My spouse and I recently went to see Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg's most recent film, The World's End. Having been fans of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz (the swan kills me even in memory), we were looking forward to another successful parody film. What I liked best about the first two was that they managed at once to be send-ups of a genre (horror film and cop movie, respectively) while also being rather successful examples of the genre. This has always been the hallmark of good parody to me. The World's End wasn't quite the same kind of thing, however. It might be called a parody of a sci-fi film, but, particularly given the similarities between The World's End and Shaun of the Dead, that seems like a stretch. The film also wasn't as laugh-out-loud funny as the previous two. Somehow, however, I walked away from The World's End liking it the best of all three.
My musings on the film might have ended there, were in not for the fact that, the day after I saw the movie, Simon Pegg tweeted this essay by A. D. Jameson that provides a fairly involved and interesting interpretation of The World's End. The link he makes between the film and the Medieval quest narrative in many ways solved the generic confusion I felt after the movie, and his analysis of the references within The World's End to the previous films makes me think that, if the movie is a parody of anything, it's a parody of the other two films. But what most struck me in Jameson's reading was his analysis of the main character:
King begins the film a tragic character, his many flaws all apparent. Only he recalls the past as glorious. Everyone else is glad to have left it behind, and now thinks him mad—a loser unable to function in the world of 2013. King’s biggest mistake, his error, is that he never moved on, never shaped up, never got with the program—he never grew up. As such, he’s treated like a child—as he later cries, complaining about the rehab center, “They told me when to go to bed!”
The message would appear simple: This is going to be a film about learning to mature. “You can’t live in the past, Gary King!”
But what if it turns that out one can? What happens if we take Gary King seriously?
Jameson proceeds to do just this--to take Gary King seriously--and in doing so he gets at what I now realize was for me the central attraction of the film: for once, the fuck-up doesn't have to either (1) "grow up" or (2) die.
I have always liked main characters who are a little bit (sometimes a lot) bad--who are subversive in some way, unwilling to "behave" according to rules determined more by social forces than common sense or necessity. (This is probably why I've spent a good part of my academic career on Milton's Satan.) But the consistent trajectory of such characters in our culture's narratives leads them either to be destroyed by their own destruction (think Cool Hand Luke, or Milton's Satan), or to be domesticated, tamed, and reformed into someone capable of maneuvering within a pre-existing framework (think Rebel Without a Cause, SLC Punk, or, as Jameson points out, Shaun of the Dead). Both options convey the same message: deviance will not be tolerated. But in some ways the second--the reform narrative--is worse because it tends to relegate rebellion to the realm of youthful exhuberance, a phase that inevitably we all have to grow out of to take our place in a world made by others--a place within what The World's End calls "the Network." The hero can live, but rebellion must die.
There's a part of me that prefers rebels without causes. It's not that I have anything against causes: quite the contrary. But to an extent the channeling of rebellious energy into a cause is just a remaking of rebellion into palatable form. We can accept the desire to fuck shit up only if there's ultimately a goal, the promise of a new order that will arise out of ashes of the destruction. This requirement that we place on rebellion to an extent echoes the tired refrain of Occupy critics. All this youthful energy is fine and well, but where's the message?, talking heads whined: what are their goals? Leaving the side the fact that the Occupy movement did in fact have a message that the media mostly ignored, the specious demand that Occupy articulate a specific, unified message was just a way to invalidate the anger. Being pissed off that the world sucks, apparently, isn't okay: you're only be allowed to be angry about it if you have a plan to fix it. We seem incapable as a society of imagining the possibility that the appropriate response to a problem might simply to burn everything to the ground, and it seems to me that this refusal to consider such a thing even possible grows more out of fear than reason.
Which brings me to the other, closely related related feature of The World's End that I liked so much. The apocalypse in the film isn't presented, as it is almost universally in films, as the worst thing ever. Things are harder now, Andy Knightley tells us at the end, but it's really not so bad. Most of us live in fear of order collapsing: both, I think, for the very real reason that the sudden demise of the structures that govern our world would likely cause immediate physical peril--how do we feed ourselves if the world goes dark in winter?--and for the reason that the structures by which we make sense of our lives would cease to exist. I am a college professor, and have always wanted to be: what happens to me when "college professor" isn't a thing any more? There's something therefore brave in the willingness to look at the prospect of total chaos, shrug, and say, "whatever--it's not so bad." In The World's End, the world's end is a comedy, not a tragedy. And the fuck-up hero gets to keep on being a fuck-up, only now in a world where that just doesn't matter. The rules end when the Network collapses, and suddenly what looked like a weakness in Gary--his utter refusal to conform to the norms of the "grown-up" world and his childish desire to lead a band of pseudo-knights--is a strength. He's not afraid to let the world burn for the right to keep being a fuck-up, and somehow, after it burns, being a fuck-up just isn't the problem is used to be. And the world keeps turning.
None of this is to say that I think it's a good idea to live like Gary King (or Cool Hand Luke, or Milton's Satan), or that this is what the film advocates. It's a film: I don't think it's advocating anything. But I think part of the charm of the movie for me is the way it stands our fear of rule-breaking on its head. We think that, if rebellion or aimless antagonism towards social boundaries goes unchecked, the world will descend into chaos. The World's End entertains exactly that notion, but it shows us an end-result where the chaos isn't the horror show we all think it will be. It asks us to look at the fear of losing order--of losing control--that is so pervasive in our culture (as evidenced by the recent popularity of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic narratives) and laugh at it.
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