Desolation On My Mind

Those who know me well are aware of my morbid predilection with movies portraying totalitarian societies or post-apocalyptic wastelands (yes, I include 1970's New York in that category), so they will not be shocked that I watched The Road (even though I found the idea of reading the book too depressing even for me) and am reading Collapse by Jared Diamond (the Silver Age successor to Steven Jay Gould).

The Road is based on the book of the same name by Cormac McCarthy, whose Southwestern novels I have read; I am not a fan of that genre. I did once read a Louis Lamour book once, but it did not compel me to pick up any others, and Western movies never grabbed me, even though I watched plenty of Paladin as a young kid. The Road, on the other hand, seemed like the bleak despairing movie I would enjoy, even if it did not seem appropriate for popcorn and a soda: the 2008 cut was not issued because it was too bleak and depressing. I suppose modern movie goers have not been inoculated with enough Ingmar Bergman. Viggo Mortenson was a good choice for the Man (as usual, someone of whom I had never heard played the juvenile lead), but the flashbacks and the tacked on feel-good ending presented problems. I suppose that the flashbacks served much the same function as the "satyr play" of a tragic trilogy, namely, to provide a brief respite to the sense of doom. The ending of the movie was marginally hopeful, which is the best one could expect from such a depressing setting. The inclusion of certain analogues to the Boy makes some sense, but the other companion of the adults at the end stretched credulity.

After I had finished Memoirs of a Geisha, I started reading Jared Diamond's Collapse. Reading it is a bit like reading The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant if Lord Foul had won: every time you think the book could not become more depressing, it exceeds itself (someone actually lived on Henderson?). The general results of ecological abuse seems to be same: ecological genocide, a barren wasteland, and near or total extinction of the human population. The horrifying aspect of these tales is that these were not people who were using intentionally destructive practices and just didn't care, but rather people who were just trying to feed themselves and their families.

I've never been to Iceland or Easter Island, but I have seen the effects of overpopulation, deforestation, and overgrazing firsthand in Malta, right before it surrendered its currency to the Euro. Malta is not a wasteland (it's actually quite lovely), and was never isolated in the way of Easter Island or Greenland, but it is a far cry from the "low wooded isle" with streams it presumably was in the days of Odysseus. In addition to the usual rainwater problems of a Mediterranean island in a dry climate, the remaining topsoil is so precious that it is recycled from site to site, vexing the archaeologists, and there are no permanent lakes or rivers.