{"id":60983,"date":"2024-03-26T17:56:45","date_gmt":"2024-03-26T17:56:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/?p=60983"},"modified":"2024-06-21T17:45:29","modified_gmt":"2024-06-21T16:45:29","slug":"the-end-of-the-beginning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themintmagazine.com\/the-end-of-the-beginning\/","title":{"rendered":"The End of the beginning"},"content":{"rendered":"

As the climate crisis has escalated over the past decade, there has been a conspicuous absence of films that mirror the predicament we are faced with. Climate philosopher and activist Rupert Read<\/strong> reviews the recent mainstream release of a film that attempts to portray what it feels like to live among the ruins of a civilisation we take for granted.<\/em><\/p>\n

A Review of THE END WE START FROM<\/em><\/p>\n

The opening scene of The End We Start From begins with a heavily pregnant woman (played by Jodie Comer) readying herself for a bath. But the scene is filmed from a\u00a0unusual angle: from within the tub. As it fills, the viewer\u2019s eye becomes flooded out by the rising waters. This unsettling experience foreshadows what is shortly to come: as her waters break, floodwaters burst into the house, signalling the chaos of an unprecedented climate disaster.<\/p>\n

The End We Start From<\/em>\u00a0is set in a near-future in which London goes underwater, a vast deluge following close upon a long drought. The imagined flood is of a different order of magnitude from anything we have yet seen; due to extreme, prolonged rainfall volumes combined with something like the failure of the Thames flood barrier. It is\u00a0is a beautifully-observed, poetic drama, whose contours are shaped by a realistic appraisal of the kind of future that will likely face us all \u2013 unless we change course.<\/p>\n

And this is why I think this movie matters. Because to date, climate collapse has been almost entirely a submerged topic in mainstream culture. Present only by way of its massive absence. But here it is, finally surfacing, in a poignant and perspicuous form as\u00a0a mainstream cinematic drama; and so potentially it could have a very different impact from previous literary or documentary attempts to bring attention to the climate-induced risks we increasingly face.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

There has never previously been a quality, mass-market film that focuses in a believable manner on this challenge.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Nevertheless, we all know that climate is a wicked problem to face\u00a0\u2013\u00a0a challengingly abstract and slow-burning collective-action predicament. What is encouraging in this film is how it tries to rise to the challenge, by embodying the predicament and making it visceral. \"\"<\/p>\n

There has never previously been a quality, mass-market film that focuses in a believable manner on this challenge \u2013 and the kinds of impacts we should fear, and the different possible responses to them. We are awash with disaster-movies, post-apocalyptic scenarios of every stripe; but until now no-one had succeeded in making a film directly enabling an average citizen imaginatively to inhabit our likely climate-impacted future.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t Look up,\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0The Road<\/em>\u00a0were both brilliant; but they worked as metaphors, rather than directly focussing on climate disaster.\u00a0The Day After Tomorrow<\/em> was the 2004 Roland Emmerich wannabe-blockbuster that first brought climate to the big screen. But it was just entertainment. And Franny Armstrong\u2019s dramadoc which imagines Pete Postlethwaite, 50 years hence, asking why we didn\u2019t prevent climate nemesis when we had the chance, was fine and memorable, but not mass market.<\/p>\n

A critical dimension of how this is different is that, unlike\u00a0The Age of Stupid<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0Don\u2019t Look Up<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0The Road\u00a0<\/em>or\u00a0Melancholia<\/em>, this film is not just another depiction of dystopia. The film\u2019s production notes stress that it seeks to be hard-headedly realistic about what may be coming, but\u00a0not\u00a0dystopian.\u00a0The End We Start from<\/em> shows us how we might, perhaps, get through the tough stuff that is coming down the track at us, in a manner we can be proud of \u2013 what I call a\u00a0 \u201cthrutopia<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

How so?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Comer\u2019s character, like everyone else in the film, except for her baby, has no name; in the credits, she is identified simply as Mother. She credibly succeeds in manifesting a sense of positive possibility for the humans around her and her tiny child, even in the midst of truly awful events. The film does not shy away from showing the more negative possibilities under the pressure of mass homelessness and food shortages, including an armed raid at a displaced-people\u2019s camp.<\/p>\n

