The title of Radu Jude’s film about labor, sex, filmmaking, corporate greed, and social media comes from writer and poet Stanisław Jerzy Lec. “Do not expect too much from the end of the world” appears in Lec’s 1957 collection of aphorisms and epigrams, Unkempt Thoughts. Lec was a Polish Jew, forced into exile by the Nazi invasion of Poland, then forced to flee the Stalinist Soviet Union before being imprisoned in a Nazi work camp, which he escaped while digging his own grave—safe to say he would have insight into what the end of the world might be like. Many of his aphorisms strike one with the pleasure of their cleverness, but over time provoke a dire sense of foreboding. “I had a dream about reality,” he writes. “It was such a relief to wake up.” The initial charm of the reversal is replaced quickly with anxious questions: From what is this relief derived? Is the dream of reality intolerable because it is too dream-like, or too real? Is ‘real’ reality preferable to dream reality for its increased certainty, or increased fantasy? When we wake from a nightmare, are we relieved to be rid of a dream, or rid of a terrifying truth?
Lec’s aphorisms—many of them contained in Unkempt Thoughts—title and break up this essay. Disparate as they seem, they share a commonality: the feeling of being caught in a dream about reality.
i. “Does surrealism cease to be such if it becomes reality?”
A man sits in a driveway as night falls, illuminated by a single spotlight. He is surrounded by his family; his mother sits at his side clutching a cane, and his wife and daughter flank him, standing. Twenty yards behind him is a rusty iron bar that spans the width of the driveway, intended as an impediment to intruders. This is the same heavy metal bar that was hit by a car and struck him on the head years prior, when this was the driveway to his workplace. That accident cost him his job and the use of his legs—look closely and see that the chair he sits in has wheels. Look closer still to see, at the base of the metal bar, an ancient doghouse marked “BELLA,” its occupant nervously pacing on a wire lead. You will further find, at the tip of the metal bar, a sloping concrete bunker painted with the telltale yellow triangles that indicate radioactivity. What you cannot see is where the voices emerge, voices that rebuke the man for not wearing a helmet on the fateful night of the accident. They invoke “the occupational safety regulations you signed,” they demand he not “say things detrimental to the company paying [him],” and they attack the man: “With a helmet, you’d be fine.” In spite of it all, he refuses to relent to their ultimate demand—that he admit he is at fault for not wearing protective workwear as he walked from the factory to his car under the heavy iron barrier. He refuses even as it begins to rain on him and his family, and the wind and cold make them shiver. He eventually finds himself holding up signs that bear no words—blank green slates that will have messages added by CGI. When the man raises his concern that the words added to the signs will make him admit to the fault he has so bitterly resisted, an official reassures: “I’ll raise hell if that happens!” In the background, a young woman in a shimmering sequined dress films herself with a cell phone posing in front of the concrete bunker as she exclaims, “This is my atomic fallout shelter with some sluts inside.”
This scene could describe a piece of absurdist theater or a Kafkaesque short story, but what it most resembles is a nightmare—if not yours specifically, then certainly the nightmare of the man whose life was permanently changed by the iron barrier outside his work. The details align it shockingly well with classical Freudian dream analysis, not just in its multiple phalluses (the obvious iron bar piercing the entire scene horizontally, mother’s cane protruding suggestively from between her legs, and the necktie she is suspiciously wearing), but also in the overdetermination of its symbology. The iron bar is described as “communist,” and points to the fallout shelter; the guard dog whose leash prohibits it from protecting anything paces impotently while voices yell about hard hats and Covid masks; and the musician (Valeriu Sterian) who partly inspires the decision to use the blank green signs killed two people in a drunk driving accident. The confluence of national and personal history swirling through immensely condensed signification (accident, protection, shelter) bears all the signs of what Freud called “The Dream-Work.”1
In spite of these surreal qualities, the scene I have described above is formally pure naturalism. All of these elements occur during a 35-minute unbroken shot at the end of Jude’s film. This shot consists of a single real-time cut; when a production assistant runs off screen to a truck to produce the blank green signs, he doesn’t return for four minutes. The entire scene is from the POV of a camera shooting a safety PSA for an international business conglomerate that owns the factory that the man (Ovidiu) worked for prior to his accident. The voices that chastise Ovidiu come from company officials who need him to mention hard hats so they can legally protect themselves from liability in industrial accidents. His family is there to provide a sentimental appeal and to cover the crass legal rationale for the video. The dog, fallout shelter, rain, and even the production assistant making perverse social media videos in the background are all presented as accidents—chance encounters that just happen to align with the historical and personal details of Ovidiu’s life.
