Which region is the greater threat to humanity: Northern California or Southern California?

That’s the most urgent question raised by 2023’s great cinematic contest between Oppenheimer and Barbie.

Sure, these are entertaining films about a physicist and a doll. But both movies are also, in no small part, California-based stories about global nightmares, about the Earth-altering threat of bombs and bombshells alike.

Embedded in those nightmares are warnings about the damage that Northern and Southern California can do when we send our ideas out into the world.

Oppenheimer is the Northern California nightmare. While much of Christopher Nolan’s film takes place in New Mexico, where the first atomic bombs were built, the most important moments occur at Berkeley, where J. Robert Oppenheimer was a professor from 1929 to 1943.

It’s there that he meets the Manhattan Project’s military chief, Leslie Groves, and befriends the physicist Ernest Lawrence (the Lawrence of the Bay Area’s Lawrence Livermore National Lab), who becomes a crucial collaborator in the Manhattan Project. In fact, the lab in New Mexico that produced the nuclear bombs ended up being managed by the University of California.

The whole endeavor is a quintessential Bay Area enterprise. Very smart people from around the world come together to rapidly create a disruptive technology, without fully appreciating its perils and complications until it’s too late. Oppenheimer has prompted comparisons to how Silicon Valley is now making available artificial intelligence tools available without understanding their consequences.

Among the nuclear age’s cultural and commercial products was Barbie (born in 1959). She, and the new film about her, are Los Angeles nightmares.

The director, Greta Gerwig, is a Sacramento kid who shares her home city’s loathing of all things L.A. So, her film pins most of the damage that Barbie has done on Southern California, where she was invented and manufactured.

Barbie, like Los Angeles itself, is a sun-splashed comedy with a dark noir heart. The central joke of the film is that when Barbie, in unexpected existential crisis, leaves the seeming perfection of Barbieland for “Reality,” it turns out to be L.A. Amid the city’s most unreal Westside precincts (especially Venice), Barbie learns of the impossible expectations her example places on women.

Barbie’s would-be boyfriend Ken, who is confined to hanging around the beach in Barbieland, discovers the possibilities of patriarchy after he falls in love with the phallic glass office towers of Century City. And when Ken takes those supposed Southern California values back to Barbieland, that utopia of feminism (with a set design that resembles Palm Springs) collapses. Soon, the various Ken dolls have imposed a bizarro dictatorship of men, who subjugate the various Barbies, who’d previously served as president and controlled the Supreme Court.

It might be wrong to think too hard about a movie as addled and antic as Barbie, but the film does reflect the Hollywood work realities of the women who made the movie. Gerwig, star-producer Margot Robbie, and their colleagues have had to navigate an entertainment industry dominated by dim-witted Kens. (The rest of L.A., thank goodness, is a bit more egalitarian, as Mayor Karen Bass and the all-female Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors can tell you.)

Both films, however, feel more than a little soulless. Barbie, for all its righteous feminism, is a corporate vehicle for selling dolls. It misses opportunities to make light of the cynicism of this American moment, when corporations try to talk like social movements, and social movements often behave like corporations. The anxieties of Barbie are firmly upper-middle-class and higher; none of the women or men of the film worry about what worries most Angelenos—scratching out a living in a too-expensive place.

Oppenheimer is even more callous. It’s a film about nuclear weapons that doesn’t show their victims. We never see the human horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which is why the film can’t get screened in Japan), or the damage people endured because of their proximity to the testing of such weapons, from the South Pacific to Central Asia.

This distance from real-life human concerns is what makes both films so unsettling—and so convincing as apocalyptic documents.

Together, they offer a two-part scenario for the end of humanity. First, we grow divided and isolated from each other because of the unattainable lifestyles and cultural expectations that Southern California creates and promotes. Second, we kill ourselves with the technologies masterminded by Northern California.

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This enduring query brought together a group of panelists that moderator Edan Lepucki called “the most interesting dinner party I’ve ever been invited to” for a Zócalo/Getty event before an overflow crowd at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.

Lepucki, author of the post-apocalyptic novel California, stressed that addressing the event’s title question—”Is Civilization on the Verge of Collapse?”—starts with defining what type of civilization we are talking about. One panelist, University of New South Wales global biosecurity scholar Raina MacIntyre, said it’s clear that our concerns about collapse are centered on technological civilization, which she described as “a fragile ecosystem under threat for a lot of reasons.”

SCI-Arc speculative architect and futurist Liam Young said that “civilization has always been collapsing,” for somebody.

The question, Young said, begs another: Just how long can we go on living with the luxuries we enjoy? We’ve set up the planet as a sort of “global conveyor belt to deliver luxuries for our life,” Young said. So, the futurist urged, we should be asking ourselves where the resources that support this world—precious metals like lithium—are coming from and for how long we can rely upon them. “A collapse is probably due,” he said.

