The sky is falling. So say those who think the Mayans had an inside track on the date our world will end. Here it is. Plan your seasonal shopping and winter solstice celebrations accordingly: December 21, 2012.
Harold Camping disagrees, but the Chicken Little of doomsday pronouncements scores below even Congress on the credibility scale.
Why am I thinking about end times on the longest day of the year? Blame it on the movies. Last night we saw Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, a rom-com of sorts starring Steve Carrell and Keira Knightly. The premise of the film pushes the boundaries of credulity, but no matter. An asteroid is headed towards Earth and life as we know it will end. As with most apocalyptic tales, the means of destruction is subservient to the human stories leading up to the event. Predictably, some people (and in this case it is American people) in the film spend their final weeks in debauchery, others join angry destructive mobs, a few choose suicide, even fewer hunker down in titanium-walled shelters with survivalist intent, ready to wait out the physical catastrophe and maybe someday start human life anew. But most just go about business as usual, showing up for work, mowing the lawn, organizing a garage sale.
The main characters, Dodge (Carrell) and Penny (Knightly), are thrown together to play out their version of the question, What would you do if you knew that today was your last?
Dodge's wife literally runs away from him as fast as she can at the start of the movie. He is left in a daze, but we figure out quickly that his current daze is an extension of a lifelong blur. Like his name, Dodge spends his time avoiding emotional commitments, both to other people and to a past that we slowly discover has left some pretty deep scars. Penny's lover runs out as well, something she admits is long overdue (although he returns for one of the funnier scenes in the film). When a mob approaches their apartment complex, Penny and Dodge escape in her Prius only to run out of gas shortly outside of the metropolis. From there, they buddy up and try to help each other reach the people who each has decided is most important to spend their last days with -- a sweetheart of his youth in Dodge's case, her family in England in Penny's.
Although everyone knows the two of them will find love and solace in each other before the final credits roll, Carrell and Knightly invest their characters with enough emotion and personality to make that journey interesting and believable. Their conversation in the final scene (spoiler alert), lying next to each other as the earth begins to shatter, sticks with you long after the movie is over. Penny says, "I wish we had found each other when we both were younger." Dodge replies, "It's not important. We have each other now." Fade to whiteout.
The Leftovers, a novel by Tom Perrotta I read several months ago, takes a slightly different tack on the question of how to behave when end times are imminent. The book's sardonic title let's you know you're in for a slightly different take on the Apocalypse. The novel begins three years after millions of random people all over the planet have suddenly disappeared. Just as in A Friend for the End of the World, everyone is fair game for the forces of death and destruction -- and disappearance. The fact that the vanished millions are gone under neutral circumstances makes their "end times" seem almost benign.
There is no culling of the faithful or punishment of the wicked involved. Clergymen and criminals, devoted parents and debauched criminals, Christians and Muslims and Jews, everyone from the Pope to starting centers in the NBA are vanished. One minute they are baking cookies, answering the phone, standing in line at the store, sitting in church, dribbling the basketball. The next minute they are simply gone, vanished without cause or reasonable explanation.
Not that people don't come up with all sorts of wild explanations, all of which, like Harold Camping's predictions of the Rapture, turn out to be false. In the novel, many simply can't let go of what they have held as firm beliefs up until the disappearances; the religious and philosophical, intuitive and rational, generous and self-centered answers that humans cling to in a world without intrinsic meaning. One good reverend groans and moans in despair, unable to understand why the Rapture he had so faithfully anticipated has left him behind. To make his personal peace, he alters his view and begins publishing a tattler's sheet of all the faults of those who were taken, thus proving that the real Rapture is yet to come. Others, such as Kevin's wife Laurie, gravitate to a cult, The Guilty Remnant. Members wear white robes, take a vow of silence, smoke cigarettes in public and lurk ominously outside homes and businesses, hounding people into becoming converts like buzzards glaring and daring the weak-willed get it over with and die. The Barefoot People (Kevin's son joins this group) make like 60's hedonists; it's all drugs, sex, and rock and roll.
Kevin stumbles about, not really sure what to do or think. He's the mayor of his town and so those duties give him a meek sense of purpose, but not any kind of fulfillment. He is in some ways like Dodge in End of the World, adrift and disconnected. What ultimately sparks him is a growing affection for a neighbor whose husband is among those gone. Caring about her trumps his despair about the world at large.
