What a Way To Go: Life at the End of Empire

Public screening of this film at Champlain College's Alumni Auditorium
Wednesday, August 15 from 7:00 to 10:00 pm
Meet the director and writer in a Q and A dialogue.

“I didn't say it would be easy; I just said it would be the truth.”
Morpheus, The Matrix (1999)

The 21st century world faces a number of problems that, in combination, provide all of us with unique challenges in a new century that will end up looking little like the 20th. If you are awake and paying attention, you can probably tick off a short list of concerns all of us confront moving forward.

Climate change.

Overpopulation.

Mass species extinction.

Global Peak Oil.

Environmental overshoot.

The culture of Empire.

Now, a brand-new documentary film written by Tim Bennett and produced by Sally Erickson – “What A Way To Go – Life at the End of Empire” – considers the interconnections between these emerging “big picture” problems. The film functions as a two hour “cat scan of the planet,” according to historian Carolyn Baker, and provides an eye-opening look at our civilization's future.

What makes this film engaging is the use of a number of techniques seen in other films – The End of Suburbia, for example - of the same genre, with the addition of a first person narrator (Bennett himself), who provides an intimate connection to the stories told in this sprawling and dense celluloid experience.

Bennett's personal take, combined with a four-part approach that structures the film – The Train, the Train and the Tracks, Locomotive Power, and Walkabout – helps frame the wide-ranging story Bennett and Erickson tell.

“What a Way to Go” is helped along by the clever editing together of old video clips from the fifties and sixties with a number of talking heads, that, in combination, keeps the viewer awake and immersed in the flow to the story. A wide variety of thinkers and cultural critics – Chellis “Off The Map” Glendinning, Daniel “Ishmael” Quinn, William “Overshoot” Catton, Richard “The Oil Depletion Protocol” Heinberg, Paul “The End of Oil” Roberts, Jerry “In The Absence of the Sacred” Mander among them – provide specific insights into the nature and scope of our global dilemmas. And a provocative pastiche of images – many arresting, some disturbing– stitched together above a Philip Glass-like soundtrack help anchor the film sonically.

The film suggests that all of us, collectively, have gotten lost in a “hall of mirrors.” Our mediated culture (built on what Quinn calls “totalitarian agriculture”) amplifies our own importance as humans, which is further exacerbated by our slavish and narcissistic devotion to technology, machines, and mediated (and often addicting) experiences. This situation, in turn, leads to serious repercussions for every other species in the world, and the health of the planet itself, as we human beings who live and work within the ever-expanding world of the Empire conquer the rest of the planet (including human cultures unlike our own) in the name of satisfying our needs, wants, and desires.

And denial is not just a river in Egypt, according to our talking heads. It is difficult for most of us to “see the prison bars,” Bennett observes, mixing metaphors, as the train the world is on speeds by, because we are addicted to the current culture, and change or resistance seems so often futile, at best, or impossible, at worst. Worse, perhaps, is the “infantilization” of our culture, which, as Heinberg notes, makes us more susceptible to herd mentality and dependence on the very forces that are threatening to take apart the planet, and us with it.

Now, the film suggests, the bill is coming due, in the form of climate change, peak oil, and a whole host of related problems for which there are no easy solutions.

Or indeed, no solutions at all.

“I don't like happy chapters,” Bennett says towards film's end, because there is “no list of quick and painless fixes. If there is going to be a happy chapter, we will have to write it together with the rest of the community of life.”

Or, as the Chinese proverb explains, “If we don't change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed.”

My biggest criticism of this film – and it is a big one – is it's failure to name names – how did the world get to this point? What about the global role of the World Bank, or GATT, or the IMF, or the WTO, or the military-industrial-media-energy (MIME) complex, or any one of a number of other structures or organizations that contribute to pushing the “train” Bennett speaks of forward?

No mention of them here.

Despite this shortcoming, though, Bennett and Erickson have provided us with a two-hour look at a very real future most of us would rather not contemplate, and offered us, if not solutions, than ways forward.

“Gather yourselves,” say the Hopi elders. “We are the leaders we've been looking for.”