Mervyn F. Bendle Ph.D.
Senior Lecturer in History and Communications
School of Humanities, James Cook University
Abstract
Popular culture
is awash with images and narratives of the apocalypse in various
forms. These range from war and acts of terrorism involving “Weapons
of Mass Destruction,” to religious, science-fiction,
horror and fantasy representations of the “End Times,” depicted
in a wide range of media including novels, comics, film, television
and video games. They include also “biblically based” presentations,
notably the Left Behind series
of 12 best-selling novels based on a fundamentalist application
of millennialist teachings to the contemporary world. This
paper argues that this contemporary fascination is associated
with a shift back towards traditional beliefs about the special
role and destiny of the U.S. associated with the long-standing
civil religion underpinning American civilization with its
historical associations with millennialist ideas. It foreshadows
further research on the extent to which these shifts are related
to public attitudes and government policy on the War on Terror
and other vital areas of national concern where religion and
popular culture intersect.
Introduction
[1] Popular
culture is currently awash with apocalyptic imagery and narratives,
appearing in every medium, from books, films, television, videos,
comics, computer to video games; and in many sub-genres, including
science fiction, techno-thrillers, horror and fantasy. Moreover,
this interest has deep roots in actual behaviour and religious
beliefs. As a recent article about the current American enthusiasm
for apocalyptic literature reports:
A TIME/CNN poll
finds that more than one-third of Americans say they are paying
more attention now to how the news may relate to the end of
the world, and have talked about what the Bible has to say
on the subject. Fully 59% say they believe the events in [the
Book of] Revelation are going to come true, and nearly one-quarter
think the Bible predicted the Sept. 11 attack (Gibbs 2002,
40).
[2] This
fascination is associated with a fundamental shift back towards
traditional ideals and beliefs about the special role and destiny
of the U.S. associated with the long-standing civil religion
underpinning American civilization. For centuries, this civil
religion has offered an “apprehension of universal and
transcendent religious reality as seen in or … revealed
through the experience of the American People” (Bellah
1991). This paper explores this “cultural rearmament,” which
was underway before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks,
but has intensified since, and now informs the current “War
on Terror.”
[3] Apocalypses
are one of the oldest narrative forms, and they have informed
some of the most imaginative and terrifying imagery in cultural
history. Apocalypses provide detailed prophetic accounts of
the end of the world, revelations of the end times, narratives
that unveil how the final destiny of the world will be decided
in a climactic battle between good and evil–in the Christian
tradition, between God and the forces of the Antichrist. These
narratives have their roots deep in the history of western
and adjacent civilizations. Judaism, Christianity and Islam
all have highly developed eschatologies, i.e., doctrines of
the end times. For Christians, the primary resource for the
apocalyptic imagination is the last book of the New Testament,
the Book of Revelation. This and other texts have given rise
to a set of extremely influential conceptions that are related
together within various apocalyptic narratives, religious and
secular, all playing major religious and cultural roles (Cohn
1995).
[4] As
this paper will show, the twentieth century saw a crucial shift
within the apocalyptic tradition, from what might be called
a Promethean to an Augustinian view of human nature and history,
i.e., from a belief in human self-determination to a conviction
of human sinfulness and weakness. In secular terms this was
a shift from a utopian to a dystopian vision, from humanism
to anti-humanism, from progressivism to conservatism. It involved
a move away from a basically optimistic outlook that complemented
secular faith in human progress based on reason, science, technology
and social amelioration, towards a far more pessimistic view
that distrusts these values, and instead sees the near future
in terms of social disintegration, violence, war and ultimate
catastrophe, before a final deliverance brought by divine power
(Abanes 1998; Baumgartner 1999; Katz and Popkins 1999; Weber
1999). It is this dark vision that now shapes the contemporary
apocalyptic imagination in both its religious and secular forms
(Ketterer 1974).
The
Apocalyptic Imagination
[5] In
order to understand the power of apocalyptic thought, it is
necessary briefly to review its history, particularly in the
United States, where it has a major political and cultural
presence (Baumgartner 1999; Katz and Popkins 1999). The apocalyptic
tradition has persisted tenaciously through millennia among
marginalized groups and oppressed classes and peoples, usually
in the face of strong opposition from political elites, who
were concerned by its extremely disruptive implications. It
played a vital role in the Renaissance and Reformation, and
was highly influential among Christians in America. The Puritans
saw themselves in terms of the apocalypse, escaping what they
saw as the demonic forces of the Catholic and established Churches.
The New World of the Americas offered them the chance of creating
the millennium kingdom in a “virgin” land–it
was the New Jerusalem–the city on the hill that was a
beacon to all people who pursued the righteousness of God.