This is the magic of Jude’s film: the hardest reality takes the shape of a bad dream. A filmmaker famous for mixing history and fantasy—blurring the distinction between realism and the experimental—Jude crosses the line in Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World between documentary and fiction to the point where the two begin to resemble one another.2 Time and again throughout Do Not Expect Too Much… we find the bizarre and the absurd expressed through the material details of real-life injustice and tragedy. A man whose hand is mangled by a work accident must record his testimonial hovering in front of a space-themed Zoom background. The words “Activate Windows. Go to Settings to activate Windows” overlap him as he describes how he was left “howling in pain for about an hour” while his employers checked his contract to see if they should call an ambulance. A woman who broke her spine falling from a walkway while working unpaid overtime offers a gift of a photorealistic cat’s head pillow to her interviewer. The executive of a company digging up remains from a cemetery in order to build a condominium is late for a meeting because of a mindfulness class. At the meeting, he tells the woman whose grandparents he is disinterring that she can “rest assured,” as he has hired “elite priests” to make sure all corpse transport is “done by the canon.” In Jude’s world, unthinkable horror is not just juxtaposed with the ridiculous: the two are inseparable. The gnawing suspicion that follows viewing the film is that Jude’s world has more in common with the everyday than it does with some melting-clock dreamscape.
ii. “Optimists and pessimists differ only on the date of the end of the world.”
I very distinctly remember the moment, three years ago, when I realized that the bread-and-butter foundations of narrative film analysis—character arc, plot continuity, thematic unity—no longer seemed useful in thinking about the real world. I was watching a video of hundreds of people gathered at Dealey Plaza in Dallas around the large white X painted on the road to mark the spot where John F. Kennedy was shot and killed in 1963. They begin to recite the Pledge of Allegiance as they count down to 12:29—the time of Kennedy’s assassination. The purpose of this patriotic performance was to lure Kennedy’s son, JFK Jr., out of hiding, as they believed his appearance before them would presage the purge of evil from our political system and usher in a new era of peace and prosperity. Some important questions I had include: Why did they believe Kennedy’s son would choose the spot of his father’s death to emerge? Why did they think JFK Jr. was still alive after his famous death in a plane crash in 1999? Why did they gather on the second of November when the anniversary of Kennedy’s death was on the twenty-second of November? Why did they think the Pledge of Allegiance would have anything to do with any of it?
Other than to gesture to the noxious palimpsest of pop culture and Americana that constitutes the QAnon cult, I cannot answer any of these questions. In the weeks and months that followed their attempted populist necromancy, I found myself thinking more and more of the logistics of the event. These were people who spent time and money—requesting off of work, scheduling plane trips and hotel rooms, purchasing clothing and memorabilia—in pursuit of something so farcical that it exceeds what I would consider reasonable suspension of disbelief. In the years after the assassination of JFK, the Zapruder film served as the bedrock of accepted reality around which theories and speculation blossomed. So sacrosanct is its presentation of truth that each frame was dredged for crumbs of evidence on which to cultivate a plausible narrative of explanation. In this more recent video of Dealey Plaza, the conspiracies reign, but where has the accepted reality fled? What possible shared truth is left?
Furthermore, how could you possibly make a movie out of it? After September 11th, Robert Altman was criticised for saying “The movies set the pattern, and [the terrorists] have copied the movies.” While his claim is too proscriptive by far, it is true that many who experienced the attacks and their aftermath relied on the simile of Hollywood disaster films to describe their experience. Then, reality appeared like a movie. Now, film form itself can feel too sensical to represent reality, its classical pillars—character, plot, theme—almost nostalgically retrograde in comparison to the gummy unpredictability of what happens in the real world. To wit: after JFK Jr. failed to materialize for the crowd in Dealey Plaza, others reported they saw him possess Keith Richards’ body at the Rolling Stones show that evening.
In Do Not Expect… there is an exchange between cantankerous German director Uwe Boll (appearing as himself) and the protagonist of the film, Angela (Ilinca Manolache)—the brash young woman in the sequined dress—that gestures to this growing gulf between the absurdity of the everyday and the brassbound realism of what happens in the movies. Boll describes his famous publicity stunt “Raging Boll,” where he invited critics he “hated” to fight him in a boxing match, and then “smashed them.” In response, Angela says, in confident English, “That is history of cinema!” Boll hesitates to agree—saying “I hope my films are also, in a way, history of cinema”—but seems to concede that his gonzo revenge performance is more genuinely “history of cinema” than are his actual films. The fact that backstage (and even offstage) shenanigans tend to overshadow the onscreen relevance of movies reflects this shift. Jude’s response is to expand the boundaries of narrative film so as to include all the bizarre pop culture effluvia surrounding them. Angela, making a video for social media, mimics the MGM lion roaring “Blow me!”
