On the end of the world

How would you feel if the world was ending? What would you do with your last night on Earth? Who would you spend it with?

POP CULTURE IS ONE OF THE PRIMARY MECHANISMS through which a society works out its fears and anxieties. One of Gen X’s earliest and most enduring worries is about the end of the world. In the 1980s, that anxiety manifested itself predominantly through the threat of nuclear annihilation, fuelled by American president Ronald Reagan’s decision to end the Carter-era detente and take a more forceful line on the USSR. The first half the decade was an endless parade of movies and songs and novels and video games and television shows, all devoted to narrating the inevitable global holocaust that our politicians seemed determined to engineer.

Read: Growing Up In The Nuclear Shadow

By the 1990s, the end of history had put nuclear Armageddon on the back burner. End-of-the-world anxieties shifted into a more distinctly countercultural mood, driven substantially by a growing obsession with the negative effects of consumerism and its impact on the environment. “Shopping is destroying the planet” became the rallying cry of the growing anti-globalisation movement, captured by such definitive texts as Naomi Klein’s 1999 book No Logo and the quarterly dispatches from Adbusters magazine.

Then came 9/11, after which any critique of capitalist consumerism was harnessed to a more global condemnation of Western imperialism and our consumer-capitalist civilization. This was made manifest in a slew of post-9/11 offerings including the 2004 anti-shopping parable Dawn of the Dead and, that same year, the global warming disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow.

But between the nuclear threat of the 80s and the enviro-declinist fantasies of the post-9/11 era there was a brief period in the mid-1990s when Gen X didn’t have all that much to worry about, at the level of sheer existence anyway. The culture of calamity saw a brief reversion to dumb ‘70s style offerings animated by nascent CGI tools — vacant fare like Twister (1996) and, famously, Titanic (1997). There was even a funny moment when 1997 saw a pair of competing volcano disaster movies (Volcano and Dante’s Peak), while 1998 welcomed the threatening asteroids of both Deep Impact and Armageddon.

Into this brainless mix slipped a quiet little Canadian movie called Last Night, shot lovingly in Toronto and directed by Don McKellar. The plot follows a loosely overlapping group of people as they prepare for their last night on Earth; for unexplained reasons the world will end at midnight, and everyone has some loose ends they want to tie up before it comes.

Sandra (played by Sandra Oh) is stranded after her car is vandalized, and she spends the rest of the movie trying to get home to be with her new husband. Patrick (Don McKellar) meets his family for a final mock Christmas dinner, but he leaves early, intent on spending the end of the world alone in his apartment. His younger sister Jenny (Sarah Polley) is off with her boyfriend to a street party. Sandra’s husband Duncan (David Cronenberg) is working late, calling customers and reassuring them that their heating gas will be kept on right up to the end, while Patrick’s friend Craig (Callum Keith Rennie) is checking off a bucket list of people he wants to have sex with, including a black woman, a virgin, and their high school french teacher.

When the movie was released, a lot of the reviews expressed surprise at how low-key the whole thing was. There was no fear, no action, no looting, no final orgy of violence; instead, everyone seems to have largely made their peace with the end. The film was described as a very Canadian take on the end of the world, and “the perfect antidote” to the American genre of apocalyptic films that were dominating the cinemas that summer.

Except that’s not quite right. There is plenty of evidence that there had been a fair amount of looting and rioting – the movie opens with a long shot of Sandra poking through the empty shelves of a supermarket looking for anything worth salvaging. Then her car is stolen and vandalised, and later, her husband is shot dead by a kid walking past who happens to see him on his front step and kills him for the heck of it.

But it is true, the predominant mood of the film is not panic or fear, and there are no superheroes running around trying to save their families. Instead, the film is soaking in regret, and any residual fear is not over death itself, but of things left undone or unsaid. Everyone is quietly but desperately trying to leave on their own terms. Sandra is in a panic to get back to her husband because she barely knows him; right to the end Craig is trying to come to grips with his sexuality, and makes a failed pass at Patrick; Patrick is looking for relief from the pain of losing his wife, who we learn was a school teacher who has recently died of cancer. Only Jenny and her boyfriend Alex seem pretty cool with the whole thing — they are young enough to have not yet accumulated the pool of regret that fills the well of a long life.

If there’s one big lesson from the movie, it’s that the real reason to fear death is not extinction, but FOMO – the fear of missing out. What makes the prospect of dying so distressing is the knowledge that things will go on without us. It’s not the end of the party that is so sad, it’s the thought of leaving the party early. But if it is ending for everyone, what is there to be sad about?

Last Night ends on a beautiful note. Patrick and Sandra have retreated to his rooftop, where they are playing music and sharing a glass of wine. The sun is high in the sky (“I liked it when it used to get dark”, says one character). They sit on chairs facing one another, each holding a pistol to the others’ temple, preparing to fire just before the world ends. The crowd gathered in the street counts down the last seconds, like some terrible New Year’s Eve. And as the sun flares and expands, filling the sky, they lower their pistols and lean in to kiss one another, and the world, goodbye.

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From the X-Files:

• The long-awaited zombie flick sequel 28 Years Later is coming out next month. Here’s the trailer.

• I just finished Annie Jacobsen’s new book Nuclear War: A Scenario, which walks the reader through how the first minutes and hours of World War Three might play out, beginning with a sneak attack by North Korea. Apparently Denis Villeneuve has optioned the movie rights.

• I’m quoted in this recent piece by Robson Fletcher of the CBC, which looked at whether Gen X was suffering particularly from Trump tariffs. I didn’t really play along, but it’s a good article.

• That said, I just came across this piece in the economist, “Why Gen X is the real loser generation.” Everyone give it a read and we’ll discuss it in a further dispatch.