Guy Maddin’s comedy is the latest in a line of films that finds humour in extinction-level catastrophe, while also pointing fingers at the elite for its colossal failings, writes Miriam Balanescu.
The end of the world might not seem much cause for laughter, but in Guy Maddin’s doomsday satire, Rumours, a surreal and hilarious series of events marks humanity’s final hours. We spend them at a G7 summit, where global leaders convene to draft a platitudinal statement in response to an unspecified crisis – while a slightly more pressing disaster, nay the apocalypse itself, unfolds around them.
Humour in Maddin’s film stems as much from the ineptitude of these eight decision-makers – hailing, a title card reminds us, from the world’s wealthiest countries – as the bizarreness of how this concluding catastrophe comes to pass. While the assorted statesmen, spearheaded by the Chancellor of Germany (Cate Blanchett), seek out a secluded nook in the woods to brainstorm ideas for their speech, unbeknown to them a new dynasty of resurrected bog men (disgraced chieftains who were once slain in sacrifice) have returned to stake their claim to power. ‘What I have in mind,’ the US President (Charles Dance, enigmatically sans American accent) valiantly proposes to his panicking colleagues, ‘is that we go back in the chateau together where we find a comfortable spot conducive to the kind of productive, diplomatic colloquy that befits our station as leaders, until such a time as help arrives.’
The day of reckoning has long been a source of comedy in films, the boundless opportunities for absurdity and mishaps – amid the obvious greater one – making the disaster movie ripe for parody. One of the earliest examples is Thom Eberhardt’s Night of the Comet (1984), a swashbuckling B movie in which two sisters fend off zombies and corrupt scientists after a comet obliterates most life on Earth. Films like Shaun of the Dead (2004), The World’s End (2013), Zombieland (2009), Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012) and This is the End (2013) used Eberhardt’s template to offer light relief from the deluge of disaster films in the 2000s, which included 28 Days Later (2002) and The Road (2009). These adventure comedies look on the brighter side of the threat of extinction by focusing instead on the antics of those attempting to survive.
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Recent apocalyptic comedies such as Don’t Look Up (2021) and the upcoming Mickey 17 are less interested in the high jinks of ordinary people dealing with disaster than the failings of the powerful and the societal systems they have forged. While previous films in this canon have felt safely far-fetched, the reality of the looming climate crisis has given these newer films an unsettling edge. None more so than The End, which could be set in a not-too-distant future. It sees a repulsively rich family seek sanctuary from the ongoing apocalypse in a purpose-built underground bunker, fully furnished with an aquarium, swimming pool, grand piano, impressionist paintings and infinitely fresh artificial flowers.
Joshua Oppenheimer’s objectionable cast of characters is headed up by the father of the family, an unnamed oil titan (Michael Shannon), who ironically remains a climate denier even as evidence of it surrounds him. Enlisting the help of his obedient son (George MacKay), the man dictates an account of his life for publication. ‘It’s a way of giving something back,’ he insists, wilfully ignoring that most of his potential readers – and indeed publishers – have perished.
Don't Look Up (2021)
Denial is the key trait on show in The End. Oppenheimer borrows elements from the musical to amplify the delusionality of these characters’ perspectives. The film’s opening introduces the rhapsodic refrain ‘together our future is bright, a life with no end in sight’. When a young woman (Moses Ingram), having trekked through a world in flames, unexpectedly happens upon the family’s haven, her arrival is the harbinger of trouble in paradise. She threatens to dispel the myths they have created to protect their serenity. Not only does she remind the family of the existence of the outside world and those they have abandoned, but she openly questions their role in bringing about the tragedy. The father rebuts: ‘It is sheer arrogance to think that we control the fate of our planet. We’ll never know if our industry contributed.’
Yet the newcomer’s survival depends on her silence. By the end of the film, the refrain ‘no end in sight’ emphatically returns, along with the characters’ all-consuming denialism and their blindness to the thing that now defines their lives: ‘the end’. This unnerving, unshakeable apathy in response to impending doom is also apparent in Don’t Look Up and White Noise (2022).
White Noise (2022)
Undoubtedly taking its cues from Dr Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), in Don’t Look Up the blasé attitude and shameless political wrangling of the US President (Meryl Streep) and her entourage as a comet steadily heads for Earth is both exaggerated for laughs and unsettlingly believable. In the absurdist drama White Noise, an extinction event occurs, ends and is quickly forgotten, the family at its centre returning to normality with little trace left by this trauma. The film’s final scene, an oddly gleeful musical number taking place in a supermarket, gestures towards the part profit and consumerism plays in allaying our concerns about the world’s demise.
When the end times are nigh in Rumours, The End, Mickey 17 and Don’t Look Up, humanity continues to be burdened by the same issues of inequality and bureaucracy. The majority are represented as being at the mercy of an incompetent few. Rather than expressing cynicism about the fate of the planet, however, Maddin and Oppenheimer use the apocalypse as a means to bring into sharp focus the flaws of the elite – much as the filmmakers are often complicatedly empathetic and affectionate towards these characters. As the family in The End reckons with their past, glimmers of self-awareness – a song asking for forgiveness – bring us closer to them, before they again sink into delusion. For all the seeming absurdity of these films’ cataclysmic events, there is a potency and realness in their representations of power.
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