doomsday machine, with a strong theme about inheriting the world left by those before but having to go on anyway. Both are, in my opinion, masterpieces and deeply humane stories.
Cue this (by now) cliched dialogue:
FRODO: I can’t do this, Sam.
SAM: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened?
But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.
FRODO: What are we holding on to, Sam?
SAM: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.
But, cliche aside, Tolkien knew what he was talking about. He had watched his best friends die in the trenches of WWI. And he knew the need to fight for hope against despair. TLOTR is, in its own way, an apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic book. The apex of Tolkien’s academic writing was his lecture on Beowulf, another arguably apocalyptic work, where he explicitly calls out the repeated imagery of the circle of light surrounding humanity and the need to defend that circle against the monsters that threaten it.
Anyway, my 2c. Thank you as always, Kyle. I look forward to each and every video because you always make me see things in a different light.
I love that comparison to Beowulf.
While watching a playthrough of Elden Ring, it suddenly struck me just how omnipresent post-apocalyptic themes are in high fantasy. There's always a cataclysmic event, there's always at least one fallen empire, there's always some lost knowledge being rediscovered after centuries if not millennia, giant ruins are everywhere, the list goes on. And it seems Tolkien is where this trope got started, or at least popularized
@UnfortunatelyTheHunger Tolkein studied medieval history, and many medieval stories are like this too. There is a lot of longing for the grand old days of King Arthur or Jesus.
It's funny you mentioned Australia. Parts of Knowing were filmed down here too. The house we see Nick Cage go into at the end of the movie is actually a house in Melbourne. There used to be a tour that went around the city showing what films were shot in Melbourne, and on the tour they showed us that house. They also showed us where scenes for On The Beach and Mad Max were filmed.
I think that a lot of what is lost or downplayed in “don’t look up” is that the reach of the film is so broad and I find that to be a feature not a bug, where so many find its broadness to be a bug.
I'm SO glad you brought up These Final Hours. That movie Fucked. Me. Up. I left the cinema at 11pm, called my mother in a state of mild panic, and stayed awake all night. The next morning, I decided that maaaybe Australian Gloom as a film genre had gone too far.
Essentially, Austalian cinema has two modes: camp as hell, or bleak as fuck.
Camp: Moulin Rouge, Strictly Ballroom, Priscilla; Queen of the Desert, Bran Nue Dae, The Castle, Fat Pizza, Happy Feet, Crocodile Dundee, Muriel's Wedding
Bleak: Snowtown, Candy, Wolf Creek, These Final Hours, Wake in Fright, Picnic on Hanging Rock, The Nightingale, The Babadook, Once Were Warriors, Two Hands
Plus your inbetweeners like Mad Max, Babe: Pig in the City, stuff like that.
I don't know what it is with us Aussies. 😅 maybe it's the fact that we stare down apocalyptic bushfires every Christmas.
How I am so fascinated by the end of the world kind of stories makes me wonder. I mean in light of recent events it really does re-contextualize seeing an empty street or watching someone alone walking almost endlessly. I know its not film but there is this wonderful anime called "girls' last tour" that just outstanding for this kind of story telling. And it really is their last tour in a lot of ways but to sum it up quickly they travel and talk philosophy, survival, and everything in between. It is an outstanding 12 episode series and it helped me through the pandemic and I can't help but recommend it enough to everyone interested.
I need to get back to Girls' Last Tour. Haunting series.
Girls last tour is really good. I read the Manga and the extra chapter had the Poem from Hermann hesse called "auf Wanderung" with similar beats to "There Will Come Soft Rains". Together with Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou probably the most positive outlooks on the ending of the World.
I think the world ending stories are fascinating for many since they externalize Death and that way we can grapple with our own mortality.
There is a passage which I truly love from the 2017 novel _What the Hell Did I Just Read_ by Jason "David Wong" Pargin, on the subject of the apocalypse:
The most fascinating aspect of our end-of-the-world obsession is our insistence that whatever cataclysm we have in mind would, in fact, be the end. The reality is that our history could actually be described as a series of apocalypses: a plague here, a famine there, a worldwide war that arrives with both in tow. What occurs in the aftermath of each is instructive.
Consider, for example, the ancient disaster known as the Toba event. It is theorized that approximately seventy-five thousand years ago, a volcanic eruption nearly wiped out _Homo sapiens_ altogether. It is believed that in the aftermath, the worldwide population of early humans may have withered to just a few thousand breeding pairs-enough to fit into a high school gymnasium. Just seventy-five thousand years later, we live in a civilization in which the population has rebounded a million times over and is on the cusp of landing a spacecraft on Mars.
