Among the endless chilling aspects of the ongoing economic crisis, perhaps the most unnerving has been the constant suspicion that this is only the beginning – that the money printing and boarded-up high streets are only the prelude to a far darker second act. The trick, of course, then becomes picturing what that might be – except it's a fool's errand, the mind's eye fogged by the sheer scale involved.
Enter the movies – still for all their flaws a fine device for speculating on the future, allowing us to to piece together a composite of likely scenarios, turning all of us into WALL-Es sifting through the cinematic debris.
Among the most active lately has been Evan Calder Williams's blog Socialism and/or Barbarism, whose musings on our likely fate are based around the filmic motifs we may shortly find spilling into real life.
The thing is, the end of the world thus far has taken most of us by surprise. It's not that at some stage we won't still wind up in The Day After Tomorrow – just that the sudden picturesque eco-calamity that was due to befall us seems to have been gazumped by something less visually immediate. That may be why the ever-familiar Mad Max is now often cited among those of an apocalyptic bent (aside from Calder Williams, it's a favourite over at housepricecrash.co.uk) – but for me, despite the suitably insane circularity of its logic ("one needs gasoline in order to drive around and kill others to steal their gasoline, but in doing so, one consumes the gasoline that one had"), it still always seems too camply histrionic to be much of a blueprint for things to come.
No, here in weary old western Europe, it feels to me that the descent will be a closer relative of Delicatessen, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's breakthrough vision of a hungry, dowdy block of flats in which no one likes to ask where the butcher's fresh cuts are coming from. Fittingly, Calder Williams namechecks both that film and its baroque follow-up City of Lost Children – identifying their timeless, flea-market aesthetic as a portent of a world hurtling backwards, an image of our being on the one hand too broke to maintain technology and, on the other, out of space to bury our rubbish, ending up by necessity recycling, repurposing and creatively salvaging. Leave out the cannibalism and it might almost pass for optimism.
Of course, it could go like that. The alternative, one supposes, is Michael Haneke's The Time of the Wolf, a psychically scarring lurch into the darkness. For the moment, however, the shape of the medium-term at least seems to me to lie in two films not mentioned in the original post. The first is the stunning Children of Men, a movie given its power by the sheer ghastly plausibility of its deportation camps along the Sussex coast and murmuring ads for state-assisted suicide. The second is Roy Andersson's deadpan masterpiece Songs from the Second Floor, a grey-on-grey tableau of flagellants and bankrupts, with the city reduced to one vast stationary traffic jam and everyone desperate to get out but doomed to stay put – a scene that feels more like London with every passing day.
But then, everyone will have their own movie that comes closest to reflecting their sense of what lies ahead. It may be La Jetée. It could be Dawn of the Dead. That's the thing about film: its ability to marry what we know of the world and what we believe it is (or could be) in our gut. Me, I'll be seeing that magic at work as my three-year-old son's eyes widen watching Christopher Reeve as Superman – part of me madly jealous, the bigger part just wishing I had the words to apologise to him.
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