Notes from the End of Time

Most great crime drama heroes have clear, distinctive, memorable personalities. Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe, Jack Carter, Tony Soprano—you know who they are and what they stand for. Patricia Highsmith’s Thomas Ripley is a protagonist who creates memorable characters to suit the occasion. You watch him with a horrified fascination and root for him despite your revulsion. Yet at the end of the story you know no more about Thomas Ripley unmasked than you did when you began.

Many see Sade as an icon of whips, leather, and naughtiness. Very few accept his philosophy and live as true Sadeans. Yet modernity keeps coming back to his questions. What restrains power when all authority is suspect? What grounds morality in a godless world? What happens when we realize that commandments are merely social constructs? And what happens to a transgressive philosophy when it runs out of boundaries to violate and authorities to disobey? Two centuries after his death, the Marquis remains less a philosopher than a philosophical problem—one that modernity has never quite managed to solve.

James M. Cain’s status as a genre writer obscures his true talent. His novels are certainly suspenseful, but their lasting power comes from his keen psychological insight. His characters build elaborate stories about who they are and what will make them happy. They build those stories into great towers that come crashing down on their heads. Cain’s fiction is not about murder, fraud, or adultery. It is about the human tendency to mistake desire for reality. The crimes are not the tragedy. They are the moment when the tragedy can no longer be ignored.

The Witcher material is frequently labeled as grimdark, and it uses many of the genre’s conventions. Heroes die; good intentions fail; kings lie; blood is spilled and body parts cut off; war reduces ordinary people to refugees and scavengers. Sapkowski never spares the reader from the consequences of violence. But neither does he mistake cynicism for wisdom. Amidst his gloom we constantly see shimmers of light.

Like many modern heroes, Geralt’s first act of heroism is refusing to believe he is one. He spends over 3,000 pages insisting he is not a knight-errant: merely a neutral party who slays monsters for profit, a witcher whose emotions were stripped away by the Trial of the Grasses. But time and again he risks his life for others, protects the vulnerable, and follows the very ideals he claims to reject.

Geralt spares monsters that do not deserve death and protects strangers who do not pay him. He adopts Ciri despite insisting he wants no attachments. He gradually accumulates a fellowship while insisting he work alone. Arthurian heroes proudly embrace their role. Geralt reluctantly stumbles into it. And he is hardly the only character who engages in this kind of performative neutrality.

The Continent is a violent place full of people who claim to care only for power, profit, or survival. Yet a closer look often reveals something else. A dwarf who admits to robbery and possible murder also escorts refugees across a war-torn countryside. A cynical lawyer who prides himself on having no scruples deliberately misses an easy killing throw. A vampire becomes a monster hunter’s trusted companion.

Sapkowski’s world contains plenty of darkness, but its most memorable characters repeatedly prove better than they pretend to be. The moral tension comes not from the absence of virtue but from virtue surviving in a world that offers little reward for it. There is no shortage of depravity, betrayal, and outright evil. But there is also no shortage of decent people who are forced into difficult choices.

Unless you’re a fan of 1940s and 1950s hardboiled fiction, you’ve probably never heard of Cornell Woolrich. Today he’s best remembered for the movie adaptation of his short story “It Had to be Murder,” Rear Window. French New Wave fans may recall Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black while admirers of Edward G. Robinson may remember his doomed psychic in Night Has a Thousand Eyes. More than thirty films in several countries were adapted from Woolrich’s fiction, though critics often dismissed both the films and their sources as disposable pulp.

The classic murder mystery starts with a corpse and a handful of suspects. It ends with the guilty punished, the aberration explained, and order restored. Woolrich rarely gives you that kind of closure. His protagonists are lonely, frightened people trapped in dirty, dangerous cities. They are alienated, paranoid and teetering on the edge of emotional collapse as they drift through lonely days and sleepless nights. They reflect what will become a common grimdark trope; the chaos undergirding our illusions of certainty and stability.

Were it not for one catastrophic act of overreach, Richard Milhous Nixon would probably be remembered as one of the 20th century’s best presidents. There was no need to plant listening devices in the Democratic Party’s Watergate headquarters. Nixon would go on to defeat George McGovern in the 1972 election by a margin of 520 electoral votes to 17. His fall was like Macbeth’s; he created enemies because he could not trust his colleagues. Had he not struggled so desperately for power he already possessed, it would never have been stripped from his hands.

So what does Richard Nixon have to do with modern grimdark? He helped create the audience. Writers can crank out stories of corruption, despair, and betrayal until their keyboards wear out. But if they can’t find people willing to read those stories, they’re soon going to seek out new genres. Nixon made grimdark’s pessimistic themes seem not only plausible but resonant. To a country reeling from the exposure of rot at the highest levels, movies like Taxi Driver and Chinatown seemed less theatrical and more realistic.

