mustinvestigate

Back at the turn of the century (a year most accurately recorded as aught-dickety-aught), I was finishing up an arts degree and had a professor who was a huge Wim Wender fan. While she would recite vast stretches of Wings of Desire verbatim, she would never let the slightest spoiler for Until the End of the World pass her lips. We simply had to experience it for ourselves, and it was a tragedy of the modern world that it was so difficult to get hold of a copy, in any format.

What re-sparked my interest was a discussion on cyberpunk that mentioned Until the End of the World as an early film in the genre, and the first act lightly qualifies. It’s set in the distant future of 1999 (8 years after the film was made), and the world is threatened by a nuclear satellite that’s losing orbit, slowly spiralling toward an unknown landing site. There are some nice touches, like the dirtiness of the urban technology – public video phones are as vandalised as pay phones of the day – and the repeating motif of proto-mobile phones and digital cameras, and light-projections of clocks showing the time all around the world.

The heroine is an impulsive, selfish moocher who’s left her wealthy lover to “find herself” in strangers’ beds around western Europe, on his dime. Initially, this was interesting – genuinely unlikeable protagonists are a rarity, and it completely changes the dynamic of watching when you are quite pleased to see the consequences of their crappy judgement come down on them. So, when she falls in with bank robbers and agrees to transport their millions into Paris, then picks up a hitchhiker who steals much of that money while she sleeps, then besottedly tracks down said hitchhiker through Europe, Russia, China, and Japan while being continually betrayed by him, with her wealthy enabling lover tagging along, literally carrying her baggage…I was happy enough to ride along, enjoying her continual and well earned unhappiness.

Sadly, it turns out she was supposed to be likeable. A vivacious free spirit every man can’t help but fall for, and be perfectly happy sharing her with other men while picking up her expenses, throwing their own lives aside without a thought. She’s not narcissistically stringing people along while she chases the one that ~~doesn’t fawn over her~~ fawns over her less, she’s the living embodiment of LOVE.

She’s the cyberpunk-lite Bella Swan.

And the hitchhiker, her male equivalent? Well, he’s actually wanted by every government in the world because he’s stolen his scientist-father’s prototype macguffin that can record images blind people can see, and he’s only running all over the world in order to record the faces of friends and family so that his sainted blind mother can see them. And his father is such a neglectful selfish Bad Daddy even Joss Whedon would roll his eyes. And his mother ends of dying of Sadness (ie, the dreaded Padme Syndrome) when the images she sees are darker and uglier than she remembers from her sighted childhood…which she only kept looking at to support her neglectful Bad Husband’s experiments, of course, so it’s also Death By Love.

Urgh.

Granted, this was the theatrical release, not the director’s cut, or the 8-hour opus Wender felt was truly needed to express himself…but the central premise that these relationships are real connections (tragically broken by dangerous images) wouldn’t change with added running time. The last two acts take place using aboriginal Australians as a quaint cultural backdrop to the important work done by a family of white people. Using people of color as objects that provide approval for white protagonists is a huge red button for me, anyway (they’re white, but they’re not western mainstream, they’re accepted by representatives of the Other, which makes them cool Others too, but without the inconveniences that come with having non-caucasian skin, you dig?), and there’s no irony or self-awareness to it here.

There’s some interesting concepts buried in the self-indulgent muck, particularly prescient in how tools meant to communicate can easily become isolating enablers of self-obsession, fooling individuals into believing there’s something mind-blowing hidden inside them, if they just stare long enough. Very Zizekian, like some of his more toilet-based theory. And the images themselves…yeah, I can see how they’d have been hypnotising in 1991, before the overuse of photoshop filters had beaten noise effects into a flat horizon of blah. Or the EMP effect of the wayward satellite being destroyed in the stratosphere before it could Fallout-ify part of the earth, leaving those in the remote area underneath without the technology that defines modern life, with no way of knowing if the rest of the world had ended.

Nonetheless, I don't recommend it. “Deeply personal” is not necessarily synonymous with “engrossing to anyone not the writer.”