Different stories, but similar conclusions. These stories seem to be saying that on our last days, what will count most is loving and being loved, the least rational and hardest to explain element of human existence. Although love is of the romantic variety in these stories, there is a broader view. As he was approaching the end of his long and adventurous life, my 95-year-old neighbor, Griz, told me , "The only things that matter when you get old are family and friends." Friends for the end of our world. In the heat of summer, or the darkness of winter, that's a truth that gives us strength to face every day, whether it is just another one of many or our last.
Harold Camping disagrees, but the Chicken Little of doomsday pronouncements scores below even Congress on the credibility scale.
The main characters, Dodge (Carrell) and Penny (Knightly), are thrown together to play out their version of the question, What would you do if you knew that today was your last?
Dodge's wife literally runs away from him as fast as she can at the start of the movie. He is left in a daze, but we figure out quickly that his current daze is an extension of a lifelong blur. Like his name, Dodge spends his time avoiding emotional commitments, both to other people and to a past that we slowly discover has left some pretty deep scars. Penny's lover runs out as well, something she admits is long overdue (although he returns for one of the funnier scenes in the film). When a mob approaches their apartment complex, Penny and Dodge escape in her Prius only to run out of gas shortly outside of the metropolis. From there, they buddy up and try to help each other reach the people who each has decided is most important to spend their last days with -- a sweetheart of his youth in Dodge's case, her family in England in Penny's.
Although everyone knows the two of them will find love and solace in each other before the final credits roll, Carrell and Knightly invest their characters with enough emotion and personality to make that journey interesting and believable. Their conversation in the final scene (spoiler alert), lying next to each other as the earth begins to shatter, sticks with you long after the movie is over. Penny says, "I wish we had found each other when we both were younger." Dodge replies, "It's not important. We have each other now." Fade to whiteout.
The Leftovers, a novel by Tom Perrotta I read several months ago, takes a slightly different tack on the question of how to behave when end times are imminent. The book's sardonic title let's you know you're in for a slightly different take on the Apocalypse. The novel begins three years after millions of random people all over the planet have suddenly disappeared. Just as in A Friend for the End of the World, everyone is fair game for the forces of death and destruction -- and disappearance. The fact that the vanished millions are gone under neutral circumstances makes their "end times" seem almost benign.
There is no culling of the faithful or punishment of the wicked involved. Clergymen and criminals, devoted parents and debauched criminals, Christians and Muslims and Jews, everyone from the Pope to starting centers in the NBA are vanished. One minute they are baking cookies, answering the phone, standing in line at the store, sitting in church, dribbling the basketball. The next minute they are simply gone, vanished without cause or reasonable explanation.
Not that people don't come up with all sorts of wild explanations, all of which, like Harold Camping's predictions of the Rapture, turn out to be false. In the novel, many simply can't let go of what they have held as firm beliefs up until the disappearances; the religious and philosophical, intuitive and rational, generous and self-centered answers that humans cling to in a world without intrinsic meaning. One good reverend groans and moans in despair, unable to understand why the Rapture he had so faithfully anticipated has left him behind. To make his personal peace, he alters his view and begins publishing a tattler's sheet of all the faults of those who were taken, thus proving that the real Rapture is yet to come. Others, such as Kevin's wife Laurie, gravitate to a cult, The Guilty Remnant. Members wear white robes, take a vow of silence, smoke cigarettes in public and lurk ominously outside homes and businesses, hounding people into becoming converts like buzzards glaring and daring the weak-willed get it over with and die. The Barefoot People (Kevin's son joins this group) make like 60's hedonists; it's all drugs, sex, and rock and roll.
Kevin stumbles about, not really sure what to do or think. He's the mayor of his town and so those duties give him a meek sense of purpose, but not any kind of fulfillment. He is in some ways like Dodge in End of the World, adrift and disconnected. What ultimately sparks him is a growing affection for a neighbor whose husband is among those gone. Caring about her trumps his despair about the world at large.
Different stories, but similar conclusions. These stories seem to be saying that on our last days, what will count most is loving and being loved, the least rational and hardest to explain element of human existence. Although love is of the romantic variety in these stories, there is a broader view. As he was approaching the end of his long and adventurous life, my 95-year-old neighbor, Griz, told me , "The only things that matter when you get old are family and friends." Friends for the end of our world. In the heat of summer, or the darkness of winter, that's a truth that gives us strength to face every day, whether it is just another one of many or our last.
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