The Growing Apocalyptic Trend

Apocalyptic fiction has been around for a long long time. Man has always envisioned the finality of his own presence on earth. Early on it was religious events. God or the Gods would come down and cleanse the world rewarding the good and damning the wicked. The rapture… Or a great flood as is the story of Noah’s Ark. Then as our understanding of the world grew we found more ways that we might be eradicated. What is more interesting is that if you view the time frames and the method of destruction you can see trends in what the public’s greatest fears were.

So for example lets look at film since as it is a much smaller body of work than other types of literature.

The nineteen fifties there were roughly 10 apocalyptic films released. Ex. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Day the Earth Stood Still, War of the Worlds, The Beach….Most of these films had a common thread. Destruction from above. Aliens to be specific. In 1957 Sputnic was launched into outer space and for the first time we had reached beyond our planet. If we could accomplish this there must be someone or something our in the vast expanse of space that could do the same. Still this felt a little far fetched and while people aliens were not as scary as the Russians death from above was a real threat.

The Ninteen Sixties there were almost twice as many apocalyptic films released with titles such as: The Day the Earth Caught Fire, Panic in Year Zero, Night of the Living Dead…. Most of these films had something to do with Nuclear War. There were still films that had the themes of the 1950s, but the new greatest fear was Nuclear War. The Cold war had firmly set in and people were on edge, and people were still coming to grips with the simple fact that for the first time in history man had the power to destroy the world.

The Nineteen nineties were again a mix of the past fears, but with the cold war now at an end fear of Nuclear war subsided and in its place we found ourselves with the growing concern of Artificial intelligence and Celestial objects. Technology was advancing by leaps and bounds and computers were slowly making their ways into the average American home. AI was quickly becoming something that people interacted with on a day to day basis. But what if the computers became smarter than us? The Terminator was the first major film to consider that our own machines might take over one day. Later The Matrix brought this fear to an all new level. These films seemed more like a word of warning than a possible reality though. Such technology still seems far off. While our technology was growing so was our understanding of outerspace. We started to realize that the planet is hit by alien objects each day and it is all together possible that we might be hit by something much larger. Thus born of these fears we get Deep Impact, and Armageddon.

During the last nine years there have been over thirty apocalyptic films ranging from topics as diverse as Nuclear war to disease to the global warming. Our understanding of our planet and our place on it has grown and so has our understanding of how truly fragile our world is. What is more interesting than the sudden diversity of destructive means is the shear number of films that are discussing the untimely end of society.

Every so often I’ll be walking around and I will overhear someone discussing what they would do if the world ended today as casually as if they were discussing what they would do if they won a million dollars. Even scarier is the idea that people think winning a million dollars is just as likely to happen as the world ending. Apocalyptic films act as an fantasy world for people to live in. A world were we are free from the ever tightening grip of consumerism, technology, and debt. I think we all are secretly yearning for a way out the factories and cubical that we spend our lives in, and when we think about the end of days we are really wishing for a simpler life.