Apocalypse 2013

Jaden Smith stars in M. Night Shyamalan's After Earth...1000 years after the cataclysm

Jaden Smith stars in M. Night Shyamalan’s After Earth…1000 years after the cataclysm

 

The last few years have begun with predictions of the Apocalypse hanging over us.

2011 was supposed to bring the Rapture with US preacher Harold Camping first saying it would come in May then readjusting his sights to October. Last year, of course, brought us the Mayan Apocalypse, which passed with lots of parties but no lasting fireworks just before Christmas.

With solar activity expected to reach a cyclical peak in 2013 this year was shaping up as another big year for apocalyptic fears however NASA have recently downgraded their predictions for solar storms. So does this mean that we can have a year off apocalyptic frenzies?

Probably not.

A look at Hollywood’s release list for this year tells us that 2013 will be anything but apocalypse free.

Diabolo Cody’s remake of the Sam Rami classic The Evil Dead continues the zombie explosion of recent years while Brad Pitt also gets to run from a zombie apocalypse and go all out to protect his family in World War Z

Matt Damon, Jodie Foster, Tom Cruise, Will and Jaden Smith and Guillermo Toro all have post-apocalyptic blockbusters scheduled and this year we even get apocalyptic comedy. The Shaun of the Dead team are back with Worlds End where five mates unite for a pub crawl that could literally end all pub crawls.

Closer to home the National Geographic Channel’s new season of Doomsday Preppers begins this week. Their episode guide promises stories of a tornado-fearing farmer building an underground Noah’s Ark for his animals and a family man preparing for a nuclear-powered terrorist attack. The series brings us weekly stories from the survivalist movement who are going all out to prepare for the worst.

When Doomsday Prepper’s first season launched last year it fitted the 2012 zeitgeist but the new season has a more eerie resonance with the widely reported news that the Sandy Hook school shooter’s mother, Nancy Lanza, was a prepper.

As J. M Berger pointed out in Foreign Policy it is far too easy to blame either his mother’s enthusiasm for guns or her survivalist beliefs for the horrific events in Newtown. However survivalist doomsday beliefs have been associated with a number of other terrorist and shooting deaths. Berger points out that there is very little research about the mental state of preppers. However he believes “anecdotal observations” point to a higher incidence of mental illness among hardcore preppers than in the general population. He adds:

The nature of their beliefs and social networks may create obstacles to diagnosis and treatment. There can be fine lines between reasonable fear, intense fear, and irrational fear, and some preppers subscribe to conspiracy theories that are completely nuts, focused on supposed threats from sinister “chemtrails” to the Illuminati (or both and then some). World ending, conspiratorial beliefs are easy to dismiss as symptoms of possible mental illness but sociologists, psychologists, theologians and literary scholars who have studied apocalyptic narratives and beliefs are more inclined to speak of them as a form of sense making. We do after all live in a nerve wrecking unstable world where in fact preparation for disaster is anything but crazy.

Apocalypse is the Greek name of the last book of the Christian Bible and colloquially it has come to mean a world-ending catastrophe because of that book’s fiery visions of plaques, famines, earthquakes, wars and global slaughter. But the word is Greek for “revelation” or “unveiling”. The proliferation of apocalyptic myths are in fact trying to tell us something, trying to reveal something. And their message is just as much about a possible golden future as it is about a gloomy end. The apocalyptic myth is uniquely associated with the utopian: they are two sides of the one coin. The bible’s Book of Revelation is filled with horrible world-ending visions but it ends with the promise of 1000 years of peace.

Even Hollywood’s slate of apocalyptic disaster films aren’t as black and white as they seem. Western Australian academic Mick Broderick has suggested that rather than analyse these films, which undoubtedly celebrate a dazzling array of cataclysmic moments, under the rubric of the “aesthetics of disaster,” as Sontag famously did, they ought more rightly be seen as being primarily about survival.

The apocalyptic myth, which seems to exist in one form or another in all cultures, is doing what all classic myth does. It is trying to hold in tension two opposite possibilities and imagine what might emerge.

