Some of you might remember an entry about the most recent crop of photos byRichard Misrach, entitled ‘On the Beach’, which borrows its name from Nevil Shute’s novel and the 1959 film starring Gregory Peck. After reading about and looking at Misrach’s latest, I decided I needed to read the book. So I did what any smart young man with a full plate would do upon such a realization, I rented the movie. The premise is simple, before the opening scene, the cold war has gone hot, deadly radiation is blowing across all corners of the earth, and the only safe place to go is Melbourne – but only for a few months. After a while, I wondered if all the romantic melodrama had anything to do with the photos I had fallen in love with, and not until the end did I see they were there all along. What is interesting about this story is that its post-apocalyptic and apocalyptic at the same time. As there is this pocket of humanity that has a few months to grieve what has happened, realize there is nothing that can be done, and live their life the best way they know how. Unlike more recent apocalypse movies, this one deals with how humans would respond to such a belated and certain death as individuals, and as a society. A while back, a movie called Deep Impact made similar investigations, but was ultimately drowned by its need for special effects depicting rocks the size of Texas and their awful destruction. On the Beach, does something much more interesting – by keeping it personal. Not just with drama, but by keeping us in one place, with one set of characters, and by showing us what they would see in such a situation, which might be something very similar to normal. In fact, if an entire society was given a few months as a collective whole to live, it might start to look and feel like paradise. Yet, like Misrach’s photos of beach goers, there is something awful, we are looking at the aftermath of something that has gone terribly wrong – even though for an instant, it seems something wonderful. I am used to Peck playing a straight up tough guy (a lucky submarine captain in this case), and he is one of my favorites of this kind – but I was surprised and refreshed to see him deal with the emotions of a warrior who never imagined that he would lose his home and love before they lost him. This film also made me naturally consider how dangerous and ludicrous it is to “defend” our nation with weaponry that poses no lesser a threat to civilization as a whole than it does our adversaries, but such foreign policy thoughts aren’t at the story’s heart. The film’s pulse is in the dialogue one’s mind embraces when he or she realizes that death is a reality, and must consider the nature of life – and how it ought to be lived. Instead of million-dollar shots of tidal waves devouring Manhattan, the director works with his formal craft – as time progresses, the symmetry and balance of the man-made structures surrounding the doomed ones becomes increasingly treacherous and deranged, as do the people. This sort of filmmaking is quite a treat for the viewer with an attention span. The film as a whole sheds light on Misrach’s photos which I now hold so dear – as they both depict a world where nothing is wrong, and yet nothing is quite right, which is probably how such a terrible day would feel for most of us.