Coming to a Theater Near You: A Christmas Apocalypse

My children have had an unusual influence on my views since they began, one by one, to pass through adolescence. I admit that they have shaped my reception of certain popular cultural artifacts I don’t know much about, mainly because I don’t care enough.

A few years ago, for example, they told me that a situation comedy about nerds wasn’t worth my time. I wasn’t going to watch it, but they confirmed my decision.

“It’s written,” my older son said, “by someone who thinks he knows what a nerd is. But he has in fact never met one.”

He explained this because, like my daughters, he happens to consider himself a nerd and the friend of nerds. And none of his friends talk or act like the “nerds” on the show. This doesn’t surprise me. TV never gets what something is really like. 

“They’ve convinced everyone who thinks they know what a nerd is and does.” My son shook his head slowly. “They just don’t get it.”

Coming to a Theatre Near You

More recently, both my sons, now squarely in high school, the target audience for Hunger Games, told me not to bother with those movies either.

“I’m so sick of post-apocalyptic movies,” my son said. “They are all the same, with some teenager showing special powers. No imagination.”

I wish I could claim that they got this from me. But they stayed away from the last two Katniss adventures on their own, and not just because she’s a girl. They avoided the Maze Runner movies as well. And Divergent.

And I have wondered with them: Why the sudden popularity of post-apocalyptic movies aimed at adolescents. What is up?

Today, as with everything religious that has been secularized, the word “apocalypse” is synonymous with "catastrophe." It evokes images of a world devastated by disease, some scientific experiment gone wrong that was meant to improve the human condition, or, less often, some attack of aliens. In this world, a remnant faces a global environmental catastrophe, horrible weather conditions, mutants, aliens, lousy economic conditions, or scarce resources overseen by a one-eyed tyrant who thinks he’s god, all of this against a backdrop of a ruined former urban glory vaguely recognizable as LA or New York.

There are usually zombies.

That’s not what the word once meant. "Apocalypse" is a Greek word meaning to unveil, to remove the curtain—basically, to reveal. In the old parlance--before 20th Century Fox--it meant that the world would not just end but face a final revelation (hence the name of the last book of the New Testament). And this would be brought about by God. That's apparently not scary enough anymore. 

God Terms

I grew up with Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green. And in school, I learned that our sun would last several billion more years after I died, and life on Earth could go on unless human civilization, probably through a nuclear holocaust, snuffed it out.

Today, I look through two lenses. In one, God creates and destroys, and in the second, humanity rises to destroy. I admit I am conditioned to expect a human catastrophe. But I am also drawn to the idea that there may be some real horror, not in what human beings can do, but in what will be shown of our own mistaken ideas about ourselves, revealed when the veil of the present age (however many ages it contains) is swept aside.

In school, the take was that there was no veil. Or, it would reveal nothing. But what if it does?

That’s another take on the apocalypse.

I’m not sure my sons want to see that in a movie theate either.