Does The End bring more meaning to our existence?
What would you do if you discovered the world was coming to an end? Who would you call? Who would you spend your remaining time with? What would you do for yourself?
These are questions that we would ask ourselves if the face of The End–or at least when with fear that the world or humanity as we know it has arrived at the breaking point, ending what we’ve come to know as “normal.”
This was a common feeling many of us have felt through the last three years. Fear of nuclear warfare, the worldwide pandemic, and strong divisions between political parties in the United States have left us feeling hollow, lost, and without meaning. We all tried to find something that brought us joy in the bleakest of times–baking, cycling, yoga, walks in the park, anything that made us enjoy our existence. We all experienced this shared optimistic nihilism that if the end is near, why not enjoy the little moments?
This idea of fear and acceptance of the unknown is something I always think about when I revisit a very niche genre of film that I call the apocalyptic drama comedy film.
When I was fourteen, I watched Lorene Scafaria’s Seeking A Friend For the End of the World with my father under the presumption that this was a normal rom-com. I mean, it had Steve Carell starring in it and I must admit that young-teenage me had never seen him in a serious role before. In the end, when the screen faded to white and the credits started to roll, I asked why they would end a movie like that, then started to sob.
Although I was crying profusely, I found something beautiful in the tragic ending of that love story. The film awakened this existential crisis in me, and I realized that we all have an unknown finite amount of time before some cosmic force brings an end to it all. Of course, this ideology can be dangerous as it can lead down the path of depressive nihilism, but the film presented this hope to the pointlessness of life.
Seeking A Friend finds intimacy in the absurd reality that life could end at any random moment, and this was Scafaria’s intention behind the project. Based on her experiences of feeling “stranded” after the September 11 attacks, Scafaria discovered that the world-altering event had such an effect on human behavior and relationships.
Dodge (Carell) has spent his entire life working a job he is dissatisfied with to provide a decent life for himself and his wife, Linda (Nancy Carell). When the news arrives that a space-shuttle mission to destroy the asteroid via Armageddon-style has failed and humanity has three weeks to live, Dodge’s wife walks out on him to join the man she really loves, leaving Dodge alone and lonely.
Dodge, along with Penny (Keira Knightley), hit the road to get to their end destinations: Dodge reconciles with his father and the love of his youth, and Penny tries to fly home to her family in England. Along the way, the two balance each other out, finding joy in the absurdity of their road trip which includes beach baptisms, orgies at a chain restaurant, the delightfully nostalgic music of Herb Alpert, and the death of a man at the hands of a hitman. These are regular people finding a way to enjoy what is left of their lives.
The movie glimpses into the human condition of these apocalyptic stories. While we all want to be the badass who can survive anything thrown their way, the reality of our situation is that we don’t have much control over how life ends. Instead, we are forced to wait without hope or false optimism to hold onto as the impending doom slowly approaches. So what do you do with your limited amount of time alive? That is the essential dilemma of life.
Seeking A Friend isn’t the only apocalyptic romance that ends with the death of humanity.
The ending of Miracle Mile is just as bleak and hopeful as Harry (Anthony Edwards) and Julie (Mare Winningham) are sinking into the La Brea pits. Harry calms the hysterical Julie by telling her that they will turn into diamonds if they take a direct hit from the nuclear warhead, and Julie accepts her fate, finding comfort in Harry’s words, and the movie fades to black. It’s the acceptance that there is nothing we can do with our fate but find some sort of comfort in it.
“In some ways, this film was me exercising that [Armageddon conviction], giving other people nightmares,” De Jarnatt said to the Hollywood Reporter while reflecting on the film’s 30th anniversary. “I think when I wrote it the intention was to wake people up and, you know, change the world.” Perhaps the everyday person cannot influence the elites in power to change their ways, but the film asks us to spend our time enjoying our lives and being with those we love despite their imperfections.
Thanasis Tsimpinis’s short film, Escaping the Fragile Planet, asks us something similar. In his boy-meets-boy-in-the-end-of-the-world short, Tsimpinis uses the pink fog to point out the normality of the characters’ situation. In an interview with the New Yorker, Tsimpinis says, “I had this idea in my head, that the drama doesn’t always shave to be related to their queerness. I thought, Why not make it about the end of the world? Time is the enemy, and the pink fog is time. It’s what ends their world. What do we do with the time we have?”
