Half of the resulting book, set in the last decades of a 21st century indistinguishable from the 19th (not only are there no flying cars in this future, there aren’t even cars) involves melodramatics that mirror the doomed intrigues among the Shelleys and their circle. Then, apropos of nothing, the plague descends, rendering all before it moot and all to come futile. The narrator of the title watches as all those he loves and all his enemies fall indiscriminately to the killer, regardless of their nobility, courage, strengths, or frailties. Perhaps worst is the death of his children: deprived of the illusory immortality of future generations, the last man must face the void of death without hope or consolation, alone.
The Last Man shows lasting power
Sharing much of Shelley’s title but little else with her book, The Last Man on Earth (1924) was the first Hollywood film of note to exploit the last-man premise. Made four years after Shelley’s mother’s dream of woman’s suffrage was established in the US with the 19th Amendment, the broadly comic fantasy lampoons the prospect of women in power. Here, “man” refers specifically to the adult male of the species, as another one of those pesky plagues springs up — this one wiping out all men over the age of 14. Women have taken over the world, and the filmmakers show them doing the job as efficiently as D.W. Griffith’s version of a black-run legislature in Birth of a Nation. Ozark hillbilly Elmer, the sole post-pubescent guy alive, finds himself in a mixed paradise, which subjects him to a degrading medical inspection by a she-devil medical team and makes him witness to a boxing match between two distaff senators out to win his hand (a prefiguration of Hillary Clinton?).
Crude though it is, something about the fantasy — its male wish fulfillment or its misogyny — would inspire remakes and variations over the years, ranging from the musical It’s Great to Be Alive (1933) to the TV movie The Last Man on Planet Earth (1999) and the 2000 romantic comedy The Last Man.
Hollywood in subsequent decades, though, had more urgent issues on its mind than women voting. Auschwitz demonstrated that human beings had the will to exterminate their fellow creatures, and Hiroshima proved that it had the means. Nuclear war took fantasy form in The War of the Worlds (1953), in which hero-scientist Gene Barry comes close to being the last person alive until a “miracle” (germs — in this case the saviors, not the destroyers, of humanity) intervenes. (Steven Spielberg’s 2005 remake later drew on such contemporary fears as 9/11 and the Red Sox–Yankee rivalry.) Things look even dicier for Kevin McCarthy in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, and remade in 1978 and 1993, as well as this year), which suggests that, if they can’t kill our bodies, the Reds (or the Red baiters?) can steal our souls.
As the arms race intensified, more realistic post-war scenarios took over the screen. Rather than focus on the downside of annihilation, some of these films saw it as an opportunity to rectify society’s past injustices and ills. Whenever a last man emerges from a mineshaft or the like to face the barren new world, chances are he’ll be met by a last woman, and more likely they’ll be of different races. In The World, the Flesh, and the Devil (1959), when Harry Belafonte wanders the spooky, deserted streets of the city (an inevitable last-man motif), just before he goes utterly buggy, he bumps into beautiful Inger Stevens and the whole round of racial and sexual strife begins anew.
