(Spoilers abound.)

“The weather ain’t the way it was before. Ain’t no spring or fall at all anymore. It’s either blazing hot or freezing cold… any way the wind blows.” Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell.

“As for the end of the universe…I say let it come as it will, in ice, fire, or darkness. What did the universe ever do for me that I should mind its welfare?” The Dark Tower (The Dark Tower #7), Stephen King

The word ‘apocalypse’ originally meant a revelation, but it has come to mean a cataclysmic end to the world. The word conjures images of destruction on a Biblical scale, yet in fiction an apocalypse can take many forms. It could be the breakdown of a civilization, the death of all humanity, or the erasure of our entire universe. Regardless of how it comes or what form it takes, an apocalypse can be very… revealing.

In the Broadway musical Hadestown, the apocalypse is hinted at as a looming threat. Society hasn’t completely broken down but the seasons are disrupted because of the gods and life is becoming difficult for the world’s human inhabitants. The setting draws on themes of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl which took place in 1930s America. In this version of the era, the Greek gods are real and their influence is felt in devastating ways.

According to the myths, Hades rules the underworld and his wife, Persephone, lives with him for half of the year. Her absence from the world causes winter, and when she returns for the other six months the spring comes with her. But Hades and Persephone’s relationship is suffering, and she no longer comes and goes on schedule. This disruption to the seasons has resulted in famine and violent storms. Humanity seems to be making do, but some are so desperate for security that they figuratively and literally sell their souls to work in the underworld.

“I haven’t seen a spring or fall since… I can’t recall.” Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell.

The Dark Tower novels are set in a world that has experienced apocalypse twice-over. Long ago, a highly advanced human civilization lived in All-World, but nuclear war and scientific progress run amok led to the destruction of society and the ruination of the world. After a thousand years some of the land began to heal, and a King Arthur figure united the world and founded a new society. By the time of the first Dark Tower novel this new civilization has also long-since fallen. Roland, the series’ main character, journeys through a landscape of desolate wilderness, ruins of an advanced people, irradiated wastelands, mutated creatures, and the occasional small town struggling to get by.

On top of this, Roland’s quest involves saving the world – the entire multiverse – from being overwhelmed by darkness. The setting of the books are at once a pre-apocalypse, post-apocalypse, and post-post-apocalypse. It alludes to the image of the lonesome cowboy wandering an untamed wild as well as the Cold War fears of a nuclear holocaust.

“‘The world has moved on’, we say… we’ve always said. But it’s moving on faster now. Something has happened to time.” The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower #1), Stephen King.

The ruined city of Lud.

Both Hadestown and The Dark Tower deal in themes of apocalypse, but their unique scenarios and what we can learn from them differ.

Hadestown portrays a slowly encroaching end to human life and society due to a changing environment. It’s a timely message for the 21st century, and speaks to concerns surrounding climate change. It presents to us an issue that is relevant and recognizable to modern audiences.

The Dark Tower’s first book, The Gunslinger, was written in the 1970s and published in the 1980s. At that time, the idea of an apocalypse was inseparable from fears brought about by the Cold War fears of nuclear bombs and mutually-assured destruction. The Dark Tower presented what Earth might look like a few thousand years after the world’s political powers blew themselves up. It was perfect for the time, and is still sometimes relevant today.

Still, the looming and seemingly inevitable threat of global warming has overshadowed concerns over a nuclear winter.

These stories approach their apocalyptic setting in different ways, but the messages they send are similar. Both show us a grim alternate reality, which might teach us some things about our own world and our future.

At a cursory glance, the problems in the world of Hadestown are the result of the gods and their failing relationship. Of course, it goes deeper than that. The gods are the elites of the world of Hadestown, taking the place of the wealthy and powerful. Hades is the king of the underworld but he runs his kingdom like a factory’s foreman. He’s turned the underworld into an industrialized warehouse and forces his subjects to mine, build, and work. It could even be inferred that Hades’ personal industrial revolution and the pollution that results is the real cause of all the changing weather. Now, the way he tells it he’s only doing this to provide for his people. He’s giving them jobs! He also claims he’s motivated by love for his wife – he wants to impress her. But his actions are turning his subjects into nameless, voiceless husks and alienating his wife, so it’s difficult not to assume that he’s motivated out of self-interest even if he denies it.

There’s also Persephone. She’s much more sympathetic in the musical, but it’s her power that controls the seasons. It’s never directly confirmed if she is late for spring because Hades won’t let her leave, though he is the reason she returns to Hadestown early, ushering in an untimely winter. The only line suggesting her role in the problem appears in Chant I when Orpheus sings that “Lady Persephone’s blinded by a river of wine, livin’ in an oblivion.” This might suggest that she is ignorant to the problem and her lateness is her own fault, but in the same song she later says, “… in the meantime up above, the harvest dies and people starve. Oceans rise and overflow, it ain’t right and it ain’t natural.” She knows what’s happening, but isn’t addressing it. In an earlier song, when she first arrives she is confronted by the humans about what is happening with spring. She replies by telling them to ‘make the most of it’ and she is ‘doing the best she can’. Still, much of her time on stage is spent drinking and partying.

For Hades, humanity’s impending doom isn’t his problem. For Persephone, she sees the problem but seemingly doesn’t want to or doesn’t know how to deal with it.

Hades and Persephone, arbiters of destruction.

