Apocalypse soon?

Well, the first season of "Jericho" ended in the middle of a cliffhanger, so the producers and writers are clearly hoping for a renewal--I liked the new flag, and Gerald McRaney had an Emmy-worthy scene. We seem to be in the middle of an apocalyptic cultural moment right now, in a way we haven't been since the early-to-mid 80's, when books like "Fate of the Earth" and "When the Wind Blows" and movies like THE DAY AFTER, THREADS, TESTAMENT, THE ROAD WARRIOR, RED DAWN, and THE TERMINATOR were all the rage. Most of the above works were concerned fairly specifically with the possibility of a nuclear war with Russia and its aftermath. After the horror of 9/11, however, we have a new batch of "end of the world" works: "Jericho" is about life in America after a nuclear terrorist attack; the current "Battlestar Galactica" is about the near-destruction of the human race; "Lost" and last season's "Invasion" aren't about wars or terrorists, but nevertheless both have a dash of apocalypse fever in their set-ups. Much current literary fiction (most recently the new Don DeLillo novel) is about people, usually New Yorkers, dealing with the destruction of the World Trade Center. In the movies, there's been a resurgence in apocalyptic-toned films (often involving zombies), such as 28 DAYS LATER, SHAUN OF THE DEAD, RESIDENT EVIL, WAR OF THE WORLDS, the "Planet Terror" half of GRINDHOUSE, and the coming 28 WEEKS LATER and I AM LEGEND.

Between the last two episodes of "Jericho," I read Cormac McCarthy's "The Road," not because it's the newest Oprah book, but because my partner checked it out of the library so it was lying around the house and not due back for a few days, and it's a short and easy read. Well, not so easy in terms of what happens. The story involves a man and his young son who wander the country from somewhere in the West, heading for the coast, after some kind of apocalyptic event has blasted the land, killing off all the trees and wildlife and turning the human survivors into scavenging bands of desperate creatures, reduced to theft, murder, and cannibalism. This is a poet's version of a zombie movie with hardly any zombies; lots of interesting physical description, but little action, and surprisingly little in the way of direct threat, despite the constant paranoia that the man and boy feel. They stay close to the road, although they must slink off to the side frequently to avoid what the man calls "the bad guys" who would threaten them. They carry their few belongings in a shopping cart and stop in towns to find abandoned homes which might still have canned foods or bottled water, but they stay nowhere for more than a few days, despite running across a fully stocked bomb shelter at one point. It's all told from the point of view of the man, though not in first person, and it becomes difficult to know how much to trust his thinking. He refers to himself and the boy as "good guys," but the boy is confused when they never act compassionately toward the few pathetic beings they encounter along the road. The man's only goal is surviving to reach the sea, which is not completely understandable: Why would one want to survive to live in such a savage world? Why reach the sea? Both seem more like natural, non-rational impulses, which may be part of the point. More character development would have made this more interesting. But what's most interesting to me about all the current doom and gloom is how amorphous the fears expressed are. We no longer have one monolithic enemy country to worry about, and most of the current stories don't explain exactly what happens to trigger the end of our world. I'm stuck between wishing they weren't so frustrating on a narrative level, and appreciating their emotionally wrenching ambiguity.