The End: Tried So Hard and Got So Far

Greetings friends,

Here we come at last to the final movie I saw at the Virginia Film Festival. If the first installment of this series was about the past, and the second about the unstable present, then this film, and this review, are about the future. I wish that this were a more compelling future, but hey, art imitates life. As much as I wish I liked this more than I did, even its shortcomings offer a lot to chew on.

Mark Fisher once spoke of "the slow cancellation of the future," and it feels like that's been readily accelerating since 2016, and by November 5, 2024 achieved terminal velocity. We'll have to put a new future together now, and regardless of what happens I'm glad to have you with me when we do. Happy holidays, and happy new Year Zero.

I. The New Order

Joshua Oppenheimer made two of the very best films of the 21st century with The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, his 2012 and 2014 duology of documentaries about Indonesia's 1965-1966 anti-communist genocide. The former, in which the government's foot soldiers re-stage their killings in the styles of their favorite movies, is a brain-breaking examination of the psyche of mass murderers. The latter, about an optometrist whose brother was murdered in the genocide before he was born and seeks to confront the killers about their crime, is a portrait of the void left in the wake of state-sanctioned murder. Since that one-two punch of moral reckoning Oppenheimer has kept a low profile, with no other works announced or released.

That Oppenheimer had a new feature coming out, The End, was big news. It only became bigger with every word of its synopsis: a fictional narrative musical about a rich family's bunker in the post-climate-apocalypse, starring Michael Shannon and Tilda Swinton. This wasn't just left field, it left the field, taking its director into uncharted territory. Learning that this movie existed and was going to be playing at the Virginia Film Festival was the entire reason I went to Charlottesville in the first place, so much did I need to see how wild this strange new work would be.

It pains me how wild it is not. 'Tilda Swinton climate disaster musical' is a counter-intuitive proposal, and in this case the intuition was correct: Joshua Oppenheimer's skills and instincts as a documentarian work against him at every turn, taking a form that is zippy and energetic and making it grounded and restrained, a deadly two-and-a-half hours that takes forever for anything to happen, too remote from its subjects' offenses to inspire the kind of revulsion they deserve.

II. Factious Fiction

The smallness of the film is at least somewhat inherent to its premise. Several decades after the climate crisis made the Earth's surface borderline uninhabitable, the last remnants of civilization, a wealthy (and unnamed) oil oligarch family and their service staff, live in a bunker built into a salt mine deep below the surface. Mother (Tilda Swinton) spends her time with seasonal interior decoration, rearranging on the bunker walls the artistic masterpieces that are the last relics of Western civilization. Father (Michael Shannon) is writing a memoir that serves as a self-serving chronicle of humanity's fall. In this he's helped by Son (George MacKay), who was born in the bunker and raised by the family's Doctor (Lennie James), Butler (Tim McInnerny), maid (the only named character, Mary, played by Danielle Ryan), and the mother's Friend (Bronagh Gallagher), and as such has never actually met anyone. That changes one day when a Girl from the surface (Moses Ingram) finds her way into their shelter. The family takes her in, but over time she raises uncomfortable questions both implict and explicit about the family's culpability in the disaster that destroyed the world, and their hoarding of resources in its aftermath.

This is a decent foundation, and the movie's several real strengths are built on it. Although the bunker setting is limited, good use is made thereof, with the 'exteriors' filmed on location within actual German and Italian salt mines that look like a subterranean moonscape. The interiors by contrast alternate between the oil baron opulence and the storage closet functionality of the spaces afforded to Mary and the rest of the help. The actors are all strong, with George MacKay the standout; a tabula rasa who starts off as a completely unsocialized little alien and evolves scene by scene until by the end his behavior is recognizably human. There's good work being done all around, and I can understand why the movie has so far been divisive rather than panned or praised outright.

But the craft and narrative conceit are completely ill-served by the genre aspects—a fictional, narrative musical—which handicap the movie and bloat the runtime. The songs by Joshua Schmidt & Marius De Vries and Ramus Heisterberg are fine, composed an earnest piano pop style rather than showtune pastiche, but they feel almost entirely superfluous, conveying little that the dialogue hadn't already made clear. Nor is the choreography overly stylized either; the actors move and dance when they can, but lighting and sets remain as they are. The vocal performances were live-captured like seemingly every musical these days, though here it is at least stylistically consistent. It feels like what it is, a genre known for its artifice as conceived by a documentarian whose chiefest asset is his ability to let his camera capture what is in front of it with minimal interference.

