A Song at the End of the World
By Chris Shields
The End
Dir. Joshua Oppenheimer, U.S., NEON
Though they may seem worlds apart, Joshua Oppenheimer’s groundbreaking and incendiary documentary The Act of Killing and his new film The End, a musical with stars and lavish production design, both do the unthinkable: they grant viewers access to the minds and concerns of killers, perhaps even engendering a degree of sympathy for them. In The Act of Killing, the killers, far right Indonesian gangsters directed to recreate atrocities they perpetrated during the massacres of the 1960s, are of the hands-on variety, soldiers of genocide who look their victims in the eyes as they tortured and ultimately executed them. The killers in The End are more hands-off: an oil company executive (Michael Shannon) and his beloved family (Tilda Swinton and George MacKay). These killers are seldom forced to face their victims, and because of this, they’re free to live in a sanitized world of rationalizations and moral fantasies, remaining comfortable even as the earth and its inhabitants are dying just outside their doors.
The End takes place around 20 years after an oil tycoon, his wife, son, and servants have taken refuge in an underground bunker fleeing climate catastrophe. Hidden in an icy cave, their home is a small oasis filled with Renoir paintings, fine food, safety drills, and unrelenting odes to family togetherness. The film’s first song reveals the face beneath this mask of warmth as the group sings about the dangers once posed to them by strangers and how they are now safe in their lair. The family’s son, born in the bunker, is writing a book on his father’s life—a grotesque work of hagiographic fluff. Mother, a former ballerina who danced at the Bolshoi, neurotically redecorates from her cache of masterworks, her college friend (Bronagh Gallagher) prepares gourmet meals, a doctor (Lennie James) attends to everyone’s health needs, Father’s butler (Tim McInnerny) gleefully serves, and Jr. works on a large-scale model depicting important historical events. The weeks and months are broken up by a slavish observation of holidays. Their world feels something like a terrarium carefully engineered to preserve WASP life.
One day an outsider, a climate refugee (Moses Ingram), penetrates the sanctity of their home. This young woman has somehow made her way in, and the group’s first instinct is to send her away or kill her. Eventually, cooler heads prevail, and she is allowed to stay. A romance begins between the family’s son and the newcomer. Tensions mount within the group, and long held secrets come to light, and as a new perspective must be integrated, the centrality of their family story and their understanding of the world is thrown off balance.
There is a matter-of-factness to Oppenheimer’s scenario because, yes, it’s true, billionaires and corporate elites are planning to leave their unfortunate victims behind as the planet becomes uninhabitable. There’s a “deal with it” ghastliness to this conceit, and yet the director’s approach is exceptionally graceful and intelligent. The apocalypse that furnishes the film’s background is an unnatural disaster made by human hands, and this grim fact dictates The End’s unexpectedly exhilarating formal approach. Like in The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer integrates a novel cinematic mode into his film to express his characters’ subjectivities. This time the chilling recreations of his 2012 documentary are replaced with songs. The musical is classically seen as the ultimate form of cinematic escapism. By shirking the limits of realism and replacing everyday address/communication with song and dance, the movie musical is able to convey feelings and experiences seemingly foreclosed to more naturalistic modes. The result, more often than not, is exuberant and romantic. In short, it’s thought of as a hopeful genre despite some notable works that subvert its formal and thematic expectations (such as Tsai Ming-liang’s The Hole or Dancer in the Dark). The End, with its unflinchingly bleak scenario filled with violent emotions and personal tragedies, both subverts and fulfills these expectations.
The effect is somewhere between the traditional movie musical, wherein songs serve as emotional and narrative supplements, and Demy’s somber, minor note The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, wherein lyrics function conversationally—at once tender and banal—never breaking completely with realism. While the songs in The End do function in much the same way as those in a traditional movie musical, the tone and tenor of how they’re performed and what they convey never completely breaks with realism, even when set pieces and choreography enter the realm of the symbolic or fantastic. Rather than coming across as a gimmicky riff on an often lampooned genre, The End feels intensely original in style and substance.
The songs, by Joshua Schmidt whose stage musical Adding Machine explored equally dark territory, are by turns emotionally devastating and gentle. Many of the lyrics feel minimal and impressionistic, but the spaces they leave allow the performers to fill them with an expansive range of mysterious emotions. Some songs are more pointed, however, like when Swinton sings to the family she abandoned when she entered the bunker, her face reflected endlessly in the mirror of her darkened boudoir. Swinton’s character has blocked out her past, and we watch (and hear) it come painfully back in her song, as she reckons with the people she’s left behind. Shannon’s character is magnetic and complex, imbuing the Ward Cleaver archetype of the all-American dad with the banality of evil. He strolls about in his L.L.Bean finest, pipe in hand, dispensing homespun wisdom. At moments, he is the picture of warmth and understanding. Suddenly, though, we see glimmers of the destruction, both emotional and material, he is truly capable of. He might also have the film’s best song, a high register, lilting ode to love that is both vague and intensely moving in its incompleteness. As Shannon sings, “it’s so beautiful even to think about,” it’s the culminating expression of the genuine feeling and the emotional stuntedness of his character.
It’s obvious that the characters in the film aren’t always telling the truth, either about what they’ve done or how they feel. Swinton lies about having danced at the Bolshoi, and Shannon about his humanitarian concern for the people his extractive business has doomed. Everyone has a secret because they believe the world they’ve created together beneath the ice is far too fragile to support the weight of real, difficult emotions. This is a major element of Oppeheimer’s film and one of its most fascinating ideas. Whoever controls the truth holds the power. In The End it’s Shannon, and to a lesser extent, Swinton. Their doe-eyed, fabricated Norman Rockwell world functions only on their terms. As perspectives and ideas from without slowly erode their monolithic authority within the situation grows volatile. All the lies, traditions, and rationalizations are safeguarding mom, dad, and baby from one fundamental question: is it all worth it? It’s both a material and existential question and the one that makes The End really sting.
The End is a vicious takedown of nativist paranoia masquerading as concerns about safety, and cultural and economic conservatism couched as family values. In a world full of Ring security cameras set up to capture people stealing Amazon packages, The End, is an excoriating vision of a family willing to watch the earth burn—as long as they have their birthday cakes and family albums.