Meaningless

It's been a while since we've visited Lileks World, that happy place where everything is full of Meaning and Importance and the past is and endless parade of film noir cliche. Let's dive right in...

Yes, I watched “On the Beach,” because I seem to be on an inexplicable Cold War horror-story jag. Not something I really want to indulge, but perhaps it’s good to see these movies when you’re not in the mood, when the tropes and assumptions seem bygone and archaic.

"On the Beach" - a nuclear war destroys the Northern hemisphere, and those in the South (specifically Australia) figure out how to spend their last days as the radiation cloud brings nuclear winter to the rest of the globe. It's a classic. Lileks naturally sneers at it through his enormous nostalgia-tinted glasses.

"Tropes" and "assumptions" mean practically the same thing in this context, as do "bygone" and "archaic." Does he calculate his IQ by the word or something?

“On the Beach” is a very curious movie. It’s set in Australia, after some global war that killed everyone, left San Francisco intact, and unleashed a cloud of radiation moving inexorably towards Australia, where it will finish its work.

San Francisco - undoubtedly one of the "first strike" targets in any nuclear scenario. Does he know this was based on a book?

So everyone dies. Even Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner. That’s how bad war is. It’s difficult to imagine the audience getting up after the credits, gathering their coats, and thinking well, pie? Some coffee? I’m starved! It would make everyone want to go home and sit in a room and brood and decide there’s just no bloody point, is there?

Lileks is missing the "bloody point" of the entire story: there's no point in nuclear war, but there IS a point in how we spend our last days. Was he even paying attention?

Is there? I mean really, the getting up and going to work, the things you sign, the lunch at the counter, the long slog of the afternoon, the jostling trainride home, the children in the living room who can barely eke out a hallo because they’re transfixed by the television, a few minutes with a Bond novel before bed, then the whole damned thing again.

Ah yes, he's assuming the character of a prototypical Lileks World Everyman of the Past. Everyone took the train, ate lunch at "a counter," and read James Bond novels (?). Convenient to boil down an entire era into a few trite stereotypes, isn't it?

In the movie, Australian society did not collapse. Right up to the end: carrying on. Stiff upper lip. Men in clubs drinking port, watching a gent play pool, dreadful business with this cloud, eh wot?

Ha! British people! Or... Australian people! They're all the same, I suppose.

The street scenes have no cars; everyone’s on bikes, or walking. But they’re wearing suits. They’re natty. They’re keeping up appearances as everything declines, and in the end when they go to the dispensary for the suicide pills, the ties are as tightly knotted as a Sunday morn.

End-of-the-world fuel shortage. Thus, no cars. Normally you'd think keeping it together until the end would be admirable. I guess here it's... amusing? "Square"? Seriously, what's his point?

You might think that the very idea of sudden flamboyant immolation would cause all the norms to be unraveled, almost on the spot.

... But that's not what they're threatened with. Slow, steady radiation poisoning isn't very "flamboyant."

Give everyone the possibility – nay, the probability of global annihilation, and men would look in the mirror, consider that the future either held attenuated decline or sudden abolition, and decide to hell with it.

Sure, James. Your version is so much better! Tell you what: write your version of "On The Beach" where people say "to hell with it." Wait 60 years and see if people are still reading it like they're reading Nevil Schute's novel. You can then set about improving other classic works of literature.

Since there were unspoken penalties for that, we just had wide sideburns and open-necked shirts and the invention of Casual Friday.

The hell? Is he really suggesting that the possibility of nuclear war was directly responsible for the creation of Casual Fridays at work? I'd enjoy seeing how he arrived at that conclusion.