What's So Fun About the End of the World?

In the last five years we've seen the earth—or at least a good chunk of it—destroyed by sun flares, global warming, sterility, blindness, bureaucratic aliens, megalomaniac superheroes, diseases that turn us into zombies, vaccines that turn us into zombies, angry robots and angry plants.

And it's going to happen again. This week, in fact, we're going to be replaced by dystopian Beanie Babies. Later this fall, 2012 arrives three years early, and with it annihilation, catastrophe, obliteration, eradication, destruction ... the end.

That's just in theaters, folks. I haven't yet gotten to cable TV "documentaries" that tell us exactly how the world will end or what'll happen to it once we vacate it. There's now even a reality show called The Colony that follows 10 hapless Los Angelinos as they try to navigate a post-apocalyptic world.

Can't Wait for the Final Countdown!
I understand some of this fascination. When I was 12, while my Sunday School teachers were trying to get me interested in the gospels and epistles, I was combing through Revelation, trying to figure out what a 10-horned, seven-headed monster might look like. At home I would collect dead insects and carefully place them on a model aircraft carrier, imagining the ocean overrun by giant miller moths.

We humans are curious creatures. We sometimes read spoilers or skip to the end of the book, and our planet's final cataclysm beckons us with a special allure. It's a locked trunk we find in the basement, and we're dying to peek inside.

"Every age, so far as I can determine, and every culture, has been fascinated with depictions of its own ending, and has created compelling art from the images of its own destruction," says Pinckney Benedict, who's teaching an end-of-the-world literature course at Southern Illinois University Carbondale this semester. He's quoted in the college's newspaper, The Saluki Times, "In decadent cultures, like our own, I think this fascination with destruction becomes an obsession and even a kind of wish-fulfillment."

Evangelical Christians, one could argue, seem particularly fascinated. Spurred by the vivid, enigmatic word pictures in Revelation, we've been avidly watching movies about the tribulation and termination of our globe since the 1972 film A Thief in the Night ripped its way through scores of church sanctuaries and rec rooms. We sent Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth to the best-seller list and bought more than 60 million books in Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins' Left Behind series.

It's like biblical prophecy expert Paul McGuire told the Los Angeles Daily News, "I was just on a two-hour History Channel special, Seven Signs of the Apocalypse, and it turned out to be one of their highest-rated shows."

But it's not just curiosity that pushes humanity toward imagining Armageddon. Many experts believe we tend to gravitate toward dire entertainment in dire times. Horror films bloomed during the Great Depression. Theaters saw the first real wave of apocalyptic films in the 1950s and early '60s, when anxiety over nuclear war was at its height.

And while fretting over World War III has subsided somewhat, we now live in a very anxious age: Environmental catastrophe is a popular trope for end-of-the-world cinema. Our growing alienation from each other may have given new life (as it were) to zombies. And should it really surprise us that, in the wake of 9/11, we've seen so many national monuments mowed down onscreen?

Documentarian Thom Beers, who created The Colony for the Discovery Channel, says interest can be attributed to one basic thing: "There's that insecure feeling right now that we could all find ourselves in their position," he told The New York Times.

Not Your Father's Apocalypse
There's something else at work here, too. While the disaster films of days gone by often doubled as serious explorations of some of our darker fears—the original Godzilla, for instance, started out as a fire-breathing analogy to the horrors of nuclear war—many of today's end-of-the-world tales feel strangely cynical.

Let me explain: Moviegoers, particularly (if I may be so bold) male moviegoers, like to see things blow up. And what has a bigger boom than the end of the world? I mean, realistically, how much more explosive can you get?

So while some 21st century films may still use the end of the world to deliver a message about our present, most apocalyptic flicks are, at their core, big-budget popcorn movies with gigantic computer-generated effects. Forget pathos. Today's disaster directors want their audiences to respond to the earth's destruction with a "Whoa! Cool!" They don't want them to think of the horrors of the world's end as much as they want them to enjoy it—so much so that they're willing to fork over another $10 to make a return trip.

"Only too often, the worst plays out like a blip in the screenplay," writes The Denver Post's movie critic Lisa Kennedy. "Cataclysm is a plot point, not the end point."

"Disaster flicks, like slasher films, have started to sell FX realism as its own reason to be," Kennedy continues. "Lessons once imparted (however cheesily) about what disaster means seem boiled down to an MBA seminar."

Maybe it was Douglas Adams who got it right first, when he wrote about people flocking to Milliways in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the second book in his Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy series. While dining on succulent beef personally proffered by talking cows, they ooh and aah as they watch the fiery end of the universe play out around them—before gulping down a sinful dessert and time-traveling back to the secure comfort of their own homes.

Here are the facts: The world will indeed end ... someday. And when it does, entertainment won't be a natural byproduct. So at the very least it's ironic that our most horrific visions of the future have become popcorn-munching diversions—and that films about the end of the world make money like there's no tomorrow.

Article by Paul Asay