Preset no. two, my native student-run station, isn’t focused on boundaries, generationally or sonically. The school youngsters play an eclectic vary of music, together with some from the period older people declare these youngsters are to this point faraway from. Regardless of transferring away, I stored the preset for my hometown faculty station too. I distinctly bear in mind the night time I discovered it: I was 19 and, like in Night time of the Comet, it was practically Christmas, and like Sam, who experiences horrible nervousness on the abuse of her step-mother, I had gotten right into a dangerous combat with my mother. For Sam and me, the radio station was a religious balm in opposition to annihilation, when social disaster precedes the cosmic. If youth makes you’re feeling helpless and hopeless, caught on the finish of time, the radio helps transcend time altogether, not by hole nostalgia, however by aural notion.
Reggie takes Sam procuring to cheer her up, the 2 indulging in a style montage. In looking for the place the women relocated, the identical researcher reiterates his dry knowledge, “The place would adolescents with nothing to do go?” However chaos rapidly descends as former stockboys try and kill the women. The mall’s security is non permanent, acknowledging the sophisticated rigidity of youthful consumerism; it might be a gathering spot for teenagers, a place extra about hanging out than spending cash, however it’s additionally a battleground of exploitation and materialism. It’s price noting that Hector is performed by Mexican-American actor Robert Beltran, who fought to offer the final man on earth, a Latino, dignity and attraction, whilst Reggie utters a number of microaggressions to him, which Hector mocks her for. Pondering again on the anecdote about my native mall’s racism, Hector not becoming a member of the women’ procuring tour feels poignant, as he splits off to search out his household and buddies in San Diego. The movie lingers on Hector strolling round his empty residence, choosing up mementos of his misplaced mom and sister. It’s a small gesture, but a pointed method of expressing how Hector is an outsider to the world Reggie and Sam simply inhabit, alongside a uncommon show of intimacy between the previous and the younger.
As for the researchers, their hole observations about teen behaviour foreshadow that they aren’t the nice guys, simply as focused on linking youngsters to consumption, actually, draining their blood to maintain themselves alive. Each grownup within the movie dies, and on this method, youngsters reign over a raptured Earth; the meek inherit in any case. However every little thing crumbles within the closing act, when the trio saves two youngsters, a boy and a lady, from the scientists. The movie constructs a picturesque nuclear household, and although cheeky, it undercuts the affectionate teenage story it initially introduced. These are excessive schoolers, not dad and mom, and their ’80s sensibilities of juvenile enjoyable distinguished them. The sisters’ as soon as androgynous names at the moment are mentioned in full, Regina and Samantha. It’s a disgrace that even after Armageddon, we’re caught with Yuppies.
Loads of movies present youngsters interacting with bygone youth hubs like film theatres, radios, and malls, but Night time of the Comet’s apocalyptic backdrop makes it significantly ripe for discussing reminiscence, temporality, and the disillusionment that comes with growing old out of those areas. The movie reminds us that nostalgia has limitations, that even again within the “good previous days,” these areas have been imperfect and youngsters have been misunderstood. As an alternative of harnessing dread on the passing of time in opposition to one another, we must always bond over how cyclical the apocalypse is, every technology experiencing its personal type of doom. The mythos of the radio station shouldn’t be a software for making soulless proclamations about our variations, however a vessel for connection between the youth of the previous and the youth of right this moment, as a result of music and dialog enable us to beat our corporeality and free ourselves from the static. The definition of a “teenage comet zombie” has shifted; nonetheless, it might be that honest correspondence contains entering into the car parking zone and recognising when somebody is tuned into the identical frequency you are.
