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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