Wednesday, February 23, 2022 — 3
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
WE HAVE ALWAYS been
obsessed with the looming
apocalypse — the final, cata-
clysmic catastrophe that will
end the world as we know it.
It’s a question that has preoc-
cupied humanity seemingly
forever, from biblical Rev-
elations to zombie flicks. But
increasingly, the apocalypse
doesn’t feel so far away. We’ve
all
gotten
accustomed
to
our current “unprecedented
times,” but everything seems
a
little
too…
precedented.
How do we deal with the end
of the world when it feels like
it’s happening right in front
of us? How do we reckon with
the cultural phenomenon of
the apocalypse when we’re
living through it? Sometimes
it feels like we’re walking
towards our certain doom on a
road with billboards still try-
ing to convince us everything
is fine. This B-Side walks that
road and examines how art is
dealing with the concept of
the apocalypse, both real and
imagined.
— Emilia Ferrante, Senior
Arts Editor
The Apocalypse B-Side
The apocalyptic setting of ‘The Last of Us’ provided strange comfort during the pandemic
Phoebe Bridgers knows the end, but how do we
deal with the ending?
The unfolding
apocalypse: climate
change, death and art
FOR MANY OF us, the pan-
demic has been a very isolating
time. Particularly in the early
stages of 2020, being shut off
from people and places we care
about was incredibly difficult to
process. While many returned
to lighter, more comforting art
to help them process and get
through some tough times, I
personally preferred to consume
darker, heavier art. I didn’t want
art that distracted me; I wanted
something that could help me
deal with what I was feeling.
I turned to a lot of apocalyptic-
based art. The Steven Soderbergh
pandemic thriller “Contagion”
was
something
that
weirdly
helped me cope with my fears
surrounding the virus. Phoebe
Bridgers’s gloomy album Punish-
er fit my feeling that everything
around me was crumbling. But
the art that was most helpful to
me processing my feelings during
the early stages of the pandemic
was the video game series, “The
Last of Us.”
“The Last of Us” and its sequel
“The Last of Us: Part II” take
place in a post-apocalyptic future
in which a fungal-based virus
called Cordyceps has ravaged
the world’s population, turning
some into mushroom-controlled,
infected people that the few sur-
vivors avoid while they try to
pick up the pieces. The pandemic
aspect of the game was an obvi-
ous (albeit twisted) draw for me
going in, but what really had a sig-
nificant emotional impact on me
was the way it handled themes of
isolation and grief.
Large chunks of the first game
are spent with the player in con-
trol of just two characters, Joel
and Ellie, trekking through deso-
late cities across the United States
in an attempt to find people who
can use Ellie’s immunity to make
a cure. Occasionally they run
into other humans, but for the
most part, it’s only the two leads
and the infected who roam the
areas. The settings in the game
are often dangerously quiet, add-
ing a sense of fear of what lies
ahead, but also conjuring a sense
of loneliness that you may never
see another human again. Backed
by Gustavo Santaolalla’s longing
acoustic guitar score, the game
drives home a helpless isolation
from society that becomes pow-
erful both in the context of the
game and the outside context I
brought to it.
The game captures an ever-
growing frustration for the char-
acters and the player. Every clue
that seems like it might lead to
the people Joel and Ellie are look-
ing for — a resistance group called
the Fireflies — inevitably comes
to a dead end. In reality, this
resonated deeply with me: All I
was hearing at the time was just
to wait a little bit longer — wait
until some milestone was hit —
and we would go back to normal.
I had felt so isolated for so long,
and I got my hopes up every time
it seemed like we were approach-
ing normal again. But we never
got there. The isolation and lone-
liness only got worse. Every day
seemed more and more hopeless.
Ultimately, Joel and Ellie’s
journey to find the Fireflies ends
in bittersweet fashion. They do
not end up finding a cure, thanks
to a major decision by Joel, but
they do find a small commu-
nity where they no longer feel
so isolated. This mirrors how
the world around us has gone in
the past couple of years. We are
back to socializing with people,
and our communities have come
back together, but it still doesn’t
really feel normal. We’re still liv-
ing with the virus and many of
the precautions put in place, and
although we aren’t as isolated
anymore, it’s still hard to say
we’re past it.
