The following is from my ARMAGEDDON FILMS FAQ book that came out last year. It deals namely with end of the world movies, but it also deals with my own thoughts about where we are as a society. I hope you all give it a chance and read it. Chapter 23: In the End, What does it All Mean? “I think if God is dead, he laughed himself to death. Because, you see, we live in Eden. Genesis has got it all wrong – we never left the Garden. Look around you. This is paradise. It’s hard to find, I’ll grant you, but it is here. Under our feet, beneath the surface, all around us is everything we want. The earth is shining under the soot.” – Justin Playfair A little theater in a small-town somewhere in Ohio back in 1997. They were letting people come in to see classic movies for fifty-cents in celebration of their renovations to their theaters. People could see Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, The Wizard of Oz and the 1968 adaptation of The Planet of the Apes. Plenty of space in the theater for the first three films, but then there was a line to see the fourth. People filed every seat in that theater to see Charlton Heston fight the apes and – as one – were shocked at the ending. Could this be Earth? Could we really finally do it? We’re lectured every day that it’s coming. Our faiths hand us prophecies that tell us the world’s end is just around the corner. Our science forecasts the sun will eventually burn out and the Earth will crumble, or some other deadly assault is about to begin. Our history reminds us that all great things eventually fall. Our societies warn us to be prepared for bad times. Our bodies nag us that someday we will die. And, above all, time washes away all things no matter how hard we hold on. We see hate, violence, senseless death, cruelty beyond measure screaming to us from the 24-hour cycle of news and the papers and the Internet and the phones. We see the insanity of war, famine, death and disease, over and over again from the time we first picked up a rock back at our birth as Mankind to today. Finally, we know that someday, somewhere, we all must close our eyes and see the end of our worlds, no matter how hard we try to avoid it. And yet – And yet – Here we are lining up to see Heston proving that we finally did it. We blew it up. We make blockbusters out of movies forecasting the end. Telling us about how we’ll be wiped out by zombies, nuclear war or contagions. We makes jokes about the end. We even write and read books about the end. But why? What does that say about us as a people? “There’s still time … brother!” – A Banner in the Street Some would say that it means we long for the end. Like those waiting for the End Times, or the Survivalists, or any of a number of cults that are waiting for the mothership to return and take them away, we can’t wait to be proven right; the doomed proven wrong, and we will be raptured into a new age of peace and harmony. But I’ll go out on a limb and say that rather the opposite is true. We’re not longing for death when watching these movies. In fact, death is a cheap rip-off if that is all that remains at the end. If we wanted death, we’d just turn on the television news, thank you very much. We may watch things that approach Armageddon, but it doesn’t mean we necessarily really want it to play out in front of our eyes. Where’s the fun in that? “It can’t rain all the time.” – Eric Draven Because what we’re searching for in these movies is not death, but life. No matter how cynical or sarcastic we become in this world of ours – and we unfortunately can get pretty dark about ourselves and Humanity – deep down inside we want one thing – to be saved. We want to be able to believe we can sleep without fear of tomorrow. We want to see love. We want there to be innocence for those that deserve it. We want redemption. We want to believe there’s still time, brother. And apocalyptic films give us that in a way few others can. The ones that fail are those that think it should be about people just moping around, waiting for the end, or that the universe is simply playing a trick on us. Most of us see such conclusions in movies and something inside of us just clicks to say, “What a load of pretentious BS.” Because we know it isn’t true. As much as some want to believe the world is a cold, hard place, we slowly have to come to grips with the idea that this simply isn’t the case. Near the beginning of the book I mentioned the idea that we began our apocalyptic journey in fiction when we realized that the world was becoming known. There was no place to go; thus nowhere to hide. A contagion in the far part of the world is of great concern to us now because it is quite likely it rapidly move to the other side of the globe by breakfast. Yet on the flipside of that is something we forgot – because we know the contagion can be here before the bacon is ready to eat tomorrow morning that means we have to actually do something about it on this side of things. We can’t be bystanders any longer. We are all next-door neighbors; interlocked into knowing each other because we have no choice. Our technology and advancements brings us hand and hand and we can’t ignore the person we’re holding on to any longer. We have to fight together as a planet because … really, what other choice have we got? “So shines a good deed … in a weary world.” – Willy Wonka We look to the apocalyptic movies because we know things can happen and can get worse, but we also want to see who survives and how they do it. Perhaps show us a way to make things better. Back in Chapter 1 it was discussed how Lucifer’s Hammer taught geeky kids the lesson that it was best to know basic survival skills because they could come in handy – not because a supposed comet will strike the earth, but due to them being good skills to have. If a child wants to learn a good, health-oriented sport like archery from having read or seen The Hunger Games, is that bad? Movies like The Day After and Threads makes us think about the unimaginable, and thus perhaps work to make sure such nuclear disasters never happen. As weird as it may sound, Armageddon Films are actually a positive genre in the movies. “Live White.” – Geum-ja Lee. This is not to say that a movie will change the world. No peace negotiation is ever going to come about because a prime minister somewhere saw Teenage Cave Man, for example. But such films do give us hope – because we know whatever hits us as a species, somehow we’re going to come out of it. We’ve survived this far and no prophecies is going to tell us what to do. Somehow we’ll make it through the next crisis. One way or another. Just like in the Armageddon Films we love to watch. After all, how often have we really seen the end of the world in these end-of-the-world movies? Oh, we see death and destruction and people struggling, but the number of movies that end with everything really, really ending? Merely a handful out of all the films discussed here, and even most of those deal with the dignity of the human spirit in spite of death approaching. Yes, there’s a whole chapter about such movies earlier in the book, but what is the results after the movie is over and the lights come up in the theater? Hey, look – I’m still alive, sitting in my seat in a theater with my shoes stuck to the floor by old soda and trying to wipe the last bit of popcorn off my pants that I couldn’t see in the dark earlier. Yep, by golly, I’m still here. You’re still here. Everyone is still here. We not only got to watch the end of the world, we survived it! We’re alive! Now we can go out into the sunny day outside and experience life with the reminder of how precious it all really is. Even when the film ultimately wants us to think the world is gone, they can’t take the real world waiting outside from us, and thus such messages are only doomed to fail. So we pulls ourselves out of the theater seat, exit the darkened theater, to find that outside the world truly is a miracle – blue skies, signs of nature everywhere you look, the sounds of children laughing, moments of caring and love – all there if we want to open our eyes and see them. There’s always a new world waiting for us, and we’ll smile because we survived and proved all the doomsayers wrong. Then we’ll grab the romantic lead, pull them close, and plant a big kiss on their lips, and they’ll return the embrace because they feel the same as we do. And as the music swells, the credits will fly up on the screen, not with The End but with The Beginning. “Look up, Hannah. Look up.” – A Barber
Posted on: Wed, 01 Oct 2014 02:14:51 +0000
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