A pre-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger destroying  a little infrastructure to save the world in  T3: The Rise of the Machines

Apocalypse Always!

by Douglas L. Howard

The world came to an end for possibly the fifth time this summer in July. 

Sentient machines plotted to launch a nuclear strike in an effort to wipe out the human race, and I had a front row seat. In fact, I even saw the missiles race into the sky and I watched with wide eyes as they found their targets and lit up the globe in an unearthly fire. And I saw the fear and the resignation in the faces of the survivors as they came to grips with the enormity of what had just taken place, as religious prophecy materialized into the grisly deaths of millions. 

But I was OK. In fact, I asked for it. I bought my ticket two hours earlier because, yet again, I wanted to see the chaos unfold so gloriously on the screen in front of me. 

I know it all sounds ghoulish and morbid, but it was only the summer of 2003, another summer of movie blockbusters, sequels and prequels that, at first glance, seemed like it could have been called the Summer of the Apocalypse. So many of the films that were released this summer offered images of scientific discovery, social unrest, genetic enhancement, computer technology, and evolutionary development gone horribly wrong, and they all spelled the end of life as we know it.

If the war between humans and mutants wasnt building to a critical mass (X2: X-Men United), or if rage hadnt given way to some new breed of cannibalistic zombie overseas (28 Days Later), then machines were trying to wipe out the human race by using us as batteries (The Matrix Reloaded) or by retroactively murdering our savior (T3: Rise of the Machines). And, lest we doubted the gravity of these situations, some of these films even threw in a smattering of Biblical prophecy to drive their points home and gave us a variety of Messiahs ranging from the merely mortal (T3) to the near superhuman (The Matrix Reloaded).

These films reflected, on one level, a fascination with metamorphosis (from mutant to zombie or from computer program to Terminator or Terminatrix, as the case may be) that spoke to our anxieties toward a world in flux. If the last century saw two world wars, nuclear weapons, and a new list of incurable diseases, then what might this one have in store for us? Where Kafka once concerned himself with the plight of a man who turned into a dung beetle, filmmakers this summer provided us with machines that became supermodels with rocket launchers and angry scientists who morphed into 3,000-pound green monsters with attitude: characters that were, at once both more and less than human — the Hulk was, ironically, completely CGI –and that symbolized concerns about the great scientific advances that we have made.

The zombies are coming in 28 Days Later.

Computer technologies and genetic research may have revolutionized the way that we live and view the world, but these films exposed them for the Pandoras Box that they could well be — Pandoras Box itself incidentally threatened to destroy the world in the Tomb Raider sequel that came out in late July — and condemned us for pursuing them with such fervor. By daring to tamper with the forces of nature or by allowing machines to control so many aspects of our lives, we have, they suggested, been done in by our own ingenuity.

After a year that was filled with so many images of bloodshed and war, that saw suicide bombers, Beltway snipers, and plummeting stock prices and often made us believe that the sky was falling for real, it seems surprising that anyone would have wanted to entertain such apocalyptic visions and encourage their worst fears or, for that matter, even pay to see them acted out on the big screen. But if the movie receipts were any indication, our appetite for destruction this summer was as insatiable as ever. Could this be yet another sign of the end?

Dont start giving away all of your worldly possessions just yet. Though Y2K came and went without so much as a short circuit, we are still, technically speaking, in the grip of what critics and historians might call fin de si”le, a cultural phenomenon, generally associated with the late 1800s, that takes place at the end of one century (hence its translation from the original French) and often lingers into the beginning of the next. And, oddly enough, it is characterized as much by a preoccupation with end of the world scenarios and apocalyptic fantasies as it is concerned with decadence, progress, and even transformation.

From the revolutions in France and America, the poet William Blake, for example, believed, in 1790, that the time had come for the return of Adam into Paradise and looked forward to the changes that would take place when the world was consumed by fire and everything appear[ed] infinite and holy.  In 1794, Samuel Taylor Coleridge similarly maintained that Yet is the day of Retribution nigh, and, in "The Prelude" that he revised from 1799 until his death in 1850, William Wordsworth saw characters of the great Apocalypse inscribed in the landscape around him.