[6] Over
time, this belief that America was the New Jerusalem changed
into a more general vision of America having a redemptive role
to play in world history, which developed into an American
civil religion (Bellah 1991). This trend was strengthened by
the religious revivalism of the First Great Awakening (1730-60),
which, under the influence of the Puritan theologian Jonathan
Edwards, led to an optimistic view of the end times, according
to which the faithful in America had a major role to play in
improving the condition of the world in anticipation of the
second coming of Jesus. This view became known as post-millennialism,
because Jesus’ return was to come after the
millennium, which was seen as a time that witnessed the widespread
acceptance of the Christian message, progress, social justice
and equality. This view found support in the secular optimism
of the Enlightenment, and with the victory in the American
Revolution, which gave birth to a new nation dedicated to the
pursuit of progress and the highest of ideals. This optimism
contrasts radically with the pessimism of later pre-millennialism, which is the presently dominant doctrine,
as we shall see below.
[7] The
Second Great Awakening (1800-30) placed a postmillennialist
emphasis on social reform and moral rejuvenation, focusing
on the evils of slavery, poverty, alcohol and sexual depravity,
which had to be addressed before the imminent return of the
Lord. As Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) concludes: “Read the signs of the times
... Who may abide the day of His appearing? For that day shall
burn like an oven.” Within a decade, the American people
had plunged into a Civil War over the issue of slavery, claiming
the greatest death toll of American lives in the wars that
America has fought. The Battle Hymn of the Republic famously sums up the messianic vision of that time: “Mine
eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling
out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath
loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword; His
truth is marching on.” As Bellah (1991, 177) stresses, “with
the Civil War, a new theme of death, sacrifice, and rebirth
entered the civil religion”; afterwards, monuments to
sacrifice became hallowed symbols of America’s sacred
role in the world. For the next 50 years America continued
to pursue expansion, progress, and moral idealism, while nurturing
a continuous stream of new millennialist movements and witnessing
a conservative reaction to liberal Christian theology that
culminated in the emergence of fundamentalism and new forms
of millennialism (Abanes, 1998, pp.209-54).
[8] The
Great War of 1914-18 largely destroyed the confidence and optimism
of western societies. It further discredited the optimism of
liberal theology and many Christians turned to the neo-orthodoxy
associated with Karl Barth, while others turned to millennialism.
As an historian has recently remarked of the final days of
peace in August 1914:
Most people in western
culture were satisfied to live in a society where the expectation
of the End Times largely meant a time when the human race,
led by science and technology, would become perfect. ... The
outbreak of World War I would shatter that optimism and provide
new opportunities for premillennial prophets. In respect to
millennialism, we are still living in the aftershocks of the
guns of August (Baumgartner 1999, 194).
[9] The
previously unimaginable horrors of the Great War facilitated
a fundamental shift within the apocalyptic tradition, from
Prometheanism to Augustinianism. Dark and pessimistic visions
rose to preeminence. Utopias turned into dystopias. Premillennialism
moved to centre-stage, with predictions that a period of massive
violence on a global scale will now precede the second coming of Jesus inaugurating the millennial
kingdom. This pre-millennialism
was synthesized with a new theological scheme of history, called
dispensationalism, to form what is now currently the major
apocalyptic model in the USA and elsewhere. The key figures
in this new apocalyptic theory of premillennialist dispensationalism
were John Nelson Darby (1800-1882), who devised it, and Cyrus
Scofield (1843-1921), who spread the doctrine through his Scofield
Reference Bible, which
has sold over 12 million copies since 1907, and became the
most important source of contemporary millennialist ideas (Poythress
1987). Its comprehensive chain-link referencing system guides the reader from passage
to passage through the Book of Revelation, to identify its “true” meaning.
[10] Premillennialist
dispensationalism offers a complex and self-consistent view
of history, which its adherents are able to apply to contemporary
events as they unfold, invariably confirming their apocalyptic
expectations. It divides history into periods (“dispensations”),
usually seven, of which five are held to be recorded in the
Bible, one is presently underway, and one is to come. According
to this scheme, the current dispensation is the Age of Grace
and includes all history since Jesus founded his Church; the
final dispensation to come is God’s Kingdom, the Millennium
that will be inaugurated by the Second Coming of Jesus.
[11] Crucial
to the political and cultural role of this model is the unique
place it gives to “Israel,” i.e., God’s earthly
people, the Jews, whose rejection of Jesus as the Messiah disrupted
the divine Plan of Salvation and caused God to inaugurate the
Church as the vehicle for his heavenly people, the Christian
faithful. Dispensationalists believe that God will deal separately
with these two peoples, and that the Christian faithful will
be “raptured,” i.e., miraculously taken from the
earth, just before God fulfils his final plans for Israel amid
the great apocalyptic violence of the prophesied time of Tribulation,
when the Antichrist arises to rule the world. Crucially for
contemporary millennialism, this new system avoids setting
dates for the Apocalypse (which have always failed to come
true), and instead emphasizes the need to identify the unfolding “signs” of
Christ’s Second Coming. Consequently, this form of violent
apocalypticism tends always to find ongoing confirmation of
its central teachings in the unfolding of actual world events.
