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

