White-Out: Apocalyptic Revision and the Erotics of Ending.

Wendy Pearson, English Department, University of Wollongong

wgp01@uow.edu.au

Jean Baudrillard may refer to fin-de-millennium western culture as the "illusion of the end," while literary critics write trenchantly of the various cautionary and critical functions of the post-apocalyptic genre. What Warren Wagar once termed "terminal visions," after H.G. Wells’ frighteningly bleak vision of the beach at the end of the world, reached their literary peak in the fifties with the publication, for example, of Neville Shute’s famous apocalyptic novel, On the Beach. For the most part, however, post-apocalypse has been predominant, exercising the imagination of twentieth-century western culture with the possibility of both ending and beginning.

Within science fiction, the genre most notoriously concerned with both apocalypse and post-apocalypse, there has been, as noted by critic Veronica Hollinger, a general turn from the apocalyptic vision, a kind of "postmodern ennui with sf’s long tradition of radical endings-and-beginnings." Apocalypse, when it appealed to us at all, was a matter of Hollywood hype, of movies like Deep Impact and Armageddon. The world was unlikely to end, but if it did, it had to go out with as much noise and hoopla as possible. Anything else was, well, boring.

What can we say then about a movie in which the world ends neither with a bang nor a whimper? In Don McKellar’s 1998 movie Last Night, the world ends. That’s it. McKellar’s film constitutes a significant revisioning of the apocalyptic genre, as if the old plot has been whited-out, just as the world is whited-out in the film. The new apocalypse calls for an alternative reading, a focus less on the societal than on the personal, less on the cautionary than on the celebratory. This paper will approach a reading of the film as at least potentially a call for alternative approaches to the end, for what might best be labelled an erotics of ending, a focus on the pleasures, as well as the perils, of apocalypse.

Biographical information:

Wendy Pearson is currently a PhD student at the University of Wollongong, where she is working on an examination of queer interventions into discourses of Canadian nationalism. Prior to arriving in Australia, she taught for fifteen years in Cultural Studies and English at Trent University in Canada. Her article, "Alien Cryptographies: The View from Queer," won the Science Fiction Research Association’s Pioneer Award for the published article that has done the most to enhance the field of science fiction research in 1999.