Preset no. two, my local student-run station, is not interested in boundaries, generationally or sonically. The college kids play an eclectic range of music, including some from the era older folk claim these kids are so far removed from. Despite moving away, I kept the preset for my hometown college station too. I distinctly remember the night I found it: I was 19 and, like in Night of the Comet, it was nearly Christmas, and like Sam, who experiences terrible anxiety at the abuse of her step-mother, I had gotten into a bad fight with my mom. For Sam and me, the radio station was a spiritual balm against annihilation, when social catastrophe precedes the cosmic. If youth makes you feel helpless and hopeless, stuck at the end of time, the radio helps transcend time altogether, not through hollow nostalgia, but through aural perception.
Reggie takes Sam shopping to cheer her up, the two indulging in a fashion montage. In trying to find where the girls relocated, the same researcher reiterates his dry wisdom, “Where would adolescents with nothing to do go?” But chaos quickly descends as former stockboys attempt to kill the girls. The mall’s safety is temporary, acknowledging the complicated tension of youthful consumerism; it may be a gathering spot for kids, a place more about hanging out than spending money, but it’s also a battleground of exploitation and materialism. It’s worth noting that Hector is played by Mexican-American actor Robert Beltran, who fought to give the last man on earth, a Latino, dignity and charm, even as Reggie utters several microaggressions to him, which Hector mocks her for. Thinking back on the anecdote about my local mall’s racism, Hector not joining the girls’ shopping excursion feels poignant, as he splits off to find his family and friends in San Diego. The film lingers on Hector walking around his empty home, picking up mementos of his lost mother and sister. It’s a small gesture, yet a pointed way of expressing how Hector is an outsider to the world Reggie and Sam easily inhabit, alongside a rare display of intimacy between the old and the young.
As for the researchers, their hollow observations about teen behaviour foreshadow that they are not the good guys, just as interested in linking children to consumption, literally, draining their blood to keep themselves alive. Every adult in the film dies, and in this way, teenagers reign over a raptured Earth; the meek inherit after all. But everything crumbles in the final act, when the trio saves two children, a boy and a girl, from the scientists. The film constructs a picturesque nuclear family, and though cheeky, it undercuts the affectionate teenage tale it initially presented. These are high schoolers, not parents, and their ’80s sensibilities of juvenile fun distinguished them. The sisters’ once androgynous names are now said in full, Regina and Samantha. It’s a shame that even after Armageddon, we’re stuck with Yuppies.
Plenty of films show teenagers interacting with bygone youth hubs like movie theatres, radios, and malls, yet Night of the Comet’s apocalyptic backdrop makes it particularly ripe for discussing memory, temporality, and the disillusionment that comes with aging out of these spaces. The film reminds us that nostalgia has limitations, that even back in the “good old days,” these spaces were imperfect and teenagers were misunderstood. Instead of harnessing dread at the passing of time against each other, we should bond over how cyclical the apocalypse is, each generation experiencing its own form of doom. The mythos of the radio station shouldn’t be a tool for making soulless proclamations about our differences, but a vessel for connection between the youth of the past and the youth of today, because music and conversation allow us to overcome our corporeality and free ourselves from the static. The definition of a “teenage comet zombie” has shifted; still, it may be that sincere correspondence includes stepping into the parking lot and recognising when someone is tuned into the same frequency you are.