Tomás Mesen

“The Worst Day of My Life”

The Apocalypse, Universal Love and Carnage

The long take that opens Roman Polanski’s Carnage (2011) presents a group

of children at a park two of whom, for reasons unbeknownst to the viewer,

commence a violent dispute. What follows is over an hour of an analogous

deterioration between the parents of the two children, contained within one

apartment, dominated by their attachment to social norms and notorious for the

absence of the children they so (un)lovingly protect. Similarly, the ending of William

Golding’s 1954 Lord of the Flies presents the deterioration of a group of children into

acts of barbarism. Golding uses them as an allegory for the adult world (mankind),

its impulses towards civilization, and their own acts of barbarism (war). However,

the reconciliation scene that bookends Carnage not only rejects this kind of reading,

but also begs to reassess the system of rationality, order and universal fun that

Ralph attempts to instil at the island as a larger cause for the (pre)apocalyptic

condition that engulfs that world. The real tragedy thus is not in Jack’s acts of

violence — or Zachary and Ethan’s — but in that the regime that Ralph and Piggy

sought to establish — like the one Nancy, Alan, Penelope and Michael abide by —

inherently derives in some form of hate-driven conflict.

“Lord of the Flies” is only one example of what Slavoj Žižek calls American’s

(and Western Civilization’s) deep psychological attachment to images of

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catastrophe, a constant anxiety about catastrophe that shows just how concerned

America is about radical social change but also indicates Americans’ desires to

preserve the status quo (Welcome 23). An argument also mirrored by Marx and

Engels; “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without incessantly revolutionising the

instruments of production, and thereby the methods of production, and

consequently all social relations… In one word it creates a world after its own

image” (128-129). Although American’s fascination with their own apocalypse is

prominent in popular culture, it has rarely been represented with the quotidianity

that Carnage demonstrates. Consequently, Carnage provides an effective starting

point for a reconsideration of the concept of the apocalypse in relation to the weight

of all human history in a contemporary context.

In his essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Walter Benjamin presents

a rejection of Marxist Historical Materialism, suggesting it is in fact a theological

fraud (para. 1-2). One of Benjamin’s main arguments seeks to provide an alternative,

for which he introduced the concept of the Angel of History employing Paul Kees’

painting “Angelus Novus”. Benjamin introduces the way in which the angel in Kees’

painting is flying away from something that it fixedly contemplates, to explain that:

“This is how one pictures the Angel of History. His face is

turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees

one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in

front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and

make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from

Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the

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angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him

into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris

before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress”

(para. 9).

Carnage could be considered a complete exemplification of this concept, of

this wreckage and its ultimate collapse. Although Benjamin makes no explicit

allusion to the apocalypse, it is precisely because of this that his concept is

applicable to the film. In Carnage, there is no pivotal event which can be singled out

as “the end of all things”; like the Angel of History, the couples’ degeneration piles

wreckage upon wreckage of what is a continual apocalypse. A recreation (and

reminder) that the human condition cannot be fixed, that modern (Western) society,

embodied in the microcosmic level by these people, has condemned itself by its own

progress. Moreover, Carnage does not merely recreate this onscreen, but it aims at

reproducing the viewer’s sociological reality. The excessive shot-reverse-shots, the

high amount of cuts in the film and numerous tracking shots, situate the viewer as

another member of this living room, not merely an external observer but rather

closer to an active participant. A further reinforcement that this is as much the

viewer’s (and everyone’s) apocalypse as it is for the characters in the film.

Žižek offers a similar theory that can be used as follow-up for Benjamin’s

theses. He uses the example of the line of thought of a worker who becomes aware

that he belongs to the proletariat, to rationalize that, “One does something, one

declares oneself as the one who did it, and, on the base of this declaration, one does

something new” (How para. 14). This moment of self-conscious declaration

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establishes two things: that everything one says/does is creating a meaning, and

that this immediately affects how one relates to this meaning. Indeed, Nancy, Alan,

Penelope and Michael as (im)proper citizens of civil Western society are overtly

conscious of the spoken and unspoken laws by which they must abide; all their acts

are a consequence of the situation in which they exist. However, it is in this

condition of reflexivity that they are also unknowingly partaking in the apocalypse.