The fear of technology is common in our modern world, and for valid reasons. MacIntyre noted that the creation of deadly viruses is a real threat; the technology to create smallpox—a disease we consider eradicated—was published in a scientific journal and can be accessed by nearly anyone, she said. So how do we regulate such knowledge and what role do our governments play in regulating it?

Lepucki pointed to the research of MacIntyre which emphasizes the fact that our laws cannot keep up with technology as it evolves so rapidly. This is why it’s so important that we be prudent and careful consumers of the technology in our lives. When thinking about technology, Young said, it’s important to ask ourselves, “are we customers or citizens of our cities?”

In our technologically sophisticated and globalized world, there are any number of dangers to civilization—from nuclear bombs to biotechnology to climate change—we have “so many balls in the air, any one of which could fall and destroy everything,” Young said. Another panelist—Jonathan P. Wong, RAND Corporation defense policy researcher and a former U.S. Marine—explained that one of the problems of big bureaucracies like the U.S. government is that they are designed to “regularize and systemize processes” and don’t do well at dealing with new threats and chaotic situations posed by technology.

Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve worried about the world collapsing around us. Wong had the opportunity to look at the notes from some of the “brightest minds” during the Cold War as they contemplated the threat of nuclear war, and they “were certain that we were going to end in a giant fireball.” However, that “hasn’t happened yet,” he said.

Young’s recent book, Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post-Anthropocene, is concerned with what the post-Anthropocene world may look like. The Anthropocene age is the age we are currently in, where humans are a dominant force and “are shaping our earth,” Young said. A post-Anthropocene world, he said, is one in which the machines created by humans are the forces reshaping the world. Such a world might have “human exclusion zones,” he continued—for example, the servers of tech giants like Facebook might be areas humans aren’t invited into and cannot enter.

Wong said that while the world we are entering can seem like a terrifying one, the fact that we can discuss hard questions about this future—at events like this very panel—is a hopeful sign. These vital questions about the human future, and the post-human future, “should be a call to arms and a rallying cry whether or not you’re at a think tank, a biosecurities agency, or you’re a Hollywood producer making a film with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson,” Young said.

MacIntyre said there are plenty of reasons to fear the technological networks we’ve created. For example, she said, the dark web has created the opportunity for nefarious interactions and collusion between organized crime networks and terrorist organizations. But look on the bright side: Humans can use these same networks to organize themselves to “protest a president or rally around climate change” at scales never before seen in human history, Young said. “If we point the network and these technologies in the right direction we can act at scales that might actually mean something in the face of the scale of these problems,” he said.

If civilization as we know it were to collapse, what would that world look like? MacIntyre said those from rural and remote areas would have the better chance of survival because they are generally more resilient than city dwellers who rely on Wi-Fi, cars, and gadgets to get by in their everyday lives. Without technology, she said, the Earth could only support 1 million people.

Lepucki asked the panelists if there would be any pleasures or surprises from a technological collapse. And while the panelists agreed that a life where we aren’t beholden to our phones and email would have its pleasures, we would lose large swaths of knowledge as much of our knowledge is stored digitally.

During the question-and-answer session with the audience, one attendee said he believed that humans do not have an inherent desire to harm one another, and wondered if the belief that many hold dear—that procreation is the fundamental purpose of human life—needs to be changed?

While MacIntyre was not sure of how or if we need to change this narrative of procreation, she stressed that one problem we face as a civilization is that “human nature is selfish, people are corruptible, and very few people live a truly good and honest life.”

“People can be easily swayed to do the wrong thing,” whether it harms the planet or other people, she said. Unfortunately, “this is the story of human history (but) we must think about the consequences of our actions globally.”

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If the apocalypse comes to California, I’ll be ready. After all, I’ve been to San Juan Bautista, which has centuries of experience with the ending of worlds.

I visited the San Benito County town again this summer, when Armageddon seems closer than ever. North Korean missiles may now be able to reach California. The president of the United States has the nuclear codes and no impulse control. Icebergs the size of states are breaking off Antarctica. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has moved its Doomsday Clock 30 seconds forward; it’s now just two-and-a-half minutes to midnight for humanity. “Global danger looms,” the Bulletin said.

California is famous for its proximity to disasters—from earthquakes to riots to floods—but this moment seems especially apocalyptic. Our governor is incapable of giving a press conference without predicting that unmitigated climate change will kill us all—and soon (but not until after he himself is dead, he adds). Judging by the size of the fires raging from Yosemite to Modoc, our incendiary end may already be underway.

And even if we manage to survive natural and man-made apocalypse, Elon Musk says robots will just inherit the world anyway.

