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In the Apocalypse, It’s Every Family for Itself
Post-apocalyptic movies reflect the selfishness we’re living through
The family crosses a bridge, single-file, in silence. Movies always teach us the rules of the worlds in which they take place, and we rapidly learn that in the universe of A Quiet Place, sound is peril. Mother, father, daughter, and two sons proceed, in painstaking caution, across the bridge, in a motion we understand is one of countless silent steps they have been taking since long before the film began. But when the youngest boy’s toy begins to pulse and beep, the looks of horror on his family’s faces, and his father’s failed attempt to rescue his son from the faceless hordes that descend and snatch him away, indicate a foundational trauma. The family is imperiled; the family must protect itself.
With the past six months, a near-endless interlude of disappeared childcare followed by intense panic about the back-to-school question, families like mine can sometimes feel like protagonists in a post-apocalyptic movie: A small band of survivors venturing out into a world of danger and distrust, populated by a mysterious, looming menace. As with Covid, the enemy in A Quiet Place is everywhere, invisible, and omnipresent. It can strike without warning, and even the smallest misstep can be fatal. Parents like the central couple of A Quiet Place are thrust into scenarios in which they must protect their children against the horrific unknown. Everything outside the family is a potential threat.
The family-against-all paradigm is one of the most durable in contemporary culture, justifying violent excesses like Liam Neeson’s vengeful-dad roles and Jack Bauer’s torture-happy warrior on 24. A tenet of the post-apocalyptic narrative is the tension between familiar and other, between those to protect and all those countless others who must be fended off. John Hillcoat’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2009) has Viggo Mortensen going to extremes to protect his son from the brigands and cannibals of an American Armageddon. Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) has Clive Owen’s benumbed drone belatedly embrace responsibility in the effort to protect the only pregnant woman in a world in which fertility itself has become all but extinct. In Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), perhaps the…
