“Do you know who you are?” reads the sign that appears among the establishing shots of Zoe Lister-Jones and Daryl Wein’s How It Ends, a movie that seems a hybrid of Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012—appropriate) and This is the End (2013).Yet unlike these films, Lister-Jones and her husband bring in a novel concept to the apocalypse movie (apart from the presence of Pauly Shore): the idea that you would be experiencing it with your younger self (YS for short).
Evidently, Liza (Lister-Jones) has been living most of her life with her YS (Cailee Spaeny). So accustomed to her presence that she knows how to act in front of people with said YS in the background urging her to do things that she’d rather not. And so, to answer that aforementioned question about knowing who she is, Liza would likely say that a large portion of what comprises her is, in fact, the adolescent girl (even though Spaeny is twenty-four) trapped inside…on the exterior. Yet that is the girl who’s literally pulling Liza out of bed in the morning and making her a huge stack of pancakes for the last day of existence. And, unlike other apocalypse movies, there’s less exposition as to the “why” it’s happening, and also less buildup to the day itself.
The fact that How It Ends starts on the same day the asteroid will smack into Earth sets it further apart from a film like Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, which, of course, Liza is. Someone besides her YS, who she continues to tell, “You don’t count. You’re metaphysical.” It seems, instead, Liza was hoping to have that “special someone” to go up in flames with, which is why she laments to her YS, “My whole life I have been terrified of dying alone, and tonight I am literally dying alone.”
But YS Liza isn’t ready to lie down and, well, die by letting Liza go through with her plan to get really high, eat until she pukes and kick the bucket. No, she’d rather do something more uplifting or “spiritual” than that. Liza instead focuses suddenly on how she’s out of her key ingredient—weed—dragging herself to the dispensary only to run into a man (Nick Kroll) who tells her he just cleaned it out—but he’ll be happy to share some with her. Offering to take her back to his “house,” he leads her to a minuscule tent in the middle of a field where, for the first time, they realize he can actually see YS Liza. Something no one has ever been able to do. He then says that his own younger self “fell” off a cliff, adding, “If you don’t wanna be with your younger self, you don’t have to be. If you wanna be truly alone, you can be truly alone.”
Ah, but Liza has never been good at being alone (despite her insistence to the contrary), which is why her younger self has for so long provided a necessary crutch. One she wouldn’t dream of getting rid of, especially not now, on the last day of life on Earth. What’s more, YS Liza has helped her form a game plan for the final day, including confronting her father, Kenny (Bradley Whitford) about his shortcomings as a parent, as well as her mother, Lucinda (Helen Hunt) about the same. The dialogue with her father goes “okay,” at best, as he talks some psychobabble about how she can “lay it all on him” by transferring her emotions with some arm gestures. Better than nothing, she figures. After the encounter, she comes across another sign. Because, as L.A. Story already taught us, Los Angeles is full of signs. This one reads: “You are enough.” She comments to her YS, “It’s a little on the nose.”
The pair continues their walk through L.A., a main character in its own right. For the street names alone create meaning: Chapter Drive, Pilgrimage Terrace—all monikers that feel pointed. As most things tend to in L.A., despite the oft-brandished accusation that it’s nothing more than a vapid wasteland. Now at the corner of Dix Street (yes, Dix), the duo happens upon an erstwhile teacher trying her hand at something she always wanted to: standup comedy. In this moment, How It Ends addresses the unfortunate reality that people will never do what they really want to until faced with a cataclysmic forecast that proves just how meaningless what they were doing in the first place was. Even Liza must deal with that sort of revelation in terms of how she treated those who were kindest to her, including her ex-best friend, Alay (Olivia Wilde). The only reason for their friendship’s demise was over one of Liza’s douchebag exes, Larry (Lamorne Morris)—but she’ll get to him later. Because Alay isn’t the only person Liza reckons with, having numerous other encounters (many unintentional) throughout the day, even if, under normal circumstances, we’re led to believe it’s impossible to see anyone actually walking on the streets of Los Angeles.
With YS Liza there the whole time to guide her like some plucky guru, the mounting toward their conflict finally escalates when Liza is told the End of the World Party being thrown by their friend, Mandy (Whitney Cummings), is now cancelled. This dashes all of Liza’s hopes for confessing her true feelings to Nate (Logan Marshall-Green), the boyfriend she fucked it up with. And the reason for that? Well, it’s as she tells YS Liza: “Oh you know, [my type is] anyone who will give me a modicum of attention paired with the promise of rejection. A little seductive, a little sociopathic. You know, someone who could potentially love me, but also someone who could prove that, ultimately, I’m unworthy of love.” Since Nate was none of those things and, indeed, the best boyfriend she ever had, she decided to ruin it.
And, naturally, these feelings of self-hatred and inadequacy stem from the time when she was abandoned, in different ways, by each of her parents. Since we all tend to freeze ourselves in our minds at the instant when we were first emotionally wounded, it makes sense that YS Liza would come in the form of a teen girl (because no matter what anyone says, Spaeny does not look like she’s in her twenties). One who screams at their mother when they go to see her, “I am trapped inside this grown person who has no idea how to ask for what she needs!” And it’s because she was made to feel afraid to do so once she started to believe that if she was her true self in front of anyone, least of all her parents, she would be rejected. Thus, forming a lifelong insecurity that was begat at YS Liza’s age.
As YS Liza grows increasingly frustrated with Liza’s self-loathing and negativity, she finally goes off on her by shouting, “When you were me, and life started feeling like it wasn’t worth living and every day since, you can’t shake it. You wanna talk freedom? I’m your prisoner. And I’ve been your prisoner this whole fucking time.” With that, she stalks away, tired of hearing how she doesn’t count, tired of trying to make Liza get in touch with some small semblance of the hope she felt when she was younger. The hope we’re all naïve enough to feel when we’re younger. And this is something Liza comments on when she finally finds YS Liza again at the beach. She notes all the things she loves about YS Liza, including, “How you laugh with your whole body—how no one has taken that from you yet.” She then has the epiphany, “When I say you don’t count, I’m not talking to you, I’m talking to me.” And yet, if YS Liza counts, then so does grown-up Liza—there can be no distinction between the two. That’s when it starts to dawn on her that she can’t really go out “at peace” with her life until she loves all parts of herself. Even the one that’s most damaged.
As for the premise of the film being set against the imminence of an asteroid’s impact, we get some sense of where the idea came from when we see the title card at the end of the credits that reads: “Shot on location in Los Angeles. Made with love during the 2020 pandemic.” This very much indicates where the headspace of the film’s creators was: total end of the world mode. And it’s a mode that actually feels more appropriate than ever in the wake of yet another damning climate change report that no one should need to be told about if they just look the fuck around.
Accordingly, Lister-Jones, who’s a bit like a more polished Lena Dunham (with the “artist parents” to match), has touched on something universal that we might all want to tap into before the grand coda (likely to be more of a painful fizzle-out). For maybe the only thing we can really hope for at the end of our lives—whether it comes from a climate apocalypse or death from “natural causes”—is to finally be at peace with ourselves. To be okay with who we are via accepting the trauma that’s happened in our lives by acknowledging that it is what has made us. Good, bad and otherwise fucked up, we couldn’t be who we are without our YS. The vision of that self reminding us from time to time of our original innocence before it all went south. And with these glimpses, we’re propelled to carry on until the bitter end.
