It is probably a universal childhood nightmare to imagine yourself utterly alone in the world. That is, literally, rather than just metaphorically. Not only are you afraid because you are friendless and without protectors; the whole fabric of your universe changes. Life becomes meaningless because there can be no hope of development, no change. Only death, which will be unnoticed and unmourned. Better, you might think, to end the farce after the first act than play to an empty, echoing theatre.
The Quiet Earth film is based on just this premise. One day, a menopausal male staggers out of sleep. All is quiet around him. The radio is quiet, the roads are quiet, nobody answers his phone calls. He drives to the city. Along the way he encounters crashed cars, devoid of occupants. The land has the appearance of being abandoned – but by every living thing.
The man, who is a scientist, drives to his laboratory. Over it broods a huge radio dish. There is no one inside – except the charred remains of his former director. His hideously deformed body is still at the console. We have gathered by now that this is all the result of the Bad Experiment. We are spared the effort of worrying our poor noodles with any details of this, except that it involved a global energy field, and the Americans.
The first part of the film proceeds to explore the plight of the Last Man Alive. By definition he has absolute power, though over an empty world. He begins to be corrupted by it. In a surreal and improbable sequence he assembles a collection of full-size cardboard cut-outs which he places before the mansion he has requisitioned. Ranks of loudspeakers provide frenzied applause to his ravings which he delivers to the gathered throng of two-dimensional greats. Belatedly, he questions the wisdom of scientific meddling, and his role in it.
The shift towards morality play is further enhanced by the appearance of first a young woman, and then a macho red-neck. She is articulately feminist, and challenges the scientist’s axioms. He is an Action Man machine, and stands in opposition to the hero’s wan intellectualism. In the last scenes, where the scientist redeems himself by driving a few tons of TNT into the radio dish, there is a symbolic coupling by the other two.
Interestingly enough, the film does not resolve. Where we might have expected the explosion and scientist’s death to redeem the vanished mankind, instead we are shifted onto another plane. One of the film’s shakier premises had been that these three had survived where all others had not because, paradoxically, they had died. More precisely they had died at the moment the Bad Experiment had taken place. Thus when the scientist dies once more, he lives on. We see him on the seashore. In the distance there is a slow sunrise, picking up the magical opening shots. Except that this sun has rings. The final image is of the scientist’s frail and once more lone humanity in an alien world.
The Quiet Earth succeeds through moments like these. It also scores heavily in sardonic humour. The action takes place exclusively in New Zealand: a land noted for its quietness at all times.
(19.3.86)
See also Moody's Black Notebook Travels
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