Walking In The Garden

On the train ride home from work the other day, I was imagining a movie adaptation of a short story that I read in high school. Possibly inspired by the ending of Half-life 2 Episode 1, the adaptation relates to nuclear armageddon:

In the original short story, titled Ad Infinitum, a man is outside his home, in his garden. His wife exits the house, having just been on the phone, and is approaching the man with a forlorn look on her face. She apparently has received bad news, and is about to share it with the man. The story is noteworthy as a work of metafiction, because it is written in the form of one of Zeno’s Paradoxes, the woman never actually arriving and telling the bad news to the man (in the story, the news is implied to be related to cancer).

In my imagined movie-version of this story, it is titled Walking in the Garden. Rather than going into the home to a landline and receiving bad news there, the bad news is conveyed on cellphones as text messages. This message on the phones is (partially) visible to the movie audience, but just out of view of the man for the duration of the movie. The message, as seen by the wife and the audience, is an automated Presidential alert text, warning of an impending nuclear strike. The clock on the cellphone progresses from 11:45am to noon throughout the movie, in reference to the Doomsday Clock [this ‘noon-as-asymptote’ conveniently also avoids one of my pet peeves: 12am/pm terminology confusion]; cuts to flashbacks/narrated anecdotes are shown with increasing length/frequency so that noon just barely occurs at the end of the movie. The movie culminates in the man’s cellphone and music on his headphones going dead, due to the electromagnetic pulse of an exploding nuclear weapon (with the movie ending before the actual heat shockwave of the explosion hits).

The movie Walking in the Garden would allude to references such as:

• John Barth’s short story Ad Infinitum
  • Alan Moore’s Watchmen, specifically the symmetrical chapter “Fearful Symmetry”
  • The Doomsday Clock
  • Queen songs: “Any way the wind blows” ending lyric from Bohemian Rhapsody; Hammer to Fall
  • Pop Will Eat Itself song: def.con.one
  • When the Wind Blows movie
  • title – Witgenstein – Walking in the Garden Eden, not seeing the end is nigh