Essay
Until the End
Of the World
Fin de Siècle Fears in
History and
Popular Culture
The stars of all the galaxies
everywhere will expire and with them our dying sun will flame
out, searing planet earth to an uninhabitable cinder. Though it
would appear utterly dark, the universe will no longer contain
any human eyes to see it.
But astrophysicists don’t predict
that end of the universe and of the earth with it for another 10
trillion years or so.
The end of the millennium on the
Roman calendar is coming at the end of this year, prompting
religious prognostication and fin de siècle
hysteria, but this is not the first time the
Western world has seen millennial fever. At the end of the
10th century there were plagues and fires and
disasters. Some devout, literal-minded Christians believed the
events of the
Book of Revelations were imminent and that the second
coming would take place in the year 1000. According to Richard
Landes, director of the Center for Millennial Studies at
Boston University, in the mid-nineteenth century, many
historians, led by Jules Michelet, drew a dramatic picture of
mass apocalyptic expectations climaxing in the year 1000. For
Michelet, this eschatological fervor aroused hope in the
oppressed and terror in the oppressors and catalyzed the
political transformations of eleventh-century France.
The approach of the year 2000 is
interesting in that it will be the first time in history that
something substantive will happen when the calendar year
becomes a round number. That something is the so-called
millennial bug. Because of
the memory limitations of computers, the first programmers and
their successors expressed dates in two digits, not four,
creating the problem that a representation of 2000 as
"00" makes it a date that precedes all the
70-something, 80-something and 90-something dates, etc., of the
twentieth century, in computers in which the problem has not been
corrected. According to Ed Yourdon,
http://www.yourdon.com/,
author of Time Bomb 2000, the
computer industry will
spend between $300
billion and $600 billion during the five hundred days before
January 1, 2000, in an attempt to avoid this problem;
other experts warn that this estimate is too low. Yourdon’s book
is written not for programmers, who are already sifting through
thousands of lines of code for embedded dates,
but for the layperson who may wake up on January 1, 2000, to find
that there is no telephone service, no electricity and that, in
fact, nothing dependent on a microchip works, not the car, not
the thermostat, not the cell phone. Supposedly, the Amish will
have the last laugh.
As with anything that is a small
part material reality but predominantly anticipation and
perception, the reactions run the gamut from vaguely uneasy
indifference and ignorance to expectations of "the end of
the world as we know it" or
Teotwawki, an acronym popping up in some Y2K circles. Political
writer Declan McCullagh suggests the pronunciation
tee-OH-twah-kee, but as ultimate a state as
Teotwawki might seem to be, both religious scholars and popular
culture have anticipated it for a thousand years or more. The Hittites, who had a lunar calendar,
believed the world would end about 100 B.C., when it reached an even number. More
recently, just one case in point is the R.E.M. song by the same name
(http://www.retroweb.com/remlyrics/lyrics_EndOfTheWorld.html).
Of course, the end of history has
also been postulated by
postmodernists,
but like other apprehensions of doom, that idea has much deeper
roots. For example,
the Anabaptists, who originated as an extreme Protestant reform
movement of the 16th century, did not aim to steer the course of
the medieval Catholic church, in
part because they were confident that they were living at the end
of history.
While no proven success story for
year 2000 can be told until after the nines all turn to zeroes,
the drama of the round number year is entirely arbitrary outside
of this computer problem. Though watches may stop, human time is
not coming to its final chapter.
Similarly, while Christian Europe
awaited the end of the world in the 990s, the rest of the world,
including the Chinese, Muslims and Jews, used other systems to
mark time and did not share such apprehensions. But today, like
1000 years ago, people were nonetheless full of ignorant fear.
The
Internet abounds with sites devoted to the enumeration of signs
that the end of the world is near. These signs include violence,
famines, earthquakes, witchcraft, war, impending economic crisis,
comets, and the mark of the beast, which one site absurdly
asserts is analogous with the Uniform Price Code (UPC). One does
not need to be a scholar of history to believe that although we
now have mass communication
that broadcasts both news of and
dramatization of violence as
entertainment, the violence of people against people is no
worse in this century than any other.
