The World's End and the Possibilty of Getting Older

by Christopher Barr

 

Star Wars was where I think it started.  That was when the man-child was born, which was followed by many imitators, the Kevin Smith’s and the Judd Apatow’s made their careers on it.  The 70’s was a time where reflection on society and government was pervasive and Star Wars, although an allegory of overcoming totalitarianism, was a place of relief, a movie unlike any other of its time, was a film where you could forget the current reality of our human disposition, at least in the first world.

 
The World’s End follows five buddies, who have since went their separate ways, around an English hamlet on a pub crawl, known as the ‘Golden Mile’, 12 pubs in one night are as is follows:

The First Post 

The Old Familiar

 The Famous Cock 

The Cross Hands 

The Good Companions 

The Trusty Servant    

The Two Headed Dog 

The Mermaid  

The Beehive  

The King's Head 

The Hole in the Wall 

The World's End

In all three of the ‘Cornetto Trilogy’ films, Simon Pegg’s protagonists, disliked change.  In Shaun of the Dead, the zombies were more of an inconvenience to Shaun than anything else.  Nicolas Angel in Hot Fuzz was a control freak and had no interest in changing and Gary King, the rude, self-centered, manipulative center in The World’s End is a man trapped in the past, a point where he naively believed was the highlight of this life.   All these men had a fear of the future, they all saw themselves as the center of the universe and they tried to live life like there’s no tomorrow.  Then life caught up with them and slapped them in the face in the form of zombies, a cult and an alien race known as the ‘Network’ forcing strict rules of conformity onto mankind.

 

All three of these men, Shaun, Nicolas and Gary, didn’t want to grow up.  But the films aren’t black and white because they explore the notion of not blaming them.  There is a routine to adult life in modern society, when checked, is unappealing.  So in a lot of cases, while watching the characters in Clerks discuss the on-going construction jobs on the Death Star and a talk that Bill has with The Bride at the end of Kill Bill Vol.2 about Superman and his alter ego Clark Kent, we see that these people have no wish to ‘grow up’ and join the rest of the herd in office towers and mindless warehouse jobs.  These films and this man-child view of the world are speaking about the banality and routine of what it is to be a working adult in modern day society.  This form of rebellion has become increasingly pervasive and maybe necessarily so.   

The robots in the film represent the loss of youth and curiosity and wonder.  They just require functionality, that the aliens believe will better humanity.  The film explores the idea of the aliens being right.  Maybe we should just function, but the film ends up fighting for our freedom at all costs.  Sending us back to the Stone Age was a last comment and optimistic view on the filmmaker’s part to give us all a second chance.  They are aware that the human project has failed but the human heart is something worth preserving.

We all get older, fact of life.  But is it that, what changes within us, edging toward death?  So it’s interesting what various people do to combat such an unfortunate calamity.  Some buy Ferrari’s, those that are financially fortunate, others kill themselves, which always seems odd to me because they are shortening a life they believe to be too short in the first place.  But some of us, including mee-self, drink.

When you’re a little kid you could give a shit about most things because most things could give a shit about you.  You just wanted money for candy and to stay up late, watch a little TV and make forts out of your blankets.  But then you get a little older and come to realize that all the fun isn’t as fun anymore and you need to survive, in some cases viciously, in this capitalistic, money hungry world.  You have to come to terms that you can’t have all the things that you want and you have to share with others, even though those others would sooner slit your throat then look at you.  Then you die….

The World’s End is a movie about putting the inevitable off to the end.  But in the mean time, let’s have a pint of your finest lager.  The drinking in the film represented what is present in real life, escapism.  Life is hard and fight we must and all the booze provides a relief from all our current and past plights in life.  But we have a future, a future that is worth fighting for.  As fun as it is to have a pint with a couple of friends at the local pub, people need to reflect inward on themselves and attempt to stabilize the rocky drift we are floating towards.

But even though the film explores the past and the present, it’s actually about the future.  The future of mankind and its up to us in the present to provide the future generation with a safe and livable world.  It’s not about getting old it’s about saving the young.  This the human project.