The second game in the series,
while still having elements of iso-
lation like the first game, deals
far more with the theme of grief.
This progression nicely paral-
leled the way I processed the
pandemic. After dealing with
isolation for so long, there was a
devastating amount of loss still
to process. Much of that loss felt
unnecessary, and had people in
positions to do something acted
quicker or differently, perhaps
the outcome would have been
better. Similarly, “The Last of Us:
Part II” sees Ellie having to pro-
cess the unnecessary loss brought
on by Joel’s decision to not use her
to create a cure for the in-game
virus. It never felt like it needed
to be this way, but for many of us,
like Ellie, it was never our deci-
sion to make — there was nothing
we could do about it.
“The Last of Us” series will
always be a very important work
of art to me. Not only are the
games’
narratives
incredibly
engaging and emotional, but the
mid-pandemic context in which I
first played them meant they res-
onated much deeper with me. It
provided me with a nice outlet for
my feelings of isolation and grief
during the pandemic. Despite its
brutal dark tone and its apocalyp-
tic setting, I was still able to find
comfort in “The Last of Us.”
APOCALYPSES ARE POW-
ERFUL entities. They rep-
resent
full-scale
calamitous
events with the potential to
wipe out everything we know
to be familiar and true. For
artists, they’re an opportunity
to experiment with our imagi-
native endurance as human
beings, an attempt to put to
words the entropy that mani-
fests at the end of the world. In
reality, apocalyptic occurrenc-
es seem unfathomable, entirely
void of rhyme or reason and
almost always end up hitting us
when we least expect it.
Improbable as they may be,
we’re endlessly trying (and
failing) to answer the end-
all-be-all questions we know
frighteningly
little
about
(When We All Fall Asleep,
Where Do We Go? anyone?).
Although the endings appar-
ent in my own life may not be
on par with those of alien inva-
sions or natural disasters, the
scale is irrelevant in the dis-
section of the feeling itself.
However brief or insignificant
in the grand scheme of things,
endings represent a paralyz-
ing inability to accept the end
of one chapter of your life and
transition to the start of anoth-
er.
With “I Know The End,”
Phoebe Bridgers closes her
sophomore album, Punisher,
with not only a bang but also a
whimper. She plunges straight
into the depths of the murky
waters of inevitability, life after
death and how we as human
beings cope with the ending
of things big and small. Bridg-
ers watches the final scenes of
intimate relationships in her
life play out and encapsulates
her ironic refusal to revel in the
downtime, to make the most of
staying at home doing nothing
after months of longing for just
that. (Yes, her pre-quarantine
predictions were eerily spot-on
and you can do with that what
you will.)
As a cluster of details makes
up the minor endings in Bridg-
ers’s own life, we catch glimps-
es of the outside crumbling in
parallel ruin. Just as a break-
up is finalized, she knowingly
foreshadows
a
catastrophic
event on the horizon. It’s not
an if, but a matter of “when the
sirens sound.” We gradually get
a sense of the larger forces at
play here as images of a desert-
ed town reside in the back-
ground of her own awareness
that “not even the burnouts are
out here anymore.”
Ever an agent of the apoc-
alypse
at
heart,
Bridgers
acknowledges the usual sus-
pects, questioning whether an
unnamed object hovering in
the sky is a “government drone
or an alien spaceship.” Her eva-
sive response of “either way,
we’re not alone” is forebod-
ing and has an ominous rather
than comforting connotation.
It’s not so much about how the
world ends, but what we are left
with after. The specifics have
no real consequences here as
she’s far more concerned with
the ending itself — the accep-
tance of the cataclysmic, earth-
shattering event — in order to
address the perhaps even scari-
er question: what next?
Like every other standing
high school senior of the class
of 2020, I spent much of my
time post-graduation (or in my
case, post-makeshift ceremony
in the bus drive-through of my
high school) in a stasis of sorts.
