Stanley Kramer's wonderful 1959 movie about the end of the world, a la nuclear war.

The haunting strains of Waltzing Matilda keep floating through this film, ostensibly because it's about how the only safe place left in the world is Australia. However, Australia might have been chosen just so Kramer could work around this lovely tune.

Superb performances from Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire and the pre-Norman Bates Anthony Perkins. A fine bit as well by John Tate as the old admiral.

"To a blind, blind world."

A remake was done by an Australian director with an Australian cast. Stars Armand Assante, Bryan Brown, Rachel Ward and Jacqueline MacKenzie.

I would have to say that this would be my favourite movie\mini-series because of its utter uniqueness. The hero doesn't save the day when they go off to find a radiation free place, and realisticly, there is no happy ending, the human race becomes extinct.

This was the most chilling movie I have ever seen, it had me shivering from the shocking realization that this was an all too possible end - Nuclear Winter. I was glued to the TV for the past two nights, I highly reccommend it should you ever see it available on video.

Neil Young's 1974 album, finally released on CD for the first time in 2003. It's a minor masterpiece, a rather laid-back collection of solid songs that was overlooked upon its release. While running away from the stardom brought on by the success of 1972's Harvest album, Young still managed to make worthwhile music, though it was definitely more complicated and inaccessible to the reocrd-buying public.

Neil is backed on most of the record by The Stray Gators, his country-rock ensemble of the mid-1970s. There are also several guest shots-- David Crosby turns up on one track, members of The Band on several others.

Side one is the more uptempo side, though it really isn't all that fast. The most famous songs are Walk On, a simple rocker that is supposedly another dig at Lynyrd Skynyrd, and the banjo-driven ballad For The Turnstiles. The best song, however, is probably Revolution Blues, a pile-driving rocker with fantastically paranoid lyrics (Neil envisions bloody fountains, ten million dune buggies coming down the mountain, and then says: "I hear that Laurel Canyon is full of famous stars, but I hate them worse than lepers and I'll kill them in their cars"). Neil turns in some blistering guitar work, and actually manages to make the guys from The Band play as if they're excited too.

Side one concludes with Vampire Blues, a slow, creaky, nearly-straight-12-bar blues with once-again timely lyrics about the energy crisis going on at the time. Neil has another good guitar solo here, as he actually almost makes his guitar sound like an oil well.

Side two is the slower, spacier side, opening with the title cut, On The Beach, a 7-minute minor key dirge which is another highlight of the album. The lyrics seem to directly address Neil's confusion following the success of Harvest, and include the memorable line:

"Though my problems are meaningless, that don't make 'em go away..."

The record concludes with the very mellow Motion Pictures and the 9-minute gonzo folk epic Ambulance Blues, which is very good, if a little on the long side.

Also worth mentioning is the cover photo, in which Neil has strategically displayed a newspaper headline of Richard Nixon's impeachment, and the nonsensical liner notes, written by severely drug-addled sideman Rusty Kershaw.

Previous album: Time Fades Away
Next album: Tonight's The Night

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river ...

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper.

T.S. Eliot

SPOILER ALERT
I wrote about what happens in the book.

Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957) details the world's slow ruin after nuclear war. It is centered largely on Australia's southeast coast, which is being approached by a deadly miasma of nuclear fallout spawned by a brief nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere. Everything on Earth will be dead within a year.

It is a story without flourish. Shute composes this work with the same restraint one would muster when piecing together an instruction manual. However, for all its asceticism, his style contains a dislocating eloquence; you very quickly learn that Shute uses every word, describes every event with the same obsessive attention. It is the endearing beauty of a simple machine. Gradually his prose becomes a blur of tiny details, becoming more and more a heartbreaking assurance that the same unblinking stare through which you see characters barbecuing steak and starting cars you will watch them retching with radiation poisoning, eventually committing suicide to bypass the pain.

