On the Beach (1959)

Inadvertently, Stanley Kramer's On the Beach is marred with the same type of problems that most apocalyptic movies are plagued by: they tend to be characterized by the specific fears of the time that a viewer who watches the movie when some years have passed by will look at it with a bemused grin: oh yeah, how paranoid people were! The problem is, then, that this type of movie does not conjure up a specific fear in a way that is intelligible if you are not immersed in a specific historical situation. I've seen worse examples than On the Beach, but I must admit that there were moments when I adopted a sociological perspective (how did people think about a looming catastrophy during the first years of the cold war?), unable to watch the movie from a more open-minded point of view. But then again, the film has some merits in its attempts to show people trying to grasp what it means to live in a world about to end. It's the grief-stricken moments that I remember best, even though there were some unnecessarily sentimental scenes. Quite beautifully, the film showed people holding on to each other, grieving the lack of a common future: the film presents life as shared, rather than individual, which is quite interesting when considering how human existence is presented in other movies about the apocalypse (an exception: Last Night). This is not a film about life as mere life. The story of On the Beach is simple and grim: radioactive dust is about to put an end to life on earth. The war is over, and people live in the one place (Australia) not yet affected by this world-wide catastrophy. But everyone knows it's only a matter of time, and the story of the film is not at all an Independence Day-type of film in which heroic squadrons are Saving the Planet. This is a film where we know that there is no hope, and the story tells us about the differences in reactions to this fact. The thing that made me hesitant about the entire project was how it oscillated between a story that we were encouraged to read concretely, as a story about the apocalypse, and a level of the story in which we were to adopt a more metaphorical perspective, in which the film revolved around life being what it is: finite, fragile, but beautiful nonetheless. - - - - My major worry: do we really need the apocalypse to understand that we do not live forever and that human possibilities are not to be wasted? One may of course suggest that this reaction appears to me due to a lack of understanding or sensibility for the kind of fear that the atomic bomb actually gave rise to. Problem #2: the music. Hearing "Waltzing Mathilda" in a thousand different variations drove me almost to the brink of madness.