Entertainment
In Pop Culture, the End of the World Is Always Nigh
A new book by the British cultural journalist Dorian Lynskey chronicles our centuries-old obsession with doomsday scenarios.
EVERYTHING MUST GO: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, by Dorian Lynskey
When it comes to make-believe disasters, our appetite is endless; yet we’re loath to anticipate real-world disasters until it is too late.
It’s a discrepancy that Dorian Lynskey explores in “Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World,” which happened to land on my desk as wildfires were tearing through Los Angeles. Lynskey, whose previous book was a “biography” of George Orwell’s novel “1984,” charts the doomsday scenarios that have enthralled and terrified people through the centuries. But our current era also offers us an unrelenting stream of catastrophe from around the world; we can no longer find respite from actual bad news. “What is notable now is that apocalyptic angst has become a constant,” Lynskey writes. “All flow and no ebb.”
Lynskey, a British cultural journalist, has the kind of omnivorous sensibility essential for a project like this. He has immersed himself in pulpy sci-fi, gloomy poetry, the literary criticism of Susan Sontag and the Book of Revelation. He sometimes gets so excited about his cultural stockpile that he can get carried away, letting loose a barrage of examples when a bit more restraint would do; at 500 pages (endnotes included), this is a book that would have lost none of its erudition or energy had it been 25 percent shorter.
But Lynskey also happens to be a terrifically entertaining writer, with a requisite sense of gallows humor. The extremity of his subject provides plenty of absurdity to work with. Reflecting on how a Nobel Prize-winning scientist predicted that “On the Beach” (a 1959 film that takes place after a nuclear war) would be “the movie that saved the world,” he notes wryly: “It is amazing what people thought a novel or a movie could achieve.”
This hyperbolic hope springs eternal — the notion that if only a story were hair-raising enough, a complacent public could be “traumatized into awareness.” Such was the case with the atomic bomb, which made for grisly prophecies not only of the sudden carnage of a fiery blast but also of the prolonged suffering of a nuclear winter. In Max Ehrlich’s novel “The Big Eye” (1949), a scientist lies about a planetary collision “in order to scare humanity straight.” Surveying the cultural landscape, Lynskey finds no shortage of “prophylactic predictions.”
“Everything Must Go” begins with a short prologue on God and Armageddon before moving swiftly to a more secular age. Lynskey’s tour starts in earnest in 1816, after the eruption of a volcano in Southeast Asia resulted in a “year without a summer” in Europe. Lord Byron wrote the poem “Darkness,” envisioning a sunless Earth that becomes “a lump of death.” Compared with the heavenly bliss promised at the end of Revelation, Byron’s godless planet was bleak stuff indeed.