I kept waiting for my mind to
catch up to my body, to dramat-
ically come to terms with the
fact that life as I knew it was
forever gone; that my future
would resemble very little of
the
long-awaited
post-high
school plans I had dreamed
of. The first few months of
the COVID-19 pandemic were
weird, but in my head, it was
still nothing more than a tem-
porary break, a pause from the
regularly scheduled program-
ming of my reality that would
soon get fixed by the forces
that be. I kept busy with school,
talked with friends on the
phone for hours and patiently
watched my prom dress gather
dust hanging from the closet
door.
By the time summer hit,
things had begun to perma-
nently set in. I was reeling from
the loss of a loved one after
months of separation from
friends and relatives, and I was
constantly anxious about start-
ing a so-called new chapter in
my life when the last one had
seemingly never ended. I was
exuding nervous energy, end-
lessly frustrated and bogged
down by a growing restlessness
and longing for a portion of my
youth that I felt was unjustifi-
ably snatched from me right as
I reached the precipice. There
was none of that closure every
Bildungsroman I had grown up
reading and watching had so
earnestly promised. No gradu-
ation ceremony, no prom, no
final school musical. No happy
ending. I knew they were
inconsequential things in the
long run, but they could only
grow in stature as I built them
up in my head instead of living
them out in reality.
Naturally, I spent far too
much of my time mourning
what a petty waste my 17th
year around the sun was. These
unresolved thoughts and feel-
ings raced around my mind
unabated by not only the rem-
nants of the senior year I did
have but the imminent pros-
pects of my freshman year of
college. The coming-of-age sto-
ries that I usually sought such
comfort in only served to fur-
ther fuel my depressive spiral-
ing and bitter resentment that
this isn’t how things were sup-
posed to be.
Listening to “I Know The
End” for the first time was like
something clicked into place.
It communicated this feeling
I couldn’t quite seem to put
into words, of grappling with
the ending of a thing you saw
coming all along, but some-
thing that still hits you with
a sudden shock all the same. I
got lost in Bridgers’s vividly-
imagined chaos, soaked in the
sadness and tried to process it
all. It’s difficult not to get fully
submerged in the song itself;
Bridgers’s
immersive
detail
in her writing only makes the
mutual catharsis of experienc-
ing her musically-actualized
apocalypse all the more viscer-
al for the listener.
For once, someone wasn’t
sugarcoating it. My own inner
melodrama could make it feel
as though the world was col-
lapsing in on itself and the neg-
ative energy I was bottling up
inside of me was desperate for
expulsion. I didn’t need some-
one to tell me it was all going
to be okay because everyone
in the world had just unani-
mously decided that it was, in
fact, not going to be okay in
the slightest. I was 17 years old
and had nothing figured out,
but I wasn’t supposed to. The
problem was that no one else
had it figured out, either — not
even the people that I thought
always did.
Although Bridgers’s apoca-
lyptic ending is certainly not
a happy one, it felt more akin
to an embodied dreamscape
than a nightmare, a cinematic
experience I projected upon
heavily within the walls of my
childhood bedroom. The first
half of the song floats along
with Wizard of Oz references
and wallows in the circum-
stances of endings itself — the
end of a tour in one verse, a
break-up in another. But her
eyes keep glancing to the hori-
zon as she iterates, “I gotta go
now / I know, I know, I know.”
In the midst of it all weighing
down on me, that same rest-
less energy buzzed about, that
urge to risk everything just for
a chance to peek over the edge
of the cliff and catch a glimpse
of what was waiting beyond.
It was this nagging desire
to pack it all up and make a
change, any change at all. What
resonated with me most was
the fact that in the midst of all
of Bridgers’s resolutions, she
seemingly had nothing figured
out. And that was where I was
at, unable to go back to the way
things were before, but with
no real way to move forward.
She so precisely captures the
sensation of feeling as though
you have nothing left to do but
stand directly in the eye of the
storm and scream it out.
THEY SAY THAT a slow death
is worse than a sudden one, that in
those last seconds when your life
flashes before your eyes, you are
at peace. A meteorite, a car crash,
a dream becoming the last place
you’re in. They tell you to picture
it as if you’re a frog placed inside a
pot with water gradually getting
hotter — the bubbles growing
exponentially bigger, until you’re
so immersed in the heat that you
no longer feel a thing. Numbed by
the stretch of time, blinded by the
vagueness with which you swam
in the water, you realize, it’s too
late.
