The Road

[PipBoy2999]

Watched this finally (thanks Netflicks!).

Oh.
My.
God.

I haven't been suckerpunched like that since the end of The Mist. I litterally can't slip from the images rolling in my head.

Anyway, seeing as how this is an alt-history board, I was thinking how the world ended up like it did. I'm thinking lithospheric shift is the cause of the cataclysm. I think it fits: sudden and widespread death and destruction. Decent into global darkness and cooling. Continued instability of the tectonics. Whoever did the eNotes for the book is an idiot, 'cause they called it a nuclear war. Since no one's hair was falling out, I think we can rule out radiation and nukes.

 

[Bavarian Raven]

asteroid impact imo, would be the most likely cause.

 

[mdc_1957]

The author himself was said to have referred to either a nuclear war, volcanic eruption or meteor impact. He deliberately left the actual disaster vague to focus on the aftermath.

That said, in any case North America looks terminally fucked up (that's well established). Yet we don't actually know what's going on outside the Eastern Seaboard. If there are any surviving countries, they're definitely not sending rescue parties stateside.

 

[Admiral Romanov]

I also saw the movie last week and I gotta agree with you that it was simply amazing. Probably the most depressing post-apocalyptic movie next to Threads.

Like everyone else, I think that it was probably a meteor impact. Either that or a solar flare. however, what I think makes the book/movie so special is that the cause is never mentioned, thus leaving it completely to our imagination. Also, while nuclear war is really improbable, we cant really rule it out. we only got to see a small number of people in the movie and for all we know, some of the character in the movie might have been dying of cancer. yeah its really improbable but still we cant know for sure.

 

[GalacticKiss]

This might be a more realistic version of what could happen if a war ever occurred with an space-economy. Asteroids and large scale colonies would eventually get used as weapons against earth areas, but would knock out the economies so they would die.

It's a plausible end to a war erupting with access to space material not far from our present technology.

 

[kirrix]

I read the book and really I have one word one the subject: punctuation. God dammit can I get a motherfuckin' quotation mark? I mean, I get minimalism as a style, limiting the amount of punctuation or words needed, but quotation marks or even just a paragraph break are pretty necessary during dialogue.

Beyond that, the character of the mother in the book betrayed once again Cormac McCarthy's deep-seated loathing of women and the decisions of the "man" in the book frequently make no sense (like that bunker where he and the boy could have survived for about a year as I recall, allowing them to survive through the colder seasons till it was safer to be on the road again).

All in all, the book is distinctly passable post-apocalyptic fiction.

 

[MacCaulay]

I read the book and really I have one word one the subject: punctuation. God dammit can I get a motherfuckin' quotation mark? I mean, I get minimalism as a style, limiting the amount of punctuation or words needed, but quotation marks or even just a paragraph break are pretty necessary during dialogue.

Then don't read Blood Meridian. Your head'll blow up if you got that bent out of shape about it.

Beyond that, the character of the mother in the book betrayed once again Cormac McCarthy's deep-seated loathing of women...

uh...I think you're missing the point of the book. As for what Cormac McCarthy thinks of women...have you ever read Blood Meridian? (EDIT: you probably haven't. I've got some beers in me.)

All in all, the book is distinctly passable post-apocalyptic fiction.

I've said this before: I get the feeling from your post that you're not a parent.

 

[marl_d]

We watched it last night. Great movie...very depressing though. Personally didn't understand why they didn't stay at the bunker. Though with the earthquakes it makes some sense.

I would think that gathering as many people around you as you can reasonably support would be ideal...but with no way to live off the land I can see why it's necessary to keep numbers low or be a loner.

I get that ammo was scarce, but he should have been able to find a LOT of ammo in places, cars, trucks, shops, houses. having only 2 to start with and using it as a plot point is understandable, but even 10-12 years after the event, it should still be around.

overall good movie and it freaked my wife out a bit.

 

[Highlander]

One thing I noticed while watching it in high definition on a rather large screen television: they did a marvelous job changing the scenery to look like it did, but I noticed that they missed some (there were occasionally green hills and what looked like healthy patches of sycamore trees).

I read the book and really I have one word one the subject: punctuation. God dammit can I get a motherfuckin' quotation mark? I mean, I get minimalism as a style, limiting the amount of punctuation or words needed, but quotation marks or even just a paragraph break are pretty necessary during dialogue.

I quite enjoyed the way he wrote the book - it was almost as if it was written by the Boy, who only had a minor grasp on writing.

Beyond that, the character of the mother in the book betrayed once again Cormac McCarthy's deep-seated loathing of women and the decisions of the "man" in the book frequently make no sense (like that bunker where he and the boy could have survived for about a year as I recall, allowing them to survive through the colder seasons till it was safer to be on the road again).

Er, what? How did you get a loathing of woman? The Mother quite correctly assumed that there really was no point in living in this world anymore.

With the bunker, they couldn't stay, as someone else had discovered it as well (protip: it was probably the family following them). Although I wonder . . . wouldn't the hatch been able to have been locked from the inside? That is, unless he broke it trying to open it.