Howard Zinn, author of The
People’s History of the United States and a historian noted
for trying to set the record straight (if
only to support a
leftist
agenda), comments: "I would guess that signs of the end of
the world are nothing new. As for violence, it is true that the
traditional culture always romanticizes the past, and that one
instance of this is an exaggeration of the difference in degree
of violence in this century and in previous centuries. The
Taiping Rebellion in 19th-century China is said to have taken
50 million lives, equivalent to World War II. Older wars, like
the War of the Roses, have absolute numbers smaller than the ones
in this century, but relative to population some of those wars –
the Thirty Years War for instance in the early 17th century –
was enormously bloody in relation to population."
In addition to cries of the total
breakdown of human civility and civilization as signs of the end,
there are also anticipations of so-called acts of God
(supposedly, to some points of view, like those that destroyed
Sodom and Gomorrah by fire and brimstone (sulfur)). Popular
culture also recently reminded us of the flood myth with an
awful and heavy-handed television adaptation of the story of Noah
and the ark aired in May 1999.
Coinciding with apprehensions
about the year 2000, there has recently been speculation of an
asteroid capable of destroying planet earth or making it
uninhabitable. Though this obviously has nothing to do with the
changing of the nines to zeroes, it fits the nervous zeitgeist.
Such a catastrophe filtered through astronomical know-how also
fits the countdown motif of space travel and in turn has been
used by Biblical prognosticators.
As for the asteroid, the facts
are that some astronomers predict a one in 1,000 chance of an
asteroid capable of destroying civilization colliding with the
earth at 6:30pm GMT Thursday October 26, 2028. At one mile long,
the XF11 asteroid is about a sixth of the size of the one that
wiped out the dinosaurs, but if it does hit, the effects would
likely be catastrophic on a global scale, throwing up dust that
could darken the sky for months, killing the earth’s plant life.
Other astronomers say that the asteroid is more likely to
overshoot by a distance of 30,000 miles – an eighth of the
distance to the moon. Though much smaller and less destructive,
there are also predictions that meteor showers may disrupt
satellites in November 1999.
 This confluence of
popular imagery and fear is then picked up in popular
culture, such as
Independence Day, the summer of 1997’s end-of-the-world
blockbuster in which the scientist shows the president the
countdown on his laptop computer.
Of course, the space teams
ultimately succeed and blow up the asteroid headed for earth in
both 1998 summer films,
Armageddon and Deep Impact (and Godzilla is
ultimately defeated in that more fantastical film), but what both
films reflect about end-of-the-world attitudes is
elucidating.
 Armageddon,
by far the inferior of the two films, is
adolescent and overtly anti-intellectual, a sort of
Space Balls meets Fail Safe in which the bumbling
Russian cosmonaut provides comic relief and the creators of the
film evidently felt the audience needed a play-by-play from the
command center to keep the events in space straight.
Decades before we were so
close
to the end of the millenium, the twentieth century produced
numerous popular culture works depicting the end of the world,
sometimes picking up on the horrific beauty of seeing it all blow
up. There are too many end-of-the world films and other popular
culture works to comprehensively analyze
here what they say about public attitudes, but Amanda Loos has
produced an impressive guide:
"The Crises and the Films: A Guide to Millennial
Cinema"
http://www.mille.org/crisesandfilm.html.
A comparison is worth making,
however, between
the older end-of-the-world films and the newer ones. The horror
and violence are tacit in Stanley Kubrick’s
1964 masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove (http://www.ravecentral.com/drstrangelove.html). In
the film, no member of
the general public has any chance to react
to the enormity of the
destruction of all life on earth, and in spite of the comic
broadness of the film, the dread is somehow
both ever-present, a scrim through we view all action, and yet
barely acknowledged. One small nod is that General Buck
Turgidson (George C. Scott), the clown of the film, tells his
girlfriend to say her prayers before she goes to sleep.
Another revealing difference
between older nuclear destruction films and the rash of late
1990s end-of-the-world films is that the older films place the
blame squarely on society, or the military, or scientists,
whereas the more recent films are more bluntly ignorant and
religious in tone. Destruction comes from beyond our ability to
control it, and we are nearly powerless and certainly not
responsible for the imminent end.