Furthermore, Žižek elaborates that “even the most down-to-earth objects

and activities always contain a declarative dimension, which constitutes the

ideology of everyday life (How para. 14).” This is much like one of Benjamin’s final

theses:

“No fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It

became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may

be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this

as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the

beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own

era has formed with a definite earlier one (para. 29).”

In the constellation of history, all events are considered regardless of their greater

or lesser significance. They not only constitute a whole rather than a string of beads,

but they are a whole that is notably unfixable. In Carnage chaos does not only unfold

around the main discussion of Zachary’s violence towards Ethan, but it is presented

in even the most mundane details (such as the cobbler being in the fridge and the

Coke not being in the fridge). Later on while sharing one of their few moments of

intimacy in the bathroom, Alan even suggests that the warm Coke was the catalyst

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for Nancy’s throwing up. The acts which both lead to and constitute the apocalypse

are not perceived in terms of small or grand history, like with Benjamin’s Angel of

History, they are all a piece adding itself to one single catastrophe.

Herein lies once more the difference that Carnage’s wreckage has in relation

to other popular apocalyptic fiction. It is unlike Marlow’s journey up the river in

Joseph Conrad’s 1899 Heart of Darkness, Willard’s similar mission in Francis Ford

Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), or Aguirre’s own down the Amazon in Werner

Herzog’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972). Carnage does not require grand or epic

events for an apocalypse, instead, it falls more in line with Luis Buñuel’s late

critiques of Western bourgeoisie culture; notably The Exterminating Angel (1962)

and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). Not only are the characters in all

three akin to each other, but the situations in which they are engulfed are identical;

held by what they see as inexplicable forces—social norms—they are unable to

successfully realize or terminate any kind of social gathering.

The films of Buñuel, like Carnage, present desire not as an instinct that is to

be fulfilled, but rather as a flowing energy that is frustrated in its attempt to be

fulfilled. Žižek points out that the films of Buñuel are more than a simple critique of

the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, but rather about questioning society and the

illusion of society as a unified body that is so easily unsettled by prohibition and

desire (Courtly para. 15). The wreckage upon wreckage notion in Carnage presents

a situation in which ‘human progress’ in society is exposed and replaced by an

apocalypse: a situation of uncontrollable desire (that is, the characters’ desires to

dominate over the other) and of violence. Once everything is exposed there remains

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only one thing to be said, aptly the film’s closing line: “Why are we still in this house?

This is the worst day of my life.” Not only is it pointing to the fact that their being in

the house is due in part to the constructs and prohibitions of social norms but it is

recognizing these norms as the very foundations for the film’s apocalypse. Because,

as rightly pointed out by Alan’s character in the film and also touched upon by

Benjamin in his essay: “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same

time a document of barbarism” (para. 7).

The unsaid argument in all of this is that if we do accept this notion of a

single wreckage that has been accumulating since the birth of (human) time, then it

is only logical to consider that an apocalypse has been ongoing for a similarly

unaccounted long amount of time. Is this apocalypse then analogous with what Alan

in the film refers to as “The God of Carnage, the God whose rule has been

unchallenged since time immemorial”? Here it is useful to return to Žižek’s concept

of self-conscious declaration. Thus, yes, it can easily be argued that the wreckage

carried upon humanity’s shoulders has long been too large for it not to be

considered an apocalypse. However, one has to first recognize that this condition is

indeed apocalyptic—as Carnage and seemingly Alan do—for it to be identified as

such. Furthermore, does this notion not serve but to reaffirm the literal meaning of

an apocalypse; from the Ancient Greek ἀποκάλυψις, meaning ‘un-covering’?

