The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
Thus Moon Lake is not a film “simply” about the end of the world, but a film about the way the world ends – about the mode of the world’s end. What mode is this? No, this is not the banal eschatological mode, not a catastrophic collapse of screams bloodsheds punishments retributions atonements revelations of infinite truths ecstasy – not the absolute end as an absolute event; it is a hushing un-happening un-event (pseudo-)normality of everyday life straying drifting decelerating losing stopping being unproductive – a drifting unproductive community with no clear goal, no leaders, not organized, not mobilized, not working, not creative.
The end of the world is a world – not, however, like some humanist myth of the beginning, of the golden age, of the ideal humanity in Eden – but as a world after the end of the world – the end of the world as a world – a world of the implacable, insatiable finiteness. No salvation. No dialectic ascent. No economy.
Yes, here, at this end of the world, the end of the world according to Moon Lake, amid the nostalgia and the hushing, an affirming, “optimistic” tone endures: the affirmation of an apocalyptic form of world. “May God grant everyone” such an end of the world. Only its enduring moment would draw us out of the global resignation of the world amidst the monstrous growth of the unworldly wasteland, the wasteland of swollen, atrophic newyorks, ejecting their venomous sperm into the pure darkness of the empty sky, the wasteland of the con-sumption of the world.
The end of the world is not only a punishment, retribution, or an exodus; it is not only a metamorphosis or an oeuvre, but it is active movement, wandering, wasting of the meaning in the void, unfocusing, focusing, resistance, struggle.
Apostasy, alteration, change.
Boyan Manchev – AFTER THE END OF THE WORLD