Dr. Strangelove (one of three
roles played by Peter Sellers), with his strangely uncontrollable
arm, is a metaphor for society. At first we think the gloved arm
is prosthetic, but if it were, it would not rebel against
Strangelove and attack him. The disorder arises from a
neurological (i.e., an organic) condition or his own
madness. In
other words, the fault lies not in the technological capability
of destroying the earth, but in the human or organic weakness.
Society thinks it can control the military (which in turn wields
the destructive technology), just as Strangelove thinks he can
control his maverick right arm. If one want to go further with
the analysis, it is not Strangelove’s left arm (traditionally
symbolic of evil and irrationality) that is uncontrollable, but
his right arm, symbolic of skill, rationality and mainstream
impulses.
Dr. Strangelove may not be a religious film, but it is a
moral film, perhaps calling us to better reign in the
military-industrial complex.
Interestingly, in spite of the
Biblical title and lip service paid to prayers and thanks to God,
Armageddon is actually an anti-religious movie. When the
public realizes an asteroid the size of Texas is headed for
earth, the president announces that humanity now has the
technology to stop the end of the world (even if God wills it.)
A veteran oil driller, Harry Stamper, (played by Bruce Willis),
whose help is needed to insert a nuclear warhead into the
asteroid, asks the NASA engineer to give his crew 10 hours break
from their rushed and intensive flight training to "remember
why the world is worth saving." And the crew spends what
may be their last hours in earthy pursuits – drinking, fooling
around and visiting family. One "roughneck," as they
are called, borrows $100,000 and spends it on strippers. The
young couple providing the movie’s romantic interest lies necking
in a field of wild flowers before the young man must join the
flight. They ponder how many other people are doing what they
are doing and decide that "millions better be, or the world
isn’t worth saving." No one goes to a place of worship.
The implication is that sensual and material things are what make
life good.
Another strong indication of this
defiance or denial of God’s goodness or power is what the main
character says during a tussle over the orders from the president
to detonate the nuclear bomb before the 800-foot hole into the
asteroid is finished. Stamper says, "Why are you listening
to someone who is 100,000 miles away? We’re right here."
When someone appeals for God’s help, the quip from Stamper that
"We’re close enough. He just might hear you," also
conveys a sense that the "someone 100,000 miles away"
is a symbol of God and not capable of hearing – or
helping.
Deep Impact is both a culturally Christian and
Western-centric film, thematically emphasizing self-sacrifice,
closure and respect for authority (as embodied in the harsh but
just national guard enforcing the edict that 200,000 preselected
scientists, officials, artists and other elites and 800,000
randomly selected under-50-year-olds fill the limestone caves of
Missouri in order to
repeople America and preserve "our way of life."
And compare Armageddon
with Deep Impact, in which the president assures the
nation, that "God hears our prayers, even if the answer is
‘no.’" In
Deep Impact, the space ship sent to blow up the asteroid
is called Messiah. In
Armageddon, the shuttles are Freedom and
Independence.
Deep Impact also contains a slightly more serious
catalog of what really matters, as indicated by what characters
focus on when the end is near and people take with them into the
limestone caves intended to preserve one million members of
humanity. This fin de siècle urge to sum up the
best of the century was termed "listomania" by Arthur Schlesinger
Jr. in an article wrote in August 1998 for the Wall Street
Journal, in which he criticizes the criteria for choosing the
greatest novels in English, the best films, etc.
À propos of what is
ultimately important, both films deal with a stormy
father-daughter relationship. In
Armageddon, the father, Stamper, stays behind on the
asteroid to manually detonate the warhead, tacitly giving his
son-in-law to be his previously withheld approval. In
Deep Impact, the daughter, a newscaster, gives her spot in
the sanctuary caves to a co-worker with a child and instead
stands on the beach to greet the giant tidal wave and to die with
her arms around her previously estranged father.
