this is trashew watching me masturbate ... she is not welcome and i have banned her ... 3.26am 130613

SUCH A HORRIBLE PERSON ....






Our apocalypses have been getting cosier for quite a while, with enough downtime amid the brimstone for celebrity encounters (Zombieland), unlikely romance (Seeking a Friend for the End of the World ), and growth opportunities for the James Franco brand (This is the End). And what about the aftermath? It looks like the post-apocalypse might not be the scorched-earth, cannibal-biker-gang free-for-all we all feared, but instead a nice opportunity to stretch your legs in the world's largest natural park: the world.

After Earth
Production year: 2013
Country: USA
Cert (UK): 12A
Runtime: 100 mins
Directors: M Night Shyamalan
Cast: Jaden Smith, Sophie Okonedo, Will Smith, Zoe Kravitz
More on this film

Two recent films, Oblivion and After Earth , revel in the spectacle of a depopulated planet Earth returned to a stunning Eden-like paradise. In the first, Tom Cruise, apart from some niggling memories of Olga Kurylenko, seems to be on Easy Street in his job as a kind of planetary janitor; in the other, one of Jaden Smith's first jobs as leading man is to gaze awestruck at a CGI vista chock full of migrating fauna. There's been plenty of solitude and wilderness before in post-apocalyptic films, but this is the first time it's seemed like it might be a good thing.

You could see the abandoned-Earth trope – a classic return to innocence – as a reaction to current global issues such as overpopulation and environmental pressures. But it's still heavily marked by 21st-century, globalised attitudes. This is the post-apocalyptic landscape as drawn up by sustainability-policy committee: concerned with nature, but somehow hovering above it. In Oblivion, Cruise has his communications officer, Andrea Riseborough, constantly whispering flirty sweet nothings in his ear-piece, like some kind of sci-fi Nescafé Gold Blend advert , as he goes about his repair work down on the plains. WithAfter Earth, it's Will Smith technologically assisting son Jaden on his quest for a lost homing beacon – Supernanny meets David Attenborough (possibly with a bit of L Ron Hubbard).

Oblivion in particular, with its emphasis on work, comes over as the daydream of some Ernst & Young IT contractor – with Tom Cruise in continuous transit, forever pining after his lakeside pied à terre. He is Wall-E for the corporate crowd. After Earth, with its battle against tooth-and-claw nature, resembles the more traditional post-apocalyptic tale. But the abandoned-Earth trope offers a variant of the genre in the sheer magnitude of the setup. They're not simply a trudge through a ravaged locale; the idea of the entire planet emptied out and restored to prelapsarian purity is central to them. It's a concept with a spherical absoluteness; paradise-Earths are the doubles, the redeemed twins, of our own, in its current sullied state.

Link to video: Oblivion

Literal twin blue planets hoved into view in 2011 in the indie filmsMelancholia and Another Earth – with all the disturbing connotations of the double. In his 1919 essay The Uncanny, Freud writes that the motif of the double, produced by a mature mind, often appears as a "ghastly harbinger of death" – an unsettling entity observing and judging its twin. That seems to what the spectre Earths do, hanging above the characters and their first-world problems – wedding-day alienation, worn-out souls in young bodies, rootless anxiety – in those two torpid movies.

Freud also writes about a more primitive use of the double, as a narcissistic self-projection a child might produce as a kind of talisman against its first realisation of death. Is this what is going in the radiant, big-budget visions of an abandoned and rehabilitated Earth? There's definitely something wishful and immature about the idea that our planet could revert, just like that, to a giant garden for Tom Cruise to romp around in in his toy hoverplane.

But Hollywood is grownup as well as childish; its movies mix up both uses of the double. They might be escapist, but they are also conceal (Freud would have called it repress) the responsibilities and traumas of an adult society. Key to the psychoanalyst's description of the double is the simultaneous sense of something foreign yet familiar; the underlying feeling of the uncanny gets its power from the tension produced by dawning awareness of a long-buried truth.

Long-buried truths don't come much bigger than the Statue of Liberty up to her chest in sand. And uncanny is exactly the feeling in a superb last sequence of Planet of the Apes as Charlton Heston rides along the shore. Towards his "destiny", as Dr Zaius points out – and also ours.

The scene has become a key visual influence on the post-apocalyptic oeuvre, and has a special psychological importance for the abandoned-Earth sort. Shots of iconic monuments of progress reduced to beach flotsam are utter clichés these days. But they are clues to the uncanny impulse – the crashing instant of self-recognition – doppelganger-Earth films are compelled towards. If Tom Cruise in the ruins of the New York Jets stadium wasn't enough, Oblivion's amnesia plotline, recycled from Philip K Dick, hammers it home. The land might look virgin, but the footprints are out there waiting.

• After Earth is out now. Next week's After Hollywood will look at the world's most pessimistic national cinema. Which global cinematic stories would you like to see covered in the column? Let us know in the comments below.