The Road

I'd like to say a few words about The Road (2009), by John Hillcoat, based on the novel of the same name of the stupid genius called Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men, Blood Meridian, The Crossing etc.), starring Viggo Mortensen. A Movie I only managed to see once and it has haunted me ever since.

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Because the post-apocalyptic worlds that cinema and literature have accustomed us to can sometimes be violent, dark, black and grim, but they always have hope at their base. In the lighter versions of the theme, such as alien invasion movies like Independence Day, the world rallies around cool heroes who are sure to prevent total destruction. In films with natural disasters on the maximum possible scale, such as Deep Impact or 2012, the existence of survivors promises the re-creation of human society, or perhaps a better one, as a result of the solidarity developed. In darker versions, such as Mad Max or even the computer games of the Fallout series, society is fragmented, violent and unpredictable, but definitely in a process of re-establishment.

It seems to be characteristic of the Western world, perhaps derived from its Judeo-Christian tradition, to see the end of the world not as a catastrophe, but ultimately as an opportunity for its redemption and re-creation, perhaps even as an opportunity for the establishment of a utopia, which until now it has been blocked by the "old" and can therefore be released through its destruction. Even in Tarkovsky's Stalker (a far more important film, by any measure), society and hope are there, albeit crumbling.

In The Road, hope is (almost) completely absent. There is no promise that the world can recover from what happened, which is not even specified. It could have been a nuclear holocaust, it could have been an environmental disaster, all we know is that “The clocks stopped at 1:17. A long shear of light and then a set of low vibrations.' The world of The Road is already dead, and we witness the last living creatures left roaming on it, until they too gradually disappear. Any human society is completely absent and the last acts of solidarity are a distant past ("within a year there were fires on the ridges and deranged chanting. The screams of the murdered."). It is one of the few times where chaos succeeds solidarity and not the other way around. In this Hobbesian hell, the only form of love that has survived is that of a father to his son. And this so fundamental thing is the only hope we are given.

It's as if McCarthy wants to mock all the disaster movies of the 80s and 90s that dared to treat the destruction of the world as something funny, to be seen as a blockbuster to have a good time. Even more it mocks the romanticism of (cinematic or non) stories that see destruction as a hope for introspection and self-improvement (like the cocooning that Kyriakos and various rich artists told us to do in the first lockdown, through their villas). The Road is like saying that the end of the world is no laughing matter or adventure, because this world is, after all, the only thing we have.

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