The film thus poses thoughtfully, the concern that perhaps true community does not mean withdrawal. It means reconnection.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet the mother through whose eyes we get to see these events, unlike some of the other main characters in the film, never loses her faith that it is possible for people to pull together under such strains, rather than being torn apart, or trying to escape. This is expressed most powerfully in her refusal to get drawn into a seemingly idyllic alternative life in a commune on a Scottish island among a group of people who have decided quite explicitly to\u00a0Leave The World Behind<\/em><\/a> (the title of another fine recent film focussing on the crises of our times). Instead, she takes herself and her baby back\u00a0into\u00a0a devastated London to rebuild their life and home there.<\/p>\n

The film thus poses thoughtfully, the concern that perhaps true community does not mean withdrawal. It means reconnection. Despite everything, Comer\u2019s character turns back to the world. To what end? To stay with the trouble and help to build a future in it for her child, along with her neighbours. But don\u2019t go to this film expecting to be shown practical stratagems for neighbourhood semi-self-sufficiency; this is poetry, not permaculture.<\/p>\n

The true meaning of a parent\u2019s love for their children has to encompass the whole human future on this blue jewel in space.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So the film\u2019s narrative arc takes the mother and child out from London, to various refugia culminating in the Scottish idyll, but then back to a permanently-changed London. This is a quotidian heroine\u2019s journey. A journey of care writ small and large.<\/p>\n

In my book,\u00a0Parents for a future: How loving our children can prevent climate collapse<\/em>, I set out how the true meaning of a parent\u2019s love for their children has to encompass the whole human future on this blue jewel in space. And that\u00a0requires those parents to look after the Earth without which they would not exist. The emotions that wash without let-up through\u00a0The End We Start From \u2013<\/em>\u00a0chiefly fear, grief and love \u2013\u00a0can all be seen, in the end, to stem from love. We fear for the future of the people and places we love; as we grieve for what\/who we loved that has been ripped from us. Fear and grief,\u00a0I would argue<\/a>, are forms of love, through a glass darkly.<\/p>\n

As I watched the film, I felt vulnerable; vulnerable to loss. I and those I love most live in a part of England (East Anglia) that is particularly vulnerable to flooding. This feeling of vulnerability is good \u2013 in that it is a reminder of what matters \u2013 and also a prompt to seek to build\u00a0transformative resilience<\/a>\u00a0against the coming climate disasters.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And part of the reason why it has proven\u00a0possible,\u00a0at last, to make and mass-market a film like this is that awareness\u00a0is\u00a0sinking in. I remember vividly experiencing the 40\u00baC heat two summers ago on our tiny holding, and the way it felt like a movie. It was almost unbelievable that everything that folks like myself had been trying to warn of was actually coming to pass. That we really are at the beginning of a process that will come to saturate our existence, a process of decline and struggle.<\/p>\n

The threat we face is\u00a0existential<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 in the sense beloved of Sartre and Camus and de Beauvoir. But it makes meaning, and, as\u00a0Nietzsche expounded<\/a>, human beings would always rather have meaning than its absence. So while the meaning is welcome it remains that we are under a collective potential sentence of death.<\/p>\n

The very, bitter, confirming reality of climate extremity and climate disaster carries within it an uncanny, queasy veneer of felt unreality. Something deep in me, something that is all-too-aware of the likely inadequacy of our flesh in the face of the tests it is going to be put to now, has not infrequently\u00a0rebelled\u00a0against even accepting the truth of where we are at. (There might even be a clue here to the mechanism of some climate-denial.)<\/p>\n

The vulnerability I feel hardly compares to the apogee of human vulnerability: a baby. And yet the wonderful thing about Comer\u2019s baby is how effortlessly he copes with most of what gets thrown at him and his mother. Because, simply, he has known nothing else. There is a lesson in such natural stoicism, shown by the most vulnerable of all.<\/p>\n