This extends to the performances and story itself. Very little happens in the movie's midsection, it is all character development for characters who are more interesting as ideas than people. This again I chalk up to Oppenheimer's documentary experience, letting the subjects of the camera reveal themselves rather than directing and pulling performances out of them. This works in a documentary format, where reality does the heavy lifting in creating an 'I can't believe these people exist' incredulity in the audience, but fiction requires an authorial hand that filters out the dead time of everyday life to distill its most potent truths. Not every post-apocalyptic class dystopia featuring Tilda Swinton needs to be as bugged-out as Snowpiercer, but it needs to have that unmistakable point of view. Fictional characters can't be expected to speak for themselves, especially if their real-life analogues won't speak to you, as was the case here.

III. Unasked Questions Unanswered

Beyond filmmaking technique, there is clear thematic continuity with Joshua Oppenheimer's earlier documentaries about murderers in catastrophic denial. The End in fact rose from the ashes of another such film. In a post-screening Zoom interview Oppenheimer discussed how he had wanted to make a third Indonesian documentary, about the nation's oligarchs who profited from the genocide. The release of those first two films brought unwanted international attention to the Indonesian government, however, and Oppenheimer was no longer able to return to the country. He began researching oligarchs more broadly, and eventually learned of one particular oil baron who had built a for-real climate apocalypse bunker. On visiting it Oppenheimer was struck by the essentially "unaskable" questions the place raised about a person sinking so much money into surviving ecological collapse without doing anything in his influential position to prevent it. Rather than try to make a documentary about a subject who would never yield answers, Oppenheimer imagined a scenario where those questions would be forced to the surface.

This is not a satisfying explanation. A whole documentary could be made of 'Unaskable Questions' toward powerful figures, and indeed some exist already: Michael Moore built an entire career off the success of Roger and Me, about his inability to get the head of General Motors to sit for an interview; Errol Morris (a producer on Joshua Oppenheimer's previous films) had better luck with Donald Rumsfeld in The Unknown Known, even as he struggled to get satisfying answers from him. Jafar Panahi has spent fourteen years directing movies, starting with 2011's This is Not a Film, which he is banned from making by the Iranian government. Knowing what can be done within seemingly impossible restraints, it's baffling that Oppenheimer's response was to change direction and impose several other restraints on it instead.^[1]

The final piece of the creative puzzle, the musical aspect, was inspired by The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which he reportedly watched as a palette cleanser after the grueling emotional wringer of producing The Look of Silence. The idea was that in contrast to a glittering Golden Age Musical, he would do an ironic "Dark Ages Musical," where the songs are a function of the characters' delusion and evasions from reality. Oppenheimer has in fact done this before: the 'Hollywood musical' was one of the genres through which the murderers of The Act of Killing reinterpreted and recreated their crimes. Oppenheimer's instinct to hang back served him well there, as the songs' self-serving point of view—climaxing with the genocide's victims thanking their murderer for killing them and sending them to Heaven—was so self-evidenly grotesque that they needed no editorializing. The musical compositions of The End are elegant and tasteful, befitting the film's upper-class cast, but they also feel like Mother dutifully arranging civilization's masterpieces on the wall with no one left to appreciate them: an earnest gesture, but empty and superfluous.

Once he had the idea and a script Oppenheimer went about the long process of securing financing for this idiosyncratic and overtly political film. He did this at a time when the industry was heading in the opposite direction, consolidating around CGI-driven superhero megafranchises and legacy sequels to mothballed IP. A nonstarter for the typical investors, The End was financed by various foundations and national arts funds, with fresh infusions needed up through the end due to inflation eating up the budget. The timing of its festival roll-out, on the eve of the American presidential election, was auspicious. Oppenheimer hoped the film could serve as a warning of a future that at that point could still be averted—a hope that is itself something of a warning sign.

IV. We Arm the World

Art about the climate crisis, indeed any systemic issue, often struggles to be both accurate and narratively compelling due to the sheer scale, the diffusion of responsibility, and the indirectness of the acts and their consequences.^[2] There is no mistaking responsibility in the cause and effect of a man butchering a woman; but a man who leads an organization whose policies lead to mass suffering and death at the end of a long chain of command—he is but the biggest gear in a misery machine, allowing him to take the most credit and reap the greatest benefits from its success while obscuring his culpability in its failures between legal permissiveness and bureaucratic sprawl.

We saw this difficulty in understanding problems at scale in the past week of coverage of the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione. Social media was awash in gleefully mordant jokes and hero worship, which establishment pundits quickly denounced for its callousness. They instead wrote human interest stories about Thompson that downplayed the widespread immiseration of United's denials of coverage which Thompson perpetuated and profited from, instead focusing on his his wholesome family life and his bootstrapping rise from modest means to the halls of power.