Like all totalized ideological systems, it is closed to refutation
(Poythress, 1987, pp.52-65).
Contemporary
Christian Representations
[12] This
type of ongoing and ever-present apocalyptic expectation was
first promoted to a wide contemporary audience by Hal Lindsey,
in his book, The Late, Great Planet Earth (1970).
This has been one of the best-selling non-fiction works of
all time, having sold more than 35 million copies, been translated
into over 50 languages, and had 12 sequels and innumerable
imitators. Written in a popular style and readily available
as a mass market paperback, this book and its sequel, The
1980s: Countdown to Armageddon,
attempted to put together the “jigsaw puzzle” of
prophetic signs that Lindsey felt had become abundant since
World War II, including not only the founding of Israel, but
the rise of the Soviet Union to Superpower status, the formation
of the United Nations, NATO, and the European Union, the emergence
of an Arab alliance opposing Israel, the victory of Israel
and its annexation of Jerusalem in the Six Day War in 1967,
the apostasy of Christian churches, the ecumenical movement,
and the rise of New Age and occult beliefs. Lindsey came to
predict horrendous battles involving hundreds of millions of
troops, nuclear war and the death of a third of the world’s
population. He continues to provide a prophetic commentary
on world events on his website (www.hallindseyoracle.com) and
weekly radio program, and markets a wide range of literature
and videos, including, for example, The Final Battle and Evidence
of the End Times.
[13] This
type of politico-apocalyptic thinking has had major political
effects, both through key figures like Ronald Reagan (who remarked
in 1970 that “everything is in place for the battle of
Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ” (Berger 1999,
135), Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and also via the extensive
grassroots Christian organizations supporting them (Barkun
1997; Kaplan 1997). This is especially true with respect to
American policy in the Middle East. In the post-war period,
a key sign of the approach of the end times was believed to
be the return of the Jews to Palestine and the founding of
the state of Israel in 1948. This event, so close to the end
of the second millennium, greatly enhanced the credibility
of the premillennialist perspective. There have been innumerable
other signs identified since, especially during the Cold War,
but the situation in Israel remains central to Dispensationalists,
who believe that the great final battle of Armageddon will
be fought in Israel. This expectation has been greatly heightened
by the 9/11 attacks and the “War on Terror.”
[14] By
the 1990s, apocalyptic expectations were so prominent that
the FBI established a task force to conduct a strategic assessment
of possible domestic terrorism leading up to the year 2000.
These expectations were heightened by the widespread and exaggerated
concerns about the so-called Y2K computer problem. These extreme
concerns gave expression to a long-standing “technological
millennialism” that is pervasive in American culture,
especially among premillennialist Christian groups, patriotic
militias and survivalists (Bozeman 1997). In November
1999 the FBI published its report, Project Megiddo (full
text available at www.cesnur.org), named after the hill in
northern Israel where Christian prophecy claims the climactic
apocalyptic battle will be fought, and from where the term “Armageddon” is
derived. The report described the widespread influence of apocalyptic
ideas in American society, and focused particularly on the
threat posed by militant millennialist groups, especially those
on the “religious right.” It warned that some Christian
militants might carry out terrorist actions in order in initiate an apocalypse. This concern with proactive violence
had already become a literally self-fulfilling prophecy when
the two month BATF/FBI siege of the Branch Davidian compound
near Waco, Texas, led to the incineration of 74 cult members
on April 19, 1993. This in turn radicalized a large number
of far-right extremist groups, one of whose members, Timothy
McVeigh, sought revenge by blowing up the Federal Government
building in Oklahoma City, exactly two years later, killing
168 people and injuring over 500 (Katz and Popkin 1999, 169).
[15] A
commitment to violence in pursuit of various apocalyptic visions
characterizes many extremist groups on the far right of the
millennialist political spectrum, or what has been called “the
American millennial community” (Kaplan 1997; cf. Barkun
1997). These include Christian Identity, the Freemen, and many
militias and survivalist groups. A crucial feature of their
beliefs is their rejection of the notion that the Christian
faithful will be raptured–swept up into heaven to preserve
them from the horrors of End Times. Instead, they believe that
they will be left to stay and fight. Therefore, they must be
completely self-reliant, both economically and as a paramilitary
force, capable of living off the land and fighting for survival
during the imminent end times. For them, the key text is the
novel The Turner Diaries (1978),
an extremely violent, racist, anti-Semitic and misogynist work
that became the most influential tract of the far-right. It
guided militant activists like McVeigh, whose Oklahoma City
bombing replicates a bombing of the FBI headquarters that is
carefully described in the novel.