 

[kirrix]

I quite enjoyed the way he wrote the book - it was almost as if it was written by the Boy, who only had a minor grasp on writing.

Er, what? How did you get a loathing of woman? The Mother quite correctly assumed that there really was no point in living in this world anymore.

With the bunker, they couldn't stay, as someone else had discovered it as well (protip: it was probably the family following them). Although I wonder . . . wouldn't the hatch been able to have been locked from the inside? That is, unless he broke it trying to open it.

Minimalist style with regard to punctuation always pisses me off. It's a cheap attempt at appearing artsy and is entirely unnecessary and confusing in a number of situations.

The mother didn't correctly assume jack, she just gave up. There is always the possibility of finding an area where life can effectively spring a new, making her only a pathetic caricature of McCarthy's sense of the weak woman.

As I recall, the only real objection the man had to the bunker was not that it was already found (it was covered in debris and hidden). It was that he couldn't hide it again once he was inside. The lock I'm pretty sure was still functional.

It's been a while and I only really finished the book because of a stubborn unwillingness to let a book beat me (same reason I finished Lord of the Rings) so I may be remembering wrong but I don't think I am.

 

[Highlander]

Minimalist style with regard to punctuation always pisses me off. It's a cheap attempt at appearing artsy and is entirely unnecessary and confusing in a number of situations.

McCarthy has said that he doesn't like a bunch of squigly lines across the page - that hardly seems like an artsy reason to me.

The writing itself almost lent to the story itself. In a world with no identities and little life, there is little need for things like names. It's a sign of emptiness.

The mother didn't correctly assume jack, she just gave up. There is always the possibility of finding an area where life can effectively spring a new, making her only a pathetic caricature of McCarthy's sense of the weak woman.

The Mother was hardly weak - she seemed quite fiery to me.

As someone else pointed out on here, when even mushrooms won't grow, there is little that can support life anymore. Who knows, things could be better on other parts of the world, or even on the other side of the country. But being able to cross over there safely is nearly impossible.

In fact, the Mother was when it counts in a way that the Man wasn't. When he died, the Boy was so poorly equipped for survival that he couldn't even start a fire. He would have been easy pickings for roving bands of cannibals, or worse.

 

[MacCaulay]

The Mother was hardly weak - she seemed quite fiery to me.

I agree with you on everything except that. She wasn't fiery. She was dead.

As someone else pointed out on here, when even mushrooms won't grow, there is little that can support life anymore. Who knows, things could be better on other parts of the world, or even on the other side of the country. But being able to cross over there safely is nearly impossible.

I think a lot of people on this board came at the book from a completely different direction than what he wrote it from. I remember that other thread when someone was unhappy because he didn't explore the world of the roving gangs.

Obviously, that wasn't the point of the book: the point was the relationship between the father and son and not the world itself. It's a literary construct.

As I said on the other thread: there's this worship of the Realism God which has gotten into folks and doesn't seem to allow a lot of us to think of stories as allegorical or just light entertainment. There's a lot of AH that gets lambasted on this site for being unrealistic that was obviously intended by the authors to be a reinvention of another genre using AH as the engine, and the people here are so geared towards realism that they miss it: Peshawar Lancers, for example, was a way for Stirling to do an old-timey adventure novel.

And the Stars and Stripes trilogy from Harrison was the same way. But since they didn't adhere strictly to folks' imagined form of realism, they were reworked (in Lancers' case) or practically strung up and crucified in the case of Stars and Stripes.

 

[PipBoy2999]

The more I think about it, the more I think that the folks with the people in the basement are the ones who will pull through. They've ascertained the problem (no food), determined a viable course of action (eat people), and implemented a methodology that ensures their continued survival for the maximum time available (don't kill 'em and eat 'em all at once).

The cannable marauders will burn themselves out after they chase down the available prey in the area. I imagine they'll turn on themselves (they ate their own opportunistically, after all) when prey runs out. If the beatle in the end of the movie signifies that life is coming back, then the "farmers" will be best positioned to transition. They've made it through the bottleneck, and much of the human race will be their decendants (although they only had one female, and she was not obviously of child bearing age).

 

[MacCaulay]

The more I think about it, the more I think that the folks with the people in the basement are the ones who will pull through. They've ascertained the problem (no food), determined a viable course of action (eat people), and implemented a methodology that ensures their continued survival for the maximum time available (don't kill 'em and eat 'em all at once).

I kind of think you're missing the point they were trying to make of having people locked in the basement and eating them.

But folks seem to react to the book and film in different ways.

 

[FineOldDude]

The Road, Cormac McCarthy

I think The Road is by far the best alternative fiction books I've read. Its also ranks high in my personal list of literary books.

One Fine Old Dude

 

[Nilats]

MI loved the book much more than the movie. I liked the section where he was carving bullets so the gun looked loaded. Very chilling for some reason.


Personally I think it was a volcano. That explains the earthquakes.

 

[CalBear]

I think The Road is by far the best alternative fiction books I've read. Its also ranks high in my personal list of literary books.

One Fine Old Dude

Please do not resurrect long dead threads (and two years is REALLY dead). This is contrary to Board policy.