As the zombie plague worsened at a frightening rate in World War Z, one brief scene takes place on board a U.S. war ship: huge paintings obviously rescued from some museums were being stowed below, along with limited amounts of precious food, fuel, and human beings. The point of the scene is the fast paced movie is obvious: society was collapsing, so humans had to get busy saving the remnants of “civilization.” Other end of world movies provide similar scenes, but rarely with a bit of reflection on why we should save things while we desperately fight off extinction at a basic animal level.
For instance, in the spectacular Deep Impact, not only is a pitifully tiny remnant of humanity chosen to survive a comet strike by hiding deep in some caves in Missouri, carefully selected items of art from museums and private collections are also carted deep into the artificial cave systems where presumably they too will eventually be rescued to form a rebirth of humanity (though I would hope that American art like like Frederic Remington’s would make it and the Warhols and Koons would be tossed for lack of space).
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| Save the children! And the Rembrandts! |
A variation of this theme: in The Day After Tomorrow, after North America freezes up into a new ice age over night, a group of survivors huddle in the New York Public Library, burning books in an old fireplace to stay alive. In one scene, there is a debate about which books absolutely should not be burned due to their historical or cultural importance. Even as people perish, they recognize that some things are worth saving for the survivors who will eventually crawl out of the frozen buildings.
This theme pops up in many disaster movies; in 2012 and Contagion we humans are once again busy packing away artworks while the world seems to disintegrate into pre-civilizational chaos due either to floods or to a viral outbreak that moves too fast to contain. And this is not an entirely new theme. In the older (circa 1970’s) film The Omega Man, the apparently last human being is holed up in a fortified apartment building with a collection of music, books, paintings, sculptures, ruffled shirts, and so on, while the mutants outside in the dark want to put out the light of culture as well as put out the lights of the last normal human being.
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| Renaissance man decked out for post-human life |
What is art for? What are museums for? Why do we have concerts? Concert halls? Why do we make poems? Poetry readings? Shouldn’t we choose a Keats poem to save and not a Lady Gaga song if we had limited space and the walls were collapsing all around us? Why do we have libraries? Why build databases that preserve Shakespeare’s plays and Eliot’s poems? Would we save a Johnny Cash LP or a Bob Dylan if we had to choose?
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| This is not what Christianity and the arts looks like. |
Scenes in movies like this signal an interesting confusion about art. Here is a delicious irony--a blockbuster movie, loaded with special effects, entertaining us with cataclysmic scenes of human destruction, the ultimate summer entertainment, also promotes the idea of high art as an aspect of humans that must be salvaged. But it doesn’t promote it too seriously. There is no real reflection on the meaning or value of art or larger issues of civilization in these movies. It is just assumed somehow that “art” must be saved along with a human remnant.
Or even if humans will apparently disappear, then the mute witness of our best efforts at being civilized will remain as a kind of consolation (the novel Children of Men shows this beautifully and it is completely lost in the film version). These scenes say that “art is important” in some way, even central to human identity and flourishing, but they don’t seem to mean it. These scenes invoke a kind of standardized view that humans produce something important called art that should be preserved in the case that humanity closes shop, but they give no sustained attention to why art is important and worth cramming into the caves along with the women and children and scientists. And yet these scenes keep showing up as if we all somehow know that art matters and that blockbuster movies don’t matter as much.
(Interesting thought--in a self-referential bit of irony, we would see in one of these movies a close-up: if a choice has to be made, a dvd of Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru will be saved and 2012 will be thrown into the ditch.)
Something is going on here probably at unconscious, repressed depths that the filmmaker does not recognize. There is something about human activity that should not die. We are not just meat machines whose directionless evolution is finished because of cosmic chance, as happened to the dinosaurs. They were successful, highly evolved meat machines, right? They were at the top of the evolutionary scheme for their time, right? So when the accident of their extermination happened, we, i.e., the secular materialist mind, has to chalk that up to the mindlessness of randomicity, right? But when it comes to us, people, human beings who want to be human, we know with inarticulate intuitive urgency that we are not in fact merely animals whose day in the sun is over. We know that what we do as human beings--like writing plays-- is not just evolutionarily optimized behavior. Our art, which we want to save, witnesses to our more than mortal craving for ultimate being and worth.
Humans make things like poems and films and books because these things are fun. Opera is fun, there is no doubt about it. So is film. But art also signals that we want to insert ourselves into pure nature to show that we are not purely natural. Disaster movies are fun to watch, and some are better than others, but they also unwitting witness to the truth that humans are possessed by a need to transcend time even if most people don’t know why.
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| Optimized evolution |