Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, translated into film, opened in scattered theaters this week. In the Bay Area only two houses were projecting it. After a brief, sweet opening scene of a loving couple, The Road sweeps on with some of the most thrilling scenes of the aftermath of destruction ever filmed: roaring forest fires, ash laden skies, mountain sides of dead trees, not a bird, beast or insect — until the closing minutes– alive. If, as Paul Goodman once claimed, anti-war films are pornography for pacifists, The Road is surely that for environmentalists — a place to go to enjoy all that they fear.
George Monbiot, the well known environmental dystopian, believes the novel is “the most important environmental book ever written.” (Yep.) I hate to remind George, but anti-war films, much less books, have done precious little to slow the slaughter on seven continents (well, six, since Antarctica is, so far, excluded from the killing fields.) It is also unlikely that The Road will juice the battle to save the planet.
Though neither the film, nor the book, specifies what is, or what brought on, the cataclysm, it looks from the evidence in the movie as though it has nothing to do with human agency. Late in the film the earth heaves, buckles and throws down enormous trees. This, and the smoke filled skies, forests ablaze and freezing weather would indicate a Yellowstone like super volcano, of the mammoth proportions the earth has experienced many times in its existence. The area of the ash cloud, the depth of the ash fall and the toxic gases released could well cause scenes like those of the film (and worse), or of McCarthy’s imagination. Such events however, have nothing to do, with mankind’s dangerous environmental folly and that folly, even in the worst case scenarios — say of Greenland ice sheet melting– is not predicted to cause scenes like the film presents us with. If McCarthy’s concern and the film-maker’s intent was to warn us about human caused environmental collapse, it needs to be re-imagined to something not as totalized but in its own way, locally and viciously picking winners as losers, as wrenching and fearful.
Leaving aside claims of who caused it, what really interests McCarthy is how we respond to it — and in his view, not too well at all. A mother commits suicide rather than living to try to protect her son; roving bands of marauders, starving, are on the look out for flesh, any flesh but young is better; the last two bullets in the doting father’s gun are saved for murder-suicide.
The cannibalism looms large in the telling — and not only that it is happening, but that it happens in the most cruel and bloody ways; that it is not mere necessity that drives it but that the moral order has completely collapsed — somewhat at odds with what is known about cannibalism in human history, where it is (always?) part of a rigid moral order. Eating your enemy, or part of him, is done in highly ritualized ways, not only for nutrition but to prevent his return, or to claim his strength. Not for McCarthy, Penhall (script) and Hillcoat (director.) The scenes seem lifted from teen-popular horror movies. (more…)