American writer Rebecca Solnit might be described as an archetypal apocalyptic writer. She first came to fame with a book that contrasted the disaster impregnated landscape of the Nevada nuclear test site and the paradisiacal Yosemite National Park. In her latest book A Paradise Built in Hell she has written about how communities come together and surprise with their resourcefulness in times of disaster. Just before Christmas last year Solnit issued a call to arms claiming 2013 was “Year Zero” for the planet. Like other activists Solnit is concerned that we are reaching a tipping point in the ongoing environmental crisis, perhaps a point of no return. But Solnit like a true apocalypticist uses this grave fact to point towards a revelation:

The reasons for acting may be somber, but the fight is a gift and an honor. What it will give you in return is meaning, purpose, hope, your best self, some really good company, and the satisfaction of being part of victories also to come. But what victory means needs to be imagined on a whole new scale as the news worsens.

She spends the rest of her article outlining the proliferation of creative grassroots responses to climate change rather than the standard list of worsening indicators.

Theologian Catherine Keller calls this attitude “counter-apocalyptic”. It is not ignoring the disaster to come nor is it merely anti-apocalyptic, which runs the risk of buying into easy black and white posturing of its own. It is a posture of hope that stands firmly in the swirl of apocalyptic omens predicting bad endings and dreams a future. A future that Solnit reminds us is only built through imagination, hope and hard work.

A shorter version of this was published in The Conversation

 

Not New York

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I have been thinking a lot about the “apocalytpic cities” section of my thesis. Initial thoughts are to focus on New York, but the whole idea of the multimodal mythic cluster means that New York is every city and every city is New York. Well, that is to say that New York is London, LA, Berlin, Shanghai, Hong Kong and various other nameless apocalyptic cities.

Just been searching out reviews of Children of Men a new adaptation of the P.D. James novel. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón(Y’Tu Mama Tambien and Harry Potter and the Prisoners of Azkaban) it is set in a beautifully dystopic London cityscape. The film is set in a world where New York has been destroyed by an atomic bomb some years earlier so in a sense London becomes the haunted double of the destroyed city.

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A number of the reviews criticise – as reviewers love to do – “gaps in the logic” of the film, but given Cuaron’s other films and the bits that I have seen on the trailer I suspect the film has a compelling visual logic – a spatially imagined logic that is played out in the filmic recreation of “London”. A futuristic story is by definition one that will have gaps: the gaps of what has not yet been. The imagined city in such films is the fragile container of such aporia.

Just started today must try to see over the weekend.

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War of the Worlds

With the Australian media preview of War of the Worlds last night SMH film writer Gary Maddox has an intriguing little piece in today’s paper. It’s not really a review, it’s not really a comment piece, it’s a short reflection on post 9/11 culture and the new film:

Panicking crowds fleeing down streets. Buildings collapsing. A coat of grey dust on Tom Cruise’s face. A crashed passenger jet. And the first thought when the explosions and killing starts: is it a terrorist attack?….

Other War of the Worlds adaptations tapped into fears about Nazis and the Soviets. While remembering the past, Spielberg has tapped into the new fears about terrorist attacks.

The strength of the movie is the resonances with other wars on humanity, including the Holocaust and Hiroshima. Spielberg is reminding us there have been many threats over the generations, but humanity can survive.

It’s not the first time this connection has been made. In fact Spielberg has been drawing people’s attention to it in many of his publicity interviews. He seems most articulate in this interview with the Chicago Sun Times:

“In my mind, there is that image of everyone fleeing from Manhattan across the bridge after the Sept. 11 attack,” Spielberg says. “That’s a searing image that will never leave our minds.

”This movie is also about people being attacked for no reason. They don’t know why they’re being attacked. We certainly went to great lengths in the movie not to explain any reason for these attackers.“

His screen writer David Koepp says in the same piece that although the reference was explicit they worked hard to make sure the politics were not:

”Certainly, there are a lot of political undertones and overtones,“ Koepp says. ”But we tried consciously to never lead with the politics. That’s a guaranteed way to make a piece of crap.

“The political tones of this movie will emerge for themselves. In the ’50s, ‘War of the Worlds’ was, ‘My God, the commies are coming to get us.’ Now it’s about fear of terrorism. In other parts of the world, the new movie will be fear of American invasion. It will be clearly about the Iraq war for them,” says the screenwriter.

