Joaquin Phoenix in Joker: Folie à Deux. The film brings back Joaquin Phoenix’s smear-faced Joker but adds a compatriot: Harley Quinn.
In Joker: Folie à Deux, Megalopolis and more, the sense of an isolated and fearful humanity pervades this season’s films.
The apocalypse started earlier this year.
Back in March, Dune: Part Two picked up the story of Paul Atreides, set 10,000 years after a war with artificial-intelligence beings nearly obliterated humanity. The Dune saga suggests history is cyclical, even if the details rearrange themselves. Paul’s world once again teeters on the brink, though the characters don’t know just how close to the edge they are. No matter. The precarity is plenty palpable.
Hollywood has sustained a long love affair with tales of apocalypse – look no further than the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s obsession with the end of the world. But frequently, the storytelling fits a familiar template. Humanity faces some great threat: aliens, viruses, zombies, meteors, nuclear devices, megalomaniac villains in shadowy lairs. Governments are incapable of dealing with the threat. Only some hero (a retired cop, a retired soldier, a retired superhero) can save the day. He does, and we all cheer.
The Dune saga feels different, though, and not just because Paul Atreides is not your typical popcorn-movie messiah. This world is darker; the fate of humanity is not guaranteed. The biggest threat to life is not a single clear menace, but a mysterious confluence of factors that nobody, not even the most savvy of characters, quite understands.
Here apocalypse moves away from the meaning we usually ascribe to it – mass destruction, curtains on humanity and so on – and toward its older meaning. The English word “apocalypse” comes from the Greek “apokalypsis,” which means revelation. It’s a moment of unveiling, of the hidden things becoming clear. The curtain blows aside briefly and reality becomes lucid. Apocalypse is not always world-historical. Our lives are full of personal apocalypses; our nations experience them repeatedly, often in times of great distress. We learn who we are, what we stand for and what really matters in apocalyptic times. What comes next might be dystopian, or utopian. Most likely, it will be a bit of both.
So perhaps it’s unsurprising that cinematic apocalypse, so visible everywhere, has been diversifying. (After all, the movie business is itself fast reaching an apocalyptic moment.) In March, the best picture Oscar went to Oppenheimer, a movie about how we arrive at moments of apocalypse. Soon after, Civil War – a movie set in a country in the midst of disintegrating – kicked up arguments about its politics. But its real insight is that habitually looking at trauma has changed the characters’ relationship to humanity itself, an apocalyptic realisation if there ever was one.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes tells the story of a nation (of apes) with historical amnesia, and it has driven them to the breaking point. Furiosa, set decades after the apocalypse, shows a world in tatters that ridiculous, tyrannical men nonetheless feel they must war over. Alien: Romulus presents a world in which humans are stalked by environmental threats and rage-filled alien beings, and menaced by artificial intelligence as well. A Quiet Place: Day One – perhaps the most explicitly apocalyptic of them all – asks, with a poignancy that feels born of recent history, what can sustain us when we’re isolated from one another, struggling to communicate.
None of these movies suggest salvation. In fact, like last year’s Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, all four are prequels to considerably darker films. We know what happens next, and it’s not victory. Apocalyptic movies traditionally end with a sigh of relief. These end with a held breath. Brace for impact.
So perhaps their greatest revelation, their greatest claim to apokalypsis, is that they show us our own 2024 state of mind.
Nobody seems to agree on anything anymore, except this: we’re nervous. Life feels precarious. The enemy might be AI – the big bad in the Jennifer Lopez vehicle Atlas and the latest Blumhouse chiller Afraid – or environmental collapse or political ruin or one of a half-dozen other things that hound our nightmares, but we each have our own hunches as to how this all ends, and your personal hunch reveals a great deal about who you are.
That nervousness seems to be spilling over into the fall movie calendar. There’s a frantic energy to some of the biggest films en route, the sense that everything is spinning out of control and taking the movies with it. They’re often grinning madly, stalked by a nervous, brooding spirit. You suspect a malevolent presence is hovering just out of frame.
Joker: Folie a Deux (due October 3) is, of course, the most obvious fit for that description. The first Joker posited an only slightly grimier version of our society, in which a figure who stood for nothing but chaos could become leader of a movement without really trying. A society already doused in chaos only needs a lit match to explode. The sequel brings back Joaquin Phoenix’s smear-faced Joker but adds a compatriot: Harley Quinn, played by Lady Gaga, who through him finds something to believe in. Folie a Deux refers to a delusion held by two closely associated people, which probably explains why the movie is a musical: they’re seeing a world for only the two of them, and the question is how many will join them. It’s impossible not to feel a looming apocalypse.
Something similar lurks in The Substance (September 19), a deranged dystopian film suspended between science fiction, horror and the bleakest of comedies. It takes place in a society where people are so desperate to stay young – driven by all-too-real market forces – that they’re willing to try anything, including a splitting of the self. So the once-marketable fitness guru Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), fighting back against an ageist show business, finds a way to become a “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” version of herself, at least part of the time.
There’s something of The Picture of Dorian Gray in The Substance, but without the older story’s moral teachings. It is neon and full of forced cheer, indicators of a world in which celebrity is a prison and being known for your appearance is a trap. It’s a world built only of surfaces, wholly devoid of, yes, substance. It’s brightly lit, and dark as hell.
Hellishness in a world gone horribly wrong, spinning out of control, is at the core of other fall movies, including Nosferatu, Heretic and Speak No Evil. That last one, an American remake of perhaps the most disturbing movie I’ve ever seen, is especially terrorising. You wouldn’t necessarily peg it as apocalyptic. But it taps into a time-honoured modern fear – stranger danger – in a way that feels both familiar and revelatory, a peek into our collective subconscious. What if human connection became, at every turn, sinister? What if we can no longer trust even the people who are kind to us? What if the idea of friendship has passed its sell-by date, and we are all very much alone?
I think that’s the anxiety that all these movies of the new apocalypse ultimately reveal: We are lonely. We feel a separation from one another, a psychic gap that leaves us combative and scared. We willingly suspect the worst of total strangers, whether ordinary people or celebrities, when it’s advantageous for politicians and gossip sites to stoke those flames. We form rabid connections to public figures that drive wedges in our personal lives.
One of the most talked-about movies of the year, Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis, is also apocalyptic. It is set in a version of New York City that explicitly references ancient Rome, and spends most of its run time exploring the difference between personal connection that’s merely expedient – for money, for power, for sex, for kicks – and relationships that will endure. (That theme, interestingly enough, is echoed in Gladiator II, framed as a battle for the democratic soul of Rome.) The end of Megalopolis – I won’t give it away – seems to be Coppola’s utopian answer, a fantasy of what the world could be.
But watching it earlier this year, I second-guessed the ending. I couldn’t decide if it was a sincere depiction of an ideal world after the deluge, or if it held a hidden meaning, a warning about how dystopia can masquerade as something good. In that way, I suppose, it’s a truly apocalyptic movie. That vacillation says a great deal about my own 2024 state of mind.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Alissa Wilkinson
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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