Despite its liberal reputation, the film industry routinely kills off millions, tens of millions and even hundreds of millions of Black people in the apocalyptic films they produce.
Even if not directly depicted on screens, millions of Black people are the casualties in films like Greenland (2020), World War Z (2013) and Skyline (2010). Hey, but it’s all okay if Black people are among the survivors. Perhaps the most absurd example (spoiler alert) is the 2015 TV miniseries adaptation of Childhood’s End, in which a woke screenwriter decided that the last person on Earth should be a Black man but even he dies.
Admittedly, callousness is baked into the genre. The viewer is only concerned with the fate of the plucky survivors fighting their way out of the chaos. The scenes of mass destruction, such as tidal waves flooding communities, skyscrapers collapsing or even nuclear mushroom clouds sprouting across the globe, are presented only as a wow factor. The viewer is not expected to cry and wail during these scenes. The lives of these unseen victims don’t matter and, as a subset, the lives of Black victims don’t matter either.
The film producers embrace the moral relativism of a psychopathic dictator. “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” – Joseph Stalin
“End of the World” stories and films, intended or not, accept genocide as an outcome. And yes, I would include The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in that category.
Even if not directly depicted on screens, millions of Black people are the casualties in films like Greenland (2020), World War Z (2013) and Skyline (2010). Hey, but it’s all okay if Black people are among the survivors. Perhaps the most absurd example (spoiler alert) is the 2015 TV miniseries adaptation of Childhood’s End, in which a woke screenwriter decided that the last person on Earth should be a Black man but even he dies.
Admittedly, callousness is baked into the genre. The viewer is only concerned with the fate of the plucky survivors fighting their way out of the chaos. The scenes of mass destruction, such as tidal waves flooding communities, skyscrapers collapsing or even nuclear mushroom clouds sprouting across the globe, are presented only as a wow factor. The viewer is not expected to cry and wail during these scenes. The lives of these unseen victims don’t matter and, as a subset, the lives of Black victims don’t matter either.
The film producers embrace the moral relativism of a psychopathic dictator. “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.” – Joseph Stalin
“End of the World” stories and films, intended or not, accept genocide as an outcome. And yes, I would include The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in that category.