However, this argument still ignores the obvious conflict that the film poses;

these are parents who (appear to) love their children, and who eventually

degenerate because of that. Why? Although, these mothers and fathers do indeed

carry upon their backs the full weight of all human catastrophe (history), embodied

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by the arbitrary establishment of Western civilization’s social norms, this does not

consider the way in which in the present (looking towards the future) they interact

with and refigure this legacy. One of Carnage’s notorieties lies in the fact that the

children are absent, in fact, the role of the child is significant precisely because of its

absence.

To consider the absent child let us also remember the Angel of History’s

position: always moving toward a future that it cannot face. Upon this, Lee Edelman

suggests that it is “impossible to conceive of the future without the image of the

child” (10). Does then the absent child equate with the wreckage of history? By this

argument the child is both the embodiment of the future and in being so it is also the

reason why we do not face it. We progress towards an unseen future in a present

that is solely based on an imaginary past full of catastrophe. Edelman argues that all

sides are always committed to futurism’s unquestioned good—the child.

Furthermore, “[…] that specific constituencies attempt to authenticate social order,

which it then intends to the future in the form of the child” (4), a situation that is

present in Carnage as the parents’ discussion begins to pile misfortunes (just like

history) on the sole basis that they desire to grant their children what they believe

to be the best future. Although initial meager agreements are marked by their

adherence to the social order, the breaking down of these norms reflects the eternal

failure of actually providing their children with any kind of future.

Here it is helpful to contextualize the size of these misfortunes using

Benjamin’s final thesis, which commences by relativizing the existence of humanity

to the history of organic life on Earth, noting, “that the miserable fifty millennia of

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homo sapiens represents something like the last two seconds of a twenty-four hour

day. The entire history of civilized humanity would on this scale, take up only one

fifth of the last second of the last hour” (para. 28). Although this argument exposes

the irrelevance of human existence, and thus the irrelevance of a human apocalypse,

it also brings forth a similar argument by Cornelius Castoriaridis:

“Contemporary Europeans (“European” here is not a geographical

expression, it is an expression of civilization) do not take into account the

enormous historical improbability of their existence. In relation to the rest of

humanity, this tradition, philosophy itself, the struggle for democracy,

equality, freedom are as improbable as the existence of life on Earth is in

relation to the existence of solar systems in the Universe” (135).

Renata Salecl supports this notion in her exploration of Western civilization’s

application of universal values: “The viral explanation of violence reveals ideology

operating in its purest form. Viruses are invisible, one cannot easily detect the

carrier, and no remedies can help the body combat them. An infected body heals

itself by creating its own antitoxins; no outside intervention will do” (129). It is the

rejection of this order that derives in an apocalypse in Carnage, the failure by the

parents to identify that in their intervention they will dwindle down into something

worse than their sons’ actions. Penelope’s mention that their son (clearly operating

under a different set of social norms to those of the adults’ world) did not want to

identify his attacker, should have been a clear indicative of what was the best stance

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the parents could assume; let the children fix things by themselves. A posture that

they approach near the beginning, only after having established their own “plan of

action.” However, even granting that little amount of control to the children proves

to be unacceptable, and becomes an object for the couples’ further deterioration.

The nature behind this kind of parent-child relationship (or lack thereof) in

Carnage can be explained by Salecl’s exploration of Lacan’s famous saying, “I love

you, but because inexplicably I love in you something more than you, I mutilate you”

(263) (a statement that by itself is already analogous to the film’s situation). She

expands on this idea by explaining that the object that is in one more than oneself is

to be understood as both the object of desire and the object of drive. In both cases,

the object can be something one admires and something one hates; though,

paradoxically, the subject often ends up destroying what he or she most loves (3).

This is an argument that she later applies with relation to the huge antinomy in

Western civilization’s embrasure of both a concept of universal human rights, and

the right to cultural difference (131), a paradoxical attempt at universal love that

can only derive in hate. This transition is also gradually revealed by the parents in

Carnage, beginning with Nancy and Alan’s perceived lack of interest, Penelope’s

excessive interest, and culminating with Michael’s declaration, “Children suck the

life out of you and leave you old and empty!” The result is that in their desire to

demonstrate their love towards them, they end up destroying any possibility of a

future that they could give them.

