National Post (National Edition)
Why the movies convey isolation better than any other art form.
Why the movies convey isolation better than any other art form
‘The Last Man! Yes I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.”
Mary Shelley wrote that in her journal in May of 1824, shortly before embarking on her novel The Last Man. Less well-received than Frankenstein, less remembered today, it nonetheless finds another powerful intersection of imagination and science in the story of a small, dwindling group of survivors of a late 21st-century plague.
Shelley wasn’t the first to imagine the predicament of the sole survivor — Le Dernier Homme, published by Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville in 1805, gives us a far future in which humans are becoming sterile, as in the 1992 novel and 2006 film Children of Men.
Neither work did well; critics of the time seemed horrified by the very idea of extinction. Although by 1936 the philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin, writing about talking pictures, noted: “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.”
Movies are where last-man (and they are almost always men) narratives found fertile ground. There is something primal in us that thrills to the vision and the notion of being the last survivor — though we tend to ignore the fact that if 7.4 billion humans were to vanish or perish, odds are we’d be among them.
We can’t help but place ourselves in the survivor’s shoes. The distancing effect of cinema lets us appreciate the oddness of the experience — like chasing a spy through the streets of Tangier, say, or spending a day with Tom Cruise — even though we know the actual event would be utterly terrifying.
This desire for the incident is why the trailer for 1959’s The World, the Flesh and the Devil promises “the story that puts YOU in the picture,” and breathlessly asks: “What would YOU do if you were one of the last three people on Earth?”
Certainly the notion of scarcity would vanish in a world full of consumer goods and only one consumer; and almost every last-man story includes a shopping spree and at least one expensive automobile. In the movie Passengers, which finds Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence alone on a vast spaceship, she looks at his clothes and remarks: “You went shopping.” He replies: “I went shoplifting.”
And bid farewell to pollution. In I Am Legend, when the last man in New York takes a deep, satisfying breath of air one morning, we realize that after a few years of airing out, Manhattan would smell like the Hamptons. And if Hell is other people, then surely there is Heaven in their absence.
Such narratives also let us explore our existential fears as a species. Shelley, writing a century after Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, used contagion as her murderous MacGuffin. Where Have All the People Gone, from 1974, suggests solar flares. In The Noah (1975), On the Beach (1959) and many others, it’s a nuclear catastrophe.
Often the survivors are beset by zombies, as in The Last Man on Earth (1964, with Vincent Price), remade as The Omega Man (1971, Charlton Heston) and I Am Legend (2007, Will Smith). Or 1985’s Night of the Comet, an unusual example in that it features a comic tone and female protagonists.
Then there are the tales in which the last man comes upon a woman and another man; drama at its most Aristotelian! A stunning example of this form is the 1985 New Zealand film The Quiet Earth, in which scientist Zac Hobson spends weeks (and about 40 minutes of screen time) thinking he’s the only one left after a power-grid experiment goes awry. He then meets Joanne and Api, the resultant love triangle made more acute by the fact that Api is Maori and the other two white.
The Quiet Earth was recently rereleased on Blu-ray with a commentary from astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who unfortunately says too little about the science in the film, and nothing about its beautiful, bewildering final shot. But it holds a special place in my heart. Not only is it a great movie, but I saw it while playing hooky with a friend from high school — a mid-week matinee about the last people on Earth, watched by an audience of two.
This is perhaps what makes cinema the ideal form for stories about the end of the world and its final survivors. Unlike dance, concerts or theatre, cinema (and its small-screen offshoots) offers the appearance of a live performance with no other human actually present. To watch a movie alone — critics know this sensation well — is to be at once solitary and in the company of others; to share communion with ghosts.
The ephemeral nature of movies adds another weird layer of loneliness; sometimes the performers are not only absent but deceased as well. Of the three survivors in The World, the Flesh and the Devil, only one of the actors — 89-yearold Harry Belafonte — is still alive.
Of course, there are very few true last-man-alive movies. The 2000 comedy The Last Man and TV’s The Last Man on Earth would seem to promise as much, but the love triangle (or quadrilateral, or pentagon ...) proves too tempting for screenwriters. For stories of single protagonists, we must usually look to tales in which someone has been cast adrift from the rest of humanity and must struggle to return.
The apex of this conceit is surely Robert Redford in the cheerily named All Is Lost (2013). A solitary sailor, listed in the credits only as “our man,” has his boat damaged by a rogue shipping container floating in the Indian Ocean. He spends the rest of the film, alone and almost wordless, trying to save himself. In similar straits, and in order of proximity, are Tom Hanks in Cast Away (on an island), Sandra Bullock in Gravity (in orbit), Sam Rockwell in Moon (the moon), Matt Damon in The Martian (Mars) and Chris Pratt — for a while, at least — in Passengers (interstellar space).
It’s a twice-tricky feat. There’s the filmmaking challenge of constructing and shooting a narrative with no sentient antagonist. For the actor comes the effort of working solo; the reaction from other players that so often fuels a great performance is missing. But when done well, these stripped-down narratives are downright thrilling to behold.
No discussion of the cinema of loneliness would be complete without the film that features not three humans, or two, but none. In 2008’s WALL-E, the first, perfect 15 minutes of story are about a self-aware trash-collecting robot and his cockroach friend on a deserted, garbage-strewn Earth. It’s not until the half-hour mark that we meet any humans — and even then, they remain largely secondary to the plot.
I like to think that in Passengers, as Pratt pines for companionship on the starship Avalon, and is eventually rewarded with Jennifer Lawrence (lucky couple!), that somewhere, light-years behind them, another last-being-standing tale is playing out on the Earth they left behind. Science-fiction has give us fantastic battles and noisy adventures, but its lasting legacy might simply be solitude.