Sometime last year, it's been months, I finally saw the movie On the Beach. It's the story about the time period after nuclear war has destroyed most human life, and people in Australia may be the last ones alive, waiting for the radiation to reach them but also hoping they might be spared. No one really knows what will happen. In addition to the locals, Gregory Peck is the captain of an American sub that survived the conflict and has made its way to the continent. It's from 1959, in black and white, directed by Stanley Kramer who did a lot of other "social" movies during the 50s and 60s like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and it stars Ava Gardner, Tony Perkins, and Fred Astaire. A big name cast.
While the plot is framed by unfathomable violence, I don't think it shows at all. It's all context. In some ways, very little happens. People wait, and go about a life that is winding down. There are parties, trips to beach, but with the loss of the rest of the world, there is less and less to do. Hope for the best, but even that seems wasted energy. In the end the inevitable occurs, and the plot concerns each character deciding how to say goodbye to everything and everyone they've known.
What comes to mind watching this movie is its languidness. It is slow and quiet. The sunny landscapes of Australia exude warmth. Slow down, rest in the shade. But otherwise it isn't too different from life in the desert.
It seemed fitting and foreshadowing for our time of creeping apocalypse. Climate decay and political disintegration come on a little at a time. Sure there are outbursts like January 6, but more of the decline comes a bit at a time, small points at which there seems less and less left to do. One more seat lost, one more local law overturned. The Republicans split Nashville up between several districts they control, and from that point on we just aren't even part of what goes on in Washington. It's a story about people from other place. Even many of the dramatic moments of climate change take the phenomenological form of a slowing down. Las Cruces, NM had 47 consecutive days over 100 degrees last summer. Existing within that involved adapting, and much of that required slowing down. Don't walk too far. Don't go too fast. Wait until the sun goes down.
One trope in climate discourse is when a person talked about the observable dire consequences of these changes, but ends by saying they are an optimist and then pull out something that might be a basis for hope. An artefact like On the Beach makes the case that what seems to be happening is happening, even if the action of what is happening is indiscernible from the background context.
I experience these two decay patterns--social and political life and climate--as part of the same phenomenology. I suppose Jared Diamond would say climate drives the social and political fraying. But they are so intertwined, aren't they. If we were to do anything, we would need some sort of organized social response. I'm reading Foucault's 1979 lectures on neo-liberalism, where he outlines the emergence of forms of governmentality that establish the market as the organizing principle of the State, its source of legitimacy. While there was a time when one might point to the successes of that principle--the German post-war "miracle"--it is hard to see the market doing anything but driving the radiation closer and closer to the last pockets of survivability. The progress is slower in our lives than even in the languid fiction of On the Beach, so that much harder to feel. But you need to feel it outside the dramatic events of the latest tornado or insurrection, but in the background changes. Or maybe that's the blessing. The fruit trees will still bloom until they don't.