Watching Girl confront Father about his leading role in the apocalypse in The End is like listening to two talking heads debate Mangione and Thompson's morality when we could be anatomizing their fateful confrontation ourselves. It's describing villainy rather than depicting it, especially since in The End we only hear about, never see, the climate inferno on the surface. Without the personal villainy of a violent gangster, the guilt that Father attempts to avoid is much more abstract, his internal struggle less interesting to observe. If the Thompson puff pieces tell us nothing else, it's that the interior lives of such professionally evil figures are not interesting, and in fact rather, shall we say, banal. However gilded and well-decorated, they are still cogs in the machine, and the biggest argument against the tactical success of Luigi Mangione's attack is that there is always another cog to take their place.

Which suggests that when it comes to dramatically tackling systemic problems, typical character-based psychological storytelling is not always or even often the best tool. Some of the most successful pieces to do so, such as the HBO miniseries Chernobyl, Shin Godzilla, and the work of David Simon, use a vast ensemble to demonstrate the workings of systems and their often perverse incentive structures. They open viewers' eyes to workings they had never imagined; here too Oppenheimer's previous work had already gotten there first.

V. Bodies of Work of Bodies

When The Act of Killing came out, watching it was like being dropped in another moral universe, where gangsters who butchered a million people in two years joke about their victims' suffering, and national politicians and chirpy talk show hosts coo about how efficient they were at exterminating communists. This kind of coarsened moral sensibility was already a part of American culture in 2012; Trayvon Martin had just recently been followed and killed by a self-appointed neighborhood watchman, and the following year a Florida police sargeant was fired for having employed Trayvon Martin-like targets in shooting practice. But these were broadly treated as abberations to be denounced and, more importantly, pushed out of view.

Yet only a year after the release of The Look of Silence in 2014, a demagogue descended a golden escalator and announced his run for the presidency with fear and loathing of Mexican immigrants. During his first year as president his neo-Nazi supporters converged on Charlottesville and rioted, resulting in the vehicular murder of antifascist protester Heather Heyer mere blocks from the theater where I saw The End. The following year Portland, Oregon became a staging ground for far right street violence, led by people in T-shirts that jokingly promised "Free Helicopter Rides," to do like Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and murder their enemies by throwing them out of helicopters into the sea. Two years later Kyle Rittenhouse, a 17-year-old who crossed state lines with a semi-automatic rifle and killed two people, became a folk hero on the right. So too did the participants of a mob that only months later sacked the U.S. capitol in an attempt to keep The Man on the Golden Lift in power. Four years on, as he readies his return and prepares to pardon the Capitol rioters, his Vice President-elect invited to a football game Daniel Penny, a man who had just been acquitted for choking a black homeless person to death on the subway in New York.

This once would have been unthinkable on a national level. Yet in little more than a decade the idea that murdering your neighbors is good and/or funny has become the guiding philosophy of the party that will control all three branches of the federal government. America hasn't reached the state of violence and degradation seen in Indonesia, and it's always possible we will not. Every country moves on its own trajectory. But we are much farther along than anyone should be comfortable with. It's easy to imagine a scene happening at the New York Young Republicans gala where Daniel Penny was celebrated as a model citizen to be emulated like the one The Act of Killing at the celebration of the Pancasila Youth gang: a pretty young woman asks to have her photo taken with one of the organization's aging murderers, and he obliges her. As soon as she's out of earshot he tells his compatriots that with her dyed hair she looks like a whore and imagines her giving oral sex to six men "without spilling a drop," before everyone bows their head in solemn prayer.

Joshua Oppenheimer's documentaries are full of moments like this, whiplash-inducing juxtapositions of self-righteousness and gutter chauvinism, which nothing in The End comes close to matching. If I am overly down on the movie, it is because its missed opportunities are so much greater and more numerous than most other films. Oppenheimer's previous work wasn't primarily intended as a warning, yet as a glimpse of what happens when a nation dismembers its conscience as well as its citizens, it has become terrifyingly more relevant. The End wishes to go bigger and illuminate the psychology of those who would doom all of humanity and warn us of the bleak future that awaits, but those grand expectations just make it feel all the smaller.

I am glad in this benighted era Oppenheimer got to make the film he eventually wanted; I just hope next time he goes for what grabs him in the first place. There's going to be no shortage of things we cannot believe exist, and somebody's got to capture them.