In 1997, I pestered my parents to let me use the VCR to record a cheesy movie called Asteroid. People think Deep Impact and Armageddon are the granddaddies of space rock disaster movies, but this piece of crap beat both by a whole year. I wanted to watch it because it starred Michael Biehn. Michael Biehn was in Aliens and Terminator and The Abyss. I thought Michael Biehn was the coolest dude in the world.
In one scene, two fighter jets blasted the incoming asteroid with lasers to pulverize it into chunks that would burn up in the atmosphere. Instead, they created a meteor shower that caused more devastation. I watched wide-eyed on the living room couch as Michael Biehn saved little blonde girls while buildings collapsed and cheap special effects incinerated the city of Dallas.
It was awesome. I was eleven.
Watching the TV world get destroyed while I sat comfortably in the intact one captivated me. I’ve been fascinated by the apocalypse ever since. Any movie, book, or video game that features the end of the world. Doesn’t matter if it takes place as the world is actively ending, or in the years and centuries that follow. If I can read it, watch it, or play it, I can’t get enough of it. It’s always been my attempt to make a world in crisis seem like one I could survive. Or even thrive in.
And as the lines between apocalyptic fiction and reality started to blur a couple years ago, I dove even deeper into this kind of media. It was my effort at processing reality as an invisible plague made a routine visit to the liquor store seem like a life-threatening gamble.
So, stuck inside during those uncertain opening weeks of the pandemic, I exercised my standard measure of control when things seemed bleak to me. I re-read Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road.
Most people watched the movie Contagion around that time.
I did too, but I’m trying to seem impressive and scholarly by bragging that I also read a book.
The Road is a story about a man and his boy struggling to survive a journey across a burnt and broken America. In the early days of lockdown, I found its motif of avoiding contact with other Americans particularly useful. But that was the only practical advice in it. The book didn’t reveal how to track down the single remaining package of toilet paper in a 30-mile radius. It had lessons about how to defend against highway robbery, but my highway commute stopped the moment my company let me work from home. It had plenty of advice about how to be a good father, but I’m still not a parent, so those lessons didn’t apply to me.
I read it again because it was a comfort to me at a time when self-care was paramount. The Road is brutal, but it remains my favorite book to this day. I always find beauty in the dense ugliness of McCarthy’s world, but most of all, I consider the main character the very pinnacle of masculinity. The man in the book is so competent and capable, and he has one single-minded goal: Keep his boy alive at all costs. At a time when I was unable to visit with anyone except my girlfriend, I enjoyed his company. Each page was another opportunity to have a man-to-man talk with the guy.
Few apocalyptic stories have characters as compelling as that man. Most have shitty characters. But they still allow me to fantasize about being a survivalist. A hero. A protector. It’s just fun to think about. I’m fairly handy with a tool kit, but in a real post-apocalyptic society, there’s no chance I’d be the guy who successfully repairs the broken generator that brings electricity to the whole town. Probably because I went to a liberal arts college instead of a trade school. But I enjoy imagining myself as that guy. It’s sort of like when you pass a driver in distress on the road and you think about being that noble motorist who stops to help. But by the time you’ve truly considered it, you’re five miles away, doing 75 down the freeway, and it’s just too impractical to turn around.
When I enjoy any standard doomsday story, instead of taking notes and gleaning valuable information, I just crack open another beer and let the fantasy suck me in. Considering how many books, games, and movies I’ve absorbed about the breakdown of society, you’d think I’d have learned something relevant from them. But in truth, it’s shocking how little I’ve done to prepare for the real thing.
I don’t have an emergency go-bag stocked with MREs and a first-aid kit.
I don’t have jugs of fresh water stored under my sink because I live in a two-bedroom apartment with inadequate cabinet space.
I have no idea how to forage for food or hunt animals. I don’t know how to raise crops. My girlfriend and I have talked for years about growing our own herb garden, speaking of the decision in the same reverent tones as getting engaged or putting a down payment on a house—“should we do it? … I feel like it’s the right time …”—yet we still buy our cilantro at Trader Joe’s, use about half of it for a single night’s worth of tacos, then throw the rest away when it goes bad.
I also don’t own a firearm. At least not yet. This is much to my younger brother’s displeasure, who sees a version of life in which there is an enemy around every corner plotting to invade your home, hurt your family, and take all your shit. In my corner of the world, I don’t consider that a likely outcome. But I’ve seen enough of season 3 of The Walking Dead to understand the importance of holding the high ground, which is why I’m glad to live on the second floor of my apartment complex. And when the Pacific rises up and swallows every first-floor unit, I’ll probably watch Waterworld.
