“The walls will fall”: last night’s calamity on C4
“When humans disappeared, sea levels were already on the rise.” This is not, as you might expect, the tale of house owners retreating from Brighton beach because the English Channel is swelling, caused by man-made climate change. This is a tale of the immediate disappearance of the human race (we’re not told why), and the water levels are rising because there are no longer humans to operate the pumps to clear the metro tunnels of ground water, to monitor and maintain the dams; to keep, to be precise, the dangerous forces of nature in check
Last night’s Channel 4 programme on a world without us, Life Without People, was a calamity for serious consideration of the issues facing the planet. The programme, an American documentary with American settings and predominantly American experts, with scenes of an overgrown New York reminiscent of Will Smith’s recent remake of The Omega Man, I Am Legend, showed us what Life would be like without humankind to stop it from getting out of hand. So what did we do?
The hero complex
There was a complex web of enemies in the programme, from cockroaches to salt, wild dogs to rust. But there was clearly only one hero: man. Or more precisely, maintenance. Keeping it in hand, literally.
Time after time in the programme, humanity and ‘human maintenance’ were heralded as the last and best defence for our ‘iron and steel icons’ of, for example, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Eiffel Tower, painted to protect, from erosion, rust, and demolition from the ‘attacks’ of the ‘enemy’, rust, humidity, corrosion. E.g. Nature. The real heroes of our civilisation? Not the doctors of Medicins Sans Frontiers, nor the climate change campaigners. The heroes are the 17 ironworkers and 38 painters who tend the Golden Gate Bridge.
Here’s a quick selection of the anthopomorphic and negative rhetoric with which ‘nature’ was tarred:
“nature’s onslaught”; nature “biding its time for the right conditions”; “nature wiped away the landmarks”; “the enemy, nature”; “the earth would move on without us”; “nature reclaims its old turf”; “the unstoppable tide”; “the destructive advance”; the “fatal flaw” of iron “comes from the earth” etc…
Yes, C4 is a public service broadcaster. Which public was it serving with this programming equivalent of The Terror?
The North American mindset
In truth, what we got to see last night was clearly intended for an American audience. Which made me think: this was a dangerous piece of television programming, in that it quite ably reinforces the specific North American anthropocentric mindset.
We saw pictures of the White House, Lincoln Memorial and the Reflecting Pool all covered in moss, lichen and overgrown with the “destructive advance” of nature. And then, a lion hunting in Washington D.C., and a rhino. Only after we’ve subconsciously identified primal Africa with the invasion does the narrator, doing a fair job of imitating HG Wells’s War of the Worlds, remind us that it is probably the zoo animals that have made it to D.C. a mere five years after people (AP), not a lion all the way from Africa.
Nature brings about another 9/11
And then, of course, with the CGI rampant, we get to see tower blocks in New York falling, “a raging inferno”, whch wouldn’t trigger any particular connection in the mind of a human viewer, would it? Life Without People? We can’t let it happen, no sir, or our dear Brooklyn Bridge will die. (Yes, die. It really did say “die”).
So humans did ok? Anything else?
Why yes, in fact:
- Nuclear power got an ok brief; “would safely shut down in two days” (as opposed to the powergrid, which would go into “meltdown”)
- The Hoover Dam - brave American dam the last light to go out. Keep rolling boys
- Mount Rushmore, of course. According to one expert, it will be here in 100,000 years, to be looked upon by the chimps who make the cognitive leap to replace us.
- Insectiside and chemical paint - without these two wonders of human ingenuity, we’d be stuffed
And not forgetting the real hero:
- Panasonic. In the second ad break, one media planner/buyer will be chuffed with getting the latest Panasonic Lumix advert into the programme. The advert shows two tourists taking photos of the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco before it pops its rivets under the pressure of trying to get the length of its span into one, standard, non-Panasonic photo shot. Along comes the hero, the Lumix, and it all fits. And then, twenty minutes later in the programme, the Golden Gate bridge collapses, under the attack of the “enemy” of rust and corrosion. Well done, Panasonic.
Anyone do worse than nature?
Actually yes,
- The Russians - the programme visited Pripyat, the Russian town evacuated after Chernobyl and never since repopulated, despite the radiation levels now being safe (”The concrete Soviet facade may look imposing, but…”). The Russian soldier showing the cameramen around got a comedy voiceover, and was seen spending more time talking about an owl (later demonised by the fake horror camerawork) than people.
- Camp experts. First listened to, then ridiculed when they dared to side with nature
And, unsurprisingly, in the end:
- CO2: if we go, CO2 release will be rampant as the termites eat all the trees (”we can’t let it happnen, pin nature back, keep those cars rolling for the sake of the environment, defend western civilisation” etc, etc….)
And now the end…
Towards the end, the narrative enters into past tense. “A thousand years ago, 6.5 billion of the human race lived on planet earth. What happened?” What happened was a “jungle of vegetation” took over, the enemy of humanity, nature, took over its arts, its literature, its cities, its creations.
And 10,000 years after people, the programmes delivers its clearest message. All traces of humanity will have been erased, with the great story of the great civilisation gone. Only the most collosal of our structures will still be recognisable. The pyramid at Giza, the Great Wall of China, the Hoover Dam in the US. But even this will go - “the last of the great collapses”. If it weren’t for humans, all this would be lost.
Without a doubt, this was one of the worst programmes I have watched for a long time, for its brutal rhetorical attack on an anthropomorphised nature, at a time when this type of message is the very, very last thing we need. Why couldn’t they film Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, for example? But as a visualisation of the psychology of selfish late capitalism, an imagined world without us as a means of stirring fear and fervour in equal measure, it did its job, and no doubt with a maintenance team on hand in case any of those damned rats got into the machine.
The new human strapline: no A/C, no history.
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