Photo courtesy of Nicholas Petty
“A disaster movie without a hopeful ending is just that, a disaster. And how can there be hope when battling the implacable power of the cosmos?”
An asteroid the size of Texas on a collision course with Earth? Let’s send up a team of unlikely heroes to drill into its core and blow it to harmless bits. A climate-change-induced megastorm pummelling the entire northern hemisphere? Let’s survive the ice, journey south, and promise to live better. Runaway universal expansion pulling the stars and the sun out of sight before destroying the planet and dismantling the atomic model itself? Let’s, erm, . . . let’s think about that.
When I first learned about the Big Rip—that is, runaway universal expansion as one potential end to the Universe—I thought it would make a great movie. A CGI-pumped, guilty-pleasure disaster flick complete with disintegrating monuments, ripped shirts, and the President of the United States of America. But even during my idle contemplations, the challenges quickly became clear. A disaster movie without a hopeful ending is just that, a disaster. And how can there be hope when battling the implacable power of the cosmos?
Rather than penning that lucrative screenplay (ahem), I decided to write a short story that explored the story-telling process itself; thus was born “John ‘The Hammer’ Johnson’s Last Disaster Movie.” I enjoyed writing it. I got to live out my movie on the page, with its cheesy one-liners, redemptive character arcs, and blockbuster fudge factor that does, in the end, overcome the power of the cosmos (spoiler alert: It’s the Unbreakable Human Spirit). I also got to explore the character of a fading film star as he struggles through his increasingly solitary life and clings to the last vestiges of his career. It’s about the stories we tell versus the truth of our existence. It’s also about ripped shirts and disintegrating monuments.
Recently, I’ve been thinking again about how to write a Big Rip disaster movie, minus the fudge. More generally (and cheerily enough), I’ve been wondering how to tell stories about unsurvivable cataclysms. It’s been done, of course, (Lars von Trier’s Melancholia springs to mind) but it’s difficult to write, sometimes even more difficult to read or watch. Even in tragedy, it’s human nature to search for hope or purpose; a sort of legacy to the tragedy, whether that be an act of kindness that survives the event, or a lesson. There can’t be a legacy if there’s no one around to voice it.
I wouldn’t describe myself as an optimist by any stretch, but when envisioning the variety of apocalypses that could befall our planet right now, I can’t imagine total devastation. No matter how bad it gets, there will be a kernel of hope, surely. A blade of green grass sprouting from the ashes as the camera pans out to show resilient survivors emerging from their hidey-holes to begin the arduous but noble task of rebuilding civilisation. And even without the grass and the survivors, there is always, in the way I picture it, someone behind the lens, viewing the destruction. Because the end can’t really be The End, can it?
Obviously, yes it can. Even if we reverse the climate crisis and dodge the asteroid the size of Texas, even if we escape the inevitable death of the Sun (let’s send up a team of misfit scientists and inject it with a nuke!), The End will come eventually. As John “The Hammer” Johnson discovers during some late-night doom-scrolling, the most agreeable end to the Universe is the Heat Death, whereby the last star putters out to herald a near-eternal era of blackholes and darkness, followed by an actually eternal era of basically nothing. Nice.
Whether the cause is homegrown or cosmological, whether it’s the eradication of a single community or the unwinding of all physics, irredeemable endings happen and they’re not pleasant. The last dodo wasn’t cracking one liners; it probably didn’t consider its character arc redemptive.
So how do we tell stories about definitive (some might say hopeless) endings in a truthful manner? Let me, erm, . . . let me think about that.
Nicholas Petty is a British writer living in Utrecht, the Netherlands. His short fiction has previously been longlisted for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award and the Galley Beggar Press Short Story Prize. It has also been published in the London Magazine, the Moth Magazine, Short Fiction Journal, and elsewhere. He is currently working on a novel and short story collection. His story “John ‘The Hammer’ Johnson’s Last Disaster Movie” appeared in NER 44.2.