Dr. Strangelove
is one of the darkest apocalyptic
films and yet it’s a comedy. Like Walter Miller’s science
fiction novel,
A Canticle  for Leibowitz, Kubrick’s
masterpiece is steeped
in dark absurdity. What the characters focus on (the purity of
bodily fluids or the mineshaft gap) is ridiculous to the point of
sickness, and the end of the world is not fully appreciated or
acknowledged by anyone. With a sick twist on T.S. Eliot’s
The Hollow Men, the world in Dr. Strangelove ends
not primarily with a bang, but with a wild, hoarse laugh (that
of Major T. J. "King" Kong, played by Slim Pickens) and with a
series of mushroom cloud explosions presented almost as a ballet
by the director.
Like Dr. Strangelove,
earlier apocalyptic films, like On the Beach
and Failsafe and the more recent made-for-television
film, Testament,
showed nuclear holocaust making the earth wretchedly
unlivable. But as Norman Mailer pointed out in an essay in
Advertisements for Myself, there is also a certain
perverse comfort in contemplating the end of the world. We won’t
actually have to fix any of the social, environmental and
political problems we have created if we blow everything up
instead.
Another spin on this is the
self-indulgently naïve idea of the nobility of dying young
offered up in the Broadway musical,
Rent and the bohemian attitude that one needs only for the
moment, "There is only here; there is only now. There's only
us; there's only this…" If one stretches this a bit
further. This is a set of attitudes that might be quite at home
in Southern California. Notably, the production companies that
created such films as
Deep Impact are based on the West Coast, making it no
surprise that the older cities of the
East Coast are the ones drowned and shattered by a 3,500-foot
high tidal wave moving at the speed of sound. After all, Los
Angeles can never be the dominant American city until New York is
reduced to rubble.
The totally illogical and loose
end-riddled X-Files: fight the future, features another
possible end of the world via ancient
extraterrestrials who
existed on earth long before the evolution of humans, but who
gestate in humans, not unlike the Ridley Scott’s aliens, but less
believable. The film fits in nicely with the
paranoia of
imminent rapture because the ultimate takeover of the earth
is being shepherded along by a secret circle of powerful men who
plan on handing over the earth, although what their reward will
be for destroying humanity is unclear.
Blade, a vampire movie based on a comic book,
shares with
X-Files the motif of a secret and elite circle of
conspirators who plan to destroy mankind. (Interestingly, Blade
can also be seen as an extended metaphor for the drug trade, with
corrupt police working side-by-side with drug dealers against the
rest of humanity. As in the film,
Deep Impact, a central character skirts the line of good
and evil.) Notably, the theme of a cadre of conspirators removes
responsibility from society as a whole, as do the films where
earth’s destruction may ensue from an act of God or
nature.
As people around the world wait to
see what will actually happen on January 1 of next year and, in
some
cases, as they work to be prepared, they have found themselves
unexpectedly building
community
connections. Eric Utne, founder of the
Utne Reader, says: "As we prepare for Y2K, something
surprising and quite wonderful is going to happen. We're going to
get to know our neighbors."
So, we may note that one of the
more positive aspects of the end-of-the-world films, such as
Deep Impact, Armageddon, X-files and
Independence Day, is that they seem to indicate a more
evident global consciousness, even if it is an America-centric
global consciousness. At the end of
Deep Impact, the camera pans over the great cities as if
to say, here’s Paris and the Arc d’Triomphe; here’s New York;
here’s Tokyo and here are sight bytes of the other, more
primitive cultures: here are some
beduins, etc. The massiveness of the destructive phenomena of
these films seem to say: We are all part of the world and must
live or die together. Even if the lights go out for a while in
the first days of the New Year, the world is really going to end
anytime soon and maybe that global unity isn’t such a bad thing
with which to begin the new millenium.
Adrienne Redd has written
about
film, theater, music, the visual arts,
politics and the environment for 15 years. She lectures on film
and leads a
monthly film discussion for the County
Theater in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.
She is writing a
book about
American political activists, working on a
documentary and pursuing graduate work in sociology at Temple
University in
Philadelphia.
This essay copyright (c) 1999 by Adrienne Redd.
