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Apocalypse Now: How ‘Sorcerer’

Proves That the World Already Ended
Christopher Cantwell
(http://www.brightwalldarkroom.com/author/christophercantwell/)

ISSUE 12: THE END OF THE WORLD

(HTTP://WWW.BRIGHTWALLDARKROOM.COM/MAGAZINE/ISSUES/ISSUE12/)

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 illustration by Brianna Ashby

I
often say that the scariest horror movie is the one we’re all living in right now.
There are no ghosts save the people you relied on who are gone. There are no
monsters except the ones who take the corporeal form of daily mundane antagonists and
interrupt your life, transforming it into a living hell. The scariest part of this “movie” is
that it is incredibly nuanced and complex in its terror. It is real, and above all,
inescapable. In the end, you will die. You’re the victim in this story. Bye.

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A graduation of this disturbing thought entertains the notion that life is not only horrific
but, in actuality, over. We just weren’t paying attention the moment it ended (whoops).
About a year ago, I began to suspect that the post-apocalypse was already upon us. In the
same way that an astronomer looks upon light from stars that have long since exploded, I
started to wonder if some phantom hyper-consciousness of the future was in fact looking
back on us, examining human existence through our limited vision and linear experience
as a kind of post-mortem experiment to see where it all went wrong for Earthlings. If this
is the case, we’re already dead and have been for thousands—if not trillions—of years.
This thought first entered my mind because lately it’s been feeling to me as if we’re all
caught in some glitchy instant replay, and what we’re missing (or cannot remember) is
the Cataclysm itself—the moment it really ended and we became stuck in this
purgatorial loop, collectively unaware.

It is said (at cocktail parties, not in science labs) that if one passes through the event
horizon of a black hole
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_horizon#Event_horizon_of_a_black_hole), that
individual will appear to be destroyed in an instant—but in that individual’s perception,
time will stop, and his destruction will occur so slowly that it will feel like an eternity. So
I wonder: what does an eternal destruction look and feel like? Are we even able to
perceive such an infinite end? Do we become the frog who doesn’t know it’s slowly being
boiled alive? Did the Earth slip into a black hole while we weren’t looking? Or did our
civilization—our species—fall into some other kind of “black hole” (cultural,
environmental, philosophical, undefined) of which we are equally unaware?

If so, when? How?

Perhaps it was the moment Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden, or maybe it was the
Genesis Deluge that followed. Even if these examples are merely mythological stand-ins
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for the real Terminus, this specific “End of the World” might more accurately be called
“The Loss of Innocence”—that instant when things changed and became self-aware,
continuing forward but unable to shed the burden of What Once Was, now gone forever
thanks to the Cataclysm, or in this regard, The Human Failure.

However, it’s my opinion that the world ended on one of the two following dates:

◦ April 19, 1993.

◦ April 19, 1995.

It’s a sweeping statement, but everything before those two bolded dates could arguably
fall into the typical parameters of Human Strife. We can identify an expected pattern of
trauma and catastrophe in our history: World War I, the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, the
Black Plague, The Holocaust, all genocides, 200 years of the Crusades, The Spanish
Inquisition, the Cold War, the invention of the atom bomb, the invention of gunpowder,
the invention of the internet, all Diaspora(s), the expulsion of the Moors, the Military-
Industrial Complex, the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, Stalingrad, the
conquest of the American West, British Imperialism, the imposition of trade of the
Japanese, the Ming Dynasty executions, AIDS, the crucifixion of Jesus, the Irish famine,
William Jennings Bryan, Genghis Khan, the Dust Bowl, and so on and so on.

But I listed those two dates. Granted, those dates probably didn’t affect everyone. They’re
both American events so I already realize their limitations in bringing about the End of
the World for all people. So for argument’s sake, let’s for a moment shrink the World
down to the pea-size of my experience.