Koepp and Spielberg also makes some interesting comments about the visual and plotting choices that were made:

Spielberg was clear about what film he wanted to make with “War of the Worlds” and what film he refused to do. The rules included: No U.S. landmarks in flames, no beating up on New York City, and no politicians, scientists or generals leading the way to victory. There would also be no shots of world capitals.

There could be airplanes crashing into houses, alien tripods sending a ferry boat the way of the Titanic and dead bodies floating sadly down a river and seen through the eyes of a child (Fanning), who comes across the horrifying site in the woods.

I’ll wait to see how successfully he avoided some of those easy cliches – or rather if he did what others he replaced them with – the frustrating thing about Spielberg is that he is a bleeding heart liberal with an overtly American mythical view of family and nation. His rule about no generals/scientists leading the way to victory will undoubtedly be matched by a parable about the heroic little guy protecting his family. Of course neither point of view really comes to terms with the complex issues of individual and communal agency in the face of disaster.

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The plot against leakage

Frank Rich has written another excellent article about the moral values scare.

He notes that a PBS affiliate in NY has rejected an add for the movie Kinsey because of the film’s “controversial” subject matter. This is not unlike the reaction of the NYT in 1948 who refused to carry ads for Kinsey’s breakthrough study, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male. Another public broadcaster refused to allow a women’s group to use the phrase “reproductive rights” in an on air announcement. And of course no one will carry the United Church of Christ’s ad welcoming gay couples to its congregations.

Such rapid-fire postelection events are conspiring to make “Kinsey” a bellwether cultural event of this year. When I first saw the movie last spring prior to its release, it struck me as an intelligent account of a half-forgotten and somewhat quaint chapter in American social history….Such history, which seemed ancient only months ago, has gained in urgency since Election Day. As politicians and the media alike pander to that supposed 22 percent of “moral values” voters, we’re back where we came in….But not unlike Philip Roth’s “Plot Against America,” which transports us back to an American era overlapping that of “Kinsey,” this movie, however unintentionally, taps into anxieties that feel entirely contemporary. That Channel 13 would even fleetingly balk at “Kinsey” as The Times long ago did at the actual Kinsey is not a coincidence.

Rich goes onto note that the “pop cultural revolution” begun in Kinsey’s era is in no danger but that the reaction to these cultural texts is indicative of more insidious measures being implemented in health care and eductaion.

No matter what the censors may accomplish elsewhere, the pop culture revolution since Kinsey’s era is in little jeopardy: in a nation of “Desperate Housewives,” “Too Darn Hot” has become the national anthem. A movie like “Kinsey” will do just fine; the more protests, the more publicity and the larger the box office. But if Hollywood will always survive, off-screen Americans are being damaged by the cultural war over sex that is being played out in real life. You see that when struggling kids are denied the same information about sexuality that was kept from their antecedents in the pre-Kinsey era; you see that when pharmacists in more and more states enforce their own “moral values” by refusing to fill women’s contraceptive prescriptions and do so with the tacit or official approval of local officials; you see it when basic information that might prevent the spread of lethal diseases is suppressed by the government because it favors political pandering over scientific fact; you see it when basic information that might prevent the spread of lethal diseases is suppressed by the government because it favors political pandering over scientific fact.

Although Rich calls his article “The Plot Against Sex in America” it is not just sex that is under attack. The folks over at Crooked Timber have been discussing the film adaption of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and note a London Times interview with the director where he says the anti-religious overtones will be cut from the film version of the book. The battle against an evil all powerful church is essential to Pullman’s novel. But according to the Times:

Chris Weitz, the director, has horrified fans by announcing that references to the church are likely to be banished in his film. Meanwhile the “Authority”, the weak God figure, will become “any arbitrary establishment that curtails the freedom of the individual”. The studio wants alterations because of fears of a backlash from the Christian Right in the United States…

Weitz made these controversial remarks in an interview with bridgetothestars.net, one of the many His Dark Materials fan sites. He said: “New Line is a company that makes films for economic returns. You would hardly expect them to be anything else. My job is to get the film made in such a way that the spirit of the piece is carried through to the screen and to do that I must contend with the fears of the studio.

“Needless to say, all my best efforts will be directed towards keeping the work as liberating and iconoclastic an experience as I can. But there may be some modification of terms. You will probably not hear of the church, but you will hear of the Magisterium. Those who will understand will understand.”

