“The nothingness is taking over the planet”

“The nothingness is taking over the planet” is a phrase Andy Warhol used to describe the philosophy he saw in NeverEnding Story. His response turns an almost empty movie theater and a popular fantasy film into a meditation on an absence spreading across the world: not a plot explanation, but a compact statement of the idea he recognized in the movie.

The Film and the Phrase

Warhol went to see NeverEnding Story in a theater that was almost empty; he thought it should have been completely empty. Against that sparse audience, he noted the contrast that the film was a major hit in Germany. The diary gives no further account of the German reception, but the juxtaposition places the movie’s commercial success beside his own markedly different, abstract reading of it.

He called the film “sort of my philosophy—looking for the nothingness.” The phrase “The nothingness is taking over the planet” extends that search into an image of movement and scale: nothingness is not merely something to find, but something he describes as spreading. The entry leaves the idea unexplained, so its force lies in the suddenness and breadth of the declaration rather than in a defined theory.

A Constellation of Fantastical Stories

Warhol compared the film to Alice in Wonderland and E.T., then added “Rumpelstiltskin.” These references place NeverEnding Story among tales he associated with fantasy and transformation, without spelling out what particular features they share. The list moves quickly between works rather than arguing for a single interpretation, mirroring the diary’s associative way of recording his response.

The phrase therefore remains deliberately open: it names the film’s connection to Warhol’s search for nothingness but does not specify what that nothingness means or why it is taking over. Its significance in the entry is this compressed collision between an almost vacant theater, a hit in Germany, and a sweeping philosophical image.