In these scary times, a tiny place like San Juan Bautista—with fewer than 2,000 people, off 101 between Gilroy and Salinas—might seem like an escape. But no California place is more haunted by visions of apocalypse—historically, seismically, cinematically.

Armageddon and the town come together in the most famous local structure, the Mission San Juan Bautista, the 15th of the 21 missions the Franciscans built in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It is distinguished by its size—it had the largest church of any mission—and its subsequent fame, as the setting of the most terrifying scenes of Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller “Vertigo.”

Look out below! Some critics have interpreted Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 masterpiece “Vertigo,” which climaxes at Mission San Juan Bautista, as an allegory of humanity’s failure to recognize and avoid its past mistakes—until it’s too late. Image courtesy of Jon Rubin/Flickr.

Shortly after arriving in the town, I headed to the mission, with several bottles of water in hand. The bottles had been a gift from my hotel; signs around town warn you not to drink the local water because of high levels of nitrates, which are blamed on fertilizer use and the area’s hydrology.

At the mission, I walked into the Guadalupe Chapel, where Father Alberto Cabrera was saying Mass and singing many verses of “Amazing Grace,” including this one:

The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
The sun forbear to shine;
But God, who called me here below,
Will be forever mine.

The hymn in that setting put me in mind of the apocalyptic story of California’s Indians, and their enslavement, forced conversion, and deaths by the thousands, mostly from disease. The mission period saw a decline in the state’s native population from 300,000 in 1769 to 250,000 when the missions were secularized in 1834. Then came the U.S. conquest and what historian Benjamin Madley has shown to be an “American genocide” that reduced the population from 150,000 in 1850, to 30,000 a quarter century later.

This history feels especially alive in San Juan Bautista. Descendants of decimated local tribes have raised the topic so consistently that Bishop Richard Garcia of Monterey gave a highly publicized Mass of reconciliation at the mission in 2012, asking for forgiveness for the sins committed against Native Americans in California. (Whatever quiet that bought was erased when Pope Francis made Junipero Serra, the mission system’s founder, a saint in 2015.)

Another player that has kept the subject in the public mind is El Teatro Campesino, the progressive theater, based less than half a mile from the mission. The theater has built a national reputation with diverse works, some of which look back at Mission Indians as well as at the Aztec and Maya civilizations that suffered their own catastrophes.

For all the weight of past apocalypses, looming destructions are plainly visible at San Juan Bautista. After walking through the mission cemetery, past the sign that says that 4,300 Mission Indians are buried there, I encountered a U.S. Geological Survey marker noting what lies beneath the mission: the San Andreas Fault.

For more than 200 years, the fault has damaged and destroyed parts of the mission. A big retrofit is being planned for next year, but can the mission stand at this dangerous spot for another 200 years? The end is so close-by that it’s right under our feet.

From the mission and the fault, I strolled across the grassy Spanish square, bordered by preserved buildings that are part of a state historical park. Among the structures is the Castro-Breen Adobe, named half in honor of Patrick Breen, the Irish immigrant who, with his wife and seven children, joined the Donner Party. They survived that cataclysm and lived to tell the tale.

The square is instantly recognizable to movie buffs. Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak run across it in the two most dramatic scenes of “Vertigo.” Each of those scenes ends with a different blonde woman seemingly falling to her death from the mission tower. The church had no tower when Hitchcock filmed in San Juan Bautista 50 years ago—the one you see in the movie is a Hollywood special effect.

But those cinematic falls in San Juan Bautista have spawned a cottage industry of analysis, with “Vertigo” as the story of the self-deception and inevitable self-destruction of mankind, the triumph of death over life. One great philosopher of our age, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, a Frenchman who teaches at Stanford and is a friend of Gov. Jerry Brown, has written that the movie inspired his own career as “an enlightened doomsayer” who developed “a metaphysics of the age of catastrophe that awaits us.”

Dupuy devotes the epilogue of his masterful book, The Mark of The Sacred, to “Vertigo’s” complicated plot, and especially to how Stewart’s character allows himself to be twice deceived by Novak’s character, only realizing the resulting peril after it’s too late.

In this, Dupuy sees humanity’s failure to recognize how close we are to the apocalypse. By the time we see with our own eyes that Armageddon is real, it will be too late.

The apocalypse, Dupuy writes, is nothing like death, which can be sweet, as when those who knew a person recall their memory. The apocalypse threatens us with the greater horror: nothingness. If humanity ends, it will be as if all the places and people who came before—Alfred Hitchcock or the Donner Party or the California Indians—had never existed.

To save ourselves and our memory, Dupuy argues, we must treat the apocalypse as inevitable, and embrace it, study it, and stare as deeply as possible into the abyss, so that humans might find some way to avoid falling in.

So, please, visit the apocalypse as soon as you can. San Juan Bautista is nigh.

The post In San Juan Bautista, It’s Apocalypse—Now appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.