The gamut of doomsday pre-
dictions has always resulted in
failure. I recall calling my par-
ents “one last time” on Dec. 12,
2020, from my overcrowded
boarding school dorm in Dub-
lin, Ireland. Between sobs was a
hardly intelligible “I read about
it on the internet,” while they
tried to pacify a baby in the body
of a preadolescent. The Last
Judgment, Halley’s Comet, the
evangelists, your crazy neigh-
bor, a book you read, a movie
you recently watched starring
Leonardo DiCaprio. Irony within
truth. A distant future, peering
around the corner.
But what if, instead of envi-
sioning the apocalypse as some-
thing sudden, a blink of an eye,
a last gasp, I told you the apoca-
lypse was here already. Go ahead,
turn the other cheek — it’s habit-
ual by now. Picture this: You’re
no longer a frog, but yourself, in
your college dorm. You notice
the empty box of Cheez-Its that
has been sitting between the blue
recycling and the black garbage
bin for days now. In the heat of
a snowless November, you real-
ize you neglected the stimuli that
told you that danger was com-
ing. The bliss of winters becom-
ing milder and springs becoming
warmer. The summer: infernal,
perpetual, wilting.
Why wait for a sudden death
when you can avoid death alto-
gether, by impeding the world
from looking like this, or this or
this? Science fiction, alas! Per-
haps the following seem more
conceivable: Evidence of Hades’
wrath in a wildfire in Madera
County, Calif. Remnants of what
used to be a seaside neighborhood
in Mexico Beach, Fla. ‘Highway
River’ AKA a morning commute
to Detroit with the wrong means
of transportation — boats weren’t
on offer that Friday.
Here’s the punch line: You
just have to open your eyes. Per-
haps you need something to help
you do so. I intended to make my
take on the apocalypse a simple
story about how climate change
is depicted through art and how
it has become a means to unravel
historical turning points. Unfor-
tunately, climate change is not
a turning point, but a series
of missed exits, reckless lane
switching and closed-eye speed-
ing on a wrong way street. Our
current apocalypse is, thus, not
one single event, but a myriad of
ludicrous and thoughtless tribu-
lations. Road rage at its finest,
except the ones getting mad are
the good guys, and the ones who
don’t mind are the bad guys.
In our fight with the environ-
ment, silence becomes too costly
an expense; the price of words is
weighed down by an hourglass
that is running out. In the age of
information, science, truth, tech-
nology and innovation we choose
to turn inarticulate, primate,
taciturn and ignorant. Because
no one wants to accept that if this
apocalypse wipes out the human
race, the Earth will continue on
creating new ecosystems — ones
in which there is no place for
us. They will speak of us as we
speak of the dinosaurs, and they
will recall the 21st century with
as much brevity as we word “Ice
Age.”
In the first lockdown back in
2020, while every single citizen
of Barcelona was confined to the
four walls of their home, while
life was put on hold and it felt
like the world stopped spinning,
COVID-19 meant nothing to the
millions of species we share a
planet with. A video of three wild
boars meandering in city streets,
dolphins spotted on the coasts,
virgin sights of the LA mountain
skyline… the Earth went through
rehab while we fought to find
new drugs to cure ourselves.
Even then, I found myself com-
ing back to the works of Alexis
Rockman, a New York-based
artist who has been depicting
pre- and post-human scenarios
where common sites such as Cen-
tral Park or the Brooklyn water-
front take on different meanings
with the demise of modern civi-
lization. In Manifest Destiny, a
24-foot long omen, Rockman pic-
tures the East River, 200 feet tall-
er, engulfing the Brooklyn Bridge
as jellyfish and eels inhabit the
places men used to — a decaying
scene in which mankind is now a
fable to the evolving species that
remain unfazed.
Design by Abby Schreck
Design by Jennie Vang
Design by Abby Schreck
MITCHEL GREEN
Daily Arts Writer
SERENA IRANI
Daily Arts Contributor
CECILIA DURAN
Daily Arts Writer
EMILIA FERRANTE
Senior Arts Editor
Read more at
MichiganDaily.com
Read more at
MichiganDaily.com