'The Road' — a hell of a movie

I saw "The Road." I have a taste for post-apocalypse stories, and wasn't going to miss this one. It has been marketed as something above the norm of science fiction; the novel, by Cormac McCarthy, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2007. But the public's wan response to the movie suggests something is the matter with it.

The post-apocalypse story has been part of popular culture for a long time. Part of it is the freedom it gives the author. Stephen King once noted after writing "The Stand" what fun it was to kill off all but a handful of Americans and start over.

To create an imaginative and fanciful world, the writer wipes industrial civilization away with a nuclear war ("The Road Warrior"), an epidemic ("I Am Legend") or the new century's bugaboo, climate change ("The Day After Tomorrow"). The explanation doesn't have to make sense. The freezing of New York City in "The Day After Tomorrow" was pure Hollywood, as was the rise in the sea level of several miles in "Waterworld." And if Australia were hit by nuclear war, it's not too likely that survivors would roar into the Outback on choppers.

Such stories are for fun. Others are meant to be warnings. In 1957, Nevil Shute gave us "On the Beach," a story of nuclear war in which humanity's last submarine visits the dead continent of North America, surfacing off Edmonds, Wash. In that story, humanity dies. In Stephen Vincent Benét's "By the Waters of Babylon," written in 1937, the future is Neolithic. In most accounts, humanity does better.

In many stories, the author organizes his characters into good and bad and has them fight to see who will shape humanity's future. In David Brin's "The Postman," it's the U.S. Postal Service. In "The Stand," it's a community connected to God through the visions of an old woman. In Walter Miller's "A Canticle for Leibowitz," it's the Catholic Church, in a replay of the role of the monasteries in the Dark Ages. In Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's "Lucifer's Hammer," in which a comet strikes the Earth, the defenders of science man the bulwarks at a nuclear power plant.

These stories make you think about what institutions, knowledge, culture and virtues keep our world together, so that humanity can have a future.

In "The Road," there is no future. All wild animals larger than a bug are dead. The fish are dead. Even the trees are dead, and are toppling over. How this happened to the Earth is not explained.

The story is of a man and his son who live by scavenging cans of food from an extinct world. As characters, the two are sketched only. We don't know their names, or what the man's profession was, or why he and the boy are among the last survivors. They just are, and they are almost alone. Their world has no organization of good people. It has only groups of cannibals — predators, who hunt.

Here is a point of fact. Faced with starvation, a few humans have resorted to cannibalism. But have they hunted each other? That is a very different thing.

"The Road" is vivid in its darkness, and if you take the movie and the book in succession, they pack an emotional wallop. This is supposed to be serious — Pulitzer and Oscar stuff. So what does it mean? Why ask people to go through this?

The book reviewer for The New York Times said there was "fearless wisdom" in it. She didn't say what it was.

Bruce Ramsey's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. E-mail him at bramsey@seattletimes.com