At one point in Chris Smith’s documentary Collapse, his subject, Michael Ruppert, says his favourite thing to do is take his dog Rags for a walk and count how many smiles he caused — “We got 23 today!” he might tell Rags when they get back home. These days, he tells Smith, those smiles feel especially precious.Collapse, on the other hand, isn’t likely to inspire any smiles, although maybe the terrified grimaces on the audience’s faces could be mistaken for smiles if you’re far enough away. And you ignore the sound of everyone anxiously grinding their teeth at Ruppert’s dire predictions of how the next few decades of human history are going to play out. Our civilization runs on oil, Ruppert says, and we are running out of it — and what’s more, there’s no source of energy, not even wind or solar, that is going to be able to replace it. What’s more, the global economy is a gigantic pyramid scheme that depends on constant growth to sustain itself. So what we’ve got is a situation where the demand for infinite economic growth is going to collide with the reality of dwindling oil production — and that collision just might take out humanity the way that asteroid took out the dinosaurs millions of years ago. At the very least, according to Ruppert, we are facing a long, tough, chaotic period where mankind is going to have to regroup and learn to live a different way. There will probably be riots. The government might disappear. He’s advising that you buy gold and stock up on organic seeds. If we’re lucky, everything will fall apart fast enough so that the infrastructure of bridges, roads, and sewers remains intact so that we can still get some use out of them if and when order is restored.
Ruppert spins out this scenario in calm, clear, articulate language from a chair in what appears to be the basement of his house in Culver City. (With its single set and single interview subject, the film closely resembles Errol Morris’ The Fog of War, right down to Smith’s ample use of archival footage and the undulating faux-Philip Glass score by Didier Leplae and Joe Wong.) Who is this guy? He’s a former detective with the LAPD, an investigative journalist, and the publisher of a dissident newsletter called From the Wilderness that digs into political and economic issues. He writes books and speaks at universities. He used to do debates, but says he stopped because he no longer needs to — all the worst-case scenarios he used to predict are now reality. He’s been branded a conspiracy theorist, but he says it would be more accurate to say he deals in “conspiracy fact.” He speaks with an unnerving certainty, although he does break into tears a couple of times during the film, especially when he talks about the need for people to get back in touch with their local communities and band together with their neighbours for survival. He says “we” a lot when he talks about his operations, but the impression you get from Collapse is of a lonely man who wrestles with despair and isolation every day of his life.
Is Ruppert a prophet, or merely an unusually convincing crank with a highly selective interpretation of the news? He compares himself to someone living in Germany in the early ’30s with the ability to foresee all the Nazi atrocities of the next decade — would someone in that position be able simply to turn away, Ruppert asks? Well, he can’t turn away either. As deeply unsettling and frightening as Collapse frequently is, you will have a hard time turning away from it too.
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