Honestly, fantastical narratives are just far easier for me to absorb than the real horrors enumerated on my phone every day. I’ve made a habit of browsing Reddit and deliberately scrolling past any post referring to rising sea levels. Or the burning of the Amazon. Or the latest asteroid that has a .0004 percent chance of annihilating life on Earth down to the last microbe. I’ve turned this avoidance into an art.
An article about mercury levels on the rise, endangering global food supply?
Skip.
A video about the worst drought in California in over a thousand years?
Better skip that one too.
Wait, what? Jeff Bezos went to space? In a rocket shaped like a dick? Now that sounds like an emotionally low-stakes article I’ll happily read on the toilet.
I know it’s all happening. I know each one is more of an emergency than the last. But what can I do about it? If the real world is on fire, all I can do is thank the firefighters for their service. So instead of trying to choose which cataclysm to prioritize, I prefer to mainline fictional doomsdays than the factual ones. And I’m not the only one who does.
The Road won a Pulitzer Prize, after all.
Bird Box crushed it on Netflix and a sequel was immediately greenlit.
And not even a global pandemic could stop The Last of Us Part II, a video game set in the aftermath of a global pandemic, from smashing sales records during a global pandemic. It was the darkest, most depressing game I’ve ever played. And I loved it. With every bleak character moment and gut-punching story beat, it was like I could sense every other gamer in the country playing it alongside me. Them and their significant others, who like mine, were nice enough to sit on the couch and watch. That felt like a community at a time when the real community outside my door was the threat.
Think about that post-apocalyptic trope where two travelers meet on the road, each one sizing the other up, taking each other’s measure to determine who means harm and who’s just passing through. Perhaps he has a weapon. Perhaps he’s willing to barter for herbs, or meat, or blankets, or Chap Stick.
The penalty for making the wrong judgment call in one of those situations could mean death.
The real-world Coronavirus equivalent of this was tamer. When I saw an oncoming pedestrian during those social distancing days, I played a game I called “Who Would Cross the Street First?”
It depended on how manic I was feeling that particular day. If I was neck-deep in “Will This Last Forever” anxiety, I crossed the street before they did. When I was feeling defiantly optimistic, I refused to deviate. I maintained my course, getting closer and closer to them—just another person like me, out for their daily sanity walk around the neighborhood. Some got closer than others. But at the last moment, they crossed the street. They always crossed the street.
I understood. That guy didn’t know if I was carrying the virus that got us into this mess. And I didn’t know if he, or the labradoodle he was walking, were carriers either. Playing games of sidewalk chicken with my fellow Americans wasn’t something I had prepared for last year.
Nor did I prepare for the disintegration of my personal community. My coworkers, men and women I’d grown to rely on and trust and appreciate … all now faceless contacts in a chat room, or pixelated, choppy broadcasts of them on buggy conference apps. My friends and neighbors, some mere yards away, became risk factors. My own family members became liabilities, and I became one too.
I wasn’t used to regarding everyone as a potential threat. No one was. For everyone like me who mourned the loss of whatever their thing was—dive bars, crowded concerts, renaissance fairs, or just the simple privilege of shaking another person’s hand—as far as we were concerned … the world did end.
And as the months dragged on, I didn’t stop at The Road. Caught in the teeth of the infection spike last winter, I cracked open Stephen King’s The Stand, resolving to finally defeat that monster. Reading over a thousand pages about a world devastated by a virus with a 99.4 percent mortality rate seemed like a way to kill time as cases skyrocketed in Southern California.
The Stand, like The Road, was another useful reminder that things weren’t as horrible as they could’ve been. King’s characters, those lucky enough to survive the virus, encountered bloated corpses on a daily basis. They were routinely threatened with torture and crucifixion by the forces of darkness. Recognizing I didn’t have it as bad as those folks felt like its own measure of control over my situation.
And unlike The Road, this book was filled with practical knowledge. I learned that following the collapse of society, bicycles are the most efficient means of travel. I learned you should loot sporting goods stores first and pharmacies second. I learned that if a 108-year-old black woman magically visits you in your dreams and tells you to travel to Kansas, you should do so.
By the time I finally turned the last page, my arm was still sore from my first vaccine shot. The throbbing pain felt like progress. After my second dose, I went straight to a newly reopened movie theater. I could tell the world wasn’t ending because I was in a theater watching A Quiet Place 2, a film set in a world that already did. With the Moderna Pharmaceuticals’ serum coursing through my immune system, I felt like I was wearing my own post-apocalyptic armor—each of my white blood cells equipped in Mad Max-style garb, some wasteland union of rubber tires, spikes, and animal skins.
Someday I imagine I will have kids of my own. And if I raise them right, eventually they will pester me to let them watch some crappy disaster movie on TV. Or they’ll just bluntly ask me about the end of the world. I will be able to provide a thorough answer. Because I’ve already seen it a million times in stunning 4K resolution.
Photo by Killian Whitelock
- Survivalist - June 15, 2023