Additionally, Penelope’s character is also guilty of fully embracing this

paradox of Western culture. She falls victim to an ill perceived Western-centric

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notion of universal love, a concept that Žižek explains, “Acquires the level of actual

existence only if there is at least one whom I hate. Universal love for humanity

always leads to brutal hatred of the exception, the enemies of humanity”

(Neighbour, 183). Thus, it is the hate of the exception that is the truth of universal

love, Penelope herself arrives at this inherent contradiction in her declaration

towards Nancy and Alan’s rights as parents: “They’re not free.” A hypocritical

behaviour that is also exploited in smaller (but obviously not less important) events

such as her tearful declaration of understanding of another culture’s pains in

contrast to the subverted racist pronunciation regarding her maid, “I don’t know

what language I’m supposed to speak to that woman in.”

As an alternative to this traditional misguided conception of love, Žižek

suggests that true love instead, “can only emerge against a background of universal

indifference” (Neighbour, 183). It would appear then, that in his cynical,

uninterested attitude it is Alan who best approaches this condition, yet it is

undeniable that even if the way he talks about his son approximates true love, his

real intentions do not lie in universal indifference but in some poor sense of

parental love. He is stuck at a midpoint between the true indifference for which he

seems to really long, but that is impossible due to his intrinsic attachment to the

norms of Western society, a society that bears the burden of an apocalypse derivate

of its paradoxical proclamations, and that thus cannot really achieve universal

indifference.

Despite these underlying yet deeply permeating conditions, the parents’

motivations should be clear; they have to have a desire to invest in their children

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because it is their way of investing in the future. Their excessive love for them is

guided by the need of maintaining Western society as it is, despite its paradoxes and

overarching irrelevance. Žižek provides and explanation for this kind of behavior, “a

human remains stubbornly attached, fixated to an impossible point, returning to it

on account of a compulsion to repeat, unable to drop it even when it reveals itself as

unattainable” (Neighbour, 176).

In the same way that the parents are driven by the desire of maintaining a

future, the child also insists that its parents and society must always act (or not act)

in its interest, fueled by its own desire of having a future. From here it is natural to

assume again that like the Angel of History, Penelope, Nancy, Michael and Alan have

been accumulating wreckage upon wreckage and they are progressing while

contemplating a single ruin. The immediate conclusion is that when the children are

removed there is no longer an object, there is nothing left to sustain the debris left

behind by history. This realization also leads to one remaining possibility: no future,

an apocalypse. Edelman holds that the child’s privileged position in the social order

has come to be seen as the reason for which that order is held in perpetual trust

(10). The reasoning behind the apocalypse in Carnage is then that in the absence of

children, and in the parents need to explain and compensate for their absence, there

is eventually no civil order which can hold anything together.

Ironically, this absence also forces the parents themselves to fill the gap; not

only do their behaviours begin to mimic those that they are critiquing, but,

responsible with maintaining futurity, they are rendered void when put in the

position of being that future—the child. Their failure resides in that they believe

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their knowledge of the world, society, and their children can only result in

demonstration of their love towards them. Their inability to recognize the rules by

which they are bound is what prevents them from effectively liberating themselves

from the existing social reality. Žižek suggests that the only act that could do this

would be to knowingly strike themselves at what is most precious to them; the

children. “This act, far from amounting to a case of impotent aggressivity turned

against oneself, rather changes the co-ordinates of the situation in which the subject

finds himself: by cutting himself loose from the precious object through whose

possession the enemy kept him at check, the subject gains the space of free action”

(Fragile, 140). In Carnage, the enemy is of course, the societal norms and a forced

adherence to futurity. Therein lies again the heart of Michael’s claim; he fantasizes

with not knowing but is too deep in the grip of Western society to be able to do so,

and thus lies another block in their apocalypse.

