For years, there’s been a game I’ve liked to play with myself: What would I do if the apocalypse were to strike right now? It’s a great game for literally any situation or time of day. Buying groceries, watching a movie, trying to fall asleep at night, going to the bathroom — you get the idea. In high school, there were several years where my friends and I were convinced that the best plan would be to live in the rafters of our local Costco and subsist off whatever rollover product hadn’t been picked through by the masses in the early hours of looting. Later, after all the pandemic raiding happened and we realized how terrifying Costco would be in a real apocalypse scenario, we decided we would live in the rafters of our high school auditorium instead.
Silly as it might seem, I still turn to this game often. It’s a great icebreaker, for one — I always know I’ll be great friends with someone willing to talk about these ridiculous hypotheticals. But even when I’m not talking to other people about it, my mind often finds its way back to this question: What would I do if the world as I know it now fell apart? My answer today, if you’re curious, is to get as far away from other people as physically possible. The reason for this should be pretty obvious, especially when you consider the aforementioned Costco scenario — the scariest thing about any apocalypse is the people left behind. And this means the scariest place to be is anywhere that people are. Namely, cities.
I am far from the only person to come to this conclusion. Just consider how much art has been made over the years exploring this same idea. From more recent hits like “The Last of Us” TV series to well-worn classics like “The Walking Dead,” one truth emerges time and again: When the apocalypse strikes, and civilization as we know it falls, the greatest monster to rise from the ashes is our fellow man.
What this means for the concept of metropolis is interesting, particularly when we consider that — at least as far as the average person is concerned — cities are often viewed as the symbol of our humanity. Perhaps even more often, they’re used as proof of and the argument for that humanity. Cities are what separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Look, we say, pointing: Look at what we have made! If we can take the earth and turn it into a skyscraper, doesn’t that mean we’re special? Doesn’t that mean we’re better than all the other beasts? Can a dog direct traffic? Can a pig operate a crane? Can a chimp take my order at McDonald’s?
Apocalypse narratives force us to reconsider this argument. Because when civilization falls, so do our cities and so too does our humanity. Suddenly, traffic, cranes and Big Mac orders are the furthest thing from anyone’s mind, and we can’t use these arbitrary “signs” of humanity to prove that we are any different from the rest of the animals that call this planet home. In what feels like the blink of an eye, we become the very predators we fear most in the world — and cities, once the sparkling crown jewel of our societies, the very proof of our civility, our poise, our superiority, become nothing more than human dens, hunting grounds for the worst of us.
Depictions of this kind of city in apocalyptic art are particularly interesting in how they choose to reflect this shift in the status quo. Often, artists represent this return to violence and an animalistic nature by taking the phrase “concrete jungle” and turning it on its head — grass crowds the sidewalk, vines climb buildings and trees burst from the pavement in the middle of the road. Cities, like their inhabitants, become one with nature again. There’s a strange sense of harmony present in this transformation — we return to what we once were and, in doing so, something is restored to us. Whether what we regain is good or bad matters far less than the reminder that we are nothing more than animals with particularly shiny enclosures, uncaged at last.
To apply this theory, we can look at the example of “The Last of Us” from above. Ostensibly a zombie apocalypse narrative, the real monsters of “The Last of Us” are rarely undead. By the time the story takes place, 20 years after the apocalypse began, the threat of the infected is limited, mostly avoidable and ultimately defeatable should one encounter the zombie-like creatures. The infected are little more than another violent animal, their greatest danger ultimately stemming not from their ability to kill you but to make you like themselves — our fear of zombies, here and in general, reflects a larger cultural fear of losing control, and of losing ourselves in the process.
By contrast, the threat of people — and the cities they call home — can only be evaded if one stays out of cities entirely. Why? Because humans are smart, and with that intelligence, they are capable of violence like nothing else in this new world. This isn’t something we need an apocalypse to see — even today, we hurt each other all the time. Yet when metropolis fails in these narratives, violence never falls with them; it only reveals what we have always known to be true. The apocalypse here shows us that, if anything, it was never cities that set us apart from the rest of the animal kingdom, but our own capacity for cruelty.
City shots in “The Last of Us” are lush with greenery and reflective glass, peaceful only in the moments just before the scene’s tension breaks and violence descends. Yet even during these “peaceful” moments, this tension is palpable — because there is something uncanny about a city fallen, a city broken, a city abandoned. It doesn’t feel like a place for people anymore, only what has been left behind of them.
In these imagined apocalypses, characters walk through cities in the footsteps of the monsters who made them, hiding from those who currently call it home. Treading those overtaken paths, there is no such thing as humanity anymore. So, the next time I play the apocalypse game, I know what my answer will be — do you?
Daily Arts Writer Camille Nagy can be reached at camnagy@umich.edu.