[16] The
Turner Diaries serves
as the paradigm of the apocalyptic desire among these militants
for the violent transformation of society. It was written
by William Pierce (using the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald),
a neo-Nazi and the leader of the white supremacist group,
the National Alliance. It describes how its hero, Earl Turner,
and his “fellow patriots” are forced underground
when the federal government launches a sudden campaign to
ban and seize all firearms. Suspected gun owners are rounded
up by the “Equality Police,” which are Jewish-led
human rights groups employing gangs of black men to invade
the homes of white people. The patriots respond by forming “the
Organization,” an underground resistance group that
uses sabotage and assassination to escalate the conflict
into an all-out race war. Conducting an effective guerilla
war against the government and its forces, the Organization
ultimately wins a cataclysmic victory amidst horrific violence
and bloodshed. Tens of thousands of “race traitors” are
lynched, including liberal politicians, actors, and white
women who sleep with black men. This “Great Revolution” begins
the “New Era” of racial purity through a war
of extermination first in America and then across the globe,
using nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons on an enormous
scale, killing billions and “sterilizing” some
16 million square miles of the earth’s surface. In
carrying out this genocide, Turner and his allies are presented
as the instruments of God, fulfilling His Grand Design.
In the light of 9/11, it is notable that Turner dies when
he crashes an aircraft armed with a nuclear bomb into the
Pentagon.
[17] Systematic
assassination is the preferred method in Unintended Consequences (1996)
by John Ross. This tells the tale of a hunter and gun enthusiast
who forms a team of assassins methodically to murder government
officials, dismembering their bodies and feeding them to pigs.
This terrorist campaign is provoked by government oppression
and violence directed at gun-owners, and it includes retellings
of actual events, including the Ruby Ridge siege, where government
agents killed several members of a militia member’s family.
Timothy McVeigh remarked before his execution that he would
have become a terrorist assassin rather than a bomber if he’d
read Unintended Consequences earlier.
[18] As
noted, a huge market exists for books that relate apocalyptic
prophecy to current events (Forbes and Kilde 2004). These are
currently epitomized by the phenomenally successful Left
Behind series of 12 apocalyptic novels told from a premillennialist
perspective, with sales of over 50 million. These novels, with
titles including Left Behind, Tribulation Force,
Soul Harvest and Assassins,
are essentially religious techno-thrillers, akin to Tom Clancy
novels, set in the seven year period of the Tribulation following
the Rapture. They follow the premillennialist scheme, focusing
on an underground Christian resistance (the “Tribulation
Force”) as they confront the Antichrist, Nicolae Carpathia,
a charismatic political leader who appears to represent hope,
peace and order, and who unites the world under his leadership,
but who is in fact leading the deluded masses of the world
into the apocalyptic battle of the end times. Carpathia uses
various means to secure his power, including a compliant United
Nations, and an Anti-pope who inaugurates an apparently liberal
but actually demonic one-world religion. He also uses “peace-keeping” troops
to carry out terrorism, torture and mass executions, and implants
microchips in the world’s population to ensure his control.
In Assassins, Carpathia is killed, but in The Indwelling he
returns from the dead as Satan incarnate. The recently released
final volume of the series, Glorious Appearing,
describes the climactic battle when Jesus returns to earth
at the height of the battle at Armageddon to destroy the Antichrist.
[19] The
huge popularity of apocalyptic prophecy continues to support
a thriving industry in books, film, television and the Internet.
Several of the Left Behind novels
have been filmed, including Left Behind (2000)
and Left Behind II: Tribulation Force (2002), and join similar movies like The
Omega Code (1999), and Megiddo:
The Omega Code II (2001).
There are also several companion series of novels set within
the Left Behind universe. These include the political thrillers, End
of State (2004), Impeachable Offence (2004) and Necessary Evils (2005); and the military thrillers, Apocalypse
Dawn (2003), Apocalypse
Crucible (2004) and Apocalypse Burning (2004). There are also websites such as raptureready.com that maintains its “Rapture Index.” This
tracks current events such as wars, crimes, political and economic
unrest, unemployment, floods, earthquakes, disease outbreaks,
and “false prophets” that threaten national or
global stability, and relates them to Biblical prophecies,
especially of the Antichrist and the Rapture. This provides
the faithful with a sense of their likelihood of being “raptured.” Unsurprisingly,
in the aftermath of 9/11 the index hit an all-time high as “the
bandwidth nearly melted under the weight of 8 million visitors” (Gibbs
2002, 39).