I’m not saying any of this to imply it’s Persephone’s fault. But, the gods in this story represent the elite: Hades is a capitalist focused on profit and advancement no matter who or what is hurt along the way; Persephone benefits from her wealth and hides from the repercussions of how it was gained.

In The Dark Tower it’s almost the exact same story, but with less charismatic figures at the forefront of the end of the world. The Great Old Ones were the scientifically advanced humans that lived thousands of years ago. Not much is known of them directly, but from the technology and ruins they left behind it’s easy to conclude that they were self-absorbed and greedy. Huge corporations did what they do best, exploited the world for profit. Their actions lead to nuclear war, humans and animals mutating into strange creatures, and large swathes of land being uninhabitable millennia afterwards.

In the time of the books, remnants of the Old Ones’ corporations exist in other worlds. They serve an evil god called the Crimson King, and their goal is no longer money but the total destruction of every world in the multiverse so that the Crimson King can rule over the remaining darkness.

While Hades and the Crimson King have little in common aside from both being called gods, the apocalypses happening in their stories have a similar root cause. Scientific advancement without the guidance of ethics and morals leads to human misery; large companies concerned only with profit will trample over everyone else, including their own workers or subjects; unchecked capitalism destroys the environment and human lives.

The result is the same. Innocent, uninvolved people suffer. The gods of Hadestown are suffering because their marriage isn’t doing well, but they could ignore the problems they’re causing and never be hurt by them. The Great Old Ones presumably died from their nuclear wars, but the consequences of their actions linger and continue to cause misery for thousands of years after they’re gone. The big corporations that remain get to live pleasant lives while they work toward the end of the world, or have deluded themselves into believing they’ll get a cushy desk job in the kingdom of eternal darkness that is coming.

Eurydice, one of the gods’ many victims.

Oh boy, this is getting to be a downer. An apocalypse caused by the actions of an elite class of people who don’t have to deal with the consequences of their destruction while the rest of us suffer and die? That doesn’t hit close to home at all, no.

Well, ‘apocalypse’ is supposed to mean revelation, so what does all this reveal to us? Besides what we already know, like that an apocalypse would be bad and it’s probably going to be the fault of those with power.

How do the characters in these stories deal with their situations? Does it work, and could we replicate it in the real world?

In Hadestown, the whole plot centers around Orpheus trying to save his lover Eurydice from the underworld. Fixing the weather is a secondary goal, but one that’s on his mind for the entirety of the show. His plan is to sing “a song so beautiful it brings the world back into tune, back into time.” All these problems are because of Hades and Persephone, you see, and those two are causing them because they aren’t happy in their marriage. Orpheus believes that if he can sing the right melody with the right words, it will remind them of the love they had and the world will be right again. On his quest to reunite with Eurydice he gets the chance to perform for Hades, and the song does move the king, and the show ends with the suggestion that Hades and Persephone are going to start working on their marriage and that Persephone is going to return to the overworld in time for spring. So, Orpheus’s plan works!

Well…

It’s suggested that Hades and Persephone are going to be alright. But the issue of Hades’ industrialization is not addressed. He doesn’t even release anyone from his mines and factories. Perhaps now that he’s happy he won’t want to continue the work he’s been doing, but that’s never stated. And perhaps now that Persephone is going to get back on schedule the seasons will go back to normal, but if the real cause of all the environmental issues was the pollution from Hadestown things might only get marginally better for the humans.

Apocalyptic stories usually don’t have happy endings.

In the Dark Tower, the nuclear apocalypse was never stopped. The fall of Arthur’s kingdom was not stopped. But the utter destruction of the multiverse was prevented. It took eight books, but eventually Roland succeeded in saving the world. It would be difficult to explain everything he did, so I’ll focus on the three that I feel are most relevant to the topic.

The first is physical violence. Lots of physical violence. It’s a book about gunslingers, after all. Second, his allies in a modern Earth form a competing corporation to foil the plans of the evil corporations whenever possible. This isn’t focused on much in the books, and it’s unclear how effective this tactic really is, but I found it interesting that the characters decided to fight evil businesses with good businesses. I’ll go into that more in a later installment. Third, he and his friends protect the novelist that is writing their story so that he can write a conclusion to their quest to save the world.

When outlining this essay, my final point for ‘how do we prevent the apocalypse’ was ‘you can’t?’ because the real world doesn’t have magic songs and it isn’t written by a version of Stephen King that exists in an alternative reality. We could do what Orpheus did and try to appeal to the elite’s sense of compassion and love and hope they stop whatever awful thing they’re doing. We could use physical violence, but no one on this earth could compare to Roland with a revolver so I don’t think anyone but him could get very far. We could create another corporation, or perhaps appeal to the ones that exist and hope they pursue ‘good’ over money. A lot of those things have been tried or are being tried, and they don’t seem to be working.

But as I was writing this section I realized that both of these stories are giving us the same tool for change: art. Art can save the world. Orpheus uses song to avert disaster and Roland saves the writer to do the same. It makes sense that this is the message that a musician and author would settle on, as art is the tool they use to enact change.

I don’t think art alone is enough, and I think both King and Mitchell knew that. But art can make people aware of the problem. Art can inspire people to act. Art can give us hope that change is possible, even if it is hard. Neither Roland nor Orpheus get a particularly happy ending, but they did manage to do something important. Both worked toward their goals with dogged persistence, both met with failure, but both left the world better than it was.

Perhaps that is the revelation.