003: A Leaf-Green Apocalypse
The Survivalist / Into the Forest / It Comes at Night (1,938 words, 8 minutes)
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It is one of the great losses of modern life that Channel 4 only ever released one series of Eden. It’s a kind of survival-reality show mixed with a loose social experiment where twenty-three people, each selected for their different skills – army officer, life coach, veterinarian, carpenter etc. – were left on an uninhabited stretch of the Scottish coast for a year with some livestock and basic supplies. The group are given a chance to craft themselves a new society on this stretch of Atlantic bay, a clean space within which to re-model their relationship to each other and to the landscape. But, of course, they cannot leave behind the cultural frameworks they bring with them. Everyday misogyny puts down deeper roots and drives cracks in the camp. An all-male splinter group crawl off into the woods to form the ‘Valley Boys’, hunting deer and needlessly slaughtering the livestock to fuel their chosen all meat diet. Blatant homophobia is caught on camera. People’s desperate need for a scapegoat ‘other’ is shown throughout. It is a raw vision of how groups form and disintegrate.
Eden is driven both by a contemporary urge to return to the earth, to prove to ourselves that we could (if we wanted to) survive without technology’s helping hand, and a fascination with what comes after; a fascination with the idea that if you could start fresh, if all of society dropped away until it was you, those you know and the un-tilled earth beneath you, what world would you create.
Hot rock pushes up from the earth’s crust; viscous, thick liquid causing the air to dance above it. Over time, everything will cool and calm, and this flowing will settle down into stable shape. It is a hard, dark form that becomes from below. It holds no soil for plants to grow. The each-day sun leaves it too hot for life to hold on to. The wind licks and tries to shape it with each movement. But, lichen appears. Small at first, but ring-like patterns growing and spreading.
Depictions of apocalypse are our cultural death-dreams. It is likely there has always been some part of us that fantasises about what the world will be like without us, when all human activity stops and the grasses grow into forests and coasts are washed away unwitnessed. After London is one of the earliest pieces of sustained post-apocalyptic fiction that wallow in this idea. Published in the late 1800’s, Richard Jefferies’ book tells of how the population of Britain has plummeted and woodland has re-taken the landscape. Tamed cats have gone back to living in the forest, once-housetrained dogs prowl the countryside in packs and savage livestock, and the people live in splintered, feudal communities. It is at times heavy going, slow passages of description of how various species and groups of people degenerated after the fall (all clearly influenced by Darwin’s work just a few decades before). But it is a pristine example of this fascination, written in a time of rapid industrial development, of what a world would be like when we take a step back, when our progress stalls, stutters and collapses, and the woods advance again.
These ideas of an earth after civilisational collapse and how those left behind will live now seem to be reaching a fever pitch in film. Our apocalypses are sculpted by the culture-wide fears of the moment. We have had the nuclear-driven collapse of films like Planet of the Apes (since re-cast as the product of the genetic manipulation of animals), have seen the post-space age era of alien invasions. More recently we have seen a wave of climate-scaled collapses: The Day After Tomorrow, Geostorm, 2012 and so on. These three films discussed here - The Survivalist / Into the Forest / It Comes at Night - are a micro-genre of these environmentally shaped cataclysms. Each revolves around small groups of people in post-apocalyptic houses in the woods, watching society crumble from the shelter of the tree cover. They were all released within a few years of each other, one joined growth of woodland paranoia and societal fear, green-leafed fever dreams of our impending decline. Part of the appeal of making these films must be their sparseness, allowing people to engage with humanity-wide ideas in an inexpensive, confined format. The Survivalist was made for around one million pound sterling, It Comes at Night for an estimated five million US. The casts are minimal (there are very few people left after all), they are largely shot in one location and they are built around tight editing and precise scripts rather than dramatic special effects. Like the lives of their post-apocalypse farmers, everything here is necessary and effective.
The Survivalist (2015) begins with an untethered graph showing rising oil production before a population collapse, humanity’s decline in a bold red line. Out of the three films, this is the moment that most explicitly ties their apocalypses to our carbon-based economics, a cartographic depiction of what Mark Fisher called capitalism’s ‘growth fetish’. It tells us that this disaster is not some freak occurrence but the logical extension of how we currently live. But each of these films is shaped by this knowledge of where we are on that graph, our current trajectory and proximity to the precipice.
Lichen are gentle symbiosis, mutualistic systems of algae and fungi. They can survive in deep desert, arctic tundra, can live largely floating in the air. Here, it spreads over this virgin rock. The chemicals it secretes erodes, weathering the rock for those who come after. Like all life, these will pass, and their complex symbiosis will stall and stutter. As days fall away into time, these dead lichen form their own thin, meagrely accumulating soil.