[20] Indeed,
the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the subsequent “War
on Terror” greatly intensified interest in prophetic
history, as the huge range of conservative Christian works
reveals. Armageddon Books, for example, offers Christianity
and Islam: A Look at the Church, Radical Islam, Israel, and
America in End Time Bible Prophecy (2004), War
on Terror: Unfolding Bible Prophecy (2002),
and Attack on America: New York, Jerusalem, and the
Role of Terrorism in the Last Days (2001),
among many others. As their titles indicate, these books present
complex biblical-prophetic-historical analyses in a Dispensationalist
mode purporting to show how the current terrorist crisis was
foretold in the Bible and what it reveals about the approaching
End Times.
[21] Children
are not ignored. The leftbehind.com website markets such books
as Left Behind: A Kid’s Guide to Understanding the
End Times, and Left Behind: The Kid’s Series of young adult novels which follows the fate of teenagers
who were “left behind” in the Rapture, and now
must rely for survival on their newfound faith in Jesus Christ. This
series alone has sold over 10 million copies. And there is
a Left Behind graphic
novel, and the Left Behind Prophecy Club, which provides a
newsletter, website and online message boards to help members
understand the implications of current events. It offers such
non-fiction books as Embracing Eternity,
and also provides “Left Behind mobile prophecies” for
cell phones, so that “the truth is in your hands.”
[22] The
demand for material exploring the possibilities of the Apocalypse
supports many similar companies, bookshops and internet sites,
supplying books, videos, CDs, games, clothing, calendars, greeting
cards and other products. Armageddon Books, for example, promotes
itself as the “world’s largest Bible prophecy bookstore
featuring books, videos, and charts on Armageddon, Antichrist,
666, Rapture, and Revelation” (armageddon.com). It also
offers a downloadable “photo of Jesus coming in the clouds.” One
product deserves special notice. This is a video entitled Left
Behind: Where’d Everybody Go?,
which the faithful are urged to buy and leave in plain sight
in their homes, so that when they themselves are raptured those
people left behind will know where they went, what happened,
and what is to come. There is also a Post-Rapture
Survival Guide, found on many Christian websites, which bluntly tells
readers that, “If you are reading this manual and the
rapture has already occurred, then you probably are not going
to physically survive; you most likely will die. This manual
is about the survival of your soul. You are going to go through
terrible suffering. The only question is whether you will go
to Heaven or go to Hell when you die” (raptureready.com).
[23] The
principal notion in all these works is that the present world
is provisional and contingent, awaiting the Apocalypse. It
is represented as an inherently sinful world, liable to slide
into anarchy and violence at any moment, from which will emerge
resourceful and determined individuals and groups who will
engage in bloody and prolonged battles with the forces of evil
for the future of humanity. There is no sense that the present
everyday world has value in itself; instead it has little purpose
other than as the battleground for Armageddon. Moreover, most
of the people who exist in this world are depicted as either
enemies, collaborators, dupes, sinners, or simple collateral
damage as the small messianic elite (“the Tribulation
Force”) wages war against the “evil-doers.” This
worldview, although originally religious, has become increasingly
influential in secular popular culture, especially in cinema,
to which we now turn.
The
Apocalypse in Cinema
[24] Cinema,
and to a lesser extent television, are uniquely suited as vehicles
for this apocalyptic imagination, in both its secular and religious
forms, especially in facilitating a clear narrative structure
and the range of spectacular imagery and other special effects
that are required to represent the end of the world and the
events surrounding it.
[25] In
the past 50 years cinema has explored apocalyptic themes in
many variations, as Shapiro (2002) and Newman (1999) detail
in their histories of “atomic bomb cinema,” and “apocalyptic
movies.” These initially took a secularized form, with
the agents of the apocalypse frequently being so-called “weapons
of mass destruction” (WMD). In such major Cold War films
as On the Beach (1959), Fail Safe (1964), Dr. Strangelove (1964) and The Day After (1983), the source of the apocalyptic evil that threatens
to destroy the world is a nuclear war between the Superpowers. On
the Beach and Dr.
Strangelove depict the end of all life on earth, while Fail
Safe depicts the destruction
of Moscow and New York. The Day After shows
the war and its horrific aftermath in the American Midwest. Mad
Max 2 (1981) and Mad Max 3 (1985) show the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust in
Australia.
[26] In
more recent films, such as Peacemaker (1997) and Sum of All Fears (2003), the threatening WMDs are still nuclear bombs
but the enemies are terrorists not other nation-states; nevertheless
there are huge losses as cities and regions are destroyed.
In Equilibrium (2003) the enemy is a totalitarian state set up in
the aftermath of a nuclear catastrophe, allegedly to prevent
another one; consequently, in addition to the massive losses
in the war, huge numbers of people are systematically exterminated
by the government. In the Terminator and Matrix trilogies
the nuclear destruction of the world occurs with the loss of
billions of lives, and the future falls into the hands of self-replicating
systems of artificial intelligence and intelligent machines,
who seek to either annihilate or enslave the human race.
