Set the right tone.
This edition of the Newsletter would have, under other circumstances, concerned the thrilling subject of Cold War apocalypse movies. I am told, however, that this would start the year off on the wrong foot. Writing, as I am, on New Year’s Day, I am as concerned as anyone else with setting the right tone for 2022. That is, after all, the purpose of the holiday.
New Year’s Eve is fine, even if it is the fifth holiday (if we are to go by State of Michigan holidays) in the space of barely more than a month. (“Ten paid holidays!” they say when you fill out your HR paperwork on day one, neglecting to remind you that most of them are lumped mercilessly together.) By January 1, though, there is no more pleasure. The merry holiday stupor has faded away and, in the cold, gray, diffuse light of day, the floor covered in pine needles and the gingerbread house occupying valuable counter space lose their romance.
For a person as superstitious and paranoid as I am, there is no holiday more exhausting than New Year’s Day. Not only is it the equivalent of being force-fed a holiday, but the pressure to set the right tone for the year is terrible.
The year begins at midnight with celebrations and fireworks. Arbitrary as calendar years might be, there is no denying that it is best not to spoil something when it starts off the right way. Why introduce the trauma of the slow apocalypse or our own small difficulties to the new year a moment before we need to? The trouble, of course, is figuring out how to go about this.
At first, the obvious solution is to have everyone wrap themselves in bubble wrap and sit very quietly for as long as possible as soon as “Auld Lang Syne” peters out. Closer consideration, however, reveals that this solution would still start the year off on a note of slothfulness and overuse of plastics — decidedly not on the right foot.
Some people use New Year’s Day as a time for quiet reflection on the past and goal-setting for the future. (Generally, there is significant overlap between this group and people whose idea of fun involves wearing synthetic clothes and running in circles around the reservoir in the park.) I find quiet reflection to be terribly boring and the creation of yearly plans to be Stalinistic, and I refuse to be party to either one.
The more practical approach to New Year’s Day — my preferred method — is to sit about very nervously and try to avoid inciting the wrath of the new year.
This year, I slept in for as long as possible and then ate a single pancake (my regular Saturday tradition) and listened to the Vienna Neujahrskonzert (the Austrians’ annual tradition) on the radio.
When it comes to strict, risk-averse traditions, nobody does it like the Austrians. I find this comforting. The program, including its three traditional and non-negotiable encores, comes in at exactly two hours and consists almost entirely of Strauss waltzes. There is no sense in taking risks and upsetting people with anything else this early in the year.
I have left the house only once today to dispose of the Christmas tree. As a child, we were lucky if the tree made it past lunch on Christmas Day before my mother cast it out onto the curb. This year, I kept mine exactly until the conclusion of the Blue Danube Waltz on the radio.
Nothing gets a person out of the holiday spirit faster than walking down the East River in the rain, clutching a Christmas tree with one sap-covered hand. The Department of Sanitation will collect trees left on the curb, but it feels particularly grim to leave a tree next to a heap of garbage bags. The alternative is an event called Mulchfest fifteen blocks away.
Mulchfest is allegedly at its most festive next week, during “Chipping Weekend.” Those who wait until Chipping Weekend get to take home free mulch for their own gardening, though this is not a major incentive in a neighborhood where the rare person who has a garden very likely employs a professional to deal in matters of mulch. Today, the festivities consisted only of a heap of abandoned trees in the park next to a banner reading “Thank you very mulch” and a few other dreary people dragging in their trees.
This is how things go on this, the Sunday of holidays. It is technically a day off for celebration, but there is the nagging feeling that the fun part is finished and the long, dark tunnel of winter is ahead. The other tree draggers and I will go home, having already cast out the old, and get on with being wary of the new. We will treat the year as innocent until it is proven guilty.
Perhaps it is ridiculous to pin the idea of good or bad to something as clerical as a calendar year. Perhaps it is ridiculous to completely change one’s behavior around the notion of setting the right tone and spend a perfectly good holiday searching for omens. But why should I risk things if I don’t have to? The year has not wronged me yet and, if it matters, I’m not going to be the one to break it.
Distractions
Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.
“Cancel New Year’s Eve Forever” by Sarah Miller in the New Yorker.
“On some New Year’s Eves, I have simply wandered around—on the subway, in a car, on foot—just looking for my New Year’s purpose. Whether I was twenty-two or thirty-four or forty-five, every wandering New Year’s had the same bad feeling of “Why am I not just at home doing nothing?” But, then again, if you did go home to do nothing, the empty, quiet house would be screaming at you that life is meaningless, and maybe it’s better to get that message someplace else. Feeling bad on New Year’s feels importantly bad. You know that a bad New Year’s is not a referendum on your life, because anyone who thinks that is an idiot—but you do think that, you can’t help but think that, so now you’re feeling bad for feeling bad. You idiot.”
Don’t Look Up on Netflix.
You know what? I’m not going to let the pressure of the new year get to me. I’m going to write (briefly) about apocalypse movies.
My cousin put this movie on on Christmas. I insisted that only Christmas movies are permitted on Christmas but I was overruled, and also the review that I read of the movie sounded interesting. Would I recommend it as a festive holiday film? No. Am I confident that putting it in the top section of the Newsletter would not incite the wrath of 2022? Also, no.
There are many people who say that this is bad satire. There are many people who say it is a bad movie outright. It is, admittedly, heavy-handed in its message.
For my part, I am excited that we have a proper apocalypse movie for our time. A chapter of my senior thesis in college concerned cold war nuclear apocalypse films and, while it made me nervous to go outside alone for about a month, it was a pleasure to write.
The proper apocalypse film serves the same key purposes as a really serious snowstorm: it reminds people of their own mortality and of the flaws of their governments. A film has the additional benefit of getting through to people in more temperate climates.
The middle of the twentieth century was a golden age for these movies. There was Dr. Strangelove, On The Beach, the Reagan-era made-for-television classic The Day After and its horrific British equivalent, Threads, and countless little TV specials about how the Russians were keen to destroy Portland or Austin or Westchester County.
These films start to lose their edge, though. They all start to feel like period pieces. A significant plot point in Dr. Strangelove involves a payphone.
Don’t Look Up, despite its faults, feels more viscerally upsetting.
[SPOILERS BELOW]
There is something uniquely horrible and relatable about the end of the film. There is the same montage of chaos and confusion that most apocalypse movies have, but the anchor is a group of people in East Lansing — people who did their best to stop the catastrophe and were thwarted by idiots — trying to have one nice, home-cooked dinner together while the idiots destroy the world and everything in it.