The book's role as a warning requires little explanation, as it is little more than a warning, a terse illustration of the consequences of nuclear war. Brig. General S.L.A. Marshall called it 'more terrifying than anything yet put into print.' Shute's lack of stylization allows the horrifying threat of mass holocaust to stand for itself. You can do nothing to make a nuclear weapon more menacing than it already is. In this respect Shute has accomplished the ultimate goal for any unselfish technical writer: to convey the message with the total clarity which can come only when its composer has become a piece of the background so subtle as to be invisible. You do not get the impression that the story was written; it feels as though it has coalesced from the bare aura of some far off and annihilated universe.

The story's hub is the exploratory mission of the submarine USS Scorpion through the waters of the destroyed Northern Hemisphere. It is a litany of disappointments. Once a crew member exits the ship (clad in life-support gear) and picks his way through a military base, finding only corpses and untouched everyday articles echoing the taken. Except for a howling dog, the expedition finds no evidence of life. Of course it couldn't be any other way.

The Characters

Commander Dwight Towers
Commander of the USS Scorpion, American Dwight Towers is somewhat out of place. During the nuclear war he is lucky (or unlucky) enough to be stationed in southern Australia; his family in the US has been destroyed. He will quickly strike you as an utter bore. Even in his growing love affair with Moira Davidson he conducts himself without a trace of passion, of nostalgia, of longing. He handles the loss of his family by pretending it has not happened. To Moira one can only assume he is the stability she urgently needs, shaped instead in an emotionally dead lump of a man open to her favorable interpretations. The obvious plea that can be made for him is that he is in dissociative state brought on by his loss. At any rate, he is a competent and level-headed leader.

Lieutenant Commander Peter Holmes
On the Beach's pivotal character, Peter Holmes is the Australian second in command of the USS Scorpion. As the cloud of fallout makes its way south he finds himself growing more and more distant from his wife Mary. Even before the final hysteria sets in when the fallout starts to cause sickness his attitude toward his family is rather businesslike. He feels terribly strained when his infant daughter's cries awaken him in the night. It becomes gradually more apparent that he sees his family as an inconvenience, particularly his wife, illustrated by this train of thought: these bloody women, sheltered from realities, living in a sentimental dream world of their own ... If they'd face up to things they could help a man, help him enormously. While they clung to the dream world they were just a bloody millstone round his neck (Shute 141). His obsession with productivity and progress is probably the story's greatest absurdity.

Mary Holmes
Wife of Peter, Mary Holmes is consumed totally with the maintenance of the household and the welfare of their infant daughter. She is emotionally needy and prone to hysterics, accusing Peter of plotting to take a mistress when he presents her with her government-issued nembutol tablets. Despite her shortcomings, she is one of the story's most heartfelt characters. While outwardly she refuses to acknowledge the destruction approaching her home, her preoccupation with trivially pleasing things - such as a play pen for her daughter, whose acquisition is a great strain to Peter - shows inwardly not only an acknowledgment of the danger but an obsessive drive to make the most of what time is left.

Moira Davidson
Moira Davidson seems an unlikely partner for Dwight Towers. Introduced during a party thrown by the Holmses, Moira is the prototypical party girl. She is spontaneous, cynical, and alcoholic. Her relationship with Towers has only slightly the feel of an illicit affair. She acknowledges his family more than he does, even buying presents for them on his behalf. Her tenderness seems to come from two sources: a genuine love of Dwight, and a need spawned by loneliness to have that kind of love before the end of the world. Moira Davidson is the book's saddest character.

John Osbourne
Moira Davidson's cousin and a scientist commissioned for the USS Scorpion's odyssey through the oceans of the Northern Hemisphere. Once his work is finished he indulges his lifelong love of auto racing, adopting his Ferarri for ridiculous and dangerous races on tracks rutted in the dust of the Australian desert. He becomes close friends with Dwight Towers over a shared interest of mechanical things.

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As Simulacron3 used to say on his homenode (paraphrased because what do you think I am, some kind of stalker), good writeups are like miniskirts: long enough to cover the subject, short enough to maintain interest. I also beg you the indulgence of allowing me to be pretentious enough to refer you to this.

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Sources:
Shute, Nevil. On the Beach. New York: Random. 1983.
The delicious Eliot snippet appears on the title page of my (and probably every other) edition of On the Beach. Originally it appeared in his The Hollow Men piece in his Collected Poems.