NETFLIXING THROUGH THE RECESSION: THE SURPRISING SUCCOR OF APOCALYPSE MOVIES

It’s a truism that in hard times people seek out movies as diversions from their despair—musicals, comedies, romances. In the weeks since I lost my job, I’ve been getting into the apocalypse. It wasn’t a conscious decision. The first book I read after getting laid off, Cormac McCarthy’s soul-crushing The Road, I picked up only at a friend’s insistence, and it just took off from there. But I suppose there’s some succor in reminding myself that my situation could be a lot worse.

Take the characters in Five—the first-ever post-atomic-disaster movie, made in 1951. A pregnant woman emerges from an X-ray chamber in a California hospital to discover a nuclear attack has apparently wiped out everybody on Earth except her unborn child and three men, one of whom—a shifty misanthrope with an intimidating accent—wants to repopulate the planet his way. Or 1962’s Panic in Year Zero!, in which mild-mannered Ray Milland becomes a thieving survivalist who barks orders at his family after America’s biggest cities are leveled. Or the three adaptations of the novel I Am Legend—1964’s The Last Man on Earth, with Vincent Price, 1971’s The Omega Man, with Charlton Heston, and the 2007 version with Will Smith—whose cheesiness can’t quite undermine the horror of a world where a man-made virus has nearly eradicated humanity and vampiric survivors rule the night.

The Netflix discs come and go daily. I’m looking forward to revisiting the Doomsday movies of my youth: The Road Warrior, especially, and maybe even The Day After. I could always watch La Jetée and Twelve Monkeys again. I hear the TV series Jericho was pretty good. And even my two-year-old can watch WALL*E with me. Who knew the End Times could be so life-affirming?

—Lawrence Levi