[27] In Twelve
Monkeys (1995), 28
Days Later (2003), Dawn
of the Dead (2004),
and Shaun of the Dead (2004),
the WMD is a lethal virus, which is unleashed on society,
either by deranged animal-rights activists or by some unknown
government or corporate agency, once again with colossal
losses of life. In Independence Day (1996), Mars
Attacks (1996), The
Fifth Element (1997), Starship
Troopers (1997), Imposter (2002), and the two War
of the Worlds films (1953 and 2005) the WMDs are extremely
powerful, and are utilized in global and cosmic battles
with extraterrestrial aliens–entire cities and regions
are annihilated and vast spaceships are destroyed, with
huge losses of life. In Deep Impact (1998), Armageddon (1998), The
Day After Tomorrow (2004), and The Core (2004),
the world is threatened by cataclysmic natural disasters
involving asteroids, the ecosystem, or even the very earth
itself, and again the death toll is enormous. A major influence
on The Day After Tomorrow,
and also on the similar television mini-series, Category
6: Day of Destruction (2004) was The
Coming Global Superstorm (2001),
in which Art Bell and Whitley Strieber apply the apocalyptic
imagination to the potentially catastrophic effects of global
warming. They provide detailed depictions of a cataclysmic “extinction
event,” alternating between scientific and archaeological
evidence and dramatic speculation to depict “the next
Ice Age.” “Superstorms” and similar catastrophes
have always been prominent in apocalyptic speculation.
[28] Biblical
prophecies explicitly drive the action in other recent films.
Here, the threat is the appearance of the Antichrist and his
reign of destruction before the monumental final battle of
Armageddon destroys evil and ushers in God’s rule on
earth. Such films as End of Days (1999) and Stigmata (1999) take a Promethean line and Armageddon is avoided
through heroic human action. In Left Behind (2000), Left Behind II: Tribulation Force (2002), The Omega Code (1999) and Megiddo: The Omega Code II (2001) the premillennialist scheme is followed and
there are vast losses of life as humanity pays the price for
its sinfulness. The increasing penetration of these ideas into
mainstream culture is exemplified by the NBC miniseries Revelations (2005), which was designed to take advantage of the
enormous interest disclosed by The Passion of the
Christ (2004) and the Left Behind phenomenon. Revelations explores the usual premillennialist themes and enjoyed
a primetime release in the U.S., Australia and elsewhere. It
is notable for the sinister and ruthless roles that are played
by scientists, politicians and major social institutions, including
the Vatican.
[29] Like
the religious manifestations of the apocalyptic imagination
the principal notion in these films is that the present world
is facing imminent destruction, anarchy and violence, and,
in accordance with the “Warrior Dreams” of
post-Vietnam America, only resourceful and determined individuals
and groups will survive, usually after bloody battles (Gibson
1994). There is no sense that the present everyday world has
value in itself; instead it has little purpose other than as
the battleground for Armageddon.
[30] In
this fashion, the expanding cultural influence of the dystopian
and premillennialist view of contemporary society and its destiny
has generated a major shift in the representation of everyday
life. For example, in the earlier films cited above, made at
the height of the Cold War, everyday life was represented as
invaluable in its innocence and simplicity, something whose
loss in a nuclear war would be irrevocably tragic. Nowhere
is this made clearer than in On the Beach,
a movie set in the near future where a brief nuclear war has
produced so much deadly radioactive fallout that all life is
about to become extinct. The film’s depiction of the
everyday lives and relationships of the film’s characters
as they face certain death evokes great pathos as they enjoy
the simple pleasures of family life and friendship. This culminates
in a very poignant scene as the camera tracks along a river,
past thousands of doomed families and other groups fishing,
picnicking, playing and singing in bright sunshine as the deadly
nuclear fallout comes ever closer. Later, they are shown placidly
lining up for the suicide tablets that will spare them the
agonizing death that otherwise awaits them. In Fail
Safe, a similar point about
the value of simple everyday pleasures is made at the climax
of the film with a series of still shots of men, women and
children frozen in the midst of their everyday activities at
the very moment before they are vaporized by a hydrogen bomb.
Appearing in the late 1950s and early 1960s, these films valorize
an affluent everyday life based on new families, new suburban
housing, a single male breadwinner, a housewife, young children
and a booming economy. This was a time when the Great Depression
and World War II were still vivid memories, but before the
tragedies of the Vietnam War, political assassinations, race
riots and mass demonstrations cast a pall over American and
other western societies.
[31] Everyday
life is scorned and even vilified in the more recent films.
