But the scenario transcends the preoccupations of any particular period. It touches on primal impulses: punishment of evildoers. Revenge against enemies. The fulfillment of infantile megalomania and narcissism. The longing for a fresh start, in which inveterate conflicts — racial, social, sexual, cultural — have been purged, or can be confronted in a pristine setting, and perhaps resolved. And perhaps mostly it evokes a spirit of adventure, the exuberance of discovery and creation, the prospect of a brave new world. It’s not just a high-concept movie pitch aimed at jaded 21st-century consumers, but an archetype that stretches back to antiquity. Although the theme resonates with the specific dreads and desires of today, its appeal is timeless.
Genesis
When you come right down to it, the last man on Earth’s situation is the same fix as the first one’s. He has dominion over the Earth, but there’s no one to brag to about it. As God said in the Book of Genesis, “It is not good that man should be alone” — and that’s when all the trouble gets started.
By chapter five, He has to flush it all away again — all, that is, except for righteous Noah, the first last man. The Noah story appeals to a lot of passions: revenge, repentance, renewal. It expresses a wish for a clean slate from which a purer, more innocent world can spring. But it also is a parable of power, in which personal hegemony comes at the expense of everyone else.
Some three millennia later, in 1719, Daniel Defoe’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe offered a variation of the flood myth. In the novel (which some scholars believe to be the first written in English), it’s not the whole world that capsizes, just a microcosm of it — a slave ship, no less. The title survivor washes ashore on a deserted island, and every grade schooler can fill you in with what happens next. Crusoe sheds the hull of civilization and builds a new world from the detritus he manages to salvage — a new world distressingly like the old, as it turns out. No less than James Joyce analyzed the story as an allegory of, and apology for, British colonialism. Perhaps so, but the reason the book has thrived over the centuries as a kid’s classic and a movie perennial (there are nearly 50 films with the words “Robinson Crusoe” in the title listed on imdb.com) is probably not due to its politics, but to its ebullience and boundless optimism.
Not so Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, published in 1826 (a modern “no-budget” adaptation written and directed by indie filmmaker James Arnett awaits distribution). Shelley was already pretty bummed out when she wrote her classic Frankenstein in 1818: her mother, prototypical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, died after giving birth to her; her own daughter died in infancy in 1815; and both her half-sister and the abandoned wife of her lover, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, committed suicide in 1816. Things hadn’t lightened up when she wrote The Last Man: her son, her husband Percy, and their soul mate Lord Byron had by that point also all kicked the bucket. “The Last Man,” she wrote, “yes, I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.”