The short focuses on the desire to feel alive and accept that fear is a natural emotion. As the two men dance with each other in the pink fog, embracing each other and playing as if the End did not exist highlighted a truly human desire to feel okay. We want to be free, interpret the world as we see it, and essentially give ourselves meaning when we can’t find any.
Similar to Seeking A Friend, Miracle Mile and Escaping the Fragile Planet gives the characters and the viewer knowledge about the final hours and the terror and freedom that exist in those moments. The playful melancholy seems unnatural, but the rollercoaster of emotions has a unique effect of reminding us how fragile life is, and is something to be celebrated each day. Life becomes yours to live. While this can be chaotic, having faith that people will be decent to each other in the end fills me with hope.
The endings of Miracle Mile and Seeking A Friend are controversial among critics and audiences for valid reasons. It’s not a happy ending. The doomsday that we were told about in the beginning arrives and love doesn’t save anybody. It’s real. It’s a little too real, and the knowledge of our brief lifespan and inevitable death is the perfect recipe for existential dread.
The question then is: Do these films have to end with The End?
These films tackle a nihilistic ideology that nothing matters in the end, yet they often find hope in the lack of meaning. Without a predetermined meaning of why they are alive and the infinite amount of freedom, the characters can create their own sense of meaning. Unfortunately, that newfound meaning almost feels futile when the world eventually ends.
However, that newfound meaning of life doesn’t have to feel pointless if the world doesn’t end. Everything Everywhere All at Once understands this and finds a moment of catharsis by manifesting the tension between The End and existentialism into an Everything Bagel.
The Everything Bagel is a bagel with everything on it. As Jobu Tupaki (Stephanie Hsu), the creator of the bagel, says that the bagel contains “All my hopes and dreams. My old report card, every breed of dog, every last personal ad on Craigslist, sesame, poppy seed, salt, and it collapsed in on itself because you see when you really put everything on a bagel, it becomes this. The truth. Nothing matters.”
The Everything Bagel is the ultimate expression of Jobu Tupaki’s nihilism. She believes that we are all doomed because of the cosmic imbalance created by people trying to put meaning to existence. As Jam Pascual states in their article for Scout, “The Everything Bagel represents the failing of pessimism, one that wants to posture an above-it-all cynicism and yet is horrified by the idea that life isn’t all about you…The Everything Bagel…subscribes to doom and is therefore doomed to fail.”
Jobu has convinced herself that The End is the only way to find peace in the chaos of existence. In a messed-up articulation of love, Jobu invites Evelyn (Michelle Yeoh) to enter The End with her. This is the turn in the film where Jobu is re-framed not as a villain, but as a reluctant god who wants to exit reality, extending compassion to someone who understands what she is experiencing. Yet, Evelyn finds a way to embrace The Absurd of life. Instead of accepting Jobu’s nihilistic view, Evelyn comes to understand that everything matters if nothing matters. Evelyn ends up winning in the end because she responds with love and adds to chaos with even more chaos.
Evelyn experienced multiple different lives and discovered that each choice she ever made led to different lives worthy of living. While there were mistakes along the way, Evelyn found joy in her meaningless existence. If there is joy in the meaningless, then is that something meaningless? It’s the small details of life that we dread that hold value, and we see this multiple times throughout Everything Everywhere.
Everything Everywhere achieves what Seeking A Friend and Miracle Mile attempt to do by framing The End as a choice rather than inevitable. When we are given the choice to look at The End, we understand that we get to dictate what our purpose is in a world that lacks meaning. We understand that we influence other people and that we are just as much of the universe as the stars or black holes. We are complex beings with no other purpose than to live.
In The End, these apocalyptic drama comedies ask us if we are living a good life. A “good” life makes you feel like you lived the life you wanted to live. I often think about if I am living the life I feel is best for me. Can I look back at each day and find beauty somewhere? I want to lead a life that expects nothing from me so I can fully embrace the chaotic beauty of what it means to be alive.