However, it is in their barbaric behaviour that the children are insisting on

having a future, perhaps in acceptance that these acts are of human nature (as Alan’s

God of Carnage speech suggests), but interpreted by their parents as their cue for

the (re)instalment of social order. Thus, the child is the cause, and its reconcilement

(its education into proper civil society) is the parents’ goal. Yet, their personal

reconciliation at the end is detached from any relation to their parents. The

directive is clear: yes there is an issue, yes the children insist on having a future, the

mistake lies in that the parents believe they can still successfully provide for that

future. Perhaps the children do have a future so long as they are not dominated by

the desire of their parents, and it is precisely in their parents’ desire to provide a

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future —based on a series of unstable social norms— that they effectively destroy it.

In this (natural) process they bring the child into Benjamin’s Angel of History and

the load of having to look back into thousands of years of catastrophe.

To finalize by returning to “Lord of the Flies”, the tragedy that Carnage

establishes is a derivative of a real world, civil, contemporary version of Ralph and

Piggy’s ideals. It is a wreckage not only because of the failure of the code of ethics of

this world, but also because as explained by Benjamin, these people carry the weight

of all of human history—one single catastrophe. Carnage assumes a world in which

certain laws and social customs are firmly established and there are people who

abide by them. Unlike Lord of the Flies or Heart of Darkness, the couples’ descent into

the ‘nastier’ sides of human nature is not guided by an extreme situation allegorical

of the real world. In Carnage there are two main differentiating factors: Firstly, the

normality; both in terms of how commonplace it is to find people talking, eating and

drinking at an apartment in the Western world, and in the ‘normal’ sense of parents

gathering to discuss the unacceptable acts of their children. Secondly, that it is a

sense of love driven by the desire to provide a future that triggers their descent. As

per Benjamin’s reading of history and Žižek’s notion of universal love, the

apocalypse therein lies not in a disaster-ridden world of carnage, but in the real

carnage of contemporary society that is subverted by the promises of still having a

future and universal rights, as exemplified by Nancy, Penelope, Michael and Alan.

In the conclusion of Carnage’s foray into the heart of darkness, Nancy’s

proclamation, “This is the worst day of my life” stands as a testament that civil

society has gone too far to sustain itself (and the film). Detached from this ending is

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the long take of Zachary and Ethan’s reconciliation. Signalled by the appearance of

the much-discussed hamster, which seems at first to be the sole survivor of the

apocalypse of civil society. The presence of the hamster in this scene serves a

confirmation that what is about to be seen is in fact a reconciliation, avoiding any

kind of misinterpretation of it as a flashback to a utopic imaginary past. The

longshot establishes a distance and prevents the viewer from hearing what the

children say; unlike in the apartment here there is a clear distantiation. What is

fairly certain is that they have indeed resolved their differences; they (might) have a

future, but one that certainly does not belong to the rest of us.

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Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Reading the Past:

Literature and History. Ed. Spargo, Tamsin. Palgrave: New York, 2000. 118-126.

ebook.

Castoriaridis, Cornelius. Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy: Essays in Political

Philosophy. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1991. Print.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University

Press: Durham, 2004. Print.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Norton:

New York, 1977. Print.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. Edit. Paul Negri.

Dover Publications: New York, 2003. Print.

Polanski, Roman, dir. Carnage. Saïd Ben Saïd Production, 2011. Film.

Salecl, Renata. (Per)Versions of Love and Hate. Verso: London, 1998. Print.

Žižek, Slavoj. The Fragile Absolute: Or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth

Fighting For? Verso: London, 2008. Print.

Žižek, Slavoj. “From Courtly Love to the Crying Game.” New Left Review, 1.202

(November-December 1993). Web.

Žižek, Slavoj. How to Read Lacan. W.W. Norton & Co.: New York, 2006. ebook.

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Žižek, Slavoj. “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.”

The Neighbor: Three Inquires in Political Theology. Žižek, Slavoj, Eric Santner, and

Kenneth Reinhard. University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2006. 134-190. Print.

Žižek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on September 11

and Related Dates. Verso: London, 2002. Print.

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