To Hellstrom and Back

The hottest summer on record making you anxious and antsy? Chill out with a doomsday doc that will make you die laughing.

This post combines three of my least favorite things: heat, insects, and the end of civilization as we know it. But bear with me, there are some laughs at the bottom of the ravine.

Feeling the Heat?   

Here in South Florida, we don’t observe seasons in the traditional sense. We go from manageable (January-April), to intense and uncomfortable (May-September), to uncomfortable and wet (September-October), to hot and bothersome (October to mid-December), with maybe four randomly distributed weeks of sunny near-perfection (overlapped with several months of occasional hurricanes). Whereas in most places, Labor Day (I’m writing this just several days past) marks the end of summer, here it just means another very hot day added to the weekend.  (BTW, there is a benefit when holidays no longer mean what they used to mean – it makes me feel more connected to my retired friends, some of whom never seem to know what day of the week it is. Very sad.)

I’ve lived through more than 20 South Florida summers, and I can’t honestly say if one quote unquote summer (late June through early September), was any hotter or unbearable than the other. But in my unscientific estimation, we’ve recorded more “hot as fuck” days this past summer than any I can remember (they say that Eskimos have 50 words for snow – to long-suffering Floridians, it’s either hot as fuck, or not as hot as yesterday).    

A recent article in the Miami Herald says it’s not just me – “It’s not just you, Florida really has gotten hotter recently. In the last fifty years, South Florida has experienced a lot more heat. Days are hotter than they used to be, there are more hot days than ever and nights, in particular, are far warmer than they were last century. All of that is tracked by meticulous records from the National Weather Service and NOAA, and scientists have chalked up the majority of that change to unchecked, human-caused climate change. That change is felt all around the globe — not just in sunny South Florida.” Climate scientists say the heat and other extreme weather we've been experiencing are consistent with three decades of scientific predictions based on steadily increasing carbon emissions we’ve heaved into the atmosphere. In a couple of years when it’s hotter than fuck we’ll look on this past summer when it was just hot as fuck and kick ourselves for not having fun while it lasted.

But wait…it is worse, much worse, than you think

It took me about a year to gin up the courage to read a book I had on my Kindle called The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-Wells. I read his article in New York Magazine on which it was based, which was scary enough. I finally manned up and dove in. Here’s how it opens:

It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down.

Gulp.

The first part of the book ends as follows:

If you have made it this far, you are a brave reader. Any one of these twelve chapters contains, by rights, enough horror to induce a panic attack in even the most optimistic of those considering it. But you are not merely considering it; you are about to embark on living it. In many cases, in many places, we already are.

Now for the Fun Part

For those who don't want to avoid the subject (the inevitable human misery and devastation caused by the unchecked march of global warming), but want room for laughs, I highly recommend you spend time watching the Hellstrom Chronicle, a laugh-riot doomsday doc. Yes, a laugh riot doomsday doc, though in the 40 years since I first saw it, I’m still not sure it was meant to be a laugh riot or it just turned out that way.

The Hellstrom Chronicle is a "documentary" film released in 1971, directed by Walon Green and produced by David L. Wolper. The Wolper Company was known for producing respectable documentaries in the ’60s, Walon Green was an experienced documentarian, the score was done by none other than Lalo Schifrin, and it was distributed nationally by 20th Century Fox. It did good box office and won an Oscar for Best Documentary (how did that happen?).

Years ago, well after it was released, I watched it, not certain if it was supposed to be a documentary, a slightly unhinged horror film, a weird combination of the two, or a spoof. The “doc” centers on the apocalyptic struggle between man and insect for possession of the Earth and is narrated by super-intense, self-anointed "truth teller" Nils Hellstrom, who claims to have been hounded from the groves of academia due to the heretical truths he alone possesses. Hellstrom paints grave pictures of a world beset by swarms of sentient insects bent on conquest (“macabre masterpieces of revenge”); he doesn't just appear on screen, he stalks you with the deadly earnestness of his message: mankind is doomed.

I’ve re-watched snippets over the years and still don’t know if Hellstrom’s absurd concern-trolling over close-up footage of highly disciplined battalions of blood-thirsty insects was intended as prophecy, and used horror film tropes to add urgency…but I do know that it makes me laugh very hard every time.

True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

The Tell-tale Heart

Here are several choice Hellstromian pronouncements:

Compared with Man, we have to admit that the insect does not display what we can describe as intelligence. But don't feel too proud about that, because where there is no intelligence, there is also no stupidity.

In fighting the insect we have killed ourselves, polluted our water, poisoned our wildlife, permeated our own flesh with deadly toxins. The insect becomes immune, and we are poisoned. In fighting with superior intellect, we have outsmarted ourselves.

Without the burden of intellect, emotion or individual identity, these creatures were given something we weren't: the knowledge that they must work together to create the elusive utopia - the perfect society.

Now I wouldn't dare compare a brainless insect to Man's brilliant computer, would I? Think about it. A computer is a mechanism programmed with a thousand tiny bits of information; it operates by juggling that information into a form of logic. I humbly submit it's not without analogy in the insect world.

We earlier demonstrated that the insect has only a semblance of heart; let it now be known he has no soul. Free from the concept of romance, the act of procreation occurs as simply, naturally and obliviously as eating. Neither does beauty play a part, for the only requisite between consenting adults is that they be of the same species.

If you took a moment to check out the clip at the beginning of this post, you can hear the manic intensity in these excerpts. Hilarious, no? Only at the end of the show are we told that Nils Hellstrom is a fictional character played by an actor, one Lawrence Pressman.

If you’re looking for a chuckle before the shit hits the fan - even as it's hitting the fan - this is the flick for you. You can watch it in its entirety here, though 30-40 minutes is all you’ll need. Enjoy! (A final cautionary note: on the off-chance I’ve spent the past four decades laughing off what turns out to be a credible existential menace, you may want to be careful where you step or what you swat - the insect whose life you mindlessly take has generations of offspring with long memories and all the time in the world.)