I’ve been enthralled by outer space movies ever since boyhood in the fifties. Over the years, I noted with interest the shift from invasion themes, inspired by the Cold War, to close encounters of a friendlier kind. I took that as a good sign, psychologically and politically. Then there was the dis-aster genre (literally “from the stars”), in which the hero saves the day (even the human race), often from troubles brought on by male techno hubris in the first place. Sometimes that very moxie turns the tide—for example, turning away an approaching asteroid.

Lately, we see films in which no hero is able to save humanity or the earth from impending doom. If film is a sort of cultural dreaming, what does this portend? Does it indicate a growing cynicism about the prospects of technological civilization, the destruction of society by corporate capitalism? Does it reflect a millenarian despair and fatalism, even a let’s-just-get-it-over-with-already death wish? Does it simply mean that movie audiences know more about the universe since NASA and Hubble? Or does it betoken a maturity that is willing, beyond comforting hope, finally to face up to the utter fragility of all things, including planetary life? Does it admit that enough is enough, and that for all of us collectively, as for each of us individually, there can indeed be an end? Perhaps all these and more.

The title of a recent disaster film, “Melancholia,” is a clue. The premise involves the filmmaker’s observation that depressed people are calmer in the face of threatening events than their pollyanna counterparts. (While that doesn’t mean that depressives are more in touch with reality, certainly being in touch with reality can be depressing.) In the film, the threatening event is the destruction of the Earth by collision with a rogue planet, looming visibly closer by the minute. That’s pretty depressing—but no more so, really, than the knowledge that the sun will engulf the earth in five billion years. The difference is only a considerable future in which to put fate out of mind, or in which to try heroically to do something about it. Yet, how many people are preparing now for the sun’s demise? It’s only a matter of time!

Still on the invasion theme, now the source of paranoia goes beyond humanly controllable factors like the bomb. Nature itself is out to get us. But guess what: it always has been! We live by grace on a narrow ledge in time, between asteroids, supernova outbursts, and other catastrophes. We survived the Big Bang, saber-tooth tigers and ice ages, only to face ultimate dissipation (as it now seems, with accelerating cosmic expansion). Whether the dream ends by fire or by ice, with a bang or a whimper, depends on your time scale. But invasion, of course, comes not only from outer space. We have regular epidemic movies too, not to mention real epidemics and people who refuse to stay dead. Both nature and the unconscious can really get under your skin! The anti-heroine of the film believes that life is unique on earth—and evil.

To be sure, we are under siege by invisible forces: biologically by every form of microbe, and psychologically by every form of unknown. Our bodies have had evolutionary time to cope with biological attack; yet, we seem to be creating uncertainty faster than we can deal with it. In the brief reprieve between natural and man-made disasters, we erect our meager defenses: personal relations and routines, family, career, science, religion, entertainment, our very sociability, and the whole of what we call culture and civilization. The film is about facing up to inevitable loss of the whole house of cards. The thing about reality, of course, is that it happens whether we face up to it or not. There is no miracle ending.