I was 11 years old during the first event and 13 during the second. I’ll call the time
immediately before this period the Pax Clintona because as a middle-class white kid
things seemed pretty good. It had its robust share of Human Strife—Apartheid, Exxon
Valdez, Rodney King, etc, etc. But for me, there was something called a Budget Surplus.
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The middle class still existed. Bruce Springsteen’s America was alive and well—and, at a
showing ofJurassic Park, I saw my fifth grade teacher. Unity. Prosperity. All that. At least
in my extremely limited, childish eyes, it was a nice time.

April 19th, 1993. The Mount Carmel compound in Waco, Texas burned to the ground.
Four federal agents killed, 16 wounded, 87 Branch Davidians killed. I remember coming
home from school and seeing the massive fire (http://youtu.be/jRTfEjhdvSo) on the big-
screen television my father had won in a sales contest at his job. He was sitting on our
couch in shorts. “Holy shit,” he muttered.

To me this event defies explanation. Without even trying to assign blame, how can such an
act ever make sense? Where is the logic? Where is the rationality? It is chaos.

April 19th, 1995. The Oklahoma City Bombing (http://youtu.be/l08zD9Pn1jk). 168 people
killed. It was apparently a direct response to the government’s perceived culpability in
the Waco Siege. But again… where is the logic? Where is the rationality? More chaos.

I don’t mean to put these events above any other tragedy that occurred before or after.
But in my own life, in my own search for some sort of mile marker on the road we’re all
on, I keep coming back to them. In my very limited world, this is when, at the very least,
the World as I Knew It ceased to exist. Pax Clintona ended. Then there was Columbine,
9/11, the Afghanistan War, the Iraq War, Katrina, the Economic Collapse. It was as if the
progression up until then had been 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… and then was suddenly followed by ☉,
then . I could no longer understand the pattern. Every moment suddenly had a new
dreadful, chaotic flavor to it, and violent irrationally has been growing at an exponential
rate ever since.

And this brings me to William Friedkin’s Sorcerer (http://youtu.be/UMof5PuQF7w). Four

men come from separate lives, separate worlds. One is an Irish gangster in Elizabeth,
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New Jersey. One is an assassin in Vera Cruz, Mexico. One is a wealthy businessman in
Paris. One is a Palestinian terrorist working underground in Israel. These are all sinful
men living in their own paradises. They do what they do and they do it well, and they
enjoy the security of a status quo.

But they are sinners, and so each of their worlds end. They are cast out. They all end up
in Porvenir, a tiny village in South America. It is the worst place on Earth. Its ashen, gray
landscape is everything “post-apocalyptic” should be.

Here, the world as a whole ended a long time ago. This is Purgatory. This is the place
where unclean souls toil and labor and dwell in misery forever. Our four souls want to
escape, to get back to the world they knew, but the cost is too high. They literally don’t
have enough pesos. They will never have enough pesos, and the more this dawns on
them, the more they realize that they are doomed to Porvenir for all eternity. The world
that once was is a dream more hazy to them by the day, and any hope of going back
becomes futile and absurd. The four souls lose their very identities and grow more
comfortable with the names assigned to them by fake passports. This is existence now.
This is life After the Fall.

A dangerous opportunity to transport extremely unstable dynamite through two

hundred miles of the jungle gives these souls hope. The payment promised to them could
be enough to escape Porvenir. That hope is enough to motivate the men into action,
become echoes of who they once were. In order to escape Purgatory, they’re willing to
travel through Hell.

Hell is exactly what they find in the jungle. They encounter madness, chaos,
hopelessness, isolation, nihilism—all of which could arguably be fates worse than death.
Every triumph is marked by the larger notion that none of it will likely matter in the end
(because the End already happened, remember?). They detonate a fallen tree in their
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path. They survive crossing a rope bridge in a storm. But what is the point? The arcade
screen already reads GAME OVER. As the men push on, it’s a breathtaking and
heartbreaking illustration of humanity’s unwillingness to accept that.