The prevailing system of values has shifted radically: families,
suburbs, public and private institutions are devalorized, criticized,
even ridiculed. At best, everyday life is represented as the
mere background to highly implausible personal heroics in the
film narratives. Hence, in the Terminator trilogy we find cyborgs rampaging through the anonymous
suburbs, determining the fate of the earth while ordinary folk
serve as little more than collateral damage. Whatever the future
is for humanity, it will be determined by these few warriors,
several of whom are machines and all but one of whom come or
act from the future. The vulnerability of ordinary people and
their everyday lives is emphasized by scenes of a nuclear holocaust
incinerating a children’s playground and the city beyond,
and by scenes of a blackened future where huge war machines
crush piles of human skulls under their wheels. Also emphasized
is the impotence, ignorance and incompetence of the police
and other institutions, none of whom are capable of comprehending
the danger or responding constructively to it; they are simply
swept aside and usually massacred.
[32] Made
over a period of twenty years, the Terminator trilogy exemplifies this shift towards the dystopian
future that now dominates the apocalyptic imagination. At the
end of The Terminator (1984),
the heroine Sarah Conner is a fugitive freshly impregnated
by the warrior from the future, with no alternative but to
escape into the mountain wilderness to join the survivalists
as huge black storm clouds loom ominously overhead, heralding
the apocalypse to come. In Terminator 2 (1991),
Sarah is in a mental institution and her son, John, the hero-to-be
in the final battle for the future of the world, is depicted
as a young hoodlum, in foster care and only a step outside
juvenile detention. Again, the everyday world is merely a venue
within which the contending forces battle for control of the
future, spreading destruction everywhere. Indeed, the entire
world is depicted as radically contingent, as Sarah makes clear
in a diatribe in the mental institution that describes the
apocalypse to come if she is not released to protect her son.
Eventually, with the aid of a terminator from the future she
is able to do this and they apparently prevent the apocalypse.
[33] Terminator
3 (2004) runs against
the narrative logic of the first two films, which previously
implied that the world was saved. It now transpires that
it is doomed to suffer a global nuclear conflagration initiated
by a system of Artificial Intelligence that actually gives
birth to itself within the narrative system of the trilogy
in an extremely good example of contemporary Prometheanism.
Indeed, both the hero John Connor, and his technological nemesis give birth to themselves,
utilizing time-travel to impregnate the past, both biologically
and technologically, with the seeds of the apocalyptic future
where they will battle for supremacy on a devastated planet.
This revised outcome, revealed in 2004, illustrates the
increasingly tight grip that the apocalyptic imagination
has over this area of popular culture. With the Apocalypse
the everyday world becomes the playground of the gods, and
Sarah is revealed as the mother of one of these gods.
[34] In
many of these films the cataclysms result in the establishment
of authoritarian or even totalitarian and militaristic regimes,
reminiscent of premillennialist expectations of the time of
Tribulation before Christ’s final return. The state and
its military and security forces dominate everyday life, which
is represented as little more than a residual realm of existence,
or at best a place where the warrior heroes can enjoy some
fleeting rest and recreation before returning to battle. Moreover,
war is represented as the defining period of life, the only
realm where individuals might establish their identities and
authenticity as “real” persons or citizens. In
this way, the state has expanded to engulf the everyday world.
This process is made most explicit in Starship Troopers,
where military service in a hideously bloody inter-galactic
war provides the only access to citizenship for the survivors.
[35] Everyday
life is also frequently represented as the deadening realm
of unfreedom, conformity, alienation, tedium, repression and
exploitation, based on superficial relationships, facile ideas
and transient commitments. This condition is made explicit
in the fantasy Pleasantville (1998), where freedom is once again represented as
a gift brought by characters from the future. However that
future is itself dysfunctional and the “freedom” that
is introduced into a previously tranquil everyday world leads
quickly to its disintegration. In Fight Club (1999), in another example of “warrior dreams,” a
group of masculinist urban terrorists destroy the financial
infrastructure of a deadening everyday world, in hope of recreating
a primitive world in which men may once again play heroic roles.
[36] The
idea that everyday life is a vacuous illusion is central to The
Matrix (1999). As Fitting
(2003, 161) argues, with reference to the macabre virtual reality
of the matrix: “how far off the mark, really is The
Matrix in its depiction
of today’s world? How is the virtual reality of the present
as offered by the machines different from the imaginary satisfactions
offered us by the media?” Indeed, The Matrix is
both literally apocalyptic,
in that its heroes lift a veil to reveal the hideous reality
of the world’s true fate that lies hidden behind the
illusion of everyday life; and messianic, insofar as the central character Neo is ultimately
depicted as the Messiah, who offers liberation from this illusion
to those who follow him. The religious and mythological strength
of these perennial apocalyptic themes partly explain the film’s
enormous success and influence.
[37] At
the start of the film, Neo is plucked from his everyday working
life as a software designer in an anonymous cubical work-space
in a giant corporation. He is taken to the rebel leader Morpheus,
who initiates him into the Truth, i.e., that the everyday world
he took for granted is actually “the Matrix,” a
virtual reality created and maintained by a gigantic global
system of computer-based Artificial Intelligence (AI). Its
purpose is to keep the human population placated and oblivious
to its actual condition, which is that it exists only as a
monstrous network of battery-farms where energy for the AI
system is harvested from inert human bodies encased in artificial
wombs. This absolute state of alienation that pervades the
world of everyday life under the reign of the Matrix is the
horrifying reality that humanity must face.