H.P. Lovecraft is one of the grandfathers of cosmic horror; Robert Bloch helped introduce the modern world to psychological horror. Bloch’s terror does not slither from the unfathomable darkness of space across vigintillions of aeons. It sits behind a motel desk and smiles nervously at the guests. If you glance up at his upstairs window, you might see the silhouette of an old lady. Stare a little longer and you’ll notice she is unnaturally still. Stick around a few days and you may see Travis Bickle pull up in the parking lot in his taxi, or Annie Wilkes may stop by to tell you she’s your greatest fan.

Our world is built on the foundations of the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions. Reason and science have largely taken the place of medieval faith and prayer; knowledge is something to be sought after like virtue or piety. H.P. Lovecraft turns that idea on its head. Knowledge does not always bring wisdom or understanding. Sometimes it brings madness and death. We have been given the power of reason, but reason often shows us we are powerless.

Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Roadstrips away those comforting illusions and reminds us that collapse is not liberating: it is simply worse. McCarthy gives us a world where a good day means finding a few cans of food for yourself and your child. There are no epic battles, just crumbling buildings and desiccated corpses. Heroism comes not in glorious deeds but in the slow grinding determination to keep the fire going one more day.

Today Get Carter is considered one of Britain’s greatest films, certainly its finest crime drama. 1971 audiences reacted to its gritty violence with shock and disgust. Director Mike Hodges’ vision was unleavened by the wisecracking wit of Dirty Harry or the stylized ultraviolence of A Clockwork Orange or The Wild Bunch. Set amidst the smoldering scrap heaps and dive bars of Newcastle, Get Carter looked like it was filmed in a dirty ashtray.

Get Carter is lauded as a Very Important Movie. Ted Lewis, the author of Jack’s Return Home and two subsequent Jack Carter prequels, is less widely remembered. Yet Lewis’s novels reveal more clearly that what many viewers still mistake for celebratory nihilism is in fact a parable that is as ordered and moral as a Greek tragedy. https://www.notesfromtheendofti.me/p/how-to-get-carter

America’s power word is “Freedom.” Puritans sailed to the New World to practice their religion and live as they saw fit. Immigrants escaped poverty and oppression to come to Ellis Island in hopes of a better life. We enshrined the rights to freedom of speech, religion, the press, and arms into our founding document. Our national anthem declares us “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” We place an enormous premium on individual autonomy, freedom of expression, and pluralistic politics.

By contrast, Russia’s power word is “Endurance.” Outside of the southern United States, no American culture has ever experienced defeat on its own soil. Russia has experienced it many times. It has survived invasions by Mongols, Poles, Swedes, Ottomans, Nazis, and Napoleon. In each case it took bloody losses but outlasted its foes and remained after they left. Russians prioritize national sovereignty, collective stability, freedom from chaos, and material security.

Few stigmatized people had the luxury of making their stigma a primary public identity. Those with recognizable stigmas struggled to be seen as more than their disability or their skin color. Homosexuals, alcoholics, or people with a history of mental illness or incarceration found themselves forced into a closet. Their goal, and their only choice, was to seek normalization over public visibility.

This disconnection led to shame, self-doubt, and alienation. Public declaration carried a heavy social cost. Making one’s identity public could mean loss of employment and community standing. The fear of exposure, or the impossibility of concealment, left many emotionally exhausted and miserable.

Modern digital systems collapsed geographic isolation and communication barriers. They transformed stigma from an isolating social condition into a foundation for community. The stigmatized could now discover each other instantly.

Outsider identities have long been prestigious among certain subgroups. The beatniks looked down on the “squares;” the hippies turned their noses up at “the establishment.” Today, “normie” has become one of the Internet’s most common terms of contempt. Membership in one’s chosen subgroups becomes a source of status. Conformity marks outsiders as gray and faceless “NPCs.” Stigma has become affiliation; affiliation has become identity; identity has become moral legitimacy; legitimacy has become social authority.

The internet allows people to recast feelings of exclusion and alienation into a moral identity. They are no longer awkward outcasts; they are members of tribes that are set apart. Their differences give them meaning and belonging. What were once isolating conditions are transformed into social resources; publicly embracing them becomes a signal of authenticity and courage.

Cultural fragmentation sounds abstract until it enters your personal life. Family estrangement, divorce, and lost friendships are painfully concrete. They can be weighed in suffering and measured in emptiness. You may no longer comprehend how your former friend sees the world, but you can feel their absence. You may not understand why your parents have become so politically radicalized, but you can anticipate the arguments before every holiday.

Fragmented realities not only divide families and longtime friends; they also erect barriers to forming new acquaintances and relationships. Profiles frequently include DNI (Do Not Interact) lists that exclude political and ideological identities alongside declarations of beliefs you must share before conversation can start. Even seemingly minor disagreements are interpreted as evidence of deep moral incompatibility.