It is easy to trace a kind of ‘back to the earth’ yearning in today’s culture. It is there in the fetishisation of a paleo diet, in Facebook videos of people cooking on outside fires, the return of foraging, the demand for allotments. It feels like a reaction to the omnipresence of life-aiding technology; daydreaming fantasies of people both addicted to their phone screen and sick of it.
For all their large-scale apocalyptic plots, a fundamental part of the driving tension in these films revolves around how you farm and forage; depictions of traumatised, organic lives. Each shows us mid-movie sustainability montages of gardening, foraging, log chopping. We watch Elliot Page learn to search the forest for food in probably the most realistic depiction of how young people would find their way in the woods – difficult at first, but with a growing contentment, leafing through books to discover what is resource and what is threat. In It Comes at Night (2017), this ‘The Good Life’ living is what provides a fragile bond for the two groups, Joel Edgerton’s family deciding to allow the others to join them as they have goats and chickens, their son Travis bonding with the other father over how to properly chop wood. Out of shot, you know there are cities burning and people crumbling but at moments there is a peace here under the canopy, a teasing idea that you could find your own stretch of woodland and begin to re-make a world.
This is back to the earth cinema, built around a kind of doom-necessitated resourcefulness. It offers the vicarious satisfaction of your yearning for the natural, the ability to sit and watch the modern world fall away on a screen, to assuage a guilty ecological conscience and watch someone exist organically; eating a diet that obeys the seasons, living within their own capacity and that of the landscape. The material of the world is finite, and we know this. These films are the anxiety-ridden underbelly of sustainability, the cultural products of the panic that laces through it. It is necessary to buy better, to live better, because of the scale of damage that our current choices are causing, necessary to wean ourselves off the sugar-rush gratification of material convenience. We are haunted by this awareness of ecological collapse, the breakdown in our climate a raw terror underneath everything, a polluted city river coursing below us in the dark.
This soil accumulates, generations of lichen dying and growing and decaying in their one humble space. It collects in the crevices of this dense, volcanic mass. Over time, it creeps up, marginal amount by whispered hope and, with one bird-drop, a seed lodges. Plant takes root, and grows from once-hot rock.
Naomi Klein’s concept of ‘disaster capitalism’ works around how capital takes advantages of disasters as moments in which it can enact itself with a new freedom, old structures burnt away, and position itself as the guardian of how you recover and re-build. The knowledge that our pursuit of growth and faith in the market is causing irreparable damage to our earth does not mean that either of those things will go away, that we will realise our faults and re-make our economies and societies into some green-leafed utopia. It is entirely possible that an increased faith will go into new market-driven technology to help get us out of this hole, that we will rely on the charity of billionaires to take us through this, that the powerful will get more powerful and watch everyone else fall away. That our communal toxicity will crawl through the collapse and shape whatever comes next; living on, cockroach-like, after the end.
The Survivalist revolves around a small cabin, submerged in the Irish woodland. The main figure lives there alone with bars on the windows. He opens the door each morning clinging to his shotgun, tendons tight with a quotidian terror. Following this morning ritual, he goes about his day. Sometimes he tends to his crop, sometimes very cleverly makes a kind of lamp oil from tree bark, sometimes masturbates onto plant seedlings. There is an inherent hope in a garden. And he seems to do a good job, attentively caring for this tree-encircled patch of earth, watching these small, straight lines of green leaves grow into a future. But this hope is fragile, and constantly at risk. Other people hold an absolute terror - a raw fear of contact, of flashlights emerging between the tree trunks. So much of the film is built around the fragility of trust, structured through choreographed bodies and eyes, each character so aware of the others around them, a constant tension legible in how they move around one another and watch each other. Inevitably, his tender little farm is raided. Face-hidden men come and ransack his cabin, tearing the plants out of the soil and leaving them there, rootless, to rot. It is a contrast of generative and destructive living, of what we should be doing and what we are.
The film chronicles the movement from individual as island, alone in his lapping trauma, to the fragile comfort of interdependence. At its close, we are offered two views. In one, there is some tenderness and care. A settlement is seen where people farm communally in a secure guarded space where there is a baby, where they vote. It feels like a quite clear directorial emphasis on the solace of community, a soft declaration that there is such a thing as society and there is hope in it. There is also a scene of cannibalism. Men dressed in black sit round a fire, watching the flames lick a roasting leg. There is no desire to interact with and grow from the earth, to nurture the soil and plan or build. Instead, a half-smouldered statement that we will consume the world and then each other.