In a vacuum, Jude’s method could seem glib. After a woman Angela is interviewing shares that her family will not be able to afford heat for the winter, Angela tells a crude joke: “What does a blind man say at the fish market? ‘Hi there, girls!’” As the woman laughs, her daughter responds offscreen: “I knew it.” The constant meeting of the dire material circumstances of the subjects in the film and the perverse humor that runs throughout adds an additional, necessary line to the famous Marx dictum: historical events appear “on the first occasion […] as tragedy; on the second, as farce,” and on every subsequent occasion as the indistinguishable mix of the two. In our current political reality, this method of Jude’s bears the mark of truth. In 2025, the president is a man who got famous calling the bassist from KISS “the most independent thinker there is,” a second-fiddle character from a plumbing-themed video game is a contested symbol of class warfare, and the presumptive health secretary is waging war against the polio vaccine. In response to each of these a voice, full of deep weariness, neither hopeful nor defeated, emerges from offscreen to announce: “I knew it.”
iii. “There were times when slaves had to be bought legally.”
Like many, I survived the pandemic by riding the momentum of a tidal wave of memes, turning to the internet as a zone of distraction and respite to counteract the internet that sent me to work, further COVID stats, or dead-eyed friend Zooms. Among the templates that emerged in the pressure cooker of the lockdown, one that stuck with me was “how tf am I an essential worker?” The first appearance of the meme featured a dutch angle of a restaurant bathroom mirror, in which a smiling, anthropomorphic Baskin-Robbins ice cream cone holds up a cell phone to take a selfie. The accompanying text grants the figure—undoubtedly designed to be indefatigably chipper—an air of ironic despair. Something of the easily bottled and sold pleasure associated with the figure and the frozen treat it represents has been shorn off by the term ‘essential.’ What about this could be necessary?
Now to ruin the joke by trying to make it meaningful: The pandemic—and its concomitant phrase ‘essential worker’—provided a shot in the arm to labor movements in general. In short, this new category asked pointed questions about how different forms of labor were valued; it became easy to ask how labor could be ‘unskilled’ and ‘essential’ at the same time. As an example, the Ad Council produced a series of advertisements under the title #OutThereForUs, intended to celebrate essential workers for the risk they put themselves under to keep things running as smoothly as circumstances would allow. These ads heavily feature images of medical professionals, scientists, and first responders, as these are all forms of labor that traditionally carry a high social value. However, in what seems a sheepish sense of duty, they sneak in images of janitors, factory workers, and gig economy delivery people. Here the title of the advertisement really twists the knife: #OutThereForUs, “us” being the people whose refuse you clean up, whose online orders of plastic trash you fulfill, whose take out and groceries you deliver. The distinction between those who could work from home and those who served the work-from-homers rendered a nasty class division more visible.
And while it is true that movements like the push for a $15 minimum wage—and unionization efforts at Starbucks, Amazon, and Tesla—began with pandemic-era frustrations, ultimately the outcome was a pervasive sense of defeat. Inflation, wage stagnation, and record-setting unemployment among recent college graduates have contributed to an overall malaise. Enter the recent meme template: “POV: You Wake Up in 2019.” Soaked in an extremely tight cycle of nostalgia—2019 was only five years ago, after all—these images and videos traffic in the yearning for the fantasy of a simpler, pre-pandemic way of life. With captions like “covid altered everything 🙁 ,” “true nostalgia,” and “#takemeback,” the consensus is that the dream of reality from 2020 forward is one that many would be relieved to wake up from. One Spanish-language video sums it up concisely: “Todo después de 2019 fue una pesadilla”—everything after 2019 was a nightmare.
Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World… is, from this point of view, the tale of a gig worker who continues to work in the midst of this absurdist nightmare. “What’s up, Angi?” her boss asks her. Driving from one appointment to the next, she replies: “looking for a double-muzzled dog that can bark while it bites.” Her boss is nonplussed: “What?” When she throws her hands up and says “Working, what else?” her exasperation is at least in part because he doesn’t get the joke. The rest of the exasperation is because her labor is constantly demeaned by her peers and bosses, even though she knows it is essential for the regular functioning of the production company that pays her. She’s the one who visits the homes of people crippled by worksite accidents, who gathers the necessary equipment for the film shoot, who ferries her boss’s boss to and from airport and hotel. Her labor is exhausting, and Jude deftly makes her exhaustion the audience’s as well by keeping them together in her car, scurrying from job site to job site. So much of the film is shot from her passenger and back seats, as she navigates through crowded traffic circles, intersections, highways, and rural roads. When she calls her paramour to tell him they “can’t meet this afternoon,” she is calling from her car, stuck in traffic. “I was supposed to have time off but they’re killing me,” she adds. It is telling that, later in the film, when Angela finally has a moment to meet up with him, they must also fuck in her car—even the seditious tryst must be conducted on the clock.
As if to prove the point, Angela shares a strange anecdote after their cramped coupling. Upset that her lover has soiled her dress in his exuberance, and forced now to continue working into the night slightly damp, she relates a story from a different film shoot she worked on as a production assistant:
One time we were shooting a porn film for some Danes, and in the middle of the scene, the guy couldn’t get it up anymore. So he got up from that hot ass under him, all naked and sexy as hell, and to get it back up he went on PornHub on his phone. It struck me as apocalyptic.
I am fairly certain that this is not what Adorno and Horkheimer had in mind when they wrote, “entertainment is the prolongation of work under late capitalism. It is sought by those who want to escape the mechanized labor process so that they can cope with it again.” Yet try as I might, I cannot find a better example.
The cell phone is what connects Angela to this impotent man, as in both cases it is the sign of how labor and respite from it have become one. Angela’s phone makes her constantly available to her bosses; it converts her car and her apartment into a potential workspace. But it is also how she stays in contact with her lover, her mother, her friends. It is with her phone her time is scheduled, and with it that she finds the space for resistance to that schedule. The most charming repeated element of the film is Angela’s videoing of herself with a goatee-and-unibrow filter as her alter ego Bobita—an Andrew-Tate inspired hyperbolic satire of the materialistic/misogynistic tenor of online discourse. To signal these selfie videos as spaces of resistance for Angela, they appear in color to brightly contrast the black-and-white of the majority of the film. Angela as well recognizes their role as an insouciant escape from the all-consuming demands of her labor: “I’m just making fun so I don’t go crazy,” she explains to her mother, “All day long, just work, work, work.”
Yet even as satire, these videos repeat the language and rhetoric that form a part of the oppression that keeps her running from place to place for little money. “Hi from London, you peasants,” one begins, which is not a bad summary of many influencers’ entire brands. Angela here takes a break from her day to playact as those who make fun of her for the content of her days. And the setting of this break—a fancy restaurant bathroom she believes could pass for London—is provided only because her work has brought her there. Sex with her partner, vulgar videos with her friends, even a visit to her grandparents’ graves with her mother, all must bend to accommodate the constant demands on her labor. As Angela emerges from a fancy hotel, her work day finally ended, she turns to the doorman and says “I can’t go on like this.” He replies, “That’s what you think.”
Jude’s film honors the exhaustion of the workplace with no boundaries and the work day that does not end. It honors the world in which the border between tragedy and absurdity melts away faster than polar ice. It is therefore the most vibrant type of film, one that does not appeal to history of cinema as a sideshow or nostalgic fantasy, but to its deep connection to the everyday. Miracle of miracles: visiting this dream of reality is cold comfort for the waking nightmare beyond the movie screen. After watching Do Not Expect Too Much…, every time I log on to a Teams meeting after dinner, check my work email once the kids are tucked in, or drive home from my office long after the sun has gone down, I smile to think of Angela-as-Bobita gleefully spewing filth to her own gender-swapped image on her phone. Jude has made a balm to soothe away excess expectations of the end, even as we proclaim we cannot go on like this, even as we go on.
- This is Freud’s term for the “form of thought” that transforms waking emotions and ideas into dream images. It is worth noting that at another point in The Interpretation of Dreams Freud argues that absurd images can represent “criticism and derision” in the dreamer, making it possible that the absurd always carries a latent political message: if you think this is absurd you should take a look at the real world!
- A quick glance at the cast on IMDB reveals that many of the ‘characters’ in Do Not Expect… are played by people with the same name. Jude also periodically includes slow motion scans and still images of the ‘extras’ from the Romanian film Angela Goes On (Lucian Bratu, 1982), who are clearly revealed to be everyday people going about their business. In this way he demonstrates that even more traditionally narrative films include documentary elements.