It is said that the universe is moving from order to entropy, and that this is why we can
remember the past, but are unable to see the future. What lies ahead is too opaque, too
complex, too disordered. Too utterly chaotic to make any sense of it. As Dominguez (Roy
Scheider, playing the anti-hero of all anti-heroes) progresses further, he drives into
entropy. It’s no coincidence that one of his compatriots is violently killed the moment he
fondly remembers his wife back in Paris.

Dominguez is Dominguez; he calls himself only Dominguez. There is no New Jersey.

There is only what lies ahead on the road. By the time he reaches the badlands two miles
outside his destination, he IS entropy. Chaos is all around him and within his mind.
He—for lack of a better phrase—completely loses it.

The truck, a machine built of ordered logical parts, fails. Dominguez is reminded of the
end of his world over and over (a brutal car crash in Elizabeth) as he stands at the edge of
time and space itself. This is not the jungle. This is the Endless End incarnate, hewn into
lifeless stone. It makes no sense to him. It cares nothing for him. His mind particulates
into madness.

There is a theory crafted by Ludwig Boltzmann known as the “Boltzmann Brain.”

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain) It states, (if I’m understanding it
correctly), that within the current constraints of our natural order, it is highly
improbable that we as thinking beings actually exist. How can organized, self-aware
entities exist within an organized, low-entropy environment? It seems improbable that

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two low-entropy states could co-exist. There actually is a much higher probability of an
individual human consciousness existing much farther into the future, when the
universe reaches a higher entropic state.

But the fact is, we do seem to have individual human consciousness, individual psyches.
How is this possible? According to Boltzmann, these separate souls should theoretically
exist trillions of years into our future, untethered to any physical body, alone in the
entropy of the time/space universe. But each consciousness will have the memories and
experiences of a human lifetime lived on Earth, even though it never actually was there.
The Earth of course, and any life that may have existed on it, will have long been
destroyed.

This means that I (and You) are actually memories of a life that never happened, that we
are reflections of thoughts belonging to a future cosmic consciousness. The End?
According to Boltzmann, we never even started. Maybe the World never was, and
Dominguez never was. What’s worse: the World ending, realizing the World already
ended, or realizing that there never was a World in the first place?

Dominguez (either a human or a Boltzmann Brain, you choose) eventually recovers, and
hand-carries the dynamite the last two miles to a roaring spout of flames of an exploded
oil derrick. The dynamite will be used to put out the flames so that production can
resume, but in this moment, what is Dominguez seeing in that big spout of fire?

The Devil? The Big Bang?

Perhaps he’s seeing Uriel’s Flaming Sword. From Genesis: “So He [God] drove the man
out; and at the east of the garden of Eden He stationed the cherubim and the flaming
sword which turned every direction to guard the way to the tree of life.”

3
Whatever the moment or reason of Cataclysm, there is no way back. It’sarticles
over. left
And as I watch the fiery blaze on the big screen, I can only mutter “Holy shit.”

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 CHRISTOPHER CANTWELL
(HTTP://WWW.BRIGHTWALLDARKROOM.COM/AUTHOR/CHRISTOPHE

Christopher Cantwell is a filmmaker and screenwriter living in Los Angeles. He is

the co-creator, writer, and showrunner of AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire, which is
currently in production on its third season.

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ONE RESPONSE

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 December 24, 2017 (http://www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2016/03/30/apocalypse-now-how-sorcerer-proves-that-

the-world-already-ended/#comment-961)

John
Reply

Is this real, or satire, or fiction? I’m confused. I’ve felt this same feeling, that we are living
in some kind of copy, or simulation, and coincidentally I came up with the date April 22
1992. So when I say your dates, my mind was just a little blown. There seems to be a
common theme in Hollywood, having to do with waking up with no memories, time
travel, consciousness transference, ai, and matrix like movies, where reality is not what it
seems. It’s crazy how almost all sci-fi released in the past few years seem to have all of
these common themes. It’s like people are either channeling something, or they straight
to know exactly what’s going on. Not sure if you know anything about the Mandela
effect, but obviously it’s a piece of the puzzle. If your story was all fiction, just disregard
this comment, because I am insane. Thanks for reading my crazy thoughts.

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