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Short
Cuts
JAPAN ADVISES
PUBLIC TO BUY
Y2K SUPPLIES
The
Japanese government is now
encouraging its citizens to buy two-
to three-day supplies of water,
food, gasoline, and other goods to
prepare for Y2K. The Web site for
the Prime Minister's Office has a
page suggesting that the public
stockpile certain items, although
the site also says authorities
expect no major disruptions to
everyday life. In addition, the
government ran ads on Saturday in 75
newspapers with the same
suggestions. Only a few days before
the warnings, the government
announced that over 90 percent of
companies in the finance, power
utilities, telecommunications, and
airline industries were ready for
Y2K. However, the recent advisories
suggest concern over how prepared
Japan is for the date change. (Wall
Street Journal 11/01/99)
MICROSOFT
UNVEILS
ANTI-VIRUS
PRODUCTS
TO FIGHT
Y2K HACKERS
Microsoft is making nine anti-virus products available for free
downloading from its Web site, www.microsoft.com/y2k. The
company's proactive move is welcomed by many in the industry as
Microsoft applications are popular targets for virus writers.
Although some users, preoccupied with last-minute Y2K issues, are
not as concerned about an increased virus threat from Y2K, they
still welcome Microsoft's offering. Symantec's Kevin Murray
says, "Every indication leads us to think that Y2K-specific
viruses won't be any different than any other virus going off on
any other day, so updated anti-virus apps are the key." Others
fear Dec. 31, 1999, will be an attractive time for hackers to
release their viruses because network administrators will be
preoccupied with Y2K-compliance issues. Microsoft's free
offering, which ends Dec. 31, includes the products of Symantec,
Central Command, Computer Associates, Trend Micro, Data Fellows,
Norman ASA, Panda Software, Sophos, and Network Associates.
(InfoWorld Electric 11/01/99)
 The Truman Show:
MEDIA AS
METAPHOR
By Ken Sanes
Transparency: Copyright ©
1996 -1998 Ken Sanes
http://www.transparencynow.com/
The Truman Show offers a grand metaphor for contemporary American culture. Its message is that we are immersed in a media landscape of lifelike
fantasies that serves the interests of those in power. If we want to be free
and have a chance at an authentic life, it tells us, we will have to
distance ourselves from the safety and comforts of our media-saturated
culture, and be willing to live in the world as it is.
What many critics don't fully appreciate is that
The Truman Show is only the
latest in a series of books, movies and television productions that have
conveyed this message. Most of these works have the same plot, with
variations in character and settings and slight alterations in their basic
elements.
Typically, the characters in these stories -- and often the societies they
live in -- are trapped in prisons disguised as ideal places. An entire
society may be in an enclosed, high-tech, city of self-indulgence that is
really a death camp, as in the movie Logan's
Run. Or it may be stuck in a
shared, drug-induced, hallucination of a world of futuristic conveniences
that covers up the fact that the actual surroundings are in a state of
collapse, as in the book The Futurological
Congress.
As the main characters realize that things aren't what they appear to be,
they try to make an escape, only to be blocked by malevolent simulators and
high-tech manipulators who are intent on keeping them inside. In the end,
they often break free and they free the societies that are trapped, as well.
When you examine these works, it is obvious that humanity is using these
stories to warn itself of the danger that we will lose ourselves in
environments of media simulation and high technology. All the realms of
lifelike fantasy the characters find themselves in, whether they are themed
stage sets, as in The Truman Show, or virtual realities, or hallucinations,
are depictions of our media culture in which television, computers, theme
parks, et al, are surrounding us with simulations that masquerade as
something authentic.
The message of these works is unmistakable -- media and advanced technology
could cause us to regress into a new infantilism in which machines and human
manipulators feed us fantasies and lifestyles of endless gratification.
These works call on us to resist these temptations and, like most of their
heroes, to make a journey of mind in which we are free from manipulation and
illusions.
Having studied these works for 20 years (and readers will find my take on
all this at www.transparencynow.com), it is gratifying that
The
Truman Show is finally getting the message across. What is really happening
is that our media manipulators -- the giant entertainment companies, the
corporations, news organizations and politicians -- have become so powerful
and pervasive, and so willing to violate ethical standards, that these
issues can no longer be kept under wraps.
The question is, why do we have to become so similar to the caricatures of
fiction before we are willing to start discussing what is really going on?
 Read more of Ken Sanes's analyses of the media at http://www.transparencynow.com/.
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