[38] At
the end of the movie Neo, in a voice-over, contacts the sinister
and hegemonic AI system, declares his status as the Messiah
and his intention to reveal to the denizens of the Matrix an
alternative world without rules and controls, borders or boundaries,
and where anything is possible. The Matrix registers “system
failure” and Neo steps forth into the hustle and bustle
of a busy city, watching the masses hurry by in their mindless
everyday toil, before he ascends into the heavens to await
the outcome of his intervention. In case there is any doubt
about the meaning of this final sequence, it is accompanied
by the pounding hard-rock music of the group Rage Against the
Machine.
[39] In
other films the everyday world is similarly provisional and
serves principally as the context for the heroics of the story.
In Deep Impact, Independence Day, Armageddon, The Day After
Tomorrow and The Core,
the families, friendships and communities are simply depicted
as the “high stakes” for which the heroes are playing.
Notably, these heroes are also invariably mavericks and outsiders,
rejected by the official institutions that have official responsibility
for preserving the everyday world, but which are depicted as
incompetent and corrupt, pursuing policies that will only aggravate
the situation or even ensure destruction. This is especially
emphasized in the Terminator films where the police and the army are always part
of the problem and never the solution; indeed, in the second
film the deadly and remorseless terminator takes on the shape
of a policeman, the epitome of authority in the everyday world.
[40] In
other recent films a very dark vision is presented, with civilization
depicted as a very fragile barrier separating the everyday
world from an apocalyptic chaos that lurks beneath its veneer
of ordinariness. Ordinary people are transformed into masses
and depicted as unstoppable eating machines, crawling over
each other to satisfy their homicidal lusts, all mouths, teeth
and grasping hands. In such visions, humanity is depicted as
little more than vermin. 28 Days Later begins
with a deserted London, through which the hero wanders, bemused
and looking for help, unaware of the biological catastrophe
that occurred just weeks before, or of the rapid transformation
of ordinary people into the vicious, infected masses that are
stalking him. In Shaun of the Dead, the anti-hero is so alienated from his disintegrating
world that he fails at first to notice the transformation of
neighbors into blood-thirsty zombies and his familiar everyday
surroundings into a bloody killing zone. Dawn of
the Dead also begins in a typical suburb of new homes, recent
model cars, manicured lawns, children playing in the streets,
and people tending their gardens. All this provides the backdrop
for an explosion of mindless carnage that begins in the early
morning when a man is almost torn apart in his bedroom by the
little girl from across the road. Himself infected, he turns
viciously on his wife, who barely escapes. Within minutes,
chaos, destruction and death engulf the infected community
as it turns on itself in a murderous lust to devour. Land
of the Dead (2005) depicts
a post-Apocalyptic world where remnants of humanity live inside
a walled city besieged by vicious hordes of the living dead.
The wealthy few live in a secure skyscraper and mall complex
while the masses of the poor live on the streets. Outside the
fences the living dead are slowly beginning to organize themselves
and acquire the leadership and skills to attack the human enclave,
while the latter is torn by corruption and betrayal. In the
end, there is no option for a few survivors but to flee as
the living dead destroy the city.
[41] As
this overview indicates, contemporary cinema offers extremely
misanthropic representations of the apocalyptic near future
and communicates a fear and hatred of everyday people. The
masses are depicted as mindless, barely functional vermin,
ready to tear each other apart in a desperate rage for survival.
Accompanying this is a depiction of the heroes and survivors
being readily transformed into effective killers, capable of
butchering large numbers of people who, perhaps only hours
before, may have been their friends, allies, or even family
members.
Conclusion
[42] This
paper has shown how popular culture has participated in a fundamental
shift within the apocalyptic imagination from a Promethean
faith in human self-determination to an Augustinian conviction
of human sinfulness and weakness. It has demonstrated how,
in religious terms, this shift also involved the eclipse of
progressivist Postmillennialism and the victory of ultra-reactionary
Premillennialism, while, in secular terms, it entailed a shift
from utopianism to dystopianism, i.e., from an optimistic faith
in humanity and the values of progress, reason, science and
technology towards a darkly pessimistic view that deeply distrusts
humanity and these values, and instead sees the near future
in terms of social disintegration, violence, war and ultimate
catastrophe. As we have seen, this dark vision is pervasive
in both the religious and secular streams of popular culture.
This analysis opens the way to further research on the extent
to which these shifts are related to public attitudes and government
policy on the War on Terror and other vital areas of national
concern where religion and popular culture intersect.
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