Sometimes I wonder if the world has already ended.
Climate Change. Trump. COVID. UFO whistleblowers. Wildfires in Maui. Why am I expected to go to work and pay bills when the world is eating itself?
Most pop culture treats the apocalypse as spectacle. Scavengers draped in spiked leather, roaming radioactive landscapes, feuding over the last drops of gasoline, eating what little detritus they can find. Less often are stories about a humanity that persists more or less business as usual through world-ending cataclysms.
The first Mad Max (1979) springs to mind, as society is crumbling but governments and institutions still cough and sputter along before collapsing entirely in the sequels. Children of Men (2006) is a vivid snapshot of a banal end times, with global infertility leading to civilization’s slouching toward oblivion. And The Leftovers (2014–2017) is a more recent tableau of clinging to everyday mundanity when confronted with inevitable entropy.
But the movie that has given me the best tools for living in uncertain times is not some heralded classic or prestige television series. No, I’m talking about learning life lessons from the schlockfest that is Split Second (1992).
Written by Gary Scott Thompson (The Fast and the Furious [2001], 88 Minutes [2007]) and directed by Tony Maylam (The Riddle of the Sands [1979], The Burning [1981]), Split Second is a murder mystery with a science fiction twist. In the far-flung future of 2008, torrential storms and a rising sea level have submerged most of London underwater. According to Cinefantastique in 1992, “Thompson came up with the premise of Global Warming […] when someone mentioned casually that the level of the river Thames rises each year.” Grizzled, high-strung homicide detective Harley Stone (Rutger Hauer) prowls these soggy streets in search of a serial killer who murdered his partner, Foster McClaine (Steven Hartley), three years earlier. Stone’s commanding officer saddles him with a new partner, Dick Durkin (Neil Duncan), a by-the-book cop with a more rational perspective on police work. This odd couple have to learn to work together to stop the monstrous killer who may be something more than human…
Split Second drops its audience into a world that looks strikingly familiar in 2023. The end is not coming from nuclear war or mysterious phenomena. In fact, the demonic beast tearing out his victims’ hearts is not the cause of London’s ruin but is attracted to the city because it embodies the world’s calamitous state.
With the high tide comes an infestation of giant rodents, and throughout the movie there are signs about plague pits and quarantines. The citizens we see in this smoggy “Swinging City” are beaten down with ennui and cynicism. Club and bar patrons push the limits of sexuality and gender. Crowds of homeless huddle around burning trash cans. Greedy rat catchers swindle our heroes.
Meanwhile, the police are militarized, armored up and carrying firearms, something that is very rare in London even today. As of 2017, more than 90% of London’s police officers don’t carry a gun and instead rely on weapons like canisters of mace, handcuffs, batons and occasionally stun-guns. The reasoning behind this “policing by consent” is everyday police officers with guns sends the wrong message to communities and can actually cause more problems than it solves.
As the River Thames overflows with vermin and disease straight out of the Middle Ages, none other than the United States is said to be blocking yet another United Nations resolution on Global Warming. This offhand comment from a radio news report is a remarkably prescient mirror of my country’s government in the 21st century.
Global Warming had been an increasingly urgent topic since the 1970s, but the inflection point was in 1988. Per UN.org, Global Warming and the depletion of the ozone layer became increasingly prominent in international public debate and politics by that year. The United Nations organized an internal seminar in January 1988 to identify environmental sectors that might be sensitive to climate change and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established and met for the first time in November.
Unfortunately, Global Warming became politicized by the early 1990s. Initially right wing politicians such as Richard Nixon and Margaret Thatcher led significant action against climate change, both internationally and domestically. Everything changed in the ‘90s when right wing media started arguing that Climate Change was invented or at least exaggerated by the left to justify an expansion of government powers.
Consequently, public opinion was divided. Even people who believed Global Warming was caused by man-made pollution didn’t tend to prioritize it as an issue. This discord wasn’t helped by pop culture that either ignored or didn’t take Global Warming seriously.
As Indian author Amitav Ghosh examines in 2016’s The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, Climate Change is not a popular topic in non-fiction or fiction books:
To see that this is so, we need only glance through the pages of a few highly regarded literary journals and book reviews, for example, the London Review of books, the New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Literary Journal, and the New York Times Review of Books. When the subject of climate change occurs in these publications, it is almost always in relation to nonfiction; novels and short stories are very rarely to be glimpsed within this horizon. Indeed, it could even be said that fiction that deals with climate change is almost by definition not of the kind that is taken seriously by serious literary journals: the mere mention of the subject is often enough to relegate a novel or short story to the genre of science fiction.