He said that he shared Pullman’s view that the Authority could represent any repressive establishment — political, totalitarian, fundamentalist or communist. “This gives me a certain amount of leeway in navigating the very treacherous issues that beset adapting His Dark Materials for the screen.

Meanwhile the Sydney Morning Herald reports that the European film industry is not being cowed.

Films about euthanasia, abortion and the hardships of immigrant life bagged the top prizes at the 17th European Film Awards today.

Head-On, about a young Turkish woman in Germany who escapes her strict Muslim home through a difficult marriage with an older man, won the best film award in the competition dubbed the “European Oscars”.

Spaniard Javier Bardem won the best actor prize for his role as a paralysed man who fought for three decades for the right to die in The Sea Inside, a true story.

Briton Imelda Staunton took the best actress statuette for her turn as a working-class mother who performs illegal abortions in the harrowing drama Vera Drake.

What is interesting in all these instances is the play of resistances. Kinsey, Pullman, Vera Drake are certainly “cultural bellwethers” as Rich suggests. But they produce resistance largely because they represent “leakage” – neither the message of the moral values crusaders nor the message of change makers can be easily contained. Any notion of consensus reality or dominant ideology is much more fluid than either of those two terms suggests. Even Weitz explicitly states that he intends to produce the Pullman film in such a way as its ambiguities leak a range of messages.

Memories reminders ghosts and myths

I have been reading some stuff on “community of memory” (Paige Baty on Marylin and Barbie Zelizer on Kennedy) and then recently came across these two quotes from quite different sources.

Firstly Derrida’s notion of ghosts from an this essay on the cultural history of the highway:

Jacques Derrida has suggested that ghosts come to talk with us both from the past and the future. Learning to understand these ghosts of the future-past or the past-future is necessary, he claims, if we wish to take responsibility for future generations:

[we must] learn to live by learning not how to make conversation with the ghost but how to talk with him, with her, how to let them speak or how to give them back speech, even if it is in oneself, in the other, in the other in oneself: they are always there, specters, even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet. (176)

In the case of highways, thus, it is important to understand the role that ghosts play in our constructions of the past and the future, if we are to learn to take responsibility for their role in the future. The way we imagine the roads of tomorrow suggests something about the way we value our selves, our environment, and our technologies — and suggests something about the way we must act, if we are to have responsibility for our future selves.

Secondly this essay from the Boston Globe on Oliver Stone’s new movie Alexander.

WRITING ABOUT the Romans seen on film 50 years ago, the French theorist Roland Barthes saw in their sweaty brows the mythology of “man thinking.” These days, however, our Greeks and Romans do not think, they remind. They remind themselves of their destiny. They remind their followers of the glory they might win. And their stories remind us a great deal of our current empire, and its strategic uncertainties.

The author J. D Connor makes not just the obvious comparison to Iraq and the American empire but also takes this new taste for epics (Gladiator, Troy, Alexander and others to come soon) as a reflection of the global empire of Hollywood: “These days any commercial filmmaker (and particularly one with a fondness for casts of thousands and lavish period detail) needs a certain amount of imperial hubris: that is, he needs to believe that audiences will flock to his or her films around the globe.”

Today’s events are present in the history remade on screen:

Since much of the action of “Alexander,” moral and military, takes place in what is now Iraq, it’s hardly surprising that Oliver Stone takes some potshots at the president. What is unexpected are the heartfelt neocon speeches Alexander delivers. Standing on his balcony overlooking Babylon, he goes on and on: “These people want change, they need change,” Alexander asserts. He lives “to free the people of the world.”

To be sure, Stone lays the irony on thick here. After the first balcony speech, Alexander’s boyfriend Hephaistion quickly changes the subject to his sovereign’s dreamy eyes. And during Alexander’s second major policy address on the balcony, he is too preoccupied with Babylon’s “deep water port” to notice that Hephaistion is busy flailing away out of focus in the background, dying of a poison-induced fever.

When a trusted commander complains that conquering all of Asia “was not your father’s mission,” Alexander responds (again la W.), “I am not my father.” Why stop now? Why stop ever? One more month, Alexander tells his men in India.

It’s all here in a condensed image. The anxiety over empire, the anxiety of sexuality, the anxiety over expansion and retreat. We are reminded of history, we see ghosts of past present and future. We see cultural production.