On Friday night, I saw the movie Miracle Mile at the Doomsday Festival. The film was as much a meditation on the 1980s and Los Angeles as on the end times through the deployment of nuclear bombs, but that the film was dated, with a bit of campiness accompanying its attempts at creating a sense of apocalyptic urgency, made it much more enjoyable to watch, and in a way, made it easier to see the same sort of thinking alive in the present moment as for Angelenos gripped in terror of impending nuclear destruction.
The film begins with a rather protracted romance story, of a man finally meeting the woman of his dreams. He oversleeps on their first date, and by the time he finally wakes up, it is 3:45 am; he heads to the diner where they were to meet, but she is gone. He attempts to call her on a pay phone, and after placing his call, the pay phone rings. It is a someone in a “nuclear silo” in North Dakota calling to warn of impending doom. And so the film is set: the man will attempt to save himself and his new found love, but ultimately, all of his attempts are frustrated and fail; in the process, he induces a mass panic in the city, such that by the time the one hour is up for the bombs to go off, the city is filled with looting hordes attempting any means at escape. In the final scene, the two main characters are in a helicopter that cannot get off the ground, crashes into a tar pit, where the man says that maybe they will just be diamonds some day—then the flash goes off and it is over.
Perhaps what I liked best about this film, aside from the great haircuts and city shots that felt a little reminiscent of a certain 1980s urban decay narrative of the sort found in Adventures in Babysitting, was that there was no chance at redemption. The bombs were already set off, the city, in fact the world, was doomed, and there was no best hope for survival. Not only could one hot hope to survive, but the film did not even entertain such a thought—we know that the tar pit, and the big flash of light, are the end for this world. There is a certain heavy-handedness to it all (especially a recurring dinosaur motif) but that feels appropriate.
Although nuclear destruction is not the vehicle of choice for apocalyptic destruction in our current moment, certainly the same sort of non-redemptive narrative can also be found in modern concepts which are often cloaked in the narrative of apocalypse. I am drawn, in particular, to critiques of American hegemony, the modern American economy, and our collective status in the world, as a site active in language of apocalypse. Oftentimes, discussions of America’s status, and future, seem to be dominated by a certain hopelessness, that we will lose our status as superpower, will not regain our economic dominance, and inevitably have a future not as bright as our past. Perhaps it is a bit lighter in character than nuclear destruction, but it is nevertheless a narrative of hopelessness, of a downfall, and one brought about by our own inadequacy, in many ways. Apocalypse does not always take the form of the big flash of light—it may be a world ending in another way, and our historical moment, just like that of the mullet-ridden ‘80s, has plenty of its own active sites and mechanisms for apocalypse.
