Afterword—Escape to Planet B

I do love a mental escape through popular-culture entertainment. And, I confess, reading about and watching documentaries for weeks, weighted by “facts” about climate change in preparing this issue, has been draining. To change the climate-change channel in my mind, I streamed an old sci-fi film one night last January. I wanted to relax. I thought I might laugh. I wanted to forget—about climate change, the end of the Holocene, the end of the world, for an hour and a half.

Internet tags for the film I chose on my streaming platform screamed, “Romance! Thrills! Adventure!” Hmmm, that sounds good, I thought. I clicked on a 1951 black-and-white movie called When Worlds Collide, directed by Rudolph Mata, better known as a cinematographer, I was to learn, than a director. Here was another B-grade sci-fi flick made during the post-War / Cold War era, with white people getting on a spaceship trying to “save humanity” from a fictional Earth catastrophe.

Basic viewer identification formula: one catastrophe narrative displaces the horror of another.

When Worlds Collide depicts the usual token woman of this “science” genre. She’s a female / “scientist,” more femme than science-serious. She is a scientist, of course, but also the coy virginal daughter of the plot’s Important Man—her Daddy, the male scientist who accurately predicts the end of the world through the collision of a distant star system with planet Earth. She also has the hots for a wayward pilot who assists her Daddy in his savior mission. Only 80-some days to go until D-Day—calendar pages flip by on the screen—while the Important Man / Daddy-scientist organizes a Noah’s Ark spacecraft, just big enough to jet some humans to the new “sun’s” rotating planet, called Zyra. The Daddy-scientist pals up with a mean, wealthy entrepreneur, who will pay the technology bills in exchange for egocentric control over the guest list. The rich man’s main goal is to save his own skin while determining who gets “saved” and who perishes.

After fighting with Mr. Money Bags, and devising a lottery system to more “equitably select” the passengers on board the escape vehicle he designs (again, they are all white folks), the Important Man/ Daddy scientist confirms a roster of some 40 people who will have seats on this spaceship-ark. Theoretically, a seat is reserved for himself, as well as his daughter, as well as for the rich financier. Unfortunately, for the daughter, her new beau doesn’t win the lottery. The the fact is that no one in the plot has any idea—a thought the script underplays—whether or not Zyra will meet the conditions necessary for human sustance. The whole goofy story turns on this irrational gamble—that Zyra will be just like Earth, a veritable Planet B.

I am beginning to think this End of the World scenario is a lot like climate-change and the persistent collective denial it elicits from human beings around the globe.

So this sci-fi film plot twists along, mythologizing the Important Man / Daddy science figure as well as other Real Men represented by white American manhood—men who can conquer outer-space as well as show ethical heroics. The lone female actress in the film, playing the Daddy’s daughter-sex figure, does some kissing experiments but not a lot of science ones. As per the gender codes of the era, she is represented as a woman controlled not just by her Daddy and boyfriends, but by her over-wrought sexual desire. She is engaged to one man while falling for another.

In the end, the Daddy / Important Man / scientist denies boarding to the greedy rich man, and also gives up his own seat to his daughter’s new beloved. He “selflessly” sacrifices himself for humanity, allowing for his daughter’s future propagation of the species. In a subliminal erotic turn—a kind of father / bridegroom switch of “who gets the girl”—the daughter’s new lover/beau takes the place of the father’s “weight” on the spaceship. He also gets to play the new Important Man Rescuer, a knight inside his shiny spaceship engine room, placed in the pilot seat with the mission to fly the space-ark and save the New World Order of humans.

Meanwhile, the errant star, the new “sun,” approaches Earth wildly. We are told it will smash into and engulf Earth. And it does in the timeline of the film—an event unseen and unheard as the spaceship takes off. The spaceship appears to be more like an old roomy 747 jumbo jetliner than a space shuttle. It comically lifts off a giant slope up and away from Earth, literally sliding into outer space like an amusement park kiddy ride above the skies of a local small-town carnival.

Yet if this low-tech and plot seems kitsch, the filmic timing is intense—the narrative becomes a rhythmical countdown towards Doomsday and death-to-all, or, possibly, the Genesis of a New World.

The humans who won the lottery (or were high enough in the social hierarchy to be chosen) are strangely philosophical about their fate. They are zen-like about their own quite-possible annihilation. They ask themselves why they think Zyra has an Earth-like atmosphere. They have no idea, really, they admit. They are preparing to die. And they are told they will black-out during this mysterious journey upward (kind of a near-death if not total death experience).

It really is an unsurprising accomplishment, then, when the daughter’s beau and her future sexual partner helps save the day and the spaceship lands safely on Zyra. Such is the dream of American popular culture. The space-ark is a success and Planet B a place of bliss. The Daddy-scientist must be dead back back on the presumably subsumed and consumed Earth. But the daughter and her savior-aviator-boyfriend open up the hatch, look upon upon a gorgeous “Zyra” sunset, and it is just like Earth.

An idealized Earth. A new Eden! Here is the mis-en-scene of a new Holocene, greeting the couple: the perfect planet, with the perfect climate. Arm in arm, they face their new sun’s light together and forever.

This silly movie did not distract me but inserted me right back into the story of Earth’s building catastrophe, the drama of climate change. We all know that the Rich Guy is out there. He is both denying the inevitable so he can keep making big bucks and most likely believing he can buy his way to safety from future rising sea-levels and catastrophic storms and refugee crises such as we have never yet seen.

Instead of investing money and agency into fighting climate change, today’s real rich guys are surely thinking they can save themselves from communal extinction.

I was not lulled to sleep that night in January by this dumb movie. Instead, images kept flashing in my brain of our broken collective world. The end-of-world motif struck slightly close to home. So did the image—the dream—of a parallel Earth to be found and mastered.

Is this the story of another would-be Earth that substitutes for our losses, due to human greed and destructiveness? Or the myth of a supplemental Earth that gives us another chance? Creative narratives and popular-culture forms of media and art often both confront and deny possibilities. Yet they do not escape the Real, no matter how hard we work to deny it. And even the funkiest of made-up entertainment confections can serve to remind us that, actually, there is no Planet B—although there are lots of Hollywood-Bs we can momentarily visit.—LH