This is the legacy of humanity, and I daresay that not enough of us take time to appreciate it. Our apocalyptic fiction depicts a world in which humans revert to the savagery of the jungle the moment our institutions fall, survivors tearing each other to pieces even as they are dying of plague or stalked by the undead. In our real history, we have been in that situation many times-left without government or law enforcement, none of the modern institutions we take for granted. From each of these scenarios what emerged was not savagery, but cooperation. When the pillars of our culture crumble, we rebuild them.
Glad you mentioned this. It's somehow less "narratively satisfying" than total annihilation, but I think it's most likely that the result of the climate apocalypse will be a population bottleneck similar to the one after the Toba event.
I've always hated these kinds of films. Its not that they're usually depressing, its because to me they feel so selfish, if that's the way to put it? Anthropocentric is more to the point. The idea that the end of *our* specific way of life would mean the end of all human life, or even more fully *all* life on Earth, or even more ridiculously *all life in the universe* is mind-boggling short sighted, unimaginative, and fundamentally untrue. Human nations have ended throughout our history, gold ages of wide spread trade (like the Bronze Age Civilizations) have come crashing into ruin do to mixtures of climate change, natural disasters, disease, and human conflict. But we survived.
Beyond ourselves, life on Earth has gone through much worse. Asteroid and comets have struck the Earth with such force to super-heat the atmosphere and blot out the sun with debris for centuries and life persisted. Cracks in the crust have torn through to the mantle, covering areas of land the size of the United States in molten rock which acidified the seas and choked the atmosphere, yet life persisted. The entire make-up of the planet's atmosphere has been radically altered and filled with a reactive chemical which can dissolve iron with time, and though most of life died out that which survived used that same O2 to produce more energy than their anaerobic ancestors could ever muster.
We and all other life on our planet are descendants of countless apocalypses. And even if the next one somehow manages to take our species out, others will persist. A world for roaches and rats is still a living world, and their descendants will take on ever newer and wondrous forms. So long as this rock persists, I'm sure some microbe with carve a place for itself in some forgotten aquifer.
Apocalypses are overrated. And I'm tired of seeing stories which boil down to a very white-christian-anthropocentric view of "wiping the slate clean of our sins". Life is tenacious and we have a knack for surviving, we have the means for repairing past damages, and we have the will to thrive despite everything.
Lars Von Trier stuff just comes across like Haneke's work. It's all misery porn. I don't get the same thing many do from it, I see films like that and I just feel infinitely worse than I did before. The world already seems nihilistic to me, I don't need films to remind me.
Between you, Zoe Bee, and Sophie From Mars, I think we've achieved the perfect Wholesome Apocalypse Trilogy
Holy shit, I love Tom Lehrer. I freaked the fuck out when the intro dropped.
Lately I've been getting into Indigenous apocalyptic fiction. It's a hell of a perspective.
I'm from New Zealand and to us Australia has always been a post-apocalyptic wasteland. It's a former penal colony, with regular forest fires, dry as hell and full of animals that can kill you.
I agree. When we give up, THAT is the end. Which may be a valid choice for some folks. Maybe everyone, sooner or later, under the right circumstances. But NOT to give up, to keep trying, therein alone lies any hope of a better life.
Thanks for this, Kyle. I remember your Melancholia video- and how much it impacted me way back when, as a teenager watching your stuff.
There always being survivors and a story to tell made me think of a book series I just read called The Dandelion Dynasty. I would highly recommend checking it out- and see if you can spot the post-apocalypse story within!
Ty for the recc!
The Melancholia video... I was a law student and i wept. One of the most cathartic "this person doesn't know me or that I even exist but they get me" experiences I had had in a RUclips video to that point. It might not be up any longer but I still carry fond memories of it.
The Melancholia video hit me like a truck. I like had to show it to my wife like right away.
Until you have enough, I will enjoy these videos. Nobody else has this kind of introspective, warming prose and style
This was... Surprisingly hopeful for a video about end of the world movies. Just a really thoughtful, thought provoking video. Great work once again Kyle!
My personal view on catastrophe these days, which I'm sure many share, isn't panic or anger, fear or disgust, even sadness or madness.
It's quiet resignation, it's where the plane has been crashing for a while, you've already made your prayers to whatever concept you like that to be to, said goodbye and reviewed your life and that of humanity.
I'm in my seat, deaf to the rushing air, bracing for impact.
Turns out I've been quoting an obscure lost film from 1931 that I've never even seen. I wish I had an explanation.
