And of course we have it now, the sense of an ending. It has not diminished, and is as endemic to what we call modernism as apocalyptic utopianism is to political revolution. When we live in the mood of end-dominated crisis, certain now-familiar patterns of assumption become evident.
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (1967)
Harry Stamper: What's your contingency plan?
Truman: Contingency plan?
Harry Stamper: Your backup plan. You gotta have some kind of backup plan, right?
Truman: No, we don't have a back up plan. This is it.
Armageddon (1998)
As Frank Kermode pointed out over half a century ago, the populace of any given era seems to think theirs the last. This was the case during the Cold War when Kermode published his book, it was the case at the turn of the millennium a thousand years ago and it is the case now. As we face a number of potential calamitous endings ranging from the climate emergency over mass extinction and depletion of resources, it might however seem that this might actually be it. Still, are we living in a truly unprecedented age, or are we simply experiencing yet another turn of the wheel, yet another cycle in the history of assumed but never actualized apocalypses?
Comparing the climate emergency to the extinction event that annihilated the dinosaurs, literary scholar and eco-philosopher Timothy Morton has claimed that ‘We are the asteroid’. As Morton points out, the difference between the extinction of the dinosaurs in a distant past and the possible extinction of humans in the not-so-distant future is however that, unlike the dinosaurs, we have no one to blame but ourselves. In a reading of two films that take Morton’s metaphor literally, Michael Bay’s Armageddon (1998) and Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up (2021), this talk will in broad terms discuss the manner in which we use allegory, metaphor, comedy and affect to come to terms with (or refuse to come to terms with) the climate emergency. In doing so, the presentation will also attempt to unspool the manner in which Bay and McKay’s two films present a major ideological shift from the supposedly carefree notion of the ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama) towards the end of the second millennium, on to present fears of the end of everything in the third decade of the third millennium.
Nominally about a big dumb rock smashing into Earth, in the process threatening to eliminate a bunch of very dumb people, Armageddon and Don’t Look Up may sound like the same film but are anything but. This is evidenced not only in the light of its cast of heroes, a bunch of red-blooded all American male oil rig workers on the one hand (Armageddon), and on the other a group of passionate but ultimately impotent scientists (Don’t Look Up), but also by the conclusion to each film respectively. Where one is resolved due to the agency, intervention and bravery of a handful of avowedly anti-intellellectual individuals, and ultimately of the sacrifice of one particularly brave individual, the other fails, in part because of too much faith in individual action, but largely due to a lack of commitment to collective action. For there to be a ‘we’ that can be ‘an asteroid’, one needs to be able to see and acknowledge the asteroid for what it is in the first place.
About
Rune Graulund (BA, MA, University of Copenhagen, PhD, Goldsmiths, University of London) is Associate Professor in American Literature and Culture at the Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies and the Center for American Studies at University of Southern Denmark. His research centers on American popular culture and literature (especially science fiction, clifi, gothic, and post-apocalyptic fiction) as well as political fiction and non-fiction relating to questions of migration, empire, ecology and the Anthropocene. His latest publication is the co-edited anthology Dark Scenes from Damaged Earth The Gothic Anthropocene (University of Minnesota Press 2022) and ‘Grotesque’ in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory (Oxford University Press 2022).
