Called “the saddest movie ever made,” the 1959 classic, “On the Beach” is a character study of the last survivors of nuclear war.
Set between Melbourne, Australia and San Francisco, the film doesn’t contain a single scene of death and destruction. Re-watching it for the first time in years, I realized that it’s a metaphysical metaphor for our time. But the doom and gloom still leaves room.
The film begins with Gregory Peck, the captain of a nuclear-powered submarine (the US Navy would not agree to film on one of theirs, so a non-nuclear Australian sub was used) docking in Melbourne to the tune of Waltzing Matilda.
By the end of the movie, the lilting, repetitive bush ballad (Australia’s unofficial national anthem), which represents national themes of independence, resilience and sympathy for the underdog, has become a dirge.
After a layover in Melbourne, the last living city in the world, the Sawfish crosses the Pacific again to take readings in the high Arctic, before surfacing at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Having stood in a crows nest while crossing under the bridge, the dated but familiar scenes of the City by the Bay devoid of life are deeply haunting.
The film makes several stabs at trying to answer why humankind wiped itself out. But it blames no one, not even the scientists who developed the bomb, personified by Fred Astaire as a guilt-ridden alcoholic scientist.
His character trenchantly says, “The war started when people accepted the idiotic principle that peace could be maintained by arranging to defend themselves with weapons they couldn’t possibly use without committing suicide.” That’s true if a global nuclear war occurs, but why is humanity dying now?
In blaming no one, the movie effectively if implicitly attests to the fact that everyone is responsible to one degree or another. Politics and the system are not the basic cause of what ails us, and technology isn’t the remedy, whether through AI, geo-engineering, or whatever.
“On the Beach” is a very human depiction of how ordinary folks might face the certainty of the imminent, pointless extinction of humankind. The screenplay portrays people mostly at their best as the invisible cloud of radiation descends upon them, quietly echoing the truism “life goes on.” Until it doesn’t.
Why watch it? After all, everyone today, nearly 70 years later, is more or less aware of the threats to humanity’s survival, from nuclear proliferation to climate breakdown and the decimation of the Earth’s diversity. We live in the shadow of the “polycrisis” every day.
Rather than the subsurface fear and denial during the Cold War, sophisticated means of avoidance through innumerable forms of entertainment and rampantly self-centered activity are the leading coping mechanisms these days. With the death of America’s soul 35 years ago, what is the extent of the irradiating effects of resignation in the rest of the west, and for that matter of the world generally?
The spreading radiation of “On the Beach” is a metaphor for the spiritual deadening that’s extinguishing the spirits of peoples across the globe.
So it’s dismaying to hear how many people in the United States, as well as across the Pacific and the Atlantic, are placing their hopes in “pockets of aliveness and community,” while feeling so overwhelmed by global challenges that they evince “no attachment to humans staying here, since the Earth will still be here.”
Humans may not matter, but it took 4 billion years for life to evolve a brain with the capacity for awe and silent awareness of the wholeness of life. The universe and the Earth produced the human brain, “the pinnacle of creation,” and though we’re massively misusing it as a species, it matters.
Indeed, now that humankind has created computers in our own image, computers that are on the cusp of surpassing our vaunted cognitive abilities, can the human brain finally be free to awaken insight and understanding, and live in harmony with the Earth and each other?
That isn’t the direction we’re heading of course, but the darker the global situation and collective consciousness becomes, the more clear and urgent the light of insight becomes.
If too many individuals lose their soul, a people die. If too many peoples die, the human spirit dies. Therefore, the danger is not from what may happen to us physically in the future. The real and present danger is from what is happening to us psychologically, emotionally and spiritually in the present.
In an interconnected world where what happens in one place is instantly seen and felt through our cells (in three senses of the word), people are giving up en masse on humanity, which means giving up on themselves and life. Whether by design or default, the world has become a metaphysical concentration camp.
Defiance is not first standing against the outer economic and political system, but remaining with and thereby transcending the inner darkness of human consciousness, which we all share.
Humanity is dying because innumerable people who have the choice don’t see there is no choice but not to quit. The deadening is spreading, but it’s not too late brothers and sisters.
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