Of course, the kind of more-than-disaster experienced by mother and child here is increasingly experienced in real life by people subject to severe climate dislocation \u2013 but mainly in countries other than the Anglosphere. Think Bangladesh, or\u00a0parts of Indonesia<\/a>. At the very end of this movie, the following words, which you\u2019ll have seen many times before, appear on the screen: \u2018The story, characters and events depicted in this motion picture are fictitious. Any similarity to places, buildings, actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is purely coincidental.\u2019 Yes \u2013 and no. Of course this is fiction \u2013 and yet, not only do we witness here a possible future, but it\u2019s here already for many less fortunate than ourselves, who are suffering badly from climate breakdown.<\/p>\n

First it came for the low-lying island states, and I did not speak out, because I didn\u2019t live there. Then it came for the \u2018poor\u2019 countries of the world, and I did not speak out, because I didn\u2019t live there either. Then it came for me \u2013 and there was no-one left to speak for me\u2026<\/p>\n

Will we let our future unfold in that way? Or will we learn a lesson from the mother and child embodied with tremendous compassion in this film? Will we move to prevent, mitigate and prepare for what will otherwise wash much too much away?<\/p>\n

The portents for our future look most grim. The warnings issued by a number of us, from the IPCC reports to the Dark Mountain Manifesto, look prophetic. Collapse, rather than merely more and greater disasters, looks to be on the cards. But the point is that we just don\u2019t\u00a0know.\u00a0Knowingness is a disease<\/a>\u00a0of our civilisation. If those of us who have our eyes firmly on the likelihood of eco-driven societal collapse pretend that we know how the future will unfold, then we are repeating a key trope of the very civilisation we are calling out. What I appreciate about\u00a0The End We Start From<\/em>\u00a0is how it puts the questions, and stages the debates, rather than pretending to have absolute answers.<\/p>\n

In the film, what came to an end was the complacent assumption that climate mega-disasters only happen to someone else, preferably in faraway countries of which we know little.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It is not until the film\u2019s ending that the film\u2019s\u00a0title\u00a0actually appears on the screen at all \u2013 it flashes up as Comer\u2019s little boy takes his very first steps. Thus the opening credits of the film actually become complete only as the film reaches its conclusion. It\u2019s a neat way of implying that new beginnings are sometimes only possible when something major has been allowed to end.<\/p>\n

In the film, what came to an end was the complacent assumption that climate mega-disasters only happen to someone else, preferably in faraway countries of which we know little. As I write, in early 2024, we are in the early stages of what will likely prove to be the most extreme El Nino<\/em> climate-event ever \u2014 so far. Prepare this year to see temperature records worldwide broken even more extremely than they were in 2023 and for worse storms than ever before. And when I say prepare, I mean that quite literally.<\/p>\n

But it is worth distinguishing between preparation that is fixated on personal stockpiling on the one hand, and preparing that includes cultural and existential\u00a0deep adaptation<\/a>\u00a0on the other.<\/p>\n

The mother in the movie rejects the \u201csafe\u201d Scottish island community that she has escaped to because its deliberate turning away from, and virtual denial of,\u00a0 the outside world doesn\u2019t amount to an adjusted, viable way of being for the connected creatures that we are. One of the best things moreover about undertaking household-level and even community-level prepping is the discovery of how very difficult it is to do, in an actually robust and effective manner. So it returns one to contemplating what is to be done at more systemic levels, recognising and retaining the deep ethical and practical ties we have both within\u00a0and beyond\u00a0the hyper-local. And thus one readies for the coming struggle.<\/p>\n

Most high-level attention to climate, to date, has been little more than shadow-boxing. Perhaps now, with the ongoing partial reversal (since 2020) of \u201cglobal dimming\u201d to reveal the approach of the hidden burden of global overheating, the phoney war may finally be coming to an end. Our climate has been drastically destabilised, and people are going to see it in 2024 as never before. Thus\u00a0The End We Start From<\/em>\u00a0can be seen as a harbinger and an opening of floodgates.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Will we wait until\u00a0after\u00a0our great cities have flooded, before we start taking action adequately?\u00a0Beginning from the end of normalcy recognised in this film and clearly indicated by the recent leap in global temperatures, we badly need to choose a new future together. To make it real in our lives. Whether that means deep adaptation,\u00a0transformative adaptation<\/a>, or something else besides.<\/p>\n

This film may have come our way only just in time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Originally published by The Dark Mountain<\/em> project here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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