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Matthew Ryan on rehearsing the end of the world.

Article Excerpt
Cormac McCarthy The Road (Picador, 2006)

The squatters paint a mural of a Mexican girl with fifteen cans of spraypaint in a chemical swirl, she's standing in the ashes at the end of the world, four winds blowing through her hair.

So goes the song 'Four Winds' by Bright Eyes. It continues, gathering some of the disaster of the present--the Iraq war couched in the language of Revelation, old colonial genocides of North America, the global North under siege from its own inequalities, knowledge of the pressing void of the Universe, spiritual vacuity--rushing it all towards the end, the very end. Or, perhaps, towards the end that signals a beginning. Squatters paint a Mexican girl standing like Aphrodite, in ashes rather than sea foam.

There is a desperation here to have it out, to finally conclude a history that was supposed to have ended some time ago, to see what happens next. It is a millennial hope to relieve the pressure of anxiety about the end of the world by rushing to it, in art at least. In the video that accompanies 'Four Winds', the band plays at a Country and Western club. The audience is silent until they start pelting the band with garbage. Playing out the end of days in pop songs, it seems, is not part of the broader cultural scene--even in a place where John's Apocalypse might be regular reading.

Despite Bright Eyes' victim-fantasy film clip, the end of the world is very much part of popular culture and particularly so at the moment. The manifestations of it are not restricted to fundamentalist Christian product, like the Left Behind series of novels. (These are set on a post-Rapture Earth, after the elect have ascended to heaven. Titles include Glorious Appearing and Kingdom Come.) There is, of course, an established genre tradition in the end-of-the-world film. Godzilla destroyed Tokyo over and over in filmic reminders of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the same time other out-sized beasts were unleashed on US cities, warning of missiles yet to come. More recently we have seen real...

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