Joshua Oppenheimer is our age’s great bard of cognitive dissonance. His previous two films, “The Act of Killing” and “The Look of Silence,” are technically documentaries about the horrific Indonesian mass killings in 1965-66. But they’re more fundamentally about the extraordinary lengths to which the human mind — or, really, the human soul — is prepared to go in justifying its own coldblooded atrocity. I don’t have to tell you that this goes far beyond one historical event, and so do these two documentaries. The subjects are men who perpetrated the massacre and seemingly feel no remorse at all. Something inside them has rotted away.
They’re disturbing films, chilling the viewer to the bone. So, too, is “The End,” which when I first heard about it sounded like a particularly unlikely Oppenheimer project. The film, which he wrote with Rasmus Heisterberg, is not a documentary at all: It’s a musical, set in the nearish future, about a family living in a vast and luxurious underground bunker while the world literally burns above them. And they, it turns out, caused that apocalypse.
The man of the house was an oil mogul when the world was alive, a great defender of fossil fuels and an affectionate guardian to his family. He is named only “Father” in the press notes, and played by Michael Shannon, who sings and dances very well. His wife (Tilda Swinton, with an appropriately reedier voice) is a nervy former ballet dancer, spending her days rearranging the well-appointed rooms of their dwelling, the walls of which are decked out with the world’s greatest masterpieces. They brought them when they fled the surface, apparently.
Mother and Father have a son (George MacKay, suitably strange) who was born underground and now is in his 20s. He’s been well-educated in this bunker, even doted upon by all of these adults — his parents and the few others they allowed to come with them. His best friend is also his mother’s best friend (Bronagh Gallagher), who in the past was a great chef. They also have an affable butler (Tim McInnerny) and a grumpy doctor (Lennie James). And for decades, that’s been everyone. There’s next to no one left above.
Musicals mostly deploy songs when characters are experiencing great emotion: desire, or fear, or exhilaration. But “The End” plays with these expectations, because emotion is a tricky subject for these bunker-dwellers. Yes, they sing lyrical songs with great swelling orchestral harmonies, and sometimes they dance. (Oppenheimer wrote the lyrics, with music by Joshua Schmidt and score by Schmidt and Marius de Vries.) But in between smiles, their faces slip into mask-like panic, with eyes that are dead. Oppenheimer modulates the lighting during the scenes from cool to warm and back again, underlining the vacillating feelings they can’t acknowledge outright.
Slowly we realize that this family has spent decades assiduously shoving every emotion down except a kind of placid, gentle happiness. They apologize to one another whenever they display any hint of sadness or grief. They’ve developed mantras like “together our future is bright.” Father deals with memories of the world he destroyed by repeating that “it’s just so beautiful even to think about.” Whenever the chef is mentioned, they say, “Where would we be without her cakes?”
It’s pretty unsettling, to be honest. I found myself thinking of Hannah Arendt’s ideas about clichés and stock phrases. She writes that they have the “function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.” The obvious future in front of this family is incredibly bleak: Each of these people will die, probably long before the surface fires burn out. The likelihood that the son will eventually be left alone in this strange emptiness, surrounded by all these paintings and furnishings and books and silence, is too much to bear.
Instead, they act like the wine they drink at dinner isn’t repulsively sour. They make up stories about the past, about the father’s benevolent intentions and the grand strokes of history, and nobody’s left to contradict them. They sing about how much they take care of one another and how “we thrive in our happily ever after.” Yes, the settled order is upended when a stranger appears, a young woman (Moses Ingram). But she is carrying guilt of her own.
It has been weirdly difficult to figure out whether I liked “The End.” I certainly watched rapt, uncertain where this story could possibly go. Was it allegory? Fantasy? Satire? When the son stands atop a pile of underground dust and sings about his “right to life and liberty,” exulting that “the shining city on the hill is mine alone,” that “the future’s mine alone,” the nauseating lines have a double meaning. Or, at least double — the “shining city on the hill,” after all, is a line from the Bible, repurposed by the Puritans and John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan to refer to America. The meaning is not subtle.
Like all apocalyptic art, this movie is less a thought experiment than a statement about our present, and in this case a rather pointed one. A certain kind of cognitive dissonance accompanies simply living in the world; we do, after all, tell our children to eat their dinner because children elsewhere are starving. We make up our own legends to absolve ourselves. The more we know, the harder it can be.
“The End” is about one version of the end of the world, and about how the people who could have prevented it might feel when they get there. But to watch it is to think about yourself, at least if you have a conscience, and to ponder the sort of cognitive dissonance you live with every day. To think about the stories you depend on, the emotions you shove down. How much of that weight can a human psyche bear before it cracks? How far are we willing to go to forget who we are?
The post ‘The End’ Review: It’s All Come to This appeared first on New York Times.