And though the scientific and technological breakthroughs of the 19th century, like the dynamo, made people like Henry Adams feel much as the early Christians [toward] the Cross, authors like Robert Louis Stevenson, in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and H.G. Wells, in works such as The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) or  The Invisible Man (1897), feared that such scientific inquiries could also be agents of corruption and give rise to those monstrosities that had previously existed only in the human imagination. (Stevensons story is, of course, part of the inspiration behind both the comic and cinematic versions of The Hulk.)  

Bram Stoker, in Dracula (1896), and Oscar Wilde, in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), on the other hand, saw the immorality of the age expressed through malevolent supernatural figures who led the innocent into temptation as they wantonly gave vent to their own dark desires. Wildes Dorian, in fact, even hopes that the fin de si”le is the fin du globe (the end of the world) because life is a great disappointment. (Characters from all of these works also played a part in the recent Sean Connery vehicle The League of Extraordinary Gentleman).  

A little fin de si”le anxiety from the film version (1953) of H.G. Wells’ apocalyptic classic The War of the Worlds (1898).

Considering the climate of the times, the German physician and cultural critic Max Nordau, in his aptly titled 1893 analysis Degeneration, believed that people were deteriorating both morally and physically and he mourned the end of an established order, which for thousands of years [had] satisfied logic, fettered depravity, and in every art, matured something of beauty. In 1896, the poet W.B. Yeats heard the clash of fallen horseman and the cries/ Of unknown perishing armies in the air as the new century approached; by 1920, the vision had more prophetically solidified into that rough beast [] Slouch[ing] towards Bethlehem to be born.

To the extent that films both manifest and define our cultural anxieties, filmmakers have, in the years leading up to and since the millennium, used the medium to convey concerns about our own fin de si”le and to remind us of how vulnerable we really are.  Weve been attacked by colonizing aliens in both 1996 (Independence Day) and 2002 (Signs) — Wells, of course, had already envisioned an alien invasion in his 1898 classic The War of the Worlds — weve had fire-breathing dragons (Reign of Fire [2002]) and giant reptiles that mutated from our nuclear testing (Godzilla [1998]), weve had problems at the center of the Earth (The Core [2002]), and in that same, particularly bad summer of 1998, we even had to deal with not one, but two meteors larger than Texas crashing into the Earth (Deep Impact, Armageddon). Oh yeah, and the antichrist tried to destroy us in 1999 (End of Days) and 2000 (Lost Souls), but thankfully it never worked out.

Although they do allow us to escape, albeit momentarily, from the responsibilities and commitments that dominate our lives, movies, like dreams or like novels, also enable us to contemplate the inconceivable and imagine the unthinkable. What is more, they enable us to do it from the safety of our theater seats with dozens of other people around us contemplating and imagining the same exact thing. In the past few years, its been hard not to watch the news without thinking, like Blake or Yeats, about what it all might mean for the future or if there would even be a future to think about. 

Its a possibility thats almost too frightening to consider in front of the morning paper, but, in front of and through the movie screen, we get to work out the worst of our fin de si”le fears and still walk away smiling. Somehow its all just okay when Schwarzenegger is dodging bullets in a speeding car out on the highway (as opposed to fielding political questions in California) or Keanu Reeves is beating the hell out of a hundred replicating agents in an inner city schoolyard. We can see the world torn apart by a nuclear holocaust and watch the Earth spin helplessly off its axis, knowing full well that, regardless of how much we willingly suspend our disbelief, at the end of the day its only a movie and, unlike the characters in these films themselves, we can return to the lives that we left. So fear not; it may be the end of the world as we know it, but, so long as the popcorns buttered and the sodas are cold, well all be fine.

P O P  F O R U M
Discuss the Coming of the Apocalypse

Douglas L. Howard is Writing Center Coordinator and teaches in the Honors Program at Suffolk County Community College in Selden, N.Y.

Related Sites
For a revelatory look at our obsession with apocalypse, visit the wonderfully elaborate Web site from PBS’s Frontline special on "Apocalypse!: The Evolution of Apocalyptic Belief and How it Shaped the Western World."
To find out why Romantic poets — such as Blake, Coleridge, and Wordsworth — were so fascinated by the apocalypse around an earlier fin de si”le, check out Norton’s very comprehensive overview.