I'm a TTRPG guy, and this puts me in mind of two recommendations; one actual play, and one game to try. The Actual Play is Critical Role's "Exandria Unlimited: Calamity." Brennan Lee Mulligan presents an apocalypse scenario to his players in soul-crushing slow-motion. The game is Ten Candles; a horror RPG played in the dark that starts with the sentence "These things are true, the world is dark and we are alive," and as the story progresses, players blow out their candles, signifying their demise and one step closer to extinction.
I will check out 10 Candles, thank you!
Nice work Kyle! Great as always!
1:13 the shot gets even worse when you zero in on Gainsbourg's character freaking out at the sight of Melancholia in her final seconds alive. She is turned to dust in her greatest moment of agony.
I remember an episode from one of my favorite '70s series, "Night Gallery". It starred Clint Howard as a child prophet, and it was entitled "The Boy Who Predicted Earthquakes". As things wrapped up, it is revealed that he predicted the end of the world by the sun going nova. Only a handful of people knew the truth; but he chose to tell the rest of the world that a new, beautiful age was arriving and that everyone would be much better off.
Note that The Rapture is a relatively recent interpretation of those 2/3 of Revelation, having been introduced by John Nelson Darby in the 1830s. While he would establish it in Europe and when witnessing in America 1862-77, those who would latch onto it most were the Civil War onward South. His doctrine would serve as the foundation of the American Evangelicals, who in turn fell under the control of corporate interests and shaped the world into what it is today.
Behind the Bastards' "How the Rich Ate Christianity" episodes offer great insight to that last point.
For those unfamiliar w/ the way the book is laid out, the first part is basically letters to other churches that didn't get their own books.
> Gets to the Lincoln joke
If that was from him, it would've been incredibly timely.
I've been feeling very morbid lately and this really helped me.
I was talking to my cousin who lives in Kyiv right now. And he was saying how he's really into House of Dragon and everyone at his work is super into it. They watch it to destress and talk abiut something else. And I'm like, do you want to know how it ends i read the book i can tell you. And he said don't you dare, i want to see it when it comes out. And i believe they all will. How can i not? How can i dare not believe that?
When Australia came up as a nation that's frequently displayed in apocalyptic movies, I was reminded of art in a different medium; King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard is an Australian psychedelic multi-genre band who's had something like 24 albums in about 14 years of existence, and something like at least 4 of their albums have stories or concepts that end on an apocalypse. (Including their most recent one at the time of this video's publication: Death of everything at the hands of a giant dragon accidentally summoned by misfired magic in an attempt to quell the more realistic threat of the world's destruction by natural disasters.)
I think it's been reported (though I may be wrong, I recall reading about this) that a lot of Australian news coverage refuses to acknowledge or straight-up denies climate change, and this in spite of (gestures wildly at everything) and the massive fires they also had a few years ago. So to me it at least makes sense that art coming from there would push back by being seeped in apocalyptic environmentalism, anywhere from a hopeful "we might make it less bad" to "we're utterly screwed".
The reason for this forced ignorance from the Australian news is that the conservative corporatist elites of the country (including but not excluding Rupert Murdoch) has entrenched themselves so much in it's media (whether it's the papers or through the TV), it's nearly impossible for any sensitive topic to be even covered unless it's approved by them. The RUclipsr friendlyjordies goes into detail into this, if you want a long story short let's just say it's not a pretty picture. From the looks of it, it sounds like Australia has it MUCH worse when it being subjected to right-wing authoritarianism, that might be expected considering the country is not just a victim of the side effects of corporatism but also the fact that the majority of their neighbors (China, Indonesia, Brunei, Malaysia and much of Southeast Asia included) are quasi or full-blown authoritarian countries who are fully willing to pour shit tons money into undermining Australia's democratic process and overall attempting to destabilize it.
Another reason we had those fires is for longer than any white people have stepped foot in Australia the indigenous people here have made big fires in the winter to stop natural overgrowth that starts in the spring from that overgrowth, it's called back burning and it's a fun way to protect the land. The government banned it for one year and that was the consequences as soon as spring started. We also have climate change disasters and they are caused by people acting like Australia is America or England or something and they don't go with the natural flow of the weather patterns
In Australia a lot of the homes here aren't even built for Australian weather
For years climate change has been a big issue but whenever it get brought up a rich person campaigns against it pretty hard, especially because it involves taxing things like coal and carbon foot print more.
@@emilyperrett6648 Why would the government ban something so cost efficient, environmentally safe and arguably vital, and completely poses no threat to the lifestyle of Australians? I'm assuming they had no knowledge of back burning and misguidedly put a ban on it and refuse to with the ban in order to save face enough face accountability from this.