Ghosh’s feelings on portrayals of Global Warming in books carried over to the movies of the time, as well. This very real and exigent topic was really only being explored in lowbrow sci-fi such as RoboCop 2 (1990), Crash and Burn (1990), Highlander II: The Quickening (1991) and, of course, Waterworld (1995).
Stone deals with these modern and topical crises of his world by getting the job done brutally and bluntly. He seems to be a walking, talking collection of action movie clichés — big guns, dark clothes, sunglasses, owns a Harley-Davidson, has a bad attitude — directly descended from “Dirty Harry” Callahan. He leads with his gut and little else.
He also seems to owe a debt to Blade Runner (1982), but not Hauer’s most famous role of replicant Roy Batty. Stone is not unlike Rick Deckard, Harrison Ford’s boozing, world-weary policeman. As Gary Scott Thompson told the aforementioned Cinefantastique, he wrote the role of Stone with Ford in mind. But by casting Hauer you get an edge and madness that Ford doesn’t really have in his wheelhouse.
The more immediate influence on Stone’s characterization may very well be Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) from Lethal Weapon (1987). Thompson did first write the script for Split Second in 1988, in the wake of Lethal Weapon, and originally set the story in Los Angeles. And although 48 Hrs. (1982) arguably originated the buddy cop subgenre, Lethal Weapon cemented the formula that Split Second follows with Stone and Durkin as mismatched partners.
Riggs and Stone are both unhinged, dangerous and at the whims of psych evaluations. The police psychologist (Mary Ellen Trainor) in Lethal Weapon warns Captain Ed Murphy (Steve Kahan) and Murtaugh (Danny Glover) that Riggs is suicidal and may be psychotic. Stone starts off Split Second returning from suspension after he’s found to have “anxiety neurosis to the point of being paranoid.” He’s also said to live on anxiety, coffee and chocolate.
Lethal Weapon affects concern over Riggs’ mental state, but the movie ultimately discredits Trainor’s character as a Chicken Little. Riggs is instead saved by the normalcy and stability of Murtaugh’s friendship and family with no mention of professional psychiatric care or even medication. Similarly, Stone dismisses his medical report by declaring, “Doctors don’t know shit.”
The difference between Riggs and Stone is the latter character is exaggerated to the point of parody. “I’ve always wanted to play a cartoon character with the accent on humor,” Hauer said in Cinefantastique. The heightened personality and behavior of the character seem to be the filmmakers’ other pointed critique of the bullheaded U.S. of A. Although Hauer is Dutch, the character speaks with an American accent and is said to have worked in “every hellhole in the world, and been fired from all of them.” Likely this bit of cultural commentary stems from British producer Laura Gregory and director Maylam switching the setting to London when they came onboard.
Dick Durkin serves to balance Stone out with several healthy coping strategies. He has emotional as well as academic intelligence, having attended schools in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Oxford. He runs five miles every morning and practices tai chi. He has a healthy sex life with his girlfriend, and shows he’s comfortable in his sexuality when he tries to give Stone a massage. He also has a healthy imagination, believing Stone has a psychic connection with the serial killer because of comic books.
Partnering with Stone does change the greenhorn cop. After their second encounter with the hulking killer, Durkin starts throwing back coffee and chocolate and insists they need some “big fucking guns!” But what he achieves by the end of the movie is a middle ground between his own ideologies and Stone’s approach to life.
Durkin uses his occult studies to interpret the map that the creature carves into his chest. He also realizes that it’s a trap when they find Michelle McLaine (Kim Cattrall) hanging within a circle of light. In turn, he influences Stone who goes from skeptic to utilizing Durkin’s smarts. Early on in the movie he says to Durkin, “What do you make of all this? I don’t care about your degrees. I don’t care about secondhand knowledge. I want to know what you think, you.” By the end, however, he trusts Durkin enough to respect his new-age sensibilities.
Michelle is the final and unifying mental health model — that of acceptance and compassion. She and Stone were having an affair but broke it off when Foster died. When they meet again, Stone confesses he doesn’t know if he can catch the killer. Michelle calmly advises, “Then don’t try. Just give it up and walk away.” Even though she misses Foster, she’s ready to live her life. She’s also a child psychologist who feels deeply, and takes it hard when Foster’s mom commits suicide.
A major turning point for Stone is when he impulsively but fleetingly kisses Michelle after she’s hurt. His willingness to admit his feelings culminates with a much more passionate kiss after they escape an explosion together during the climax. Every character reaches their apotheosis at this point: Stone uses some quick Durkin-esque thinking in electrifying the water, Michelle harnesses her aggression by gun-butting a gate down, and both she and Durkin save Stone by unloading their big fucking guns on the satanic spawn.
They end the movie happy, healthy and speedboating off into the London morning together. There’s nothing else to do with Armageddon but face it with friends and a positive mindset.
The Bartcave 