the apocalypse will be so damn slow
wherein I bravely reveal that I have seen both Venom and Aquaman
I’ve been thinking about the apocalypse a lot recently which is a cool and chill way to expend mental energy. Mostly what I’ve been thinking about is how so many of us have come to terms with the fact that Earth is not going to be tenable for much longer.
Recently I watched both Venom and Aquaman in the same week. Yes, I do love culture, thank you for noticing. Anyway, both movies have this weird undercurrent of doom that I thought was kind of shocking for big budget Marvel productions. Not doom in the like, The Villain Wants To Blow Up The World way, but in the We Fucked Up This Planet And Have To Deal With That way.
In Aquaman, the antagonist is Patrick Wilson playing an underwater prince named Orm (what a great string of words) who wants to wage war on humans for our pollution of the ocean. Which, fair! He makes a good point! We really did fuck up the ocean! The whole thrust of the movie is that Orm is gonna take out all of humanity for our crimes against the sea, which Aquaman disagrees with because some of his best friends are humans. It’s a little hard to fully side with the hero here because, as the Onion put it, Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point.
(I just want you guys to get a visual on Orm. He’s riding a shark like a horse.)
Venom also makes the doomsayer the villain, but in a more evil, Elon Musk-y way. Riz Ahmed is a billionaire tech guy who realizes that we’re gonna have to get off this planet soon, so he starts testing alien technology on San Francisco’s homeless population to figure out how he can live in space. All of them die. TBH, this is probably what’s going to happen in like 30 years and we’re all gonna look back and realize that Venom was weirdly prescient.
And it’s not just movies that the inevitability of destruction has crept into. It’s books! It’s pop music!
Ling Ma’s Severance presents the end of humanity as something that’s just gonna sneak up on us. We’ll keep going to parties, we’ll keep fighting with our romantic partners, we’ll keep going to work, and then we’ll look up and be like, damn this is really it. In the book, the world is overtaken by a disease called Shen Fever that turns you into a husk of your former self until you basically rot to death. The narrator, Candace, documents the decay of New York on her photo blog until her audience slowly dies off.
“Is that why you left, because your blog no longer had a readership,” someone asks her. Huge mood. When New York inevitably floods I will only leave when my Instagram posts of me floating on one of those inflatable donuts stop getting likes. It all comes back to traffic, baby!!
Remember that weird ConEd explosion in December that made the New York sky electric blue? Remember how people were shitposting their way through it even though there was a very real possibility that it was something dangerous? Same energy.
Ok one last example. The new cute pop teen is this boy named Conan Gray. He has heartthrob hair and is always dressed like he’s going to gym class in a movie about high school. His big song is called “Generation Why.” It sounds like a knockoff Clairo song. One of the verses goes like this:
Parents think, we're fast asleep
But as soon as we're home, we're sneaking out the window
'Cause at this rate of earth decay
Our world's ending at noon
Can we all just move to the moon?
It’s like “Eve Of Destruction” took a Xanax. Or maybe it’s like if “Eve Of Destruction” was written by someone who grew up watching An Inconvenient Truth in middle school science class and then witnessed a bunch of people in charge do nothing about it.
A common theme in mid-twentieth-century notions of the apocalypse is fear. Most of it is fear of nuclear destruction because that’s what was most pressing. Think The Day After, The China Syndrome, “Wooden Ships,” etc. Cut to 50 years later and that fear of a sudden, instantaneous wipe out seems to have been replaced with a tacit and sort of resigned understanding that the ice caps melting and there’s too much carbon in the air and and the rainforests are disappearing and we’re all using too many plastic straws. The new, and much more likely, narrative about the End is that it will be slow and in fact may have already begun.
So ya know what, go ahead and buy that $80 Sunday Riley serum! What else are you gonna spend that freelance check on? A house?? Lmao.
My friend Joe has a site called Bubbi Book! Liv Letter is also going to exist over there! It’s a Curated Digital Space and although I don’t understand what any of those words mean I love Joe and the site looks great and hosts some v cool stuff. Peep that here.
Also, please participate in this meme I fully made up where you record yourself lip syncing the first line of “Fast Car” with water in your mouth. I want to meet Ellen Degeneres so we can fight.