Also, why the fuck other countries want to act like the United States let alone imitated it? I swear for some reason the people who do this are primarily out of touch, middle-class or upper-class ignorant dipshit who seems America is the idea utopia to look up to, and let me tell you, it's not. Tell me is is there some other social issues (outside of economic recession) going on in Australia that as let people thinking/or want to pretend that the United States. From what I'm seeing, countries such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia and good chunk of Europe (including the Netherlands of all places), places that are leagues ahead of stability compared to the US are getting a hard on from rise of right-wing quasi fascist groups in America and all because of our previous president. Even white supremacist groups (even German neo-nazis) in these countries seems look up to our country's racists. As I saw a video Qanon lead protests in the Netherlands, protesters were not Americans but dutch who truly believed American based conspiracy theory.
I'm sorry if I'm being melodramatic, but it completely baffles and disturbs me that this is a thing. Do these people have any sense of agency or national pride? It makes me think that the moment our country invades them, their simply welcome us with open arms. If there is anyone who sees this and has a any straight up objection to this, please reply to me. I'm willing to hear your take on this.
@@zzamorano1717 Six months late to reply to this, but not all that long ago I found out that KGLW does have a song about Rupert Murdoch; aptly titled, "Evilest Man".
well after two very large life changing events in the last week for me, this hit like a truck and i feel things i've never felt this strongly before. thanks for the videos Kyle, they continue to strike to my core at least and i imagine many others
Take care!
''they toed my car, i shall not look at them......''
The 'staying monetized' censor bar cracked me up and I do not know why 😂
thank you for this kyle ❤
So get this: A producer raises $150 million for a kaiju, then finds a lab can make a lizard the size of a football stadium for only $10 million. The mayhem writes itself for the camera.
The 2000 version of On The Beach is actually quite good as well
As horrible as the ongoing climate crisis is, and all the talk of things ending for humanity in roughly 50 years, I tend to think back to my childhood in the 80's and how "Threads" and "The Day After" had me fearing that at any moment, the world could end in roughly 50 minutes, so, hey...progress!
Also throughout the video I kept thinking of T.S Eliot's famous stanza from his 1925 poem, The Hollow Men (one Eliot himself found irrelevant in the atomic age):
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper
A whimper... has there ever been a truly apocalyptic film regarding a pandemic? No survivors dealing with twisted religious shenanigans (The Stand) or mutant antagonists (The Last of Us), just the disease, the last character keeling over from the symptoms before the credits roll?
there's It's A Disaster, which features a group of friends preoccupied with Sunday brunch, not knowing until their friend arrives in a Hazmat suit that a virus is killing people all over the world and subsequently giving into their worst tendencies while trapped inside their house and eventually accepting death
I really needed this today. Thank you.
in a way, Star Trek is an example of a atheistic millenarian vision for the future: WW3 kills hundreds of millions, and then the survivors build an interstellar utopia. Its setting is just so far ahead of it that it's like thinking about the Thirty Years War as apocalyptic
I do appreciate the numerous uses of Miracle Mile clips. Not enough people have seen it in my opinion.
As for Australia being the last survivors, I think it's because they're on the ass end of the world and out of the way of anything that is likely to kill everyone else first. Either Australia is going first or its going last, basically.
Kyle: Australia…are you okay?
Me, an Australian: No
Thanks Kyle! Can confirm, living in expectation of the End of the World is a waste of life... or at least that's been my experience, growing up in a household *HEAVILY* influenced by apocalyptic anticipation. Christ what a long, boring, horrible way to die.
Delighted to see you cite Last Night! I stumbled across it years back because it stars one of the actors from Slings & Arrows, and it rattled me in the best way. I haven't seen many people talk about it or cite it, and it's such a great character study of various people's reactions to The End of the World. The guy who stays at his job at the power company to call everyone and inform them he'll keep the lights on until the end especially haunts me like ... yeah there's people who would do that, there's absolutely people who'd do that.
Dude I was trying to figure out what the fuck I watched at 2am high as balls on TCM 20+ years ago with posts describing it on Reddit and all kinds of other places and you just solved it. I was legit told nothing like that existed and I prob just dreamt it or something, but no it was totally Peace on Earth! Thanks dude!
"Thinking Scatologically"
You must BE the Scatman.
Those shots from threads really reminded me of Watkins the war games, very similar mood, which in turn is remeniscient of things to come. the aesthetics of destruction and the birth of film are holding hands. Great video as always.
One of my favorite Saturday morning cartoons when I was growing up was Thundarr The Barbarian.
I recently realized Lars von Trier's later works are his Magnum Opus in its original meaning: an alchemy transformation process. Antichrist and Melancholia the nigredo, Nymphomaniac the albedo (and citrinitas if you see the two parts as two steps), and The House That Jack Built the rubedo.